Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Pip Ballantine

  “If the gods don’t approve of western mechanicals, might one find it insulting to use ‘em in a float?” he asked.

  Tokiko nodded. “Insulting enough to punish the city. Whether by their own hand, or through the Choushuu.”

  “Using the gods as a scapegoat for political balderdash,” Law growled, feeling his nostrils flare as he inhaled the scents of dust, oil, and blood. And the faint reminder of incense. He flexed his hands, the stretch of muscle in his right hand, the whirr and tick of clockwork in his left. “I ‘spect we ‘ave a float to catch.”

  Tokiko Hanamura pressed her hand against her katana and wakazashi’s grips to keep them out of her way, walking fast enough to scandalise her Nee-san. Luckily, without a Maiko’s face paint, elaborate hair, and cumbersome costume, no one recognised O-Tokiko the Geisha-in-training, and no one would blink at a Shinsengumi Investigator hurrying through Gion on a festival day.

  The taiko drums pounded several streets ahead and she picked up her pace, determined to catch the floats before any could make it across the Kamo River. Whatever the Choushuu had planned, it couldn’t be good. Her skin crawled as she recalled the Imperialist’s screaming confession the night of the Ikedaya Incident, how he’d said the Choushuu dogs planned to set her beloved city ablaze. Tokiko’s feet struck the stone faster as she imagined the beautiful city her brother had died for burning to ashes. She would never allow it.

  The Englishman’s horse made a steady clicking sound behind her, and from the corner of her eyes she could see people press toward the shop fronts to avoid him. Even walking beside his horse, few Kyoto-jin were taller than Agent Dagenhardt’s shoulder. He proved many of her father’s observations about westerners—ostentatious, outspoken, and bellicose—but diverged from them in others, most pointedly in that he’d neither threatened nor shot anyone since arriving in Kyoto.

  Agent Dagenhardt sped up, drawing level with her own shoulder. She tried not to stare as he swept off his bowler with a ticking left hand, dragging his real fingers through sweaty, barley-coloured hair. His face was strange with its deep-set features, his emotions easy to read as a Noh mask. Now he was the aspect of anger, his brow drawn in a scowl as he jerked his stubbled chin toward the roadside. She craned her neck as they sped past, noting the red lacquered columns and wheat sheaves decorating a small shrine wedged between two buildings.

  “There are fox statues,” Agent Dagenhardt said. “They’ve got some kind of ball in their mouths.”

  “Tama—a jewel,” she said. “They are said to grant wishes—all the myoubu have them.”

  “Excepting ours. The clockwork fox ‘ad its teeth bent out. I ‘spect the same folk what done the clockmaker pinched it.”

  Tokiko glanced up at him in surprise. She had been so intent on the message, she’d missed the state of the clockwork myoubu’s teeth, but it could have been carrying a tama. She nodded, matching her footfalls to her racing heartbeat.

  They skirted Yasaka shrine’s north side, murmuring cursory apologies as they shouldered past the throngs preparing the festival. Heart thumping, Tokiko scanned the courtyard for the enormous yamaboko floats, but they were already gone. All that was left were the mikoshi, the Shinto Pantheon’s portable shrines. The taiko drums grew louder as gathered men lifted the gold-leafed shrines on long poles and settled them on their shoulders. The hair on her neck rose and stray thoughts attempted and failed to converge. A sinking feeling in her stomach made her hand tighten on her sword. The first float would already be halfway across the bridge.

  Agent Dagenhardt growled something crude. “We don’t know which wagon we’re looking for do we?”

  “No,” she said, meeting his bright eyes, which seemed to have trapped all the shades of the summer sky. His strange, foreign eyes.

  Now that was an idea.

  She glanced at the enormous horse who stamped and tossed his head in impatience, and looked back at Agent Dagenhardt. Her lips curled into a smile. “But I think I know how we can make them reveal themselves.”

  Agent Dagenhardt, who had tracked her gaze, twitched his lips. “I believe I take your meaning, miss. Allow me to take a butcher’s.”

  And before she could remind him to address her as Investigator Ogawa, he put one enormous boot in his stirrup and swung into the saddle, sinking deep into his seat like a man returning home. He shed the awkwardness of his size and bearing, emerging still and calm and strangely graceful. He made a thousand times more sense in the saddle. He clenched the reins in his brass hand and touched two fingers to his hat.

  He whipped his pistol from its holster and fired three rounds in quick succession, letting out a loud, high-pitched howl like an enraged oni. The multitude scattered and Brutus exploded forward. They plunged toward the Kamo River.

  She had met Englishmen before, but this one from Whitechapel was very different. Most apt that he represented an organisation dealing with the peculiar.

  Tokiko coiled her muscles and sprinted through the startled throng, which sucked back into shops like a retreating wave. They saw her Shinsengumi haori and pointed toward the crazed foreigner shouting, shooting, and trailing steam and gun smoke. The road was straight as a sword from Yasaka shrine to the bridge over the Kamo River, and with the crowd cleared to let Agent Dagenhardt pass, she had an unobstructed view of what happened next.

  The rear float—an enormous, gilded thing hung with rich tapestries and lanterns, capped with a roof like a miniature shrine, stopped before it reached the bridge, and men boiled from the float like bees, their steel katana appearing as glittering stings. A familiar white crest emblazoned their jackets: the number one above a trio of pearls—the Choushuu clan’s sigil.

  The first Choushuu ronin reached Agent Dagenhardt just as Tokiko passed the last building. The Englishman leaned hard to the right, his horse made a nimble turn, and Agent Dagenhardt caught the first katana across his prosthetic arm. A loud ring shivered through the air, heralding battle. He kicked out, boot connecting with the man’s face and sending him back into the man behind him. Two more replaced them, and the swarm of swords drove Agent Dagenhardt further up the riverbank, away from the bridge. It was possible they intended to protect the parade from the mad Englishman, but they split into groups, some going after Agent Dagenhardt, the rest creating a perimeter around the float, with no apparent communication. As if they’d had a plan for being attacked, and that plan was protecting whatever destructive force waited inside the float.

  Tokiko surged straight toward the perimeter, drawing her sword in one liquid motion. Their muscles coiled, and they sank low into fighting stances, teeth bared like dogs, bristling with steel. She held her sword out forward and the flash of her turquoise haori sent pride spiking straight to her heart. They may call her an Aizu wolf, but they were nothing but mongrels, destroying what they could not rule. She was a Shinsengumi warrior, tasked with protecting her beloved city be it from man, monster, or god.

  Five feet away, she leapt. The world stilled a moment, like the instant before the curl of a wave, and she broke against the black rocks of the Choushuu ronin. Her gaze narrowed to throats, armpits, knees, striking vulnerabilities with blade, pommel, and feet too fast for the lead-footed ronin to follow. She blocked a downward cut and twisted aside, sweeping her blade up into one man’s groin.

  A crack sounded, echoing off the river, and Agent Dagenhardt shouted something unintelligible. Then she saw her opening. Tokiko drew her sword back and pivoted, catching the blade of a man with his face contorted into a murderous, wolf like snarl. She twisted her grip, directing his sword toward the ground, and released her katana. The unexpected manoeuvre left him staggering forward. Then her foot slammed his shoulder and she launched herself up, twisted mid-air, caught the float’s protruding roof with both hands, and swung up.

  The roof beneath her moved, the same noises as Agent Dagenhardt’s arm and the dead tokeiya-san’s shop emanating from under her. Sunlight glinted off the little door and track where, at a specific time, a tiny clockw
ork bird would emerge to announce the time. A cuckoo clock. Clocks that were designed to start and stop with a special key.

  This was the right float. Unquestionably.

  She crossed the roof in a crouch, drew and swung down, wakazashi drawn—

  —and caught a gleam off a tall man’s katana, threatening to skewer her.

  Tokiko changed her direction at the last moment and slapped the blade aside, but the movement sent her off balance and her fingers twisted free. She slammed into the floor, rolled, and came up in a defensive crouch, bringing up her blade. Her adversary was a long-faced ronin, his dark haori blending in with the shadows. The light shining in from the wagon’s front cast, his eyes into shadow, giving his grinning face a skullish appearance. She clenched her jaw, and he ducked his head, the grin turning into a snarl. Something glittered at his chest, catching the light from the folds of his kosode. It was a small golden orb, the gears between the two hemispheres visibly working as the two pieces ticked in opposite directions.

  Of course. Time-wired black powder kegs.

  This must be the key the clockmaker had designed and tried to send the Shinsengumi for safekeeping, which meant above her, packed into the roof’s delicate mechanisms, was a battery of black powder. Her eyes returned to the ronin’s face, and Tokiko favoured him with a cold smile.

  “Aizu wolf!” He pointed his sword straight at her collarbone and drove it down. Tokiko jerked sideways, but he was fast, pivoting on one foot and redirecting his cut much quicker than she’d anticipated. She brought up her wakazashi, and the clash of steel sent a shudder down her arm. He withdrew his blade, slashing her across the arm. It opened up her sleeve, and blood welled to the surface, staining the turquoise fabric. She sprang from her crouch to drive him back, but he was too fast, catching her blade and redirecting her into another warrior climbing into the float.

  Several more sharp cracks sounded and Law gave another unearthly scream, startling the men reaching for her. Tokiko dropped her weight before the first man could grab her, reaching around to slash open the meat of his calf. She jammed the heel of her hand into his groin and he staggered, falling from the wagon and taking down the two other ronin climbing in. Movement stirred the air behind her and Tokiko rolled backwards just as the Choushuu leader brought his katana in a powerful downward strike that would have split her skull in two. Her shoulders slammed into his toes at the exact moment his katana buried itself in the wagon’s floor, giving her scant seconds to react.

  She surrendered to instinct and training. Tokiko dropped her wakazashi, grabbed his ankles, and kicked both feet straight up. Her wooden sandals slammed into his chin and his head snapped backwards. It was not the fighting style in keeping with the bushido. Most fortunate Tokiko was no samurai.

  The Choushuu ronin went boneless, dropping hard to the float’s floor. She hadn’t had the leverage to snap his neck with that kick, but it had done the job well enough. She pressed her hands behind her shoulders and leapt up from the ground, jerking the man’s katana from the floor. She swooped down and hunted in his kosode for the key, the sudden absence of immediate danger reminding her of the clock ticking overhead. How long did they have? When was the float meant to go off? Cold sweat slid down her back, but she forced stillness into her soul as she hunted for the tama. The instant her hand closed around the cool sphere, clicking and fluttering in her hand like a metal cricket, a cold hand snapped up and clenched her wrist.

  She jerked back, but the man held fast, strong despite his injuries. Blood trickled from his mouth, seeping between his teeth as he grinned up at her.

  “It is too late, Aizu wolf,” the man slurred. He laughed, sucked in a rattling breath and coughed on the blood seeping into his throat.

  The battle outside now grew louder, this time with the familiar voices of Captain Hijikata and his forces. People streamed past the immobilized float, the mikoshi-bearers ushered onto the bridge despite the danger, to complete the parade so the gods would spare them another year’s strife.

  “Susano’o, god of sea and storms, will visit his wrath upon you! The city will blaze in the wake of his chariot,” he pronounced, his dying breath dripping with victory and his own blood, “and judgement will fall on the Aizu wolves! He will vanquish the foreign pestilence the Bakufu have allowed to plague Japan.”

  “His chariot?” she said, her brain whirring, spinning backwards, flashing like the pop of those infernal cameras. Her mind produced a snapshot of memory, words painted in blood. The word kami beside a red smear actually resolved into the word chariot.

  No, not a chariot. A palanquin. A divine palanquin, to carry the gods.

  She looked up, her eyes tracking the parade across the bridge, on the heels of men bearing portable shrines, ignorant of the danger they carried.

  “The mikoshi,” she whispered, and surged to her feet. She leaned out the float’s rear and surveyed the carnage—six Shinsengumi officers fought a dozen Choushuu, half wearing hair-covered oni masks. Agent Dagenhardt rode like a wild man between them, herding them toward the Shinsengumi. She watched him straighten his arm at one point, shifting back the entire top plate of his brass forearm with an audible clunk, to aim it at the ronin sneaking up behind one of her engaged cohorts. A small explosion roared from his arm, recoiling his shoulder, tightening the straps across his chest. A cloud of black smoke obscured Dagenhardt as the dishonourable ronin fell.

  Then Tokiko did something that would have made her Nee-san faint outright. When she was nine, Tokiko’s father had translated for an American ambassador, whose son had spent the day teaching Tokiko and her brother shocking western customs. She put her thumb and forefinger in her mouth, curled her tongue, and whistled.

  Agent Dagenhardt’s head jerked around, and his horse’s body followed the direction. She held out the orb for him to see, and swung her arm toward the bridge, pointing after the mikoshi. The Englishman’s summer-sky eyes widened in a face coated with gritty gun smoke. He kicked Brutus, which, despite his cumbersome size, cut deftly around knots of warring samurai.

  Agent Dagenhardt lifted his hand, shouting something she couldn’t hear over the whirr of clockwork above her. She leapt into the scalding sunlight just as a battering ram of bronze slammed into her back.

  Law’s shouted warning came a second too late. The enormous mechanical beast slammed full force into Tokiko, sending her sprawling onto the stones. He watched, trapped in horror, as the glittering orb shot into the air and made a long, graceful arc straight into the Kamo River. The shinobi woman lay still.

  When she rolled onto her back and lay there, head tipped back, fingers twitching toward her dropped weapon, Law saw Phoebe—half crushed beneath the hansom she’d tried to escape, smuggling her father’s newest invention away from Tsar Nicholas I’s assassins. Her fingers had twitched like that, reaching for the weapon even as she died.

  He reigned in Brutus as memory muffled the sound of battle. His face was cold, gaze narrowing to the stretch of stone between the monster and himself. He straightened his arm and conjured a wild firestorm from the gates of Hell.

  The thing that had slammed into her hissed steam from every joint as the pneumatics in its legs settled. Law knew that noise, and his lip curled at the full-bodied version of his own simulacrum. A suit of clockwork armour had dropped from the float’s ceiling. The masked samurai within piloted a sword-wielding oni golem. The ronin lifted his leg, and the clockwork oni started its inexorable forward march.

  Law tugged out a fresh magazine from his saddlebag, snapped it into his Remington 44, and drew back the hammer. He felt calm, transcendent, as if this were a terrible nightmare he’d gone through a thousand times and grown bored of enduring. In a way, it was. The high-pitched buzzing in his ears was exactly like it had been that day, and even the lantern-light flashing off street windows replayed in the Kamo River’s glimmering water. In his dream, he always missed his shot and staggered to Phoebe’s side with her blood still warm and her eyes gone cold.

  He
buried her, in the ground, and in his heart, then ran away.

  The hammer’s satisfying click shifted something inside him, and he clenched his nerveless left arm, sending the clockwork spinning even as gears in his heart and mind ticked into place. In the glare off the clockwork oni’s massive blade, Law squinted. No more running. Not this time.

  He let up on the reins, settled his feet heavy in the stirrups, and wrenched a harsh “Yahh!” from his throat. Brutus surged forward like a warhorse and Law levelled his pistol at the man inside the clockwork suit, who raised his sword high over Tokiko.

  Horse and rider thundered toward the oni, and Law squinted, aiming for the centre of the masked forehead through the vision pane in the golem’s brass plates. He sucked in a breath, felt a calm wash over him as he exhaled, and fired.

  The blade came down, and Tokiko rolled aside, coming up on one knee as steel sparked off the stone where she’d been seconds before. She clutched her shoulder, which hung low, and blood poured from her nose and seeped from a scrape on her cheek, but she was alive. His heart rammed into his throat.

  Lawrence steered Brutus with his knees, bending the horse around behind the clockwork-oni like he had the spies’ carriage. The oni settled and hissed, overbalanced forward on its large sword, which skidded, drawing a slow, deep gash through the stone. Dark blood oozed from the opening at its metal head.

  “Agent Dagenhardt!” Tokiko called. Her voice sounded pained. Brutus skidded to a halt, hooves sparking on the stones, and Law leapt down. Tokiko’s strong, delicate hand was covered in blood.

  “The bomb,” she wheezed. “It isn’t in the float. It’s in the mikoshi—Susano’o’s. There is a phoenix on top. The tama was a key to halt the mechanics.” She struggled to her feet, and though Law was tempted to give her his arm for support, something hot and fierce in her eyes stopped him. This woman was neither delicate flower, nor the ethereal, supernatural thing he had imagined. She was just a woman, hot-blooded and burning with a fiercer fire than he’d ever possessed.