It was windowless, lit by a few candles in lanterns, dark and hot. The floor was bare, the walls sweated moisture. It smelled of cooking garlic and acrid chilli seeds and offal and sewers.
In the room were seven people. Four of them were Chinese, faces guarded, squatting against the far wall, waiting. The other three were European. One was a burly young man of medium height, with light brown hair, vivid green eyes and a square jaw. He stood against the wall with his arms folded, next to a large bundle of sackcloth. The next was a woman, aged perhaps thirty. She was plainly dressed, with dark hair twisted in a neat chignon, an olive-skinned face that was strong rather than attractive, and large, intensely brown eyes.
The last person in the room was Stephen. He was perched on the edge of a rickety table, amber eyes glowing slightly. They crinkled almost imperceptibly as he met Crane’s gaze.
“Hello, Lord Crane. Thank you very much for coming. I wonder if you can give us a hand.”
“By all means, Mr. Day.” Crane wanted an apology for Stephen’s latest disappearance, an explanation of how Rackham’s greed really threatened him; he wanted to wind his fingers in the curly russet hair and pull the shorter man’s head back for a kiss. He gave a small, polite smile instead. “In what way?”
“Well,” Stephen said, “we need to speak to a practitioner urgently. Our usual interpreter is not available, and nobody appears to grasp what we’re asking for, and these gentlemen don’t want us to go any further, but I’m afraid that’s not an option. I’d rather not force my way in, given a choice. The practitioners here are Mr. Bo and Mr. Tsang, and we need one of them now.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Crane switched to Shanghainese, and spoke to the men carefully and reasonably for a few minutes, until it was abundantly clear that they had no intention of helping. At this point he raised his voice and lowered his tone.
“…and get him fucking now, you scrofulous, shit-stained syphilitic discards of a substandard brothel!” he bellowed after the three men who were fleeing out of the room, leaving one terrified guard flattening himself against the wall. He turned back to Stephen, whose expression was absolutely neutral. His colleagues looked somewhere between astonished and appalled. The girl was grinning.
“They weren’t very cooperative,” Crane explained. “The shamans are unavailable, they said. They should be getting a headman now, someone in authority, to tell me what the problem is.”
“What are shamans?” asked the burly young man. He had a deep voice and an uncompromising look.
“A shaman is a Chinese practitioner,” Stephen said. “Let me introduce you. Lord Crane, this is Peter Janossi, and Mrs. Esther Gold, and you’ve already met Jenny Saint.”
Crane murmured courtesies and looked round at the urchin, realising that she must be the fourth of Stephen’s team of justiciars. He had heard a certain amount about them all, and had pictured something rather more impressive than the reality. Janossi looked mildly hostile; Saint had what Crane suspected was a permanent smirk. Mrs. Gold was looking at him with interest, her head slightly cocked.
Crane knew from Stephen that Mrs. Gold was the senior member of the team, and that she resented the common assumption that she was subordinate to the men. He addressed his next words to her. “Please don’t think this is vulgar curiosity, but if you want me to translate when someone arrives, it would help to know what I need to discuss. What’s the problem?”
The practitioners glanced at each other, quick fleeting looks. Esther Gold said, “Rats.”
“Rats?”
“Rats.”
“We got a rat problem.” Saint wore a malicious grin.
“I suppose you know you can hire a man and a dog in any pub in this city,” Crane offered blandly.
“It wouldn’t help,” Stephen said. “Joss, show him.”
Janossi put a toe under a fold of the sackcloth bundle and flipped it over. Crane walked over and looked at what lay within.
It was undeniably a rat. Its long yellow teeth were bared in death. Its eyes were blood-filled and bulging, which Crane attributed to Stephen, since he had seen a man dead that way at his hands. Its matted, dirty brown pelt was stiff with filth and dust, its claws were grey and scaly, its naked tail pinkish. It was a rat like any other, except in one respect.
It was about four feet long, not counting the tail, and would have stood perhaps a foot high at the shoulder.
“I see,” said Crane slowly. “No, I don’t suppose a terrier would help, would it. Did you say rat, Mrs. Gold, or rats?”
“Rats.”
“That’s not good.” Crane stared down at the monster. “How many?”
“Don’t know,” said Stephen. “At least twenty. And they appear to be normal rats apart from the size, so the answer to ‘how many’ is, for all we know, ‘twice as many as yesterday’. It’s been a busy morning,” he concluded casually and met Crane’s eyes for a second.