Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

The result was shocking. The creature shrieked, staggered, tore at itself with huge, clawed hands. The bleeding wounds sizzled and blistered. The others backed a step, and in that instant the old man turned and fired the second barrel at one of the two that blocked the way to the left-hand tunnel. The thing collapsed to the floor, screaming and raking its own flesh around the smoking wounds. Mizukami stripped out of his spent flame-thrower and strode in on the attacking group, sword flashing, and in that same moment the tallest of the yao-kuei – even slumped it must have been nearly six feet – lunged at Karlebach, caught the barrels of his shotgun as if he would wrench the weapon from his hand—

And stopped, staring at him in the lantern-light.

And for an instant, Karlebach paused in his frantic scramble to reload, stared back.

There was nothing human left of the doglike face, but as Asher brought up his pistol and fired point-blank into the thing’s head, his mind noted automatically that the few strands that remained of its verminous hair, as dark in the fitful glare as that of the others, were curly rather than straight and caught a mahogany-red gleam.

Asher’s shot knocked the yao-kuei sprawling. He grabbed Karlebach by the shoulder of his coat, thrust him ahead of him into the left-hand tunnel. Nishiharu laid down a burst of fire to cover the other two, and Asher plunged forward, praying his recollection of what came after the room with the shaft was correct. An inclined corridor, the Hsi Fang-te map had noted. Ceiling bagged down with the weight of the mountain above and floor littered with broken props, another incline . . .

A gallery, this one high-ceilinged, with glimpses of scaffolding on the nearer wall. Asher pulled a hunk of it free of its rotting ties, fumbled for his map, swung around in shocked terror at the sudden flash of eyes a foot from his shoulder—

A white hand, cold as the grip of a corpse, blocked him from bringing his revolver to bear. Ysidro said, ‘This way.’

‘We blew up that tunnel this morning,’ Asher gasped.

‘You Protestant imbeciles!’

Karlebach shouted a curse, swung toward him with his shotgun—

And Ysidro was gone.

‘They are down here too!’ The Professor staggered, passed a hand over his eyes. ‘I knew it! I knew it was a trap! I felt their presence—’ Then, like the stroke of a monster drum, the ground underfoot jarred. The distant explosion was strong enough to send rocks slithering from the slag piles at one end of the gallery, and to make all the scaffolding rattle and sway. Dust rained from the ceiling. Then far off, and stronger, a second blast.

‘That’s it,’ said Asher. ‘They set off the gas – and sealed the mine.’

In the silence there seemed nothing more to say. Lydia , he thought. Miranda . . .

Far on the other end of the gallery, a light flickered. A shaky old voice called out, ‘ Na shih shei? ’ Who’s there?

And Asher shouted back, scarcely believing his ears, ‘Chiang?’

The others simply stared as the distant blur of white resolved itself into the old man, hurrying toward them, surprisingly agile on the steep and slippery floor. In one hand he held his staff, a cheap tin lantern in the other, its glimmer turning his long white hair into trailing wisps of smoke. ‘I thank the Yama-King and all the Magistrates of Hell for guiding me in this terrible place,’ he said as he drew closer. ‘The entrances to the mine have all been sealed up—’

‘How you get in?’

‘Ah, but there is a secret way, which lies in the crypt of the Temple of the Concealed Buddha. I studied there after the death of my wife. It was built during the Sung Dynasty, when because of the growing strength of the Heaven and Earth Sect the Emperor decreed . . .’ The old man looked from face to face of the fugitives. ‘Those creatures that I saw—’

‘Lead us,’ commanded Asher. ‘Poison gas, soon, quickly, now—’

Mizukami had gone to the edge of the lamplight, listening into the darkness; Karlebach and the two soldiers, without a word of Chinese among them, still stared at the white-haired priest as if he’d descended from the ceiling in a chariot of fire.

‘Poison gas?’ Chiang’s white brows drew together indignantly. ‘What a frightful thing! Mo Tzu, in the Spring and Autumn Period, wrote of the use of mustard to make toxic smokes to be blown at enemies, but it is a shameful use of man’s wisdom and energies to—’

‘Shameful waste our wisdom and energies,’ said Asher tactfully, ‘for us die with yao-kuei . . . ’

‘Oh, quite right, quite right!’ The old priest nodded and led the way back along the gallery in the direction from which he had come. ‘An excellent point. Yes, the yao-kuei . . . But surely the yao-kuei have their own path, their own place, in this world. The Buddha taught that even noxious insects have their own Buddha-nature.’

‘Here they come,’ Mizukami said.

Eyes glittered behind them in the darkness. Mizukami motioned Private Seki toward Karlebach, spoke an order; the young man handed his lantern to Asher, put his shoulder beneath the old Professor’s arm. The floor ahead of them swarmed suddenly with rats, scurrying and dropping from the scaffolding; Mizukami snapped another order, and Nishiharu fired the flame-thrower.

‘Fascinating,’ murmured Chiang. ‘In the Spring and Autumn Period, Sun Tzu wrote of such devices—’

Asher shoved him without ceremony toward the darkness: ‘Run!’

They ran. The flame-thrower sputtered out, and Nishiharu slithered from its straps as he ran, then swung around to fire his rifle into the loping shadows of the yao-kuei . Asher smelled above their stink the distant reek of chlorine, growing stronger as it flowed into the mine. As he had observed on the shores of the Peking Sea, the yao-kuei moved with the swift precision of a school of fish, dispersing themselves across the gallery. Some scrambled up on the rotting scaffolding, moved along it with terrifying agility, spreading out to keep from being shot into in a mob. To aim, the fugitives would have to stop, and to stop was to die.

‘This way!’ Chiang waved his staff encouragingly. The gallery ended in a steep tunnel, its walls marked with enormous, fresh chalk Xs – obviously Chiang’s way of keeping from getting lost. Two yao-kuei dropped from the scaffolding in front of the entry to the tunnel, bared their outsize teeth. Asher didn’t see how, but like an eye-blink, Ysidro was behind the creatures in the tunnel mouth: thin and rather tattered, skeletal in the lantern-light. He caught one of the yao-kuei with both hands around its head and twisted its neck. Asher heard the bones snap, but when Ysidro kicked the thing aside it got up again, staggered blindly, arms thrashing, still looking for prey. The second yao-kuei fell upon Ysidro, mouth stretched to bite, and Mizukami took off both its hands with one stroke of his sword, and then, as Ysidro dodged nimbly away, its head with the next stroke.

More of the creatures dropped from the scaffold, the main group – twenty at least – closing in from the gallery floor. Karlebach fired into the group as they approached, and a yao-kuei grabbed him from behind. Its claws tore through his thick coat, and it seized him by his white hair. The next second the thing was knocked sprawling by the tallest of the yao-kuei – blood clotting from the gaping entry-wound Asher’s pistol had left in its skull – who flung the smaller creature aside, caught up the rifle Seki had dropped during the fray, and waded into the advancing others, swinging the weapon like a club.

The other yao-kuei fell back before it. It turned, for one second, and looked back at Asher, at Karlebach, at the small group huddled in the tunnel mouth in the lamplight.