Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

Or both?

When the men had gone, Asher and Mizukami emerged from hiding, crossed to the ghostly rectangle of star-pinned heaven. Enough wind remained to sting Asher’s cheeks and numb the end of his nose. Looking down from the terrace he saw men emerge from Big Tiger Lane on to the lakeside pebbles, some running north, some south, boots crunching in the ice. The pursuers clung together, looked fearfully around themselves . . . So presumably the fact that Madame Tso’s son and nephew had become yao-kuei didn’t mean that the other yao-kuei could be controlled to the point that they wouldn’t attack Tso enforcers.

In the courtyard behind them and below, a woman’s voice rose, sharp with anger. Asher crossed the room silently, opened one of the shutters a crack in time to see Madame Tso, still in her embroidered robe of blue silk, slap Chi T’uan smartly across the face.

‘Lump of dog meat!’

‘We’ll catch them, Aunt.’

‘Are your brother and my son all right?’

‘I’m going down now to see.’

‘And Li?’

‘Aunt, I—’ Chen Chi T’uan pressed a hand to his temple. He was, as far as Asher could see, tall for a Chinese and dressed and barbered in the Western fashion, his coat a flashy double-breasted American style. The hardness in his voice dissolved, and he said, much more quietly, ‘I can’t always hear him.’

She slapped him again. ‘You’re not trying, then! Ungrateful brat!’

‘I am trying.’

‘It should be growing easier.’

‘But it’s not! Aunt, I don’t think it was a good idea to infect him with the blood of the kuei . What if it drives him crazy, the way it has Chi Erh—?’

‘My son has been stupid all his life and hadn’t the strength to resist. And, we hadn’t learned the right combination of herbs then, to keep the mind strong. Chi Fu is all right—’

‘Chi Fu is not all right! Chi Fu is turning into one of those things too, no matter how many herbs and medicines we give him! When I try to find my brother’s mind, it’s like trying to pick up the fragments of a rotting body—’

‘You’re a coward and a fool. Chi Fu will be well. He is recovering. As for Li – Li is chiang-shi . His body is like a diamond, stronger than the blood of the kuei . If he wouldn’t do what is needful to turn you into chiang-shi , what other course was open to us? Don’t be a baby, and give me your arm.’

Chi T’uan held out his arm, steadied his formidable aunt’s mincing steps as he led her toward the door of the main pavilion. Toward the stairway that led down to their prisoner’s lair, where the vampire Li could live in safety and darkness forever.

Asher and Mizukami descended the stair, crossed the courtyard swiftly, their breath clouds of silver in the excruciating cold. There was no one, now, in this part of the compound – everyone being presumably out combing the lakeshore or repelling rioters. They followed the walkway to the small courtyard where An Lu T’ang’s pleasure pavilion stood, and so out into Big Tiger Lane.

The sounds of riot around the Empress’s Garden had died away. As they turned down Lotus Alley, broken shopfronts, smashed shutters, and fragments of furniture and bottles bore witness to the magnitude of the disorder. The lanterns of shopkeepers bobbed in the darkness as they took stock of shattered boxes and looted goods. Here and there bullet holes punctuated the thick walls, and the air reeked with spilled liquor and vomit.

Outside the gate of the wine shop itself, Mizukami stopped a blue-uniformed policeman and asked, ‘Was anyone badly hurt?’

The representative of Peking’s Finest expiated for some minutes on the subject of big-nosed foreign-devil stinking sons of slave girls and hoped their commanding officers would flog them with rusty chains until the skin was stripped off their backs, and no, nobody had been killed. Mizukami handed him a few coins and signaled a couple of rickshaws.

When Asher climbed into one, the Count said to the puller, ‘Japanese Legation.’

An hour and a half later – it was by this time nearly three in the morning – Asher, pacing the sparely-furnished four-mat room at the back of Mizukami’s cottage, heard the cottage door open and the soft scrunch of running feet on the tatami. A moment later, the door of the room was flung open and Lydia threw herself into his arms.

TWENTY-THREE

‘Forty.’ Asher turned Ysidro’s note over in his fingers.

Though the cottage was wired for modern electrical lamps, Mizukami clearly preferred the dimmer glow of paraffin. An oil-lamp stood – incongruous with its pink-flowered globe – on the small Chinese table in the corner, and by its honey-colored light the queer letters – drawn with a writing brush as if they were pictures – were clearly readable on the stiff yellow paper.

Other than the lamp and its table, the room, like all those in the house, was furnished in the Japanese style, which to a Westerner’s mind meant not very furnished at all. When Asher and Mizukami had returned there, servants had brought out quilts for Asher to sleep on, a neat dark square that took up two-thirds of the floor.

He now sat cross-legged on the floor mats beside a low table, Lydia perched on a cushion at his side.

A servant had brought tea, and then left them alone.

It was nearly dawn.

‘Forty isn’t so very many.’ Lydia spoke in the neutral tone that Asher had observed her use when she was deeply troubled about something.

He knew what it was: what she wasn’t saying.

‘It is when there’s only five or six in the defending party,’ he replied. ‘And when you know that if you’re wounded – if enough of their blood gets into the cut – you’ll be one of them within days.’

Lydia looked down at her hands. Not saying – because she could not say it, not even in her own heart – we have to get him out .

The words stood between them as they discussed the explosives, and chlorine gas, and how to keep the rats at bay long enough to plant the gelignite charges. (‘Do the German regiments have any flammenwerfer they’d lend us, I wonder?’)

Asher understood. It was one thing to say, He is what he is, and he cannot help what he is . The same was true of Grant Hobart. Karlebach had said to him once of Ysidro, Every kill he makes henceforth will be upon your head , and Asher knew that this was the truth.

The fact that Don Simon Ysidro had gone to the mines in the first place to help Asher’s investigation of the Others – to keep the threat from spreading further – made no difference.

Nor did the fact that he had saved Asher’s life, and Lydia’s, and that of Miranda before she was born.

The fact that Asher had himself killed, repeatedly, over the span of nearly twenty years in the service of the Department made no difference, either. He had walked away from it. Ysidro could not, and never would.

To do him justice, the vampire was probably not expecting rescue. Nevertheless, Asher felt like a Judas, the pain of betraying and deserting a comrade grinding in him like the poisoned barbs of an arrow.

‘She really deliberately infected her son, and then her nephew – two of her nephews! – with the blood of the Others, for . . . for the sake of power ?’ Lydia shook her head disbelievingly, when Asher told her of what he’d found in the Tso compound, and what he’d overheard. ‘How could she? How could anyone do that?’

He knew she was thinking of Miranda. Tiny, perfect, like a red-and-white flower . . .

‘She’s a woman who had her feet mutilated by her own mother before she reached the age of six,’ replied Asher, ‘so that she’d be “beautiful” enough to sell to someone whose influence would help her family.’