Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘This afternoon.’ It was in Asher’s mind to wonder if he would ever see the old scholar again.

‘May his ship go down with all hands.’ As he had in the mines, Don Simon looked thin and haggard, and very unhuman. The scars on his face and throat, which he generally used his psychic glamor to cover from living eyes, were shockingly visible. Asher wondered whether this was because this was only a dream, or because of the silver that had scorched his flesh.

‘I suppose the thought has never crossed his mind that, had he followed his own dictates and simply destroyed that precious student of his the moment he became infected, rather than giving him the wherewithal to travel and spread the virus, all this might have been avoided.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Asher, ‘I think the thought was very much in his mind. This journey for him was penance – and redemption.’

‘At someone else’s expense,’ said the vampire with a sniff. ‘And without asking those he would “help” if they wanted his interference. Like all the Van Helsings of the world, who must become a little mad in order to pursue such phantoms as we. Obsession with us destroys them – as obsession with our own safety destroys us, in the end. I am only grateful,’ he added as Lydia stepped back from him, ‘that ’twas no worse. Is it well with you, Mistress?’

She smiled a little and straightened her glasses. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

‘Yes,’ said Asher. ‘Thank you – more than I can say.’

Ysidro’s eyes touched Asher’s – asking permission, as gentlemen do. Asher nodded, and the vampire took Lydia’s hand and brushed the ink-stained fingers lightly with cold lips. He released his hold at once, and when Asher held out his own hand to him, took it – a little gingerly – in a skeletal clasp.

Behind Ysidro, in the shadows of Kuan Yu’s statue, Asher became aware of the priest Chiang, curiously young-looking in the moonlight, his eyes gleaming reflectively, like a cat’s.

And deep in his dreaming, Asher wondered how he could possibly not have noticed that the old Taoist was a vampire.

Did he always look like that? Asher had the impression that the man’s coloring had been warmer, not silk pale as it was now. He had no recollection of noticing before that the old man didn’t breathe, nor had he ever taken note – and he couldn’t imagine he had been that unobservant – that the long nails of his hands, like Ysidro’s, were hard and shiny as claws. Moreover, he had the impression somewhere at the back of his mind that he’d seen the old man in daylight. Whether the psychic illusion did not hold in dreams, or merely because Chiang wished to make matters more clear, Asher saw him now.

He said, ‘Chiang Tzu-Wen. One of the ten Magistrates of Hell. You were an official in the Han Dynasty and later worshiped as a god in the Moliang District—’

His Chinese was much better in his dream than it was in real life.

‘Long ago.’ The old vampire responded to him in Latin and inclined his head. ‘We all of us – Professor Gellar – have lives which we once lived, once upon a time.’

He rested his hand on Ysidro’s shoulder, the black claws curving like a dragon’s against the skin of his throat. ‘I will say that I was surprised – and not pleased – to learn that one of those whom I summoned here to deal with the Filthy Ones turned out to be a vampire. We had enough to deal with, my kindred and I, without the concern about a newcomer making alliances that would shift the balance of things here in this city.’

‘Without his assistance,’ replied Asher, ‘we could not have destroyed them – if they are indeed destroyed.’

‘They are. I – and my kindred – have gone out to the mine and have walked by night among the bridges and temples on the shores of Peking’s five Seas. No trace of the things have we found. Li had summoned to him all those few that dwelled in the city, and all perished together in the flames. We have gone to the place: nothing of them remains.’

Through the door behind him, in the moonlit garden, Asher was briefly conscious of other shadows among the bare wisteria, the timeless stones: a woman with the unbound hair of a shamaness, a great sturdy man who stood like a warrior, a cold-faced mandarin in the robes of a dynasty long perished. They kept their distance from one another, their eyes like pale marsh-fire, wary and ancient and indescribably alien, more like dragons than human souls.

And Lydia, who had been listening with difficulty – her Latin being limited to medical texts – stepped forward and put a hand on Chiang’s ragged sleeve. ‘He risked his life to learn of them,’ she said. ‘And he didn’t have to come here.’

The old vampire regarded her with a dragon’s inhuman gaze. ‘It is so, Lady,’ he said. ‘And as I said, I was surprised. It is not often that the chiang-shi –’ the pronunciation was completely different from that of his name – ‘display interest in anything but the hunt and their own immediate safety.’ He shared, in part, in Ysidro’s quality of stillness, but Asher detected the momentary flicker of a derisive glance at the vampires in the courtyard beyond the door. ‘We all owe you thanks.’

The Magistrates in the courtyard – among whom, Asher was interested to note, Father Orsino was not present – did not look as if they thought they owed the yang kwei tse anything, living or dead, but evidently nobody was going to argue with Chiang Tzu-Wen. After a moment they too inclined their heads, then stepped back and dissolved into the moonlight. Their reflective eyes seemed to linger on for a moment more.

‘Much as my heart longs to say that it was our pleasure,’ remarked Ysidro, ‘I can assure you, my lord, it was not.’

‘Even so.’ Chiang’s hand tightened slightly on his uninjured shoulder, then released him. ‘Yet you did it nevertheless. The Tso woman has been put out of the way, along with poor Li: as you will have observed, the living who meddle in the affairs of the dead are far less dangerous to all than the dead who meddle in the affairs of the living. One hopes that a lesson was learned by all –’ he glanced again toward the now-empty courtyard – ‘and that the matter will not arise another time.’ The last gleam of lingering eyes flickered away.

Chiang made a move to step away, and Lydia – always insatiably curious – lifted her hand again, as if to stay him. ‘Sir,’ she asked diffidently, in her careful Latin, ‘when Li summoned the Others – the yao-kuei – to him, was it to get him out of there? Or might he have known that they would destroy him – might he have known he couldn’t control them . . . but only wished to end his life in the only way that he could?’

Chiang considered her for a moment, half a smile touching his mouth. ‘This I do not know, Lady,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Li did not know either. But assuredly, he has gone on to Hell—’ He stepped back into the shadows of the war god’s niche, so that, like the Cheshire cat, only the glimmer of his eyes and the ghost of his voice remained. ‘Not as a Magistrate, but as a humble client, as we all shall one day be.’

‘ Domine salvet me ,’ Ysidro whispered, and from the darkness, Chiang’s voice replied.

‘No doubt He will, when He has a use for your services.’

Waking, Asher laid his hand on the pillow at his side. Swathed in a heavy quilt, Lydia sat beside the window that overlooked Rue Meiji. But she was looking at her hand, and as Asher sat up, she brushed the back of it with her finger, where Ysidro’s cold lips had touched. At his movement she turned her head and her eyes met his.

She looked at peace.

He went to her, and she opened the quilt, to wrap him as well. ‘Did you dream about him?’ he asked.