the same.
But he could not bring himself to ask.
In its heyday, the entrance to the mine on the far side of Shi’h Liu mountain had been a workings in its own right. Asher traced the foundations of sheds and huts, small squares of brick and stone on the slope beneath the cave mouth, and a graded track that led down to what had been a worker’s village, strung out along the trickle of a stream. Everything was gone now except for a few broken fragments of wall. This was a country where abandoned brick or cut stone did not go long un-scavenged. Rats swarmed forth – as they had at two other entrances – and Asher and the bodyguard Ogata swept them with flame. Then Asher checked his watch and wired the gelignite blocks into the decayed wooden props that held up the entrance to the cave.
He hid the detonator in what looked like the debris of a shed while Mizukami and one of the three soldiers, Nishiharu, scouted a few yards down the tunnel through the smoking carpet of dead and dying rats. Karlebach shouldered his shotgun, and the spare cylinders of oil and nitrogen, in case there were more vermin further down. Another soldier, Seki, carried in a satchel of explosives, wire, and a detonator box.
Asher signed Ogata and the third soldier, Hirato, to remain outside on guard over the ponies. Then he picked up his satchel and his lantern and followed the gleam of Mizukami’s dim light down the tunnel into the dark.
It was then not quite three o’clock.
TWENTY-FIVE
Rats whipped among the rocks. Asher could hear the scrabble of their feet, their constant squeaking in the dark; their sweetish, fusty stink mingled with the scents of water and stone. In the abysses of the cross-drifts, tiny eyes glittered like malevolent rubies. Asher counted turnings, checked and rechecked both his maps by the lantern-gleam, and prayed that Ysidro’s observations here had been correct, and that those lazy bastards at the Hsi Fang-te mining offices hadn’t simply gone on hearsay of what was down here or, worse yet, just made something up –
The ceiling barely cleared the heads of the Japanese and forced Asher and Karlebach to stoop as they walked. Mizukami whispered, ‘
Asher checked his map. The tunnel beside the X was in the right place to be the one that led down to the gallery they sought.
‘Who has been down here?’ Karlebach asked hoarsely
‘The priest Chiang,’ lied Asher, ‘said he recalled something like this. Let me go ahead.’
He raised his lantern, moved forward again. The tunnel sloped sharply, following an ancient coal-seam. When he touched the wall, moisture slicked his hand. After a time the walls widened out around them, the ceiling grew higher and the lantern-light showed them a few pillars still standing where the coal had been cut out around them. Wooden props had been installed to support the roof, gray and desiccated with age.
Then the gallery narrowed again, and Asher had to turn sideways and brace himself against the steep angle of the floor. He held the lantern further out before him, then knelt and crept forward step by step.
Darkness dropped away before him. The ends of a ladder poked up over the edge, but he knew better than to trust it. He merely extended his lantern out over the abyss and glimpsed the faintest hints of pillars – stalactites aglitter with moisture and crystal – hanging from a ceiling somewhere not far above him, and undulating shapes of pale flowstone and stalagmites not far below. He called out, ‘Hello!’ into the darkness, and echoes picked up his voice, the distant ringing of vast underground space. Ysidro was right. The caverns would swallow any amount of chlorine, disperse it harmlessly in millions of cubic feet of air. The
Asher edged back from the brink and scrambled, stooping, to where the others waited. ‘The caves are down there, all right,’ he said as he collected wires and gelignite from young Mr Seki. ‘By the look of the ceiling here –’ he raised his lantern toward the swagged-down rock, the age-grayed rotting props – ‘an explosion will bring the whole gallery down, so I want the lot of you to go back up the tunnel.’
The detonator wires, extended across the gallery to the narrowing of the way to the caves, were some twenty feet short of the tunnel mouth. Asher wired the gelignite as close to the cave entry as he could, aware that only a few slabs remained to him in case they found some unexpected shaft or fissure that had been shown on neither map. ‘Get back,’ he said as he wired the lines to the box. ‘I mean it.’
Mizukami put a gently-urging hand on Karlebach’s arm, but the old man shrugged free. He was staring as if hypnotized at another X cut into the rock of the gallery wall. ‘Is
‘I don’t know.’ Asher met his gaze calmly. ‘Chiang spoke of finding such marks—’
‘Could they have been made by the Others? Or by the vampires of Peking, to lead us into a trap?’
Love and respect notwithstanding, Asher had to force himself not to snap,
‘And can he be trusted?’ Karlebach’s voice trembled with the violence of his emotions. ‘Jamie, we hunt a thing which has no soul. A thing infinitely cunning, which can twist the minds and perceptions of even the good and the strong!’
From his pocket, Asher dug wads of cotton, handed two to the old scholar: ‘Put those in your ears. Give these –’ he unwrapped another from its blue paper – ‘to Mizukami and his men, and don’t forget to cover your mouth and nose as well.’ He suited the action to the word, pulling up his own handkerchief, tied bandanna-wise over the lower part of his face like a Wild West badman. ‘Now get back. God knows how much of this ceiling is going to come down.’
He shoved down the plunger, sprang to his feet, and ran for the tunnel as if the Devil of his father’s worst sermons bit at his heels. He was still a yard short of it when the earth jerked underfoot, the world echoed with the trapped cataclysm of detonation, and a tidal wave of burning dust overtook and overwhelmed him, nearly throwing him to the ground. He staggered and stumbled on, mind focused on the tunnel and the distant lanterns as the lights vanished utterly in the murk. Behind him he heard rock falling – tons of it – as the gallery ceiling gave way . . .
He must have aimed dead on at the tunnel, for a sickly yellow blur showed almost in front of him. Men unrecognizable with dust – save for Mizukami’s glasses and sword, Karlebach’s height and beard – caught his arms. Ears ringing, Asher felt more than heard when silence fell behind them. He took the lantern, returned along the tunnel through what felt like a palpable wall of suspended dust, to find the inner end of the gallery roof had all come down, a bare yard in front of the detonator box. Dizzy with the shock of the explosion, his cracked ribs making him feel as if he’d been bayoneted, Asher nevertheless dragged the wires free of the rubble, wound them around his arm.
When he reached the soldiers again he had to put his watch almost up against the lantern to see the time.
Karlebach’s face was haggard in the grimy light of the lantern, and in his heart Asher heard him murmur,
It was a blessing to smell air, even the cold, dusty air of the Western Hills. The daylight that Asher could glimpse beyond the tunnel mouth had the golden quality of the first approach of evening. Though his hearing was returning, Asher’s head still ached, and Seki – whose nose had bled from the shock – looked like some gore-daubed creature of a horror tale.
Ysidro, in his sleep, would hear this next explosion – the one that would bring down the ceiling of the old rear entrance of the mine – and would know:
