Read Online Magistrates of Hell by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Barbara Hambly
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I’ve heard a thousand fireside legends, Herr Professor, and I’ve talked to hunters who’ve been all over these hills . . .’ She shook her head, her eyes filled with anger and fear.
‘Now anthropologists from Berlin call me a faker, and my own bishop has accused me of trying to garner contributions to my mission by coming up with a “scientific discovery”. And all the while my people here tell me they have seen more and more of these things. The village policeman saw what he thought was two of them together, only five days ago – and now I see by your faces that you are not shocked, not even very surprised. Where, and when, have you seen these things before? What can you tell me of them?’
‘We can tell you nothing,
gnädige
Frau,’ said Asher, before Karlebach could speak. ‘Because we know nothing. But it would help us learn if you could have someone take us to the place where your policeman saw these things, and also to the marsh below the coal mine, where Liao Ho’s dogs killed our friend there in the box.’
‘It is them.’
Dr Bauer – pacing sturdily ahead of them along the steep, brush-grown trackway up the gorge – glanced back at the sound of their voices, but Karlebach breathed the words in the Czech which had been his childhood tongue, and which Asher had spoken on his wanderings through Central Europe twenty years before. The missionary had greeted Sergeant Willard and trooper Gibbs in halting English, and in that language had thanked them for accompanying the exploring party. And while Asher knew that thousands of Germans – possibly tens of thousands – considered the Kaiser’s warlike aspirations as irresponsibly appalling as the English did, there was no guarantee that Christina Bauer was one of them.
And even if she did, Asher knew that in every foreign ministry in every country on the globe there was one clerk or secretary or minister-without-portfolio whose sole business it was to pick up shreds of information – from shopkeepers, from missionaries, from other peoples’ servants – and sort through those shreds for something which could be used by the Home Country. He’d done it himself. He didn’t know what use the German General Staff would think up for things that were deathless, predatory, and might or might not share the mental powers of illusion and deception that seemed to come with the vampire state. But with a colony of them as close to Berlin as Prague, he wasn’t about to take chances.
‘What are they doing here?’ he asked softly in the same tongue. ‘I asked vampires I met in Central Europe whether this . . . this
mutation
, this altered form, had ever been known to spontaneously appear . . .’
‘And you believe what they told you?’ His shotgun slung over one powerful shoulder, Karlebach leaned on a stick as he walked, but though the trackway was steep, his breath seemed as strong as that of the two soldiers who brought up the rear of the party.
‘They had no reason to lie.’
‘It is the nature of the vampire to lie, Jamie,’ retorted the old man. ‘Until you believe that, you will not know them.’
The gorge of the Mingliang stream had been severely deforested over the centuries. Here and there thin stands of pine trees remained, but mostly there was only brush along the water, and thin yellowed grass flittering in the icy wind. Chan – Liao Ho’s remaining dog – stopped on the trail, a growl rumbling in his throat. ‘What you see back there, eh?’ demanded the little farmer, and he gently shook a handful of his pet’s thick ruff. ‘Somebody follow, not follow?’
Asher, too, scanned the bleak hill-slopes. All his instincts from seventeen years in the field prickled under his skin.
Not the
yao-kuei
, anyway
. . . It was mid-afternoon, the sun slipping from zenith to the western ridges.
But someone. On the hard dust of the trail he’d seen recent boot prints, enough to know that either bandits – endemic in China during periods of
‘Now anthropologists from Berlin call me a faker, and my own bishop has accused me of trying to garner contributions to my mission by coming up with a “scientific discovery”. And all the while my people here tell me they have seen more and more of these things. The village policeman saw what he thought was two of them together, only five days ago – and now I see by your faces that you are not shocked, not even very surprised. Where, and when, have you seen these things before? What can you tell me of them?’
‘We can tell you nothing,
gnädige
Frau,’ said Asher, before Karlebach could speak. ‘Because we know nothing. But it would help us learn if you could have someone take us to the place where your policeman saw these things, and also to the marsh below the coal mine, where Liao Ho’s dogs killed our friend there in the box.’
‘It is them.’
Dr Bauer – pacing sturdily ahead of them along the steep, brush-grown trackway up the gorge – glanced back at the sound of their voices, but Karlebach breathed the words in the Czech which had been his childhood tongue, and which Asher had spoken on his wanderings through Central Europe twenty years before. The missionary had greeted Sergeant Willard and trooper Gibbs in halting English, and in that language had thanked them for accompanying the exploring party. And while Asher knew that thousands of Germans – possibly tens of thousands – considered the Kaiser’s warlike aspirations as irresponsibly appalling as the English did, there was no guarantee that Christina Bauer was one of them.
And even if she did, Asher knew that in every foreign ministry in every country on the globe there was one clerk or secretary or minister-without-portfolio whose sole business it was to pick up shreds of information – from shopkeepers, from missionaries, from other peoples’ servants – and sort through those shreds for something which could be used by the Home Country. He’d done it himself. He didn’t know what use the German General Staff would think up for things that were deathless, predatory, and might or might not share the mental powers of illusion and deception that seemed to come with the vampire state. But with a colony of them as close to Berlin as Prague, he wasn’t about to take chances.
‘What are they doing here?’ he asked softly in the same tongue. ‘I asked vampires I met in Central Europe whether this . . . this
mutation
, this altered form, had ever been known to spontaneously appear . . .’
‘And you believe what they told you?’ His shotgun slung over one powerful shoulder, Karlebach leaned on a stick as he walked, but though the trackway was steep, his breath seemed as strong as that of the two soldiers who brought up the rear of the party.
‘They had no reason to lie.’
‘It is the nature of the vampire to lie, Jamie,’ retorted the old man. ‘Until you believe that, you will not know them.’
The gorge of the Mingliang stream had been severely deforested over the centuries. Here and there thin stands of pine trees remained, but mostly there was only brush along the water, and thin yellowed grass flittering in the icy wind. Chan – Liao Ho’s remaining dog – stopped on the trail, a growl rumbling in his throat. ‘What you see back there, eh?’ demanded the little farmer, and he gently shook a handful of his pet’s thick ruff. ‘Somebody follow, not follow?’
Asher, too, scanned the bleak hill-slopes. All his instincts from seventeen years in the field prickled under his skin.
Not the
yao-kuei
, anyway
. . . It was mid-afternoon, the sun slipping from zenith to the western ridges.
But someone. On the hard dust of the trail he’d seen recent boot prints, enough to know that either bandits – endemic in China during periods of
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