Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences (18 page)

In that moment he was, he knew, quite lost in a safe and convenient insanity wherein the rules of the world no longer applied, lost where myth and legend replaced the rational and the real. The hook dipped, carving a line in the dirt floor as it howled about its deadly arc, and Lachlan wondered in passing if he spied thin liquid, bright red and bubbling, seeping up from the flesh-pale gouge it left in the earth.

Then he was running, the hook still whirling overhead, his voice a harsh cry echoing off the mountainside as he pelted past the furious eyes of the
tekoteko
that overlooked the wharenui, legs pounding as he reached the lake shore.

A quick look over his shoulder told him that he was not alone. Pulling himself from the wreckage, Frank Ascot was hot on his heels, his face a livid mask of blood.

Lachlan ran. The mist hung thick in the air where the waterfall spilled free, near the few small trees that clung to the cliff-edge. Lachlan envisioned himself swinging the hook on its rope, wrapping around one of those stunted trees, and swinging through hundreds of feet of shadow, his fine feather cloak spread out behind him like the wings of some nightbird, like the great eagle
Hokioi
in his rage. With a quick tug he would shear through his anchor tree, reel the hook back to himself, and ride the Pacific winds all the way back to England.

He was Maui, a legend of flesh who could break the rules of the world, the laws of the Empire, spit in his father’s face.

It seemed so perfect, so unpredictable.

Then he saw it; a great, looming brown eye with its pupil of blazing white as it swelled up from the glowing fog.

“Away with you,
taniwha!”
he barked, a mad sound, and swung the hook out and over his head. “Fear me!”

“Sir? Is that you?” came an uncertain call from the fog.

Reality slammed home, but already it was too late. The hook flew true and deadly, slicing a thin tear in Barry’s bizarre construct and wrapping itself around the poles that held his would-be escape vessel aloft.

Hot air shrieked from the balloon, sending the dirigible spiralling out over the void. It was all Lachlan could do to wrap both hands around the rope before he was lifted from his feet and pulled over the cliff face, leaving Ascot’s furious screams behind as momentum and gravity whipped him around in dizzying circles. Above him, Lachlan could hear Barry swearing over the hissing and whining of the slap-dash airship.

“Hold on sir,” Barry yelled. “I’ll have this sorted in a two shakes of a dog’s hind leg.”

Lachlan couldn’t answer. It was taking all his strength just to hold on as they plunged from the hole in the world where the river shone, down into the well of shadows.

“Sir, I’m going to put her down, nice and easy,” Barry called with impossible optimism, as the craft fell sideways in sickening arcs across the sky.

The bush-clad valley spiralled nearer. When they hit the ground and the propane tank sheared open in a flurry of sparks, it would all be over, and for nothing. Lachlan looked up to where the gash in the canvas fluttered and snapped.

Sometimes, we must be bigger than we really are.

They dropped into the mists.

Summoning what was left of his flagging strength, Lachlan reached over his head and stretched, pulling himself up the rope one aching foot at a time, feathers billowing behind him like dark wings. The rope was wrapped right around the balloon’s metal poles, pinching it in the middle so that it appeared like a bloated figure-of-eight. The hook dangled in a loop of its own making an arm’s reach from the tear. His focus intent on the artefact, Lachlan climbed past the tractor cab, refusing to contemplate the empty space below him. Wrapping a leg hard around the nearest pole, daring to let go of the rope with one raw, blistered hand, Lachlan lunged out and grabbed the hook’s smooth edge.

Maui did not care for the rules of the world. Maui had cast a rope to catch
te Ra
, the sun; had thrown a hook which pulled a land of plenty from the sea. Lachlan King was not Maui, was not made of the same stuff as that ancient hero, but he was the son of knights long dead, and he could be more than his father had ever dreamed he might be.

Lachlan tugged the hook towards him and began to haul in the rope, drawing its length through its own loops, his eyes straying to the high glow of sunlight that slid, breath by breath, towards darkness.

Perhaps a little insanity lingered. Time for
te Ra
to catch itself a fish.

Lachlan hooked the coil over his shoulder and slid down the pole, ignoring the pain in his palms, hitting the hansom platform with a grunt. The roar of water was loud in his ears now, the mist shadow-shrouded except for the propane’s glow. The unseen earth rushed ever closer.

Lachlan lashed a hasty knot through the base of the cannon-armature, wrapped one arm around a gun-barrel and hurled the rope up and out, towards the disappearing sun. He braced himself and hoped that, in this modern world, there was still room for the making of legends.

“Sir?” Barry’s concerned voice seemed very distant, lost in the mist, as the rope flew away from him.

The dirigible jerked suddenly and snapped backwards, nearly tossing both agents into the mists as its descent was violently interrupted. Both men clutched onto the gun platform for dear life as it swung pendulously to and fro. Between the roar of the waterfall and the swallowing mists, Lachlan and Barry were blind and deaf, bobbing in the fog, hanging with no visible means of support, the propane flame illuminating nothing but white all around.

“For goodness’ sake lad, turn off that light before they find us,” Lachlan chided.

“Sir, what just happened?” Barry asked, struggling to secure a foothold.

Lachlan closed his eyes and let a smile wrinkle his exhausted features. “I believe that we just caught the sun.”

Barry squinted over his head. “Are you sure? Because I think that looks like some sort of swing-bridge up there. I don’t suspect it’s likely to hold this weight for long.”

Lachlan took a deep breath, feeling the strain in his shoulders. This night wasn’t over yet. “Let’s get out of here with what we came for, lad. I’ll tell you what I can on the way.”

“Righto,” Barry agreed, hauling himself up the hansom to grasp the rope in one hand, and reaching out to Lachlan with the other. “If we can make it back to where the tractor was, sir, I believe I left the billy there. We might have time for a nice cup of tea.”

“That,” Lachlan breathed, “would be quite divine.”

The Incident
of the Clockwork Mikoshi

Lauren Harris

Kyoto, Japan

July 15, 1864

First Year of Emperor Keio

People always gave Ministry Agent Lawrence P. Dagenhart the kind of wide berth reserved for night men, mug-hunters, and sooty chavies of the light-fingered sort. He usually had his reputation to thank, but now people scattered to either side of the Kamo River bridge because he was exactly what the Emperor’s woodblock-prints taught them to fear—a foreigner.

He had no quarrel with the people of Kyoto, not yet in any case. They weren’t as used to Europeans as the population at his post in Nagasaki, so the sight of a five-foot-eleven bodyguard with a prosthetic brass arm and a massive horse was bound to cause distress. The bridge was packed with people headed toward the main city for the parade. Of course, the Aizu Lord would choose the busiest day of the biggest festival in Kyoto to ask his help in solving a murder. At least he was heading into the smaller, quieter district of Gion. Planks trembled under Brutus’s hooves, and Law, ever late to the party of discretion, dismounted.

He rolled both shoulders—one flesh, one fiction—and attributed the fear to fox mentality. The Emperor’s subjects, he had deduced during his time on assignment, were either the scattering sort or the fighting sort, startled foxes or startled hounds, and it was only the latter Law was bothered about.

He was a hound when it came to fights, but Law reckoned he was a fox with everything else. He’d been running since the day he learned to walk. Running from a home overrun with cholera to beg on Artillerie lane, from begging to bare-knuckle boxing in the East End rings and from that to play personal guard for a clankerton on the edge of London. Then, when the man realised there was a brain beneath his bowler, to Oxford. After that… well, he tried not to think much about what happened after that.

Over the hump of the bridge, Law spied the turquoise uniform coat of a Shinsengumi patrol officer. He squinted, trying to decide if it was Investigator Ogawa or a page sent to bring the
gaijin
to the murder site. Law might solve mysteries for a living, but determining anyone’s age in Japan was like shooting a river scamp halfway across the Thames with a Colt—mostly luck and likely to backfire. He brought Brutus to a halt, took in a slow breath to clear his head, then drew his Remington 44 and snapped out the cylinder, finding it full. They’d called him to shoot. Might as well make sure he was prepared.

He holstered the revolver and extended his mechanical left arm, sliding his right hand down to flip open a compartment of loaded magazines on his metallic bicep. With all the steam his arm generated, he’d been afraid the black powder would dampen to uselessness, but the clankertons had assured him it was quite waterproof. That had remained true, but Law still had a hard time putting away the instincts of an East ender. Water plus black powder equaled a ball in the backside.

Or the shoulder, as it happened.

He loaded a magazine of rifle bullets into the cavity on his bronze forearm and finessed it into place, keeping the hammer locked inside his wrist lest he shoot off a leg as well.

The lad spotted him just as he finished loading and approached. He executed a graceful bow, half-cat and half-clockwork. Investigators—or
shinobi
, as the Japanese called them—were more spy than samurai. By all accounts they blurred the line of supernatural, and by the time Law reached the end of the bridge, he’d decided.

“Investigator Ogawa.” He tipped his bowler and the suggestion of a smile tensed the youth’s black eyes.

“I am honoured to meet you, Agent Dagenhart,” a sweet alto voice returned in English, much better pronounced than his own.

He took a step back, eyes flicking to the Investigator’s throat, then back up at the childlike face. His left arm hissed, articulated joints venting steam into the muggy summer air as he reached up to remove his headwear properly. “Beggin’ yer pardon, miss,” he said. “I was expecting… well, beggin’ yer pardon, miss…”

The woman in the Shinsengumi uniform gave her strange, not-quite smile again. “I am often Investigator Ogawa,” she said. “But you may call me Tokiko Hanamura. Come with me—our victim is a
tokeiya-san
.”

A clockmaker? Law replaced his bowler and forced himself back into a business frame of mind. Well, as business went in this Land of the Rising Sun. It would have been nice if someone had told him he would be partnered with a woman. Just when he thought he understood the way this country worked…

The Shirakawa district’s tea houses and specialty shops were set close to narrow stone roads, as if corralling the small river between them. Cherry trees fringed the embankments and cast a lace of shadows onto the green water. There was so much colour here, so much life, all carefully tended. Back in Whitechapel, the only green Law ever saw was in half-healed bruises and the coat of slime at the base of the buildings. You wanted green growing things? You left London.

Law ducked through the doorway of the
tokeiya
and banged his head on the lintel, toppling his bowler to the floor.

“Bloody end to you too,” he muttered, remembering too late his companion was both an English-speaker and a lady. As Law bent to retrieve his nab, the pneumatic hiss and clicks of his prosthetic left arm blended with the shop’s clockwork ticks and sighs. Most tokeiya, the Japanese clock-shops, belonged to one side of the country’s civil conflict or the other. Harassment of the shop owners was not uncommon as Bakufu supporters like the Shinsengumi warred with Imperialists, who harnessed the infernal technology for the sole purpose of kicking those same foreigners out boots over bowlers.

This time, though, the Imperialist’s xenophobia didn’t seem to be at fault. That was why the Aizu Lord had called Law all the way from Nagasaki, requesting he bring his “unique Ministry skills to bear on a problem requiring supernatural expertise.” Law wagered that was the honorific version of “We’ve no idea what’s got us in the suds, so if swords don’t work, could he try shooting it?”

Unwilling to alienate a powerful member of the Bakufu, Law shelved his Tengu investigation, saddled Brutus, and made the long, humid trip to Kyoto. If he happened to have liquored his boots before he left, well… he was from Whitechapel.

He swatted aside the curtains and squinted into the dark shop. The rich stink of blood hit him first, followed by the descant buzzing of flies. Like all buildings in Japan, the entrance had a step where folk removed their footwear before entering the shop. But a glimmer of dark liquid pooled at the edge of the
tatami
mats, stopping Law in his boots.

A striation of light shone past his shoulder, and the dark liquid flashed scarlet. He glanced past the blade of light into the darkened shop, where Tokiko stood in woven sandals on the shop’s ruined tatami. Behind her, tiny clockwork mechanisms glimmered and clicked, pulsing together as if they stood inside a breathing, sleeping beast.

He stepped up into the shop and navigated around a smashed grandfather clock and peered at the clockmaker’s body, sprawled across two tatami mats, his arms outstretched. A large scarlet stain spread around the chap’s top half, though Law couldn’t see where it came from. More blood glinted on the wall between the show room and the workshop. Law followed the spray pattern up the rice-paper all the way to the ceiling, and back down again. Irregular as a Parliament convening in a dollhouse.

He scraped his knuckles across his stubble and glanced back down at the dead tokeiya-san. “Well, well, well. What in ‘ell.”

“More precisely,” Tokiko said, “what in Heaven.” She pointed in front of the dead chap’s hand. The tokeiya-san stared, as if he, too, gazed in the direction of his extended right arm. Law squinted. Judging by the streaked liquid, the clockmaker had dragged himself across the mat toward the workshop and, failing to reach it, wrote something on the woven surface of the next tatami in the only ink he could find—his own blood.

It took Law a moment to recognise the character. He knew few enough, and the easiest to remember was
sake
, since whoever first wrote it had the good sense to draw a liquor bottle and have done with it. This one, however, was less familiar.

“Kami,”
he said at last. “God?”

Tokiko nodded. “According to the Emperor, the god of war will punish those using foreign technologies.” She looked serene as she crouched, pointing to a smear next to the symbol, where blood seeped between the woven bamboo threads. “Something else was written here, but whatever came after him—god or otherwise—did not want it to be read.”

Law crouched, mind clicking and whirring in time with his arm. “‘Ow long’s the chap been backed?”

Her eyebrows drew together. Law clicked his tongue and shook his head. Old habits.

“Dead.” He clarified. “‘Ow long’s ‘e been dead?”

“Ah. Since this morning. The tea shops on either side were open late, and Shirakawa is quiet compared to the rest of Gion.” She stood, adjusting her white headband with fingers that looked too delicate to wield the katana through her belt. “I will check his records. Perhaps it was a client.”

He quirked an eyebrow, watched her glide across the floor, past the stairs, and into the syncopated commotion of the workshop. He’d not been comfortable with women since Phoebe’s death, but Tokiko possessed a natural gift at making him quite unsettled. It was as if she didn’t notice the ground. She didn’t move like other samurai, with their erect posture and sure footing, their strict economy of movement. Rather, she seemed to flicker, to bend like flame and catch again in a place where there’d been only shadow before.

“You don’t think ‘e was killed by the god of war then?” he asked, gazing back down to the corpse at his shoes. He leaned to either side, noting a greater amount of blood soaking the man’s
yukata
on his left.

“Of course not,” Tokiko said with a slight laugh. “Until now, every murder attributed to the god of war was of a Bakufu supporter. The Choushuu clan insists they are being punished for allowing foreign technology into Japan, and the Emperor supports them. This man was a Choushuu retainer.”

Law pushed the aged clockmaker’s body onto its back, careful not to get blood in any of his brass joints. The man’s long, thin mustache dragged gummy streaks of blood across his waxy face. He looked rich, pale and paunched like any chap with poppy to spare. But nothing set him apart as an Imperialist—no Choushuu or Satsuma clan crests, which Law had learned to recognise and avoid well enough in Nagasaki.

“This bloke was an Imperialist?”

“Yes. All the others were as described in the Daimyo’s letter to you: Bakufu supporters, most of them victims of
oni
.”

Law grimaced. Oni were no chavy game, but he’d expected some such creature here in Kyoto. “It’s not consistent with the murders what’s already ‘appened,” he said. “Why add it to the case?”

“The writing.”

“Kami? Anyone ‘oo heard the Emperor’s warnings might ‘ave writ that to shift blame. You sure it wasn’t one of yours? As I understand, it wouldn’t be the first time a Shinsengumi officer got ‘is back up and snuffed some chap what ‘e shouldn’t.”

That earned him a dark look from his contact. “All our members were accounted for at the
bansho
.”

Law touched his brim with the barest of bows and looked back to the dead clockmaker. The wound wasn’t hard to find—a single puncture to the throat, as wide as Law’s thumbnail. Its placement accounted for the spray radius, but the skin was pushed in, made with a flat blade rather than a sharp one. Even stranger, one side of the wound had a slight bow to the shape, as though there were a groove down the back of the instrument.

“I’ve never seen a weapon what made this kind of mark,” he spoke over his shoulder. “And unless your god ‘as powerfully abnormal fingernails, I’m guessing it’ll be a trade instrument.”

Tokiko neither looked up nor changed her expression. “If he punishes me for my support of the Bakufu, I shall be certain to check.”

Law snorted. So she did have a sense of humour.

Tokiko rifled through what Law assumed were receipts as, for the next half hour, he checked every corner of the shop for a tool that might have made the puncture wound. It wasn’t until he scanned the workbenches at the rear that he noticed something irregular. Though most of the shop was impeccable, an oil flask lay on its side, contents seeping into the wooden bench.

He crouched by the bench to get a closer look. A cloth lay crumpled beside the work area, no longer covering whatever device the clockmaker had been working on. Mechanisms whirred as he closed his fingers around the cloth and shook it out.