Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Buckle yanked back on the reins with a sudden jerk, and Cronos released an indignant whinny as he slid to a halt, working his bit. Towering over them, nine stories high, loomed the partially buckled midsection of the airship, where the skin still clung to the girders, ripped and burned but somehow largely intact, and there, black against the fire-seared, light-gray canvas, loomed the Imperial iron cross.

  Exhilaration rose in Buckle: now he would prove Katzenjammer Smelt a liar. “Here!” he shouted back at Pinter as he slid out of the saddle, his feet landing hard on the snow. He wound Cronos’s reins around a twisted girder, securing the snorting horse.

  “I’m on yer tail, boy!” Pinter called out as he galloped up. “But mind yerself! The ground is spoilt with cutting jags! And mind yer musket, there!”

  Buckle heard the mountain man’s warning, but he did not heed it. He was already at full stride through the jumbles of twisted iron and frozen ropes and wires, each footfall disturbing the ground, each boot print revealing black-and-gray ashes beneath the white snow.

  Buckle had his evidence. In his mind, he plotted his revenge. He would tear down the flimsy wall of canvas and cut a section of the iron cross free, roll the swath of fabric into a bole, and carry it home. Then he would unfurl it in front of Smelt for everyone to see in Pinyon Hall, in front of Balthazar, Horatio, and the ambassadors. It was damning evidence, unassailable proof that the Imperials had been the ones who had bombed Tehachapi and killed the innocents, killed his mother, Calypso, and either killed or kidnapped Elizabeth.

  Buckle’s blood boiled. His ears burned despite the freezing air.

  Buckle would demand that Smelt admit his guilt. He would demand that Smelt release Elizabeth from captivity in some Imperial dungeon. And if Smelt refused, if he even hesitated one whit, Buckle would draw his sword and run the devil through. He would stand over Smelt as the man lay dying upon the skin of his own airship, his lifeblood seeping across the iron cross, and there he would promise the chancellor that his clan would be destroyed, his legacy ground to dust. When Smelt had choked out his last miserable breath, Buckle would ship him home on a tramp with a declaration of war pinned to his bloody shroud.

  Buckle reached the base of the zeppelin’s starboard side and halted, looking up at the towering curve of the envelope’s flank. He clutched two handfuls of the loose canvas—it was stiff with ice, but its doping left it still pliable—and yanked downward with a furious twist of sinew and muscle, as if he were attempting to pull the sky itself down from the very heavens.

  With a shuddering rip, high up on the curving girders, the whole of the skin fell in one massive wave. It came down hard and fast with the roar of snapping rope hooks, tearing fabric, and splitting ice. Buckle, hearing a muffled shout from Pinter and the startled shrieks of the horses, had to lunge backward, stumbling over broken wood and iron, lest he be buried alive under the avalanche of canvas.

  The flank skin collapsed into a long pile at the base of the superstructure, sending up a wall of airborne snow and ashes that forced Buckle to duck and hold his breath. The wave of debris passed over him, and he lifted his head.

  He gasped.

  He blinked.

  The envelope skin of the dead airship and its black iron cross had completely fallen away. But another skin remained, having been hidden beneath it.

  And upon this age-yellowed, once-white skin towered a great silver phoenix.

  SKELETONS WITHOUT HEADS

  BUCKLE STARED AT THE GIGANTIC emblem of the phoenix. It rippled and rustled ever so slightly along its sweeping length—a hint of a breeze had come up, and the snowflakes fell with a hair more density.

  “Well, ain’t that a kick in the arse!” Pinter shouted, coughing in the cloud of ashes and snow that was quickly settling out of the air. “The Founders’ bird, eh? I didn’t see that one comin’!”

  Buckle just stared. Katzenjammer Smelt had told the truth. It was not the Imperials who had attacked the Crankshaft stronghold at Tehachapi, but the Founders, who had disguised their airships as Imperial ones. In their treachery, the Founders had planned to set the Crankshafts and Imperials against one another, and it had worked. Buckle had taken the bait. Bitten down hard. Had he been left to his own devices, he would have declared war on the Imperials and bled both clans, making them easy prey.

  And it meant that Elizabeth, if she truly was alive, was now in the hands of the Founders.

  Curse the devils!

  Buckle charged forward, clambering atop the mountainous heap of fallen canvas. He wanted one more piece of evidence. He wanted the airship’s name.

  “Where are you going, Cranker?” Pinter yelled with a sudden anger. “It is time to take our leave! Aye! It is time to go!”

  Buckle halted atop the stack of canvas and glared back at Pinter, who was allowing his horse to make small, nervous circles, and jerked his head around on each turn to keep his eyes on him. Pinter was anxious, and he was making his horse anxious. “Stand fast like a good lad, Pinter,” Buckle said. “I’ll be just a moment.”

  Pinter pointed at the churning snow and ashes beneath his horse’s hooves. “You see this, boy? You see it? With yer eyeballs? Look!”

  From Buckle’s elevated perch on the canvas wall, perhaps seven feet up, he could see exactly what was making both Pinter and the horse so agitated. On the ground in front of them lay a scattering of human skeletons, perhaps a dozen in total. Buckle’s boot prints tracked right through the middle of the skeletons—he had not noticed the bones, so struck was he by the wreck—and the rib cages and femurs were badly cast about, still wrapped in bloody black tatters of clothes, and partially drifted under by blowing snow.

  Buckle felt a pang of sympathy for the stranded survivors of the enemy crew—but only for a split second. Served them right. Fogsuckers. Murderers. “We figured that we would find some bodies, Pinter,” Buckle said. “Looks like the ones who survived the crash did not make it. Serves them right.”

  “But look at them, boy!” Pinter snapped. “Look at them! You see any skulls? No, you don’t see any skulls! Why? Because they ain’t got no skulls! They ain’t got no heads!”

  Buckle scanned the macabre remains. He certainly did not see any skulls in the graveyard, no.

  “They ain’t got no skulls,” Pinter said breathlessly, as his horse finally stopped spinning. “Because them beasties, the sabertooths, they take the head, you see? Bite it right off and crack it like a walnut to feast on the steamin’ brains! Then they come back and gobble up the rest.”

  “The beasties are not here now,” Buckle said. Pinter was crazy. Of course the beasties slunk in during the night and made a meal out of the vulnerable humans. That was what beasties did. Buckle had been raised in Tehachapi. He had even lived in the same mountains as a child. He was well familiar with the nature of the alien sabertooth, and its preference for human heads.

  “We must go!” Pinter bellowed.

  “The dead are no concern to us as long as we do not join them.”

  Pinter shook his head. “No, no, no, sir! You are no captain on this mountain, you hear me? Where is yer weather eye, lad? Look up! The sky grows dark. The wind is up. The snow comes thicker and thicker until the world becomes a murk! A twilight! That’s when the beasties wake up. And we need to be off the mountain or in a cave by then.”

  Buckle looked up. Pinter was right. A colossal stretch of low black clouds was rolling in over the northern peaks like an ocean wave. The soft gusts of the wind were noticeably more blustery than a few moments before. And the atmosphere was growing darker by degrees; the torch in Buckle’s hand seemed to burn a fraction brighter with each passing second.

  “Just one minute, I said!” Buckle replied, plunging through a gap in the airship skin and emerging inside the ruin. He cursed himself for not having noticed the turn of the weather. A sky captain had no right to ever allow himself to be as blinkered as he had just been.

  “One minute, boy! That’s all!” Pinter yelled from outside, his voice a
lready muted at the edges by a low whine of wind. “But one moment longer and you’ll find yerself alone here, brass buttons or no, damn your hide!”

  Buckle ducked and wove his way through the guts of the foreign-built wreck. He peered through the labyrinth of collapsed girders, ropes, and wires—a crushed grappling cannon collapsed from the roof—all charred black and crusted with ice. There had to be a clue—there had to be—that might lead him to Elizabeth. Buckle stopped to dig at the jumble where the piloting gondola might lie beneath. Sharp metal tore his gloves and he cursed. His right forearm ached where the steampiper had cut him in battle three weeks before, and Buckle was certain he could feel the bandages becoming wet. If he had broken the stitches again, well, Surgeon Fogg could sew him up and chew him out yet another time.

  But none of that meant anything to Buckle in that moment, especially the pain. He knew one minute was all Pinter was going to give him. He brushed aside snow and clawed at a loose catwalk grating. He found the shards of a chattertube hood and a tinderbox. No name. He found a wad of papers covered in handwriting: they were partially burned and brittle. He stuffed them inside his parka. He jammed his hands beneath a splintered wooden hatch—what looked like it could be an access to a flattened piloting gondola beneath—and heaved it aside.

  Buckle had lifted the lid of a coffin. The mummified body of a man, withered and desiccated by a year of relentless cold, his skin gray and shriveled, his eyes sunken away beneath the closed lids, his face stern and horrible, teeth gritted and glimpsed behind shrunken lips, lay trapped in a tomb of crushed wood and metal. His sunset-reddish-orange hair and heavy sideburns apparently had not lost any color in death. His uniform was ridged with frost and ice, but it was black, Founders black, and judging from the amount of silver and red piping on the collar and cuffs, he was a high-ranking officer, perhaps even the captain.

  Buckle gazed at the dead man for a moment, the face ghastly under the shadows cast by his torch. The fellow was somewhat lucky, entombed in the bowels of his airship as he was—at least the beasties had not had at him. But Romulus Buckle felt no natural kinship with this fellow airman—not for him, and not for the rest of his treacherous Founders breed.

  Buckle grasped the frost-rimed silver phoenix pip on the dead officer’s collar. The metal was cold, the collar cloth rough and stiff against the backs of his knuckles. He ripped the insignia loose, snapping it off its securing post, and jammed it into his pocket.

  Buckle had his evidence.

  SABERTOOTH

  “GET YER ARSE OUT HERE and on yer horse, sky dog—or you be leavin’ me no choice but to abandon ye!” Pinter howled outside the ruins of the Founders zeppelin. The man’s voice sounded oddly thin and far away. Then Buckle realized why. The wind had whipped up to a gusting snarl, howling and whistling though the fire-charred wreck, casting about waves of loose snow and ashes. Buckle turned and started back through the hedgerows of broken metal, reaching the skin gap and hurrying over the high raft of deceitful canvas beyond.

  Buckle’s first unobstructed glimpse of the sky shook his survival instinct by the scruff of the neck. The weather had turned more quickly than he had ever seen before: the clouds churned with an unkind, dark-fisted gray—what he could see of it through the snowfall that now descended in thick, waffling, wind-tossed waves—and the light was rapidly draining away to a preternatural murk.

  Pinter’s horse snorted, making tight circles again, and aboard her, Pinter, his bug eyes bright, clutched his musket with its oil rags unwound. “Run, boy!” Pinter screamed. “They come with the darkness! They be here! They be here!”

  The sabertooths? Storm or no storm, the sabertooths only came at night. The old mountain man surely knew that. Terror had driven Pinter mad, which was probably as easy to do as it looked.

  But Buckle’s instinct, raising the hairs on the back of his neck, told him otherwise. He broke into a sprint, his boots throwing ash-laden snow as he covered the thirty yards between him and Cronos, who was wide-eyed and pulling at his tether. Buckle unhooked his coat as he ran, exposing the pistols in his belt.

  “Beasties!” Pinter shrieked, and swung his musket around in Buckle’s direction.

  In the same instant, something came at Buckle from his right—a low, broad shadow inside the undulating snowfall—with such speed that it was upon him in a heartbeat. Buckle only had time to swing his torch into the path of his attacker.

  Pinter’s musket boomed, a muffled burp lost under the wind, the phosphorus-laden ball slicing away through the storm in a bright yellow streak.

  The sabertooth beastie veered away from Buckle’s fluttering torch, exploding past him in a pummeling of heavy footpads, claws slicing ribbons in the snow, insanely green eyes filled with hunger—four of them, two set on each side of the monstrous, tigerlike head—with the buffeting displacement of air only a hugely muscled creature at high speed could effect. Bright-blue blood splattered across Buckle’s thighs as the sabertooth plunged into the snowstorm, uttering an agonized wail so piercing, so nerve jangling, and so foreign to the earth that it was all Buckle could do to resist clapping his hands to his ears.

  Pinter’s musket ball had grazed the beastie, severely pissing it off. The sabertooth that had just missed Buckle was an adolescent, half-grown, about as big as a large pork hog. The adults, the full-grown alpha males, were as big as draft horses, but far burlier, and damned near impossible to take down. The best way to kill one—for an expert marksman—was a head shot into the thinnest part of the skull, just behind the second eye socket.

  Buckle gripped his torch tightly while his free hand jerked a pistol free of his belt. He charged toward Cronos, who was now little more than a shadow in the thickening snowstorm, though not more than fifteen yards distant. Both Cronos and Pinter’s horse had gone half-mad at the appearance of the sabertooths: they bucked and kicked, whinnying with fright. Cronos was backing up, twisting his head from side to side with a great violence, desperate to free his reins from the girder where Buckle had wrapped them.

  Buckle had faced sabertooths before: the beasties had attacked his family’s cabin one night and nearly tore them and their home to pieces. He had been close, nose to nose, smelled their alien stink of rotten eggs, seen the bristling, matted, gore-encrusted fur, heard the click of the huge claws snapping out of their paws, and known the terror of seeing one’s own reflection in their plasmatic green eyes. The sabertooths loved horseflesh. If it came down to a menu choice of men or horses, they often took the horses first. If a man faced by sabertooths was willing to sacrifice his mount on the mountain, it was said, he might make it home to tell the story.

  Buckle heard a muffled thumping across the earth, horse hooves on snow, and spun his head to see Pinter galloping away, already a shadow in the murk. “Damn your hide!” Buckle screamed. “Abandon me here, will you?”

  A large figure leapt through the air over Pinter’s horse, and suddenly the shadow that was Pinter’s head was gone. Pinter’s torch dropped, whirling to the ground, a glowing witch’s orb rather than a shadow. More shadows swarmed after the horse and it shrieked, a jabbering, high-pitched scream, and then everything vanished in sheets of falling snow.

  Buckle reached Cronos. The horse stomped at the prospect of being free to run, bobbing his big head back and forth as if he might bite Buckle. Terror glittered in Cronos’s big, dark eyes, mixing with the reflected blaze of Buckle’s torch: if Buckle tried to mount the horse now, the crazed animal would throw him. Buckle hauled at the reins, but they did not slip free of the girder. He peered at the knotted mess of leather straps; the big horse, with all his terrified yanking, had somehow cinched the reins deep into a crevice in the twisted metal.

  Buckle grabbed the handle of his sword but froze when Cronos suddenly stilled, motionless except for the back-and-forth switching of his ears, and blasts of hot vapor from his nostrils, his eyes soft brown pools of terror. Under the wind-battered light of the sputtering torch, Buckle could sense the horse’s heart pounding, po
unding so hard that he could feel its shockwaves through the wind.

  The sabertooths were on them.

  Buckle spun around, leading with his pistol and torch. The blizzard swirled in all directions at once, driving snow upward and downward in a churning murk. The sun was near utterly defeated, and the world was in a storm twilight. Buckle could see no more than fifteen feet in any direction, and most of that was undulating shadows. But the sabertooths were close, circling, stalking him on their soft paws, readying to pounce.

  A sudden shadow transformed into Pinter’s horse, exploding out of the storm into Buckle’s view, wild-eyed, teeth bared in terror, mouth slathered with foam gobbets, still carrying its headless rider. Buckle jumped aside, half-frozen finger still on his pistol’s trigger, as the animal thundered past, its dead passenger flopping in the saddle, his fire horn still agleam. The mount and its ghastly rider disappeared into the murk again—one heartbeat after they had appeared—but a moment later, the horse screamed, a guttering shriek of agony, followed by a heavy thump that vibrated the earth, followed by the thrashing of legs.

  The invisible sabertooths, perhaps a dozen of them, roared.

  Silence followed, the deafening silence of the blizzard. Waves of snow, whipped into madness by the wind, flooded sideways, then shot straight up, blotting out the world three feet in front of Buckle’s nose.

  He was blind and deaf in a tiger cage.

  Buckle could see them in his mind, though, the sabertooths, the green-eyed beasties slouched low, weaving back and forth as they returned to circle him, their long canines dripping with the blood of Pinter’s horse. Buckle backed up against Cronos’s muscled flank, and the horse stood still. His only hope was to run; cut the reins, climb on, and hold on for dear life—and even then, he figured his chances stunk.