Hunt Among the Killers of Men by Gabriel Hunt Page B

He had to duck; the headroom was low.
    The stairs broadened into a tiny pavilion with carved rails, all of it indistinguishable beneath caked, stinking muck.
    Twin terra-cotta sentries stood mute guard over the pavilion with long-corroded weapons of bronze that had rotted away to stubs and flakes. The standing soldiers appeared to have been dunked in cake batter and left to decay for a century. Their features were not apparent. They were clotted and bloblike, runny pseudohuman monstrosities, more manlike in size and general outline than in any internal detail.
    The pavilion faced a grand chamber at least the size of a football field. The distant sound of a small stream or other subterranean waterway was louder here, joining with the other ambient noises and echoing slightly, indicating that this was a very big room.
    The whole place was a hibernaculum.
    The concave dome of the ceiling was wall-to-wall with thousands of nesting bats. He could identify at least three species at this distance—the horseshoe bat, the long-fingered bat and the roundleaf bat. There were also lizards and annelids and other scavenger-parasites that fed on bat guano, which would be abundant indeed here.
    Gabriel stepped forward very cautiously.
    To either side of the pavilion he could now make out two large, hinged wooden constructions like catapults or small cranes. A shaft held an ironbound basket the size of a bale of hay aloft over a reservoir, which Gabriel presumed had once been filled with water, long-since evaporated.
    And below, massed on the floor of the huge chamber, standing in a foot-deep tar pit of urine and guano, was Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s army of life-sized figures.
    Then Gabriel heard Qi calling out to him from above, as loudly as she could, and thousands of bats took wing, flying straight for him.

Chapter 10
    Gabriel smashed the only fuel lantern he had to make a pool of fire near the archway during his hasty retreat, but the bats’ sonar had unerringly informed them of a new way out of the cave. Some of them sported a wingspan of two feet or more.
    From Qi’s point of view it was as though Gabriel was propelled out of the base of the idol by an unbroken thunderhead of swarming bats.
    They were not vampires or the dreadnaught-sized killers of the Amazon, but this many airborne teeth and claws could make life terribly inconvenient, especially if the horde was hungry.
    Gabriel struck Qi like a linebacker, sprawling them both onto the floor, shielding her face and burying his own into her shoulder in a duck-and-cover as the black beehive madness of the bats filled the shrine room. Eventually they would peter out and find their way into the night. They were just bats. But Gabriel did not know if Qi harbored any phobias or other reactive behaviors that might complicate their survival right now.
    When the first wave ebbed, they worked togetherto seal the sliding iron portal. With two pairs of shoulders and thighs heaving and amped up on adrenaline, they no longer required the motorcycle to move the door.
    Stragglers winged wildly about the upper reaches of the room. Gabriel looked as though he had lost a paintball fight, and this time Qi’s reaction could not be dammed back. She found his appearance hilarious.
    “Very funny,” said Gabriel.
    “I suppose you’ll be wanting to use the bath again?” she said.
    “Briefly,” he said.
    “Bats are good luck all over Asia.”
    “But not all over my head.” Gabriel made his way to the other shrine, stripping off his shirt as he went.
    “My mother used to tell me,” Qi said, following, “if a bat lands on your head, you should hope the cricket sees rain coming because the bat won’t get off your head until it hears thunder.”
    He ducked his head under the now cool water, ran his fingers through his hair. He finally came up for air again.
    Qi was still beset with mirth over Gabriel’s condition. It buoyed him to see that Qi could laugh.
    He described for her what he’d found in