The Puppeteer King

by Chris Ward

  ‘Well done, my child.’

  ‘Did I do it right?’

  ‘Perfectly. I might create you in my own image yet, my dear. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

  ‘An honour that I would never be able to forget,’ Nozomi said, forcing a grin as her master began to cackle. Unless I never looked in a mirror again.

  Her master jumped up from his chair and strode across the hall towards his production line of the macabre. The machines popped and whizzed, conveyors rumbled and sparks flew from automated soldering irons as they built her master’s latest army, piece by horrifying piece.

  ‘Follow me, my dear,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve earned the acquaintance of my latest completed creation.’

  Across a couple of conveyors, a metal-clad once-human was sitting up. She couldn’t see the auto-controller in her master’s hand, but it had to be there somewhere. He was a genius; she knew that without doubt, but he couldn’t create sentience. All he could create was altered humans or machines operated by remote or computer programmed instructions.

  He wasn’t about to stop trying though, and with each horrifying monstrosity that climbed up off his experimenting tables, he got one step closer.

  Nozomi shivered at the sight of the muscular male torso, the thick shoulders and hard chest, and felt again that woman feeling that was manifesting itself more and more often. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it made her uncomfortable, like something warm but unknown climbing into her bed at night. It was easily flushed out though by the sight of the thing’s head, a hard cuticle made of a grey substance covering what had once been a man’s face. Huge honeycomb shapes covered where his eyes might have been, and wires protruded from the top of his head like an ant’s antennae.

  The once-human twisted his head back and forth with an audible creak.

  ‘I call this one Franco,’ her master said. ‘Do be a polite girl and say hello.’

  Nozomi muttered a greeting, but her master shook his head. ‘Don’t be shy, little princess. He won’t bite … much. Come here.’

  Nozomi inched her way closer until she was just out of range of the once-human’s muscular arms. Her master’s bony fingers closed over her wrist, jerking her forward. She started to twist away, angling to throw a punch with her free hand, but it was her master who had seized her, and Nozomi’s fear of him shook the defiance out of her body.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, my dear,’ her master’s ugly face sneered, pushing her hand towards the hard muscles of Franco’s exposed chest. ‘We’re all friends here.

  Nozomi gasped as her fingers pressed against Franco’s flesh. It was hot, almost scalding, and she could feel the thundering pulsing of blood, the heartbeats so rapid that they were like a vibration under her fingers. Even as her fingers screamed in agony, she found herself fascinated. Whatever her master was doing, he was getting better at it.

  He released her wrist and she jerked her hand away. Franco grunted and lurched sideways like a ship set adrift. He staggered a few steps towards a distant door and then stopped, waiting for commands.

  ‘Are you watching, dear?’

  Her master didn’t wait for an answer. Nozomi caught the flicker of lights out of the corner of her eye, coming from a small computer tablet on her master’s palm.

  With a grunt, Franco lifted a fist towards the roof and rose up into the air a few feet, hanging there suspended like a wired up stage actor stuck after the equipment had broken down. Nozomi stared, waiting for some revelation, but nothing happened. After a few seconds Franco dropped back to the ground, collapsing in a heap to the floor.

  ‘No, no, no!’ her master shouted, pushing past Nozomi to reach his fallen creation. He knelt down beside Franco and began pulling him up, the fingers on one hand working like an air guitarist as they tapped commands into the computer tablet. Part of Franco’s headgear had cracked, and a black substance was oozing out.

  Nozomi had seen enough. She didn’t want to be present to either help clean up or witness another of her master’s frequent rants. She hurried back through the tangle of equipment and through a door into the dark corridors beyond.

  She went back to her room, thinking perhaps to read some magazines or to study, but the dingy little box on the third level of the old theatre’s basement gave her no comfort. Instead she headed for one of the secret ways out, through a basement sewer system that emerged through a grate into the wall of a little river flowing under Barcelona’s streets.

  After a few minutes of creeping along a dark concrete passage she emerged in a quiet little park a block away from the theatre.

  Her master might be angry at her for leaving. She could never be sure. He was a man with a crowded mind, she knew, and he might not notice she was missing for hours. As she walked through the ornate streets of Barcelona, she wondered if it would be possible to forge an escape; to find someone to remove the safety nets in her hands and feet before he found out.

  The safety nets. That was her master’s term for his little insurance policy to keep her in line. The police had used something similar in days gone by, alarmed neck or wrist braces that would blare when a prisoner tried to get away.

  Hers were a lot more sinister. She could feel them in her palms and the soles of her feet like little marbles, pushed in between her tendons, tiny balls of pain and suffering that he could detonate at a moment’s notice. She wasn’t sure whether hers had a distance function too, or even whether he could track her. Her master kept his cards close to his ugly, misshapen chest, but he had given her a live demonstration using a man she had helped capture. Watching his hands turn to bloody pulps at the press of a button had been enough to convince her that the little balls she could feel under her skin were very real indeed.

  But could she get them out?

  She’d fallen asleep one day and woken up with scars on her palms and feet. They had shrunk as she grew older, but even as her growth spurt started to slow they were still obviously present, as though her master didn’t want her to forget. Mutilating her in the name of justice was not his priority, it was to stop her leaving. She genuinely thought that he didn’t want to see her hurt, but whatever code of living that he aspired to would rule out if it came down to a choice.

  So she stayed.

  But did she really want to leave?

  Her master wouldn’t ever be the most personable of people, but he had kept her alive. Others might have used or abused her, but while he had never been exactly friendly he had treated her like an unwelcome niece, with a distant sense of affection that he intentionally kept well buried. Somewhere behind the hideous visage and the nastiness that occupied his foremost thoughts he liked the company. He could say what he liked about humanity, but there was the seed of a real human in him somewhere, and she caught glimpses of it at times.

  She turned a corner and another quiet city park appeared in front of her, but at the sight of all the green she scowled and turned away, heading through a stone arch which led to an alleyway snaking behind a row of buildings, eventually emerging on to a quieter residential street where parked cars pressed against the curb collecting dust. As she reached the alley end and glanced out, a flash of colour behind her made her turn, just in time to see a figure duck out of view.

  She was being followed.

  Rather than panic, Nozomi felt only a growing rage, like hot coal searing into the palm of her hand. She ducked down beside the alley entrance, listening for the sound of footsteps, her fists clenched tight. The figure had been small and slight. It wasn’t one of her master’s once-humans unless there was one she hadn’t yet seen, and her master himself never left the theatre until after dark.

  The patter of feet announced her stalker’s arrival. Nozomi waited until a shadow fell across the dusty paving stones beside her, then in one fluid motion she leapt back and up, kicking off with her feet and swinging her elbow backwards with all the force of her thighs and stomach moving through it. She felt it connect with someone’s face, then she was twisting around, shoving her stalk
er backwards into the shadows of a doorway just inside the alley entrance. Before she could stop herself she had swung a fist into the newcomer’s stomach and another into his face. In the blurring of her movement he was just an enemy, someone to be neutralised in the way her master had taught her.

  Fight first, think later. Never, ever hesitate.

  The little figure was almost smaller than her, and Nozomi felt a wave of shame as she looked down at Jorge, the little boy from the bakery, crouching in the shadows at her feet, holding his hands over the blood pouring from his nose. He was breathing hard, his brow drenched with sweat, and his eyes stared up at her, terrified.

  Nozomi opened her mouth to apologise, but no words would come. She stared at him a moment, her cheeks burning with regret. A bruise was already forming over his eye to go with his rearranged nose, and he looked like someone a lot bigger than a preteen girl had taken their fists to him. She started to shake her head, then a single tear dribbled out of Jorge’s eye and ran down his cheek to where it was lost in a smear of his blood.

  Nozomi let out a big, choking sob and bolted, sprinting back down the alleyway in the way she had come, but instead of heading back towards her master’s secret hideaway she headed up a slight hill and through a gate into a vast cemetery. Running down the stone pathways between the tall family crypts, she didn’t stop until she was quite lost.

  Then she sat down on a low stone wall in the shadows between two huge crypts and began to cry.

  As she wiped away her tears, she looked down and saw a red smear on her t-shirt where it covered her stomach. For a moment she thought she had been hurt, then she realised her elbow was slick with Jorge’s blood.

  Why had the stupid boy been following her? Why couldn’t he leave her alone? Couldn’t he see that she was dangerous?

  I used to be a normal girl, she thought. I never used to be so full of hate. What happened to me?

  But the answer was obvious.

  Once upon a time I was carried away by a Crow.

  14

  Intruder in the darkness

  His name rarely remained the same from one place to the next, but these days he was calling himself Galo. It was a version of a name his master had given him some years ago, when their lives had consisted of a one mile radius around an abandoned Siberian mining town. He knew darkness because at times he’d been forced to live in the inky blackness of caves, and he knew light because in winter the snow blanketed everything. He was a man of two colours, two opposites. He cared little for shades in between, and he carried that philosophy into his work.

  He had once asked an old assassin how a ninja—those men of famed fighting and espionage skills—might have killed an entire town full of enemies. How can you possibly win when the odds are so stacked against you? Scale the town walls at night, cut the throats of as many men as you can find before they raise the alarm? Set a fire, hope the panic kills as many as the flames?

  The answer had been a simple one: poison the water supply.

  No need to even enter the town. Make a slight adjustment to nature and let it do the work for you.

  Plant a seed, some might say. Then watch it grow into a beautiful black flower.

  Galo had never been to Japan before. He had been to many strange and wonderful places, but this was a first.

  He could never pass as Japanese, but that old assassin had taught him a lot more about stealth; the modern way, of course, and when the customer was responsible for expenses, it was easy enough to cover your tracks.

  A container ship from Taipei had brought him in to Yokohama, and his passable French had ensured anyone to which he spoke might vaguely remember a softly spoken European tourist, the kind that came through daily in their droves. A bullet train had taken him to Tokyo, and a series of roundabout local trains had taken him to within ten miles of his target.

  He had walked the rest of the way by night, the cool temperatures a relief after the stifling days.

  The outer fence had been no challenge, and he had enough experience with security cameras to creep past those that scanned the grounds with barely a pause. Getting inside was easy too. The place was hardly maximum security, and all he had to do was find a maintenance entrance and use his skills to disable the lock.

  Getting around inside was more of a challenge. Moving through tight corridors without being seen wasn’t easy, but this late at night there were only a couple of security guards on the front desk who made regular patrols. Galo found a closet to hide in for a while and timed their excursions. Once he had established their pattern, he only had to time his movements between theirs.

  Ken Okamoto’s room was easy to find; the out-of-place number 6-67 fitted with something Galo had read about the man’s former band on the internet.

  He was surprised to find the door was unlocked. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him, squinting in the darkness until his eyes adjusted. A curtainless bay window looked out at a lightfield of distant suburbia, the collective glow giving outlines to furniture and shelves.

  Galo frowned. There was something about the room that wasn’t right. Something that shouldn’t be here.

  Someone was sitting in a chair by the window. Galo dropped to his knees as a lamp came on, but rather than a raised gun or a knife hurtling in his direction, he heard just the creak of a reclining chair as its occupant shifted to face him.

  ‘I wasn’t sleeping.’

  Galo frowned again, then realised the other man had spoken in English. I have a lot to learn about stealth, it seems.

  ‘He’s in Barcelona. It’s Crow you’re after, isn’t it?’

  Galo considered whether to respond. Was this a set up? Were there guns trained on him right now?

  ‘You don’t have to speak. I don’t expect you to. I figured at some point someone would come looking for him. And I’m the best lead, aren’t I? Whatever the police might think, anyone who delved deeper would figure out my daughter was with him.’

  Again Galo stayed silent. Talking with his intended victims wasn’t something he liked to partake in.

  ‘On the table. The letters. I leave them out every night, just in case. Waiting for the day you came.’

  Galo stood up slowly. Okamoto was facing him, sitting in the easy chair, his hands at his sides. Galo felt almost sorry for him. The ghost of a muscular physique was still evident in his shoulders, but otherwise Okamoto was just a shell of a man. When the end came, Galo would be doing him a favour.

  ‘When you find him, don’t leave anything to chance,’ Okamoto said. ‘Don’t let him get away.’

  Galo shook his head, a small indication that he understood.

  ‘But I ask you not to hurt her. If she’s there, make her safe. She’s not a part of this.’

  Galo cocked his head slightly. He frowned before he could stop himself.

  ‘Please.’

  This had gone on too long. Galo had his orders. Okamoto had given up the information without any kind of resistance. The evidence was on the table, but Galo didn’t need it. He had seen the truth in Okamoto’s eyes.

  ‘If you don’t need the letters, you should leave now.’

  Galo cocked his head? Was Okamoto giving him orders? It was likely Okamoto had an alarm button by his side, but it would never bring help in time, and if it did … so what? He didn’t need to poison the water supply to deal with a group of hospice workers.

  In two seconds he had reached Okamoto’s side. He stared at the man’s face in the shadows, then reached down for his neck.

  ‘Don’t touch—’

  His body exploded with pain and blinding white light filled his vision. Galo was aware that he was tumbling through the air, but for how long he didn’t know. It could have been moments, or it could have been forever.

  Then he collided with something hard and the light faded to black.

  #

  It was still dark when he opened his eyes. His body tingled and sparked as if electricity coursed through him and his head felt crushed by a
stampede of elephants. He looked up, his vision slowly coming back into focus.

  The man still sat in the chair by the window, facing towards him. His head was tilted to one side, and as Galo shifted, Okamoto gave a little humph as if surprised the assassin still lived.

  ‘I tried to warn you,’ Okamoto said, his voice sounding tired. ‘You understand now what he did to me, don’t you? It’s far worse than it looks, far worse than anyone could have imagined. The doctors don’t understand it, nobody does. They’ve been trying for years to get the wires out, but it’s like it takes power from the air itself.’

  Galo tried to stand, but his legs slipped out from under him. Why hadn’t Okamoto called for the guards?

  ‘I don’t know who you are,’ Okamoto said, ‘but if you found me you can find him. Don’t underestimate him again.’

  Galo gave a slow nod. He understood now. Ken wanted Kurou dead as much as the Grey Man’s contractor.

  ‘My orders were to see you dead,’ he said slowly, careful not to let any noticeable accent slip into his words, although he felt sure Okamoto would never say a word to anyone about this meeting. ‘But you already are.’

  In the darkness, Okamoto gave a soft laugh. ‘So, the silent assassin speaks? You’re wrong, my friend. I’ll never die until the day my daughter dies. While she lives, I live.’

  Galo nodded. The temptation to engage Okamoto in a longer conversation hung in the air before him, but he held his tongue. The Grey Man would already be angry if he was found out, and he had already stayed longer than was safe. Without another word, he crept back to the door and slipped out, retracing his steps back down through the complex to the maintenance entrance and slipping out into the grey pre-dawn light. He climbed back over the outer security fence and walked as quickly as he could until he was a clear mile away.

  Then he climbed into the woods alongside the road, found a quiet place and lay down on the ground, gritting his teeth at the painful tingle of electricity that still coursed through him.