Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477807682

  ISBN-10: 1477807683

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935320

  For my parents, Richard and Janet, with love.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: THE PHOENIX AND THE IRON CROSS

  I THE MOUNTAINS OF TEHACHAPI

  II SHIPWRECK

  III SKELETONS WITHOUT HEADS

  IV SABERTOOTH

  V THE BLACK ANGEL COMES

  VI THE BLACK ANGEL FALLS

  VII WHITEOUT

  VIII THE CAVE

  IX FIRE AND THE LITTLE PINK SCAR

  X THE APPRENTICE SURGEON

  XI THE CHAMBER OF NUMBERS

  XII THE ISLAND IN THE STREAM

  XIII THE GOOD LIEUTENANT

  XIV NIGHT WATCH

  XV DELIRIUM

  XVI THE BLACK CARRIAGE

  XVII THE IMMORTALITY EQUATION

  XVIII THE MAGNESIUM FLARE

  XIX RESCUED, FOR NOW

  XX THE TALE OF THE BAROMETER

  XXI BLOODFREEZER

  XXII AXES

  XXIII IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

  XXIV THE KRAKEN

  XXV TENTACLES

  XXVI SKIES OF GLASS

  XXVII THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF ICE

  XXVIII FORMULAE

  XXIX OLD FRIENDS

  XXX NEW FRIENDS

  PART TWO: COUNCILS OF LOVE AND WAR

  XXXI THE DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL

  XXXII UNDER THE DEVIL’S CHAIR

  XXXIII HORATIO CRANKSHAFT

  XXXIV PINYON HALL

  XXXV VALKYRIE SMELT

  XXXVI TINSKINS AND AMBASSADORS

  XXXVII THE GRAND ALLIANCE

  XXXVIII WHISPERS IN THE CORRIDOR

  XXXIX THE MARTIAN IN THE IRON LUNG

  XL TYRO AND THE IMPERIAL RAID

  XLI HOLLY CHURCHILL

  XLII YOUNG MEN, SQUARE-RIGGED

  XLIII THE SEASONAL

  XLIV PECCADILLOES AND PETTICOATS

  XLV THE APPRENTICE NAVIGATOR

  XLVI SWEETHEARTING

  XLVII THE WARRIOR AND THE WALTZ

  XLVIII DISTURBING NEWS

  XLIX A MARTIAN NEVER LIES

  L LADY ANDROMEDA’S CARRIAGE

  LI CAPTAIN ROMULUS BUCKLE AND HIS ZEPPELIN

  LII A PICKELHAUBE AND TEA

  LIII FUNERAL PYRES AT DAWN

  LIV NEW BERLIN

  LV AMBASSADOR BISMARCK

  LVI THE RAILWAY STATION

  LVII THE ENVOY

  LVIII LEOPOLD GOETHE

  LIX ULTIMATUM

  LX BY THE CLAIM OF THE CRIMSON BLOOD

  LXI MERCY FOR THE WICKED

  LXII AIRSHIP ON FIRE

  LXIII MESSAGE FROM A DEAD MAN

  PART THREE: THE BATTLE OF MUSCOVY

  LXIV THE CAPTAIN’S TABLE

  LXV RUN OUT THE GUNS

  LXVI AN ACT OF WAR

  LXVII THE BOW CHASER

  LXVIII HARD A’STARBOARD!

  LXIX ASTERN THE CZARINA

  LXX THE CHRYSALIS

  LXXI COLLISION COURSE

  LXXII BROADSIDES

  LXXIII BOARDING PARTY

  LXXIV GRAPPLING HOOKS

  LXXV THE BELLEROPHON

  LXXVI SCUTTLED

  LXXVII SHACKLED TO A DEAD MAN

  LXXVIII WHAT THE NAVIGATOR SAW

  LXXIX THE BOYAR AND THE CLOUD COSSACKS

  LXXX THE BURNING GALLOWS

  LXXXI THE MELTING POT

  LXXXII THE PENNY DREADFUL

  LXXXIII THE GRAVEDIGGER

  LXXXIV TO ATLANTIS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE MOUNTAINS OF TEHACHAPI

  CAPTAIN ROMULUS BUCKLE WAS A zeppelineer, and zeppelineers, with their instinctive affinity for air machines, never felt entirely at home on the steaming back of a horse, especially a horse scrambling up a precarious path cut into the icebound face of a mountain. Buckle grumbled curses, uncomfortable and random, into the mothball-musky wolf fur of his parka hood. Ice particles pricked inside his nose. Through the tunnel of his hood, the trail appeared to jerk back and forth as the horse clambered upward. Now and again a snap of freezing air punched in and stung the still-feeling edges of the otherwise numb skin on his cheeks and nose.

  Buckle’s goggles had frozen over a while before, leaving him near blind, but the fur lining insulated a good chunk of his face; the hoary lenses transformed the world into a bouncing shimmer. His horse, a coffee-colored brute named Cronos, was experienced on the trails—Cronos knew every cleft and cranny, according to Buckle’s hired guide, Pinter—and Buckle had been told to leave the horse be and let him mountain-goat the treacherous heights the way he knew how to climb them.

  Putting his life in the keeping of an aggressive horse he did not know did not please Buckle. But if he wanted to scale the mountain now, this was the only way he could do it. Dog teams would be useless on this kind of terrain.

  “Time to wake up, Captain!” the glassy wobble that was Pinter shouted back over the rump of his horse, five paces ahead. “We’re headin’ over into the soft stretch of the traverse now, you hear? Into the pass. The wind don’t bother to be so cantankerous there. But keep yer musket handy—we’re ramblin’ into sabertooth territory!”

  Buckle lifted his chin out of the wolf fur and shouted, “Aye!” He barely trusted the fidgety mountain man—with his gaunt features, uneven head, and half-wild eyes—but Pinter was a reliable guide, and one of the few who might, for a sizable payment, be crazy enough to take him high up the mountain in the Bloodfreezer storm season. It was the possibility of the Bloodfreezers that had kept the Arabella, the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s two-hundred-foot launch, moored in the town below, not far from the ruins of the old Crankshaft stronghold, and forced Buckle to make his ascent on horseback. Despite the frowns from Chief Navigator Sabrina Serafim and Chief Engineer Max, Buckle had insisted that he make the journey alone. He was not about to risk the launch and the lives of his crew to prove a theory—to pursue an obsession—of his own.

  Buckle clamped his stiff fingers around the stock of his blackbang musket—something of a feat in thick gloves—and lifted it out of its sheath, laying the heavy weapon across his lap and flipping the pommel flap over its middle to protect it from the cold. A wrapping of oily rags kept the firing mechanisms from freezing solid—a necessity that also promised some delay if he ever needed to bring the firearm into action quickly.

  Buckle grunted. He had three blackbang pistols holstered inside his parka—their wooden butts poked his kidneys as the horse bounced—and he trusted his own pistols and saber more than a clunky musket in a scrape, in any case.

  The horse lunged up the steep path, delivering a whack to Buckle’s spine that made him miss the smooth glide of his airship. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was moored in the dockyard of the Devil’s Punchbowl stronghold, fifty miles to the southeast, undergoing repairs to the extensive damages she had suffered rescuing his father, Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft, from the City of the Founders over three weeks before.

  Once freed from the clutches of the Founders, B
althazar had been busy: he and the Crankshaft council dispatched messengers to every corner of the land, each carrying an invitation to a secret parley with the purpose of forming an alliance against the Founders. Many clans had responded—Imperials, Alchemists, Tinskins, Brineboilers, and Gallowglasses—promising to send their ambassadors. Suspicions ran deep in the blood between the clans, but if the rumors were true, if the Founders and their Grand Armada were gearing up for a mass invasion, then to stand alone meant annihilation. And they all knew it.

  In the meantime, Balthazar had begrudgingly given Buckle leave to take the Arabella up to Tehachapi in search of a shipwreck. On the night of the Tehachapi Blitz, more than a year before, Buckle had seen one of the attacking Imperial airships suffer a fatal hit—a Crankshaft cannonball had struck home, causing a multichambered hydrogen explosion that had lit up the sky—and the burning sky vessel, ripped wide open, her engineering gondola obliterated, had yawed wildly to starboard and drifted northeast into the mountains.

  Buckle wondered if any of the men aboard the crashed enemy airship had survived; they would be long gone by now, over a year later. But it was not flesh and blood, nor even bones, that concerned Buckle—he’d be damned happy if each and every one of the attackers had burned alive—but rather the artifacts of the airship itself. The body of the fallen machine would most certainly provide evidence of its owner, the murderer of the Crankshaft clanspeople.

  Buckle had seen the Imperial iron crosses on the sky vessel’s flanks as she burned, but the Imperial chancellor, Katzenjammer Smelt, had sworn upon his life that his clan had not attacked the Crankshafts. Buckle did not trust Smelt, but he had to know for sure. And if the airship was not Imperial, to whom did it belong? Buckle’s first instinct was to suspect the Founders: it could only benefit them and their treacheries if they could sow the seeds of conflict between the clans they planned to invade and conquer. Someone was stoking the engines of war, Balthazar had said. If the airship proved to be a Founders craft, then Buckle knew where to begin his search for his sister, Elizabeth, if she was alive. She had disappeared during the Tehachapi Blitz, leaving not a trace, and everyone assumed that she had been incinerated in the bomb blast that had obliterated much of Balthazar’s house. But the word, whispered by the zookeeper Osprey Fowler and confirmed by Balthazar himself, was that Elizabeth was alive, and if alive, she had been taken by someone.

  And Buckle would burn heaven and earth to rescue her.

  With a jerk of his gallows-tree head, Cronos reached the crest of the trail. He turned in to a crevice in the wall, a gap barely as wide as man and horse, which quickly opened to an interior ravine where the sky crushed down upon a plunging, high-walled valley. Buckle pulled his parka hood back, the ice-rimed fur lining swamping his neck. The cold air bit his ears despite his pith helmet and its fur havelock flap, but it was very still and it was bearable. Buckle yanked his goggles up over the front of the helmet and squinted. The weak sunlight reflecting off the snow packed an uncomfortable level of glare, but it was a small price to pay to be able to see properly. The sky was gray as old iron, rippled with clouds. Caves dotted the steep walls of the valley, their irregular mouths dark and menacing, half-hidden by dense clutches of fir and pine—the needles glittered with ice and danced with black-and-white chickadees that chirped as they knocked little avalanches of snow from the branches.

  Cronos rocked up and down, humping through the deep snow, though his work was eased by following Pinter’s big brown horse as it broke the trail. Buckle coughed; a cloud of vapor burst in the air in front of his face and vanished.

  Pinter jerked the reins of his horse and stopped, the bottoms of his stirrups leaving troughs in the deep snow, and turned in the saddle to peer at Buckle. “Best to be quiet as a mole up here, sky dog,” Pinter whispered through vocal cords roughened by cold and gin. “The sabertooths, they tend toward the night, but it would be prudent not to announce the servin’ up of horseflesh on their doorstep, if you catch my meaning, sir.” Pinter smiled, stretching his skin, leathery and large-pored, over a long, narrow jaw.

  “Aye,” Buckle replied. The blanketing silence of the ravine muffled sound. His voice barely made it to his own ears. The landscape was oppressive. Not enough sky.

  Pinter grinned, a sudden tightening of the muscles around his mouth, exposing two stumpy yellow teeth wobbling in purple gums. He drew two torches from his saddlebag. At his waist he carried a hollow bull’s horn that glowed a yellow-cream color with the fire carried within it, fed by slow-burning snake grass. Fire horns were vastly more reliable than a match or tinder on the windswept mountain, a place where torches proved the best defense against the beasties that lurked there. Pinter had given a fire horn to Buckle, and he had laid its long leather strap across his shoulder so the horn was cradled at his waist.

  “Just in case, just in case,” Pinter muttered as he pressed the mouth of the horn to each torch in turn, igniting the tar-soaked wrappings at their heads. “The beasties don’t like tar. They shy away from the flame and stink. So they tend not to swallow ye if yer holdin’ one.” The man laughed at his little joke, a rattling, bronchial chuckle.

  “I know about sabertooths,” Buckle said, annoyed at the volume of Pinter’s noises. “Keep it down, will you, mate?”

  Pinter’s laugh choked off and his eyes narrowed. He thrust one of the torches into Buckle’s hand before whirling his horse around in the snow.

  “Then you know enough to keep movin’,” Pinter barked in a whisper. “Keep moving, eh?”

  Cronos jerked forward, following Pinter’s lead without a need for spurring.

  Buckle did not have any affinity for Pinter. No affinity at all. But the mountain man knew where the wreck of the mysterious airship was located—at least, he claimed he did.

  And right now that had to be good enough for Romulus Buckle.

  But he did not have to like it.

  SHIPWRECK

  THE SNOWDRIFTS IN THE RAVINE shallowed, making the movement of the horses smoother, and within twenty minutes, Buckle and Pinter crested the northeast end of the ravine. Buckle found himself overlooking a wide, gentle slope leading down into a snowbound valley curving between two craggy peaks. Even if he was as odd as a square peg, Pinter proved, pointing his heavily gloved finger, that he was no liar. For there, nearly in the center of the valley floor, flattened except for one towering stretch of her starboard-side girders, lay the sprawling wreck of a gigantic airship that once had been nearly the size of the Pneumatic Zeppelin herself.

  “There she lies in her grave,” Pinter announced, lifting his canteen for a swig of something unlikely to be water. “Dead as dead as dead be—but the dead always be a mystery.”

  Pinter offered his canteen, but Buckle shrugged it off. It took him a moment to find his voice in his tightened throat. “No thanks, Pinter,” Buckle rasped. “You are a poet as well as a scout, I see.”

  “Sometimes I rhyme, perhaps. But only by a happy accident, sir—a strange tripping of the brainpan,” Pinter said as he screwed the cap back onto his canteen, thought better of it, unscrewed it, and fired back another swig. Buckle caught a sharp whiff of the gin.

  Buckle heeled Cronos in the ribs, and the big horse accelerated into a gallop. It did not take much coaxing—the animal was happy to run: the open slope, where the wind had scoured away all but a small crust of snow, was a relief after the deep drifts of the ravine. Pinter released a sudden snort, as if he had been caught off guard by Buckle’s taking of the lead, and spurred his horse behind, awkwardly attempting to replace his canteen cap while balancing a burning torch and the musket across his saddle.

  Buckle found himself grinning: it felt good to be aboard a horse at speed, even if he was somewhat uncertain of the huge animal, and the air was bracing and clear. Drifting snowflakes occasionally sparkled here and there, floating down from the sky, falling with such ease and curling gyre that they resembled snow fairies of lore, denizens of the mountain, wafting in to see what machinations consumed t
he mortal men below.

  As he closed the distance to the shipwreck, Buckle’s heart began to pound. The enemy airship had come down brutally, out of control and apparently tail first—the port-side superstructure collapsing upon impact, splitting apart every hydrogen cell that had not already been afire, igniting the volatile gas, and gutting the machine in a final conflagration. Half of the iron superstructure, the starboard flank, still pointed at the sky; its black girders, curved like the ribs of an animal, were wrenched and scorched and painfully reaching for their port-side sisters, which now lay in jumbled, icebound heaps on the ground among the ruin. It was difficult to see the entire wreck as a whole now that Buckle was so close: the tail section had been blasted and flattened beyond recognition, and the crash had displaced the port side of her frame from nose to stern.

  Buckle remembered the old zeppelineer’s “Tale of Woe.”

  If down to twisted wreck

  My wretched fate so be,

  Bury not my bones

  Nor weep nor moan

  Nor tear thy hair to mourn me.

  Rather set to bended knee

  Gather up my scattered scree

  Hammer and nail

  To the Bosun’s rail,

  And set my sail to eternity.

  Buckle spurred Cronos to the left, circling the collapsed nose of the wreck to swing around on the starboard flank, where the fabric skin still clung in great swaths to the ribs. He wanted to find at least a shred of the clan emblem—the iron cross he had seen that terrible night of the raid. And he wanted to discover the airship’s name. Even if the arch board was gone, the name should be everywhere—engraved on the captain’s door, chiseled into the prows of the gondolas, inked in the logbook, and painted on the midshipmen’s plates and mugs. Still, it might be difficult. The gondolas were crushed under the girders, and nearly every inch of machine was charred black, but surely some evidence remained.

  The air on the slope was crisp and unnaturally full of echoes. The sounds of Cronos’s hooves across the snow and the jangle of his tack seemed as loud as a charge of cavalry. Buckle could not escape the impression that he was circling the remains of a great monster, fallen facedown upon the earth, its innards incinerated and bones scorched in a death by fire, felled by a lightning bolt cast down from the heavens.