Magistrates of Hell (25 page)

‘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 mopped and washed, and paused long enough to hold out the brandy flask to Karlebach, who sank down on to a heap of rubble nearby, his face nearly green with shock.

‘Take his pulse,’ she ordered Mizukami. ‘Sit him on something – tree stump will do – and get his head between his knees . . . please,’ she added, remembering belatedly that Japanese men, even more so than English, were unused to taking orders from a woman. As she worked on the stricken soldier she spoke over her shoulder: ‘Professor, can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying? Please answer—’

Faintly, Karlebach replied, ‘I hear, little bird.’

‘Can you breathe? Does your chest hurt you?’

‘I’m well.’ His voice was a little muffled, for the Count had obeyed Lydia’s orders with great promptness and had lowered the old man’s head down as instructed. ‘I am – dear God . . .!’

‘Count, have one of your men get this man – what is his name?’

‘Takahashi.’

‘Please have one of your men get Takahashi-san back to Dr Bauer. He’ll need to be started on rabies treatments as soon as we get back to Peking. Mr Liao—’

She looked around for the guide, who was helping Ogata hold the frantic ponies.

‘Count Mizukami, would you ask Mr Liao if he’s up to guiding us to the remaining mine-entrances that he knows about? I realize it’s a horrid thing to have to do.’

‘No, honored Madame,’ the Count replied quietly, ‘it is not horrid. At least, no more horrid, as you say, than war. And this is war: something for which, in times past, women in my country have been as trained and ready as men.’

He stood back as Lydia went over to kneel beside Karlebach. ‘Are you feeling better, sir?’ she asked softly. ‘I think you should go back with Takahashi-san to the village.’

‘No.’ He waved weakly, groped for his shotgun. ‘No, the more of us who know the land – who know the places where explosives and gas must be placed – the better. Anything could happen to any of us . . . The old legends, the old accounts, said they could call rats to their bidding. In the catacombs beneath Prague Castle, in the wells and tunnels and chambers that all connect . . . Matthias was sometimes turned back by the rats. But never like this . . .’

Never that you knew about.
Lydia looked back up at the mine entrance.
Or was that one of the things the Master of Prague told you that you thought he was lying about?

From here she could see, in the shadows of the outer cave, hundreds of rats still darting around the crushed and battered corpses of their comrades. The cold breath that seeped from underground brought her their sweetish, frowsty stink. One of them, running back up the icy slope nearby her, made her almost jump out of her skin.

She realized she herself was trembling, with shock and cold that seemed to penetrate to her marrow.

Mizukami held out to her the brandy flask. ‘Now at least,’ he said softly, ‘we have a good reason – a logical reason – for ordering hundreds of cylinders of chlorine and as much explosive as it will take to cave in the mine. Moreover, you know and I know now what it is that President Yuan seeks to control, if he can achieve command over these devils. Yabe—?’

The young soldier – who looked younger than most of Jamie’s students, thought Lydia – was almost green with shock, but he stood stiffly to listen to his Colonel’s instructions.

‘
Hai
.’ The young man saluted and helped his bleeding and half-conscious comrade on to one of the ponies. Chinese ponies being what they were, he led it down the trail toward the village, rather than risk riding. Karlebach got to his feet like a man half-stunned, looked around him for his lantern; it lay on its side just within the entrance to the cave.

Bracing herself with loathing, Lydia climbed back up the half-dozen yards that separated her from the gaping darkness in the hillside. The sound of rats squeaking and scuttering in the cave raised the hair on her nape.
Chlorine gas
, she thought.
Seal the mine, detonate the containers
. . . It would eat away most living tissue.

She bent quickly, picked up the lantern, straightened.

And, like a breath, a thought passed through her mind.

A whisper that seemed to come from the darkness; not physical sound, but something deeper, as if someone had breathed her name.

Only, it wasn’t her name.

A single word passed through the back of her mind, leaving her shocked and cold and aghast and filled with horror.

Mistress
. . .

And then was gone.

D
espite brutal cold and a cutting wind that kept everyone on Peking’s dark streets wrapped in as many scarves as they could obtain, Asher felt as exposed as he would have had he been wandering the Tatar city in tweeds and a homburg. Even in the early-falling autumn twilight he kept instinctively to the smaller
hutongs
, avoided crowds and the lights of shops. There were Han Chinese six feet tall, especially from the north; with his hands gloved in cut-out rags and the lower half of his face swathed, he was no more conspicuous than any other passer-by in a faded, quilted
ch’i-p’ao
and padded trousers tucked into felt-soled boots.

But, years ago, Don Simon Ysidro had said to him,
We usually have warning of their suspicions
, when the talk had turned to the friends, lovers, and bereaved families of the vampires’ victims who might guess how their loved one had died.
Most of us have good memories for faces, for names, and for details
. . .

Even locked in the irresistible sleep of the daylight hours, the vampire was not truly unconscious.

Asher knew he’d have only one chance to get a look at the outer walls, to identify the various doors and gates, of the Tso compound. On a second pass, even in daylight, one who slept within might well turn in his sleep and think:
I have heard that unfamiliar stride before, smelled that flesh.

He was fairly sure, now, what was in the Tso house and why the family had risen so swiftly to such power.

And felt like the world’s supreme idiot, for not having thought of it before.

That is our strength
, Ysidro had said to him once.
That no one believes, and not believing, lets us be
.

Yet at the moment he walked the streets of a city in which ninety-nine men of a hundred believed in the Undead and would be perfectly ready to hunt them and kill them . . .

Or use them for their own ends.

Or be used by them, for mutual benefit.

So you have become their servant
? Karlebach had asked him, a year and a half ago.
His day man – like the shabbas goy my granddaughter employs to light the fires in the stoves here on the Seventh Day . . .

They kill those who serve them
. . . he had said.

And Asher thought now:
But what if they didn’t?

What if they employed, not one ‘day man’, but – as Father Orsino had said – an entire extended family of them: grandfathers, uncles, daughters, cousins? What if they helped and enriched and protected that family, in exchange for protection during the daytimes . . . and a steady supply of weak or confused or very young victims?
They rule the world
, Father Orsino had said . . . The spirit hidden in the cellar, the secret at the heart of the family, the ruler of the enclave – the Magistrate of Hell.

The thought was monstrous, but not nearly as monstrous as machine guns or phosgene gas or the staggering, horrifying stupidity of generals who remained convinced that an army’s ‘will to fight’ and ‘patriotic spirit’ was going to carry a bayonet charge against a line of Vickers guns.

He turned off the Te Ching Men Street, worked his way eastward past the Catholic University, glancing now and then at the hand-drawn map Ling and her brothers had worked up for him. A line of camels passed him, laden with coal; a rickshaw bearing two daintily-bediziened prostitutes nearly ran him down. This whole district was the domain of the Tso family. From the Tatar city’s western wall almost to the old granaries on the east side, rickshaw-pullers worked for them, hawkers of hot soup and fried watermelon seeds rented their pitches on the street corners from them, small shopkeepers paid them for ‘protection’, gambling parlors gave them ‘squeeze’. Everyone passed them information. Everyone wanted to be on their good side. It was a situation far from exclusive to China or Peking.

He counted turnings, looked for landmarks. In the cold twilight the narrow gray-walled
hutongs
seemed all very much the same to a foreign eye. But there he noted the shape of a gate with green-and-gold pillars instead of the more common red. At that intersection was an enormous, gaudy banner announcing THE EMPRESS’S GARDEN beside the gate of an eating house, tiers of open galleries around a central paradise. (
And what do the local Republicans make of THAT
?) Here was a
hutong
that made ten turns inside of two hundred feet and another that ran straight as a railway line for nearly that distance, and Asher’s mind, trained to detail, logged these individual minutiae as he would have noted exits from a house in which he planned to meet an enemy.

He’d heard vampires speak of their fellow Undead who grew timid, shrinking in on themselves: afraid to leave their houses, afraid to go beyond what was familiar. Afraid lest some accident somehow trap them out of doors, in the burning horror of the rising sun. Sometimes they’d get their vampire compatriots to hunt for them, to bring them prey . . . But on the whole, Ysidro had told him more than once, genuine friendship among vampires was rare.