Magistrates of Hell

EIGHTEEN

At Mingliang Village the following morning, Lydia introduced herself and explained to Dr Bauer that the University of Tokyo had hired Professor Karlebach to continue her husband’s investigation into the possibility of an atavistic tribe hiding in the Western Hills. The missionary thanked her, but though her sympathy for Lydia – in a skirted black riding-costume and a hat festooned with mourning veils instead of the jodhpurs she’d have preferred – was genuine and warm, there was reserve in her manner, almost fear.

When Lydia inquired, in her schoolgirl German, whether she might see whatever remains were left of the creature to observe if there were any cellular changes in the bone tissue, Dr Bauer replied, ‘I believe that there were. My microscope here is not powerful. I doubt that anything is left of them by this time, but you would have to inquire with Dr Chun.’

‘Dr Chun?’

‘Of the Peita University.’ Her voice was expressionless. ‘A man came here Tuesday from the office of the President – a Mr Huang Da-feng – and offered me three hundred pounds for the remains and for my notes, which he said would be turned over to Dr Chun at the University.’

‘Who is Dr Chun?’ broke in Karlebach. ‘And what does he—’

‘There is no Dr Chun at the Peita University,’ said Lydia. ‘At least, not in the Medical Faculty – is there?’ She turned back to Bauer. ‘I looked through their catalogs on the boat coming out here.’

In that same constrained tone, Dr Bauer replied, ‘Not that I know of. But naturally, I did not wish to disoblige President Yuan. He could close this mission altogether and destroy twenty years of my work here. And we stand desperately in need of money. And as no one – other than your poor husband – ever paid the slightest attention to the story of this thing in the hills, I felt . . .’

‘I don’t see that you had any choice,’ Lydia reassured her. ‘This Mr Huang—’

‘Huang Da-feng certainly has no connection with the University,’ put in Mizukami, who had stood quietly by the infirmary door while this discussion went on. ‘His title is attaché to the President, but he began his career as a bully boy for one of the criminal gangs in the city. A gang which I believe contributed greatly to the President’s treasury this year.’

Dr Bauer sighed and pushed the loose strands of her graying fair hair back into their bun. ‘I have lived in China for twenty years,’ she said. ‘And I never thought I would ever have a single good thing to say about the Manchu emperors. Yet it seems to me that those who have replaced them – and everyone in the village seems to believe that it is only a matter of time before President Yuan will proclaim himself Emperor – are no better and, if possible, worse. Certainly, the men with Huang had more the air of thugs than of soldiers.’

‘Did they go up to the mine as well,’ inquired Lydia, ‘after taking the remains and your notes?’

‘They did. They hired Liao Ho as guide – and cheated him of his pay, so I’m sure he will be glad to guide you as well. Huang, too, seemed interested in finding all its various entrances.’

‘Liao says, no one knows all the entrances to the mine.’ Count Mizukami drew rein where the trail crested over the little ridge and looked across the marshy expanse of the old mine-camp toward the great irregular oval of the cave mouth. Even in the daylight it had the look of a gate into hell. Slag heaps, broken bins, and the few surviving fragments of sheds added to the dismal air of the place, and the Chinese ponies – surer-footed than the taller Western horses, and shaggy as teddy bears in their winter coats – tossed their heads at the smells that whispered from the mine.

Chan, Liao’s big yellow dog, pressed close to his master’s legs, the hair along his spine darkened with the lift of his hackles. A growl rumbled in his throat. Behind them, Lydia heard the three Japanese soldiers murmur to one another in their own tongue. The bodyguard Mizukami had brought out with them in the motor car from Peking that morning, a young man named Ogata, sat his mount little apart, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

The little guide, pointing, said something else to Mizukami, who added, ‘Huang Da-feng had a map also, but two entrances that Liao knows about weren’t on it.’

With the air of a man half-hypnotized, Karlebach slipped from his saddle, unshipped his shotgun from his back, and moved down the slope. Lydia sprang down and hurried after him, and when she touched his arm he almost started at the contact.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

He laid his other hand – his useless hand, bent completely in on itself with arthritis – over hers. ‘Little bird,’ he murmured, ‘it was all my doing. They were like sons to me. Matthias, and Jamie.’

‘What else could you have done?’

He only shook his head.

Leaving Ogata and Liao with the horses, Mizukami and his men descended the slope behind them, the three soldiers scouting through the marsh on both sides of the path, their rifles ready. The pools had frozen hard in last night’s bitter cold; the touch of the noon sun hadn’t melted them. Lydia’s trailing black skirt caught on what had been a half-submerged branch, and she muttered an imprecation against Mrs Pilley and Ellen, who had begged her with tears to ‘show respect’ and ‘consider appearances’ by wearing this ridiculous costume.

At least with her face swathed in veils it was possible for her to wear her glasses without it being obvious. She had a feeling, as they climbed the packed-earth ramp up to the cave mouth, that she was going to need to see as clearly she could.

At the top of the ramp the soldiers lit the lanterns they carried. The floor of the outer cave – some sixty feet by thirty – was sheeted across with ice, and away from the opening the cold blue twilight deepened to the point that Lydia, exasperated, pushed up her veils so that she could see the openings of the two tunnels that had been cut into the mountain. I don’t CARE if I look like a goggle-eyed golliwog (that was what her cousins had called her): it was simply impossible to see details through all that mourning. Pieces of broken carts, looted of their iron undercarriages and wheels, lay along the sides of the cavern.

‘How much explosive will we need –’ Lydia took her notebook from her jacket pocket – ‘to close these tunnels? Jamie always says – said –’ she corrected herself quickly – ‘that gelignite works best, if it can be transported safely.’ She turned to scan the great archway behind them, then looked at both tunnels and the shadowy well of subsidence to her right and did some swift mental arithmetic. ‘I think what we really need here is some kind of poison gas – chlorine or phosgene – that’s heavier than air and will sink.’

‘Chlorine would be easiest to obtain.’ A glint of something like amusement flickered behind Mizukami’s thick spectacles. ‘The liquid is produced in Shanghai and Hong Kong both, for purposes of disinfection. It will volatilize with air.’

‘If containers of it could be placed deep in the mine – as close as possible to where the creatures sleep – and then detonated with a small charge to blow them up, just before the mine entrances are sealed—’ She looked over at Karlebach, who was regarding her with deep compassion and something like awe, as if he would have said how brave and strong she was being . . .

As if he saw his own grim obsession reflected in her triumph over her supposed grief.

Oh dear, all that didn’t sound awfully grief-stricken . . .

But how DOES one plan to blow up a mine filled with monstrosities in a grief-stricken manner . . .?

Beside her, Mizukami was giving orders to the three soldiers, two of whom moved off down the mine tunnels, the light of their lanterns dwindling in the darkness.

‘We’ll need to come up with some good reason for ordering all that chlorine,’ added Lydia, a little worriedly. ‘Not to speak of getting it up here. It would be ghastly to have either Yuan’s troops or the Kuo Min-tang confiscate it—’

‘I trust that you, Madame, will devise a reason sufficiently pressing to justify a strong guard.’ Again Mizukami’s eyes twinkled in a hidden smile. ‘Leave the issue of its transportation to me. What troubles me most is President Yuan’s inquiries.’

‘Yes . . . Obviously somebody knows something. Would President Yuan go to the trouble of scouting the mine and securing the remains of the yao-kuei if he didn’t think he could find some way to use them?’

‘Use them,’ said Mizukami grimly, ‘or to rent them out to his friends. And if he can control them, or thinks he can . . . or thinks he will be able to do so in the near future . . . I fear he is the kind of man who will then seek a way to make them multiply. Yabe—’ He signed to the third soldier – barely a boy – to bring the lantern, then turned toward Karlebach, who had moved a few steps off, staring into the abyss of the nearest tunnel. ‘Is there some way, Sensei, that these things can, or might be, controlled?’

Karlebach’s dark eyes glinted suspiciously behind the small oval chips of his spectacles. She went quickly to his side, lowered her voice to a whisper: ‘Did your friend Matthias learn anything of this? Or did the vampires of Prague speak of it—?’

‘Anything a vampire says is a lie. Or a half-truth aimed to some ulterior purpose, to buy your trust for some still greater lie to come.’

‘What did they say?’

Karlebach shook his head. ‘Upon my honor, Madame, I know of no way that the living – those of us who are still whole men, with souls and minds – can have any influence upon these . . . these things. And if it were possible . . .’

The shriek that cut through the dark of the tunnel was picked up by echoes, magnified: horror, agony, shock. Lydia strode toward the tunnel mouth, and Karlebach caught her back and thrust her behind him. As Mizukami rushed past her toward the black square of darkness, the dog Chan set up a wild salvo of barking.

The next second the soldier-scout blundered into the light of Private Yabe’s lantern from the tunnel’s depth, falling into the walls as he clawed wildly at the rats that covered him: face, body, legs. Lydia sprang back – she had hated rats from childhood – then looked down as something brushed her ankle, gasped, and fled in earnest to the entrance of the cave.

Rats streamed out of the tunnel around her feet. Mizukami whipped his scabbarded sword from his belt and, keeping the blade covered, strode in and used the scabbard as a club to knock the rats from the soldier’s face and body. The other men stomped, kicked, crushed at the rodents underfoot – the second soldier rushed past Lydia from the other tunnel and joined in the horrifying process. Lydia saw the subsidence at the east end of the cave also disgorging a river of rats, shouted, ‘Watch out!’

Mizukami and Private Yabe grabbed the bleeding soldier by the arms an instant before he would have fallen and dragged him at a run toward the mouth of the cave, Karlebach and the other soldier at their heels. The guide Liao dashed up to Lydia’s side, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her back down the earthen ramp: ‘Hsiao hsing!’ he shouted.

The slag heaps, the naked bushes, the blackened reeds of the frozen swamp all threshed with scurrying life. But when the dog Chan charged barking into their midst, the rats scattered, as if, once in the daylight of the gorge, the urge to swarming attack was less commanding. They merely rushed agitatedly here and there, torn between their instincts and whatever it was that demanded of them that they kill.

Sick with shock, Lydia scrambled back up to the ponies, dug in her saddlebags for bandages and carbolic. She knelt beside the wounded soldier as his comrades lowered him to the ground. The stiff collar of his uniform had protected his throat, but rat bites covered his face, one eye and one side of his lips a chewed ruin. She wiped and mopped and washed, and paused long enough to hold out the brandy flask to Karlebach, who sank down on to a heap of rubble nearby, his face nearly green with shock.

‘Take his pulse,’ she ordered Mizukami. ‘Sit him on something – tree stump will do – and get his head between his knees . . . please,’ she added, remembering belatedly that Japanese men, even more so than English, were unused to taking orders from a woman. As she worked on the stricken soldier she spoke over her shoulder: ‘Professor, can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying? Please answer—’

Faintly, Karlebach replied, ‘I hear, little bird.’

‘Can you breathe? Does your chest hurt you?’

‘I’m well.’ His voice was a little muffled, for the Count had obeyed Lydia’s orders with great promptness and had lowered the old man’s head down as instructed. ‘I am – dear God . . .!’

‘Count, have one of your men get this man – what is his name?’

‘Takahashi.’

‘Please have one of your men get Takahashi-san back to Dr Bauer. He’ll need to be started on rabies treatments as soon as we get back to Peking. Mr Liao—’

She looked around for the guide, who was helping Ogata hold the frantic ponies.

‘Count Mizukami, would you ask Mr Liao if he’s up to guiding us to the remaining mine-entrances that he knows about? I realize it’s a horrid thing to have to do.’

‘No, honored Madame,’ the Count replied quietly, ‘it is not horrid. At least, no more horrid, as you say, than war. And this is war: something for which, in times past, women in my country have been as trained and ready as men.’

He stood back as Lydia went over to kneel beside Karlebach. ‘Are you feeling better, sir?’ she asked softly. ‘I think you should go back with Takahashi-san to the village.’

‘No.’ He waved weakly, groped for his shotgun. ‘No, the more of us who know the land – who know the places where explosives and gas must be placed – the better. Anything could happen to any of us . . . The old legends, the old accounts, said they could call rats to their bidding. In the catacombs beneath Prague Castle, in the wells and tunnels and chambers that all connect . . . Matthias was sometimes turned back by the rats. But never like this . . .’

Never that you knew about. Lydia looked back up at the mine entrance. Or was that one of the things the Master of Prague told you that you thought he was lying about?

From here she could see, in the shadows of the outer cave, hundreds of rats still darting around the crushed and battered corpses of their comrades. The cold breath that seeped from underground brought her their sweetish, frowsty stink. One of them, running back up the icy slope nearby her, made her almost jump out of her skin.

She realized she herself was trembling, with shock and cold that seemed to penetrate to her marrow.

Mizukami held out to her the brandy flask. ‘Now at least,’ he said softly, ‘we have a good reason – a logical reason – for ordering hundreds of cylinders of chlorine and as much explosive as it will take to cave in the mine. Moreover, you know and I know now what it is that President Yuan seeks to control, if he can achieve command over these devils. Yabe—?’

The young soldier – who looked younger than most of Jamie’s students, thought Lydia – was almost green with shock, but he stood stiffly to listen to his Colonel’s instructions.

‘Hai.’ The young man saluted and helped his bleeding and half-conscious comrade on to one of the ponies. Chinese ponies being what they were, he led it down the trail toward the village, rather than risk riding. Karlebach got to his feet like a man half-stunned, looked around him for his lantern; it lay on its side just within the entrance to the cave.

Bracing herself with loathing, Lydia climbed back up the half-dozen yards that separated her from the gaping darkness in the hillside. The sound of rats squeaking and scuttering in the cave raised the hair on her nape. Chlorine gas, she thought. Seal the mine, detonate the containers . . . It would eat away most living tissue.

She bent quickly, picked up the lantern, straightened.

And, like a breath, a thought passed through her mind.

A whisper that seemed to come from the darkness; not physical sound, but something deeper, as if someone had breathed her name.

Only, it wasn’t her name.

A single word passed through the back of her mind, leaving her shocked and cold and aghast and filled with horror.

Mistress . . .

And then was gone.