Free Magistrates of Hell by Barbara Hambly Page A

eastern reaches of Europe, they had been in quest of information about whether it were possible – whether any of the vampires in Berlin or Augsburg or Prague or Warsaw had ever heard of it – for vampires to mutate spontaneously, without masters and without instruction in the ways of survival. The Others, however, had been whispered of only in Prague. It had been enough, at the time, to learn that the Others were not the creatures that he sought.
    Staring into the endless black seam, Asher now regretted the questions Ysidro had not asked at that time of his fellow Undead. He started to make a comment to that effect, but the expression on his companion’s face silenced him: a despairing intensity, as if the whole of the old scholar’s being strained to pierce the midnight beyond the kerosene’s glow. Beneath the luxuriant masses of beard his mouth was set, and Asher could see that he trembled.
    Eighteen months ago he was content to live in Prague. Content to study the secrets of that ancient place in the full knowledge that vampires walked its streets
. . .
    What changed?
    The knowledge that vampires existed elsewhere in the world had not sufficed to turn the old man from scholar to hunter. Yet when Asher had denied the request in that first letter, the old man had packed up and left the house where he had been born, where he had dwelled the whole of his long life, to journey first to England, then to China.
    Why?
    Why now?
    What does he know that he has not told me?
    Stirring, deep in the darkness. More eyes glittered, as if the floor of the tunnel were now carpeted with rats. Behind him, Asher was aware that the light in the outer cave was dimming as the sun moved beyond the valley’s rim.
    ‘I think this is all we can accomplish today,’ he said, and Karlebach startled, as if Asher had fired off a gun. ‘We’ve found the place; we’ve ascertained that these are indeed the creatures you know in Prague.’
    Karlebach stammered a little, then said, ‘Yes. Yes, of course you’re right . . .’
    ‘We don’t know how many of them there are, or how deep in the mine they’re hidden – or how much twilight in the world above suffices to wake them.’
    Karlebach nodded. For a moment Asher felt that the old man would have said something else to him. But instead he looked aside, mumbled, ‘That’s true. We had best— We had best be going . . .’
    As if, thought Asher, having come halfway around the world to find this place, he had no clear idea of where to go from here. Of what to do.
    Of what he WANTED to do.
    Odd
.
    He followed his old teacher back toward the cave entrance, where Sergeant Willard, Liao Ho, Trooper Barclay, Chan the dog, and Dr Bauer stood silhouetted against the fading daylight.
    Karlebach stopped twice, to look back into the dark of the tunnels.
    Asher wondered what it was that he expected to see.

SIX
    ‘I t’s called the Temple of Everlasting Harmony.’ Like most Russian ladies of good family, the Baroness Tatiana Drosdrova spoke fluent French, and it was in this language that she addressed Lydia as she climbed down and paid off the three rickshaw ‘boys’ who had hauled her party at a jogging run nearly two miles from the Legation Quarter. ‘Stay here, all-same.’ She pointed imperiously down at the hard-packed dirt of the lane – the ‘boy’ to whom she spoke was, to Lydia’s estimation, sixty at least, old enough to be her father and far too old to be hauling stout Russian females around the alleyways of Peking. ‘Ten cents.’
    ‘Ten cents, all-same.’ The gray-haired puller gestured from himself to the two younger men who’d ferried Lydia, doe-eyed young Signora Giannini – the other diplomatic wife of the party – and the Baroness’s two sturdy Russian bodyguards to the head of Silk Lane, which stretched away to their right. ‘Ten cents, ten cents.’
    Meaning, Lydia assumed, that each of them wanted that modest sum to stay put while the three ladies investigated the