by Kin Law
The Inspector was sitting on what looked like a pile of rags, with all the sleeves and pants legs tied together. It was still struggling, but every so often the blonde law enforcer would reach into it and twist something, extracting a piercing scream from within.
“Ear,” The Inspector explained absentmindedly. “The Yard never taught us how to subdue a suspect who was double-jointed almost everywhere. I had to improvise. Oh bollocks, how am I supposed to run off with the ship now?” She added half-heartedly.
The Inspector hadn’t come out of it unscathed.
Her borrowed clothes were scuffed and torn, and she was sporting a rather beautiful black eye, clashing magnificently with her tussled gold hair.
“Oy! That was my second-favorite bodice!” I chastised.
“Too bad it didn’t work. Good plan, very pirate of you,” Albion ignored me and praised Hargreaves, earning him a look full of vitriol . “Don’t knock it, you’ve already got the eye patch.”
Through a fit of giggles, I managed to step in with Auntie, and together, the three of us ladies undid the bonds. There were altogether too many people on the bridge now, and the girl we freed didn’t even try to escape.
She just tumbled out of the bundle, all dense jumpers, violently orange hair and a multitude of scarves. She sat there on the deck like a broken doll, with her enormous boots peeking out of a beribboned hem.
“Hello,” Albion said, kneeling in front of her. His smile was kind, though it was having trouble penetrating Kitty Desperado’s pout. “I’m not drunk now. How did you steal my ship?”
While Albion was talking with Kitty, Blair and I turned towards the Inspector, who seemed out of sorts. She was dusting herself off, constantly stopping and picking at a rip here and there, as if she didn’t see the point. I sighed.
“There’s a pile of clothes in the hold nobody knows what to do with, and a cleaning steamer in the boiler room. You can take your pick from those,” I supplied. “Mind, it’s mostly men’s wear.”
“Those would be easier to move in,” She said appreciatively. She leaned on my steering wheel to pick at a rip near her knee. “I see you are expecting me to stay. I suppose it is inevitable, if we are to solve the mystery of Westminster and recover your Captain Samuel.”
“You certainly came in useful,” I agreed reluctantly. This Hargreaves was making herself far more at home than I was comfortable with. She also had the legs off a giraffe, something I was seriously uncomfortable with.
“We will discuss the matter at length with the Captain. I expect some sort of alliance can be reached?” she said.
The Inspector gave me a once-over disturbingly like a frisking. A nerve in my forehead began to twitch unbecomingly.
At that point, Albion straightened up, with the orange girl clinging to his elbow.
His goggles were back up, and the girl was staring up at him with wide eyes.
“Ladies? This is Kitty Desperado.”
The story of Kitty Desperado was merely an exceptional one- meaning, it was one we had heard hundreds of times scouring the bars of the Hook. She was one of a faceless multitude orphaned during the last Great War. Then only a babe in arms, a Welsh relief corporal had nearly tripped over her, nestled in the debris of a bombed Glasgow hotel, clothed in a pile of evening gowns and hangers.
Dropped from one of the still new Eastern Conglomerate dirigibles, steamcraft bombs left flesh melted off bone, pillars warped and broken in its wake.
The closet and room had taken the brunt of the attack, but a mother’s careful wrapping had saved the child, wound in a dress meant to keep a lady protected near searing hot engines. These costly thermal materials were just then coming into fashion, driven by a fiercely progressive and practical new London femininity.
Near as the corporal could figure, the girl had been abandoned there not long before the bombing, along with several ready milk bottles and a bell looped round her wrist to attract attention.
It was a common enough tale. Like as not, the girl was the secret fruit of some society debutante and a handsome, transitory soldier, hidden away in the interests of the aristocracy hiding out in Scotland’s country manors.
The tenant of the room had used a false name, borrowed from a popular series of propaganda pictures playing at the time, about a Spanish thief turned spy for the Western Partnership.
The name of the thief had been Kitty Desperado.
The Great War had left plenty of boys and girls in Kitty’s unenviable circumstance. The modestly retained corporal had been thoroughly moved, but in the end was forced to give up Kitty to the state’s care. Britain’s deficits during the war were well documented, and it had been a miracle the military even managed to build their flagship dirigible fleet, the Knights of the Round, which won the Partnership the war.
Orphans who could contribute nothing were summarily shipped to the filing cabinets of military orphanages.
As early as the age of six, were sent into the reserves as yeomen and engineering apprentices, where their deft fingers were made to mend the engines of war.
Kitty Desperado nearly never met with her gallant rescuer, not until she was well into her service as a knocker-up aboard the pressed-helium medical carrier Lionheart.
The job was simple: at the appropriate times, according to the shipboard clock, she had to run down to the appropriate officers or midshipmen and wake them at any cost. These hardened officers worked twenty-hour shifts, and were hard drinkers. Often she had to pick the locks, or wriggle in through the heating vents, to slap the man or woman awake with hands stinging from another officer’s stubble. She was so good at it, pretty soon the officers learned to wake at the sound of the bell on her wrist, lest Kitty give them a good licking.
It was the sound of the bell that alerted Kitty’s corporal, then a major by the name of Topher Kien, to Kitty’s existence.
Fate was not kind. By the time Kitty received the major’s message, Kien had succumbed to bullet wounds in a quiet corner of the Lionheart’s patient quarters.
He had been shot in the head, and the bandages were so thick beneath the breathing apparatus, Kitty never saw what the man looked like. The only image she retained was the large, round lenses atop the breathing apparatus, sat there like a toad on his face.
Kitty could not have known, but as she knelt at the feet of the rescuer she imagined day and night, the military was preparing to jettison its orphans out into the world.
The new Baleanopteron-class airships, spearheaded by the Knights, were large, well armored, and could punch holes the size of lakes in an aerial blockade. By the time Major Kien passed, the peace was well under way, with the remnants of the Eastern forces driven back behind the riveted partitions of the Neo Ottoman Empire.
Standing in the busy dirigible port with her few belongings in a satchel on her back and the military’s meager pittance in an envelope in her pocket, Kitty found herself abandoned. She didn’t know the name of the port, even, or the city it was situated near. The shops sold unfamiliar goods, and the water tasted foul, slimy, compared with the clean precipitate of dirigible runoff.
Even at such a young age, she had some idea how a young girl could make a living in the world. She could see them flitting about in the shadows of the alleys and taverns, the hint of garters like frilled creatures peering out from the lager-scented undergrowth. The idea made her want to run to the bog and wretch.
Her deliverance came in a most unprecedented form- in the conversation between two airmen, recently detached from a Salvation Army aid ship.
Kitty had sat herself at a table across them to figure herself out, in a cafe not far from the Lionheart. Funny- it had seemed something like a home yesterday. Today it was merely a ship, one of a thousand moored far overhead. The airmen took no notice of them, instead discussing something that seemed of all-encompassing import.
“I’m telling you, Eriksson, they’re all right. They never target our ships, only the stoolies.”
“Maybe not the one
s you’ve heard about Bernard, but they’re pirates all the same. No two are alike. Make ‘em desperate and they’ll do anything.”
“You’re saying now the war’s over, they’ll start poaching civilian vessels,” deduced the one called Bernard.
“It’s easy, even if you haven’t got a ship,” replied the one called Eriksson. “You simply sneak aboard, hide in a smuggler’s nook or cold steam vent, and wait until everyone is asleep. Then you slit their throats, or take what you want and bugger off on a longboat. Not a soul to stop you in the open sky.” He seemed engrossed in the logistics, never mind who was listening. He was right- the coffee was good and the café was busy. Not many would have bothered to hear a hypothetical from a faceless airman. Not many, but a little girl with red, red hair.
“Pirates are a noble bunch, I say,” the one called Bernard insisted stubbornly. “Descended from ancient rebels, fallen kings. It’s like there’s something bigger behind them, telling them where to go, what ships are safe to plunder. I’ll just bet there’s a band waiting to take down the Turkish trader two towers over.”
If the table across from them were not then vacant save an empty coffee cup, the little girl might have devoted herself to the study of criminal psychology, from men who watched safe beside the front lines. But she had heard enough.
Kitty Desperado, having spent her time in the service of the state opening doors and delivering painful messages, was preparing to apply herself the only way she could conceive: as her namesake, a master thief.
“You have no idea how attractive Captain Albion looked with his goggles, and his dashing coat, and those dimples…” Kitty was saying to me, later on the top deck of the Berry. I harrumphed, as if the idea of Albion’s dimples didn’t make me go a soft one inside.
Kitty was standing in the longboat, packages of supplies and basic tools at her feet. I suppose Albion felt somewhat responsible for the hiccup at the Hook, and some sympathy for her plight. He would not throw her to the winds, as she had been all her life. It might have explained what he did next, as well.
Albion grabbed both sides of Kitty’s face, and looking deep into her eyes, bent down to kiss her, eyes closed, drinking deep like he was going through a vintage Bordeaux. I looked away for a good twenty seconds, after which he let go with a slight pop.
“Kitty Desperado, you are a beautiful femme fatale, and a damn good thief. I am hopelessly infatuated with you, but I am afraid this would never work. You’re just too good for a dirty, deceptive pirate player like me. You should find someone better, someone with a lot more to give. Farewell, Kitty! Think fondly of me!”
He put a boot on the longboat and kicked, sending it drifting gently away, elephant bobbing overhead.
“I’ll always remember you!” Kitty called across the widening gulf.
“Oh, and another thing! That Captain Samuel you were looking for? I heard he was laying low in the Mediterranean! Look for him there!”
We stayed there a long time, until a drift of cloud covered Kitty’s pink, open features and muffled her voice.
“Well that’s that,” Alby remarked, turning to go back into the bridge.
“Just like that?” I protested. Sure, I had been a little jealous, and the sort of relationship the girl wanted was illegal in most of the civilized world, but Kitty had real feelings for Albion. It was just a little romantic, if I took myself out of the equation: a master thief with the heart of a nubile, falling in love with a hardened pirate, Albion wasn’t immune to such fanciful things, or we would be a very different crew.
“What else could I have done? She’s no longer a threat to us, and I left her with as much grub as we could spare. It would never have worked, Rosa,” Albion said jokingly. He looked at me with a fleeting expression, as if I of all people should have known what he really meant. I did.
“I don’t know. Maybe you ought to show it more often, that you actually care,” I answered him the only way I could. “Maybe you could have offered her a place with us. You were certainly quick to offer it to Vanessa Hargreaves.”
“It’s time for us to go, Rosa,” he ordered. Albion fumbled in his pocket, as if he wanted to hammer home the point but the prop was missing.
“It looks like Kitty Desperado got the better of the Pyongyang Purloiner after all,” I said, and gave him my best smirk. I took my own pocket watch, a delicate jeweled number purchased with my Hook winnings, out of my bodice and twirled it in his face.
“Next time I see the little…” he muttered, and made a motion with his hands like he was drowning a cat. “I shouldn’t have given her back the Chandler Polaris.”
“Wait… you WHAT!?”
6: Rome
Hikawa Shoutaro was about to collapse in the courtyard of a monastery.
After days of kneeling in the sun, he was parched, dusty, but no less determined. Figures in brown robes kept passing by, pointedly ignoring his suffering or laughing uncomfortably at his odd, layered clothing. Others left food or water before him, items Hikawa did not touch. To touch a drop of charity would be to throw away an ocean of honor. Besides, much of it was unfamiliar foodstuffs: hard, brown buns, wedges of something yellow smelling of stables, and the occasional glass bottle, bound heavily with cord, smelling heavily of heady, rotten fruit.
Hikawa assumed it was some decadent European sake.
On the first day, the kneeling had been relief. After months of vomiting into the waves off a seafaring trader, then weeks of vomiting into thin air on a connecting dirigible, Hikawa finally reached the outskirts of Rome. From there, he had boarded one of the Europeans’ metal dragons, a smoky, rattling, crowded affair seemingly made to test Hikawa’s Zen calm. The denizens were raucous, hairy, and they had an alien smell.
Rome herself was narrow and crumbling beneath the pressure of time. Hikawa saw much ancient beauty, too often marred by unappreciative residents.
Carvings lay in broken piles on the ground. Historic streets ran obscured by haphazardly built dwellings.
A beautiful wall made of some white jade-like material had been drilled into by an enterprising owner, creating a ladder into an otherwise inaccessible loft.
Despite nearly run over by buzzing, steaming two-wheeled horrors streaking through those narrow channels, Hikawa’s sandals eventually treaded the pleasant gardens of the Abbey, nestled in a claustrophobic corner of the city.
Cool grass embraced his knees. Though the figures in brown robes, with their odd hair cropped to look like so many kappa, or water imps, chattered incessantly at him, Hikawa did not speak Italian, and it was too late to learn.
Instead, he conducted the ritual: possessions, laid before him, just so. His hands, placed at rest on his knees. He spoke the name of the one he wanted, and settled down to wait.
On the second day, the stiffness and numbing took on the familiar background unimportance of toil. Hikawa had gone through worse simply obtaining the leave of the emperor on his journey. There were the days on horseback, weeks of polite waiting in richly lacquered parlors, and the thousands of steps the country warden had been allowed to climb to actually gain an audience with the emperor. He had counted a hundred and eight tori, or spirit gates, on the long stair, with a hundred and eight steps between. Finally, he had had to renounce his ancestral lands, passing them onto a distant relative desperate for the title. The only things he had been allowed to take were the clothes on his back, some little provisions and the way of samurai. It mattered not; Hikawa had long discarded such frivolous things.
There was the sword, of course. He had been allowed to keep his katana. Without his sword, a perfect cut would be impossible.
That afternoon, some youths dared challenge the strange man with the black topknot and tanned complexion, like a Sicilian, who sat as if he awaited the end of the world.
They approached him from behind, as if he would not be aware of their presence. There were four of them. Hikawa was not yet so far gone as to be deaf to their footsteps.
The red lacquer of hi
s sword sheath before him reflected their figures clearly- one larger than Hikawa himself, the others likely cronies. They threw small stones at him. Hikawa knew the missiles for what they were: a test of his mettle, no more than the barking of small dogs at some interesting new animal in their yard.
The instant one touched him, the youth found himself flat upon the floor, Hikawa’s fingers a pincer round his wrist. Hikawa hadn’t even stood up.
Some small fuss resulted from this altercation, of course. There was some rustling of brown robes. Several of the kappa emerged to chatter some more at him, but they seemed unwilling to acquiesce to his clearly stated demand. Neither did they look prepared to throw him out.
For the first time, Hikawa considered the possibility they were toying with him. No, it could not be, Hikawa reassured himself. Such a thing would blot out the honor of so great a swordsman as the one he had come to challenge. Hikawa repeated the name to the kappa, rather more insistently, changing his honorifics to reflect his growing impatience.
It was a masterfully phrased demand- as polite as a request could be for a samurai of his already substantial accomplishments, yet clearly communicating the existence of discomfort. He had faith it could not be misconstrued. Very proper- his father would have been proud.
Now it was the third day, and morning dew had ceased to sustain Hikawa’s lean, muscular form.
His knees were locked comfortably in their customary pose beneath him, but everything else felt parched, dried out, like a bit of bonito, ready to be shaved. A wisp of longing drifted through his mind, of hot fluffy rice, and simple days in his Ryukyu island home. Even with the dirigible traffic from Lands Beyond explorers, news reached the cluster of islands at a languid pace- even the passing of the era
to Showa had come a month late, by official messenger. For a Nippon lauded for advancement in steamworking, the Ryukyu clusters often felt like Meiji, even Edo era with its open ocean breezes, tropical climate, and country simplicity.
Shoutaro shook the remembrance from mind. It would only make the ordeal more difficult. Besides, here was a contingent of kappa, come to receive him once more. Perhaps they would be civilized this time, at least with a missive from their master. Hikawa had not been treated this way since he had been an apprentice.
