Clockwork Samurai (15 page)

I took one of my sleeping needles and discharged half the drug into a wad of cloth before injecting the rest into him.

“Will I sleep?”

“You'll feel very, very drunk,” I replied. At least that was what the eunuchs had reported when we tested the serum.

Makoto nodded slowly. “That sounds good.”

By the time I finished bandaging him, his eyelids were drooping. He murmured something as I closed the edges of his robe.

“What was that?”

He opened his eyes a fraction wider. “
Arigato
.”

I nodded, not sure I did anything more than make him look less cut up.

“I am not dying today, Lady Jin.” His voice was starting to drift. “Someone else took my place.” He nodded toward the far wall. “That should have been me.”

Satomi sat near the door with her head bent as she worked on her rifle. Her hair fell over her face, hiding it. Takeda sat beside her, speaking in a quiet tone. The sword he'd taken from the fallen assassin lay beside him on the floor. If we were attacked again, the inventor was the only able-bodied warrior left among us.

I went next to Chang-wei, who sat with his back propped up against the wall.

“Let me see your arm.”

He recoiled when I reached for him. “It's not bad.”

With a sigh, I took hold of him and carefully unwrapped the makeshift bandage he'd created. The cut had taken him across the back of his forearm, missing the joint. The wound had mostly closed. It was hard to tell how deep it was—the katanas were razor sharp. A thin red line could hide a wound that cut to the bone.

When I tried to pull up his sleeve to rebind the wound, Chang-wei jerked away, causing fresh blood to seep from the cut.

“Stupid!” I snapped.

It was poor of me to take my frustration out on him like that, but I was exhausted and still very frightened. And he was being stupid.

“I'm sorry,” Chang-wei said, suitably chastised. “It was reflex.”

Holding his wrist firmly, I pulled back his sleeve and saw the angry red line that traveled down his arm. I stared at it for half a minute before binding the minor cut.

“How long have you had this?” I asked, deadly quiet.

It looked like blood poisoning, which wasn't possible from today's injuries. My insides were a mix of emotions. If I could sort them out, the primary one would be anger. Then disbelief. But anger first.

“It's nothing.”

“It's
not
nothing. And I'm getting tired of hearing that.”

To a healer, that denial was far from helpful. I didn't raise my voice at him this time. Instead, I remained cold and calm.

“How long have you had this?” I repeated.

“I first saw it just two days ago.”

The skin around the line felt hot. “What caused this infection?”

As far as I knew, Chang-wei hadn't suffered any recent injuries aside from today's confrontation, but even the smallest cut could become infected.

“It's not an infection,” he insisted. “Or not the sort you would think.”

There was no use in arguing now, when I didn't have the herbs necessary to treat the condition. The airship had contained a cargo of medicinal supplies. When we returned to the Chinese quarter, I would hopefully find what I needed. I made a silent vow to keep watch on Chang-wei in the meantime.

“They're saying Lord Takeda is not the target,” Chang-wei said, indicating the conversation near the door.

Takeda and Satomi both turned to us at once. “I offered myself,” Takeda explained. “It wasn't an act of bravery, on my part. Merely etiquette. I thought the
hitokiri
would ignore the rest of you if they achieved their purpose.”

“My father was struck down in a crowded schoolhouse,” Satomi added. “No one else was harmed.”

I didn't know what to say. To me, the samurai code seemed uncommonly brutal; to breathe was to die. Yet they hung the trappings of honor and civility over it.

“But the assassins would not accept those terms,” Chang-wei pressed.

“They seemed to have another target in mind.”

We all looked to Chang-wei. The
hitokiri
had paused over him. The rest of us were expendable, but the shogunate wanted Chang-wei alive.

A shudder ran through me. “We brought this upon you.”

Takeda exhaled slowly. “This day has been coming for a long time. Satomi-san and I will take watch.”

Satomi finished preparing her firearm and stood to accompany him.

“Lady Sagara,” Chang-wei called out as she reached the storehouse door. “I'm sorry for the loss of your guardsman.”

Satomi turned, her expression haunted.

“He was a loyal friend,” he went on. “It was an honorable death.”

She dipped her head briefly to acknowledge the tribute, though she had yet to shed a single tear for her companion.

“Yoshiro was only
karakuri.
” She looked sadly to Takeda. “An illusion created from metal and wood. And yes, his was an honorable death.”

Karakuri
.

Like the puppets in the teahouse. The automatons in Takeda's workshop.

We traveled in silence over the next day, lying low whenever we could. Even though Yoshiro had been a machine, we felt his loss like the loss of a comrade. He had traveled with us for days, and I had never suspected. Though I'd never seen his face beyond the war mask, I had attributed a range of emotions to him. Concern, determination and even affection when he hovered over Satomi. All those moments took on an eerie cast now.

Nagasaki city grew nearer with each step, but we still had thousands of steps to go. We trudged through the small roads along the rice paddy terraces cut into the hills. The air was damp and the ground muddy beneath our feet.

I took Satomi's side as she guarded the rear. Lord Takeda took the front with Makoto and Chang-wei at the center. Makoto could only move slowly, but he continued without complaint. He had already offered to be left behind, but we had refused.

We were all in this together. My gaze darted along the terraces. The visibility was clear among these fields. Satomi and her rifle had the advantage over a swordsman with a katana. Firearms were weapons for a less civilized age marked by violence.

I expected the black shadows to fly at us at any moment.

Satomi had said nothing more about Yoshiro, which left me to ponder how he'd come about. Now that I looked back, all the peculiarities of his presence made sense. He'd never spoken, never eaten, never slept. He had also been impervious to pain.

“My father and Takeda-sama created him” was all Satomi would say about her mechanical bodyguard as we walked side by side.

The Japanese scientists had fused art and knowledge into one. For the first time, I realized the scope of Japanese technical advancements.

We all remained lookout as we made our way back to Nagasaki, city port of foreigners and outcasts. With every moment, we were prepared for battle to once again erupt around us.

I watched my charges as they trudged in front of me. Makoto moved with a slow gait, his weight shifted to nurse his injury. Despite the stiffness of his movements, his hand remained near his sword. No matter how injured he was, he would die with steel in his hands.

Chang-wei appeared steadier, but there was a pallor beneath his complexion. The rifle Satomi had granted him rested firmly in his hands.

What had happened to him? Had Yizhu had him drugged? Some form of slow-acting poison to ensure he'd return?
Even with my work in the Court of Physicians, I only knew a fraction of the substances in the apothecary. The antidote must be lying there in some secret combination of drawers.

Chang-wei was confident he need only return to Peking to be cured, but I didn't trust them.

“Is there room on that airship for me?” Satomi asked.

She spoke in such a low tone that I nearly missed it.

“By order of the shogunate, a countryman who has left our shores can never return,” she continued before I could reply. “But I killed a samurai. With a gun.” She adjusted the strap on her shoulder. “Being a woman only compounds the crime. There's no place for me here any longer.”

“Then you'll come with us,” I promised.

Chang-wei turned his head partway back toward us before returning his focus ahead.

I didn't have the authority to offer Satomi passage, but we owed it to her. And I still had a feeling deep in my soul that we were connected by fate.

As to what awaited us in Peking when we returned with our unlikely companions, I couldn't say. At first it seemed as if danger had followed us to the island empire, but now I knew that the dark cloud of it was everywhere. Like a tangled net thrown over our heads. Grasping the end of the net were
Yingguo
and the Western nations while we fought and thrashed inside, fighting against ourselves instead of the true enemy.

* * *

We stopped for rest among the terraced rice fields, begging food and drink for our midday meal from a nearby farmhouse. With Lord Takeda's noble demeanor, the peasants were obligated to comply.

I took the time to check Makoto's bandages.

“See, just a scratch,” he boasted, back in his usual spirits. I refrained from telling him that the scratch had been dangerously close to spilling his guts out.

Chang-wei wasn't doing as well. The red line beneath his skin had traveled up past his elbow, and the fever had taken hold. He barely ate at all, drinking only a few sips of water while we rested. He kept his eyes closed as I felt for his pulse.

“They injected you with something,” I said, barely containing my anger. “If you know what it was, I can try to counteract it.”

He shook his head wearily. “The imperial court was just being cautious.”

“So you wouldn't flee?”

“I know too many secrets.” He opened his eyes to look at me. “Clever of them, really.”

“This is uncalled for.”

“As long as we return to Peking soon, I'll be fine.”

I steeped dried chrysanthemum petals to treat the fever, but I doubted it was strong enough. Within the hour after we'd
set out again, his steps were dragging. I took the rifle, which he relinquished without argument. Makoto wouldn't touch the firearm, and Takeda, despite his studies of Western advancements, declined the weapon as well. I kept it slung around my shoulder. It was surprisingly light.

By late afternoon, we could see the outlying hills of the port city.

“It will be easier to sneak back in at night though the same passage,” Makoto suggested.

“I would like to visit my father's school one last time.”

Satomi had hardly spoken for most of the day. There were no objections, so we planned to wait there until dark. After curfew had passed, there would be less of a guard presence around the Chinese quarter. The regular crew of Japanese laborers and entertainers would have left for the night.

We made it to the abandoned building in time to see the sun dipping over the edge of the cliffs just beyond. Wordlessly, Satomi slipped inside, and we allowed her privacy to pack whatever effects she wanted to take with her. The rest of us congregated around the workshop, the main study stained by Lord Sagara's final moments.

Takeda set his lantern down and drifted to the
elekiteru
box in the corner, just as Chang-wei had done days earlier. The two of them really were of one mind.

“You had a hand in building the clockwork samurai, didn't you?” Chang-wei asked.

“I made his body,” the inventor admitted, with just the faintest hint of pride. “But Shintarō-san built his heart.”

“How?”

Lord Takeda smiled sadly as he touched his hand to the wheel of the broken generator. “A
karakuri
maker is protective of his trade secrets. If everyone knew how his creations worked, then the illusion would be destroyed.”

But the bodyguard had been more than an illusion. He had walked among us. He'd fought against trained warriors. I knew what Chang-wei was thinking.

“Mechanical soldiers,” he said, barely able to contain his excitement. “Imagine the possibilities.”

Takeda shook his head. “We thought the same once, but the
bakufu
opposes the replacement of swords with guns. Vulgar devices that take away any difference between a warrior and a peasant. Imagine what they would think of a creation that replaces a warrior completely with gears and wires.”

It would be considered an abomination. “Such a thing would threaten the very core of the shogunate,” I said.

“But we built it anyway.”

Takeda set down the journal he'd carried all the way from his villa. Chang-wei looked at it with interest, but all we could see were the familiar yet unfamiliar characters of the Japanese script.

“How did you power it?” Chang-wei insisted. “A windup mechanism would have worn down quickly.”

“That was Shintarō-san's secret to keep.” The scientist bowed his head reverently. “A good friend.”

Now Chang-wei had a problem to solve. “A generator contained inside the mechanism? But it would have to be small.”

As I looked at the
elekiteru
, it came to me. Satomi had used a glove fitted with copper wires to send electricity into the
hitokiri
. Blue white lighting had crackled over the armored warrior, felling him.

“The energy is stored in container.”

Takeda looked pleased. “A good thought.”

Aside from his cryptic smile, he refused to reveal any more.

Both Chang-wei and I looked to the ceramic jars gathering dust in the corner. On first glance, they had looked like wine jugs. Still too big to have been contained inside Yoshiro's frame, but the idea was intriguing. Lightning in a jar.

It was Satomi who had the answers to Chang-wei's questions, not Lord Takeda. I remembered her kneeling before her bodyguard with her hand to his chest. She had been checking his heart—or his energy store. I had mistaken it for a tender moment, though maybe it had been exactly that. The clockwork warrior had been her father's master creation.

“The
karakuri
took us years to build,” Takeda explained. “We did it for art . . . and for pride. Easier to train a soldier in terms of efficiency.”

But I could see Chang-wei was thinking, laying out his own designs.

“
Shina-jin
, you should come see this.”

Makoto called to us from the far window where the paper had mostly worn away. In the distance, I could see an orange light, brighter than the earlier sunset.

Chang-wei moved to the window, each step labored. His strength was fading. Despite that, he hurried outside a moment later. I rushed to follow him into the night air with Makoto and Lord Takeda immediately behind me.

“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.

He had rushed to the edge of the plateau, where we had a view of Nagasaki Bay as well as the port city. At the edge of the city lay the airfield where we had landed. Plumes of black smoke rose into the sky to disappear into the night.

Our airship was on fire.