Magistrates of Hell

as well. Huang, too, seemed interested in finding all its various entrances.’

‘Liao says, no one knows all the entrances to the mine.’ Count Mizukami drew rein where the trail crested over the little ridge and looked across the marshy expanse of the old mine-camp toward the great irregular oval of the cave mouth. Even in the daylight it had the look of a gate into hell. Slag heaps, broken bins, and the few surviving fragments of sheds added to the dismal air of the place, and the Chinese ponies – surer-footed than the taller Western horses, and shaggy as teddy bears in their winter coats – tossed their heads at the smells that whispered from the mine.

Chan, Liao’s big yellow dog, pressed close to his master’s legs, the hair along his spine darkened with the lift of his hackles. A growl rumbled in his throat. Behind them, Lydia heard the three Japanese soldiers murmur to one another in their own tongue. The bodyguard Mizukami had brought out with them in the motor car from Peking that morning, a young man named Ogata, sat his mount little apart, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

The little guide, pointing, said something else to Mizukami, who added, ‘Huang Da-feng had a map also, but two entrances that Liao knows about weren’t on it.’

With the air of a man half-hypnotized, Karlebach slipped from his saddle, unshipped his shotgun from his back, and moved down the slope. Lydia sprang down and hurried after him, and when she touched his arm he almost started at the contact.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

He laid his other hand – his useless hand, bent completely in on itself with arthritis – over hers. ‘Little bird,’ he murmured, ‘it was all my doing. They were like sons to me. Matthias, and Jamie.’

‘What else could you have done?’

He only shook his head.

Leaving Ogata and Liao with the horses, Mizukami and his men descended the slope behind them, the three soldiers scouting through the marsh on both sides of the path, their rifles ready. The pools had frozen hard in last night’s bitter cold; the touch of the noon sun hadn’t melted them. Lydia’s trailing black skirt caught on what had been a half-submerged branch, and she muttered an imprecation against Mrs Pilley and Ellen, who had begged her with tears to ‘show respect’ and ‘consider appearances’ by wearing this ridiculous costume.

At least with her face swathed in veils it was possible for her to wear her glasses without it being obvious. She had a feeling, as they climbed the packed-earth ramp up to the cave mouth, that she was going to need to see as clearly she could.

At the top of the ramp the soldiers lit the lanterns they carried. The floor of the outer cave – some sixty feet by thirty – was sheeted across with ice, and away from the opening the cold blue twilight deepened to the point that Lydia, exasperated, pushed up her veils so that she could see the openings of the two tunnels that had been cut into the mountain. I don’t CARE if I look like a goggle-eyed golliwog (that was what her cousins had called her): it was simply impossible to see details through all that mourning. Pieces of broken carts, looted of their iron undercarriages and wheels, lay along the sides of the cavern.

‘How much explosive will we need –’ Lydia took her notebook from her jacket pocket – ‘to close these tunnels? Jamie always says – said –’ she corrected herself quickly – ‘that gelignite works best, if it can be transported safely.’ She turned to scan the great archway behind them, then looked at both tunnels and the shadowy well of subsidence to her right and did some swift mental arithmetic. ‘I think what we really need here is some kind of poison gas – chlorine or phosgene – that’s heavier than air and will sink.’

‘Chlorine would be easiest to obtain.’ A glint of something like amusement flickered behind Mizukami’s thick spectacles. ‘The liquid is produced in Shanghai and Hong Kong both, for purposes of disinfection. It will volatilize with air.’

‘If containers of it could be placed deep in the mine – as close as possible to where the creatures sleep – and then detonated with a small charge to blow them up, just before the mine entrances are sealed—’ She looked over at Karlebach, who was regarding her with deep compassion and something like awe, as if he would have said how brave and strong she was being . . .

As if he saw his own grim obsession reflected in her triumph over her supposed grief.

Oh dear, all that didn’t sound awfully grief-stricken . . .

But how DOES one plan to blow up a mine filled with monstrosities in a grief-stricken manner . . .?

Beside her, Mizukami was giving orders to the three soldiers, two of whom moved off down the mine tunnels, the light of their lanterns dwindling in the darkness.

‘We’ll need to come up with some good reason for ordering all that chlorine,’ added Lydia, a little worriedly. ‘Not to speak of getting it up here. It would be ghastly to have either Yuan’s troops or the Kuo Min-tang confiscate it—’

‘I trust that you, Madame, will devise a reason sufficiently pressing to justify a strong guard.’ Again Mizukami’s eyes twinkled in a hidden smile. ‘Leave the issue of its transportation to me. What troubles me most is President Yuan’s inquiries.’

‘Yes . . . Obviously somebody knows something. Would President Yuan go to the trouble of scouting the mine and securing the remains of the yao-kuei if he didn’t think he could find some way to use them?’

‘Use them,’ said Mizukami grimly, ‘or to rent them out to his friends. And if he can control them, or thinks he can . . . or thinks he will be able to do so in the near future . . . I fear he is the kind of man who will then seek a way to make them multiply. Yabe—’ He signed to the third soldier – barely a boy – to bring the lantern, then turned toward Karlebach, who had moved a few steps off, staring into the abyss of the nearest tunnel. ‘Is there some way, Sensei, that these things can, or might be, controlled?’

Karlebach’s dark eyes glinted suspiciously behind the small oval chips of his spectacles. She went quickly to his side, lowered her voice to a whisper: ‘Did your friend Matthias learn anything of this? Or did the vampires of Prague speak of it—?’

‘Anything a vampire says is a lie. Or a half-truth aimed to some ulterior purpose, to buy your trust for some still greater lie to come.’

‘What did they say?’

Karlebach shook his head. ‘Upon my honor, Madame, I know of no way that the living – those of us who are still whole men, with souls and minds – can have any influence upon these . . . these things. And if it were possible . . .’

The shriek that cut through the dark of the tunnel was picked up by echoes, magnified: horror, agony, shock. Lydia strode toward the tunnel mouth, and Karlebach caught her back and thrust her behind him. As Mizukami rushed past her toward the black square of darkness, the dog Chan set up a wild salvo of barking.

The next second the soldier-scout blundered into the light of Private Yabe’s lantern from the tunnel’s depth, falling into the walls as he clawed wildly at the rats that covered him: face, body, legs. Lydia sprang back – she had hated rats from childhood – then looked down as something brushed her ankle, gasped, and fled in earnest to the entrance of the cave.

Rats streamed out of the tunnel around her feet. Mizukami whipped his scabbarded sword from his belt and, keeping the blade covered, strode in and used the scabbard as a club to knock the rats from the soldier’s face and body. The other men stomped, kicked, crushed at the rodents underfoot – the second soldier rushed past Lydia from the other tunnel and joined in the horrifying process. Lydia saw the subsidence at the east end of the cave also disgorging a river of rats, shouted, ‘Watch out!’

Mizukami and Private Yabe grabbed the bleeding soldier by the arms an instant before he would have fallen and dragged him at a run toward the mouth of the cave, Karlebach and the other soldier at their heels. The guide Liao dashed up to Lydia’s side, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her back down the earthen ramp: ‘Hsiao hsing!’ he shouted.

The slag heaps, the naked bushes, the blackened reeds of the frozen swamp all threshed with scurrying life. But when the dog Chan charged barking into their midst, the rats scattered, as if, once in the daylight of the gorge, the urge to swarming attack was less commanding. They merely rushed agitatedly here and there, torn between their instincts and whatever it was that demanded of them that they kill.

Sick with shock, Lydia scrambled back up to the ponies, dug in her saddlebags for bandages and carbolic. She knelt beside the wounded soldier as his comrades lowered him to the ground. The stiff collar of his uniform had protected his throat, but rat bites covered his face, one eye and one side of his lips a chewed ruin. She wiped and