Magistrates of Hell

TWENTY-FOUR

On Monday, the eleventh of November, Asher, Mizukami, and Professor Karlebach took the noon train for Men T’ou Kuo. With them journeyed the bodyguard Ogata and four soldiers from the Japanese garrison, armed not only with rifles but with flammenwerfer – the new German flame-throwers – guarding a shipment of a thousand liters of pure chlorine. Two other soldiers, requisitioned – Mizukami said – on the grounds of a worsening infestation of rabid rats in the Shi’h Liu Mine, met them in the little town with horses, donkeys, and guns. They reached Mingliang village shortly before nightfall.

‘News of us will be all over the hills by moonrise,’ surmised Asher as he checked the action on his borrowed Arisaka carbine, preparatory to taking the first shift at guard. ‘We’ll have the Kuo Min-tang and every gang of bandits this side of the Yellow River coming to have a try at them. And, unless we’re really lucky, somebody will ride back to the city and let Huang and the Tso Family know there’s something afoot as well.’ Lydia had smuggled him his own clothes and boots from the hotel, so he no longer felt like a deserter from the chorus of Turandot. In addition to arranging for a squad of villagers to carry the cylinders of chlorine down into the mine, Dr Bauer had offered her clinic as a headquarters. But she was silent and uneasy, as if she guessed there was more behind the ‘rabid rats’ story than anyone was saying.

‘This is beyond our capacity to alter.’ Count Mizukami shut the small iron door on the kang that occupied a third of the room: their blankets were already spread out on the hollow brick platform that, in most Chinese farmhouses, served as both stove and bed. At the table, Karlebach said nothing. But every now and then he looked up from cleaning his shotgun, to regard Asher with a kind of aching wonderment, as if he couldn’t believe that one of his surrogate sons, at least, had returned from the dead.

Knowing his old teacher incapable of disguising either grief or joy, Asher had kept hidden from him until they were on the train out of Peking. He’d had Mizukami break the news to Karlebach that Asher was in fact alive, before walking into the compartment himself, but still the old man had clung to him for a time in tears. His first question, when he could speak again, had been, Does Madame know? To which Asher had responded with a smile, ‘Forgive me – but yes. She’s a much better actress than you are.’ This had lightened the air between them with laughter, but now Asher was interested to note that rather than ending Karlebach’s grim resolve, the reunion had energized him. Once in their headquarters for the night, he had gone lovingly over every millimeter of his shotgun, and he was now checking each of its glinting brass shells, stuffed with enough solid silver deer-shot to blow a living man to Kingdom Come.

‘Word could have gone out,’ Mizukami went on reasonably, ‘to Huang, or to the Kuo Min-tang, when Sergeant Tamayo arrived in Men T’ou Kuo yesterday and arranged for the porters and horses.’ He removed his glasses and set them aside, but kept his sword beneath the blanket with him. ‘If we set a guard openly, at least the small dogs of the hills will keep their distance for the night.’

With that, Asher had to agree, and in fact the night passed without incident. He returned from his watch at midnight to find his old teacher still awake, poring over the map which the priest Chiang had drawn for them the previous night in the Temple.

‘You’re sure this man’s information can be trusted?’ Karlebach looked up as he came in and brushed the map with his fingers. ‘You say he is familiar with these hills. But after all, if he has not seen the Others, how can he be sure where it is that they sleep?’

‘I know of no reason he’d lie.’ Asher kept his voice low, for Mizukami slept under a pile of blankets and sheepskins on the kang, and the table had been drawn up close to it for warmth. He pulled off his gloves, held his half-frozen fingers to the kang’s iron door. ‘For all I know he could be in the pay of the Tso Family, and this could be an elaborate trap to keep me from peaching on them to the British authorities about their nefarious deeds. In China you simply can’t tell. But—’

The old man chuckled in the depths of his white beard and waved the possibility aside. Asher didn’t want to tell him that Chiang had only been following Ysidro’s thoughts, like a spiritualist wielding a planchette. All vampires lie was not a discussion he wanted to engage in just now.

Instead he brought out the map he and the Legation clerk P’ei had pieced together from the various mining company diagrams, turned it so that it was oriented in the same direction as Chiang’s. ‘The tunnels match,’ he said. ‘Look here – this is just where that gallery should be. There are cave temples in these hills, and Lydia tells me the ruins of one lie not far from that rear entrance. My guess is that Chiang served in one of them in times past and did a little exploring on his days off.’

If Taoist monks have days off, reflected Asher as he crawled into his own blankets on the kang, his cracked ribs aching under the plaster dressing that the Japanese Legation doctor had provided. Old Chiang had been thoroughly disconcerted at the thought of riding the Iron Dragon, as he had called the railway, and that morning had sent the hulking younger priest of the Temple to the station with a message in his stead. The speed of the train, the message had said, would so disrupt the geomantic alignments of his chi energy that it would be impossible for the earth to absorb the effects.

Thus, he said, he would walk to the mine. He hoped this would not inconvenience anyone.

Meaning we will have no one after all, reflected Asher, who can listen through the darkness of the earth. And in any case, Ysidro would be asleep.

Lying in the darkness and listening to the sob of the wind in the vent holes of the kang, Asher thought about the vampire, trapped in Father Orsino’s silver-barred refuge. The vampire whom eighteen months ago he could have killed with swift mercy in St Petersburg. Ysidro might even have been grateful.

If the yao-kuei waked earlier in the evening than a vampire, and went to sleep later, then Father Orsino’s refuge would indeed be a slightly larger version of a coffin, a prison inescapable. And soon it would be flooded with one of the most corrosive gasses known to man. With the yao-kuei dead, and the mine sealed, death would not even be an option for Ysidro – neither by being devoured, nor by the light of the sun. Only darkness eternal, and eternal burning pain.

Dante himself couldn’t have come up with a more suitable fate. Asher closed his eyes, not wanting to think of it.

A horse snuffled in the courtyard. Liquid spots of reflected ember-light moved on the wall.

Somewhere a Just God is laughing, at one who decided he was willing to kill in order to live forever.

Had Ysidro not stayed at Lydia’s side, one night in St Petersburg when the local vampire nest had attacked the house where she was staying, she would not be alive now. He would not have a daughter today.

Lydia would not, Asher knew, imitate those heroines of novels and go dashing off into the underground darkness to seek the vampire . . .

Still, he was glad she had not come.

Forty, he made himself think, taking refuge in planning and facts. Not a great number. The first big gallery on the lowest level of the new part of the mine. A hundred and seventy feet down – too far to transport the gas cylinders, or run the detonator wires, but when the cylinders are blown up, the gas will sink. This late in the year, even riding horses, there would barely be enough daylight hours to seal all its exits, to descend through the rear entrance to the opening between the mine and the cave system below, and to blow that up as well.

Twenty years in the Department had taught him precisely how many things could go wrong when one was working against a time limit.

In his mind he saw them as he sank into uneasy sleep: the Others, lying in the blackness like the trout that dozed beneath the shadows of the banks of the Stour when he was a boy. But open-eyed in the watery dark. Listening for their prey.

Asher and his party left the village as soon as it was light, to set charges in the cave that formed the mine’s main entrance. A dozen villagers accompanied them, under the command of Dr Bauer. The moment Asher and the Japanese set foot in the cave, rats poured forth from both tunnels and up from the subsidence, as if some spigot deep in the mountain had been turned, and as Asher had suspected, the German flammenwerfer worked against them perfectly well. It was a hellish weapon to use even on rats – their squealing as the burning oil doused them was a sound he thought he would never get out of his head – and the thought that the flame-throwers had been designed for use against men in the war that everyone knew was coming turned his stomach. And it wasn’t the rats’ fault or intention, he knew, to attack these invaders, to die in agony . . .

But he was damn glad the compressed nitrogen threw the flames fifty feet down the tunnels. Even in flames, the rodents kept on coming until their bodies were consumed. The stink of charred flesh, burned oil, and scorched hair was horrific as they descended – through drifting smoke that almost obscured the light of their lanterns – to a gallery where, according to both maps and Ysidro’s instructions, down-shafts led directly to the deep-sunk room where the yao-kuei slept.

‘Have your porters stack the cylinders here,’ Asher instructed the German missionary quietly. ‘I’ll wire a charge at the bottom of the pile but won’t connect it to the detonator-box until all your men are out of the mine. It’ll be perfectly safe. When the rest of the mine is sealed, we’ll fire the charge to release the chlorine, then immediately detonate the charges on the main entrance.’

‘And this is the only thing that can be done with them?’ Bauer looked up into his face, her blue eyes filled with pity and regret. ‘Kill them like dogs that have run mad?’

‘Believe me,’ said Asher, ‘it is the only way. And it is necessary that it be done soon.’

She studied him for a moment more, then sighed a little, and nodded. ‘Yes. I see that it is. And it shall be done.’

Karlebach lingered in the gallery as Asher set his charges, under the first of the growing dull-green mountain of chlorine cylinders. The only way to the lower levels from that long, dark chamber was a couple of rickety ladders, which the Japanese soldiers drew up for a little distance, then cut off and dropped back into the chasm. When it was time to go, Karlebach turned from the brink of the downshaft as if he could scarcely bear to leave it, his lined face set like stone.

Asher found himself remembering that he and Lydia were not the only ones tormented by the thought of someone who would be sealed in the poisoned abyss.

It would take, Asher guessed, until mid-afternoon for the villagers to carry all the canisters down the narrow tunnels. He showed Sergeant Tamayo how to affix the ends of the detonator wire into the box, listened to Mizukami translate his instructions: the gas cylinders to be detonated at four thirty, the main charge to bring down the tunnels immediately thereafter. Two armed troopers would remain with the sergeant after the villagers left, to make sure there was no interference from bandits or anyone else.

‘And if the President sends men to stop us,’ Mizukami added as the rest of the little party nudged their scrubby Chinese ponies single file along the overgrown track toward the other entrances, ‘Tamayo has instructions to hold them at bay and set the charges off immediately.’

‘I doubt Yuan will authorize troops.’ Asher scanned the brush-choked gully below the track, the queer, snaky ridges of the hills that closed in around them. His cracked ribs ached, and after the dark of the mines, the sunlight seemed queerly bright. ‘He’s sensitive about how he’s perceived by the West. If there’s trouble, he’ll find his actions hard to justify. The ones we need to watch out for are the Tso. Though I wouldn’t put it outside the realm of possibility,’ he went on grimly, ‘for us to meet Colonel von Mehren and some of his merry men – depending on who Madame Tso has chosen to sell information to.’

All around the rear flanks of the mountain, they stopped at the small subsidiary entrances and ventilation shafts of the mine – most barely more than holes in the ground, some centuries old – and blew them up as they went, burying in seconds the brutal labor of years.

Can he hear the explosions in his sleep? Asher wondered as the hillside jarred beneath him and thick yellow dust belched from the narrow pits. Lying asleep a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down into the earth . . .

Is he counting them in his dreams? Twelve yet to go, then eleven, then ten . . . Until final darkness and an eternity alone with pain?

As he rolled up his wires, packed his detonator back on his shaggy little mount and then hauled himself – ribs stabbing him – into the saddle again, Asher glanced at Karlebach’s stony face and wondered whether he thought the same.

But he could not bring himself to ask.

In its heyday, the entrance to the mine on the far side of Shi’h Liu mountain had been a workings in its own right. Asher traced the foundations of sheds and huts, small squares of brick and stone on the slope beneath the cave mouth, and a graded track that led down to what had been a worker’s village, strung out along the trickle of a stream. Everything was gone now except for a few broken fragments of wall. This was a country where abandoned brick or cut stone did not go long un-scavenged. Rats swarmed forth – as they had at two other entrances – and Asher and the bodyguard Ogata swept them with flame. Then Asher checked his watch and wired the gelignite blocks into the decayed wooden props that held up the entrance to the cave. Right on schedule, always supposing President Yuan hasn’t sent an army to stop the villagers . . .

He hid the detonator in what looked like the debris of a shed while Mizukami and one of the three soldiers, Nishiharu, scouted a few yards down the tunnel through the smoking carpet of dead and dying rats. Karlebach shouldered his shotgun, and the spare cylinders of oil and nitrogen, in case there were more vermin further down. Another soldier, Seki, carried in a satchel of explosives, wire, and a detonator box.

Asher signed Ogata and the third soldier, Hirato, to remain outside on guard over the ponies. Then he picked up his satchel and his lantern and followed the gleam of Mizukami’s dim light down the tunnel into the dark.

It was then not quite three o’clock.