by Rokuro Inui
“Master Kyuzo!”
Jinnai ran to Kyuzo and crouched at his side.
Then came the horrific realization.
Both of Kyuzo’s arms had been torn off at the shoulder, complete with the sleeves of his brown kosode. He looked like a doll mistreated by a violent child.
Aghast, Jinnai put his ear to Kyuzo’s chest. His heartbeat was faint, but he was still breathing.
He had lost a terrible amount of blood, though. It had poured from his wounds to form a sticky, coagulating pool on the floor. His face was white, and when Jinnai helped him sit up straighter, his skin was cold.
“Is he dead?” asked Kasuga.
“No,” Jinnai said after a long pause.
“He won’t be repairing any more automata, though,” she said with concern.
The hands that Kyuzo had used to craft automata of near-divine accomplishment were gone.
This could not be. It was precisely in those hands that Kyuzo’s divinity resided.
“We have to take him home,” said Jinnai. “He’s still breathing.” He hoisted Kyuzo over his shoulder. The old man groaned, although whether he was conscious was unclear.
“Did the Sacred Vessel do this?” asked Kasuga.
“So it would appear.”
The Vessel must have attacked Kyuzo as soon as she awoke and then left him dying in the storehouse while she pursued her own ends.
Was she truly attacking as wildly and without distinction as it appeared? Or was there something deeper at work—some mechanism Keian Higa had built into her?
That would explain a lot. Keian had surely died convinced of Kyuzo’s betrayal. If he had done some tinkering with the Vessel before leaving the palace to surrender …
No feats of deduction were necessary. The sealed-up Vessel had been wound for revenge on the shogunate, in anticipation of the moment when the shogun seized control of the palace and his agents opened the imperial tomb.
The trap might have been designed to spring into action the moment the iron cabinet was opened. But for whatever reason, at some point during its years underground, the Vessel had stopped working.
Until Kyuzo’s inspection and repairs had revived her.
“What is Her Majesty going to do?” Kasuga fretted. She seemed more concerned about the survival of Kyuzo’s skills than his physical form.
It made sense. To Kasuga, a life in service to the imperial automaton was a life well spent.
Kyuzo’s life might be saved, but his work on automata was essentially over. Jinnai well understood Kasuga’s concern about the empress. He was worried about Eve himself.
Kyuzo’s arms were lying in the corner, but there was no point taking them home. They were of no use to anyone anymore.
Exiting the storehouse with Kasuga, Jinnai saw smoke rising from the castle keep.
“Kasuga,” he said. “I need you to carry Master Kyuzo home. If a man named Sashichi turns up, tell him to get the word out to the other students—as of today, Kyuzo Kugimiya’s school is closing its doors.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going back to the keep.”
“Why?” said Kasuga, shifting Kyuzo onto her own shoulders. “Let it burn.”
Kasuga had once been a lady of the innermost sanctum. She had given up that life to free the imperial automaton, but she likely took a dim view of the shogun’s intrusion into the palace. If the men of the shogunate were slaughtered en masse by the Vessel they had awakened, that was no concern of hers.
Kasuga was slightly surprised by how light Kyuzo was. It was due to the missing arms, no doubt.
“The Sacred Vessel is Eve’s twin,” said Jinnai. “I can’t just leave her.” He had no idea what he was actually going to do. All he knew was that the thought of her captured and helpless in the hands of the shogun’s spies was unbearable.
“I understand,” said Kasuga. She had thrown her life away for an automaton, too. Their circumstances were different, but she surely understood Jinnai’s feelings for Eve—and, by extension, the Vessel—even if they could not be put into words.
Jinnai watched her run swiftly off, still carrying Kyuzo. Then he turned back toward the keep.
By now it was an inferno. Smoke and flames erupted from the windows and under the eaves.
Jinnai readjusted his sword and ran toward it.
As he approached the stone walls of the keep, the air shimmered with heat. Sparks showered down along with scorched and broken roof tiles.
He saw a warrior fleeing the scene and seized his arm.
“The woman! Where is she?” he demanded.
“S-still i-in the keep,” stammered the man.
Jinnai nodded and let him go, then raced up the stone staircase and into the keep.
It felt deserted inside. By now everyone else must have fled.
The fire seemed to have started on an upper floor, because the lower floors were still only filled with thin smoke. Flames always sought to rise, so he probably had some time. But if one of the main pillars burned out, the whole upper section of the castle could crash down on him.
He ran first to the great hall where the final round of the cricket-fighting tournament was to have been held. The scene was very different now. Habitats and cages lay scattered across the floor, and here and there were smears where panicking men had trampled the same insects they had once so solicitously raised.
Jinnai headed deeper into the keep, kicking down screens and doors instead of wasting the time to open them properly.
He found a steep staircase leading upward and scaled it rapidly, cornering the tight turns at the landings.
The smoke was thicker on the floor above, but he still saw no flames.
Several corpses in battle gear lay around him. The Vessel’s handiwork, he presumed.
As he searched for the stairs to the next floor up, he heard a beam crack.
“Sacred Vessel!” he called out desperately. “If you are here, show yourself!”
He had not expected it to work.
From outside he heard the sound and felt the shudder of eaves collapsing and a landslide of roof tiles clattering down the side of the building.
He found the next flight of stairs and had just stepped onto the first step when he saw the white feet of a woman descending the stairs from above.
Jinnai stopped and removed his sword, still in its scabbard, from his belt. Drawing the blade, he tossed the scabbard to one side. It could only get in the way.
Step-by-step, the feet descended the staircase.
The fire on the next floor up looked intense and was sending a constant spray of sparks and burning fragments into the staircase.
There was no telling when the whole keep might collapse. And yet the Vessel came slowly. Even irritatingly slowly.
When her lower half had come into view, he saw that she was carrying something.
A moment later he realized that it was a head.
The shogun’s head.
By now the Vessel was almost fully in view.
Where is he?
Those had been her first words to the crowd in the great hall. Had she been looking for the shogun? And yet …
In her other hand the Vessel held a sword.
The flames had burned most of her hair off by now. The thin underrobe she wore had been reduced to rags by the sword blows she had endured, and now those rags were scorched as well.
She was a pitiful sight. In one place her skin was torn, revealing her gleaming metal rib cage and the endlessly whirling gears and clockwork within.
As she descended she swung the shogun’s head like a watermelon from the market. If she felt any nervousness or excitement at having beheaded the shogun himself, she showed none.
Finally she noticed Jinnai and spoke.
“Are you of the shogunate?�
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Jinnai braced himself for single combat and said, “I am.”
It seemed clear by now that Keian Higa had designed her to kill not just the specific individuals against which he sought vengeance, but anyone who worked for the shogunate. And so she asked the same question of everyone she met and killed them if they answered in the affirmative. He felt a pang at her earnestness and immaturity.
But isn’t this the natural state of the automaton? he thought as he raised his sword. As Kyuzo’s apprentice, he had learned much about automaton construction but still harbored certain doubts.
Kyuzo argued that automata were soulless.
Eve, for example, might laugh as if happy and cry as if sad, but this was a masquerade orchestrated by gears and springs and clockwork and metal wires and quicksilver-filled tubes under her skin. The Eve that actually felt happy or sad did not exist.
Jinnai granted that Eve’s workings contained no component that could control a soul.
But were humans any different?
Jinnai had accompanied Kyuzo to countless dissections at the execution grounds as part of his studies. Each one had deepened his conviction that Kyuzo was mistaken.
No matter how minutely you dissected the human body, you found nothing that embodied the soul or called up emotions and memories.
Where did the soul come from? Where, in the body or brain, did it conceal itself while a human still lived? These question had always bothered Jinnai.
If he had not met Eve, he doubted that he would ever have given such issues a thought.
And it was those feelings for Eve on Jinnai’s part that gave Eve life.
Automata like Eve and the empress showed human behavior as a response to the care and love they received from humans. Their life was in that behavior.
The Vessel had lain in the imperial tomb since the Age of Gods, sealed away with full awareness. For a being with life, such loneliness would have been intolerable.
When had she finally become ensouled? Probably, Jinnai thought, when Kyuzo named her.
The replica of Eve that stood before him now had slept bearing within her Keian’s enmity for the shogunate and all its works. Perhaps what had awoken her was Kyuzo’s own self-loathing, his bitter regret.
Eve was bright and cheerful. Why not? Everyone loved Eve.
On the surface, this Vessel was Eve’s twin. But no one had given her their heart.
“Poor thing,” Jinnai said. The words came as a surprise even to himself.
But the Vessel was still approaching. And his answer to her question had changed her expression dramatically.
The only sure way to stop her was the method he had tried to share with Kihachi. He would have to punch through the hole in her solar plexus and disengage the mechanism behind her breastbone.
It was a close-range operation. She would have time to react. Was he willing to die to see this through?
Yes, he thought. I am.
Perhaps it was her resemblance to Eve that made him feel this way. If there was no one else to give the Vessel their heart, he would just have to do it himself. A double suicide for the sake of this lonely automaton who had slept so long in hell.
Jinnai adjusted his stance. He would knock her sword from her hand, throw away his own, and leap at her.
And then part of the ceiling fell.
Blackened beams and rafters crashed to the floor, still engulfed in flames. The sound was deafening.
The Vessel did not even glance at the vortex of fire behind her.
Jinnai stepped forward.
As he did, she threw the shogun’s head into the flames and swung at him with her sword.
Blade clashed against blade.
Even with a two-handed grip, it took all of Jinnai’s strength to withstand the force she brought to bear with a single arm.
As he struggled, her other hand reached for his neck.
Jinnai prepared himself for the end.
Then he heard a dry sound at his feet, like someone stepping on a bean.
“Oh!”
Letting her sword clatter to the floor, the Vessel looked down and raised her foot.
Jinnai looked down too.
Underneath her foot was a crushed cricket.
Jinnai recognized it immediately: it was Hawk and Plum, the cricket that Kihachi had captured at the palace. The cricket rumored to have come out of the imperial tomb.
The automated cricket that had been sealed in the tomb with her.
The Vessel wailed piteously and collapsed forward. Jinnai caught her, bracing himself against the weight.
He saw what had happened.
She had not been searching for the shogun. She had come in search of Hawk and Plum.
When Keian had closed her up in the tomb, this cricket had been with her. Why, Jinnai did not know. Perhaps the cricket was like Eve—a design from the Age of Myth, preserving the knowledge of the ancients in its very form.
But to the Vessel, it had been her only friend through years of darkness and solitude.
“Don’t cry,” Jinnai said. The Vessel clung to him, and he hugged her tightly.
Her tears dampened his shoulder.
He knew the design. Behind her eyes of agate and glass were two tear ducts made of specially tanned swim bladders that were found in fish. When her face contorted, a mechanism of springs and clockwork squeezed the ducts and the water inside them spilled out.
But what did that matter?
It was not clockwork that had brought these tears to her eyes. It was grief.
Jinnai moved his hand to her chest, extended a finger, and pushed it into her solar plexus.
The Vessel offered no resistance.
He pressed on the mechanism behind her breastbone, and her movements stopped.
As deadweight, the Vessel was too heavy for Jinnai to support. He lowered her to the floor.
From close up, it was clear that the crushed insect had indeed been an automaton too. Gears the size of sesame seeds and even tinier springs were scattered around its exoskeleton.
The Vessel’s lashes and cheeks were still damp with tears. She looked as if she were sleeping.
The building lurched violently.
Jinnai left the Vessel where she was and backed away. He heard and felt a series of thuds above him, until a beam so gigantic he could hardly have gotten both arms around it pierced the ceiling and came crashing down almost vertically.
The Vessel and her cricket were engulfed in flames.
The skin that covered her body bubbled and melted, gradually revealing her carved skeleton and the mechanisms it contained.
Shaking off the urge to stay where he was and watch to the end, Jinnai forced himself to dive out of the nearest window, smashing the wooden lattice that covered it. He landed on the eaves and kept running, leaping free of the keep just as the mighty walls collapsed inward.
VII
Tempu Castle blazed like a torch held aloft above the city, visible from its every corner.
Crowds were already arriving to gape at the scene. Jinnai hurried through them and made his way back to the Kugimiya residence.
There was still work to be done.
“Master Kyuzo!”
Hearing only echoes in the main residence, he ran to the workshop in the yard. He opened both doors and hurried down the stairs to find everyone there before him.
“Jin!” Eve said. It was strange to see her after having left her identical twin in the burning castle only moments earlier.
Kasuga was in the corner, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She had changed from her indigo shinobi gear into a more subdued pink kosode.
On the central workbench lay the imperial automaton.
Her head and limbs had been removed and placed on their separate platforms, connected by their saggi
ng bundles of steel and tubes.
“Who … ?” Jinnai asked.
“He told us to make sure you could start immediately,” said Eve. Jinnai followed her gaze and saw Kyuzo. His shoulders had been bandaged, but blood was already beginning to seep through the white cloth.
Without opening his eyes, Kyuzo muttered, “You’re late.” His breathing was shallow. “But you did make it back before I died. Well done.”
“Master Kyuzo—”
Kyuzo’s eyes flew open. “Inspection and maintenance of the imperial automaton begins now.”
“But in your condition—”
“As of now, Jinnai, this work falls to you. I will guide you through the key points of its construction—every secret it contains. But there isn’t much time. This is your final lesson. Make sure it sticks.”
“But …” Jinnai was aghast. Neither his knowledge nor his dexterity were anywhere near the level of Kyuzo’s.
“Believe me,” said Kyuzo, “I too would have preferred a worthier successor. But here we are. Stop arguing and do the work.”
Jinnai looked at Kasuga. She nodded grimly.
It looked like he had no other choice.
He picked up the monocular scope from the table where the tools were laid out. It was the one Kyuzo always used. Fitting it against his eye, he adjusted the dial with trembling hands to focus the lens.
The rest was a blur.
He did remember the things Kyuzo told him: how the imperial automaton was constructed, how to repair it, the secrets of manufacturing the necessary materials. All this stuck with him as if carved on his mind with hammer and chisel. But how he had managed to pull off those near-divine feats of workmanship and finish the work was a hazier matter—a shimmering memory glimpsed through mist.
According to Eve and Kasuga, he and Kyuzo had worked for three days and three nights straight, without food or rest.
Kyuzo cursed his clumsiness and slowness on the uptake. But ultimately the work was a success. The newly repaired automaton opened her eyes again. Kyuzo sighed as if in relief, and that was his last breath. Jinnai collapsed in exhaustion, Kyuzo’s final words still with him.
The construction of Eve’s body taught me everything Keian Higa knew. You must learn from her too.
