Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

Peking – lying close to the deserts of the north – was a city of artificial lakes and marble bridges, of waterways built by emperors to cool and brighten their playgrounds and to thwart the dry spirits of evil. The sides of the canal had been embanked with bricks since last he was here, and the smelly water lay invisible in the shadows. The noises he heard he thought – he hoped – were rats.

Ysidro didn’t accost him. If anyone – or anything – else watched him pass, he was unaware of it.

But later that night he dreamed that he was back on the banks of the canal, and that something was moving along the opposite side in the darkness. Something that stopped when he stopped, yet when he moved on again he heard footfalls scrunch softly on the gravel of the road verge. Once, in a glimmer of starlight, he saw that whoever it was, he – or she – or it – bore Richard Hobart’s red-and-blue silk necktie in hand.

Peking’s new railway line ran directly out to the village of Men T’ou Kuo, but the nearest ferry over the river Hun Ho lay some miles to the south. Thus it was almost noon on the following day before Asher and Professor Karlebach, accompanied by Sergeant Willard and His Majesty’s troopers Barclay and Gibbs, reached the little town on horseback.

The Western Hills rose some fifteen miles from the walls of Peking, steep-sided, dry, dun with coming winter. Thin brush and an occasional straggle of pine or laurel grew in deep gorges, or around the sprawling half-empty temple complexes where Europeans would picnic in summer among the chanting monks. The unpaved track from Men T’ou Kuo to Mingliang Village wound along the main river gorge and then up over a ridge under sharp, heatless sun.

‘Used to be a fair bit of traffic along this way, sir,’ provided the sergeant, in the treacle accents of the Liverpool Irish. ‘Back in the nineties when the mines at Shi’h Liu was still a goin’ concern.’ He pronounced it Shee-Loo. ‘Like a picture book it was, with lines of camels and donkeys takin’ coal down to the depot – coolies, too, some of ’em carryin’ a hundredweight of tools or what-have-you just on a shoulder-pole. Tough little buggers.’

‘And when did they quit working the mines?’ asked Asher. Sergeant Willard looked about his own age, graying and sturdy. One parent, probably his mother, from South Ireland , he calculated by the man’s pronunciation of terminal – er .

‘Been quit for years, sir. Well, stands to reason – they been diggin’ those mines back since God invented dirt. The new ones is over toward Tong-shan. Hardly anything left of Mingliang these days, now the mine’s shut.’ The sergeant turned sharply in his saddle to glance at the crests of the hills above them. He’d done this three or four times, Asher had observed, since they’d left Men T’ou Kuo.

And he was listening, as Asher himself had listened now for an hour.

Softly, he asked, ‘What do you hear, Sergeant?’

‘Could just be monkeys, sir,’ spoke up Trooper Barclay, his glottal vowels putting his birthplace within a few streets of London Bridge. ‘There’s a deal of ’em in these ’ills, an’ they’ll follow riders sometimes for miles.’

Or it could be the Kuo Min-tang . Yuan Shi-k’ai’s assurances to the contrary, not all Chinese felt ‘happy and secure’ with the heavy hand of the generalissimo of the Northern Army on the rein. Rumor was rife in Peking of the militia groups forming to protect the Republic should its ‘provisional President’ decide – as he was rumored to be contemplating – to found a new Imperial dynasty with himself as its first Emperor. But as Hobart had pointed out on Wednesday night at Eddington’s, an army could be concealed in these empty hills. They were by all accounts riddled with abandoned coal-mines as well as natural cave systems, some of which ran underground for miles.

Lydia had protested that morning at being left behind to collect gossip about Richard Hobart (‘Why do I always have to do that bit? You’re going to need a medical opinion of whatever specimens Dr Bauer preserved . . .’), but when it came down to it, Asher had wanted to make the first reconnaissance himself. Every time he glanced over his shoulder at the brush-choked gorge below, or strained his ears to identify some fancied anomalous sound, he was glad he’d left her behind.

He would have left Karlebach as well, had the old man not refused to surrender his ‘rightful place’ in the party. ‘I know about these things, Jamie,’ he had insisted. ‘I have studied them for decades.’ He had grown more autocratic, Asher thought, since the death of old ‘Mama’ Karlebach – that bent, tiny woman who had welcomed Asher as a student to the house in the old Prague ghetto back in the eighties. She had spoken only Yiddish, but had been a formidable scholar in her own right. Since her death ten years ago, it had seemed to Asher, from Karlebach’s infrequent letters, that the old scholar had relied more and more on his students, adopting one or another of them as he had adopted Asher, in preference to the company of a family with whom he had nothing in common.

The most recent of such surrogate sons, Asher had gathered, had been a young Hungarian equally devoted to the study of folklore and to the righting of his nation’s wrongs at the hands of the Austrian Empire. His name – Matthias Uray – had vanished quite suddenly from the old man’s letters, and Karlebach had not spoken it at any time on the voyage. Presumably, thought Asher, he had deserted Karlebach for the Cause, just as he, James Asher, had deserted him, first to serve Queen and Country with the Department . . .

And then to partner with a vampire.

Would Karlebach have come to China at all, Asher wondered, had his wife still lived? Had he not felt himself deserted and alone?

He considered his former teacher now, as the old Jew nudged his skinny Australian ‘whaler’ close to the sergeant’s mount, and asked, ‘Have you heard of other dangers in these hills, besides irate natives?’

‘You mean bears or suchlike, sir?’ Both troopers looked blank at the question, though the younger one – Barclay – cast a nervous eye at the double-barrelled shotgun that Karlebach carried in his saddle holster. ‘There ain’t been bears ’ereabouts for – Lord, not ’undreds of years.’

And Gibbs added, ‘Ye’ll scarce be needin’ the ’eavy artillery, sir.’

‘Ah.’ Karlebach patted the smooth-oiled stock. ‘One never knows.’

The shotgun bore the mark of Kurtz – one of the premier gunsmiths of Prague – and, Asher could see, its trigger and guard had been specially modified to accommodate the old man’s arthritis-crippled fingers. For six weeks on shipboard, he had watched his mentor practice with this formidable weapon, and he knew that each of the cartridges that distended the pockets of that rusty old shooting-jacket were loaded, not with lead, but with silver deer-shot, enough to tear a man or a vampire to pieces.

Karlebach’s pockets clinked also with a dozen phials of distillations which he had concocted from the grimoires that were one of his major occupations – silver nitrate combined with those things inimical to vampire kind: garlic, whitethorn, wolfsbane, Christmas-rose.

‘Don’t you worry, sir,’ added the older trooper cheerfully. ‘We’ll get you there safe as ’ouses.’

Movement in the trees below the road drew Asher’s attention, but as always, when he looked, there was nothing to be seen.

Mingliang village lay some four miles back from the Hun Ho river, where a smaller gorge widened out at the foot of a shoulder of hills. The Lutheran mission stood at the top of the village, which was a maze of gray mud-brick siheyuan , the compounds bunched tight together with only a snarl of alleyways between. Many of these, Asher noted as they climbed the narrow ways up the hill, were deserted. Empty gates opened into courtyards filled with the dust of many winters. A number of the village shops, down near the bottom of the hill, were closed up.