Magistrates of Hell (34 page)

‘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 order, and Nishiharu fired the flame-thrower.

‘Fascinating,’ murmured Chiang. ‘In the Spring and Autumn Period, Sun Tzu wrote of such devices—’

Asher shoved him without ceremony toward the darkness: ‘Run!’

They ran. The flame-thrower sputtered out, and Nishiharu slithered from its straps as he ran, then swung around to fire his rifle into the loping shadows of the
yao-kuei
. Asher smelled above their stink the distant reek of chlorine, growing stronger as it flowed into the mine. As he had observed on the shores of the Peking Sea, the
yao-kuei
moved with the swift precision of a school of fish, dispersing themselves across the gallery. Some scrambled up on the rotting scaffolding, moved along it with terrifying agility, spreading out to keep from being shot into in a mob. To aim, the fugitives would have to stop, and to stop was to die.

‘This way!’ Chiang waved his staff encouragingly. The gallery ended in a steep tunnel, its walls marked with enormous, fresh chalk Xs – obviously Chiang’s way of keeping from getting lost. Two
yao-kuei
dropped from the scaffolding in front of the entry to the tunnel, bared their outsize teeth. Asher didn’t see how, but like an eye-blink, Ysidro was behind the creatures in the tunnel mouth: thin and rather tattered, skeletal in the lantern-light. He caught one of the
yao-kuei
with both hands around its head and twisted its neck. Asher heard the bones snap, but when Ysidro kicked the thing aside it got up again, staggered blindly, arms thrashing, still looking for prey. The second
yao-kuei
fell upon Ysidro, mouth stretched to bite, and Mizukami took off both its hands with one stroke of his sword, and then, as Ysidro dodged nimbly away, its head with the next stroke.

More of the creatures dropped from the scaffold, the main group – twenty at least – closing in from the gallery floor. Karlebach fired into the group as they approached, and a
yao-kuei
grabbed him from behind. Its claws tore through his thick coat, and it seized him by his white hair. The next second the thing was knocked sprawling by the tallest of the
yao-kuei
– blood clotting from the gaping entry-wound Asher’s pistol had left in its skull – who flung the smaller creature aside, caught up the rifle Seki had dropped during the fray, and waded into the advancing others, swinging the weapon like a club.

The other
yao-kuei
fell back before it. It turned, for one second, and looked back at Asher, at Karlebach, at the small group huddled in the tunnel mouth in the lamplight.

Karlebach whispered: ‘Matthias—’

It opened its fanged mouth like an ape and screeched at them. Then turned, and strode toward the others, holding them at bay.

‘Go,’ said Asher. ‘Run!’ He caught Karlebach by the arm, forced him along in the wake of Chiang’s lantern, stumbling on the uneven floor. Another white X glimmered at the bottom of a shaft.

‘Up,’ urged Chiang. ‘Hasten—’ For indeed, the smell of chlorine was growing stronger in the shaft, and Asher began to cough, lungs burning, ribs stabbing him, tears flooding his eyes.

‘Go.’ He slipped his satchel from his shoulder, with the last two bars of gelignite. ‘I’ll be up—’

‘You’re a fool,’ said Ysidro’s voice in his ear as the others disappeared up the ladder.

Asher was coughing so hard he couldn’t respond. The pain in his side made him dizzy.

‘How do you set these?’

‘Detonator – in the middle—’

Cold hands pulled the wires from his fingers.
All very well for you to talk. You don’t need to breathe
. . .

‘Get up the ladder.’

‘Lydia,’ gasped Asher. ‘Tso house— Said they have her—’

Ysidro swore hair-raisingly in Spanish. ‘Go. And cover me from that lunatic Jew before you touch off the explosion.’

Head swimming, Asher dragged himself up the rungs, endless in the dark. Overhead, the lantern-light was a dim spot. It was like trying to swim up out of a lightless well.

Hands grabbed his arms, pulled him up. He saw Mizukami kneeling over the detonator box, gasped, ‘Wait—’ and staggered, flung out his arm as if to catch his balance, and fell, knocking lantern and detonator spinning away into the blackness.

The darkness was like being struck blind. Voices cried out, scrabbled in the lightless abyss, and Asher lay on the stone floor gasping. Aware that Ysidro had heard their voices in the mine and come out from behind his protective silver bars and followed them, once the Others were fully occupied . . .

Cold thin hands took his, pressed the hot metal of the lantern into them. Long nails like claws. He managed to shout, ‘I found it,’ and coughed again, almost nauseated, as he fumbled for matches.

With the first flicker of the lamplight, Mizukami seized the detonator and pressed the plunger home.

Deep, deep below them the earth surged. Dust erupted thickly from the shaft, blurred the lamplight; filled what Asher saw now was a small rock-cut room, its walls carved with column after column of Buddhist scripture, engraved into the stone.

After the bellow of the explosion, silence. Karlebach dragged himself to the shaft’s edge and knelt beside it, gazing down, crippled hands folded in prayer. The priest Chiang, standing behind him with the lantern, seemed to understand what had happened in the gallery, for he laid one skeletal hand on the old man’s shoulder and over the shaft made a sign of blessing.

Of Ysidro, no trace remained.

I
must have fallen asleep at the Infirmary again
.

Her feet were freezing, even in the sturdy hand-me-down boots that her friend Anne had sent her (which were too wide and had to be filled in with rags) after Lydia had walked out of her father’s house. Her corset pinched her waist, and the hospital smell of chloroform had given her a splitting headache. When Dr Parton was on duty at the Radcliffe Infirmary Lydia was all right, for he treated her like any male orderly and understood that in addition to lectures, study, and practicum she was also tutoring students from the other colleges in science. The other physicians persisted in the belief that this unwanted ‘bacheloress’ (as they called her) could be pushed out of the male medical preserves by being given all the nastiest duties. So falling asleep in odd corners of the Infirmary was nothing new.

She’d dreamed she was married to Edmund Woodreave.

Dreamed she was tied to him inescapably. Was forced to stay at home and organize teas and pay calls on relatives in an endless round of hypocritical chit-chat . . .

Dreamed of wishing he were dead.

Dreamed of seeing his eyes as someone stabbed him before her . . .

Oh, God, that really happened
—!

She woke. Slivers of twilight through shuttered windows showed her painted Chinese rafters overhead. She lay on a carpet. When she turned her head she made out the enclosing shape of a Chinese bed, like a little wooden room faintly smelling of cedar and dust. The carpet had simply been pushed on to the bare platform, and the whole room around her smelled of mustiness, and of something rotting nearby.

The carpet
, she thought cloudily.

There were workmen with rolled-up carpets in the lobby. That must be how they got me out of the hotel, rolled up like Cleopatra in a rug
.

And how they got poor Mr Woodreave’s body out.
She shuddered again, at that last sight of his eyes.
Ellen and Mrs Pilley won’t know I’m missing. They’ll think I went off somewhere with him
.

She moved, and somewhere in the room there was an instant scrabble and scurrying. Rats. She sat up hastily, groped for her reticule with her eyeglasses in it and had only to think of it to give the matter up in despair. Her money was in it, too, so the man in charge of the carpet-carriers had undoubtedly simply appropriated it as part of his pay. Her exploring hands found the protective silver chains gone from her throat and wrists. Her cameo, earrings, and necklaces of jet beads – suitable for mourning – were also gone. She pulled up her skirts and found the little roll of picklocks still buttoned to the bottom edge of her corset, and whispered a prayer of thanks to Jamie for suggesting she never go out of the house without it, even if it was only for a walk with Miranda.

Though if they’ve bolted the door from the outside I’m out of luck
.

It was growing dark, wherever she was. Scratching at the wall somewhere close, tiny nasty little pink feet . . . Lydia struggled against panic at the sound. With the fetor in the room she wasn’t surprised there were rats.
We must be near a midden or a garbage tip
. . .

No
.

I’m at Mrs Tso’s
.

Cold swallowed her heart as the knowledge fell into place.

Hobart brought me here. He’s working for them. With everything they know about him, of course they’re blackmailing him.
This must be the pavilion Jamie told me about: the pavilion where those two poor young men – or what used to be men – are being kept
.

She got quickly to her feet. She was too nearsighted to see if there were rats in the shadows along the wall, but if there were, they weren’t moving. Holding her skirts well up around her knees, she groped her way to the windows. They were shuttered, bolted on the inside, but when she unbolted and tested them, a hasp and padlock thumped softly on the other side of the thick wood.
Damn
.

Jamie, don’t let them make you do anything stupid!

The door had a bolt on the inside but none on the outside. The room had evidently been an ordinary bedroom, and it opened into a larger chamber, likewise shuttered and padlocked, but scuttering with rats. The attic at Willoughby Court had been a haven of them, for both her mother and stepmother had had a loathing of cats, and one of her nanny’s favorite threats had been that she would lock her up there. The smell in this room was stronger, too – one with which Lydia was profoundly familiar from her residency in a London charity clinic. Rotting flesh and human filth.

The door on the south side of the big room would lead into the courtyard, she guessed, given that the windowless wall of the bedroom where the bed stood was north. At least that’s what the Baroness had said was true of all Chinese dwellings. The courtyard door was padlocked on the outside as well. In the other bedroom – the western one – the stench was worse, and the long table by the trapdoor near its west wall confirmed her fear. It was, as Jamie had described, stained, as if chunks of bleeding meat had been set carelessly down on one end of it, and there were spatters and dribbles of other substances, dark on the pale wood. Of the jars and bottles he’d seen there, all that remained were a sort of chafing dish and couple of small clay drinking-vessels stained with dark residue.

They must have cleared everything off after Jamie snooped through
.

She took the candle from the chafing dish, hunted in the table drawer and found a box of matches. Whispered another prayer of relief. It was hard to guess how much daylight was left, but the thought of being in this place after full dark fell – completely blind – sickened her. She had Jamie’s word that the poor wretches in the cellar were locked up in some fashion, but anything could have changed in the past two days. She lit the candle, descended the stair – also not locked nor even equipped with a lock.
Mrs Tso can’t have had the scheme to use them for very long. She must have counted on keeping the pavilion itself under lock and key
.

From what she’d heard of Mrs Tso, it was hard to imagine any member of the woman’s household would dare go poking around in a place where they weren’t supposed to be.

The stench at the bottom of the stairs was horrific, but still not worse than the yard behind the surgical theater of the charity hospital on a hot day after they’d been doing amputations. Lydia held the candle high up, squinting to see and not daring to go closer to the two men whose sleeping forms she could just make out.

They were chained to the walls at opposite ends of the little brick strongroom. There were buckets for drinking water and waste, but it was clear that both prisoners were beginning to forget that earliest of civilized behaviors. It was also clear, as far as Lydia could see, that the room was cleaned on a regular basis. They had blankets and quilts. Rats darted in the dense shadows, chewed on the half-eaten carcasses that lay on the floor nearby: what looked like part of a chicken and the half-picked leg of a goat.

She did this to them.
Lydia backed carefully up the stairs, trembling and, despite herself, slightly faint.
Deliberately infected them, in the hopes of controlling the rest
. For a moment her mind flashed to Miranda, to what it felt like to hold her child in her arms.