All the onlookers stared at the executioner god, stunned; they didn't know what had happened.

Kheim kept the pistol pointed at them, while he rooted in his belt bag for charge, plunger, ball, wad. He reloaded the pistol right in front of them, shouting sharply once or twice, which made them jump.

Pistol reloaded, he aimed it at the guards, who fell back. Some kneeled, others stumbled away. He could see I Chen and his sailors toiling up the snow of the last slope. The caped priest said something, and Kheim aimed his pistol carefully at him and shot.

Again the loud bang of the explosion, like thunder in the car, and the plume of white smoke jetting out. The caped priest flew back as if struck by a giant invisible fist, tumbled down and lay writhing in the snow, his cape stained with blood.

Kheim strode through the smoke to Butterfly. He lifted her away from her captors, who quivered as if paralysed. He carried her in his arms down the trail. She was only semi conscious; very possibly the tea had been drugged.

He came to I Chen, who was huffing and puffing at the head of a gang of their sailors, all armed with flintlocks, a pistol and musket for each. 'Back to the ships,' Kheim ordered. 'Shoot any that get in the way.'

Going down the mountain was tremendously easier than going up had been, indeed it was a danger in that it felt so easy, while at the same time they were still light headed and half blinded, and so tired that they tended to slip, and more and more as it warmed and the snow softened and smashed under their feet. Carrying Butterfly, Kheim had his view of his footing obscured as well, and he slipped often, sometimes heavily. But two of his men walked at his sides when it was possible, holding him up by the elbows when he slipped, and despite all they made good time.

Crowds of people gathered each time they approached one of the high villages, and Kheim then gave over Butterfly to the men, so that he could hold the pistol aloft for all to see. If the crowds got in their way, he shot the man with the biggest headdress. The boom of the shot appeared to frighten the onlookers even more than the sudden collapse and bloody death of their priests and headmen, and Kheim thought it was probably a system in which local leaders were frequently executed for one thing or another by the guards of the Emperor.

In any case, the people they passed seemed paralysed mostly by the Chinese command of sound. Claps of thunder, accompanied by instant death, as in a lightning strike – that must have happened often enough in these exposed mountains to give them an idea of what the Chinese had mastered. Lightning in a tube.

Eventually Kheim gave Butterfly to his men, and marched down heavily at their head, reloading his gun and firing at any crowd close enough to hit, feeling a strange exultation rise in him, a terrible power over these ignorant primitives who could be awed to paralysis by a gun.

He was their executioner god made real, and he passed through them as if they were puppets whose strings had been cut.

He stopped his crew late in the day, to seize food from a village and eat it, then continued down again until nightfall. They took refuge in a storage building, a big stone walled wooden roofed barn, stuffed to the rafters with cloth, grain and gold. The men would have killed themselves carrying gold on their backs, but Kheim restricted them to one item apiece, either jewellery or a single disc ingot. 'We'll all come back some day,' he told them, I and end up richer than the Emperor.' He chose for himself a hummingbird moth figured in gold.

Though exhausted, he found it hard to lie down, or even to stop walking. After a nightmare interval, sitting half asleep by Butterfly's side, he woke them all before dawn and began the march downhill again, their guns all loaded and ready.

As they descended to the coast it became apparent that runners had passed them in the night, and warned the locals below of the disaster on the summit. A fighting force of men held the crossroads just above the great coastal city, shouting to the beat of drums, brandishing clubs, shields, spears and pikes. The descending Chinese were obviously outnumbered, the fifty men I Chen had brought approaching some four or five hundred local warriors.

'Spread out,' Kheim told his men. 'March right down the road at them, singing "Drunk Again on the Grand Canal" Get all the guns out front, and when I say stop, stop and aim at their leaders whoever has the most feathers on their head. All of you shoot together when I say fire, and then reload. Reload as fast as you can, but don't shoot again unless you hear me say so. If I do, fire and reload yet again.'

So they marched down the road, roaring the old drinking song at the top of their lungs, then stopped and fired a volley, and their flintlocks might as well have been a row of cannon, they had such an effect: many men knocked down and bleeding, the survivors among them running in a complete panic.

It had only taken one volley, and the coastal city was theirs. They could have burned it to the ground, taken anything in it; but Kheim marched them through the streets as quickly as possible, still singing as loudly as they could, until they were on the beach among the Chinese landing boats, and safe. They never even had to fire a second time.

Kheim went to I Chen and shook his hand. 'Many thanks,' he said to him formally before all the others. 'You saved us. They would have sacrificed Butterfly like a lamb, and killed the rest of us like flies.'

It seemed to Kheim only reasonable that the locals would soon recover from the shock of the guns, after which they would be dangerous in their numbers. Even now crowds were gathering at a safe distance to observe them. So after getting Butterfly and most of the men onto the ships, Kheim consulted with I Chen and their ships' provision masters, to see what they were still lacking for a voyage back across the Dahai. Then he took a big armed party ashore one last time, and after the ships' cannons were fired at the city, he and his men marched straight for the palace, singing again and stepping to the beat of their drums. At the palace they raced around the wall, and caught a group of priests and women escaping at a gate on the other side, and Kheim shot one priest, and had his men tie the others up.

After that he stood before the priests, and mimed his demands. His head still pounded painfully, he remained floating in the strange exhil aration of killing, and it was remarkable how easy it was to convey by mime alone a fairly elaborate list of demands. He pointed to himself and his men, then to the west, and made one hand sail away on the wind of the other one. He held up samples of food and the bags of tea leaves, indicated that these were wanted. He mimed them being brought to the beach. He went to the chief hostage and imitated untying him and waving farewell. If the goods didn't arrive… He pointed the gun at each hostage. But if they did, the Chinese would release everyone and sail away.

He acted out each step of the process, looking the hostages in the eyes and speaking only a little, as he judged it would only be a distraction to their comprehension. Then he had his men release all the women captured, and a few of the men without headdresses, and sent them out with clear instructions to get the required goods. He could tell by their eyes that they understood exactly what they were to do.

After that he marched the hostages to the beach, and they waited. That same afternoon men appeared in one of the main streets, bags slung down their backs from lines hung around their foreheads. They deposited these bags on the beach, bowing, and then retreated, still facing the Chinese. Dried meat; grain cakes; the little green leaves; gold discs and ornaments (though Kheim had not asked for these); blankets and bolts of the soft cloth. Looking at it all spread on the beach, Kheim felt like a tax collector, heavy and cruel; but also relieved; powerful in a tenuous fashion only, as it was by a magic he didn't understand or control. Above all he felt content. They had what they needed to get home.