Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

The track ascended a rise of ground, then went down into what had been a level area in front of the Shi’h Liu mine entrance itself, perhaps a hundred yards in length, once given over to washing sheds, outbuildings, and slag heaps of waste rock. A ramp of rammed earth had been erected – who knew how long ago? – up to the cave mouth, which was a vast uneven oval set on its side, blue with shade in the yellowish rock of the hill’s steep shoulder. Seepage had turned the whole area into a sodden wasteland, weed-clogged, black with coal-dust, choked with cat-tails and sedges and, as Dr Bauer had said, rustling with rats.

‘The body lay here.’ Dr Bauer motioned to the nearest of the rock heaps, a few yards from the track where it first began to descend.

‘He was running back to the mine.’ Liao Ho put a hand on Chan the dog’s head. Asher let the missionary translate the little farmer’s words into German, for Karlebach’s benefit. ‘Shun and Shuo had torn his throat out, and he had clawed them in return. In the dark –’ he nodded toward the mine – ‘I saw the eyes of others, like the eyes of rats, but man-high. Rats were everywhere in the marsh, squeaking and running about.’

‘And was this near where your policeman saw them?’ Asher asked of Bauer, in German still.

‘No. Those were nearer the village, much nearer. No one comes this close to the mine in the twilight.’

‘You want to be careful, sir,’ warned Sergeant Willard as Asher picked his way around the worst of the pools toward the ramp that led up to the cave mouth. ‘This’s exactly the kind of place bandits’ll camp in . . .’

Having neither German nor Chinese, the soldiers were under the impression that Asher and Karlebach were seeking a legend, rather like the yeti of the Himalayas: a belief Asher had been careful to foster by his replies to Willard’s questions en route. ‘Does it smell like there’s men hidden inside?’ he asked, and the sergeant’s gray-blue eyes narrowed.

‘It don’t smell natural, sir, and that’s a fact.’

This was true. The latrine-stink of men camped together – and the smell of smoke that would drift up even from fires built far back in the tunnels – was absent, and there was certainly no sign that horses had been anywhere in the valley. But there was a smell of some kind, which raised the hair on the back of Asher’s neck.

They climbed the ramp, the packed earth dimpled where track had been laid for the mine carts, but the iron rails and wooden ties alike long ago carried away by thrifty villagers. The outer cave was roughly the volume of the church in Wychford where Asher’s father had held his living, and was filled with the same soft grayish gloom. By the low narrow shape of the two tunnels that opened from one end of it, it was clear to Asher that the mining had been done in the old way: with picks, and the coal carried out in baskets on men’s backs. At the other end of the cave the floor had subsided into a sort of sinkhole, where a suggestion of water glimmered far below.

Asher took the lantern from Sergeant Willard and lit it, and then walked to the nearer tunnel, six inches shorter than his own six-foot height and barely more than half that width.

Gray rats scurried away into darkness. Turned back to look with eyes like tiny flame.

The smell was stronger here, nauseating. Asher was aware of his heart pounding. Karlebach came to his side, his less-crippled hand curled on the trigger of the shotgun, the barrel resting lightly across his other wrist. The old man murmured, ‘Yes. They’re here.’

Eighteen months ago, when Asher had traveled with the vampire Ysidro through the eastern reaches of Europe, they had been in quest of information about whether it were possible – whether any of the vampires in Berlin or Augsburg or Prague or Warsaw had ever heard of it – for vampires to mutate spontaneously, without masters and without instruction in the ways of survival. The Others, however, had been whispered of only in Prague. It had been enough, at the time, to learn that the Others were not the creatures that he sought.

Staring into the endless black seam, Asher now regretted the questions Ysidro had not asked at that time of his fellow Undead. He started to make a comment to that effect, but the expression on his companion’s face silenced him: a despairing intensity, as if the whole of the old scholar’s being strained to pierce the midnight beyond the kerosene’s glow. Beneath the luxuriant masses of beard his mouth was set, and Asher could see that he trembled.

Eighteen months ago he was content to live in Prague. Content to study the secrets of that ancient place in the full knowledge that vampires walked its streets . . .

What changed?

The knowledge that vampires existed elsewhere in the world had not sufficed to turn the old man from scholar to hunter. Yet when Asher had denied the request in that first letter, the old man had packed up and left the house where he had been born, where he had dwelled the whole of his long life, to journey first to England, then to China.

Why?

Why now?

What does he know that he has not told me?

Stirring, deep in the darkness. More eyes glittered, as if the floor of the tunnel were now carpeted with rats. Behind him, Asher was aware that the light in the outer cave was dimming as the sun moved beyond the valley’s rim.

‘I think this is all we can accomplish today,’ he said, and Karlebach startled, as if Asher had fired off a gun. ‘We’ve found the place; we’ve ascertained that these are indeed the creatures you know in Prague.’

Karlebach stammered a little, then said, ‘Yes. Yes, of course you’re right . . .’

‘We don’t know how many of them there are, or how deep in the mine they’re hidden – or how much twilight in the world above suffices to wake them.’

Karlebach nodded. For a moment Asher felt that the old man would have said something else to him. But instead he looked aside, mumbled, ‘That’s true. We had best— We had best be going . . .’

As if, thought Asher, having come halfway around the world to find this place, he had no clear idea of where to go from here. Of what to do.

Of what he WANTED to do.

Odd .

He followed his old teacher back toward the cave entrance, where Sergeant Willard, Liao Ho, Trooper Barclay, Chan the dog, and Dr Bauer stood silhouetted against the fading daylight.

Karlebach stopped twice, to look back into the dark of the tunnels.

Asher wondered what it was that he expected to see.

SIX

‘It’s called the Temple of Everlasting Harmony.’ Like most Russian ladies of good family, the Baroness Tatiana Drosdrova spoke fluent French, and it was in this language that she addressed Lydia as she climbed down and paid off the three rickshaw ‘boys’ who had hauled her party at a jogging run nearly two miles from the Legation Quarter. ‘Stay here, all-same.’ She pointed imperiously down at the hard-packed dirt of the lane – the ‘boy’ to whom she spoke was, to Lydia’s estimation, sixty at least, old enough to be her father and far too old to be hauling stout Russian females around the alleyways of Peking. ‘Ten cents.’

‘Ten cents, all-same.’ The gray-haired puller gestured from himself to the two younger men who’d ferried Lydia, doe-eyed young Signora Giannini – the other diplomatic wife of the party – and the Baroness’s two sturdy Russian bodyguards to the head of Silk Lane, which stretched away to their right. ‘Ten cents, ten cents.’

Meaning, Lydia assumed, that each of them wanted that modest sum to stay put while the three ladies investigated the Temple.

‘Ten cents, ten cents,’ agreed the Baroness affably. She spoke little English, but appeared to be conversant in the pidgin used by every servant and rickshaw-puller in the city. ‘Of course he’ll abscond the moment someone offers him eleven,’ she added, switching back to French as she straightened the veils on her flat, outdated little hat. ‘But there are always a dozen pullers just down Silk Lane, so we won’t have lost anything much.’