Steampunk World

Tangi a te ruru / The cry of the morepork Pip Ballantine

Manuwatu Gorge, New Zealand

September 1873

The man lying face up in the rain at the bottom of the gorge looked surprised. Agent Aroha Murphy, looking down at his broken body, shared that very emotion, though hers was tinged with the bitterness of disappointment. The cloak of thick bush around them and the rush of the Manawatu River made it seem like a far too pretty place for the man to have breathed his last—even in the pouring rain. Allen Henderson was a liar, a thief, and should have been dead years ago. However, it should have been at Aroha’s hand.

As water filled his damnable eyes, she ground her teeth to hold back a scream of outrage at the unfairness of fate. She had been hunting Henderson for years after the attack on the farmhouse that had ended with her sister Emma dead, and her mother quite lost to her senses. Perhaps I should feel more relieved, she thought to herself, but damn it, I wanted to end him.

After a long few minutes, James Childs, the constable at her side, cleared his throat. He was trying to gallantly hold the umbrella over her head, but he was having some difficulty keeping his footing in the growing mud of the riverbank.

“Agent Murphy?” he asked softly, and that was enough to snap Aroha out of her contemplation.

She was here, she recalled, not as a wronged party, but as an agent of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, and she had a job to do.

Aroha poked Henderson with her foot, rolling him over onto his face, and then bent down to examine his back.

“I can’t see any wounds apart from that from the fall,” she commented, pursing her lips. “I couldn’t think of a man less likely to commit suicide than Henderson.” She pointed up the hill to the path where carts and carriages made their perilous way along the side of the mountain between Ashhurst and Woodville. Her Maori kin had named the gorge Te Apiti, the Narrow Passage, and it was well deserved, for at any time a landslide could take out the fragile road. It was, however, not the cause of Henderson’s plunge down to the river because the road was intact.

She looked up, her brown eyes focusing on Constable Childs. “You say this isn’t the only one last night?”

The young man ran his fingers through his ginger hair and glanced at his damp regulation issue notebook. “Indeed, Marie Lafayette, Tommy Ring, Hemi Hudson, and two others that we don’t know of down by where the river exits the gorge.”

“And the moon last night was full?”

Childs nodded. “A huge one.”

“Not all of them could have accidentally walked off the road on the same night,” Aroha muttered to herself. She already knew she was on the right track, so she just had to find the culprit. That task sat poorly with her though, given the identity of one of the ‘victims’.

“It’s very strange,” Childs replied, “but it was lucky you were in the area, Agent Murphy.”

“Yes,” she said examining the towering hills and bush around them. “Lucky indeed.” She didn’t dare tell him the Ministry had sent her chasing after a string of similar suicides up and down the North Island. The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences did not have a large office in New Zealand, so resources were spread very thin, and she was pretty much it for the lower half of the North Island.

The wars with the Maori were still fresh in people’s minds, and the Imperial forces had only just left the shores of Aotearoa. Still, because of her heritage, Aroha could move more easily around the countryside than most agents.

However, it was probably her dark skin and strange dress that had this young local policeman nervous. He was about to get a lot more so in a moment. She was sick of explaining herself to the locals. Lately she had given up telling them all about her airship captain Ngati Toa father, and her Italian mother, so she let her outfit speak for itself. Aroha might wear pakeha male clothing for ease of use, but she also had draped over her shoulder her father’s kahu huruhuru. She had received the highly valued cloak, which contained the highly sought-after kereru feathers, as some kind of recompense from him for not taking her into the tribe. He already had a fine Ngati Toa wife, after all.

She wore the cloak not because it was his, but because it came from her ancestors, and that still meant a great deal to her.

Swinging down her backpack and placing it carefully on the ground, Aroha began to unpack the equipment she’d been hauling around since she’d left Rotorua three weeks ago.

She pulled out a small brass box, and attached to it a needle-thin rod, and to that a white sail-like shape about the size of her spread hand.

Constable Childs couldn’t help leaning down to see what she was doing. “That looks…”

“…delicate,” Aroha interrupted, worried the enthusiastic policeman might start poking at it in the way of men.

“What is it?”

She let out a sigh. “It’s an aether tracker. A brand new device just shipped in from the London office last month.”

Childs nodded as if he had a clue what she was talking about, and now she knew his eyes were fixed on the moko kauae that was carved proudly on her chin. The marks made her lips a dark blue, and decorated her chin with the curves and spirals she was entitled to. It was a declaration of her mana, her rank, and her past. She was proud of it, but she knew many others just didn’t understand why she would mark her face.

The policeman was earnest but clueless, so Aroha smiled at him as she explained something he might be able to grasp. “The tracker is an extension of what my ancestors were very good at, but instead of following tracks in the bush we can follow the emissions of anything beyond the normal.”

“You mean ghosts?” Childs whispered, going even paler.

That such things existed had always been accepted by her father’s people, but pakeha tended to become a little unhinged if they came near to the truth.

“No,” she said, as she began to turn the small crank on the side of the tracker, “ghosts do not exist Constable Childs…” she added under her breath, “…at least not here.”

The small receiver on the top flicked back and forth, and narrow tape of paper chugged out from the side. After examining it, Aroha let out an exasperated breath. “The signal is too weak. Show me where you think the body fell.”

Constable Childs gestured to two local men who were waiting some distance away from them, and they hustled up to carry Henderson away before he spoiled the beauty of the spot with his rotting corpse.

Aroha watched dispassionately as they did their work. It felt odd to know someone else had stolen her vengeance. Her father’s ancestors believed firmly in utu, the concept that all must be kept in balance with kindness or vengeance depending on the action. Her mother’s ancestors had also believed in an eye for an eye. Apparently both sets of ancestors would not be satisfied this day.

Still, it was a new world with new rules.

Aroha packed up the tracker, and then together she and Constable Childs climbed up the slippy, narrow track to the road. The wet bush dripped on her head, and the occasional fern slapped her in the face. New Zealand bush was thick and dense, unlike forests in the old world, and Aroha wondered if it concealed at this very moment an attacker.

“If Henderson didn’t kill himself,” Childs asked, holding back some horoeka saplings from her path, “and he didn’t accidentally walk off the road, then what do you think happened to him, Agent Murphy?”

Holding her kahu around her tightly, Aroha considered how much to tell him. It looked like the local constable had nothing better to do than follow her around, and she couldn’t really order him away; these were his locals that had died.

“I am not sure,” she said finally, “but I am determined that we find out.”

They were nearing the top when Childs finally asked the question she had been waiting for. “So…Murphy isn’t much of a native name? Was your mother Maori?”

Half-caste girl they had called her when she was a child, and other less kindly words.

Aroha answered as reasonably as she could manage. “My father is Ngati Toa, an airship captain, but he and mother were never married. He went on his way when I was small, and she married an Irishman.” She locked eyes with Childs. “I just found it easier to use my stepfather’s name, but that is all I took from him.”

The constable looked away, his face flushing red. He probably wouldn’t have been so probing if she’d been a pakeha girl, but Aroha had nothing to be ashamed of, and she’d always found lies more trouble than they were worth.

They reached the roadway, which wasn’t much more than the track they had just left, except it wound its way parallel with the river down below.

Aroha wordlessly set up the tracker on the edge of the roadway and cranked it to life while Childs watched. The tiny device began to spit out the long white tape, and this time the pattern of dots indicated a stronger reading.

“This is definitely where the event occurred,” Aroha muttered, tucking her dark hair behind her ear. “There is a disturbance in the…”

The tracker resting just under her fingertips exploded. For a moment she wondered if she had done something terribly wrong, but then she realized that her ears were ringing from the retort of a very close gunshot.

She spun about, pulling the two-foot staff from under her cloak, and Childs had his pistol out, but neither of them could see where the attack had come from. Before she could say anything, Childs had grabbed her under the arm and dragged her back so that they had the cover of the downhill slope away from the road.

The constable’s breath sounded very loud in her ear, but then her own heart was racing in time with his breathing.

“That,” she whispered to Childs, “was either a very good shot, or a very poor one.”

“Whichever,” he replied, “they are prowling on the Queen’s road, killing people. We have to stop them, but…” he paused. “Your device is all broken, how are we going to find them now?”

With a slight tap on his arm, Aroha grinned. “You pakeha, so married to your technology. We will do this the old fashioned way. Now, how do we get to the other side of the road?”

He jerked his head to the right. “There are drainage pipes running under the road, otherwise it would get swept away every winter.”

Together they slipped and slid sideways until they found one. Luckily it was a rather large size, and agent and constable were able to navigate it hunched over. They emerged on the other side, and Aroha led them back towards where they had been shot at. For a pakeha, Childs was actually rather quiet.

As they drew near he did whisper in her ear, however, “Do you have a gun by any chance, Agent Murphy?”

She smiled at him and shook her head. “But I am armed, never fear.”

Working their way up the hillside, Aroha easily found the place where their attacker had shot at them. “Maori,” she said after examining the spot. When Childs frowned, she pointed to the impression in the mud. “Do you know many pakeha that wander through the bush barefoot?”

She led the way, following the trail of partial footprints, and broken undergrowth further up the hill. They were nearing the edge of the bush trail when Aroha heard the sound of something she had never imagined hearing in such a place.

It was a flute, or rather the kōauau, the Maori instrument that she still recalled her father playing to her as a child. Yet this was something more than mere music.

Aroha did not need an aether tracker to feel the pull of it. Suddenly, the music was all that mattered. Nothing else was of any consequence. Constable Childs turned to her, his face split with a huge, ridiculous grin. “You are a true Aphrodite of the South Pacific, Agent Murphy.” His voice was slurred as he reached out to grab her, and for a moment Aroha leaned into his embrace. She wanted it. She needed him. Then the ghost of her mother’s experience reached her and gave her a much needed dose of reality.

Henderson had captured her mother, drawn her into a web, and then killed her with it. Aroha had sworn never to allow that to happen to her.

She evaded the constable’s clumsy attempt at a clinch, grabbed his arm, dragged it behind him, and then used it to push him away. In the slippery, wet conditions of the hillside, it didn’t take much. With a surprised yelp, Childs slid down the hill into the embrace of the bush itself. Within a few feet he was lost to her sight, but she could hear his yelps of sorrow. Perhaps some time in the mud and rain would cool the unnatural ardour the music was pushing on him.

Aroha didn’t pause to see how far he slid; she was already climbing up the rest of the hill as quickly as possible. Luckily, she still had some Ministry technology at her disposal.

It wasn’t the first time that the paranormal had tried to overcome the agents of the Ministry, and one of the standard issues were a tiny pair of plugs for her ears. She paused to wind the exquisite clockwork before jamming one in each ear. The random tickings were louder than the music that filtered through the bush, and as she climbed higher, Aroha was relieved to find that the compulsion to lie down was less.

When she crested the hill and saw the open sky, it was very welcome. Off in the distance she could see an airship with the Ngati Toa colors. It seemed strange that her iwi was so close, and yet perhaps not.

She turned and looked across the ridge and saw the musician standing against the horizon. He was only fifty feet away from where she stood, but the ticking of the clockwork in her ears could not take away from the beauty of him.

He was only about her own age, with a kiwi feather cloak over one shoulder, and a piupiu around his lean hips. The flax skirt was seldom worn by itself anymore. In this day and age most Maori had adopted some type of pakeha clothing, but this tall, dark skinned young man wore none of that. As he stood there, with the flute raised to his nose, playing the most haunting music she knew, it was like he had stepped out of another age.

For a long moment she quite forgot why she was there. She glanced over her shoulder and realized she was not imagining it; the Ngati Toa airship was getting closer, and she finally had confirmation that her iwi had something to do with this.

The player swayed slightly on the spot, but then his eyes locked on Aroha, and eventually he saw that she was not moved by the power of the flute. He lowered it from his lips.

“Aroha,” the man called to her over the wind, “I hope you know this was for you.”

Under her cloak, her hand closed on the shaft of her weapon. “Do I know you?” she asked, Maori feeling strange on her tongue after so long in the world of the Ministry.

“No,” came the mild reply, “but I know you. I am Ruru.”

It was the name of the owl in the dark, the one heard but seldom seen. It was very clever.

“And that,” she said, inching her way closer, “is the instrument of Tutanekai.” She had heard the stories, even though they were not ones of her tribe. Tutanekai had fallen in love with a beautiful maiden of another tribe, but they had been separated by a lake. When he had played the flute, the maiden Hinemoa had been so moved that she had dared the frigid waters of the lake to reach him.

Aroha swallowed as she heard the engines of the airship over the wind. “I thought it was a love story, but now it seems poor Hinemoa might not have had a choice. Where did you get it from?”

Ruru held the flute up, so she could see how small but intricately carved it was. “I found it,” he said simply.

The instrument of the most famous love story in all of Aoteroa’s history, and he held it like it was a weapon—which he had turned it into. Aroha suspected he must have found the burial site of the lovers. It did not belong to his iwi.

“That was made for love,” Aroha said, pointing to the flute. “It wasn’t meant for vengeance.”

Ruru glanced up, behind her, to where the airship was drawing close and closer. “It depends on how you play it.”

Aroha held out her hand towards him, trying to keep her voice unemotional. “Tutanekai’s love and yearning shouldn’t be used to kill. Let me return it to his people so it may be re-buried with him.”

Now the airship engines were very loud. Aroha didn’t know who was on it, but she understood that once it came close Ruru and the flute would disappear.

Ruru shook his head. “Utu was exacted for you, Aroha. Among others, but for you most of all. We have to use what we have, just as our people have always used what we have.” He pointed to the airship. “Your own tribe know that.”

Aroha could feel the tearing inside her; the two parts of her heritage pulling at her. What was left in the middle? Anything at all?

Both parts understand vengeance, but at the same time she remembered her role, the oath she had made to protect the people of this land from the strange, the unusual, the bizarre. Despite her own personal feelings, no one should have the power of Tutanekai.

“Give me the flute,” she said, pulling her taiaha. The short three-foot tube extended out with a hiss.

His eyes widened when he saw her innovation up close, as she spun it around and directed it at him. He met her first attack with a parry of the rifle he quickly snatched up from against the rock.

Her taiaha hissed with its internal power, jetting steam into his face, and he backed away blinded for a moment. When he regained his vision, Ruru actually looked upset. “You are attacking your own people? I am setting wrongs right!”

“It is a different age,” Aroha said, as she swung her taiaha for his legs. “You cannot be judge of all things. None of us can.”

A ladder unfurled from the airship above them. Ruru glanced up at it for just a moment, and Aroha knew that she had only that moment. Distracted as he was, she could have had the killing blow, but instead levelled a blow for his head, and when he jerked out of the way, she stepped in and snatched the flute from the waistband of his piupiu.

Their brown eyes locked as her fingers tightened around the delicate piece of bone. “You have had enough utu,” she shouted to him over the roar of the airship engines. “Tell my father, so has he. We are done.”

Ruru let out a laugh at that, and then turned and leapt for the ladder just as it pulled it away. His fingers locked on the rungs, and then he climbed up and away.

Aroha did not look up as the airship moved away. She had not seen her father in years, but he had his life in the clouds, and she had one on the ground. Just like Rangi and Papatunuku, the sky father and the earth mother. Somewhere in between was a place for her to stand, and she just had to find it.

It took Aroha a couple of weeks to return to Wellington and the district headquarters of the Ministry. It was the fault of a rather roundabout trip she took. She knew she was a mess of mud and stank sorely, but the idea that had begun worming its way into her head would not be put off.

Miss Tuppence let her into the Regional Director’s office, with only the slightest of winces at her appearance, so perhaps it was not that bad.

Anderson looked up from his desk, his bright blue eyes roaming over her condition. “Agent Murphy, I see things must be urgent with you. I take it your mission was successful?”

This was going to be the hard bit. “Yes, sir. It turned out that a Maori nose flute with unusual properties was being used to extract utu on some rather nasty people.”

He placed his pen carefully down on his desk and steepled his fingers. “And I take it you apprehended the suspect and got hold of this flute?”

She looked him directly in the eye. “Actually Regional Director, the perpetrator escaped, but I did manage to make sure he no longer had the flute in his possession.”

Anderson waited for her explanation in a way that was rather unnerving.

“Unfortunately,” she said with the steadiest of voices she could manage, “the artifact was smashed into pieces in the process.” She did not tell him that it had been returned to Tutanekai’s iwi, to be buried with honor. As far as his ancestor’s knew the flute was merely a tapu item, sacred but with no mysterious powers. She had not enlightened them on that, just as she was not enlightening her superior.

“Well, that is a shame,” the Regional Director said, picking up his pen.

Aroha did not move.

“Is there something else, Agent Murphy?”

She swallowed hard, thinking of her torment at taking such a sacred object, and how she was stuck between the worlds of her parents—but perhaps that could be put to advantage.

She stood a little straighter, resting her hand on her taiaha under her cloak, gaining strength from that touchstone of tradition. “Director Anderson, in all my travels, I have noticed that there is something missing from the Ministry.”

Her superior’s dark eyebrows pressed together. “You have had a sudden dose of insight. Do tell, Miss Murphy?”

“I believe there is a better way to handle the acquisition of dangerous objects.” Her fingers rested on the breast of her coat where the flute had so recently ridden. “Rather than barging in and snatching away objects, might a softer, gentler approach be not the best way, with a position made especially for it?”

He leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the desk between them. Morning sun spilled over the pile of papers. “And what would you call this position?”

Aroha smiled. “I believe we could begin by creating a liaison agent. Someone who could be a bridge between the Queen’s Ministry and the tribes of Aoteroa.”

“And that,” he said with a tilt of his head, “I presume would be you?”

Aroha raised her chin just a fraction, feeling the pride of her ancestors whisper in the back of her head. “Yes, sir, that would be me.”

For a long moment she feared the Regional Director would brush off her suggestion. However, finally he let out a sigh. “We are a long way from Headquarters, Agent Murphy, but I will take your suggestion under serious consideration.” His gaze focused on her. “I can see that you have the particular…experience and qualifications for such a role. I will give the HQ Director my recommendation. I don’t think they comprehend our ways are different down here.”

She smiled at that. Perhaps there was hope, if they could understand each other just a little.

“Thank you sir,” she said. “I believe I can make a difference.”

He dismissed her, and as she turned to go, she thought of Ruru and the Ngati Toa airship, and wondered what the days ahead would bring.