Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences (20 page)

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 clockwork 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.

But, as fire was like to do, it caught. First a spark, lighting something long-dormant inside him, limning the edges to a hot orange glow. Then it flickered to life in his chest, a soft candle illuminating an empty, disused chamber, sealed tight as a tomb. He stretched out his left arm and checked the watertight compartment for a new cartridge, waving away the steam before he pulled it out.

Watertight.

He glanced up, seeing the first mikoshi already reaching the far shore, where thousands of unsuspecting men and women waited for the parade. Without the tama to turn off the bomb, they would have to stop it another way.

“I’ve either a plan or a death wish,” he said. He snapped the magazine into place, tugged the loading lever back, and swung himself in the saddle. “Time to find out which.”

Tokiko nodded and drew her wakazashi, turning back to the skirmish now leaning in the Shinsengumi’s favor. “Forgive me if I do not wish you Godspeed.”

Law tipped his bowler and spurred Brutus. The groups carrying mikoshi moved slowly, their walk a rhythmic dipping gate, bouncing the shrine up and down like a stagecoach over uneven ground. Law and Brutus drummed the planks toward them, and caught up just as the final mikoshi reached the bridge’s centre. The men were turning around, scrambling and staggering to clear a path on the bridge without dropping the elaborate shrines.