Magistrates of Hell

TWENTY-FIVE

Rats whipped among the rocks. Asher could hear the scrabble of their feet, their constant squeaking in the dark; their sweetish, fusty stink mingled with the scents of water and stone. In the abysses of the cross-drifts, tiny eyes glittered like malevolent rubies. Asher counted turnings, checked and rechecked both his maps by the lantern-gleam, and prayed that Ysidro’s observations here had been correct, and that those lazy bastards at the Hsi Fang-te mining offices hadn’t simply gone on hearsay of what was down here or, worse yet, just made something up – who’s going to go down to check, eh?

Burn in Hell, the lot of you.

The ceiling barely cleared the heads of the Japanese and forced Asher and Karlebach to stoop as they walked. Mizukami whispered, ‘Iei!’ and the light of his lantern fell on an X, scratched deeply into the stone of the left-hand wall. The scratches were fresh. ‘What is this, Ashu Sensei?’

Asher checked his map. The tunnel beside the X was in the right place to be the one that led down to the gallery they sought.

‘Who has been down here?’ Karlebach asked hoarsely

‘The priest Chiang,’ lied Asher, ‘said he recalled something like this. Let me go ahead.’

He raised his lantern, moved forward again. The tunnel sloped sharply, following an ancient coal-seam. When he touched the wall, moisture slicked his hand. After a time the walls widened out around them, the ceiling grew higher and the lantern-light showed them a few pillars still standing where the coal had been cut out around them. Wooden props had been installed to support the roof, gray and desiccated with age.

The whole thing will come down when we blow the tunnel . . .

Then the gallery narrowed again, and Asher had to turn sideways and brace himself against the steep angle of the floor. He held the lantern further out before him, then knelt and crept forward step by step.

Darkness dropped away before him. The ends of a ladder poked up over the edge, but he knew better than to trust it. He merely extended his lantern out over the abyss and glimpsed the faintest hints of pillars – stalactites aglitter with moisture and crystal – hanging from a ceiling somewhere not far above him, and undulating shapes of pale flowstone and stalagmites not far below. He called out, ‘Hello!’ into the darkness, and echoes picked up his voice, the distant ringing of vast underground space. Ysidro was right. The caverns would swallow any amount of chlorine, disperse it harmlessly in millions of cubic feet of air. The yao-kuei could probably follow them to some other entrance, miles away.

Asher edged back from the brink and scrambled, stooping, to where the others waited. ‘The caves are down there, all right,’ he said as he collected wires and gelignite from young Mr Seki. ‘By the look of the ceiling here –’ he raised his lantern toward the swagged-down rock, the age-grayed rotting props – ‘an explosion will bring the whole gallery down, so I want the lot of you to go back up the tunnel.’

The detonator wires, extended across the gallery to the narrowing of the way to the caves, were some twenty feet short of the tunnel mouth. Asher wired the gelignite as close to the cave entry as he could, aware that only a few slabs remained to him in case they found some unexpected shaft or fissure that had been shown on neither map. ‘Get back,’ he said as he wired the lines to the box. ‘I mean it.’

Mizukami put a gently-urging hand on Karlebach’s arm, but the old man shrugged free. He was staring as if hypnotized at another X cut into the rock of the gallery wall. ‘Is he down here?’ he whispered in Czech, coming to kneel at Asher’s side. His eyes almost blazed in the lantern-light. ‘Not this priest . . . You know of whom I speak.’

‘I don’t know.’ Asher met his gaze calmly. ‘Chiang spoke of finding such marks—’

‘Could they have been made by the Others? Or by the vampires of Peking, to lead us into a trap?’

Love and respect notwithstanding, Asher had to force himself not to snap, Don’t be such an ass! ‘He said they’d been down here for years.’

‘And can he be trusted?’ Karlebach’s voice trembled with the violence of his emotions. ‘Jamie, we hunt a thing which has no soul. A thing infinitely cunning, which can twist the minds and perceptions of even the good and the strong!’

From his pocket, Asher dug wads of cotton, handed two to the old scholar: ‘Put those in your ears. Give these –’ he unwrapped another from its blue paper – ‘to Mizukami and his men, and don’t forget to cover your mouth and nose as well.’ He suited the action to the word, pulling up his own handkerchief, tied bandanna-wise over the lower part of his face like a Wild West badman. ‘Now get back. God knows how much of this ceiling is going to come down.’

Simon, he thought, and cast a glance over his shoulder at the soldiers’ retreating lantern, forgive me . . .

He shoved down the plunger, sprang to his feet, and ran for the tunnel as if the Devil of his father’s worst sermons bit at his heels. He was still a yard short of it when the earth jerked underfoot, the world echoed with the trapped cataclysm of detonation, and a tidal wave of burning dust overtook and overwhelmed him, nearly throwing him to the ground. He staggered and stumbled on, mind focused on the tunnel and the distant lanterns as the lights vanished utterly in the murk. Behind him he heard rock falling – tons of it – as the gallery ceiling gave way . . .

He must have aimed dead on at the tunnel, for a sickly yellow blur showed almost in front of him. Men unrecognizable with dust – save for Mizukami’s glasses and sword, Karlebach’s height and beard – caught his arms. Ears ringing, Asher felt more than heard when silence fell behind them. He took the lantern, returned along the tunnel through what felt like a palpable wall of suspended dust, to find the inner end of the gallery roof had all come down, a bare yard in front of the detonator box. Dizzy with the shock of the explosion, his cracked ribs making him feel as if he’d been bayoneted, Asher nevertheless dragged the wires free of the rubble, wound them around his arm.

When he reached the soldiers again he had to put his watch almost up against the lantern to see the time.

Three forty. We’ll still be on this side of the mountain when Sergeant Tamayo detonates the chlorine cylinders and seals the mine.

Karlebach’s face was haggard in the grimy light of the lantern, and in his heart Asher heard him murmur, Like a son to me . . .

It was a blessing to smell air, even the cold, dusty air of the Western Hills. The daylight that Asher could glimpse beyond the tunnel mouth had the golden quality of the first approach of evening. Though his hearing was returning, Asher’s head still ached, and Seki – whose nose had bled from the shock – looked like some gore-daubed creature of a horror tale.

Ysidro, in his sleep, would hear this next explosion – the one that would bring down the ceiling of the old rear entrance of the mine – and would know: only one left.

Don’t think about it. In Asher’s years with the Department, he had learned how not to think about things like that.

It was, in part, why he had left the Department.

The pain in his ribs when he coughed, the ache in every muscle and bone, was such that it was difficult to think about much of anything.

Then up ahead of him, beyond that round of daylight, he saw movement.

Men running toward the tunnel.

Too many men. Rifles in their hands.

Asher yelled, ‘Back!’ as the first bullets ripped into the cave.

Karlebach didn’t have a soldier’s reflexes. The private Nishiharu grabbed his arm, thrust him back down the tunnel. There was a cross-cut about thirty feet back – in its shelter Asher slid into the straps of his flame-thrower again, stepped out and sprayed the tunnel with fire. The five men just entering sprang clear; he saw they wore ch’i-p’aos and ku, with Western boots. Those behind them, the gray uniforms of the Chinese Army. A man in a Western suit – Asher recognized the American double-breasted jacket – stepped forward, hands raised.

‘Asher!’

T’uan, he thought. Chen Chi T’uan. Madame Tso’s nephew.

Even in the shadows he could see the bruises on the young man’s face, the swelling where the deformation was beginning.

‘Throw down your weapon, come out!’ T’uan shouted. ‘We got your wife!’

You’re lying. The breath seemed to choke in his lungs.

He edged himself to the corner of the cross-cut tunnel, shouted, ‘What do you want?’ He repeated the words in Chinese, though T’uan had called out in English.

‘We want you.’ T’uan’s English was clear, if simple. ‘We want no trouble. Not kill you, not kill friends, not kill nobody. Promise. Swear on Holy Bible.’

And you want me to step out of cover and walk towards a dozen men with rifles on the strength of ‘Promise’? You need to run for the government, friend.

‘We got your wife, Asher,’ T’uan repeated. ‘Got her all safe. You come out, Japanese come out, nobody hurt. This mine our property. We—’

Shots cracked beyond T’uan. One of the bully boys in the mine entrance flung up his arms, pitched forward on his face. The Chinese soldiers sprang aside as a bullet kicked dirt among them. Then, as one, they and the bully boys ran forward into the shelter of the tunnel mouth—

Straight under the gelignite wired into the props beneath the roof.

Ogata. The thought came to Asher in the split instant before the explosion. Driving them forward under the blast zone . . .

He flinched back behind the shelter of the corner, clapped his hands over his ears. Thunder, blackness, dust in his lungs and the ground lurching underfoot. If the Chinese soldiers – or T’uan’s enforcers – screamed, the sound didn’t penetrate the booming horror of the explosion directly over their heads. Asher pressed his face to the wall and buried his nose and mouth in the crook of his arm.

Then stillness, terrible and deep. Blackness like the abyss of Hell. Through the ringing in his ears he heard one of the Japanese soldiers gasp a question and thought he heard someone say, Ogata . . .

It had been, Asher reflected, as neat a piece of tactics on Ogata’s part as one could hope for, and the only way the two men left outside the tunnel could neutralize eleven well-armed enemies. The bodyguard knew the men in the mine had maps, to get them through the tunnels to the main entrance. At this very moment, he suspected Ogata and Hirato were riding hell for leather along those overgrown paths, to reach Sergeant Tamayo at the main entrance and tell him, Don’t detonate until they arrive . . .

Which would make sense, Asher reflected, if there were no reason not to delay detonation past fall of darkness.

And if rats were the worst thing we’re likely to meet in the mine.

Yellowish light smeared the dust-choked darkness behind him; he heard Karlebach’s gasping cough. ‘Is everyone all right?’ Asher called out. ‘Rabbi?’

‘This depends,’ croaked the old scholar, ‘upon how one defines the words “all right”.’

‘We live,’ Mizukami said. ‘Ashu Sensei, the man cannot have known about Madame Ashu.’

‘He can.’ Asher coughed and spat up dust. ‘We have forty minutes of safety to get to the front entrance of the mine – if Ogata can make it around the shoulder of the mountain that quickly. And if Tamayo and the others at the front aren’t attacked—’

A gunshot cracked in the blackness, the bullet whining off the rock by his head. Dimly, in what seemed like a wall of solid dust, Asher saw the glint of catlike eyes.

T’uan can see in the darkness . . .

IT can see in the darkness.

The thing that used to be T’uan.

Of course it survived.

He answered the shot with a blast from his flame-thrower, then turned and thrust Karlebach and Mizukami ahead of him along the cross-cut. ‘Go, forward! There should be a gallery ahead—’

Another shot. The air grew clearer as they plunged into the long chamber that ran before an ancient coalface. Asher uncovered his lantern again and stumbled toward the yellow gleam of someone else’s; only by the height of the dim figure did he see it was Karlebach. The old man staggered, groped for the wall, and Asher caught his elbow, pulled him along. ‘He can see in the dark! Don’t close the lanterns!’ The tiny glow showed huge heaps of waste rock all along the gallery walls, and they ducked behind the nearest one; Asher made a swift count of his companions, motioned for all to take hands, then signed for darkness.

It was pitchy, utter, and unspeakable, the silence horrible. Under the choke of dust, Asher smelled rats, heard them skittering among the loose rock of the slag heaps.

From the direction of the tunnel, nothing.

There was water on the floor. Could T’uan – and any of his men who might have survived the explosion – come near without sound? Or fool their perceptions, so as to remain unheard?

Beside him he felt Mizukami bend down a trifle, to reach the puddles . . . Washing his eyeglasses, Asher realized. The little nobleman had been stumbling along almost blind.

How sharp is their hearing? They were cousins to vampires, who could detect differences in the rhythm of breath in a crowded room . . .

He pressed his hand to his side, trying to will away the pain.

How far along is T’uan in his transformation to yao-kuei? How much did those ‘herbs’ affect the process? How much of his mind is left, and how long will that last?

Or would, in fact, the medicines allow the young man to retain enough of his human mind to command the yao-kuei – like figures on a chessboard?

We have your wife . . .

His heart screamed that’s impossible! but the long-time field agent in him asked, How did they do it, and where would they take her?

Beside him Asher heard one of the soldiers jerk and gasp, and then the squeal of a rat as it was knocked to the floor.

Silence again.

At last he slipped the lantern cover a millimeter. ‘Let’s go.’