Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘’Ere, you watch where you’re swingin’ that chopper!’ gasped Gibbs’s voice.

Barclay only said, ‘Gor blimey, it’s the fucken mikado!’

Asher stepped forward, tripped over something that rolled slightly under this foot, and Karlebach gasped. ‘Are you all right, Jamie?’ He grasped his arm with his twisted hand. ‘You are not injured—?’

‘I’m fine. Is everyone all right? Is anyone hurt?’

‘What the hell were they?’ demanded Willard, and two pale forms emerged from the darkness and bowed.

‘Ashu Sensei—’

Asher bowed in return, deeply. ‘Mizukami-san? Are you well? Ten thousand thanks—’

‘What were those things?’ demanded the deep voice that he well recalled from his earlier days in the Shantung Peninsula. Behind the bespectacled little Japanese, his bodyguard – a broad-shouldered young man in his twenties – held a hand pressed to his side, his light-colored military jacket darkening with blood.

‘We will speak as we walk, if this suits you, Mizukami-san? They will likely return. Is your man able to walk?’

Mizukami asked something in Japanese; the bodyguard straightened his shoulders and replied. Almost certainly, reflected Asher, he said that it was only a scratch . . .

‘Colonel the Count Mizukami, may I present the Rebbe Dr Solomon Karlebach of Prague?’

More bows, but instants later they were moving off, the darkness in the gorge so intense that Asher was barely able to make out the dark notch in the land to the right where the trail veered and began to climb the ridge. The wind shifted, blowing colder from the north, and Asher smelled on it the unmistakable dry whisper of a coming dust-storm . . . Please , he thought wearily, not until we get back to town . . .

Willard swore. ‘Just what we bloody need.’

Bringing up the rear of the party, Asher turned and looked back as the first light of the moon appeared over the hills. It was nearly full and showed clearly the slumped shapes of their erstwhile attackers clustered around the hacked pieces of the yao-kuei that Mizukami and his bodyguard had killed.

At that distance he couldn’t be sure, but he thought that an arm lay on the pathway a few yards from the main scene of the carnage. The arm was moving, pulling itself along by its fingers, as if in dogged pursuit.

Beside him he heard a hiss of indrawn breath, and Count Mizukami whispered again, ‘ What are they , Ashu Sensei? And why are you not surprised to find them here?’

One of the Others scrambled up from the shadows below the trail, caught up the arm, and trotted back towards its companions, tearing chunks from the flesh with its teeth, like an American devouring a turkey leg.

EIGHT

‘And what did you tell him?’ asked Lydia the next morning, when Asher related the events of the previous day in more detail than he’d had the energy for, in the small hours after half-carrying Karlebach up to the suite.

‘Nothing, at the time.’ Asher poured coffee rather gingerly from the bright polychrome pot that Ellen had set before them accompanied by scones (fresh), buttered eggs (excellent), extremely Scottish marmalade (tinned), and pungent commentary on heathen countries where the weather was enough to send a good Christian running for home. Asher got the impression that in the maid’s opinion the dust storm currently wailing over the tiled roofs of Peking had been visited by a disgusted God upon an unregenerate population of idolaters. ‘We had other things to worry about.’

The dust storm had overtaken them within sight of the lights of Men T’ou Kuo, after a stumbling race along the trail by moonlight, with no thought of anything but haste.

‘Ito – Mizukami’s bodyguard – was wounded, more seriously than he’d admit, I think. Mizukami had to help him most of the way back. And Karlebach was at the end of his strength.’ Asher flexed his wrists, which ached from holding off eleven stone of homicidal impaled killer who should have been dead. ‘Mizukami drove us back in his motor car – Karlebach, Ito, and myself – because there wouldn’t be a train until morning. Even after the worst of the dust passed it was all he could do to hold the car on the road. He didn’t explain his own presence, but I’m guessing that he and Ito had been following us most of the day. Mizukami must have recognized me and may still think I’m a German agent. I assume he will arrive shortly after we finish breakfast, to ask everything he had not the opportunity to query last night.’

Lydia glanced over her shoulder at the door of their bedroom, where the old professor had spent what had remained of the night. Though Karlebach had revived a little on the drive under the influence of the Count’s French brandy, he had still barely been able to get up the stairs, and even allowing for the ghastly things electric lighting did to peoples’ appearance, neither Asher nor Lydia had liked the chalky grayness of his face.

Since Lydia invariably traveled with both stethoscope and sphygmomanometer tucked into one of the dozen steamer-trunks of Worth and Poiret dresses, she’d made sure his blood pressure and heartbeat were normal, if weak, before mixing him a sedative. She’d spent the night in Miranda’s little cubicle with Mrs Pilley, while Asher had dossed down on the parlor sofa.

Now, even with the windows shuttered, the drawn curtains bellied restlessly in the cold, dust-laden wind and the air was blurred with a gauze of suspended gray-yellow silt. In the nursery, Asher could hear Miranda crying fretfully at the dust in her eyes, nose, and porridge.

‘You’ve heard nothing of Ysidro?’

Lydia shook her head.

Ellen appeared, starched and friendly, like a good-natured draft-horse in the spotless print cotton dress appropriate for maidservants before noon, to take away the tray, and through the open door into the ‘service’ half of the suite, Asher heard Mrs Pilley exclaim, ‘Now, there’s my good girl!’

‘Miranda doesn’t sound like she approves of her first dust storm,’ he remarked, and Ellen chuckled.

‘Oh, she’s kept trying to scrape the dust off the porridge with her little fingers, and the Pilley –’ Ellen had little use for the nurse, whose opinions on the rights of working men to picket (‘They should be arrested!’) and women to vote (‘They should be sent home to their husbands, who should have kept them there to begin with!’) she decried as barbaric – ‘has been half-mad wiping her hands every two seconds. And it itches her eyes, poor sweet. How we’re to bath her with this dust turning the water to mud I don’t know. And how is poor Professor Karlebach?’

‘I’m just going in to check.’ Lydia rose, unobtrusively collected her glasses – which she’d whipped off at the first creak of the door hinges heralding Ellen’s entry – and moved softly toward the bedroom: ‘No, you sit there and finish your coffee, Jamie. I heard you get up and check on him in the night when you should have been resting yourself.’

Asher sat back and gazed consideringly at the half-open door of the bedroom after Ellen left, his coffee cup still cradled in his hands. He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune , Francis Bacon had written. They are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief . . .

When he glanced down at the cup he saw that a microscopic film lay on the surface of the coffee.

He was deeply glad that Lydia and Miranda were with him – were where he could protect them, or at least know what kind of danger they were in. But his dreams last night had been troubled by the reflective eyes, the deformed faces seen in starlight. The stink of rotting filth. Exhausted as he had been, he had waked half a dozen times, less from concern for his old friend than from the nightmare that he’d heard clawed hands scratching at the windows, seen those slumped shadows following him again along the stagnant waters of the canal.