Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

Lydia started to say something else, then couldn’t, and only shook her head.

‘A woman whose feet are bound lives in daily pain for the rest of her life, Lydia. I wouldn’t say it gave Madame Tso a hatred for her family, but I can’t see how it wouldn’t give you a rather specialized view of what a family can reasonably ask its members.’

‘And I thought Aunt Louise was bad . . .’

‘I don’t know how Madame Tso found herself in the position to mutilate the vampire Li and make him her prisoner,’ Asher went on quietly. ‘Whether it was chance, or whether he trusted her enough to let her know where he slept.’

‘Well, I must say it certainly explains why the Peking vampires don’t trust the living.’

‘Or anyone. My guess is, once she had him at her mercy, she starved him—’

‘It’s what I’d do,’ agreed Lydia reasonably. ‘That is, if I were – um – that kind of person . . .’

Asher brought up her hand and kissed it. ‘I’ve seen you in the dissecting rooms, Best Beloved, and you are that kind of person. You just haven’t had her motives. There’s nothing I wouldn’t put past you, if Miranda were in danger.’

‘Well, no.’ She blinked at him behind her spectacles, as if his observation were self-evident.

‘Later she had victims brought to him, in exchange for his using a vampire’s ability to read dreams – and plant dreams – to give her husband and his enforcers an edge over other criminal families in Peking.’

‘And reading dreams,’ went on Lydia, ‘and being able to . . . to touch the minds of others, the way very old vampires can do, he would have become aware of the minds of the Others. Or the hive mind, anyway, which is what it sounds like they have.’ Her brow furrowed briefly. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to have had Madame Tso’s dreams for the past twenty years . . .’

‘No. But if he’s been sending her wake-up-screaming nightmares every night for two decades, it’s still a price she’s willing to pay. She’s willing to pay any price for power for herself and her family – including her sons and her nephews. It sounds as if she tried to force Li into making them into vampires, and when Li wouldn’t cooperate, infected him – and them – with the blood of the Others, in the hopes of controlling the Others through Li. I’m guessing that not everyone in the family knows about Li.’

‘Well, it’s not a secret I’d share with some of the people in my family.’ Lydia shifted her weight on the cushion. She had arrived, Asher was hugely amused to observe, fastidiously turned-out in a black silk mourning costume glittering with beads of jet. Her red hair, now unloosed from its careful chignon, stood out against the dark cloth like a river of lava. ‘ Can the mind of a contaminated victim be preserved by those potions you saw in the Tso compound?’

‘Matthias Uray’s was, as long as he was able to take them.’ Asher shivered at the thought. ‘But whether the nephew I saw – Chen Chi T’uan – will be strong enough to control the vampire Li is another matter.’

‘It’s a scheme which may turn on her,’ went on Lydia thoughtfully, ‘if Li becomes able to control these yao-kuei with any kind of accuracy. I wonder how precise his control will be, once he gets the hang of it? If it doesn’t make him insane first, that is. I must say,’ she added, ‘it does serve them all right.’

Asher hid a grin, then sobered. ‘It would,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t serve those around them right. And the innocent in every country on earth, if President Yuan decides to sell the secret to buy himself alliances. Those are the ones who’ll suffer. This man who brought you the message –’ he touched it again, on the table beside them – ‘this priest . . .’

‘Chiang – I think that was what he said his name was. He’s one of the priests from the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. At least, he wears the same kind of robe.’

‘A yi ,’ said Asher. ‘It’s the type of clothing the Chinese wore before the Manchu conquered them and made them wear ch’i-p’ao and queues. The Japanese adopted it from them, way back in the days – you’ll usually see it only on temple priests. He said he dreamed this?’

‘Copied it from a dream.’ Lydia turned the paper around, studied the characters again in the lamplight. Even the idiosyncrasies of Ysidro’s handwriting had been reproduced, the characteristic sixteenth-century loops on the Fs and Ys, the flourish on the end of each S.

‘He must have a high degree of psychic sensitivity,’ said Asher thoughtfully, ‘given that Ysidro is trapped beneath the earth. Would he agree to be hypnotized, I wonder?’

‘We can ask. His English isn’t good, though. Do you know how to hypnotize people, Jamie?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But he may agree to put himself into a meditative state that would allow us to communicate with Ysidro in the mine.’

She met his eyes then, opened her mouth – and closed it. Only looked at him, her eyes, behind the thick rounds of glass, filling with tears.

And what? she would have asked him, he guessed. Ask him to help us even though we’re going to abandon him? Seal him in a grave – a grave filled with corrosive gas, skin and eyes burning away, conscious, blind, and without hope of ever escaping – forever?

Yes, and yes . . . and yes .

Like playing chess , reflected Asher wearily. Or more simply, like playing Patience. When you know five moves ahead that you can’t win and there’s nothing you can do about it . . .

Remember me kindly . . . Ysidro had written.

He gathered her into his arms. She took off her glasses, laid them on the table beside Ysidro’s note, and pressed her face to his shoulder, shivering as if with bitterest cold.

‘Voice in dreams.’

The priest Chiang passed his hand across his high, balding forehead, white brows contracted with pain.

Lydia had not left Mizukami’s bungalow until almost daybreak; Asher had slept until past noon. Mizukami’s dwelling stood near the end of the grassy mall in a corner of the Japanese Legation, not far from the small service-gate that let on to an alley off Rue Lagrené. The military attaché’s servants (and, surprisingly, his mistress, whose voice Asher heard through the thin walls but whom he never saw) were loyal, quiet, and treated Asher as if he were simultaneously very honored and completely invisible. It was not difficult to slip out of the Legation Quarter and meet Lydia in Silk Lane at two.

‘I trust we’re going to clear your name completely in short order,’ she had said as they’d walked briskly in the direction of the Temple of Everlasting Harmony. ‘I’m positive that someone noticed me sneaking out of the hotel at three o’clock this morning, and that word’s already going about that I’ve got a lover – I swear Annette Hautecoeur has the hotel servants on retainer . . . If anyone sees us together while you’re dressed like that , people are going to start saying I have a Chinese lover, and then I’ll simply have to go live in Paris or someplace, though even in Paris that would be considered outside of enough.’

‘I shall keep a respectful three paces behind you, ma’am,’ responded Asher meekly, and he tugged his scarves a little higher up over the bridge of his nose. He had bathed at the bungalow – something that it had been simply too cold to do very often in the half-ruined courtyard on Pig-Dragon Lane – and Mizukami had provided him with a new ch’i-p’ao , ku , and cap. ‘You could borrow Mrs Pilley’s coat, couldn’t you? And Ellen’s skirt and hat?’