Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘I could , but that’s the oldest trick in the book – I dare say Madame Hautecoeur has used it a thousand times herself. I could tell everyone you were conducting me to an opium den, though,’ she had added, suddenly cheered. ‘That would be perfectly acceptable—’

‘It would be nothing of the kind!’

‘Well, it would be understandable, and everyone would ask me what it was like . . . Which I’ll have to find out before the story goes too far . . .’

But upon arrival at the Temple, the stout priest had informed them that Chiang had gone out begging – the occupation of all good priests – and would not return until dusk. Thus it was not until after nightfall that the experiment in hypnotism could be made.

‘Voice in dreams,’ repeated Chiang, and he brushed his forehead with his fingers, as he had when speaking to Lydia in the hotel parlor.

The old-fashioned lamps in the building behind the temple wavered in the drafts – desert wind blew down on the city again, the air fuzzy with dust. Shadows loomed, huge as the kuei in some old fairy-tale: a broken-down bed, a rack of scrolls, piles of books heaped everywhere. A thousand bottles and jars – ginseng, peony root, turtle plastron and rhinoceros horn – knobby ginger, and the bones and teeth of mice. A line of pestles in graduating size; a set of acupuncture needles like some strange, tiny musical instrument.

In the corner, the gleam of a halberd blade.

‘You speak to voice?’ asked Asher in Chinese.

The black eyes, bright as a squirrel’s, turned toward him, and in the same language the old man replied, ‘Sometimes I can. All my life I have spoken with spirits, you understand.’ He gestured toward the scrolls, toward the line of tablets – slices of bamboo with characters carved into them – that hung on the soot-blackened wall of the room. ‘My mother also had this gift. When a family is in trouble, or in need of advice, I can sometimes reach out to the Great Beyond and ask an ancestor what it is best that they do. Or if someone is troubled with a hungry ghost, who cannot find rest and so returns to trouble the living: often these can be treated with and given what it is that keeps them from peace. But this – this cold thing that came to me as I slept . . . This was not a spirit.’

Asher said, ‘No. Not spirit.’

‘Yet nor is he a living man.’

Again Asher shook his head.

The priest frowned in thought, then rose and put a couple of pieces of coal in the brick stove which occupied one corner of the room. Asher guessed his age as in his seventies, but he could have been older. His hair, milk white, hung below his hips, not queued any more but tied in a simple thong; his thin beard and mustaches trailed down his chest. The temple’s other two priests – the stout little man and a taller, younger one – had seemed a little afraid of him, which made Asher smile inwardly.

Every one of Rebbe Solomon Karlebach’s students – himself included – had been terrified of the old scholar.

‘Perhaps he is a bodhisattva?’ inquired Chiang. ‘A saint who has achieved the Buddha-nature within himself – who has freed himself from the cycle of rebirths – but has lingered behind in this world to save others? Yet this coldness is nothing I have felt before. When a man’s soul divides at death, and the upper soul is carried off to Heaven by the Spirit of the Dragon of Wisdom, the lower soul remains . . . but I understand that it usually disperses. Although, if one reads the writings of Wang Bi on the subject . . . Oh, yes, ten thousand pardons. You said you wished to speak to him . . .’

He returned to his stool, beside the bench where Asher sat. Closed his eyes.

Stillness filled the room, save for the keening of the wind around the temple’s eaves.

Then he whispered, ‘Under the mountain.’

‘You speak to him?’

Chiang moved his head a little, as if to say, No , then was still.

After another long silence he murmured in English, ‘Mistress—’

‘Are you all right?’ Lydia put her hand to her lips the instant the question passed them, probably realizing, thought Asher, what a useless one it was. But, he thought, she couldn’t not ask.

‘I am well.’ Even the timbre of that uninflected voice was the same.

‘We’re going to seal the mine –’ Asher kept his tone deliberately matter-of-fact – ‘after detonating cylinders of chlorine gas. Will that kill them?’

‘Most assuredly. They are not immortal, James. Twelve entrances. The farthest two are ventilation shafts on the north-east flank of the mountain.’

‘We know of all twelve.’

‘There is a thirteenth you must also destroy, the worst. Below the level of the mine tunnels lies a natural cave system. The old mine entrance, on the far side of the mountain; follow the tunnel to the great gallery on the left, filled with slag and broken rock. From there the tunnel slopes down sharply and breaks through into the caves below. This tunnel must be sealed. They do not go there yet, but if driven they will. I know not how far those caves extend.’

‘It will be done.’

‘Thank you . . .’ Lydia whispered.

‘I assure you, Mistress, that had I known what this information would cost me, you would never have had it.’

‘Could a vampire control these things?’ asked Asher.

‘ This vampire cannot. Trust me, I have tried. The vampires of Prague have been trying for years.’

‘What about a vampire who was infected with their blood?’

Into the long silence which followed this, Lydia added, ‘Jamie found one of them. One of the old ones, it sounds like. He’s being kept prisoner by a criminal family who’s trying to get control of the Others.’

‘Prisoner?’

‘Tso—’ Chiang flinched, put his hand to his head again, opened his eyes. ‘A sound,’ he explained in Chinese, looking at Asher. ‘Something moving in the darkness. Where is this? Where is he?’

‘Western Hills.’

‘And you understood the words I said? Extraordinary.’ Chiang’s face was alight with fascination. ‘Kuo Hsiang writes that it is possible to completely detach the mind from one’s activities, to become utterly one with the Way; a most astonishing sensation. But he is afraid,’ he added. ‘Your friend. The things he fears, the things in the dark underground . . . I have heard stories of them. Now – since summer – when I go begging I hear of things here in the city as well, things seen in the night on the shores of the Seas—’

‘You try,’ asked Asher, ‘bid these things come, bid them go? Listen to minds, as you listen for speech of spirits?’

Chiang tilted his head. There was something in his eyes that told Asher that he’d tried.

In time he said, ‘No. There is nothing. Only madness, and hunger that cannot be assuaged.’

‘Tomorrow, next day,’ said Asher, ‘come with us to hills? We destroy these creatures, yao-kuei in Shi’h Liu mine. We need all help we can get.’

The old man was silent for a moment, studying Asher’s face. At length he said, ‘Yes. I will come.’

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.