Page 94 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Thaniel went out onto the lawn to breathe. He went too fast, though, and at first all he could do was cough, until he felt dizzy and noticed, distantly, that he’d gone down on all fours. The snow soaked through to his knees, and all at once he felt again how horribly, miserably cold it was. There was nothing clear or fine about the air anymore. It felt like trying to inhale razors. But when he shut his eyes, he kept seeing Mori’s wrist bang against the door frame.

When he could stand up again, he looked around for Katsu, but there was no sign even of any tracks. He started back down the hill towards the railway station. There was nothing he could do officially, but he had a pretty strong feeling that now there was proof of an attack and arson, the head of Mori’s house would have things to say.

As he ducked back under the Keep Out rope at the gate, he saw a man across the street, watching him from below a street lamp. The man was wearing a bright red coat with a Fabergé egg button on it. The man waved easily and stepped into the carriage beside him, which took off fast before Thaniel could follow.

THIRTY-NINE

Tokyo, 17th February 1889

The huge redbrick terminus of Shimbashi station was deserted. Snow blew along the road in writhing patterns and caught in the shirts and coat hems of the ghosts there. There were hardly any real pedestrians. The electricity was weaker here than in Yokohama, but as the train pulled in, the smell of burning haunted the carriage and a fire crew hurried everyone off at the platform. Theirs was the last train. Once everyone was out, firemen closed the station. They put a thick, official-looking rope over the broad doors, and a sign that said Closed until further notice.

The station clock tower was striking midnight. There was one last cab, the driver hunched over a cigarette. Thaniel had no idea where the Duke of Choshu lived, but the driver did, and seemed warily impressed that Thaniel was willing to interrupt such an important person at such a late hour.

The Duke of Choshu’s townhouse was so close to the Palace that it was possible to see into the windows of the buildings above the curtain wall. On either side of the gateposts hung the Mori house banners, lit from below by brilliant electric lights. The symbols of the noble houses looked odd, coming at them from an English point of view – a view which usually expected lions couchant or a fleur-de-lis, something recognisable. Here they might have started out as a picture of something, but they were so old that they had been redrawn and simplified, until they used the smallest number of marks possible. The Mori sigil was nothing but three circles arranged in a triangle above a straight line, black on red.

They did colour well here. He’d seen samurai sigils in photographs and they were nothing frightening, but the red and the black flying above the gates had been made for battlefields.

A steward answered the door, unsurprised to find such a late visitor on the step. He looked sceptical, but eventually he let Thaniel in.

It was a pidgin of styles inside: as traditional as you could get away with without being trite, and as Western as it could be without looking imitative, sitting balanced on the scales between two worlds that hated each other. The balance was diluted and insipid, and completely sensible.

The sliding doors were mainly closed, but he caught a glimpse into some of the grand rooms. There was a library, and some women talking over tea at a low table. The floor creaked and above them hung banners with different sigils – other smaller houses that served this one, maybe, but he didn’t recognise them.

The house was laid out in a way Thaniel couldn’t follow. By the time they reached the Duke’s study, he couldn’t have found his own way out again and he didn’t recognise the view from the window. The Duke was waiting at an austere desk, full of papers. He was a delicately ugly man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a manner like a banker. His clothes were beautiful but plain. It was half-past midnight now, but he didn’t look tired, just as crisp as he must have been at nine o’clock in the morning.

‘You have news pertaining to the disappearance of a bannerman of mine, I hear,’ he said. He had a parchment voice.

Thaniel nodded. ‘Yes, sir. I’ve just come from Yoruji. I saw ghosts there. They show some of Count Kuroda’s men abducting Keita Mori. The whole house has been burned down.’

The Duke lifted one eyebrow, which shifted his spectacles ever so slightly. He moved them back and pursed his lips. ‘And why might they have tried to abduct him, do you suppose?’

‘They wanted to take him somewhere. He left a phonograph recording in the cellar; he mentioned a place called Abashiri.’

‘I believe you know the Baron quite well, Mr Steepleton?’ He enunciated quite. Thaniel swallowed, because although he’d told the steward his name, he hadn’t said who he was, least of all who he was to Mori. ‘You are familiar with his particular capabilities?’

‘I – yes, well enough.’

‘Then I wonder if you would be so good as to explain why in the world he might allow himself to be kidnapped and taken to Abashiri prison?’

‘It’s a prison?’

‘It is a labour camp of over a thousand inmates in the far north of Hokkaido, where, because there is a constant threat of invasion from Russia, all prison details are devoted to clearing roads through the forest, to allow the movement of our troops when they are, inevitably, required.’ He spoke slowly, and so clearly that Thaniel could hear the punctuation. ‘In the winter I believe the death rate is one in six, daily. Not the sort of place I can imagine Keita allowing himself to be taken.’

Thaniel shook his head, which panged his shoulder. He’d taken some more morphine in the cab here and it was keeping him upright, but nothing more. ‘I watched them take him.’

The Duke moved his head just enough for the reflection of the window in his glasses to obscure his eyes. ‘And how would anyone keep him in a cell?’

The Duke was unsettling him in a way that Kuroda never had. Choshu sounded different. He was measuring every word on some internal accounting scales, and the books in front of him were ledgers. He didn’t sound like he had politics. He sounded like he had money. There was nothing to prove, nothing to want or strive for, only maintenance and the deep indifferent calm of a caretaker.

‘A constant supply of random data,’ Thaniel said. ‘He can’t predict random things. Dice, or atmospheric electricity. You feed those numbers into … maybe they have a combination lock that they keep changing, or something that rotates.’ He could hear how unlikely it sounded, but he ploughed on anyway, even though he could feel the ploughshare grinding. ‘It would be hard work, but it’s possible if you have enough numbers. I’ve seen it done, Kuroda had something like it set up at the lighthouse in Yokohama. Does Abashiri have an electrograph? You know, a machine to—’

‘I know what an electrograph is. All Hokkaido prisons double up as weather stations,’ the Duke said. He didn’t seem to have an opinion about what Thaniel had told him, one way or another.

‘I’ve just come from a research station in Aokigahara. They’re generating all this electricity, and until the end of January, someone was sending them experimental information about Mori, they have transcripts of it, they’re calling him Subject A—’

The Duke’s eyes flared at the mention of Subject A and Thaniel had a tiny flutter of hope.

‘You’ll excuse me a moment,’ the Duke said. He got up without letting his spine bend, and left.