Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

Asher edged back from the brink and scrambled, stooping, to where the others waited. ‘The caves are down there, all right,’ he said as he collected wires and gelignite from young Mr Seki. ‘By the look of the ceiling here –’ he raised his lantern toward the swagged-down rock, the age-grayed rotting props – ‘an explosion will bring the whole gallery down, so I want the lot of you to go back up the tunnel.’

The detonator wires, extended across the gallery to the narrowing of the way to the caves, were some twenty feet short of the tunnel mouth. Asher wired the gelignite as close to the cave entry as he could, aware that only a few slabs remained to him in case they found some unexpected shaft or fissure that had been shown on neither map. ‘Get back,’ he said as he wired the lines to the box. ‘I mean it.’

Mizukami put a gently-urging hand on Karlebach’s arm, but the old man shrugged free. He was staring as if hypnotized at another X cut into the rock of the gallery wall. ‘Is he down here?’ he whispered in Czech, coming to kneel at Asher’s side. His eyes almost blazed in the lantern-light. ‘Not this priest . . . You know of whom I speak.’

‘I don’t know.’ Asher met his gaze calmly. ‘Chiang spoke of finding such marks—’

‘Could they have been made by the Others? Or by the vampires of Peking, to lead us into a trap?’

Love and respect notwithstanding, Asher had to force himself not to snap, Don’t be such an ass! ‘He said they’d been down here for years.’

‘And can he be trusted?’ Karlebach’s voice trembled with the violence of his emotions. ‘Jamie, we hunt a thing which has no soul. A thing infinitely cunning, which can twist the minds and perceptions of even the good and the strong!’

From his pocket, Asher dug wads of cotton, handed two to the old scholar: ‘Put those in your ears. Give these –’ he unwrapped another from its blue paper – ‘to Mizukami and his men, and don’t forget to cover your mouth and nose as well.’ He suited the action to the word, pulling up his own handkerchief, tied bandanna-wise over the lower part of his face like a Wild West badman. ‘Now get back. God knows how much of this ceiling is going to come down.’

Simon , he thought, and cast a glance over his shoulder at the soldiers’ retreating lantern, forgive me . . .

He shoved down the plunger, sprang to his feet, and ran for the tunnel as if the Devil of his father’s worst sermons bit at his heels. He was still a yard short of it when the earth jerked underfoot, the world echoed with the trapped cataclysm of detonation, and a tidal wave of burning dust overtook and overwhelmed him, nearly throwing him to the ground. He staggered and stumbled on, mind focused on the tunnel and the distant lanterns as the lights vanished utterly in the murk. Behind him he heard rock falling – tons of it – as the gallery ceiling gave way . . .

He must have aimed dead on at the tunnel, for a sickly yellow blur showed almost in front of him. Men unrecognizable with dust – save for Mizukami’s glasses and sword, Karlebach’s height and beard – caught his arms. Ears ringing, Asher felt more than heard when silence fell behind them. He took the lantern, returned along the tunnel through what felt like a palpable wall of suspended dust, to find the inner end of the gallery roof had all come down, a bare yard in front of the detonator box. Dizzy with the shock of the explosion, his cracked ribs making him feel as if he’d been bayoneted, Asher nevertheless dragged the wires free of the rubble, wound them around his arm.

When he reached the soldiers again he had to put his watch almost up against the lantern to see the time.

Three forty. We’ll still be on this side of the mountain when Sergeant Tamayo detonates the chlorine cylinders and seals the mine .

Karlebach’s face was haggard in the grimy light of the lantern, and in his heart Asher heard him murmur, Like a son to me . . .

It was a blessing to smell air, even the cold, dusty air of the Western Hills. The daylight that Asher could glimpse beyond the tunnel mouth had the golden quality of the first approach of evening. Though his hearing was returning, Asher’s head still ached, and Seki – whose nose had bled from the shock – looked like some gore-daubed creature of a horror tale.

Ysidro, in his sleep, would hear this next explosion – the one that would bring down the ceiling of the old rear entrance of the mine – and would know: only one left .

Don’t think about it . In Asher’s years with the Department, he had learned how not to think about things like that.

It was, in part, why he had left the Department.

The pain in his ribs when he coughed, the ache in every muscle and bone, was such that it was difficult to think about much of anything.

Then up ahead of him, beyond that round of daylight, he saw movement.

Men running toward the tunnel.

Too many men. Rifles in their hands.

Asher yelled, ‘Back!’ as the first bullets ripped into the cave.

Karlebach didn’t have a soldier’s reflexes. The private Nishiharu grabbed his arm, thrust him back down the tunnel. There was a cross-cut about thirty feet back – in its shelter Asher slid into the straps of his flame-thrower again, stepped out and sprayed the tunnel with fire. The five men just entering sprang clear; he saw they wore ch’i-p’aos and ku , with Western boots. Those behind them, the gray uniforms of the Chinese Army. A man in a Western suit – Asher recognized the American double-breasted jacket – stepped forward, hands raised.

‘Asher!’

T’uan , he thought. Chen Chi T’uan. Madame Tso’s nephew .

Even in the shadows he could see the bruises on the young man’s face, the swelling where the deformation was beginning.

‘Throw down your weapon, come out!’ T’uan shouted. ‘We got your wife!’

You’re lying . The breath seemed to choke in his lungs.

He edged himself to the corner of the cross-cut tunnel, shouted, ‘What do you want?’ He repeated the words in Chinese, though T’uan had called out in English.

‘We want you.’ T’uan’s English was clear, if simple. ‘We want no trouble. Not kill you, not kill friends, not kill nobody. Promise. Swear on Holy Bible.’

And you want me to step out of cover and walk towards a dozen men with rifles on the strength of ‘Promise’? You need to run for the government, friend .

‘We got your wife, Asher,’ T’uan repeated. ‘Got her all safe. You come out, Japanese come out, nobody hurt. This mine our property. We—’

Shots cracked beyond T’uan. One of the bully boys in the mine entrance flung up his arms, pitched forward on his face. The Chinese soldiers sprang aside as a bullet kicked dirt among them. Then, as one, they and the bully boys ran forward into the shelter of the tunnel mouth—

Straight under the gelignite wired into the props beneath the roof.

Ogata. The thought came to Asher in the split instant before the explosion. Driving them forward under the blast zone . . .

He flinched back behind the shelter of the corner, clapped his hands over his ears. Thunder, blackness, dust in his lungs and the ground lurching underfoot. If the Chinese soldiers – or T’uan’s enforcers – screamed, the sound didn’t penetrate the booming horror of the explosion directly over their heads. Asher pressed his face to the wall and buried his nose and mouth in the crook of his arm.

Then stillness, terrible and deep. Blackness like the abyss of Hell. Through the ringing in his ears he heard one of the Japanese soldiers gasp a question and thought he heard someone say, Ogata . . .