Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘No, that’s Mingliang, all right, sir,’ the clerk reassured him, when Asher slid the map across to him. ‘I suspect the man who put this map together had never been near the place and was trying to make the earlier maps all fit.’

They worked in the Legation offices – Asher had a deep mistrust about anyone knowing any more about his family or place of residence than was absolutely necessary – in a room of the original old princely palace that hadn’t even been piped for gas, let alone wired for electricity. Paraffin lamps threw strange shadows over the red-lacquered pillars that rose between the prosaic desks of the clerks, caught glints of peeled gold and faded polychrome among the maze of ceiling beams. As he studied the maps, Asher found a great deal of his long-neglected Chinese returned to him, though he was glad of an assistant: ‘Is that incline there? Does that ten mean degrees of slope?’

‘That’s keng – pit. I assume ten bu deep, unless – when was this made? Unless they were using meters.’

‘When did the company switch over to meters? Does it say?’

P’ei shook his head. ‘If a mine was getting its equipment from Germany or France they’d sometimes switch over to meters – even as far back as 1880 – but it depended on whether they kept foremen who were more used to measuring things in chi and bu . And then some of the foremen came from parts of the country where it was five chi to a bu , and some from where it was six chi .’

‘Hmn.’ Asher reflected that it was no wonder the unfortunate Emperor Kwang Hsu – before he’d been locked up by his ferocious old aunt the Empress Dowager and poisoned – had wanted to reform measurements. ‘And where does this lead? It says old tunnel .’

‘ Old tunnel could mean something that was dug in the time of the T’ang emperors, sir. That part of the hills is riddled with old mines. Some of the tunnels are caved in or flooded. Others go Heaven knows where. The Company got cheated when it bought the diggings and tried to get its money back out of its workers’ wages. They never put up enough shorings, or bothered to keep their pumps working properly.’

Asher glanced across the table at the young man, neat as any Cockney clerk in a blue suit and starched collar, with a little close-clipped French mustache. ‘Have you ever been to the mines?’

P’ei shook his head. ‘But one of my mother’s neighbors worked in the Shi’h Liu mines, both before and after the Hsi Fang-te Company bought them. He said the galleries would sometimes connect with older diggings – from back even before the . . .’ He stopped himself from saying Long-Nosed Devils . ‘Before the Europeans came to China.’

‘Did he ever scare you with stories of things hiding in the mine?’

The clerk grinned. ‘You mean demons? He used to scare the daylights out of me and my brother telling us about a kuei like a giant catfish, with six pairs of men’s arms and eyes that glowed in the dark. It would haul itself along the tunnel singing in a woman’s voice and devour miners.’

But no yao-kuei . That would be – he tried to estimate the young man’s age – maybe twenty years ago? And his instincts told him that Dr Bauer was correct. That the yao-kuei were of very recent appearance.

But how? Where did they come from? And why?

ARE the vampires of Peking behind it somehow?

During these three days of examining maps, Asher also paid visits to the other friends of Richard Hobart – a Trade Ministry clerk named Cromwell Hall, and the dandified German translator Hans Erlich – and confirmed what he already suspected: that on the evening of their disastrous expedition to Eight Roads, young Hobart hadn’t been wearing the tie with which Holly Eddington had been strangled. It was clear to him that the young man had been very neatly separated from his companions that night, drugged – the rickshaw-puller must have showed Hobart’s pass to the gate guards – and dumped in the garden beside his fiancée’s dead body. The Department at its finest couldn’t have done better.

On the third evening, Asher brought up the subject of where a yang jên gentleman of moderate wealth and specialized tastes might go to seek entertainment in Peking.

‘A friend of mine asked me to make inquiries,’ he explained.

‘You mean a boy?’ P’ei didn’t turn a hair. ‘Or children?’

Waiters in Peking eating houses used the same tone to inquire: All-same want steam rice, want fry rice ?

‘Girls,’ Asher said. ‘Young girls. Who would I speak to about that?’

The clerk was silent for a moment, studying his face, though Asher himself had learned long ago that it wasn’t always possible to judge a man’s tastes in the bedroom by looking at him. In time he replied, ‘I would go to Fat Yu, or An Lu T’ang. Yu, if your friend likes his girls very young. An, if he does not wish to be troubled by the law, if it should so happen that the girl gets . . . hurt.’

‘I’ll speak to my friend.’ Asher saw in the young clerk’s eyes the glimmer of wary disgust, as if he suspected that no such ‘friend’ existed. ‘I’ll ask him what he prefers. Thank you.’

P’ei turned back to the company records and unfolded another sheet in the pool of brightness cast by the lamp. ‘Watch out for An,’ he added. ‘He works for the Tso family – they’ve become one of the biggest gangs in the city. Generally, An – and the Tso – provide the house. Your friend may find himself paying blackmail.’

‘I’ll warn him. Thank you.’

It was close to eight o’clock when he locked up the maps in the cupboard that Sir John had set aside for him in the Legation offices, gave P’ei his ten shillings – the clerk refused with a quiet head-shake the extra crown that he offered – and went out to Meiji Street in quest of a rickshaw. He had arranged to meet Lydia, Karlebach, the Russian attaché the Baron Drosdrov and his wife, and a Belgian professor of Chinese literature for dinner at the Peking Club, and he barely had time to stop at the hotel and change. Lydia and Karlebach had already departed – ‘The old professor took himself off just after five, sir,’ provided Ellen, with a note of disapproval in her voice. ‘Said he had to buy some ties, but I say that’s no excuse for leaving poor Mrs Asher to get herself to the Club without an escort.’

It was five hundred yards from the front doors of the Wagons-Lits Hotel to the Peking Club, along two of the best-patrolled streets in China, but Ellen had read – Asher suspected – far too many novels about the Yellow Peril to believe her lady could make the journey in anything resembling safety. ‘Ties are a critical component of a man’s survival in a foreign country, Ellen,’ he replied gravely. ‘I only hope Rebbe Karlebach set forth on his quest in evening dress, because the maître d’ at the Club isn’t likely to admit him if he isn’t, no matter how many ties he has purchased.’

As it happened, he was given the opportunity to judge Karlebach’s attire for himself. As usual – the habit of vigilance never left an old field agent, vampires or no vampires – Asher took note of every doorway, vehicle, and passer-by along Legation Street and Rue Marco Polo as his rickshaw bore him at a brisk trot toward the Peking Club. In the same fashion, over the past three days, he had thoroughly familiarized himself – and Lydia – with the hotel itself, until he knew every stairway, every attic, every cupboard, six different ways of getting to the money cached in the generator room, and most particularly every exit . . . just in case.