Magistrates of Hell

TWENTY-SIX

British Legation, Peking

Tuesday, November 12, 1912

Mrs Asher,

Might I beg the favor of five minutes of your time? I would not dream of troubling you, save the matter is an urgent one, and of utmost importance.

Ever your servant,

Edmund Woodreave

‘Please, ma’am.’ Mrs Pilley clasped her hands over Lydia’s, when Lydia would have torn up the note. ‘The poor man looked so desperate when he stopped me in the lobby just now. I’m sure he wouldn’t have waited half the morning here for you, just for foolishness.’

‘Are you?’ Lydia turned the note over in her black-gloved fingers. It sounded to her exactly like the sort of thing her most persistent suitor would do. She thought she’d glimpsed that tall, pot-bellied, awkward form scrambling up out of an armchair as she, Ellen, and Mrs Pilley had crossed the lobby with Miranda, after a morning spent walking with Madame Hautecoeur on the Tatar City’s walls. At the sight of him she had quickened her steps to the stair.

The effort to keep her mind from what she knew had to be taking place in the Western Hills – from the thought of Jamie tangling with the Others, who might or might not be asleep; from the knowledge that Simon would be sealed into the mine with them – had exhausted her. Annette Hautecoeur, for all her gossipy slyness, had maintained a gentle flow of harmless commonplace as they’d looked out across that eerily impressive sea of gray and green and crimson roofs, and had made no comment about Lydia’s distraction and silences.

A new-made widow, Lydia was finding, could get away with a lot.

Such forbearance would definitely not be encountered in Edmund Woodreave’s company.

‘Please.’ The little nurse’s voice almost had tears in it. ‘He has a faithful heart, ma’am, and loves you so much.’

‘He has debts of over five hundred pounds to his club, his tailor, his wine merchant, and Hoby’s in London where he orders his boots,’ returned Lydia astringently. ‘And he loves so much the thought of an independent income which would put him in line for promotion.’

Mrs Pilley’s face crumpled a little, her eyes pleading. Her own fondness for the clerk, she knew, would forever go unconsummated – without a marriage portion of some kind neither he nor anyone else could afford to look at her . . .

Unless, thought Lydia, with a sudden pang of mingled suspicion and pity, he’s courted her a little in order to get her help in delivering this.

Another look at the nurse’s face confirmed her thought. Of course he has.

She sighed, feeling a little sick, and inspected herself in the parlor mirror. She retreated to the bedroom and repaired the ravages wrought by an hour’s sedate stroll under the protection of enough veiling to tent the grounds of New College – touches of rice powder, the tiniest refreshment of mascaro on the lids of her eyes (I may be in mourning but there’s no reason to look frightful . . .), smoothing and readjustment of her coiffure . . . Then she tucked her spectacles back into their silver case, put on her gloves again, and made her way down to the lobby, steeled to be grief-stricken and polite.

Simon . . .

He’ll find a way out somehow . . .

Woodreave was pacing the lobby outside the door of the smallest of the private parlors when Lydia came down the stairs. She noticed in passing a Chinese workman deep in argument with the manager at the desk and three laborers standing next to a number of rolled-up carpets nearby. Woodreave came forward and took her arm with a reverence that almost concealed the pre-emptory anxiety of the gesture. ‘Madame – Mrs Asher – thank you for coming down! Truly I’m – I’m sorry for disturbing you this way, but I really had no choice . . .’

He conducted her into the private parlor with the blue curtains and closed the door.

Grant Hobart rose from beside the fire. ‘Mrs Asher—’

Lydia turned sharply on Woodreave; his face was filled with anguish and guilt. ‘Please, Mrs Asher, please forgive me! Mr Hobart needs very much to speak to you. He said you wouldn’t answer his letters—’

‘I wouldn’t answer his letters,’ responded Lydia, furious now, ‘because I do not want to speak with him. The man who lied about my husband? Who drove him into the situation which resulted in his death, rather than have him reveal what he’d learned about the blood on his own hands?’

‘Blood—?’ Woodreave threw a pleading glance toward Hobart, who crossed the little parlor in two steps to Lydia’s side. He looked frightful, Lydia thought, trying not to peer nearsightedly at him – haggard and feverish: anxiety over Richard? When he knows perfectly well why Holly Eddington was murdered . . .

‘Ask him,’ said Lydia coldly. ‘Or was part of the money he offered you on the condition that you didn’t ask him anything?’

She was so angry that it took her an instant to identify the smell that clung to Hobart’s clothing. A breath of foulness, of fishy decay buried under nauseating French cologne . . . and something else, something chemical . . . Chloroform—

She turned to dive for the parlor door, but it was too late. Hobart grabbed her arm in a grip of terrifying strength and clapped a soaked rag to her nose and mouth. Lydia held her breath, kicked backwards at his shin—

And in the same instant, a Chinese man – respectably dressed in Western fashion – stepped from behind the curtains that half-concealed the alcove of the door, put one hand over Woodreave’s mouth and with the other drove a foot-long steel stiletto at an angle up through the larynx and into – Lydia guessed – the medulla oblongata and the cerebellum behind it. Which was, she reflected with her last conscious thought before blacking out, truly excellent aim given the circumstances.

Asher smelled the yao-kuei in the darkness, some fifteen minutes before he and his companions were cornered. By the feeble glimmer of two of their lanterns it took all his concentration to keep count of turnings, and of the few landmarks that had been noted on the map: did stone pit (or dump) really mean a disused room filled in with broken ‘gob’, as it was called in Wales, or was that something else that would be further along? Did a hogback rise of the floor mean they’d come down the wrong tunnel, or had the floor heaved up in the twenty years or more since the map was made? Despite the chill in the mine he was sweating, and he wondered how close they were to the detonation site of the chlorine and how fast the gas would spread once the canisters shattered.

Wondered where the sun was in the sky.

Ahead of him, Private Seki whispered, ‘Nani-ka nioi desu ka?’ and an instant later Asher smelled it, too. Fishy rottenness, the human stink of unclean flesh . . .

Forty of them, Ysidro had said.

He checked the map. ‘Back this way. There’s a shaft down to a gallery below this one, then a shaft up again—’ If we’re in the right tunnel.

There was a shaft – a few yards down a cross-cut that wasn’t as the map had described it – and a ladder with rotten rungs that cracked and whispered under the weight of the men, forty feet down into utter darkness. A gallery, the entire ceiling of which had sagged to within five feet of its floor, ankle deep in water in places, a slippery, hideous scramble.

Then, like the warning rush of wind that presages the storm, the skitter of claws on stone, the stink of rats.

Beyond the radius of the light Asher saw movement and a river of glittering eyes. He quickly unshipped the nozzle of his flame-thrower and lit the pilot (six matches left . . .), but when he turned the flame on the creatures, the first wave of them was already barely two yards from his boots. The rats shrieked, those behind pushing the flaming leaders ahead, and the whole swarm of them tried to fan out in a crescent around the men. Mizukami and Nishiharu fired up their lights and swept the moving wings of the army, the glare of the blaze blinding after hours of darkness.

And God, I hope this swarm is only a single wave . . .

It was. The rodents scattered, squealing, the charred and dying casualties a twitching carpet of stink and embers underfoot. They gave squishily as Asher strode forward, praying that there would indeed be the up-shaft that was supposedly at the end of the gallery and that the ladder there would still be able to bear weight. Tiny feet splished in water behind them in the darkness, scratched on the stones.

‘There!’ Karlebach panted.

As the failing lantern-light touched the ascending shaft, a rat fell down it. Then two more.

Bollocks.

‘Let me go up first.’ Asher shifted the weight of the flame-thrower on his back. Too light. How much fuel remained?

He knew what would be at the top.

Rats lined the uppermost rung of the creaky ladder, rimmed the pit head, eyes a tiny wall of live embers in the dark. Asher fired a burst of flame up at them, climbed a yard – lantern banging awkwardly at his thigh where it hung from his belt – then braced himself and fired again, sweeping the top of the shaft. He sprang up the last few feet and fired once more as soon as he got his elbows over the edge on to solid ground, the yellow burst of flame racing for yards along the floor of the tunnel. Scrambled up and shouted, ‘Come on! Now!’

Swept again, to keep the carpet of vermin at bay. The flame gave out with a sputter moments later; Mizukami swept the next wave of rodents while Asher shed the now-useless tank, reached down to haul Karlebach up the last few feet. The old man was gasping, struggling to hook his wrists over the rungs; in the dark behind him Asher made out Private Seki, pushing and guiding him from below.

‘There’s a tunnel leading into and out of this room,’ panted Asher as he pulled Karlebach, then Seki up out of the shaft. ‘We want the one that corners to the left.’ The room was invisible beyond the glare of the flame-thrower. When the rats retreated, Asher led the way straight to the wall, which he knew would be close – on the map the room wasn’t big. Slag and ‘gob’ heaped all around its walls – this part of the mine had been long abandoned as a dumping ground. The piled debris swarmed with rats. They followed the wall, but the tunnel they came to cornered right, and as Asher’s lantern failed, and Nishiharu kindled his own to replace it, the yellow flare of the match caught more eyes in the darkness.

Not the eyes of rats.

Asher cursed, led the way along the wall toward where he knew now the left-hand tunnel must be; behind him he heard Mizukami’s quiet-voiced directions to his men. Asher guessed they had only a dozen rounds apiece, perfectly adequate to deal with bandits . . .

Four yao-kuei emerged from the left-hand tunnel when Asher was within two yards of it.

They were the first Asher had seen by anything brighter than moonlight, slumped shapes that moved like animals. Yet they came with deadly swiftness, fanged mouths gaping. He fired his pistol almost point-blank at the nearest one, and behind him one of the soldiers got off a shot with his rifle. One of the yao-kuei staggered to its feet again, the other – half its head blown away – crawled toward them until Mizukami hit it with the last stream from his flame-thrower. More yao-kuei emerged from the right-hand tunnel at the other side of the room, loped toward them, eyes flashing in the darkness, and very deliberately Rebbe Karlebach brought up his shotgun and emptied one of the barrels into the nearest creature at a distance of ten feet.

The result was shocking. The creature shrieked, staggered, tore at itself with huge, clawed hands. The bleeding wounds sizzled and blistered. The others backed a step, and in that instant the old man turned and fired the second barrel at one of the two that blocked the way to the left-hand tunnel. The thing collapsed to the floor, screaming and raking its own flesh around the smoking wounds. Mizukami stripped out of his spent flame-thrower and strode in on the attacking group, sword flashing, and in that same moment the tallest of the yao-kuei – even slumped it must have been nearly six feet – lunged at Karlebach, caught the barrels of his shotgun as if he would wrench the weapon from his hand—

And stopped, staring at him in the lantern-light.

And for an instant, Karlebach paused in his frantic scramble to reload, stared back.

There was nothing human left of the doglike face, but as Asher brought up his pistol and fired point-blank into the thing’s head, his mind noted automatically that the few strands that remained of its verminous hair, as dark in the fitful glare as that of the others, were curly rather than straight and caught a mahogany-red gleam.

Asher’s shot knocked the yao-kuei sprawling. He grabbed Karlebach by the shoulder of his coat, thrust him ahead of him into the left-hand tunnel. Nishiharu laid down a burst of fire to cover the other two, and Asher plunged forward, praying his recollection of what came after the room with the shaft was correct. An inclined corridor, the Hsi Fang-te map had noted. Ceiling bagged down with the weight of the mountain above and floor littered with broken props, another incline . . .

A gallery, this one high-ceilinged, with glimpses of scaffolding on the nearer wall. Asher pulled a hunk of it free of its rotting ties, fumbled for his map, swung around in shocked terror at the sudden flash of eyes a foot from his shoulder—

A white hand, cold as the grip of a corpse, blocked him from bringing his revolver to bear. Ysidro said, ‘This way.’

‘We blew up that tunnel this morning,’ Asher gasped.

‘You Protestant imbeciles!’

Karlebach shouted a curse, swung toward him with his shotgun—

And Ysidro was gone.

‘They are down here too!’ The Professor staggered, passed a hand over his eyes. ‘I knew it! I knew it was a trap! I felt their presence—’ Then, like the stroke of a monster drum, the ground underfoot jarred. The distant explosion was strong enough to send rocks slithering from the slag piles at one end of the gallery, and to make all the scaffolding rattle and sway. Dust rained from the ceiling. Then far off, and stronger, a second blast.

‘That’s it,’ said Asher. ‘They set off the gas – and sealed the mine.’

In the silence there seemed nothing more to say. Lydia, he thought. Miranda . . .

Far on the other end of the gallery, a light flickered. A shaky old voice called out, ‘Na shih shei?’ Who’s there?

And Asher shouted back, scarcely believing his ears, ‘Chiang?’

The others simply stared as the distant blur of white resolved itself into the old man, hurrying toward them, surprisingly agile on the steep and slippery floor. In one hand he held his staff, a cheap tin lantern in the other, its glimmer turning his long white hair into trailing wisps of smoke. ‘I thank the Yama-King and all the Magistrates of Hell for guiding me in this terrible place,’ he said as he drew closer. ‘The entrances to the mine have all been sealed up—’

‘How you get in?’

‘Ah, but there is a secret way, which lies in the crypt of the Temple of the Concealed Buddha. I studied there after the death of my wife. It was built during the Sung Dynasty, when because of the growing strength of the Heaven and Earth Sect the Emperor decreed . . .’ The old man looked from face to face of the fugitives. ‘Those creatures that I saw—’

‘Lead us,’ commanded Asher. ‘Poison gas, soon, quickly, now—’

Mizukami had gone to the edge of the lamplight, listening into the darkness; Karlebach and the two soldiers, without a word of Chinese among them, still stared at the white-haired priest as if he’d descended from the ceiling in a chariot of fire.

‘Poison gas?’ Chiang’s white brows drew together indignantly. ‘What a frightful thing! Mo Tzu, in the Spring and Autumn Period, wrote of the use of mustard to make toxic smokes to be blown at enemies, but it is a shameful use of man’s wisdom and energies to—’

‘Shameful waste our wisdom and energies,’ said Asher tactfully, ‘for us die with yao-kuei . . .’

‘Oh, quite right, quite right!’ The old priest nodded and led the way back along the gallery in the direction from which he had come. ‘An excellent point. Yes, the yao-kuei . . . But surely the yao-kuei have their own path, their own place, in this world. The Buddha taught that even noxious insects have their own Buddha-nature.’

‘Here they come,’ Mizukami said.

Eyes glittered behind them in the darkness. Mizukami motioned Private Seki toward Karlebach, spoke an order; the young man handed his lantern to Asher, put his shoulder beneath the old Professor’s arm. The floor ahead of them swarmed suddenly with rats, scurrying and dropping from the scaffolding; Mizukami snapped another order, and Nishiharu fired the flame-thrower.

‘Fascinating,’ murmured Chiang. ‘In the Spring and Autumn Period, Sun Tzu wrote of such devices—’

Asher shoved him without ceremony toward the darkness: ‘Run!’

They ran. The flame-thrower sputtered out, and Nishiharu slithered from its straps as he ran, then swung around to fire his rifle into the loping shadows of the yao-kuei. Asher smelled above their stink the distant reek of chlorine, growing stronger as it flowed into the mine. As he had observed on the shores of the Peking Sea, the yao-kuei moved with the swift precision of a school of fish, dispersing themselves across the gallery. Some scrambled up on the rotting scaffolding, moved along it with terrifying agility, spreading out to keep from being shot into in a mob. To aim, the fugitives would have to stop, and to stop was to die.

‘This way!’ Chiang waved his staff encouragingly. The gallery ended in a steep tunnel, its walls marked with enormous, fresh chalk Xs – obviously Chiang’s way of keeping from getting lost. Two yao-kuei dropped from the scaffolding in front of the entry to the tunnel, bared their outsize teeth. Asher didn’t see how, but like an eye-blink, Ysidro was behind the creatures in the tunnel mouth: thin and rather tattered, skeletal in the lantern-light. He caught one of the yao-kuei with both hands around its head and twisted its neck. Asher heard the bones snap, but when Ysidro kicked the thing aside it got up again, staggered blindly, arms thrashing, still looking for prey. The second yao-kuei fell upon Ysidro, mouth stretched to bite, and Mizukami took off both its hands with one stroke of his sword, and then, as Ysidro dodged nimbly away, its head with the next stroke.

More of the creatures dropped from the scaffold, the main group – twenty at least – closing in from the gallery floor. Karlebach fired into the group as they approached, and a yao-kuei grabbed him from behind. Its claws tore through his thick coat, and it seized him by his white hair. The next second the thing was knocked sprawling by the tallest of the yao-kuei – blood clotting from the gaping entry-wound Asher’s pistol had left in its skull – who flung the smaller creature aside, caught up the rifle Seki had dropped during the fray, and waded into the advancing others, swinging the weapon like a club.

The other yao-kuei fell back before it. It turned, for one second, and looked back at Asher, at Karlebach, at the small group huddled in the tunnel mouth in the lamplight.

Karlebach whispered: ‘Matthias—’

It opened its fanged mouth like an ape and screeched at them. Then turned, and strode toward the others, holding them at bay.

‘Go,’ said Asher. ‘Run!’ He caught Karlebach by the arm, forced him along in the wake of Chiang’s lantern, stumbling on the uneven floor. Another white X glimmered at the bottom of a shaft.

‘Up,’ urged Chiang. ‘Hasten—’ For indeed, the smell of chlorine was growing stronger in the shaft, and Asher began to cough, lungs burning, ribs stabbing him, tears flooding his eyes.

‘Go.’ He slipped his satchel from his shoulder, with the last two bars of gelignite. ‘I’ll be up—’

‘You’re a fool,’ said Ysidro’s voice in his ear as the others disappeared up the ladder.

Asher was coughing so hard he couldn’t respond. The pain in his side made him dizzy.

‘How do you set these?’

‘Detonator – in the middle—’

Cold hands pulled the wires from his fingers. All very well for you to talk. You don’t need to breathe . . .

‘Get up the ladder.’

‘Lydia,’ gasped Asher. ‘Tso house— Said they have her—’

Ysidro swore hair-raisingly in Spanish. ‘Go. And cover me from that lunatic Jew before you touch off the explosion.’

Head swimming, Asher dragged himself up the rungs, endless in the dark. Overhead, the lantern-light was a dim spot. It was like trying to swim up out of a lightless well.

Hands grabbed his arms, pulled him up. He saw Mizukami kneeling over the detonator box, gasped, ‘Wait—’ and staggered, flung out his arm as if to catch his balance, and fell, knocking lantern and detonator spinning away into the blackness.

The darkness was like being struck blind. Voices cried out, scrabbled in the lightless abyss, and Asher lay on the stone floor gasping. Aware that Ysidro had heard their voices in the mine and come out from behind his protective silver bars and followed them, once the Others were fully occupied . . .

Cold thin hands took his, pressed the hot metal of the lantern into them. Long nails like claws. He managed to shout, ‘I found it,’ and coughed again, almost nauseated, as he fumbled for matches.

With the first flicker of the lamplight, Mizukami seized the detonator and pressed the plunger home.

Deep, deep below them the earth surged. Dust erupted thickly from the shaft, blurred the lamplight; filled what Asher saw now was a small rock-cut room, its walls carved with column after column of Buddhist scripture, engraved into the stone.

After the bellow of the explosion, silence. Karlebach dragged himself to the shaft’s edge and knelt beside it, gazing down, crippled hands folded in prayer. The priest Chiang, standing behind him with the lantern, seemed to understand what had happened in the gallery, for he laid one skeletal hand on the old man’s shoulder and over the shaft made a sign of blessing.

Of Ysidro, no trace remained.