Daylight on Iron Mountain

by David Wingrove

  ‘I like that,’ Li Chao Ch’in said. ‘It seems…’

  ‘An elegant solution,’ Wang Hui So finished for him.

  There was sudden laughter. The laughter of relief, at the thought that this might yet work. That they might, after all, survive the day.

  ‘So what do you need?’ Tsu Chen asked. ‘You want us to sign a document, empowering the marshals?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Shepherd said, getting to his feet. ‘Just your word of agreement.’

  Li Chao Ch’in looked about him, then back at Shepherd again. ‘You have it. But you said about us moving away from here…’

  There was a sudden hammering at the door. Shepherd walked across and threw it open. One of the Ministry’s agents stood there, head bowed, what looked like a small parcel in one hand. There was a whispered exchange between the two, then Shepherd came back across to them. He had the parcel.

  He held it out to Li Chao Ch’in.

  ‘It is for you, Lord Li. From your “Master”, Tsao Ch’un. Our agents have checked it for poisons and explosives.’

  Li Chao Ch’in reached across and took the parcel from Shepherd. He looked inside.’What is it?’

  Shepherd looked down. ‘A tape. From Tongjiang…’

  Li Chao Ch’in’s face changed. All colour blanched from it. And the parcel… he held it away from him now, as if he held some dead thing.

  ‘Do you want to be alone?’ Tsu Chen asked gently.

  Li Chao Ch’in hesitated, then, in a small, quiet voice. ‘No… we’d best all see this. I…’

  He groaned, closing his eyes, knowing what he was about to see. His worst fears made real.

  Wang Hui So reached across, put his hand over his cousin’s. But he said nothing, for there was nothing to be said.

  Li Chao Ch’in thrust the parcel towards Shepherd again. ‘Put it on…’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The T’ang met Shepherd’s eyes. There was anger in them as well as hurt. Uncertainty too. Maybe Tsao Ch’un had spared his family…

  Only the tape showed otherwise. Tongjiang was burning, and there, in the gardens where he had stood but half a day ago, lay three of his sons: dead, their eyes sightless, their naked bodies smeared with blood.

  Seeing that, Li Chao Ch’in made a strange, half-choking noise. ‘Kuan Yin preserve us all…’

  But worse was to come. Panning away from that awful sight, the camera showed another – showed his wife, baby daughters, and Li Peng, being led in chains, up into the back of an unmarked cruiser.

  And there, just in the background, visible for a moment beyond his family, was the First Dragon, Shen Fu: his wrists and ankles bound, being carried on a stake, up into another of Tsao Ch’un’s craft.

  Li Chao Ch’in groaned again.

  The camera jerked round, reacting to the sound of shots. There, near one of the doors at the back of the east wing, soldiers were waiting, guns raised, picking off whoever emerged. Laughing as they shot the poor devils who staggered out, their hair and clothes on fire.

  Li Chao Ch’in buried his face in his hands. He could bear to see no more.

  ‘Enough!’ Shepherd called, his face, usually so hard, touched by Li Chao Ch’in’s suffering.

  The tape stopped.

  ‘Aiya,’ Wang Hui So said softly, staring at his cousin who sat there now, sobbing in the sudden silence of the room.

  But there was nothing to be said.

  In the seventh subterranean level of the Black Tower, in a cellar which had been adapted for the task, lay the chamber. There, naked on the slab in the centre of that white-tiled room, lay Shen Fu, his hands and feet bound tight. Taut wires attached him to the brightly polished electrodes that gleamed in the scouring white light from overhead.

  Tsao Ch’un had stripped off. All he wore was his butcher’s apron. In the heated iron brazier close by were the implements, ready for his use.

  He had promised himself this, from the moment when he’d heard that Shen Fu had sided with the Seven. The First Dragon deserved to die. Only he, Tsao Ch’un, had no intention of letting him die. He was interested only in giving him pain, endless pain.

  Right now Shen Fu lay there, as if at his ease, his chest rising and falling slowly, his eyes closed. He seemed almost relaxed. But that would change. And as for closing his eyes…

  Tsao Chun reached out for the heated clippers and smiled.

  He’d be fucked if the bastard was allowed to close his eyes.

  *

  Wolfgang Ebert stood by the board, looking on as his team of hackers responded to the latest assault.

  They were trying to shut Bremen down, to infiltrate its computer systems and switch the whole thing off. Only his men were preventing that; tracking each new attack and deflecting it. For the last three hours they had tried, just as Shepherd had said they would, and now their attempts were getting more and more desperate. What had begun as a kind of dance, a trial of intelligence and agility, had turned into smash and grab raids.

  Ebert smiled. They could try smashing and grabbing as much as they liked, only it was a stalemate. And the longer it went on…

  Something on one of the screens caught his attention.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to it.

  ‘What do you…?’ his man began, then let the query drop. ‘Shit…’

  Pixel by pixel, it seemed, the screen was turning black. Like an old mirror, flecked with black spots, the darkness on the end screen slowly grew.

  Ebert looked along the line. Every screen was now affected.

  ‘What can you do?’ he asked, looking to the team leader.

  The young man shrugged. ‘If we had any idea what it was… it’s not a virus…’

  The end screen was completely black now, while the others…

  Everything blinked, like there’d been a power surge. A moment later there was a fanfare, a faint, tinny little tune, like you’d get from a child’s computer game when you’d made another level. One second later the whole damn place switched off.

  In the sudden dark, voices yelled and people knocked against each other in the room. If they’d shut the big circulation fans down then they were all in trouble. Without air they couldn’t breath. Not for long, anyway.

  Ebert touched out a code on the communicator inset into his wrist. A moment later a voice sounded in his head.

  ‘Wolfgang? What’s happened? The whole fucking lot’s closed down!’

  ‘I know. And I can’t explain it. One moment things were fine, the next…’

  ‘Are none of your machines working?’

  ‘Not one. Something closed them all down…’ Wolfgang paused. He had an idea. ‘Amos… can you get hold of Alison? She had a team working on this kind of thing and—’

  ‘Alison’s dead.’

  ‘What!’ The news shocked him. But Amos didn’t go into detail.

  ‘Get out of there at once,’ Shepherd said. ‘We’re giving Bremen up. The troops are out and the T’ang are elsewhere, and as for the new First Dragon…’

  The voiced in his head vanished, like it had been switched off.

  Ebert swallowed. Then, calming himself, gave the order to withdraw.

  Shepherd crouched over the body, staring at it in shock.

  Wang Hui So had been shot twice, once in the heart and once in the head, the second bullet taking the top of his skull clean off.

  The assassin had been one of his own. A groom called Yu Ch’o, a Wang family retainer who had served since childhood, which was almost thirty years. Why he’d done it they would never know, for he’d used the third bullet in his gun on himself.

  The others had gone on already, to the Domain. He could think of no safer place right now. But was anywhere truly safe when something like this could happen?

  It was an ill omen. Things had been on the turn, but now…

  Amos stood back, letting the medics take the body away. He was tempted to keep this a secret for a time. Because when news of this got out there would be another
great surge of fear.

  He could sense it in the air. Could see it, there in the eyes of those that surrounded him. People were afraid. And with every new event that fear grew. The uncertainty of it all ate away at them. It bored into their psyches like acid. Out there, in the levels, they were running scared. Literally so. He had seen for himself news item after news item showing the riots and the protests, and the endless mass hysteria.

  Only a quick and decisive result could end it, and that was precisely what he didn’t want. Only Tsao Ch’un could benefit from a rapid resolution of events.

  But as for Wang Hui So…

  He walked through, into the communications room and, giving his code, had himself pasted through to the Domain.

  It was Tsu Chen who answered him.

  ‘Lord Tsu… I have bad news…’

  Tsu Chen’s face barely reacted. ‘What other kind is there?’

  ‘There is bad and there is bad. And this…’ Amos swallowed, then came straight out with it. ‘Wang Hui So is dead. Assassinated by his own groom.’

  ‘Aiya!’ Tsu Chen looked horrified. ‘Who else knows?’

  ‘A handful of men. But they’ve been sworn to secrecy.’

  ‘We’re not announcing this, then?’

  ‘Not yet. I thought…’

  Amos stopped. There was a news screen just across the room from him. The sound had been turned down but he could see, as clear as day, just what had happened.

  ‘Oh Christ… Oh Jesus Christ…’

  Tsao Ch’un stood at the sink, washing the blood from his arms.

  ‘This had better be good,’ he said, snarling threateningly at his steward, who knelt there, his head pressed to the tiled floor.

  There was a faint moan from the man on the slab. He was still alive, though the gods knew how.

  Tsao Ch’un grabbed a towel, then left the room, with barely a glance at his prisoner.

  ‘This better be really fucking good.’

  Li Chao Ch’in let his head fall into his hands. Beside him Hou Hsin-Fa groaned.

  On the screen, Wu Hsien was dragged towards camera, his arms held by two guards who showed him less respect than a common criminal. Wu Hsien’s left eye was missing, the socket black and swollen, while his face and shoulders showed signs of a severe beating. But he was still alive, still defiant.

  Defiant, sure, but dead. Whenever Tsao Ch’un ordered it.

  As Tsu Chen returned to the room, Li Chao Ch’in turned to him. ‘Have you seen?’

  ‘I have. I was on the line to Shepherd and…’

  The two T’ang turned to face Tsu Chen, surprised by the tremor in his voice.

  ‘What is it?’ Hou Hsin-Fa asked quietly. ‘What now?’

  ‘It is Wang Hui So. He’s dead. His groom…’

  ‘Aiya!’ Hou looked to Li Chao Ch’in, then back at Tsu Chen. ‘Three of us gone…’

  ‘We are cursed,’ Li Chao Ch’in said, looking back at the screen. ‘The gods are repaying us for serving that demon loyally all those years. We’d have had better treatment from the Lord of Hell.’

  Tsu Chen stared at his fellow T’ang, astonished by his outburst.

  ‘Cursed? No, cousin Li. But we are at war, and we must win or see everything we built lost.’

  Li Chao Ch’in turned to him, his face fierce yet also anguished. ‘Is it not all already lost? For myself—’

  But Tsu Chen shouted him down. ‘For yourself ? Do you wish to stand down, cousin?’

  ‘No… No, I…’

  ‘Then take heart. Until he has us all, he has but part of us. We are Seven, neh? And Seven is stronger than One. We have but to kill him and it is done.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’ Hou Hsin-Fa asked.

  ‘I do not know. And yet I must believe we can. Or else, what hope is there for any of us?’

  ‘None at all,’ Li Chao Ch’in said, in a low, defeated voice.

  ‘You must stop this, cousin!’ Tsu Chen said, getting angry now. ‘If you do not show strength, then how do you expect—’

  He stopped dead, not finishing the sentence, his jaw dropping at the sight that now greeted his eyes.

  ‘Gods…’

  The other two turned to look… and groaned. For there, centre screen, was Tsao Ch’un’s eldest son, Tsao Heng, grinning into camera, Wu Hsien’s bloodied head on the stake he held in his hand.

  ‘Barbarians…’ Hou Hsin-Fa said quietly. ‘They’re all bloody barbarians…’

  But then we knew that, Tsu Chen thought, staring bitterly at the sight of his dead friend’s damaged face. We knew that from the first day we worked with him.

  Tsao Ch’un looked a ghastly sight as he stared up at the giant screen. He was naked beneath his apron, the pure white of which was spattered with blood and gobbets of flesh. But it was not that which caught his servants’ eyes as they looked on at their Lord and Master, it was the erection he sported; an erection which a man fifty years his junior would have been proud of.

  They tried not to look, but it was impossible not to see it. Besides, Tsao Ch’un himself did not care. All he cared for was the fact that another of the Seven was dead, his head on a stick.

  ‘At last!’ the great man said, a ferocious smile lighting his features. ‘At fucking last!’

  With Fan Chang and Wu Hsien dead and Shen Fu on the torture slab, all was well in Tsao Ch’un’s world. Five more – six, if you counted Shepherd – and he’d be done with it. Until then…

  ‘Send in the Third Banner,’ he barked, looking to his marshal who stood by the great double doors, his head bowed. ‘I want Bremen destroyed! Issue the men with ice-eaters…’

  ‘Is that wise, Chieh Hsia,’ the man began. But Tsao Ch’un shouted him down.

  ‘I don’t care if it’s fucking wise! I want it done!’

  The marshal fell to his knees. ‘Yes, Chieh Hsia.’

  Tsao Ch’un turned back, forgetting the man instantly. He rubbed his hands together and laughed. ‘That’s my boy… And I thought you’d lost your touch.’

  The dungeon keeper stood beside the slab, looking down at his charge.

  With that much damage done to him, the First Dragon ought to have been dead. Any other man would surely have succumbed. Then again, it was said that Tsao Ch’un knew ways of keeping a man alive – of hurting without harming. Harming permanently, that was. Not that there wasn’t evidence enough of real harm. Why, there was barely a bone that was not broken, barely a nerve-ending unpunished by the electrodes. And the man’s eyes…

  Had he not seen it before, he might have felt nauseous at the sight, only in the years he’d worked as dungeon keeper, he had seen many like this one. Tsao Ch’un’s ‘special guests’ as he liked to call them. Men whose conduct had annoyed the great man sufficiently to warrant his special attentions.

  Many would have called the great man a sadist. But he felt differently. To him, Tsao Ch’un was, in this one respect, an artist; a man immensely skilled in the art of creating pain. Just as a great and talented woman might have learned the arts of lovemaking, in order to enhance and intensify the pleasure of sex, so Tsao Ch’un had practised his arts across the years, until he could make a man sing on the slab; could make him beg and gibber and betray.

  Especially the last.

  Shen Fu seemed to be sleeping. He seemed as if in a dream. Whatever pain he had suffered – and he surely must have suffered much – seemed now to have left him. He seemed quite beyond pain. And yet how could that be so? When his Master returned it would begin again. He knew that without doubt, and surely Shen Fu knew that too? Only he seemed calm now, untroubled.

  The dungeon keeper reached out, his fingertips gently touching the sleeping man’s face, as if to bless him. Then, knowing his Master would soon return, he hurried from the room, back to the tiny cell he called his home.

  Karl let his head rest against the wall. They had been fighting for the best part of a day now, skirmish after skirmish, and he was exhausted. Across from him Dag sat where he’d sat for the la
st two hours, staring into space with a vaguely surprised air about him, the hole in his forehead where the laser had burned him puckered and black now.

  A lot of their men were dead, and even those that still lived – men like himself – were barely so. Cut off from reinforcements and steadily running out of ammunition, it was only a matter of time. As soon as the enemy had taken out their cruisers on the roof he’d known the game was up. Jump in, jump out had been the strategy, but without aircraft…

  These Han were not as dumb as they looked. At least, their junior officers weren’t.

  He could hear them, further up the corridor, whispering to each other. They’d be making another assault real soon now. It had been at least twenty minutes since the last, and they had to know now that they were pushing against an open door. But they were being cautious. And who could blame them? They had time and numbers on their side.

  Ragnar lay out there somewhere, dying, his left leg blown off. He hadn’t made a sound in some while, so maybe he was dead. Who was to say? As for the others…

  Karl slowly turned his head, looking at the handful who’d survived. They were all sitting there, their backs against the wall, waiting.

  Henrik didn’t have a gun. He’d lost it earlier, but he had a grenade – his last – and he cradled it now like a child. Beside him, Sven had his head tilted back, his eyes closed, his big automatic balanced across his left knee. He had one clip left. After that he’d have to use the gun as a club. As for Einar…

  Einar looked like he’d been sprayed in a fine mist of blood. His face was dark with it, like a demon’s, his eyes showing bright and white amidst that caked mask. His handgun lay on the deck beside him to his left, his big hunting knife in his right hand.

  Karl smiled. If he was going to die, it was good to die alongside these men. And die they would, because Tsao Ch’un wasn’t taking any prisoners. They’d learned that early on.