About as many times as I spoke to my own, he reflected, with a wry regret that wasn’t precisely sadness. It was the way most people he knew had been raised. Presumably, if his father had known he and his wife were both going to die while their only son was thirteen years old he’d have made a greater effort to spend more time with him, if only to more firmly inculcate into him the vital importance of not letting down the standards expected of the Better Classes, and the paramount necessity of knowing all the Right People in order to further one’s career.
That pedantic, fastidious scholar – whom Asher still thought of as ‘old’, though he’d been just forty at the time of the accident – could have secretly been Jack the Ripper or the King of the Cannibal Islands when he’d go ‘up to Oxford’ or ‘down to London’ from Wychford, and no whisper of it would have reached his children’s ears.
All those children he saw in the hutongs, who darted in and out of courtyards full of laundry and goldfish and uncles and grandmas . . . Asher shook his head, prey again to that curious sense of visiting another planet.
‘Do you think Hobart will make some other kind of trouble for you?’
‘I hope he’s not that much of a fool.’ He held the coin between his fingers, made it vanish, and sat gravely while Miranda investigated every finger separately and probed with her tiny hand down his cuff. ‘If he takes it into his head that I might peach on him, he may try to do something that will get me thrown out of China – hence the thirty pounds hidden in the generator room. I might have to go lie doggo at Wu’s.’
‘I knew I should have married Viscount Brightwell’s son.’
‘You’re the one who insisted on coming to China . . .’
At that point Karlebach knocked on the suite door, bundled in his long old-fashioned coat and bearing a satchel which contained a dark lantern, branches of wolfsbane and hawthorn, and a dozen of vials of his arcane potions. Over his shoulder he carried the discreet case of his new shotgun, and his pockets rattled with ammunition.
Asher glanced at the clock. A little past four. In an hour it would be dark.
Ito would be waking up.
‘If this samurai does not flee there tonight,’ Karlebach asked as they crossed the lobby to the hotel’s front doors, ‘might this Japanese – or your own ambassador – gain us entry to the old palace pleasure-grounds around the – what are they called?’
‘The Golden Sea,’ Asher replied. ‘President Yuan’s taken over that whole enclosure for his own palace, so I doubt his guards will look with favor on two ch’ang pi kwei wandering around peering into grottos with a shotgun. But by the same token, they’d probably kill – or try to kill – any yao-kuei they saw . . .’
‘If they don’t try to hire them,’ said Karlebach grimly.
‘In any case, didn’t you say that the Others – at least in Prague – avoid lights and people? Right now Lydia is concentrating her research around the “Stone Relics of the Sea” – the two lakes that lie to the north of the enclosure. They’re open to the public, but many of the temples and tea houses around them have been deserted since the Revolution.’
‘It would be worth my time to visit them, while you finish making your map of the Shi’h Liu mine.’ Karlebach reached back to touch the leather-wrapped shotgun with the affection of a lover. ‘How much longer until you have enough of a map for us to go down and find where these things sleep?’
‘If they sleep as vampires sleep,’ corrected Asher. ‘We don’t know that they won’t wake up the moment they hear us coming – or feel us coming, as the vampires feel the living, even in their sleep.’
And if the yao-kuei had taken up some kind of residence near Peking’s lakes, reflected Asher as the two rickshaws spun their way toward the rear gate of the Japanese Legation, what would the vampires of Peking make of that? Always supposing that the Magistrates of Hell weren’t behind these creatures to begin with.
He folded his hands within their gloves, watched the shopkeepers lighting the first lanterns of the evening against the autumn’s early twilight. Their presence hangs in the air like smoke . . .
And fear of them had driven the old Jesuit vampire to hide underground for nearly three hundred years.
Asher and Karlebach left their rickshaws at the rear gate of the Japanese compound on Rue Lagrené, followed the narrow line of neat brick bungalows: a tribute to the determination of the Japanese to become a Western power rather than be subjugated and chewed up piecemeal as China had been. The dwellings of its diplomats and attachés had nothing in them of the horizontal architecture and encircling verandas of Japan. They could have been imported whole from London or Berlin or Paris, like the solid walnut chairs that decorated Count Mizukami’s parlor. Electric light streamed from sash windows; men in royal-blue uniforms, or the discreet gray or black mufti of European suits, climbed front steps, knocked at doors . . .
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Asher.
Karlebach looked around him, then counted the bungalows and realized that all those officers, all those officials, were going to, or coming from, the fifth dwelling along the little street.
Count Mizukami’s.
No sign of haste, or panic. Yet when Asher and Karlebach arrived, it was to find the wall of the foyer lined two-deep with shoes, and when a servant conducted them to that blandly Western parlor, Asher saw the little shrine to the left of the door was closed and covered over with white paper. ‘Someone has died,’ he said.
His glance sought Mizukami, standing in a small group near the inner door into the rest of the house. Like a sturdy elf in his black suit, the attaché exchanged bows with the men who crowded around him. All Japanese, Asher noted.
Not someone whose death would be noted in the other Legations.
Karlebach’s eyes widened with horror as he guessed whose death it must be. ‘Then they do pass through death,’ he whispered, ‘they are indeed more like the vampire than we had thought. Will this Count of yours understand, do you think, if we tell him that we must see this man’s body? We must cut the head off quickly and stake the heart—’
Asher gestured to him for quiet. Together, they made their way through the crowd to the Emperor’s military attaché, and when he turned to them and bowed, Asher asked, ‘Was it Ito-san, sir?’
‘It was.’ The Count’s coffee-black eyes met Asher’s, steady and deeply sad. ‘The physical effects of his illness were more than his body could bear. He died a little before sunset.’
‘I am deeply sorry to hear it. We owed him our lives, and it grieves me, beyond what I can say, to realize that our lives were bought at the cost of his own.’
‘He was samurai,’ replied Mizukami. ‘He understood that it was his duty.’
‘If you will excuse us, Count,’ put in Karlebach in an urgent whisper. ‘It is necessary – vitally so – that we be permitted to see the body. The head at least should be severed, lest—’
‘It is custom,’ returned the Count, folding his hands before him, ‘that when a man commits seppuku, the friend who assists him onward severs the head. You need have no concern for that. I have made arrangements for Ito-san’s body to be burned tomorrow, and his ashes will be sent back to his family in Ogachi.’