by Rokuro Inui
Today’s show had been canceled out of respect for the deceased empress. Leaving Nakasu Kannon, Kasuga had just set foot on Ten-Span Bridge when she saw a woman in a red kosode coming toward her.
She had never seen the woman before, but she felt as if lightning had run down her spine.
She’s another one. Just like the empress.
Kyuzo Kugimiya was the real thing.
Which meant the empress could be saved …
Kasuga’s breast burned with excitement. She felt tears well in her eyes, but the other woman had the coldest look she had ever seen.
The woman stopped a few steps before her. “You must be Kasuga, former lady of the innermost sanctum,” she said.
People streamed around them in both directions.
“Kugimiya sent me here to meet you. You and—” the woman paused, then shook her head slowly. “The imperial automaton.”
“Jinnai. Out.”
Jinnai had been bound in a leaning-forward lotus position and left lying on the floor. With a grunt, he wriggled around so that he could look up.
One of Kihachi’s henchmen was grinning down at him through a hatch in the ceiling.
“How do you expect me to get out like this?” Jinnai demanded.
“Still healthy enough to complain, I see. Here.” A knife sailed down from the ceiling to land with a splash in the pool of feces and urine that covered the floor. “You do the rest. I’ll be back once you’re ready.”
Jinnai was at Tempu Castle, a guest of the head gardener.
To be specific, he was in the tank under Kihachi’s toilet seat.
It was spacious as these things went—perhaps six feet on every side, the size of a small room. The bones on the floor suggested that he was not the first to be imprisoned there.
Jinnai squirmed across the slick floor and managed to catch the dagger between his teeth and use it to cut his bonds.
“Looks like I’ll be spared your fate,” he said to a maggoty skull nearby.
But why was he getting out?
“Lord Haga, master of the Conch and Taiko, has been ordered to commit seppuku,” said Kihachi.
Jinnai listened cautiously, the worst of the effluent scrubbed off him.
“I understand he was meeting with a senior palace attendant without the shogun’s knowledge,” Kihachi continued.
Just as Jinnai had feared, their man on the inside had told all. He should have killed him when he had the chance.
Kihachi was carefully pruning the potted plants in his own private yard with a pair of shears.
Jinnai looked down at his own hands. Both little fingers and his left ring finger had been severed at the root. His left hamstring and several toes on his left foot were also gone, as was his left ear.
All had been removed by the very shears Kihachi was using now. He kept them very sharp.
“There’s more,” Kihachi said. “The Haga household has been dissolved, and the bureau of the Conch and Taiko itself is to be abolished.”
Secret meetings with a palace official were bad enough. To attack imperial guards and carriage bearers and kidnap a female official was an outrage.
Placing the shears on a table with a clink, Kihachi accepted a bucket of water from a nearby henchman and dipped a ladle into it to water his plants. Each of them had been tended with loving care for years, and he put them on display around the castle when the season was right.
“You said the empress died too,” Jinnai said.
“Yes, and our stubborn prince Hiruhiko has finally agreed to the shogun’s demands. It won’t be long before a new empress takes the throne.”
When she did, the imperial household would be fully absorbed by the shogunate.
Jinnai had his doubts.
The imperial family had kept its secret for three long decades since the empress’s birth. Why abandon it so easily now? Hadn’t the whole point been to prevent a coup from without like the one that was about to take place?
And then something occurred to him.
What exactly was the “carelessness” Kasuga had committed? More to the point—
Jinnai pushed the thought away. Had he been misunderstanding the whole affair, right from the start?
“You won’t be doing much shinobi work in your state,” Kihachi told him. “Your master in the Conch and Taiko is dead. You’re out of the intelligence service, of course. And your name’s been struck off the census lists, too.”
In other words, the moment Jinnai set foot outside Tempu Castle, he would be homeless and destitute. A nonperson.
“We’re letting you go without killing you in honor of the new empress,” said Kihachi with his usual beatific smile. “That’s the story, anyway. I’ll level with you: I just didn’t want to let you rot down there. You think a toilet smells bad without a cadaver in it …”
Kihachi made a show of grimacing, then turned back to his plants and tossed another ladle of water over them.
Kicked out of Tempu Castle in grimy clothes with a rope for an obi, Jinnai made straight for the Kugimiya residence.
He had no shoes or undergarments, and his unusual appearance was enough to keep the other people on the street away.
As he walked, Jinnai’s mind raced.
If he was right about his new realization, he had been misreading the situation from the moment he attacked the palanquin at the crossroads.
An icy, silent rain began to fall. Just the thing for his current mood. Tramping down the increasingly muddy road barefoot, Jinnai finally arrived at Kyuzo’s compound.
He ducked through the little gate in the walls of raised earth and knocked on the front door.
“Jin?”
Eve appeared from within and hurried to support him when she saw he was on the verge of collapse.
“You were alive, then,” she said.
“Turns out you don’t owe me one after all,” Jinnai said. “Was the stool okay?”
“The what? Oh … Yes. Perfectly safe.”
She seemed to want to say more, but didn’t.
“Let me tend your wounds inside,” she said instead.
“No, they aren’t that serious,” Jinnai said, stepping into the entryway and sitting down on the step. “I’d like some water, though. And there’s someone I want to see.”
Eve brought him a cup of water, and he drained it in one gulp.
“She is here, isn’t she?” he said. “The imperial automaton.”
Eve’s expression changed noticeably.
Jinnai added, “The one I thought was Kasuga.”
VII
“Astonishing. Master Keian made this himself?”
Kyuzo reached up to rotate a segment of the scope over his eye, adjusting the focus of the thick lenses.
He stood over a slim torso that rested on a workbench at the center of the room. The torso’s limbs had been removed and now rested on four smaller, narrower benches arranged around it. Each remained connected to the torso by hundreds of individual strands running to each limb, from hairlike filaments to conduits as thick as a thumb, gathered into bundles that drooped between the benches.
More startling was the head, which sat on a slightly raised platform of its own, connected by another mass of tubes and wires.
The chestnut-colored, slightly wavy hair that Kasuga loved had been cropped short, as befit a kamuro. Given the empress’s childlike features, the effect was not without its charm.
The empress’s eyes were closed. Apart from the occasional twitch of her eyelids, she looked fast asleep.
We know what you are, Kasuga. You are an ukami.
That night in the innermost sanctum, the empress had seen through her facade. And in that moment, Kasuga had made her decision.
She would not, could not, ever lie to the empress again. Automaton or not, this was the woma
n to whom she had sworn her life in service.
Kasuga was the daughter of the master of ukami. On her twelfth birthday, Prince Hiruhiko himself had informed her of the empress’s secret and assigned her to the innermost sanctum to determine if any of the other girls had discovered the truth.
She listened closely to their conversations both on and off duty. Sometimes, in the attendants’ quarters, she joined their discussions to ask a probing question. Whenever any of the others hinted at knowing more than they should, she told the prince and they were killed.
Even for someone who had been training as an ukami since birth, to inform on fellow attendants, on friends, knowing that they would be put to death, was near-unbearable at times. This was when Kasuga poured her heart and soul into her everyday duties for the empress, striving to perform even the tiniest detail with the utmost care. The more deeply she venerated the empress, the more trivial everything else seemed. By treating Her Majesty as more than human despite knowing that she was a machine, Kasuga had sought to protect herself.
You are an ukami.
With these words, the empress had finally freed Kasuga from her double life. Kasuga had wept.
Will you protect us?
The ukami served the empress, and the empress needed her now.
Kasuga’s resolve was set. Even if it meant making enemies of the entire imperial household, including the other ukami, she would keep the empress safe.
“Our father was a man named Keian Higa, but he has long since departed this life,” the empress said.
As a result, she explained, she had not received repairs or maintenance for some time, and her systems were failing one by one.
“Keian operated a private school called the Institute of Machinery. It was closed when his plot against the shogun was uncovered, but one of his students disappeared just before the magistrates made their arrests.”
The two of them were beyond the veil on the imperial bed. The empress whispered as if imparting a great secret.
“That student was a mole. Keian knew but feigned ignorance because the student showed such promise.”
“And so …”
Even now, Kasuga felt a nervous thrill at breaking the injunction against speaking to the empress directly.
“We think he escaped beheading, and lives still. He is the only one who can repair our person. His name is Kyuzo Kugimiya.”
“Am I to bring him to the palace, then?”
The empress slowly shook her head. “No. We will leave the palace and go to him.”
She spoke simply, but the sheer audacity of what she proposed was stunning.
“Leave the palace? But, Your Majesty …” Kasuga’s voice trembled with shock.
“We have a plan. You, Kasuga, are the only one who can help us carry it out.”
At these words, Kasuga fairly melted with delight.
“Master Kyuzo.”
Kasuga’s reverie was interrupted when Eve entered the room. Kyuzo did not even look up, so absorbed was he in the construction of the imperial automaton.
Then Kasuga saw the man Eve had brought with her and leapt to her feet, her color rising.
“Wait,” the man said. “I’m not here to start anything. You don’t need to either.”
He looked very different now, but this was definitely the man who had ambushed the palanquin, left Kasuga for dead, and hidden the empress in the Thirteen Floors.
“I’m with the shogun’s intelligence service,” he said. “Or was. My name is Jinnai Tasaka.”
“No fighting in here, either of you,” Kyuzo said without looking up. “These are delicate mechanisms.”
Kasuga slipped the weighted length of wire back into the fold of her kimono.
“So you were the real Kasuga,” said the man who called himself Jinnai, as if through gritted teeth.
Kasuga had little sympathy for him. He had knocked their plan off-kilter before it had even begun.
It had begun on a night when Kasuga was assigned to the empress’s bedchamber. As agreed, the empress had pretended to shut down. Rather than telling the ladies-in-waiting, Kasuga had slipped into Prince Hiruhiko’s quarters to inform him.
The prince was already under pressure from the shogunate on the matter of abdication. This did not help matters. Kasuga proposed that they smuggle the empress out of the palace and find a technician to repair her without revealing her identity. They could hide her in the palanquin they used for attendants who had been “careless,” and Kasuga could ride along as well.
Meanwhile, within the palace, the word would be spread that the empress’s illness had worsened and that she was to be attended only by Kasuga for the time being. No one would know that she had left, and once her maintenance was complete, they would simply eliminate anyone who had been aware of the true situation.
This was Kasuga’s proposal, and Prince Hiruhiko had given his assent.
The second, secret part of the plan was for Kasuga to wait until they were a fair distance from the palace and then burst out of the palanquin, kill the guards and porters, then abscond with the empress to Tempu.
But Jinnai had launched his attack on the procession first, and even Kasuga had barely escaped with her life. Worse, he had abducted the empress, leaving a human corpse Kasuga did not recognize in her place.
Thinking quickly, the empress had claimed to be Kasuga when Jinnai had asked and had let him take her to Tempu.
And now all three had been reunited in Kyuzo’s workshop.
Kasuga was still glaring at Jinnai when she realized that the empress’s eyelids were slowly rising.
Now hear this: the day is come!
She felt a pang of nostalgia for those languorous palace mornings. They would not come again.
“Jinnai,” said Kyuzo. “I understand that the Haga line has been ended and the Conch and Taiko dissolved.”
Jinnai nodded.
“My own position as refinery assistant might vanish before long, too.” Removing the scope from his eye, Kyuzo rose to his feet. Stiff shouldered, perhaps from his work, he tilted his head left and right to crack his neck and began to massage his own shoulders. “The secret is secret no longer; what cards we had are worthless. The shogun’s men will have the imperial tomb open before long, I imagine.”
Eve frowned. “But that’s where …”
“The Sacred Vessel from the Age of Myth slumbers,” said the empress’s head.
Was the tremble in her voice different from usual? Some side effect of maintenance, perhaps.
Kasuga had pursued the empress’s abductors to Tempu, but the trail had gone cold there. She had begun by locating Kyuzo Kugimiya to request his assistance with the imperial automaton’s maintenance. Well, not request so much as demand, given the blade at his throat.
But Kyuzo had not shown a hint of fear. On the contrary, he seemed genuinely interested in the prospect.
When Kasuga heard that Kyuzo had been summoned by the master of the Conch and Taiko and forced to agree to a meeting at the Thirteen Floors with Jinnai and a former lady of the innermost chamber named Kasuga, she was confused for a moment but then realized what must be happening. The empress was concealing her true identity beneath that of her former servant.
And so Kyuzo had good reason not to appear at the meeting as planned.
If Haga and Jinnai learned that their “Kasuga” was actually the empress herself, who had, furthermore, fled from the palace of her own volition, they might have locked her up in the Haga residence forever.
Kyuzo wanted to inspect the imperial automaton for himself. Kasuga wanted her to get the maintenance she needed. The benefits of working together were obvious.
Kasuga had rescued the empress from the Thirteen Floors, but her methods had created new problems.
Kyuzo had gone into hiding, leaving his residence deserted, and Eve had b
een left in a friendly bathhouse with instructions to help Jinnai.
But the imperial automaton’s maintenance could only be performed in Kyuzo’s workshop.
And so Kyuzo had entrusted Kasuga and the empress to an acrobat troupe currently at Nakasu Kannon. He had been making karakuri stalls for the temple for some time and was able to call in favors. Kasuga’s ukami training let her pose as a member of the troupe without difficulty.
Eventually, they assumed, the palace would no longer be able to conceal the empress’s absence. When that happened, the word would go out that she had died or perhaps just abdicated. The heat would die down, the surveillance would be lifted from Kyuzo’s residence, and he would finally be able to inspect and repair the empress at his leisure.
All this meant that Jinnai’s struggles with Chokichi Yaguruma and the shogun’s spies had been utterly pointless. Haga had been ordered to commit seppuku, his family line had been dissolved, and the Conch and Taiko as an organization had been disbanded, just as the shogun had been planning for some time.
“Developed a limp, I see,” Kyuzo said. “And you don’t seem to have the standard complement of fingers anymore. Or ears.” Jinnai didn’t smile. “All Eve’s fault, of course. She shouldn’t have asked you to get her box in the first place. Let me take a look at you later.”
“What good will that do? You aren’t a physician,” said Jinnai.
The corners of Kyuzo’s mouth twitched. It was the closest thing to an expression Jinnai had seen on his face since arriving earlier.
“What a physician cannot heal,” said Kyuzo, “I can.”
VIII
Some days later, when his wounds were finally patched up, Jinnai accompanied Eve across Ten-Span Bridge to Nakasu Kannon.
They had invited Kyuzo, too, but he had shown no interest in joining them.
Jinnai thought back to his parting from Eve at the top of the bridge before leaving for his assignment in Kamigata. Only a few months had passed, but everything had changed. His station in life, and even his body.
