Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘That makes the most sense of anything I’ve heard. A Chinese can’t bring a case against an English diplomat, Lydia. This is the only way they could make him suffer: by having the son he loves disgraced and hanged.’

She said nothing. Thoughts turning, like her fingers on the table furnishings. Asher’s thoughts, too, ranged back to those three strange months of spending four hours a day with that loud-voiced, hard-cursing young man who got himself violently drunk every night after the lessons were done. The fifty pounds Hobart had paid him then had been what had taken him to Central Europe that second time, to study with Karlebach.

And his familiarity with the less-known reaches of the Austrian Empire that he had thus acquired had been what had brought him to the attention of the Department in the first place.

He’d been the only one of the Balliol men who had been invited, five years later, to Grant Hobart’s wedding to the daughter of an American millionaire.

Behind the closed bedroom door his quick ears picked up the creak of the bed springs and a rumbly murmur in Yiddish.

‘I’ll see how he is.’

Lydia wiped the dust off her spoon again and set it in her saucer. ‘You know Sir Grant isn’t going to want to hear that.’

‘No. So, just in case of trouble, I’ve cached thirty pounds where I can get at it in a hurry, under a floorboard in the generator room of this hotel. He has a temper, and he may turn spiteful – in which case I may have to run for it. I wonder if old Wu is still willing to hide ch’ang pi kwei in his house . . .?’

‘Old Wu?’

‘A minor crook in the Chinese City. I think he works for the Sheng family, or he did fourteen years ago. He could procure anything from telephone wire to French champagne, and he’ll certainly hide a yang kwei tse from the authorities – or irate Germans – if the price is right. But I’m hoping we’ll be able to come up with a story of some kind that will exonerate Richard, cause minimal damage, and keep his father from killing again.’

He wondered, as opened the bedroom door and saw his old teacher propped up among the pillows, if he had learned to move so casually past the unavengeable murder of an unknown girl – barely more than a child, from what he knew of Grant Hobart’s tastes – from his days with the Department.

Or was that something that had come on him since he’d known vampires?

‘We have to go back.’ Karlebach’s left thumb – the only digit still mobile on that hand – curled down hard over Asher’s fingers, as if he feared his former pupil would pull away at the murmured words. ‘We have to go down into the mine, find where they lie. I saw shotguns for sale at Kierulf’s store, next to the hotel, and there’s a gunsmith attached to the British barracks—’

‘I’ll go.’

‘No! I must—’

‘ Why ?’

Karlebach turned his face fretfully aside. ‘I know these things . . .’

‘What more about them do I need to know,’ asked Asher softly, ‘other than that they must be destroyed? There must be maps of some kind of the mine. I’ll find out from one of Sir John’s clerks what the mining company was and how to get my hands on its records. If I tell them I suspect the Kuo Min-tang is using the mine for a hideout I should get access. It isn’t as if it’s a secret. Those medicines you made—’

He nodded toward Lydia’s dressing table, where the phials stood in a glittering line. A minuscule drift of dust had settled along their bases.

‘You don’t know if they’d work against these things or not?’

‘I was a fool to bring them.’ Karlebach sighed. ‘Had there been more remains at the German woman’s mission I would have tried a drop here, a drop there, to see what effect they would have . . . Jamie, did you count them? Did you see how many there were? Dozens—’ His lined face twisted with distress.

‘There always seem to be more attackers in the dark,’ said Asher firmly, though he himself had been appalled at their numbers.

‘And we did not hear them, did not smell them, until they were almost on us. Matthias—’ Again he hesitated on his betrayer’s name. ‘Matthias said they had something of the vampire power to shield themselves from the eyes and minds of the living.’

‘Matthias made a study of them, then?’ He wondered if that young rebel had had the opportunity to do so because the medieval crypts and tunnels beneath the Old City had been in use by the revolutionary groups of Hungarians, Czechs, and Slavs who plotted to free their various homelands from the age-long grip of Austria.

Karlebach lay motionless for a time, then nodded. In the dense gloom of the bedroom, tears gathered in the old man’s eyes. ‘Like me, he feared what would happen if some of these politicians, these generals, learn of them, seek to use them to control their enemies. Already there are too many evil weapons in the world, Jamie. And too many men who believe that some good can come from fighting what they perceive as evil with weapons of an evil stronger still. This is why I say, I have to go back to the mine. I have to see them for myself, with my own eyes that cannot be deceived.’

Asher was silent for a time. Then he said, ‘Deceived?’

‘Jamie—’ Karlebach’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘These things are the kindred of the vampire. How can we tell that it is not the vampire that controls them? That commands them? These things have no minds of their own, but if a vampire rules over them, what can they not do? You have been deceived by a vampire before,’ he added, deep sorrow in his voice. ‘Your heart is good, Jamie, but in this you cannot be trusted.’

The arthritic right hand, with its crooked fingers, closed around Asher’s, the grip still powerful as a young man’s. ‘The stakes are too high for me to risk the slightest error. So you see, it must be me.’

Maybe so , thought Asher, watching as the old man turned his face aside. But something tells me I’m not the only one who can’t be trusted .

NINE

The winds did not abate until long after dark.

Shortly past noon, a message came from the front desk that Count Mizukami was asking for him. Such was the thickness of the atmosphere outside that the lights were on in the small private parlor to which the manager conducted him, and the electric brightness was hazy with floating dust. ‘I am deeply thankful for your intervention last night, Mizukami-san,’ said Asher, bowing. ‘I and the men with me unequivocally owe you our lives. I trust that Ito-san’s injuries were not of a serious nature?’

‘My servant is resting. Thank you for your interest in him, Ashu Sensei.’ The emperor’s attaché bowed in return, like a chubby, bespectacled elf in his trim dark-blue uniform. Asher hoped the changes wrought in his own appearance over the past fourteen years were greater than those that marked Mizukami: a powdering of gray at his close-cropped temples, and the deepening of the lines around his eyes. In 1898, Asher had been not only bearded and shaggy and masked with thick glasses, as befit his persona of an eccentric academic, but – whenever anyone could see him – irascible, ill-mannered, and fluent only in German.

Mizukami went on, ‘My concern is that creatures which smell as those did will prove to carry some infection in their claws and teeth, so he is under observation from the Legation physician. Is Ka-ru-ba-ku Sensei recovered?’

‘He is, thank you. Your arrival was fortuitous.’

‘Perhaps not so fortuitous as that – Ge-raa Sensei.’ Mizukami met his eyes as he gave his pronunciation of Asher’s 1898 alias.

Damn it. And me traveling with an Austrian Jew can’t help the situation . . .