Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences (19 page)

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?

“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.