Page 92 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Takiko realised her mouth had fallen open, and clamped her molars together for half a second too long, trying to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. ‘I’m sorry – who are you?’

‘An obscure prince I don’t expect you’ve heard of.’ He looked hopeful. ‘Who are you?’

‘The cleaner. Sorry, I … thought you might be someone else.’ She swallowed. Her throat was suddenly scratchy. ‘Sorry – what are you doing up here, why are they keeping you like this?’

‘I don’t think they wanted to put a prince in with the other prisoners,’ he said unhappily. ‘I should have liked the company.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Disagreed with the Emperor once or thrice too often. Wrote a pamphlet.’

‘So what’s this palaver with the door?’ she demanded, and then held her hands out to show she wasn’t angry with him, only the circumstances.

‘I’m not sure. It was there when I got here. Rather clever, isn’t it? But will you sit with me a bit, since you’re here? I only ever see the warden and he is – desperately boring.’

‘I can’t. If anyone catches me they’ll put me in the solitary confinement shed.’

‘Yes, I see,’ he said, with a terrible docility. Now that her eyes had adjusted, he looked much too intense and his friendliness had a hysterical edge. ‘But perhaps for five minutes? Or even four?’

‘I’d really better—’

He caught at her hem. ‘Please—’

He was just an old man left alone too long, but she lost her nerve. She pulled away and shut the clockwork door, locked all of its unnecessary locks, and stood with her head against the warm bronze, listening as he cried on the other side. With a creeping, seaweed cold, she realised she had no idea what to do. This was a cage for Mori. But no Mori. The more she tried to tell herself it was a good thing that he wasn’t locked in that terrible, perfect, efficient cell, the louder she heard him say that he didn’t know what was going on because there was a heavy chance he would be dead.

When she reached the base of the stairs, there was another telegraph message. This one was from Hakodate prison. There had been a typhoid outbreak. They were evacuating surviving prisoners to Abashiri.

Very slowly, she straightened up and folded the message into as many tiny sections as it would go. Kuroda had let her come here, knowing fully well that Mori wasn’t here. Mori, perhaps, had been confused, but not Kuroda. The only reason to let her come all this way for absolutely nothing was to get her the hell out of his way. Maybe with any luck she’d even die here, in the prison or just the pounding cold.

She should have known, of course.

Meaning to leave right then, find a ship, go home, she swung towards the window and then stopped. Of course she couldn’t. The shore was a deserted white stretch, and beyond it, the sea was frozen – an unnavigable mess of pack ice and snow. The ships in the bay were all stuck in place as firmly as they would have been in tar.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Yoruji, 16th February 1889

Something bumped into Thaniel’s ankle.

He thought for a split second that it was a horribly deformed cat, but then he realised it was gleaming, and the bizarre shape resolved itself into Katsu. The little octopus backed up a bit, tried to shuffle through Thaniel again, then seemed to give up and coiled away at an odd angle. Thaniel dropped onto his knees again and pulled his sleeve over his hand. Even so, Katsu was hot to touch. When Thaniel picked him up, he only waved drowsily as if he still thought he was on the ground.

Thaniel couldn’t keep a proper hold on him. Usually Katsu would furl up round your arm and get on your shoulder, and it was the devil’s own work to prise him off again if he wanted not to be prised, but if he didn’t hold on, he was heavy. He writhed out of Thaniel’s hands and bumbled away over the same tracks he had already made, cutting them new again through the fine dusting of snow that had blown over them. But it was only a dusting. Under that was clear ground. He must have been going round the same circuit since the snow started. Whatever catch between clockwork and life there was in his mechanisms, none of it thought Thaniel was there.

Hating the idea of leaving him behind, Thaniel set off after him, down towards the ruins. There were no bodies, at least. At a distance, a good many things looked like wrecked skeletons, but they were only burnt furniture, collapsed doorways, floorboards that had warped right upwards into the shape of ribs. Katsu trundled through everything. Thaniel had to climb sometimes, half looking, too, for any surviving tablecloth or scrap of sacking to scoop Katsu up in. There was nothing. It had been a very thorough fire.

Katsu disappeared down a set of stone steps Thaniel had never seen before. The way down was completely dark. Thaniel stopped at the top. There were burnt floorboards all around, and jagged edges around the stairway. It had once, he realised, had a trap door. He gazed around, trying to work out where he was in the house. It took him a long time before he understood that he was in front of the same hot pool he had been when they first came to stay. He was standing in the room Mori had slept in.

Somewhere in the darkness, Katsu clunked down more stairs. Thaniel hesitated, because the daylight was failing, but Katsu was noisy on the stone. He could navigate more or less by the sound colours and the way they rang off surfaces, if he had to.

It was a long way down. The stairs went beneath the hot pools, and after a few yards, the air was warm. When he reached the bottom, he almost fell over the lamp someone had left on the last stair. It was an oil lamp, and beside it, a little box of matches. The gunpowder fizzed as he struck the match on the wall.

He didn’t know what he’d hoped. The light edged over arches carved in the stone, and marks that looked old, very old, the rambling, weird, characters that had been writing before someone sensible standardised them. Generation upon generation of novice monks must have practised on them, for whatever reason, in the house’s monastery days. It was hard to tell what the place had been meant for. The walls were rough-hewn and irregular, lined now with shelves. The light was only just enough to brush them. The flames from the lamp rippled red and blue at first before they balanced.

In the ceiling, an odd, soft clicking began. It tinted things a dim yellow.

Every shelf was lined with dozens of glass bulbs, but not for lights. Rather than filaments, they housed miniature black windmills. Some were turning, and more began to turn as he watched. He leaned down to see one. It stopped when his shadow fell over it, then began again when he let the light touch it. The little set of sails was winding a tiny, fragile mechanism in the base of the bulb. From the base ran a hairline thread. It was real thread, not copper wire.

The walls shimmered, because similar threads, all different colours, stretched up from the light mills. At the top, worked into the ceiling, were little vials. The threads were pulling springs there, which spun the vials, and now, they were beginning to fan down a soft snow of something white that hung in the air. He put his hand out to catch some. Chalk.