The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  When the smoke reached what used to be the dining room, the ghosts turned nearly as solid as real people. Breathing into his sleeve, he navigated through the burned remnants of the corridor to see them better.

  Mori was sitting by what had been the window, holding a watch formed partly of cinders, waiting. Thaniel brought some spars nearer to make a new fire up close. Despite all the heat, the blood had gone out of his hands and he could hardly grip. He’d never felt so cold.

  A whorl of sparks spun through Mori’s ghost. It ribboned up his arm at first, then up behind his eyes and into his hair. The bright pinpoints followed strands of it, fading as they reached the tips, turning to red and then grey ashes. Thaniel almost didn’t notice when he lifted one hand, the ends of his fingernails bright with rising cinders. He was counting down; five, four, three, two, one.

  Ghost men burst through, silent and smoke-roiling. Mori didn’t move. He let the nearest man pin his hands behind his back and didn’t bother even to turn his face away when a second man held something that must have been chloroform over his mouth. When he collapsed, they only looked shocked he hadn’t fought, and the man with the chloroform didn’t move for a long time before he remembered that too much killed you and jerked the cloth away. Someone else, a giant who looked like he might once have been a wrestler, lifted Mori away. It was all soundless, but one of the others waved at him and held him back as if that was wrong, to leave already. The cinders glimmered on the Fabergé egg button on his coat.

  The ghost took out a pair of dice and a piece of notepaper. Thaniel turned away, breathed in deep from the clearer air, then went closer to see. The ghost threw the dice and consulted the paper, but the smoke wasn’t clear enough to show anything written on it.

  They seemed decided. The big man hurried out, carrying Mori. He let Mori’s wrist bang against the phantom door frame, and then disappeared into a clearer patch of air where the smoke didn’t reach.

  Thaniel went out onto the lawn to breathe. He went too fast, though, and at first all he could do was cough, until he felt dizzy and noticed, distantly, that he’d gone down on all fours. The snow soaked through to his knees, and all at once he felt again how horribly, miserably cold it was. There was nothing clear or fine about the air anymore. It felt like trying to inhale razors. But when he shut his eyes, he kept seeing Mori’s wrist bang against the door frame.

  When he could stand up again, he looked around for Katsu, but there was no sign even of any tracks. He started back down the hill towards the railway station. There was nothing he could do officially, but he had a pretty strong feeling that now there was proof of an attack and arson, the head of Mori’s house would have things to say.

  As he ducked back under the Keep Out rope at the gate, he saw a man across the street, watching him from below a street lamp. The man was wearing a bright red coat with a Fabergé egg button on it. The man waved easily and stepped into the carriage beside him, which took off fast before Thaniel could follow.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Tokyo, 17th February 1889

  The huge redbrick terminus of Shimbashi station was deserted. Snow blew along the road in writhing patterns and caught in the shirts and coat hems of the ghosts there. There were hardly any real pedestrians. The electricity was weaker here than in Yokohama, but as the train pulled in, the smell of burning haunted the carriage and a fire crew hurried everyone off at the platform. Theirs was the last train. Once everyone was out, firemen closed the station. They put a thick, official-looking rope over the broad doors, and a sign that said Closed until further notice.

  The station clock tower was striking midnight. There was one last cab, the driver hunched over a cigarette. Thaniel had no idea where the Duke of Choshu lived, but the driver did, and seemed warily impressed that Thaniel was willing to interrupt such an important person at such a late hour.

  The Duke of Choshu’s townhouse was so close to the Palace that it was possible to see into the windows of the buildings above the curtain wall. On either side of the gateposts hung the Mori house banners, lit from below by brilliant electric lights. The symbols of the noble houses looked odd, coming at them from an English point of view – a view which usually expected lions couchant or a fleur-de-lis, something recognisable. Here they might have started out as a picture of something, but they were so old that they had been redrawn and simplified, until they used the smallest number of marks possible. The Mori sigil was nothing but three circles arranged in a triangle above a straight line, black on red.

  They did colour well here. He’d seen samurai sigils in photographs and they were nothing frightening, but the red and the black flying above the gates had been made for battlefields.

  A steward answered the door, unsurprised to find such a late visitor on the step. He looked sceptical, but eventually he let Thaniel in.

  It was a pidgin of styles inside: as traditional as you could get away with without being trite, and as Western as it could be without looking imitative, sitting balanced on the scales between two worlds that hated each other. The balance was diluted and insipid, and completely sensible.

  The sliding doors were mainly closed, but he caught a glimpse into some of the grand rooms. There was a library, and some women talking over tea at a low table. The floor creaked and above them hung banners with different sigils – other smaller houses that served this one, maybe, but he didn’t recognise them.

  The house was laid out in a way Thaniel couldn’t follow. By the time they reached the Duke’s study, he couldn’t have found his own way out again and he didn’t recognise the view from the window. The Duke was waiting at an austere desk, full of papers. He was a delicately ugly man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a manner like a banker. His clothes were beautiful but plain. It was half-past midnight now, but he didn’t look tired, just as crisp as he must have been at nine o’clock in the morning.

  ‘You have news pertaining to the disappearance of a bannerman of mine, I hear,’ he said. He had a parchment voice.

  Thaniel nodded. ‘Yes, sir. I’ve just come from Yoruji. I saw ghosts there. They show some of Count Kuroda’s men abducting Keita Mori. The whole house has been burned down.’

  The Duke lifted one eyebrow, which shifted his spectacles ever so slightly. He moved them back and pursed his lips. ‘And why might they have tried to abduct him, do you suppose?’

  ‘They wanted to take him somewhere. He left a phonograph recording in the cellar; he mentioned a place called Abashiri.’

  ‘I believe you know the Baron quite well, Mr Steepleton?’ He enunciated quite. Thaniel swallowed, because although he’d told the steward his name, he hadn’t said who he was, least of all who he was to Mori. ‘You are familiar with his particular capabilities?’

  ‘I – yes, well enough.’

  ‘Then I wonder if you would be so good as to explain why in the world he might allow himself to be kidnapped and taken to Abashiri prison?’

  ‘It’s a prison?’

  ‘It is a labour camp of over a thousand inmates in the far north of Hokkaido, where, because there is a constant threat of invasion from Russia, all prison details are devoted to clearing roads through the forest, to allow the movement of our troops when they are, inevitably, required.’ He spoke slowly, and so clearly that Thaniel could hear the punctuation. ‘In the winter I believe the death rate is one in six, daily. Not the sort of place I can imagine Keita allowing himself to be taken.’

  Thaniel shook his head, which panged his shoulder. He’d taken some more morphine in the cab here and it was keeping him upright, but nothing more. ‘I watched them take him.’

  The Duke moved his head just enough for the reflection of the window in his glasses to obscure his eyes. ‘And how would anyone keep him in a cell?’

  The Duke was unsettling him in a way that Kuroda never had. Choshu sounded different. He was measuring every word on some internal accounting scales, and the books in front of him were ledgers. He didn’t sound like he had politics. He sounded like he had
money. There was nothing to prove, nothing to want or strive for, only maintenance and the deep indifferent calm of a caretaker.

  ‘A constant supply of random data,’ Thaniel said. ‘He can’t predict random things. Dice, or atmospheric electricity. You feed those numbers into … maybe they have a combination lock that they keep changing, or something that rotates.’ He could hear how unlikely it sounded, but he ploughed on anyway, even though he could feel the ploughshare grinding. ‘It would be hard work, but it’s possible if you have enough numbers. I’ve seen it done, Kuroda had something like it set up at the lighthouse in Yokohama. Does Abashiri have an electrograph? You know, a machine to—’

  ‘I know what an electrograph is. All Hokkaido prisons double up as weather stations,’ the Duke said. He didn’t seem to have an opinion about what Thaniel had told him, one way or another.

  ‘I’ve just come from a research station in Aokigahara. They’re generating all this electricity, and until the end of January, someone was sending them experimental information about Mori, they have transcripts of it, they’re calling him Subject A—’

  The Duke’s eyes flared at the mention of Subject A and Thaniel had a tiny flutter of hope.

  ‘You’ll excuse me a moment,’ the Duke said. He got up without letting his spine bend, and left.

  Thaniel waited again, staring at the Persian rug on the floor. There was a cat sitting on it, a beautiful grey one with huge green eyes. The quiet went fathoms down. Somewhere through the walls, he heard an argument break out, two men, but he couldn’t hear what they said. The quiet came back. The snick of the door was loud when the Duke opened it again.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. He stood back and seemed wholly unworried that Thaniel was nearly a foot taller than him.

  They went through to another room, much bigger and full of old, beautiful maps of the city, and then outside, across a snowy courtyard, to a shrine. It was beneath a huge pine tree whose trunk was tied with thick red rope. Thaniel had seen those at other shrines but he had never found out what they meant. The pillars inside were hung with prayer cards. It smelled of fresh-cut wood, which seemed always like a warm smell, even now when there was snow floating in with them. Under the bell was what he would have called an altar but probably wasn’t, and on the altar was something the size of a man, covered with a shroud. Someone else was there too, a broad man in a Western suit facing away from them. A priest beyond the barrier read out the day’s prayer cards. After each prayer, the bell tolled. Thaniel felt something under his ribs slither.

  ‘Keita Mori isn’t at Abashiri, Mr Steepleton,’ the Duke said. ‘He’s here. Or what’s left of him is.’

  Everything spun without moving. When it stopped, he felt like panels of glass had thunked down around him. The world was still there and he could still hear it and see it, but it was muted and he might have been watching a play. He had started towards the altar before he had decided to move. The man standing there turned back. Thaniel only just had time to recognise that it was Kuroda before he was smacked flat on his back in the snow. Kuroda clamped one hand round his throat to keep him there.

  Thaniel couldn’t talk, or breathe. Of their own accord, his hands had jolted up to catch at Kuroda’s wrist, but he stopped himself in time. He could think just clearly enough to see that if he touched Kuroda now he would end up in a Japanese prison for the rest of his life. The scar on his shoulder seared.

  Kuroda let him go like touching him was repulsive.

  ‘Your Grace,’ Kuroda said to the Duke, ‘you’ll excuse all this, I hope. I’ll get him out of your sight now. Mr Steepleton, you’re under arrest. For murder.’

  ‘No!’ Thaniel said over him, jerking onto his feet again to turn to the Duke. ‘It was Kuroda’s men, the ghosts are still there! You can go and see!’

  Kuroda nodded at someone and two men came up on either side of Thaniel. One of them was the man in the red coat with the Fabergé egg button. ‘You can indeed go and see if you like, your Grace, but what you’ll see is this parasite murdering your bannerman and setting fire to the place in a fit of jealousy. Found out Mori was married, you see. Look at his eyes now, he’s off his head on something. He got scared when he realised the ghosts would have recorded what he did, he’s taken something and now he’s come raving to you.’

  ‘Go and look for yourself,’ Thaniel begged the Duke. ‘You’ll see what happened.’

  ‘I should be gratified if you wouldn’t take it upon yourself to give me orders,’ Choshu said, as cool and quiet as he had been throughout. ‘And I shall not do the Prime Minister the indignity of doubting his word because some foreign troglodyte tells me so.’

  ‘Take him back to the British legation,’ Kuroda said to his men. ‘Make it clear to Secretary Vaulker that if he strays from British soil, he will be delivered back again in pieces. I want him deported and tried in London. Choshu, thank you for having invited me, it was very kind.’

  The Duke bowed slightly and Kuroda bowed deeper. Two men pulled Thaniel away. He didn’t feel it. At the door he twisted back against them to see the shrine again, willing there to be some sign it wasn’t Mori, but the form under the shroud was the right size.

  Thaniel didn’t remember the journey back to the legation. The first thing he remembered was ridiculous: he had to explain in third person what they had against him because Vaulker didn’t speak Japanese and Kuroda’s men refused to speak English, and no one else was good enough to translate well.

  Vaulker wasn’t surprised. He directed them up to one of the diplomatic guest rooms at the top of the house. The men went away. Vaulker followed him inside and shut the door.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Thaniel said, but mechanically.

  ‘Well, let’s have your version then.’

  He shook his head. Maybe he could have had a stab at explaining about a real clairvoyant and all the rest of it if he’d been feeling normal, but he wasn’t. It was half-past two in the morning.

  Six had to be on the edge of blind hysteria by now. He couldn’t imagine anyone had taken the time to explain anything to her. They would all just be telling her no, she couldn’t see him, and to stop being a nuisance and go and play.

  In the distant sort of way he recognised from fevers, he noticed that he couldn’t hold a thought for very long before he skipped onto the next one. They were skipping fast, all over the place, except to the memory of the shroud and the chapel, and the delicate bones; it was like trying to catch a swarm of frogs jumping away from a cat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Vaulker said after he had let the silence go on, ‘but I’m sending you back to England. This is far too sticky. You’ll be on the next ship out.’ He blew his breath out in a near-whistle. ‘If you want my advice, I’d tell them that you ought never to have been put into a position of responsibility in the first place. You weren’t educated or brought up for it, naturally it went wrong. Clearly you haven’t killed anyone, you’ve just been mixed up in something you don’t understand. Not your fault.’

  Thaniel smiled a little. ‘You know it’s not just London and then a big wall and then Pandemonium. I didn’t get much school but I remember they were pretty solid about not killing your child’s godfather. It isn’t like getting the dative and the locative confused if you don’t learn your declension tables properly.’

  Vaulker stared at him. When he spoke, his voice broke. ‘I know that. I’m telling you what to tell those fossils at the FO. There are men there who still disapprove of people who only have money because their grandfathers were promoted from the ranks at Trafalgar. People like … but you think I’m like them, of course, just because I bothered to learn to speak properly. Steepleton, I don’t know why you did it, and perhaps – God knows perhaps you didn’t – but I can’t do anything else, except what I’m doing. I’m going to lock you in now. Kuroda’s men are staying outside and … if you try to escape, I think they will shoot you. For God’s sake, think of your daughter.’

  He let himself out. Thaniel watched the door close an
d heard the green clank of the lock, and felt nothing for a long, long lag before it broke over him. He pressed his hands over his mouth to keep from making a sound.

  PART FIVE

  FORTY

  Abashiri, Hokkaido, 19th February 1889

  Kabato prison was two hundred miles away. Most of the way was roadless through the forest, and it took the prisoners thirty days to arrive.

  It was a very, very long month. Takiko had no idea what to do anymore. She’d never had no idea what to do, and she was so angry with the helplessness of it that she stopped being careful. She snatched five bewildered prisoners from in front of a firing squad – including the yakuza man who had beaten up Oemoto – and said she needed help cleaning if so many more people would be coming from Kabato. She’d been watching firing squads for days. They were trying to clear space in the cells. They let her have the five prisoners. The warden stirred himself enough to say it was irregular. She said it was free labour. That was that.

  And all the while, the owls stayed on the roof of the Oracle tower.

  The first column arrived early in the morning on the thirtieth day. Takiko saw them from the prison gates. The prisoners were in bright red, just like the Abashiri men, but theirs was weather-faded and frosted now. They’d come through the forest, not along the coast. There could only have been roads for a tenth of the way, and they looked exhausted. Only a few guards rode up and down the lines. More than anything, they looked like a defeated army trailing home. She was too far away to see properly, but the stiff way the men at the front moved made it clear enough that they were chained together.

  Gunshots rang out inside the prison. She glanced back and hoped they were shooting the cows. They had a herd of their own, because people in town charged mad prices for cheese, but in all the time she’d been here, the cows had proven themselves to be nothing more useful than grain-eating machines. She wasn’t usually much of a beef or milk person, but for the whole of the last week, she’d been craving a proper English Sunday lunch so badly that she’d made herself a meticulous menu for when the spring crept round and the boats ran to Tokyo again. She was getting to the point where she would have cheerfully murdered someone for some proper roast potatoes, the kind they’d made at the old legation when her father had been the translator.