Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

He conducted her into the private parlor with the blue curtains and closed the door.

Grant Hobart rose from beside the fire. ‘Mrs Asher—’

Lydia turned sharply on Woodreave; his face was filled with anguish and guilt. ‘Please, Mrs Asher, please forgive me! Mr Hobart needs very much to speak to you. He said you wouldn’t answer his letters—’

‘I wouldn’t answer his letters,’ responded Lydia, furious now, ‘because I do not want to speak with him. The man who lied about my husband? Who drove him into the situation which resulted in his death, rather than have him reveal what he’d learned about the blood on his own hands?’

‘Blood—?’ Woodreave threw a pleading glance toward Hobart, who crossed the little parlor in two steps to Lydia’s side. He looked frightful, Lydia thought, trying not to peer nearsightedly at him – haggard and feverish: anxiety over Richard? When he knows perfectly well why Holly Eddington was murdered . . .

‘Ask him,’ said Lydia coldly. ‘Or was part of the money he offered you on the condition that you didn’t ask him anything?’

She was so angry that it took her an instant to identify the smell that clung to Hobart’s clothing. A breath of foulness, of fishy decay buried under nauseating French cologne . . . and something else, something chemical . . . Chloroform —

She turned to dive for the parlor door, but it was too late. Hobart grabbed her arm in a grip of terrifying strength and clapped a soaked rag to her nose and mouth. Lydia held her breath, kicked backwards at his shin—

And in the same instant, a Chinese man – respectably dressed in Western fashion – stepped from behind the curtains that half-concealed the alcove of the door, put one hand over Woodreave’s mouth and with the other drove a foot-long steel stiletto at an angle up through the larynx and into – Lydia guessed – the medulla oblongata and the cerebellum behind it. Which was, she reflected with her last conscious thought before blacking out, truly excellent aim given the circumstances.

Asher smelled the yao-kuei in the darkness, some fifteen minutes before he and his companions were cornered. By the feeble glimmer of two of their lanterns it took all his concentration to keep count of turnings, and of the few landmarks that had been noted on the map: did stone pit (or dump ) really mean a disused room filled in with broken ‘gob’, as it was called in Wales, or was that something else that would be further along? Did a hogback rise of the floor mean they’d come down the wrong tunnel, or had the floor heaved up in the twenty years or more since the map was made? Despite the chill in the mine he was sweating, and he wondered how close they were to the detonation site of the chlorine and how fast the gas would spread once the canisters shattered.

Wondered where the sun was in the sky.

Ahead of him, Private Seki whispered, ‘ Nani-ka nioi desu ka? ’ and an instant later Asher smelled it, too. Fishy rottenness, the human stink of unclean flesh . . .

Forty of them , Ysidro had said.

He checked the map. ‘Back this way. There’s a shaft down to a gallery below this one, then a shaft up again—’ If we’re in the right tunnel .

There was a shaft – a few yards down a cross-cut that wasn’t as the map had described it – and a ladder with rotten rungs that cracked and whispered under the weight of the men, forty feet down into utter darkness. A gallery, the entire ceiling of which had sagged to within five feet of its floor, ankle deep in water in places, a slippery, hideous scramble.

Then, like the warning rush of wind that presages the storm, the skitter of claws on stone, the stink of rats.

Beyond the radius of the light Asher saw movement and a river of glittering eyes. He quickly unshipped the nozzle of his flame-thrower and lit the pilot ( six matches left . . .), but when he turned the flame on the creatures, the first wave of them was already barely two yards from his boots. The rats shrieked, those behind pushing the flaming leaders ahead, and the whole swarm of them tried to fan out in a crescent around the men. Mizukami and Nishiharu fired up their lights and swept the moving wings of the army, the glare of the blaze blinding after hours of darkness.

And God, I hope this swarm is only a single wave . . .

It was. The rodents scattered, squealing, the charred and dying casualties a twitching carpet of stink and embers underfoot. They gave squishily as Asher strode forward, praying that there would indeed be the up-shaft that was supposedly at the end of the gallery and that the ladder there would still be able to bear weight. Tiny feet splished in water behind them in the darkness, scratched on the stones.

‘There!’ Karlebach panted.

As the failing lantern-light touched the ascending shaft, a rat fell down it. Then two more.

Bollocks .

‘Let me go up first.’ Asher shifted the weight of the flame-thrower on his back. Too light . How much fuel remained?

He knew what would be at the top.

Rats lined the uppermost rung of the creaky ladder, rimmed the pit head, eyes a tiny wall of live embers in the dark. Asher fired a burst of flame up at them, climbed a yard – lantern banging awkwardly at his thigh where it hung from his belt – then braced himself and fired again, sweeping the top of the shaft. He sprang up the last few feet and fired once more as soon as he got his elbows over the edge on to solid ground, the yellow burst of flame racing for yards along the floor of the tunnel. Scrambled up and shouted, ‘Come on! Now!’

Swept again, to keep the carpet of vermin at bay. The flame gave out with a sputter moments later; Mizukami swept the next wave of rodents while Asher shed the now-useless tank, reached down to haul Karlebach up the last few feet. The old man was gasping, struggling to hook his wrists over the rungs; in the dark behind him Asher made out Private Seki, pushing and guiding him from below.

‘There’s a tunnel leading into and out of this room,’ panted Asher as he pulled Karlebach, then Seki up out of the shaft. ‘We want the one that corners to the left.’ The room was invisible beyond the glare of the flame-thrower. When the rats retreated, Asher led the way straight to the wall, which he knew would be close – on the map the room wasn’t big. Slag and ‘gob’ heaped all around its walls – this part of the mine had been long abandoned as a dumping ground. The piled debris swarmed with rats. They followed the wall, but the tunnel they came to cornered right, and as Asher’s lantern failed, and Nishiharu kindled his own to replace it, the yellow flare of the match caught more eyes in the darkness.

Not the eyes of rats.

Asher cursed, led the way along the wall toward where he knew now the left-hand tunnel must be; behind him he heard Mizukami’s quiet-voiced directions to his men. Asher guessed they had only a dozen rounds apiece, perfectly adequate to deal with bandits . . .

Four yao-kuei emerged from the left-hand tunnel when Asher was within two yards of it.

They were the first Asher had seen by anything brighter than moonlight, slumped shapes that moved like animals. Yet they came with deadly swiftness, fanged mouths gaping. He fired his pistol almost point-blank at the nearest one, and behind him one of the soldiers got off a shot with his rifle. One of the yao-kuei staggered to its feet again, the other – half its head blown away – crawled toward them until Mizukami hit it with the last stream from his flame-thrower. More yao-kuei emerged from the right-hand tunnel at the other side of the room, loped toward them, eyes flashing in the darkness, and very deliberately Rebbe Karlebach brought up his shotgun and emptied one of the barrels into the nearest creature at a distance of ten feet.