Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Pip Ballantine

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 o
f 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.

  A fist-sized clockwork thing sprang out, rebounded off Law’s chest, and went scampering toward the door. Law stumbled backwards, drawing his revolver as the thing flashed, all copper and gears, here and there across the shop. It was no bigger than a rat, tails buzzing like airship propellers behind it, but damned if he wouldn’t shoot it before it could do any damage.

  He drew back the hammer but just as his finger tightened on the trigger, Tokiko’s sword flickered from its sheath. She flipped the clockwork creature into the air where it spun, heavy and glinting, back toward Law, too close to shoot.

  He swung, smashing the back of his mechanical wrist into the clockwork thing and sent it into one of the gear-laden tables with a crunch of delicate mechanics. One slender leg continued to churn with a steady tick-tick-tick-tick, but otherwise the little clockwork creature was still.

  In the echoing absence of frantic mechanicals, Tokiko blinked at him, both hands still on her raised sword. She glanced at the creature, then back at Law in apparent incomprehension.

  “I thought you would catch it,” she said.

  “I just did.” Law holstered his gun. “If you knew Whitechapel, you’d understand.”

  The creature turned out to be a small copper fox, still recognisable despite its dented casing. It had three tails, and odder still was the tiny slip of paper unfurling like a dragon’s tongue from the creature’s open jaws. Tokiko sheathed her katana and stooped, withdrawing the paper.

  “It is a myoubu,” she said. “A messenger to the god Inari.” Her brow knotted as she peered at the minute characters. How she could differentiate strokes the size of fly shit was beyond him. Law lifted the twitching clockwork fox by its tails and peered at the damage he’d caused. There was a sizable dent in its side. That belonged to him. The scratches running along its belly and head, though, didn’t come from his arm-attack. He looked closer, noting its tiny copper teeth bent outward as though something had been pried from its jaws. Whoever had stolen it either missed or hadn’t cared about the message.

  “This note is addressed to one of the Shinsengumi captains,” Tokiko said. “A meeting place and time, and the clockmaker’s name-stamp. He’s promised important information regarding the events of the Ikedaya incident.”

  “Sorry? The Ikedaya incident?”

  Tokiko’s dark eyes did not soften, but her gaze cut back down to the slender note in her hand. “The events that unfolded at the Ikeda Inn a few weeks ago involved a disturbing conspiracy. The Choushuu clan intended to kidnap the emperor and force him into open war with the Bakufu.”

  Law nodded to the corpse. “And this bloke knew somewhat he oughtn’t? And it made ‘im want to spill the tale to the Shinsengumi?” He studied the clockmaker’s rigid face, the puncture in his throat, and sucked his teeth. “Why wouldn’t the Choushuu send oni and make it look like the others?”

  “Oni are not discreet. If the clockmaker had information, they would not have wanted to attract the attention of the Shinsengumi
before they could be sure he was dead. Better to assassinate him.”

  Law grunted agreement and glanced around the shop, imagining what havoc the enormous goblins would have done to such delicate contraptions. His gaze landed on the toppled oil and the empty workbench where he’d found the fox. They wouldn’t have left it behind if that’s what they’d come for.

  “What if this Choushuu clan ‘ad ‘im make something? Some kind of weapon?”

  Tokiko glanced back toward the stack of receipts and shook her head. “Neither the Choushuu nor the Satsuma clans had anything under commission.”

  “Yes, of course,” Law snorted, “because if I were under duress, I would naturally track my time and keep detailed books on this secret commission, right?”

  She tilted her head, crooking a single eyebrow at him. “Perhaps that would be too obvious.” She slipped past Law, stepping close as she avoided the outskirts of the blood-stain. Her dark hair smelled of trapped incense smoke, blotting out the iron tang of blood for just a moment. He glanced down at her slender hand perched like a bird on her katana. Suddenly, he felt like the oni in this fragile eco-system of ticking life—large and destructive. He decided not to follow her into the workshop.

  “Could be the old chap changed ‘is mind at the last minute,” he suggested. “Didn’t want to start sliding down that particular slope?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “It is also likely he did not know how his work would be used.”

  “You think he refused to ‘and it over?”

  Tokiko pulled out a receipt and squinted at it. “I do not think he is so noble he would refuse a group of Choushuu ronin. Decisions are remarkably simple with a sword to your throat.”

  “Not if you ‘ave a pistol,” he said, just to have a response.

  “This was for a parade float,” Tokiko said, and the confusion in her tone made Law look up from the dead clockmaker. He thought of the enormous wagons with their colourful paper and fabric, loaded down with folk in resplendent kimono like the queen herself was on parade. Was it so strange to include clockwork in one of those posh floats?