Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘They didn’t have any hesitation about hurting Mr Woodreave,’ she said softly.

Hobart’s head jerked sideways, like a horse tormented by a fly. ‘What?’

‘Mr Woodreave? The man you paid – I presume – to get me downstairs, knowing I’d come at his request but not at yours?’

‘I – he shouldn’t have . . .’ By the blurred candle-flame she saw a tremor shake him, and he pawed the air near one ear. ‘Excuse me?’ He blinked at her, as if waking from a dream himself.

His mind is starting to go . Panic flooded her. How long does it take to turn completely into one of those things ? How long do I have before he turns on me?

She took a deep breath and pretended she had a procedure to finish that had to be done correctly before the patient stopped breathing or went into shock. There’s plenty of time, but this needs to be done with delay . . .

‘Why did you come back here?’ she asked. ‘And how did you get in?’

For a moment he looked at her a little blankly, as if he’d forgotten again, then went to the corner by the open trapdoor, Lydia never taking her eyes from him as he moved. He picked up something he’d leaned against the wall, and she moved back away from the table a little. As she did, a whisper of icy air breathed on her from the total blackness of the room.

Moving air.

Door open. Window open .

‘I don’t know.’ He held up a black rod. By the way he handled its weight it had to be a spanner or pry bar. ‘Something . . . I had to come. I had to come here. It wants me.’

‘Who wants you?’ If I run, will he chase me, as a dog will if you flee?

‘The ruler. The – The Lord of Hell – one of the Lords of Hell. Of this part of Hell. He needs me to— What?’ His head jerked again, and in the near-dark, his stance changed, his hunched shoulders dropped a little. ‘I – I’m sorry. This afternoon I dreamed – I slept, and I dreamed that I had to come back here. When I woke it was all I could think of. I didn’t mean to, but . . . but it’s as if I drifted off again for a bit, and then woke up and here I was.’ He hefted the pry bar in his hand. He’s a big man , she thought. He can easily break a skull .

‘Did you break in through one of the gates?’ she inquired, in the same tone of voice in which she’d have asked Lady Cottesmore where she’d got the shrimp for her buffet. Thank you, Aunt Lavinnia, for all those lessons in speaking calmly and politely no matter what one feels . . .

‘Yes. There’s not a soul in this part of the house, you know.’ The words came out perfectly naturally. Then his head began to move again, as if he were disoriented, and he said something in Chinese. The candle in Lydia’s hand flickered – she risked a glance down at it and saw it was burned nearly to its end in its little porcelain dish.

Hobart gasped and dropped the pry bar – it made a great, ringing clatter on the tiled floor – and clutched his head. Voices cried out in the room below: one in Chinese, the other simply bleating, a goatish sound that made Lydia’s stomach turn.

Without a word, Hobart lurched away from her and vanished down the stair. Lydia turned at once and scanned the darkness, looking for anything . . .

There . A lighter rectangle in the blackness. He’d pried open a window.

She ran to it as soundlessly as she could, climbed out into the dark.

TWENTY-EIGHT

DAMN those wretched gangsters for stealing my glasses!

Lydia strode along the side of the building to its corner in the darkness, one hand to the wall, trying desperately to remember whether Jamie had said anything about which way one went to get out of this particular courtyard. Both Jamie and the Baroness Drosdrova had explained to her that in the larger courtyard houses, only a few courtyards had gates or doors leading out into the hutongs , and it would make sense that Mrs Tso wouldn’t imprison her son and her nephew in any courtyard that fit that description . . .

So how had Grant Hobart found it?

Something was drawing him – the hive mind of the Others?

Whatever was happening – completely aside from the hostage-for-Jamie issue – Lydia didn’t want any part of it.

There isn’t a soul in this part of the house , Hobart had said.

Moonlight painted the elaborate tiled ridges of the roofs, but the courtyard remained plunged in shadow. A walkway led away westward from the corner of the building, a blotchy patchwork of darkness and deeper darkness. There might well be more than one route out of the courtyard, but Lydia wasn’t about to stay and look for others. Hobart’s pry bar would make short work of the staples that held the yao-kueis’ chains to the cellar wall. The walkway led around two corners and branched; she heard a woman’s voice in one direction, and the voices of children, and smelled cooking oil. The other way took her into a deserted courtyard, and she made her way slowly around its entire perimeter, searching for anything resembling a doorway.

Two other walkways. It was like getting lost in the hutongs that lay somewhere on the other side of all those crowding walls. One led to a courtyard that was definitely occupied – the dim glow of oil-light outlined windows showed Lydia goldfish-kongs and laundry. The other opened into a longer walkway where the light of a lantern bobbed, coming closer.

Lydia turned and walked away as if she were merely another member of the family, but it didn’t work. A man shouted at her in Chinese. She broke into a run, dodged around a corner and back along another walkway – or was it one she’d already traversed? She fled across a courtyard, and two women emerged from one of the rooms off it, shouting at her (presumably – for all she knew they could be screaming about stains on the good tablecloth the way her stepmother did). She tried to find another way out, but the men with the lantern came running from another corner of the court, shouting ‘ T’ing !’ One of them fired a pistol, which knocked splinters of brick from a wall yards from her, and both Chinese women immediately turned upon the guards and started to shriek at them.

Lydia tried to dart past them, but one of them seized her and twisted her arm brutally, and the other struck her in the face with force that took her breath away. The Chinese women still screaming at them, the men dragged her into the nearest room – empty, but obviously somebody’s home, with blankets piled on a kang stove-bed and clothing of some kind hanging in the shadows on the wall. One of the men yelled a command to the women in the courtyard. There were shrieks of argument ( whoever said Chinese women were trained to be submissive? Lydia wondered), and then running feet. A child’s , Lydia thought as she was shoved into a battered bamboo chair. The way the women had moved, it was obvious that their feet were crippled.

She sat motionless, head throbbing from the blow. A more intrepid heroine, she reflected, would probably take on both guards with the chair. But one of them had the gun pointed at her, and she didn’t see how being beaten senseless was going to help her flee later, to say nothing of the fact that even if she got out of this room and the courtyard, she still hadn’t the slightest idea of which way the compound’s single open gate was, if it was still open . . .

They need me as a hostage. They can’t kill me, they need me as a hostage . . .

Only until they get Jamie .

The door opened.

There was only one person with Mrs Tso, a fat little Chinese man dressed in Western style, his hair cut short and smelling faintly of pomade. Lydia couldn’t make out his features clearly but could see at least no sign of the horrors visible in Hobart’s face and on the poor samurai Ito’s. Her oldest son?