Magistrates of Hell

Asher – the only man of the party who’d had a hideout knife in his boot – had, at the sight of a rare stand of bamboo in the gorge below them, scrambled down to gather makeshift weapons. It had been nearly dark even then. He’d cut five lengths of six feet apiece and carried them up to the road again to sharpen. The process had taken roughly half an hour, but he knew that even an extra half-hour wouldn’t get them to Men T’ou Kuo or anywhere near it. It had been almost full dark when he’d finished, the moon not yet risen.

Now they stood straining their ears, each wondering if that actually had been movement they’d heard in the brush-choked gorge far below the track, or only some trick of the icy wind.

‘How far is it until the trail turns off over the ridge, Jamie?’ Karlebach murmured. ‘We’ll be farther from the stream then.’

‘Do they stay close to water?’ he returned. ‘Or can they come on to drier ground if they want?’

‘That I don’t know. I’ve only seen them on a few occasions, you understand. Matthias—’ His voice hesitated over the name of his latest protege, the young man whose departure for some other cause had, Asher guessed, finally cut the old man loose from his accustomed ways.

‘Phew! God!’ Barclay gagged as the wind shifted, and for a moment the stenchy reek – like rotting flesh rolled in filthy garments – flickered in the air. ‘Where the bloody ’ell ’ave them bandits been hidin’?’

‘In the mine, you dumb berk,’ retorted Willard. ‘Didn’t you smell ’em back there?’

Barclay took a few steps to the edge of the gorge, raised his voice to a shout. ‘Hey! Chink-chink! We got nuthin’, savvy? Mei ch’ien! Flat broke, y’hear . . . How’d you say “we ain’t got a pot to piss in” in Chinese, Professor?’ Starlight made smoke of his breath; the wind whipped it away.

So much, reflected Asher, for discretion about letting people know he spoke Chinese . . .

‘Shut yer ’ole,’ whispered Gibbs. ‘See ’em there, against the sky?’

‘There’s boulders by the trail,’ said Asher quietly, ‘about a hundred yards back.’ He had spent the past hour’s walking identifying every scrap of cover or defensive terrain they’d passed. ‘If we can cover our backs—’

‘Too late.’ Willard pointed. It was nearly impossible to see in the starlight, but behind them on the trail Asher thought he glimpsed the reflective glitter of eyes. ‘What the hell—?’

‘Keep in the open!’ said Asher, and the five men set themselves back-to-back, spears pointing outward, as all the underbrush on the slope down to the stream crashed in the darkness with the sudden onslaught.

‘How the hell many of ’em—?’ Gibbs began, and then the scrambling forms sprang up on to the trail.

Asher struck with his bamboo, felt it sink into something that screamed, a hoarse awful noise, like an injured camel. The stink was nauseating. He heard Willard swear. Asher shouted into the crowding darkness, ‘Na shih shei? Ni yao she mo?’ but doubted he’d get an answer; he felt the thing he’d impaled still thrashing on the end of the spear, fighting to get at him. It lurched closer, and he felt its clawed nails flick his face.

Other screams. Barclay yelled, ‘What the—?’ and Asher heard the crunch of something – a rock? – impacting with flesh.

The darkness all around them seemed filled with shoving shapes – Christ Jesus, how many of them are there? Then a rifle fired from somewhere down the trail, and the thing on the end of his spear thrust at him again, its weight jerking at his grip, as if it cared nothing for the shot . . .

He saw its face then, and yes, it was yao-kuei, it could be nothing else: a dim impression in darkness of deformed features, a fanged mouth snapping at him, eyes gleaming.

Another shot. Then running feet and the screams of the Others – the yao-kuei – and a flash in the starlight of what looked, impossibly, like the blade of a sword. And an instant later on the round lenses of spectacles.

A man shouted, the bellowing bark of a Japanese war-cry, and yes, thought Asher, that was a sword . . .

The yao-kuei jerked, and where its face had been – pale and hairless and almost canine in its deformation – there was nothing. He smelled the blood that fountained from the severed neck. The pale glimmer of a man’s white coat or jacket in the darkness, splattered with gore; another flash of sword-steel and spectacle-lenses. Colonel Count Mizukami. He’s the one who followed us.

It’s too dark to shoot without danger of hitting one of us.

He wrenched the bamboo free, drove it hard at another one of those dark, slumped forms, pinning it for the Japanese to slash. He’d seen men torn apart in South Africa by shellfire, and had once had occasion to dismember the corpse of a man he’d killed with an ax in order to dispose of it discreetly – in the service of the Department, which was supposed to make it all right, though it had given him frightful dreams for years. But there was something horrifyingly fascinating about the archaic art of slaughter with cold steel.

He heard the yao-kuei shrieking and the crash of foliage below. So they at least have some sense of self-preservation . . .

‘’Ere, you watch where you’re swingin’ that chopper!’ gasped Gibbs’s voice.

Barclay only said, ‘Gor blimey, it’s the fucken mikado!’

Asher stepped forward, tripped over something that rolled slightly under this foot, and Karlebach gasped. ‘Are you all right, Jamie?’ He grasped his arm with his twisted hand. ‘You are not injured—?’

‘I’m fine. Is everyone all right? Is anyone hurt?’

‘What the hell were they?’ demanded Willard, and two pale forms emerged from the darkness and bowed.

‘Ashu Sensei—’

Asher bowed in return, deeply. ‘Mizukami-san? Are you well? Ten thousand thanks—’

‘What were those things?’ demanded the deep voice that he well recalled from his earlier days in the Shantung Peninsula. Behind the bespectacled little Japanese, his bodyguard – a broad-shouldered young man in his twenties – held a hand pressed to his side, his light-colored military jacket darkening with blood.

‘We will speak as we walk, if this suits you, Mizukami-san? They will likely return. Is your man able to walk?’

Mizukami asked something in Japanese; the bodyguard straightened his shoulders and replied. Almost certainly, reflected Asher, he said that it was only a scratch . . .

‘Colonel the Count Mizukami, may I present the Rebbe Dr Solomon Karlebach of Prague?’

More bows, but instants later they were moving off, the darkness in the gorge so intense that Asher was barely able to make out the dark notch in the land to the right where the trail veered and began to climb the ridge. The wind shifted, blowing colder from the north, and Asher smelled on it the unmistakable dry whisper of a coming dust-storm . . . Please, he thought wearily, not until we get back to town . . .

Willard swore. ‘Just what we bloody need.’

Bringing up the rear of the party, Asher turned and looked back as the first light of the moon appeared over the hills. It was nearly full and showed clearly the slumped shapes of their erstwhile attackers clustered around the hacked pieces of the yao-kuei that Mizukami and his bodyguard had killed.

At that distance he couldn’t be sure, but he thought that an arm lay on the pathway a few yards from the main scene of the carnage. The arm was moving, pulling itself along by its fingers, as if in dogged pursuit.

Beside him he heard a hiss of indrawn breath, and Count Mizukami whispered again, ‘What are they, Ashu Sensei? And why are you not surprised to find them here?’

One of the Others scrambled up from the shadows below the trail, caught up the arm, and trotted back towards its companions, tearing chunks from the flesh with its teeth, like an American devouring a turkey leg.

EIGHT

‘And what did you tell him?’ asked Lydia the next morning, when Asher related the events of the previous day in more detail than he’d had the energy for, in the small hours after half-carrying Karlebach up to the suite.

‘Nothing, at the time.’ Asher poured coffee rather gingerly from the bright polychrome pot that Ellen had set before them accompanied by scones (fresh), buttered eggs (excellent), extremely Scottish marmalade (tinned), and pungent commentary on heathen countries where the weather was enough to send a good Christian running for home. Asher got the impression that in the maid’s opinion the dust storm currently wailing over the tiled roofs of