Ministry Protocol: Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Tee Morris

  *****

  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.

  Where was the phoenix mikoshi? Law stood in his stirrups, hot wind whipped past his face as Brutus surged down the line. Then he saw it—the intricate carving atop the second-to-last mikoshi. It was burnished to a high sheen, but the lid’s wood was newer, brighter than the rest. He whistled, sending Brutus into an immediate lunge to the right, heading off the mikoshi.

  He drove the bearers sideways on the bridge, and the men holding the two rear mikoshi seemed to think better of trying to cross the mad Englishman armed with the horse and gun, turned to flee back the way they had come. These were normal tradesmen, not samurai. He drove them back, cursing his poor Japanese as he shouted vague orders they didn’t seem to understand. He wasn’t sure how to tell them there was a bomb, couldn’t impress on them his desire to save them, not hurt them. Treating these people like sheep wouldn’t do much for peaceful relations, but the only way to get them where he wanted was to herd them.

  They reached the centre of the bridge just as the mikoshi began to smoke. The bearers shouted in alarm, half letting go and scrambling away from the shrine, which now ticked loud enough to hear over the drums and shouts. He dismounted and swatted Brutus. As hoof beats retreated, he grabbed a pole, tugging it toward the railing.

  “In the bleedin’ water!” he shouted. The men resisted him, shouting and arguing at each other in Japanese, their dialect so thick his limited grasp of language failed to help. He caught the nearest man’s gaze and paused, wishing he could explain that he was trying to help. They looked at each other for a beat, and the man stopped struggling away from him. Something in the man’s dark eyes shifted, opened, and Law was looking at a person. Not just a part of the crowd, but another human being with as long a history as his own. Perhaps not so much spent running away.

  Sunlight flashed off the mikoshi then, blinding him. Suddenly, he knew what to say. Words appeared unbidden in Law’s mind and with them came recognition. A chill shuddered through him, seeming to take hold of his jaw and force out the words. “Mizu ni ire!”

  The old man’s eyes widened, and together they heaved the clockwork mikoshi skyward. The muscles in Law’s back strained and the wooden box knocked off his hat. The ticking, smoking mechanism was right next to his ear when he heard the familiar zip-hiss of flame catching fuse. His heart leapt into his throat.

  Law shoved into the mikoshi’s underside, feeling the clockwork in his shoulder screech to a halt as the last heave sent the heavy shrine over the red-lacquered railing.

  An instant before the mikoshi hit the water, it erupted. The concussion sent a watery jet into the air and Law was slammed up and out, soaring over the Kamo River’s rushing green current.

  The last thing he thought of was Tokiko’s burning eyes.