Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

But he was damn glad the compressed nitrogen threw the flames fifty feet down the tunnels. Even in flames, the rodents kept on coming until their bodies were consumed. The stink of charred flesh, burned oil, and scorched hair was horrific as they descended – through drifting smoke that almost obscured the light of their lanterns – to a gallery where, according to both maps and Ysidro’s instructions, down-shafts led directly to the deep-sunk room where the yao-kuei slept.

‘Have your porters stack the cylinders here,’ Asher instructed the German missionary quietly. ‘I’ll wire a charge at the bottom of the pile but won’t connect it to the detonator-box until all your men are out of the mine. It’ll be perfectly safe. When the rest of the mine is sealed, we’ll fire the charge to release the chlorine, then immediately detonate the charges on the main entrance.’

‘And this is the only thing that can be done with them?’ Bauer looked up into his face, her blue eyes filled with pity and regret. ‘Kill them like dogs that have run mad?’

‘Believe me,’ said Asher, ‘it is the only way. And it is necessary that it be done soon.’

She studied him for a moment more, then sighed a little, and nodded. ‘Yes. I see that it is. And it shall be done.’

Karlebach lingered in the gallery as Asher set his charges, under the first of the growing dull-green mountain of chlorine cylinders. The only way to the lower levels from that long, dark chamber was a couple of rickety ladders, which the Japanese soldiers drew up for a little distance, then cut off and dropped back into the chasm. When it was time to go, Karlebach turned from the brink of the downshaft as if he could scarcely bear to leave it, his lined face set like stone.

Asher found himself remembering that he and Lydia were not the only ones tormented by the thought of someone who would be sealed in the poisoned abyss.

It would take, Asher guessed, until mid-afternoon for the villagers to carry all the canisters down the narrow tunnels. He showed Sergeant Tamayo how to affix the ends of the detonator wire into the box, listened to Mizukami translate his instructions: the gas cylinders to be detonated at four thirty, the main charge to bring down the tunnels immediately thereafter. Two armed troopers would remain with the sergeant after the villagers left, to make sure there was no interference from bandits or anyone else.

‘And if the President sends men to stop us,’ Mizukami added as the rest of the little party nudged their scrubby Chinese ponies single file along the overgrown track toward the other entrances, ‘Tamayo has instructions to hold them at bay and set the charges off immediately.’

‘I doubt Yuan will authorize troops.’ Asher scanned the brush-choked gully below the track, the queer, snaky ridges of the hills that closed in around them. His cracked ribs ached, and after the dark of the mines, the sunlight seemed queerly bright. ‘He’s sensitive about how he’s perceived by the West. If there’s trouble, he’ll find his actions hard to justify. The ones we need to watch out for are the Tso. Though I wouldn’t put it outside the realm of possibility,’ he went on grimly, ‘for us to meet Colonel von Mehren and some of his merry men – depending on who Madame Tso has chosen to sell information to.’

All around the rear flanks of the mountain, they stopped at the small subsidiary entrances and ventilation shafts of the mine – most barely more than holes in the ground, some centuries old – and blew them up as they went, burying in seconds the brutal labor of years.

Can he hear the explosions in his sleep? Asher wondered as the hillside jarred beneath him and thick yellow dust belched from the narrow pits. Lying asleep a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down into the earth . . .

Is he counting them in his dreams? Twelve yet to go, then eleven, then ten . . . Until final darkness and an eternity alone with pain?

As he rolled up his wires, packed his detonator back on his shaggy little mount and then hauled himself – ribs stabbing him – into the saddle again, Asher glanced at Karlebach’s stony face and wondered whether he thought the same.

But he could not bring himself to ask.

In its heyday, the entrance to the mine on the far side of Shi’h Liu mountain had been a workings in its own right. Asher traced the foundations of sheds and huts, small squares of brick and stone on the slope beneath the cave mouth, and a graded track that led down to what had been a worker’s village, strung out along the trickle of a stream. Everything was gone now except for a few broken fragments of wall. This was a country where abandoned brick or cut stone did not go long un-scavenged. Rats swarmed forth – as they had at two other entrances – and Asher and the bodyguard Ogata swept them with flame. Then Asher checked his watch and wired the gelignite blocks into the decayed wooden props that held up the entrance to the cave. Right on schedule, always supposing President Yuan hasn’t sent an army to stop the villagers . . .

He hid the detonator in what looked like the debris of a shed while Mizukami and one of the three soldiers, Nishiharu, scouted a few yards down the tunnel through the smoking carpet of dead and dying rats. Karlebach shouldered his shotgun, and the spare cylinders of oil and nitrogen, in case there were more vermin further down. Another soldier, Seki, carried in a satchel of explosives, wire, and a detonator box.

Asher signed Ogata and the third soldier, Hirato, to remain outside on guard over the ponies. Then he picked up his satchel and his lantern and followed the gleam of Mizukami’s dim light down the tunnel into the dark.

It was then not quite three o’clock.

TWENTY-FIVE

Rats whipped among the rocks. Asher could hear the scrabble of their feet, their constant squeaking in the dark; their sweetish, fusty stink mingled with the scents of water and stone. In the abysses of the cross-drifts, tiny eyes glittered like malevolent rubies. Asher counted turnings, checked and rechecked both his maps by the lantern-gleam, and prayed that Ysidro’s observations here had been correct, and that those lazy bastards at the Hsi Fang-te mining offices hadn’t simply gone on hearsay of what was down here or, worse yet, just made something up – who’s going to go down to check, eh?

Burn in Hell, the lot of you .

The ceiling barely cleared the heads of the Japanese and forced Asher and Karlebach to stoop as they walked. Mizukami whispered, ‘ Iei !’ and the light of his lantern fell on an X, scratched deeply into the stone of the left-hand wall. The scratches were fresh. ‘What is this, Ashu Sensei?’

Asher checked his map. The tunnel beside the X was in the right place to be the one that led down to the gallery they sought.

‘Who has been down here?’ Karlebach asked hoarsely

‘The priest Chiang,’ lied Asher, ‘said he recalled something like this. Let me go ahead.’

He raised his lantern, moved forward again. The tunnel sloped sharply, following an ancient coal-seam. When he touched the wall, moisture slicked his hand. After a time the walls widened out around them, the ceiling grew higher and the lantern-light showed them a few pillars still standing where the coal had been cut out around them. Wooden props had been installed to support the roof, gray and desiccated with age.

The whole thing will come down when we blow the tunnel . . .

Then the gallery narrowed again, and Asher had to turn sideways and brace himself against the steep angle of the floor. He held the lantern further out before him, then knelt and crept forward step by step.

Darkness dropped away before him. The ends of a ladder poked up over the edge, but he knew better than to trust it. He merely extended his lantern out over the abyss and glimpsed the faintest hints of pillars – stalactites aglitter with moisture and crystal – hanging from a ceiling somewhere not far above him, and undulating shapes of pale flowstone and stalagmites not far below. He called out, ‘Hello!’ into the darkness, and echoes picked up his voice, the distant ringing of vast underground space. Ysidro was right. The caverns would swallow any amount of chlorine, disperse it harmlessly in millions of cubic feet of air. The yao-kuei could probably follow them to some other entrance, miles away.