Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

Would Hobart – and the two Tso Others to whom he had now allied himself – be able to track her by the smell of living flesh, living blood, in the darkness?

She didn’t know.

At least there were no rats here. Although the vampire Li, down in his cellar tomb, was – Jamie had assured her – utterly unable to move, still the antipathy that all animals had to those Undead predators seemed to persist. Even Simon’s cats back in London gave the vampire wide berth, at least – Lydia suspected – until he had fed.

But the thought of that tall, narrow house on its nameless side-street – the street that had by coincidence been left off every map of London since the late sixteenth century – brought a desperate tightness to Lydia’s throat, the sting of tears to her eyes. Every wall jammed with bookshelves, the carved graceful products of eighteenth-century cabinetmakers’ art or simple goods boxes stacked on top of them . . . A desk of inlaid ebony, and a strange old German calculating-engine that grinned with ivory keys.

They are unable to reach me, nor I to pass them . . .

She remembered how cold his hands were when they touched hers; the journey in his company from Paris to Constantinople, long nights playing picquet to the swaying of the train coach (‘. . . the representation in little of all human affairs,’ he described the game, while beating her at it, soundly and mercilessly.) She still had a handful of his sonnets, hidden in the back of a drawer at home, a fact that she had never told either Simon or Jamie.

Remember me kindly, if we meet not again .

She leaned her head back against the pillar behind her. Her knees ached from standing, but she did not dare slither down to sit. The tightness of the binding on her wrists was such that, despite flexing and turning her hands as well as she could, her fingers kept going numb.

You don’t understand , Hobart had whispered. A killer asking to be excused.

Simon had never asked that, nor pretended that he wasn’t what he was.

Did that make him less deserving of being buried alive in a gas-choked mine?

No. No .

Then why are you crying?

The silence in the pavilion seemed deeper in the darkness. Then through that silence, dim and muffled, a voice lifted. Screaming. Words, Lydia thought, though the thickness of the intervening earth made it impossible to tell . . .

Does he scream every night?

Or just since they infected him with the blood of the yao-kuei?

Twenty years , Jamie had said. Maybe longer . Twenty years of lying propped on a little daybed with his long hair flowing down around him, unable to move. Had he trusted Mrs Tso, beautiful as the sky with stars ? Had he let her know where he slept? Relied on her to do things for him, the way Don Simon Ysidro relied on her and Jamie? She had twice seen Ysidro asleep, sunk in the vampire trance of the daylight hours, from which nothing could waken them. On the second of those occasions, in St Petersburg, Jamie could have – should have, Karlebach would say – killed Simon where he lay, to save the lives of who knew how many thousands of men and women in the future.

And Karlebach was right! she thought despairingly.

But it had never – would never – have occurred to either of them to chop off his arms and legs and keep him alive to use his powers over the minds of others at their bidding.

And I suppose that’s the reason I’m not the all-powerful matriarch of a gangster family .

But even that, Lydia reflected, was unfair. She had been born wealthy, a rich man’s only child. God only knew where Mrs Tso had come from, or what had been done to her – other than crippling her feet to make her ‘more beautiful’ (and also more expensive on the market) – to turn her into a woman who would think of doing that. Who would use her son, and then her nephews, as pawns, so that she herself would never be that helpless again.

Deep below her, the vampire Li screamed in the dark.

Screaming? Or calling out?

Calling out for who?

TWENTY-NINE

A shot cracked the night.

Close. Lydia’s heart lurched. A few courtyards away . . .

In this part of the Tatar City gunplay could have nothing to do with the situation in the Tso compound tonight. Since the Emperor’s fall, Peking had become a violent place, the gangs that controlled the brothels and p’ai-gow games, the rickshaw stables and opium dens all fighting for mastery, the soldiers of the President and of the Kuo Min-tang staging murderous battles in the taverns. Robbers, layabouts, and killers for hire hid out under the bridges and in the empty temples around the shallow ‘Sea’ and vastly outnumbered the new police-force.

But the shot filled her with panic.

Deep beneath the pavilion, Li had fallen silent.

For a thousandth time, Lydia pulled and twisted at the silken rope around her wrists, trying to at least get her fingernails on the knots.

Nothing.

Then, so softly she wasn’t sure if the sound was actually in the ground beneath her or inside her head, Lydia heard Li crooning, a horrible mixture of words and throat sounds.

Oh, God , she thought, struggling again though she knew it would do her no good. Oh God —

Something – some one – pounded on the pavilion door.

Where are the wretched guards? They were every way I turned three hours ago . . .

Yet there had really been only a few. Not a soul , Hobart had said, and he’d been very nearly right; she remembered how Mrs Tso had appeared with only her son for escort. Had they heard that Jamie was going out to the Western Hills today and went out to prevent them blowing up the mine?

And did Li know that?

Fists crashed on the shutters, a yard from her head. Lydia fought not to scream. Two of them – even in her terror she identified the sounds at the windows. Two of them, pounding on the wood with the violence of machinery. Hobart’s face swam into her mind, distorted, fanged. The bloody mouth and sprouting teeth of the samurai Ito, the horrible thick claws of the things chained in the cellar . . .

More crashing, on the shutters of the main room this time, the pitchy darkness seeming to shake with the noise—

Jamie, Jamie get me out of here!

Gunshots again, right outside the pavilion. The things hammering at the front windows stopped, but the crashing at the windows beside her, in front of her, kept on, unheeding, and through the hammer blows she heard a man scream. Three more gunshots, with the speed of someone shooting wild in panic, and then the rending crash of wooden shutters tearing, and moonlight streamed into the room.

Two of them, black slumped silhouettes. One crossed the room to the door as if it didn’t see her, but the other came straight for her, eyes flashing yellow like a cat’s. After the blackness the dim blue moonlight seemed bright, and Lydia brought up one foot and kicked it in the stomach with all her strength as it reached for her.

It staggered back, bayed at her, a yawping animal sound, then drove in again. She kicked again and felt her skirt tear where it grabbed her, kicked a third time, and a fourth – it didn’t seem to have any other strategy than to keep coming, keep grabbing, as if it knew that she’d tire long before it did. It leaned its weight on her, swung its arms, and her kick turned into a desperate shove, holding it away.

It howled.

Then it turned from her and followed its companion out the door and into the main room.

Lydia heard other things in that room and realized that the crashing in that direction had stopped. So had the screams and the shots. The smell of fresh blood came to her, and of cordite. She heard them crashing and pounding on the door of the western chamber, drowning out the crooning wail of the vampire Li below.