The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang Part 22

The cave mouth by the Jade Emperor temple was the nearest exit from the control chamber, and Kwok's athletic frame took him there quickly. That meant it was faster to reach the Azure Clouds temple by going round the cutting in the eastern peak than by going through the tunnels in search of another exit. A soldier tossed Kwok one of the new German guns as he emerged, and he caught it one-handed.

He wasn't sure what had so upset HsienKo, but he did know that he had never seen her so pale, and that worried him.

There must be a serious problem for her to be so unsettled, and the only clue he had was that it involved that cursed Li. He had feared all along that that policeman would cause trouble, and he wasn't happy to be proved right.

He increased his pace to a run once he had reached the southern ridge that led down to the Azure Clouds temple and the Bridge of the G.o.ds. He burst into the temple at full tilt, ready to empty the whole magazine into anyone he found there. All he discovered, however, was a dead signalman and a radio with its power supply severed. The settings on the radio were odd, though, and definitely not a Black Scorpion or Nationalist frequency which in this area left only one real choice.

Kwok was disgusted; Li must have been in Shanghai when the j.a.panese briefly overran it in 1932, so why would he want to aid j.a.pan? Perhaps he had been working for them then, too.

That would be just the sort of thing Kwok might expect from such a dishonourable coward. Kwok had lost several friends that year; he wondered how many more might die as a result of the actions of traitors like Li.

He reminded himself to follow HsienKo's original instructions after killing Li, but with a difference he would ensure that the body would be delivered to the Emperor's doorstep.

' Dai lo Dai lo,' one of the soldiers called. Kwok turned back to the door, where the soldier was pointing down. 'Look.'

A splash of blood had crossed the doorway and more spots led off towards the cave mouth. So, Li was wounded; Sin's work, Kwok suspected. That would make him slower as well as easier to track.

The soldiers formed up, ready to follow Kwok in search of Li. c.o.c.king the MP38 with his free hand, Kwok marched off towards the cave mouth.

Eighteen ohan been an engineer of the railway line since it was laid. T B he interactions of so many pieces of mechanism to produce one smooth journey was a source of delight to him, and he was very proud of the old engine.

The troops who were the most common travellers on his train now had no appreciation for such mechanical artistry, but at least their philistine existence on the line was restricted to the coaches. Coaches were as much pa.s.sengers as were the humans inside, Bohan felt.

He looked out along the wooden platform that stretched beside the right side of the train. Most of the troops had boarded, but a few stragglers were moping around on the planks. He sounded the whistle, reminding them that the train was due to leave.

The whistle was so loud that he almost didn't hear the polite metallic knocking from the left side of the train. He turned to see what his fireman was up to and saw him standing nervously with his hands in the air. Three people were looking up at them from between the tracks. A baby-faced man with a s.h.a.ggy fringe and a tall white woman with a proud demeanour and tumbling dark hair both held handkerchiefs across their faces. A white man with a wide-brimmed hat low across his eyes and one loop of an enormous woollen scarf round his face stood between them. The first man held a gun, while the white man doffed his hat. 'Is this the Tai'an train?'

Bohan could only nod dumbly.

'Ahem, you wouldn't mind if we borrowed it for a while, would you? Only my friends and I don't really have the knack of navigating along telluric currents.'

Li had found a small pool in a depression, and paused to wash the blood from his leg. The dwarf's knife had barely touched it, yet his calf was open almost to the bone, or so it seemed to him. He marvelled that he could still walk at all, as he tore a strip from his suit jacket to form a bandage. The stolen uniform would just have to fit badly after all.

Once he had tied the cloth, he stood with difficulty and hobbled off in a new direction. The most important thing was to stop the blood trail that would lead Sin straight to him, and then get out of the area.

Whimpering no louder than the cries of a mouse, he chose a new tunnel and limped down it, his wounded leg trailing behind him.

Steel piston-arms spun the train's wheels into a dark blur as it arrowed through narrow cuttings in the foothills of the Shangdong ma.s.sif. The thick smoke billowing from the engine left a sort of fuzzy ghost-trail to indicate the train's recent pa.s.sage.

The Doctor had hung his coat and scarf on a lever and was watching the steam pressure gauge carefully, while Woo shovelled more coal into the boiler. This wasn't exactly the sort of action he had planned to take against the Black Scorpion there were people who were paid to do these things. Privately he thought that they should have kept the engine crew aboard instead of leaving them stranded in Jining.

Of course, there wasn't enough room for all of them, but he would have been happy to sit in a carriage for the good of all.

'How long to Tai'an?' Romana asked. She was at the rear of the footplate, holding on for dear life.

'About another forty minutes at this speed,' the Doctor shouted over the noise of the engine. Despite the noise and smoke, he was grinning broadly and obviously thoroughly enjoying himself. 'So long as we don't get the wrong type of leaves on the line.'

Woo looked up from his rather straining efforts. 'What is that supposed to mean?'

'I've no idea; it's just something you say in this business. I think it's some kind of superst.i.tious invocation.' He punctuated the words with a 'so there' nod. 'Did you say that T'ai Shan is where Greel first arrived?'

Romana nodded. 'According to HsienKo. She seems to think we'll approve of what she's doing.'

'So she said. I wonder what she means.'

'Self-justification is a characteristic of trauma-based psychoses.'

'I think there's more to it than that. She's not planning to rescue him at the point of death, you know.'

'She's not?'

'I think she hopes to short out the zygma beam so that he never makes it to 1872. That way her father will survive too.'

'But she would never become irradiated with chronons; there would be a temporal paradox!'

'I know. Remember she's from a primitive age, basing her work on the leavings of someone who was a scientific ignoramus in the first place.'

'Is everybody you meet like that?'

'No, no. Some of them are real crackpots.'

K9's antennae buzzed. 'Attention. Two aircraft approaching from the north.'

'Oh, not again!'

Woo straightened. 'j.a.panese raiders coming down from Jinan. HsienKo has picked a very dangerous place to carry out her plans everything north of T'ai Shan is held by the j.a.penese Twelfth Army.' After a few moments, he began to make out the distant drone of aircraft engines. It grew rapidly louder, and a few shots crackled from the windows of some of the carriages as the soldiers within opened fire.

The combination of the pounding steam engine and the roar of radial engines at full throttle drowned out any actual sound of gunfire, but the crash of exploding gla.s.s panes was warning enough. The Doctor hurled Romana to the floor of the engine as Woo dived for cover.

The attack was over in moments, but it felt more like minutes. The aircraft were very fast, however, and had pa.s.sed the train in seconds. Woo leant out the side of the engineering s.p.a.ce, twisting his head round to try to identify the type of aircraft which had attacked them if they had a bombload, then the train was in trouble. The planes had flashed overhead and beyond the train, however, so it was a few moments before he saw them peeling round against the clouds to set up another attack run. Both planes glinted silver, with no camouflage, and had wide wings that formed a long ellipse, with a surprisingly small fuselage behind the large radial engine. A small black smudge on each fuselage was an open c.o.c.kpit. He looked round at the others. 'Type 96s: Mitsubis.h.i.+ A5Ms. Two machine guns, no bombs.' He looked back out, then returned to the floor. 'Here they come again. This'll probably be the last run they've sacrificed weapons for speed and manoeuvrability in this model. This is just a nuisance raid, to show that they can do it whenever they feel like it. It's standard procedure to teach respect this way.'

'You seem to know a lot about j.a.panese equipment and strategy,' Romana called out over the renewed sound of splintering gla.s.s and wood. 'Have I missed something?'

'Work experience,' the Doctor suggested.

This time the planes came at the train head on. A cacophony of metallic squeals and howls erupted from the engine's boiler as bullets ricochetted from it, and a couple of small valves cracked open. While the wave of exploding splinters rushed back towards the end of the train, the Doctor cut off those valves, using his scarf to protect his hands from the sharp jets of steam.

The A5Ms peeled off away from the railway line, showing no sign of damage from the sporadically returned fire. Woo leant out from the side of the footplate. 'Yes, they're going.'

'Good.' The Doctor wiped his hands on his scarf. 'They haven't done any real damage. The tricky part will be getting off the train without those soldiers bothering us.'

'I've been thinking about that. Why don't we just jettison the carriages?'

'Aha. Excellent idea. We'll wait until we're nearer town, though, in case those planes come back.'

'They won't,' Woo promised.

Sin could scent the rich aroma of warm blood amidst the cool rock. It had a welcoming air, promising the pleasure of sustenance. He had no means to consume anything, of course, but the dimmest memories buried in his porcine cerebral cortex remembered how good it felt; how strong it made him.

In thermographic mode, his solid-state eyes could make out the light spots that were cooling blood droplets on the cold darkness of the ground at the edge of a black stretch of cold water. There were no more drops ahead, but the brightness of these last few indicated that they were more recent. The human wasn't far ahead, he calculated. Soon he could release its blood, and allow himself the luxury of recalling the taste and the strength gained by devouring living matter.

He hoped the presence of the other human mind would stay away while he did so. It had often interrupted this most heartfelt of pleasures, directing his body to take him elsewhere, so that the smell and warmth of the fading life could no longer invigorate him. Now, however, he couldn't feel it at all.

There were distant scuffling sounds from the caverns ahead, but the acoustics of the enclosed s.p.a.ces made direction-finding difficult. Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection, his targeting systems determined. A series of rapid calculations provided the original source in a microsecond, and Sin moved towards it.

Kwok silently indicated that the soldiers should spread out among the pillars and b.u.t.tresses of the expansive grotto.

Sound carried very well down here, what with all the echoes, and he didn't want to risk a stray whisper driving Li further out of sight.

Water dripped in loud plops somewhere outside the cones of illumination provided by the light bulbs, and Kwok stood still so that he could listen without the interference of the sounds of his own movement. The faint sussurations of moving cloth from the soldiers' uniforms and an almost imperceptible electrical hum from the lights were the only sounds in the grotto. The slight chill made his bandaged eye socket throb painfully.

Kwok disliked such places. In one way it was good: it limited the approaches an enemy could make. However, the darkness provided an excellent cloak for a fugitive such as Li.

If he had found the right sort of fissure to hide in, they could walk straight past him and never know it.

There was a faint click from the left, through the forest of glittering pillars. Kwok turned silently on his heel. It could have been a rat or something, but it could also have been a footstep, but all his soldiers were in sight. Kwok flipped open the folding stock of his MP38, and raised it to his shoulder. He was going to take no chances about this as far as aiming was concerned.

A pale head emerged from the shadow of one pillar about twenty yards away. Kwok's finger was squeezing the trigger before the face even turned to see who was there. A short childlike figure twitched through the air in a shower of sparks, and Kwok ceased firing, the noise echoing for several moments. d.a.m.n, he thought, it was Sin. Kwok rarely felt anything approximating fear, but when he did, it was usually in connection with Sin. He had never trusted its loyalty at the best of times, and had no idea how it would react to having a couple of dozen bullets put in it, especially if HsienKo was busy concentrating on the reactor and not on controlling him.

Sin sat up from where he had fallen.

The first few buildings of Tai'an were approaching rapidly, and Woo looked to the Doctor for confirmation that it was time to separate from the carriages. He couldn't say why he did so; he hadn't looked for instructions from anyone since he left Hong Kong. Perhaps it was because unlike his superiors then the Doctor had earned his respect.

The Doctor nodded, so Woo clambered up onto the tender behind the engine and picked his way carefully across the mound of coal and logs. At the rear, he lowered himself into the gap between it and the first carriage. He balanced himself with one foot on the coupling and the other on a thin ledge that surrounded its base.

Hanging on to the edge of the tender with one hand, he stretched down and pushed and shoved at the retaining pin in the coupling until it popped free. The leverage almost toppled him from his perch, but he recovered his balance, pressing himself relievedly against the grimy metal.

The front end of the nearest carriage was rapidly dropping away as it slowed, and Woo rather shakily scrambled back across the tender to the engine. 'We're on our own,' he said, delighted to be standing on a solid footing again.

Sin's targeting system swiftly worked out the reciprocal bearing for the projectiles that had impacted upon him. A human was there, holding a weapon which glowed with the heat of recent use.

It wasn't the human whose blood trail Sin had been following, but at least this one was in clear sight. Sin picked up his knife and started marching towards the human, already sensing the joys to follow.

The human opened fire again, the muzzle flashes momentarily causing Sin's vision to white-out, and the dwarf felt himself knocked back against a pillar by a rapid flurry of projectile impacts. There seemed to be no damage, however, and he advanced once more. The human shook his gun, but nothing happened; clearly there were no more projectiles stored within.

The human turned and ran, his thorax and legs brightening slightly in Sin's thermographic vision. Sin felt a surge of excitement as he realized that the human was afraid. Fear enriched the bouquet of the spilled blood, as did recent muscular activity. Hormones that spoke of the legacy of organic life would be released for his reminiscences: adrenalin, norepinephrine, various others that made the scent clearer and the sensation of being alive stronger.

Sin ran.

A dimly lit blur stepped out in his path, firing a weapon at point-blank range. The flashes blinded Sin as he fought to stay upright, but at this range he didn't need to see. A wide sweep with his arm produced a delicious squeal and a cloud of rich smells.

Kwok tossed his empty gun aside and bolted, trying not to hear the rapid footsteps hurtling across the rock floor of the grotto. There was a scream from behind that formed ice crystals in Kwok's spinal column, and he couldn't resist the far too human impulse to turn round.

Sin's sweeping arm had opened up the abdomen of one of the soldiers and a plume of blood and digestive juices sailed between him and the knife. The soldier's gun went off as he fell, blasting the electric lights into the darkness of oblivion.

In deference to millions of years of evolution which said that running about unfamiliar terrain with no way to see what was in front of you was a bad idea, Kwok froze immediately, knowing it was completely the wrong thing to do.

When Sin's vision cleared, not much had changed for him.

The flaming spots high in the cavern were no longer there, and the light levels had dropped, but he could still see perfectly well in the infra-red frequencies.

His target had stopped moving, but several humans were working up adrenalin surges as they converged on the sounds of death. Sin tried to repress a gurgling giggle of antic.i.p.ation, but to no avail.

This would be a veritable feast.

Footsteps echoed confusingly through the pitch-black cavern and Kwok started to back away slowly. He hoped Sin was equally blinded by the darkness, but he wouldn't like to bet on it. Sound, however, was at least a medium he could try to control, so he moved very carefully.

A warbling scream that seemed like the very sound of life draining away howled through the grotto, then guns started firing. The muzzle flashes stung with their sharpness in the dark, but allowed Kwok to see that he had somehow stumbled into one of the Rounds of the seventh circle of Dante's h.e.l.l.

The brief rapid flashes illuminated Sin ripping open a soldier's chest as efficiently as any Aztec priest. Scorched wood chips and gobbets of blood and flesh were blasted from both of them under the gunfire of at least three soldiers.

Because of the briefness and rapidity of the muzzle flashes, Sin's movements were like those of a very jerky old film being played at the wrong frame speed. In this fitful light, he leapt from his current victim, hurling himself at the nearest attacker. Sin's knife glowed redly as it tore into the man's groin. The soldier doubled up, suspended in slow motion by the rapid-fire lighting, to have his throat impaled on the point of the knife.

Kwok's foot nudged a rock as he drew back in horror and Sin's head turned towards the noise, his white-painted leer now the demonic red shade of the blood that gathered in the grooves of his carved face. Laughter that was part childish delight and part swinish grunting swirled around Kwok.

Kwok turned and ran, praying that the spirits of the mountain wouldn't obstruct him with rocks that could trip him.

Li had pulled himself up through a steep fissure to a higher level while any noise he made was covered by the sounds of gunfire and screaming. It had been absolute h.e.l.l on his arms, but if it saved his life then it would have been worth it. Now slumped against the wall under a curving ramp, he could feel his heart racing; he had the somewhat irrational idea that the sound of it might be magnified by the echo of the caves and draw the traitors to him.

He ignored the irony of his choice of descriptions HsienKo's betrayal of her superiors for the sake of chaos and anarchy was a far greater crime than his own changing of sides in the name of order. In j.a.pan, everyone knew who was boss and grew up with the habit of obedience ingrained in them.

It used to be like that here in the old days, but not any more. Not while the Nationalists and Communists both tried to impose conflicting edicts. True, things had been even worse twenty years ago when many more warlords had squabbled among themselves, but that didn't excuse the current behaviour.

Ryuji Matsu had recognized that need for order in Li in 1932, and had been gratified by Li's appreciation of the j.a.panese efficiency. That was when he had suggested the partners.h.i.+p. j.a.pan needed order in China so that trade would be attracted into the region. The sort of indecision that had led to the sanctions put on j.a.pan by Shanghai that year was bad for China too, he had pointed out.

Li could see that for himself: children working in factories or brothels, and coolies merely property of their owners.

Everyone was on a starvation diet except the powers which fought amongst themselves and destroyed the population in the crossfire.

Li had seen the truth of Matsu's words at once, immediately agreeing to help in any way he could. He had heard the stories of atrocities in Manchuria, of course, but as one of the so-called authorities in the city, he knew how much of what the KMT publicized was true on average, so he didn't believe it. He and his wife would be able to live in complete safety once these bandits and their ilk had been subdued, and if it took the j.a.panese to do what his own government was too uninterested to do, then so be it.

Li realized his mind was wandering; a result of his fear, no doubt. It was an unaccustomed feeling, fear. He wondered vaguely if this was how people felt when he was chasing them.

Did they also identify every drop of water as the footstep of an approaching pursuer? He clenched his fists, digging his fingernails into his palms.

Be calm, he told himself; you are a rational man, not a hunted animal to rely on primal instincts. Reason and determination had seen him through his life so far they would see him through this, too. That certainty had been drummed into him all through his childhood usually by force.