Magistrates of Hell

‘There!’ Karlebach panted.

As the failing lantern-light touched the ascending shaft, a rat fell down it. Then two more.

Bollocks.

‘Let me go up first.’ Asher shifted the weight of the flame-thrower on his back. Too light. How much fuel remained?

He knew what would be at the top.

Rats lined the uppermost rung of the creaky ladder, rimmed the pit head, eyes a tiny wall of live embers in the dark. Asher fired a burst of flame up at them, climbed a yard – lantern banging awkwardly at his thigh where it hung from his belt – then braced himself and fired again, sweeping the top of the shaft. He sprang up the last few feet and fired once more as soon as he got his elbows over the edge on to solid ground, the yellow burst of flame racing for yards along the floor of the tunnel. Scrambled up and shouted, ‘Come on! Now!’

Swept again, to keep the carpet of vermin at bay. The flame gave out with a sputter moments later; Mizukami swept the next wave of rodents while Asher shed the now-useless tank, reached down to haul Karlebach up the last few feet. The old man was gasping, struggling to hook his wrists over the rungs; in the dark behind him Asher made out Private Seki, pushing and guiding him from below.

‘There’s a tunnel leading into and out of this room,’ panted Asher as he pulled Karlebach, then Seki up out of the shaft. ‘We want the one that corners to the left.’ The room was invisible beyond the glare of the flame-thrower. When the rats retreated, Asher led the way straight to the wall, which he knew would be close – on the map the room wasn’t big. Slag and ‘gob’ heaped all around its walls – this part of the mine had been long abandoned as a dumping ground. The piled debris swarmed with rats. They followed the wall, but the tunnel they came to cornered right, and as Asher’s lantern failed, and Nishiharu kindled his own to replace it, the yellow flare of the match caught more eyes in the darkness.

Not the eyes of rats.

Asher cursed, led the way along the wall toward where he knew now the left-hand tunnel must be; behind him he heard Mizukami’s quiet-voiced directions to his men. Asher guessed they had only a dozen rounds apiece, perfectly adequate to deal with bandits . . .

Four yao-kuei emerged from the left-hand tunnel when Asher was within two yards of it.

They were the first Asher had seen by anything brighter than moonlight, slumped shapes that moved like animals. Yet they came with deadly swiftness, fanged mouths gaping. He fired his pistol almost point-blank at the nearest one, and behind him one of the soldiers got off a shot with his rifle. One of the yao- kuei staggered to its feet again, the other – half its head blown away – crawled toward them until Mizukami hit it with the last stream from his flame-thrower. More yao-kuei emerged from the right-hand tunnel at the other side of the room, loped toward them, eyes flashing in the darkness, and very deliberately Rebbe Karlebach brought up his shotgun and emptied one of the barrels into the nearest creature at a distance of ten feet.

The result was shocking. The creature shrieked, staggered, tore at itself with huge, clawed hands. The bleeding wounds sizzled and blistered. The others backed a step, and in that instant the old man turned and fired the second barrel at one of the two that blocked the way to the left-hand tunnel. The thing collapsed to the floor, screaming and raking its own flesh around the smoking wounds. Mizukami stripped out of his spent flame-thrower and strode in on the attacking group, sword flashing, and in that same moment the tallest of the yao- kuei – even slumped it must have been nearly six feet – lunged at Karlebach, caught the barrels of his shotgun as if he would wrench the weapon from his hand—

And stopped, staring at him in the lantern-light.

And for an instant, Karlebach paused in his frantic scramble to reload, stared back.

There was nothing human left of the doglike face, but as Asher brought up his pistol and fired point-blank into the thing’s head, his mind noted automatically that the few strands that remained of its verminous hair, as dark in the fitful glare as that of the others, were curly rather than straight and caught a mahogany-red gleam.

Asher’s shot knocked the yao-kuei sprawling. He grabbed Karlebach by the shoulder of his coat, thrust him ahead of him into the left-hand tunnel. Nishiharu laid down a burst of fire to cover the other two, and Asher plunged forward, praying his recollection of what came after the room with the shaft was correct. An inclined corridor, the Hsi Fang-te map had noted. Ceiling bagged down with the weight of the mountain above and floor littered with broken props, another incline . . .

A gallery, this one high-ceilinged, with glimpses of scaffolding on the nearer wall. Asher pulled a hunk of it free of its rotting ties, fumbled for his map, swung around in shocked terror at the sudden flash of eyes a foot from his shoulder—

A white hand, cold as the grip of a corpse, blocked him from bringing his revolver to bear. Ysidro said, ‘This way.’

‘We blew up that tunnel this morning,’ Asher gasped.

‘You Protestant imbeciles!’

Karlebach shouted a curse, swung toward him with his shotgun—

And Ysidro was gone.

‘They are down here too!’ The Professor staggered, passed a hand over his eyes. ‘I knew it! I knew it was a trap! I felt their presence—’ Then, like the stroke of a monster drum, the ground underfoot jarred. The distant explosion was strong enough to send rocks slithering from the slag piles at one end of the gallery, and to make all the scaffolding rattle and sway. Dust rained from the ceiling. Then far off, and stronger, a second blast.

‘That’s it,’ said Asher. ‘They set off the gas – and sealed the mine.’

In the silence there seemed nothing more to say. Lydia, he thought. Miranda . . .

Far on the other end of the gallery, a light flickered. A shaky old voice called out, ‘Na shih shei? ’ Who’s there?

And Asher shouted back, scarcely believing his ears, ‘Chiang?’

The others simply stared as the distant blur of white resolved itself into the old man, hurrying toward them, surprisingly agile on the steep and slippery floor. In one hand he held his staff, a cheap tin lantern in the other, its glimmer turning his long white hair into trailing wisps of smoke. ‘I thank the Yama-King and all the Magistrates of Hell for guiding me in this terrible place,’ he said as he drew closer. ‘The entrances to the mine have all been sealed up—’

‘How you get in?’

‘Ah, but there is a secret way, which lies in the crypt of the Temple of the Concealed Buddha. I studied there after the death of my wife. It was built during the Sung Dynasty, when because of the growing strength of the Heaven and Earth Sect the Emperor decreed . . .’ The old man looked from face to face of the fugitives. ‘Those creatures that I saw—’

‘Lead us,’ commanded Asher. ‘Poison gas, soon, quickly, now—’

Mizukami had gone to the edge of the lamplight, listening into the darkness; Karlebach and the two soldiers, without a word of Chinese among them, still stared at the white-haired priest as if he’d descended from the ceiling in a chariot of fire.

‘Poison gas?’ Chiang’s white brows drew together indignantly. ‘What a frightful thing! Mo Tzu, in the Spring and Autumn Period, wrote of the use of mustard to make toxic smokes to be blown at enemies, but it is a shameful use of man’s wisdom and energies to—’

‘Shameful waste our wisdom and energies,’ said Asher tactfully, ‘for us die with yao-kuei . . .’

‘Oh, quite right, quite right!’ The old priest nodded and led the way back along the gallery in the direction from which he had come. ‘An excellent point. Yes, the yao-kuei . . . But surely the yao-kuei have their own path, their own place, in this world. The Buddha taught that even noxious insects have their own Buddha-nature.’

‘Here they come,’ Mizukami said.

Eyes glittered behind them in the darkness. Mizukami motioned Private Seki toward Karlebach, spoke an order; the young man handed his lantern to Asher, put his shoulder beneath the old Professor’s arm. The floor ahead of them swarmed suddenly with rats, scurrying and dropping from the scaffolding; Mizukami snapped another