Magistrates of Hell by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ingram Distribution
Published: 2012-07-01T06:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Wind from the north sliced Asher’s padded ch’i-p’ao like a razor. The moonlight made a cloud of his breath. All around the shores of the Stone Relics of the Sea, ice formed a rough crystalline collar, and the crowding roofs of fancy tea-houses, ancestral temples, pleasure pavilions and dim-sum parlors shouldered black against the sky.

Not a fleck of light in all that shuttered darkness. Curious, Asher reflected, considering what Grandpa Wu and Ling had both told him: that the empty pleasure-grounds along the lakeshore were haunted these days by thieves, gunrunners, and killers-for-hire. From the humpbacked marble bridge where he stood, the smell of smoke from every courtyard around this side of the lakes came to him, in fierce competition with the refuse dumped on the lakeshore near the mouths of every hutong that debouched there – impossible to tell whether anyone had built a hidden fire along the lake that night.

Then the wind shifted, and for an instant he caught the stink he’d smelled in the mountains, below the Shi’h Liu mines.

Yao-kuei.

They’re here.

That was the short of what he had come to learn. He could go home now . . .

Do the Tso know it yet?

He stepped from the bridge to the muddy verge of the frozen lake itself.

In addition to his knife, his revolver, and a tin dark-lantern, he’d brought with him a sort of halberd that Grandpa Wu had sold him for three dollars American, the kind of thing that gang enforcers carried on late-night forays, like a short sword-blade mounted at the end of a staff. For two nights now he had waited to hear from Ysidro, but the vampire had either gone to ground or, like Father Orsino, was hunting far from Peking. That afternoon Ling had said a friend of her mother’s had smelled ‘rat-monsters’ by the lake. A beggar-child, the woman had said, had disappeared, the third in two weeks.

The Tso family had their headquarters in the triangle of land between the northern and southern lobes of the lake, away to his left across the water. Everyone in this neighborhood worked for them. In daylight, despite the Chinese clothing, Asher knew he could never pass unnoticed. He supposed the sensible thing would be to declare the evening a success, go back to Pig-Dragon Lane, and wait until he heard from Ysidro.

IF I hear from Ysidro.

And if I hear from him before Karlebach looks over Lydia’s shoulder at her police reports some evening and decides to make inquiries here on his own. The old man would have the freedom to come here during the day, but if the Tso were trying to keep inquiries away from the mine, the danger to Karlebach would not be less.

He is obsessed.

Long service in the twilight world – where love of country and duty to the Queen were the only landmarks – had taught Asher what obsession did to men’s judgement. They see what they want to see, his Chief had once said to him. They convince themselves things are safer than they are.

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