Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One)

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Instead of gutting Katzenjammer Smelt, he was going to set him free.

  KATZENJAMMER SMELT

  INFURIATED AT THE FURTHER DELAY—A delay caused by the rescue of Smelt—Buckle snatched a key on the dead master of the watch’s key ring and jammed it into the padlock of cell number twenty-six. He did not look inside the window. His skin crawled just being this close to Katzenjammer Smelt.

  “I have an extra sticky bomb,” Corporal Druxbury muttered in Buckle’s ear. “You wouldn’t mind if I just lit the thing and threw it inside, would you?”

  “I would be elated, Corporal,” Buckle said under his breath. The first key—the very first key—opened the padlock, and Buckle wrenched it aside. “Come on out, Imperial,” Buckle grumbled as he swung the heavy cell door open. “Or stay here. I do not care which.”

  Buckle clamped his teeth as Katzenjammer Smelt emerged from the doorway. Smelt was a tall, limber man, long-faced, lantern-jawed, and unfortunately handsome, with gray-brown hair cut close to the skull, and a glass monocle clamped over his left eye. He was dressed in the traditional Imperial uniform: silver and red epaulettes decorated his shoulders, and the high collar of his powder-blue tunic was embroidered on each side with the silver iron cross, the emblem of the Imperial clan; his trousers were dark-blue jodhpurs with thick red stripes tucked into black jackboots below. In the crook of his arm he carried a polished pickelhaube helmet with an iron-cross plate and a large silver spike affixed to the top.

  Smelt scrutinized the situation with a detached, critical eye, oozing typical Imperial arrogance in the way he peered down his long nose at the world and everything in it.

  Buckle wanted to bash him.

  Smelt narrowed his stare at Buckle. “You!” Smelt, with a baritone voice imperious even for an Imperial, barked. “Where is my zeppelin, you thieving little blackheart?”

  “We all pay a price, don’t we, Smelt?” Buckle replied.

  “I shall have your head when the time comes,” Smelt said. “I shall have your gremlin head and tack it up on my parlor wall. The Pneumatic Zeppelin is mine.”

  “Finders keepers,” Buckle retorted. His head was a riot of fury. His hand crept toward his sword.

  Perhaps now was the time to bash him.

  As if reading Buckle’s mind, Balthazar clamped a beefy hand on his shoulder and stepped between him and Smelt. “Greetings, Katzenjammer,” Balthazar said. Balthazar and Smelt knew each other, if only in a small way, from a time when they had both been much younger men.

  “Ah, Balthazar. Come to finish me off, have you?” Smelt said with an odd wryness.

  “Fear not, Chancellor,” Balthazar replied. “My son is your rescuer, and your bodyguard.”

  “Assassin would be the more accurate term,” Smelt huffed.

  Buckle swung his mouth close to Balthazar’s ear. “For this monster, I am no bodyguard,” he whispered.

  “It is your responsibility to make sure Smelt gets out of here alive,” Balthazar said.

  Buckle gritted his teeth. “It is my responsibility to get you out of here alive.”

  “You have your orders,” Balthazar said.

  “A rather ragtag rescue, Balthazar, I must say,” Smelt said. “I would have been put at much greater ease to see Imperial dragoons here rather than this motley bunch—although I am most appreciative of your efforts, of course.”

  Oh, Buckle so badly wanted to bash Smelt—but he wanted to get moving even more. “Damn it—I shall kiss the devil himself if we could just lace up our boots and go!”

  A chorus of warning shouts suddenly echoed from the four Ballblasters guarding the southern approaches of the main corridor. The boom-boom-ba-boom of an uneven volley erupted from their muskets, and was answered by enraged yells and scattered muzzle flashes from adjoining corridors to the south. Bullet trails of white phosphorus streaked through the air, ending in shatters of sparks when the musket balls ricocheted off the stone walls.

  “Too late! This party is crashed,” Sabrina shouted, aiming her pistol down the corridor and firing a round. “Just peachy!”

  “We are not leaving,” Balthazar shouted. “Nobody leaves until we free Andromeda Pollux!”

  “Of course, Father,” Buckle said, ducking as a musket ball whizzed past his head in a bolt of phosphorus. “But may I suggest we hurry.”

  ANDROMEDA POLLUX AND THE COPPER CORRIDOR

  GENERAL SCORPIUS WRENCHED THE LAST key out of the door of special cell fourteen with such a yank that Buckle feared he might snap it off in the lock. “None of the keys fit!” Scorpius raged—he snapped his head to Buckle. “The explosives! Do you have the explosives?”

  “Yes,” Buckle said, turning to shout. “Corporal Druxbury! Blow the door!”

  Druxbury stepped forward and carefully drew the last sticky bomb out of the satchel riding on his armored hip. He pressed the malleable explosive into place with his thumbs, forcing as much as he could into the keyhole.

  Scattered musket shots sent lead balls whizzing past. Buckle and Druxbury cringed, but Scorpius did not notice the near misses, grabbing the lazy guard by the throat and thrusting his face into the guard’s. “How close is Lady Andromeda to this door? Will she be in danger if we blast the damned thing open?”

  “She’s in the back,” the lazy guard rasped. “There is a corridor and another door. She isn’t close.”

  The enemy, shadowy figures ducking in and out of the south end of the main corridor about fifty yards away, started shooting again. Judging by the irregular nature of their volleys and their poor aim, Buckle was sure that they were up against no more than a handful of frightened prison guards. But the regulars had to be on their way.

  “A pistol!” Katzenjammer Smelt demanded, somewhere in the haze of powder smoke. “I require a pistol!”

  “Shut up, spiker!” someone howled back.

  A musket ball smacked off the wall above the lazy guard’s head, showering both him and Scorpius in a flash of hot sparks. The lazy guard kicked in terror. Scorpius did not flinch. “If you are mistaken, if Andromeda Pollux suffers even a scratch,” Scorpius hissed, “I will yank out your guts with my bare hands and strangle you with them.”

  The lazy guard fainted. Scorpius dropped him, the limp body slumping to the floor.

  “Hurry, Corporal,” Buckle said.

  “Aye!” Druxbury replied. He punched the hard tip of the fuse through the greasy outer wrapping of the sticky bomb, thrusting it deep into the body of the explosive.

  “Everybody back!” Sabrina shouted. “Fuse ready!”

  “Watch your backs, lads!” Pluteus shouted at the Ballblasters engaged in the firing line, twenty-five yards to the south. “Fuse ready!”

  Buckle nodded to Druxbury. Druxbury snapped the tinderbox flint; it sparked into a flame under the fuse, which caught, burning in a bright red flutter of papery embers.

  Buckle and Druxbury sprinted to the nearest adjoining hallway, where Balthazar, Sabrina, and Scorpius were crouched. “Ten seconds!” Buckle said. He dropped to one knee with Druxbury crouched at his back. On his left was Balthazar and on his right was Sabrina, her shoulder pressed against his.

  Sabrina tucked in close against Buckle, and he felt her warm breath in his ear. “This is rather exciting, isn’t it?” she said, her dry humor having returned to her along with Balthazar. Buckle smelled her expensive lemoncherrydrop perfume.

  “Just peachy,” Buckle replied.

  “Zip up!” Balthazar ordered, clapping his hands over his ears and clamping his eyes shut.

  Then the world exploded and Buckle was nearly knocked over, Sabrina’s body lurching into his chest, his right shoulder slamming into the stone wall. The ringing in his ears was deafening. He tried to stagger to his feet and failed; grasping at the wall, he tried again. In the dense smoke, he glimpsed Sabrina’s face and wondered why it was covered in fine white dust. What was she trying to say to him? He couldn’t make it out.

  Everything snapped back into focus. The door. Andromeda.

/>   Scorpius charged past Buckle, plunging into the swirling haze of smoke and ashes, and Buckle charged after him. Buckle, shaking the jelly out of his head, tried to keep up. For a few moments he could not see anything except the shadow of Scorpius’s back. A white flash skittered overhead—a phosphorus musket ball skidding along the stone ceiling.

  The door to special cell number fourteen appeared in the murk, ajar and burning, wood splintered, metal sheathing ripped back and splayed, the place where its lock used to be now a smoldering hole—it could barely be described as a door anymore.

  “I swear on my life, Founders,” Scorpius howled, “if you have harmed Andromeda Pollux, I shall burn both you and your city from the face of the earth!” He kicked the blasted door and it slammed inward with a jerky, hinge-snapping squeal. The hallway beyond was thick with glowing orange haze. Scorpius plunged headlong into it through the flames licking the wooden doorframe, and disappeared.

  Buckle plunged in after Scorpius. Behind him, the gunfire in the corridor had picked up again in earnest, though this time there seemed to be more muzzle flashes on the enemy side. Time was running out.

  Even before he cleared the worst of the blackbang-blast smoke, Buckle knew by the ring of his boots and the dull glimmer surrounding him that he was in a very different kind of corridor. The light became brilliant, a gleaming amber-brown illumination so intense that Buckle had to throw his arm up to his eyes to shield them. The wide corridor dead-ended no more than twenty feet ahead and every inch of it, floor to ceiling, was sheathed with copper plating. The ubiquitous blue light of the Founders gas lamps was missing here, replaced by two oil lanterns that hung on pegs along the right wall. Floor-to-ceiling copper bars lined the left side of the hallway, containing a long cell stacked with wooden kegs and boxes.

  Scorpius headed straight to a single cell door, also glistering with copper, located just to the right at the end of the passageway. The cell door had a large, barred window.

  And peering from that window was the beautiful face of Andromeda Pollux.

  “Lady Andromeda!” Scorpius shouted. “By the fortune of the forgotten sun, we are all saved!”

  Buckle caught his breath. Andromeda was older, perhaps in her midthirties, and the stunningly elegant balance of her features suggested that her creation had not been left to the unpredictable eccentricities of nature, but rather that she had been chiseled from marble by a genius sculptor. She was pale-skinned, a blue-blooded alabaster ice queen. Her hair, braided to the back of her slender neck, was blondish, swept through with shades of golden hay and sun-bleached sand.

  That was all Buckle could see of Andromeda Pollux through the cell window, although the woman appeared to be tall, judging from her height in relation to Scorpius.

  “It is very good to see you, Scorpius,” Andromeda said with a small smile. To the smitten Buckle—and only a blind man might not be smitten by Andromeda—her voice sounded as clear as water running along a forest stream. She did turn her eyes—they looked dark, reflecting the yellow gleam of the lamps—to Buckle once, scrutinizing him: dressed in the black Founders jailer uniform, he was a mystery to her.

  “Are you unhurt, my lady?” Scorpius asked.

  Andromeda nodded, glancing at the smoldering doorway as musket fire thumped and boomed out in the main corridor. “I am well, but I fear there is great injury being inflicted on my account.”

  “We have taken the prison,” Scorpius said, “but we cannot hold it for long.” Scorpius rattled the door and grimaced. “Damn my hide! What is this?”

  Buckle peered at the door lock. It did not have a padlock or keyhole, but rather an ugly iron plate with what looked like two sundials circled by symbols and numbers.

  Wolfgang and Kepler loped in through the smoking doorway, both grinning when they saw Andromeda.

  When Andromeda saw her clansmen, her face turned both warm and scolding. “Both my dear Wolfgang and Caliban are here as well? I am not worth such risk.”

  “I most respectfully disagree, my lady,” Wolfgang said.

  “Wolfgang!” Scorpius said, pointing to the door lock. “What is this?”

  Wolfgang knelt at the door and narrowed his eyes. “It is a combination lock,” he muttered. “No key is going to open this thing. We need the exact sequence of numbers it has been set to read.”

  There was a pause, a tense silence, as everyone stared, uncertain on how to proceed. Outside the door, with more shots and shouts, the gun battle was increasing in intensity.

  “Cursed luck!” Scorpius raged. He slapped the master of the watch’s key ring in Buckle’s hands, drew his pistol, and aimed it at the combination lock. Buckle stared—a musket ball wouldn’t even dent an iron lock like that one.

  “No!” Wolfgang and Andromeda shouted. But it was too late.

  The blackbang pistol discharged with a walloping burst of smoke. The ball bounced off the lock, struck the copper ceiling, and dropped at Scorpius’s feet, a deformed, smoldering glob of lead.

  “Scorpius! No!” Andromeda scolded. “Look around you!” She thrust her finger at the wooden kegs stacked in the cell across the corridor. “That room is packed with munitions!”

  Looking more closely at the stacks of barrels and crates in the opposite cell, Buckle saw that they were tattooed with the phoenix and the word Gunpowder. Hence the copper plating, which reduced the possibility of sparks.

  “If your hot bullet had penetrated one of those barrels, it would have surely been the end of us all, General,” Buckle said.

  Scorpius stuffed his smoking pistol back into his belt, looking defeated. “My most sincere apologies, Lady Andromeda. I have not acted well.”

  Balthazar appeared in the doorway of the copper corridor, his bulky frame nearly as broad as the burning jambs. “Ho, there! Crack Andromeda free and let us be on our way! We are trapped like rats in a hole and soon to be overrun if we stay down here!” He ducked back into the haze-swirling mayhem beyond.

  Buckle saw surprise flash in Andromeda’s eyes. “Balthazar…the Crankshafts are here?”

  Scorpius nodded. “Yes, my lady.”

  “Good. You and the council must forge all of the alliances you can with the other clans, Scorpius,” Andromeda said.

  “Ah, but that is your job, my lady,” Scorpius replied.

  When Andromeda spoke next, she spoke softly. “Give me a loaded pistol and go, General Scorpius.”

  “What? Go? Without you? I shall have none of that!” Scorpius retorted.

  Kepler growled with bearish displeasure, shaking his head.

  “You have done your best, Scorpius, and I am proud of you. But fortune is not with me this day. I cannot be responsible for more casualties to our brave soldiers. Leave me behind. Retreat and cut your losses.”

  “Never! I shall die here defending you, if necessary!”

  “You shall oversee the transfer of power to Capella de Vega on the council,” Andromeda said. “Do you understand?”

  “But what about Altair, your nephew?” Scorpius asked.

  Andromeda’s gaze flicked to Buckle. She obviously wanted her clan’s succession affairs to be private, but there was nothing for it now. “Altair is not capable,” she said. “We are no monarchy. You shall award him a minor portfolio and he shall accept it, and that shall be that.”

  Scorpius stood still, his jaw working under his skin. “As you wish, Lady Andromeda.”

  Andromeda held her hand out through the bars, a slender, pale hand with the long fingers of a musician. “I order you to relinquish one of your pistols to me immediately, General.”

  Looking ashen and sick, Scorpius reached into his gun belt.

  “I—I can open the door, Lady Andromeda,” Wolfgang blurted as if it hurt him, gripping his metal instrument box so tightly his knuckles had gone white. “I can pop the Owl.”

  “Pop the Owl?” Scorpius gasped. “In here? Lad—that would most likely kill her.”

  “Do it,” Andromeda said.

  FIFTY-FIFTY

>   “YOU MEAN BLOW THE ROBOT up?” Buckle asked, incredulous. He did not know much about detonating robots, but from the look on Scorpius’s face, it was as drastic a solution as he sensed it to be.

  “I must collect the Owl,” Wolfgang shouted, dashing out into the glowing smoke of the main corridor.

  Scorpius lunged to Andromeda’s door. “My lady, the pop would surely open the door. But the intensity of a robot-furnace blast, in here—if it does not kill you, it would set off the munitions.”

  “Move your people back as far as you can, General Scorpius,” Andromeda ordered.

  “Yes, my lady,” Scorpius nodded, defeated. “May fortune be with you.” He holstered his pistol, planted his hand on his sword, spun on the ball of his foot, and strode out, motioning for Kepler to follow at his heel.

  “And take those oil lanterns with you,” Andromeda added. “No need having them fuel the inferno in here.”

  “Aye, my lady.” Scorpius said. “Kepler!”

  Kepler collected the two lanterns from their hooks as he followed Scorpius out.

  With the departure of the lanterns with Kepler, the copper corridor fell dark, its hazy atmosphere weakly illuminated by the diffuse blue gaslight issuing from the main hallway. Buckle could see little more than the contours of one side of Andromeda’s face, lit silver blue, between the bars of her window. He could sense that she was studying him.

  “I must admit that I am surprised to see Crankshafts here, side by side with my Alchemists,” Andromeda said. “But it is something I do not find unpleasant, or unhopeful.”

  “Nor I, ma’am,” Buckle said.

  A heavy exchange of volleys and the scream of a dying man out in the main corridor left them silent.

  More quickly than Buckle would have thought possible, the Owl scrambled into the doorway, a weird, huge-headed, turkey-like apparition, glowing orange and red at the seams. Wolfgang was right behind it, manipulating his instrument box.

  “Move aside, Cranker!” Wolfgang ordered, short of breath.

  Buckle stepped away from the cell door as the Owl passed him, its body emitting waves of skin-pinching heat and the pungent stink of heated metal.