Magistrates of Hell

All vampires lie was not a discussion he wanted to engage in just now.

Instead he brought out the map he and the Legation clerk P’ei had pieced together from the various mining company diagrams, turned it so that it was oriented in the same direction as Chiang’s. ‘The tunnels match,’ he said. ‘Look here – this is just where that gallery should be. There are cave temples in these hills, and Lydia tells me the ruins of one lie not far from that rear entrance. My guess is that Chiang served in one of them in times past and did a little exploring on his days off.’

If Taoist monks have days off, reflected Asher as he crawled into his own blankets on the kang, his cracked ribs aching under the plaster dressing that the Japanese Legation doctor had provided. Old Chiang had been thoroughly disconcerted at the thought of riding the Iron Dragon, as he had called the railway, and that morning had sent the hulking younger priest of the Temple to the station with a message in his stead. The speed of the train, the message had said, would so disrupt the geomantic alignments of his chi energy that it would be impossible for the earth to absorb the effects.

Thus, he said, he would walk to the mine. He hoped this would not inconvenience anyone.

Meaning we will have no one after all, reflected Asher, who can listen through the darkness of the earth. And in any case, Ysidro would be asleep.

Lying in the darkness and listening to the sob of the wind in the vent holes of the kang, Asher thought about the vampire, trapped in Father Orsino’s silver-barred refuge. The vampire whom eighteen months ago he could have killed with swift mercy in St Petersburg. Ysidro might even have been grateful.

If the yao-kuei waked earlier in the evening than a vampire, and went to sleep later, then Father Orsino’s refuge would indeed be a slightly larger version of a coffin, a prison inescapable. And soon it would be flooded with one of the most corrosive gasses known to man. With the yao- kuei dead, and the mine sealed, death would not even be an option for Ysidro – neither by being devoured, nor by the light of the sun. Only darkness eternal, and eternal burning pain.

Dante himself couldn’t have come up with a more suitable fate. Asher closed his eyes, not wanting to think of it.

A horse snuffled in the courtyard. Liquid spots of reflected ember-light moved on the wall.

Somewhere a Just God is laughing, at one who decided he was willing to kill in order to live forever.

Had Ysidro not stayed at Lydia’s side, one night in St Petersburg when the local vampire nest had attacked the house where she was staying, she would not be alive now. He would not have a daughter today.

Lydia would not, Asher knew, imitate those heroines of novels and go dashing off into the underground darkness to seek the vampire . . .

Still, he was glad she had not come.

Forty, he made himself think, taking refuge in planning and facts. Not a great number. The first big gallery on the lowest level of the new part of the mine. A hundred and seventy feet down – too far to transport the gas cylinders, or run the detonator wires, but when the cylinders are blown up, the gas will sink. This late in the year, even riding horses, there would barely be enough daylight hours to seal all its exits, to descend through the rear entrance to the opening between the mine and the cave system below, and to blow that up as well.

Twenty years in the Department had taught him precisely how many things could go wrong when one was working against a time limit.

In his mind he saw them as he sank into uneasy sleep: the Others, lying in the blackness like the trout that dozed beneath the shadows of the banks of the Stour when he was a boy. But open-eyed in the watery dark. Listening for their prey.

Asher and his party left the village as soon as it was light, to set charges in the cave that formed the mine’s main entrance. A dozen villagers accompanied them, under the command of Dr Bauer. The moment Asher and the Japanese set foot in the cave, rats poured forth from both tunnels and up from the subsidence, as if some spigot deep in the mountain had been turned, and as Asher had suspected, the German flammenwerfer worked against them perfectly well. It was a hellish weapon to use even on rats – their squealing as the burning oil doused them was a sound he thought he would never get out of his head – and the thought that the flame-throwers had been designed for use against men in the war that everyone knew was coming turned his stomach. And it wasn’t the rats’ fault or intention, he knew, to attack these invaders, to die in agony . . .

But he was damn glad the compressed nitrogen threw the flames fifty feet down the tunnels. Even in flames, the rodents kept on coming until their bodies were consumed. The stink of charred flesh, burned oil, and scorched hair was horrific as they descended – through drifting smoke that almost obscured the light of their lanterns – to a gallery where, according to both maps and Ysidro’s instructions, down-shafts led directly to the deep-sunk room where the yao-kuei slept.

‘Have your porters stack the cylinders here,’ Asher instructed the German missionary quietly. ‘I’ll wire a charge at the bottom of the pile but won’t connect it to the detonator-box until all your men are out of the mine. It’ll be perfectly safe. When the rest of the mine is sealed, we’ll fire the charge to release the chlorine, then immediately detonate the charges on the main entrance.’

‘And this is the only thing that can be done with them?’ Bauer looked up into his face, her blue eyes filled with pity and regret. ‘Kill them like dogs that have run mad?’

‘Believe me,’ said Asher, ‘it is the only way. And it is necessary that it be done soon.’

She studied him for a moment more, then sighed a little, and nodded. ‘Yes. I see that it is. And it shall be done.’

Karlebach lingered in the gallery as Asher set his charges, under the first of the growing dull-green mountain of chlorine cylinders. The only way to the lower levels from that long, dark chamber was a couple of rickety ladders, which the Japanese soldiers drew up for a little distance, then cut off and dropped back into the chasm. When it was time to go, Karlebach turned from the brink of the downshaft as if he could scarcely bear to leave it, his lined face set like stone.

Asher found himself remembering that he and Lydia were not the only ones tormented by the thought of someone who would be sealed in the poisoned abyss.

It would take, Asher guessed, until mid-afternoon for the villagers to carry all the canisters down the narrow tunnels. He showed Sergeant Tamayo how to affix the ends of the detonator wire into the box, listened to Mizukami translate his instructions: the gas cylinders to be detonated at four thirty, the main charge to bring down the tunnels immediately thereafter. Two armed troopers would remain with the sergeant after the villagers left, to make sure there was no interference from bandits or anyone else.

‘And if the President sends men to stop us,’ Mizukami added as the rest of the little party nudged their scrubby Chinese ponies single file along the overgrown track toward the other entrances, ‘Tamayo has instructions to hold them at bay and set the charges off immediately.’

‘I doubt Yuan will authorize troops.’ Asher scanned the brush-choked gully below the track, the queer, snaky ridges of the hills that closed in around them. His cracked ribs ached, and after the dark of the mines, the sunlight seemed queerly bright. ‘He’s sensitive about how he’s perceived by the West. If there’s trouble, he’ll find his actions hard to justify. The ones we need to watch out for are the Tso. Though I wouldn’t put it outside the realm of possibility,’ he went on grimly, ‘for us to meet Colonel von Mehren and some of his merry men – depending on who Madame Tso has chosen to sell information to.’

All around the rear flanks of the mountain, they stopped at the small subsidiary entrances and ventilation shafts of the mine – most barely more than holes in the ground, some centuries old – and blew them up as they went, burying in seconds the brutal labor of years.

Can he hear the explosions in his sleep? Asher wondered as the hillside jarred beneath him and thick yellow dust belched from the narrow pits. Lying asleep a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand black iron steps down into the earth . . .

Is he counting them in his dreams? Twelve yet to go, then eleven, then ten . . . Until final darkness and an eternity alone with pain?

As he rolled up his wires, packed his detonator back on his shaggy little mount and then hauled himself – ribs stabbing him – into the saddle again, Asher glanced at Karlebach’s stony face and wondered whether he thought