Magistrates of Hell (33 page)

The effort to keep her mind from what she knew had to be taking place in the Western Hills – from the thought of Jamie tangling with the Others, who might or might not be asleep; from the knowledge that Simon would be sealed into the mine with them – had exhausted her. Annette Hautecoeur, for all her gossipy slyness, had maintained a gentle flow of harmless commonplace as they’d looked out across that eerily impressive sea of gray and green and crimson roofs, and had made no comment about Lydia’s distraction and silences.

A new-made widow, Lydia was finding, could get away with a lot.

Such forbearance would definitely not be encountered in Edmund Woodreave’s company.

‘Please.’ The little nurse’s voice almost had tears in it. ‘He has a faithful heart, ma’am, and loves you so much.’

‘He has debts of over five hundred pounds to his club, his tailor, his wine merchant, and Hoby’s in London where he orders his boots,’ returned Lydia astringently. ‘And he loves so much the thought of an independent income which would put him in line for promotion.’

Mrs Pilley’s face crumpled a little, her eyes pleading. Her own fondness for the clerk, she knew, would forever go unconsummated – without a marriage portion of some kind neither he nor anyone else could afford to look at her . . .

Unless
, thought Lydia, with a sudden pang of mingled suspicion and pity,
he’s courted her a little in order to get her help in delivering this.

Another look at the nurse’s face confirmed her thought.
Of course he has
.

She sighed, feeling a little sick, and inspected herself in the parlor mirror. She retreated to the bedroom and repaired the ravages wrought by an hour’s sedate stroll under the protection of enough veiling to tent the grounds of New College – touches of rice powder, the tiniest refreshment of mascaro on the lids of her eyes (
I may be in mourning but there’s no reason to look frightful
. . .), smoothing and readjustment of her coiffure . . . Then she tucked her spectacles back into their silver case, put on her gloves again, and made her way down to the lobby, steeled to be grief-stricken and polite.

Simon
. . .

He’ll find a way out somehow
. . .

Woodreave was pacing the lobby outside the door of the smallest of the private parlors when Lydia came down the stairs. She noticed in passing a Chinese workman deep in argument with the manager at the desk and three laborers standing next to a number of rolled-up carpets nearby. Woodreave came forward and took her arm with a reverence that almost concealed the pre-emptory anxiety of the gesture. ‘Madame – Mrs Asher – thank you for coming down! Truly I’m – I’m sorry for disturbing you this way, but I really had no choice . . .’

He conducted her into the private parlor with the blue curtains and closed the door.

Grant Hobart rose from beside the fire. ‘Mrs Asher—’

Lydia turned sharply on Woodreave; his face was filled with anguish and guilt. ‘Please, Mrs Asher, please forgive me! Mr Hobart needs very much to speak to you. He said you wouldn’t answer his letters—’

‘I wouldn’t answer his letters,’ responded Lydia, furious now, ‘because I do not want to speak with him. The man who lied about my husband? Who drove him into the situation which resulted in his death, rather than have him reveal what he’d learned about the blood on his own hands?’

‘Blood—?’ Woodreave threw a pleading glance toward Hobart, who crossed the little parlor in two steps to Lydia’s side. He looked frightful, Lydia thought, trying not to peer nearsightedly at him – haggard and feverish:
anxiety over Richard? When he knows perfectly well why Holly Eddington was murdered
. . .

‘Ask him,’ said Lydia coldly. ‘Or was part of the money he offered you on the condition that you didn’t ask him anything?’

She was so angry that it took her an instant to identify the smell that clung to Hobart’s clothing. A breath of foulness, of fishy decay buried under nauseating French cologne . . . and something else, something chemical . . .
Chloroform
—

She turned to dive for the parlor door, but it was too late. Hobart grabbed her arm in a grip of terrifying strength and clapped a soaked rag to her nose and mouth. Lydia held her breath, kicked backwards at his shin—

And in the same instant, a Chinese man – respectably dressed in Western fashion – stepped from behind the curtains that half-concealed the alcove of the door, put one hand over Woodreave’s mouth and with the other drove a foot-long steel stiletto at an angle up through the larynx and into – Lydia guessed – the medulla oblongata and the cerebellum behind it. Which was, she reflected with her last conscious thought before blacking out, truly excellent aim given the circumstances.

Asher smelled the
yao-kuei
in the darkness, some fifteen minutes before he and his companions were cornered. By the feeble glimmer of two of their lanterns it took all his concentration to keep count of turnings, and of the few landmarks that had been noted on the map: did
stone pit
(or
dump
) really mean a disused room filled in with broken ‘gob’, as it was called in Wales, or was that something else that would be further along? Did a hogback rise of the floor mean they’d come down the wrong tunnel, or had the floor heaved up in the twenty years or more since the map was made? Despite the chill in the mine he was sweating, and he wondered how close they were to the detonation site of the chlorine and how fast the gas would spread once the canisters shattered.

Wondered where the sun was in the sky.

Ahead of him, Private Seki whispered, ‘
Nani-ka nioi desu ka?
’ and an instant later Asher smelled it, too. Fishy rottenness, the human stink of unclean flesh . . .

Forty of them
, Ysidro had said.

He checked the map. ‘Back this way. There’s a shaft down to a gallery below this one, then a shaft up again—’
If we’re in the right tunnel
.

There was a shaft – a few yards down a cross-cut that wasn’t as the map had described it – and a ladder with rotten rungs that cracked and whispered under the weight of the men, forty feet down into utter darkness. A gallery, the entire ceiling of which had sagged to within five feet of its floor, ankle deep in water in places, a slippery, hideous scramble.

Then, like the warning rush of wind that presages the storm, the skitter of claws on stone, the stink of rats.

Beyond the radius of the light Asher saw movement and a river of glittering eyes. He quickly unshipped the nozzle of his flame-thrower and lit the pilot (
six matches left
. . .), but when he turned the flame on the creatures, the first wave of them was already barely two yards from his boots. The rats shrieked, those behind pushing the flaming leaders ahead, and the whole swarm of them tried to fan out in a crescent around the men. Mizukami and Nishiharu fired up their lights and swept the moving wings of the army, the glare of the blaze blinding after hours of darkness.

And God, I hope this swarm is only a single wave
. . .

It was. The rodents scattered, squealing, the charred and dying casualties a twitching carpet of stink and embers underfoot. They gave squishily as Asher strode forward, praying that there would indeed be the up-shaft that was supposedly at the end of the gallery and that the ladder there would still be able to bear weight. Tiny feet splished in water behind them in the darkness, scratched on the stones.

‘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—’