Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘This is beyond our capacity to alter.’ Count Mizukami shut the small iron door on the kang that occupied a third of the room: their blankets were already spread out on the hollow brick platform that, in most Chinese farmhouses, served as both stove and bed. At the table, Karlebach said nothing. But every now and then he looked up from cleaning his shotgun, to regard Asher with a kind of aching wonderment, as if he couldn’t believe that one of his surrogate sons, at least, had returned from the dead.

Knowing his old teacher incapable of disguising either grief or joy, Asher had kept hidden from him until they were on the train out of Peking. He’d had Mizukami break the news to Karlebach that Asher was in fact alive, before walking into the compartment himself, but still the old man had clung to him for a time in tears. His first question, when he could speak again, had been, Does Madame know? To which Asher had responded with a smile, ‘Forgive me – but yes. She’s a much better actress than you are.’ This had lightened the air between them with laughter, but now Asher was interested to note that rather than ending Karlebach’s grim resolve, the reunion had energized him. Once in their headquarters for the night, he had gone lovingly over every millimeter of his shotgun, and he was now checking each of its glinting brass shells, stuffed with enough solid silver deer-shot to blow a living man to Kingdom Come.

‘Word could have gone out,’ Mizukami went on reasonably, ‘to Huang, or to the Kuo Min-tang, when Sergeant Tamayo arrived in Men T’ou Kuo yesterday and arranged for the porters and horses.’ He removed his glasses and set them aside, but kept his sword beneath the blanket with him. ‘If we set a guard openly, at least the small dogs of the hills will keep their distance for the night.’

With that, Asher had to agree, and in fact the night passed without incident. He returned from his watch at midnight to find his old teacher still awake, poring over the map which the priest Chiang had drawn for them the previous night in the Temple.

‘You’re sure this man’s information can be trusted?’ Karlebach looked up as he came in and brushed the map with his fingers. ‘You say he is familiar with these hills. But after all, if he has not seen the Others, how can he be sure where it is that they sleep?’

‘I know of no reason he’d lie.’ Asher kept his voice low, for Mizukami slept under a pile of blankets and sheepskins on the kang , and the table had been drawn up close to it for warmth. He pulled off his gloves, held his half-frozen fingers to the kang ’s iron door. ‘For all I know he could be in the pay of the Tso Family, and this could be an elaborate trap to keep me from peaching on them to the British authorities about their nefarious deeds. In China you simply can’t tell. But—’

The old man chuckled in the depths of his white beard and waved the possibility aside. Asher didn’t want to tell him that Chiang had only been following Ysidro’s thoughts, like a spiritualist wielding a planchette. All vampires lie was not a discussion he wanted to engage in just now.

Instead he brought out the map he and the Legation clerk P’ei had pieced together from the various mining company diagrams, turned it so that it was oriented in the same direction as Chiang’s. ‘The tunnels match,’ he said. ‘Look here – this is just where that gallery should be. There are cave temples in these hills, and Lydia tells me the ruins of one lie not far from that rear entrance. My guess is that Chiang served in one of them in times past and did a little exploring on his days off.’

If Taoist monks have days off , reflected Asher as he crawled into his own blankets on the kang , his cracked ribs aching under the plaster dressing that the Japanese Legation doctor had provided. Old Chiang had been thoroughly disconcerted at the thought of riding the Iron Dragon, as he had called the railway, and that morning had sent the hulking younger priest of the Temple to the station with a message in his stead. The speed of the train, the message had said, would so disrupt the geomantic alignments of his chi energy that it would be impossible for the earth to absorb the effects.

Thus, he said, he would walk to the mine. He hoped this would not inconvenience anyone.

Meaning we will have no one after all , reflected Asher, who can listen through the darkness of the earth . And in any case, Ysidro would be asleep.

Lying in the darkness and listening to the sob of the wind in the vent holes of the kang , Asher thought about the vampire, trapped in Father Orsino’s silver-barred refuge. The vampire whom eighteen months ago he could have killed with swift mercy in St Petersburg. Ysidro might even have been grateful.

If the yao-kuei waked earlier in the evening than a vampire, and went to sleep later, then Father Orsino’s refuge would indeed be a slightly larger version of a coffin, a prison inescapable. And soon it would be flooded with one of the most corrosive gasses known to man. With the yao-kuei dead, and the mine sealed, death would not even be an option for Ysidro – neither by being devoured, nor by the light of the sun. Only darkness eternal, and eternal burning pain.

Dante himself couldn’t have come up with a more suitable fate. Asher closed his eyes, not wanting to think of it.

A horse snuffled in the courtyard. Liquid spots of reflected ember-light moved on the wall.

Somewhere a Just God is laughing, at one who decided he was willing to kill in order to live forever .

Had Ysidro not stayed at Lydia’s side, one night in St Petersburg when the local vampire nest had attacked the house where she was staying, she would not be alive now. He would not have a daughter today.

Lydia would not, Asher knew, imitate those heroines of novels and go dashing off into the underground darkness to seek the vampire . . .

Still, he was glad she had not come.

Forty , he made himself think, taking refuge in planning and facts. Not a great number . The first big gallery on the lowest level of the new part of the mine. A hundred and seventy feet down – too far to transport the gas cylinders, or run the detonator wires, but when the cylinders are blown up, the gas will sink. This late in the year, even riding horses, there would barely be enough daylight hours to seal all its exits, to descend through the rear entrance to the opening between the mine and the cave system below, and to blow that up as well.

Twenty years in the Department had taught him precisely how many things could go wrong when one was working against a time limit.

In his mind he saw them as he sank into uneasy sleep: the Others, lying in the blackness like the trout that dozed beneath the shadows of the banks of the Stour when he was a boy. But open-eyed in the watery dark. Listening for their prey.

Asher and his party left the village as soon as it was light, to set charges in the cave that formed the mine’s main entrance. A dozen villagers accompanied them, under the command of Dr Bauer. The moment Asher and the Japanese set foot in the cave, rats poured forth from both tunnels and up from the subsidence, as if some spigot deep in the mountain had been turned, and as Asher had suspected, the German flammenwerfer worked against them perfectly well. It was a hellish weapon to use even on rats – their squealing as the burning oil doused them was a sound he thought he would never get out of his head – and the thought that the flame-throwers had been designed for use against men in the war that everyone knew was coming turned his stomach. And it wasn’t the rats’ fault or intention, he knew, to attack these invaders, to die in agony . . .