Magistrates of Hell

Don’t think about it. In Asher’s years with the Department, he had learned how not to think about things like that.

It was, in part, why he had left the Department.

The pain in his ribs when he coughed, the ache in every muscle and bone, was such that it was difficult to think about much of anything.

Then up ahead of him, beyond that round of daylight, he saw movement.

Men running toward the tunnel.

Too many men. Rifles in their hands.

Asher yelled, ‘Back!’ as the first bullets ripped into the cave.

Karlebach didn’t have a soldier’s reflexes. The private Nishiharu grabbed his arm, thrust him back down the tunnel. There was a cross-cut about thirty feet back – in its shelter Asher slid into the straps of his flame-thrower again, stepped out and sprayed the tunnel with fire. The five men just entering sprang clear; he saw they wore ch’i-p’aos and ku, with Western boots. Those behind them, the gray uniforms of the Chinese Army. A man in a Western suit – Asher recognized the American double-breasted jacket – stepped forward, hands raised.

‘Asher!’

T’uan, he thought. Chen Chi T’uan. Madame Tso’s nephew.

Even in the shadows he could see the bruises on the young man’s face, the swelling where the deformation was beginning.

‘Throw down your weapon, come out!’ T’uan shouted. ‘We got your wife!’

You’re lying. The breath seemed to choke in his lungs.

He edged himself to the corner of the cross-cut tunnel, shouted, ‘What do you want?’ He repeated the words in Chinese, though T’uan had called out in English.

‘We want you.’ T’uan’s English was clear, if simple. ‘We want no trouble. Not kill you, not kill friends, not kill nobody. Promise. Swear on Holy Bible.’

And you want me to step out of cover and walk towards a dozen men with rifles on the strength of ‘Promise’? You need to run for the government, friend.

‘We got your wife, Asher,’ T’uan repeated. ‘Got her all safe. You come out, Japanese come out, nobody hurt. This mine our property. We—’

Shots cracked beyond T’uan. One of the bully boys in the mine entrance flung up his arms, pitched forward on his face. The Chinese soldiers sprang aside as a bullet kicked dirt among them. Then, as one, they and the bully boys ran forward into the shelter of the tunnel mouth—

Straight under the gelignite wired into the props beneath the roof.

Ogata. The thought came to Asher in the split instant before the explosion. Driving them forward under the blast zone . . .

He flinched back behind the shelter of the corner, clapped his hands over his ears. Thunder, blackness, dust in his lungs and the ground lurching underfoot. If the Chinese soldiers – or T’uan’s enforcers – screamed, the sound didn’t penetrate the booming horror of the explosion directly over their heads. Asher pressed his face to the wall and buried his nose and mouth in the crook of his arm.

Then stillness, terrible and deep. Blackness like the abyss of Hell. Through the ringing in his ears he heard one of the Japanese soldiers gasp a question and thought he heard someone say, Ogata . . .

It had been, Asher reflected, as neat a piece of tactics on Ogata’s part as one could hope for, and the only way the two men left outside the tunnel could neutralize eleven well-armed enemies. The bodyguard knew the men in the mine had maps, to get them through the tunnels to the main entrance. At this very moment, he suspected Ogata and Hirato were riding hell for leather along those overgrown paths, to reach Sergeant Tamayo at the main entrance and tell him, Don’t detonate until they arrive . . .

Which would make sense, Asher reflected, if there were no reason not to delay detonation past fall of darkness.

And if rats were the worst thing we’re likely to meet in the mine.

Yellowish light smeared the dust-choked darkness behind him; he heard Karlebach’s gasping cough. ‘Is everyone all right?’ Asher called out. ‘Rabbi?’

‘This depends,’ croaked the old scholar, ‘upon how one defines the words “all right”.’

‘We live,’ Mizukami said. ‘Ashu Sensei, the man cannot have known about Madame Ashu.’

‘He can.’ Asher coughed and spat up dust. ‘We have forty minutes of safety to get to the front entrance of the mine – if Ogata can make it around the shoulder of the mountain that quickly. And if Tamayo and the others at the front aren’t attacked—’

A gunshot cracked in the blackness, the bullet whining off the rock by his head. Dimly, in what seemed like a wall of solid dust, Asher saw the glint of catlike eyes.

T’uan can see in the darkness . . .

IT can see in the darkness.

The thing that used to be T’uan.

Of course it survived.

He answered the shot with a blast from his flame-thrower, then turned and thrust Karlebach and Mizukami ahead of him along the cross-cut. ‘Go, forward! There should be a gallery ahead—’

Another shot. The air grew clearer as they plunged into the long chamber that ran before an ancient coalface. Asher uncovered his lantern again and stumbled toward the yellow gleam of someone else’s; only by the height of the dim figure did he see it was Karlebach. The old man staggered, groped for the wall, and Asher caught his elbow, pulled him along. ‘He can see in the dark! Don’t close the lanterns!’ The tiny glow showed huge heaps of waste rock all along the gallery walls, and they ducked behind the nearest one; Asher made a swift count of his companions, motioned for all to take hands, then signed for darkness.

It was pitchy, utter, and unspeakable, the silence horrible. Under the choke of dust, Asher smelled rats, heard them skittering among the loose rock of the slag heaps.

From the direction of the tunnel, nothing.

There was water on the floor. Could T’uan – and any of his men who might have survived the explosion – come near without sound? Or fool their perceptions, so as to remain unheard?

Beside him he felt Mizukami bend down a trifle, to reach the puddles . . . Washing his eyeglasses, Asher realized. The little nobleman had been stumbling along almost blind.

How sharp is their hearing? They were cousins to vampires, who could detect differences in the rhythm of breath in a crowded room . . .

He pressed his hand to his side, trying to will away the pain.

How far along is T’uan in his transformation to yao-kuei? How much did those ‘herbs’ affect the process? How much of his mind is left, and how long will that last?

Or would, in fact, the medicines allow the young man to retain enough of his human mind to command the yao-kuei – like figures on a chessboard?

We have your wife . . .

His heart screamed that’s impossible! but the long-time field agent in him asked, How did they do it, and where would they take her?

Beside him Asher heard one of the soldiers jerk and gasp, and then the squeal of a rat as it was knocked to the floor.

Silence again.

At last he slipped the lantern cover a millimeter. ‘Let’s go.’

TWENTY-SIX

British Legation, Peking

Tuesday, November 12, 1912