Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Sabrina nodded internally. Max was up on the mountain—of course she was up on the mountain—and there was no telling what fix she might be in, either.

  “We shall pay you for the animal—if it dies,” Sabrina said, turning back to face the nose dome. “And now, Mister Lazlo, please escort Mister Caruthers off the ship. Toss him off, if you have to. We are about to depart.”

  Lazlo hurried Caruthers away.

  The Arabella’s maneuvering propellers whirled up as Windermere brought her around into the wind. Caruthers was going to have to make a small jump to the ground, as it was. The main propellers thrust the lithe little airship forward, the surge of the engines rippling through her deck.

  Peachy, Sabrina thought. Just peachy.

  NIGHT WATCH

  BUCKLE SAT IN THE OLD wooden chair in the chamber of numbers, watching Max as she slept. Her morphine-doused slumber was fitful; she often stirred, gulping air as if she found it difficult to breathe. The squarish room was full of soft firelight, orange from the candles and red from the wood burning in the potbellied stove. The now fire-warmed air was reassuringly comfortable, temperate enough for Buckle to remove his sheepskin underjacket and leather coat.

  Buckle glanced at his pocket watch: two o’clock in the morning. They had been inside the chamber for roughly five hours now. He slipped his watch back into his pocket with a rattle of the fob, and resumed cleaning his four sabertooth claws, carving the seats of cartilage and sinew away from the wicked yellow bonecutters, which each measured about eight inches long.

  It had been a near-run thing, closing that ancient portal. A sabertooth—probably the big alpha—had stuck a paw in, and Buckle had cut it off with the axe. The half-rotted handle split up the middle on impact, but the rust-encrusted blade had still managed to do the job. Victorious, Buckle was able to crank the door shut after that, his reward amounting to four twitching claws, a splash of blue blood, and a huge beastie screaming outside.

  Buckle had had quite his fill of sabertooths for the time being.

  Now Buckle allowed the stillness of the chamber to sink into him. All they could do was wait in the chamber of numbers until the dawn; by then, hopefully, the sabertooths would have returned to their lairs. His heartbeat was slow, bruised, and grateful for the respite, as if it had been hammering in his chest for days. His mouth was dry, his tongue resting, pulpy, in his mouth. He swallowed to wet it a bit; he was thirsty but did not want to drink the water in the canteen. Max would need that.

  The morphine seemed to have done its work well: Max’s face was serene, even if her sleep was restless. He felt thrilled as he watched her, thrilled that she was still alive. For an instant, he felt just a touch improper—he had never watched Max sleep before, not like this, and she was such a private soul that he could not escape the sense that he was in some way intruding, even though it was necessary. Part of him said he should at least not stare at her, but it was difficult to shift his eyes.

  She was inordinately beautiful.

  Buckle forced his gaze to the granite wall on his right, where, after a moment, he focused on the sea of numbers. Every inch of wall in the chamber was covered, floor to ceiling, in handwritten charcoaled numbers. The long, tortured mathematical musings and equations, hieroglyphic in the candlelight, far surpassed his own ability to understand what mystery the sequestered mathematician had been attempting to crack. Whatever the equation had been, it was complicated. The infinity symbol was prominent in the lines of numbers, but often it was half-erased, smudged, or furiously crossed out.

  The potbellied stove in the corner pinged as its metal expanded against the fire within it. Buckle watched the red flames glow behind the grate. The thing was old, but just as usable as the day it had been forged, and the stovepipe had been ingeniously constructed, running up to the roof of the chamber, bending at an angle to be lengthened in sections and bolted into the stone with metal brackets, to run across the length of the ceiling and disappear into a hole drilled through the granite above the door.

  Somebody had made a home of the place, but it had been a long time ago. The squat bed frame, a sturdy pine construction crossed with warping slats, had started to cave in, and the spiders had thrown up a community of webs within it. The table and writing desk were made of oak and had fared better, the edges of the wood paled and grayed by the constant cold. Buckle ran his fingers across the surface of the writing desk, where thousands of tiny strokes had been pressed into the wood by a pen furiously scribbling across paper atop it, jotted down hard by a man or woman trapped deep in the agony of the numbers that populated the walls, thousands of numbers crushing inward with a question they could not solve, nor apparently escape.

  What mystery, what question, would have caused someone to come here to live the life of a hermit, at least for a time, every morning waking to the numbers that had accompanied them into their dreams the night before?

  Buckle stood up to stretch his aching legs, holding his scabbard so it did not clank on the furniture. He unclasped the scabbard from its belt frogs and carefully laid it on the desk. He stepped to the opposite wall, where a tiny fan, its mechanism set in motion by the heat of the stove, spun in its metal frame inside a tunnel in the front wall, a three-inch-diameter hole bored through six feet of solid granite and out the front of the cliff face, pulling in a small but steady stream of cool air to ventilate the room. Buckle would have really liked to know how the mathematician managed to make a hole like that.

  Buckle watched the little fan as it spun in the sea of numbers, until time seemed to slip away.

  Then came the bloodcurdling scream.

  DELIRIUM

  MAX TWISTED, HER HEAVILY BANDAGED body sprawling out from beneath her furs, her spine arched so her head was thrown back, her hands clawing at the air. She convulsed horribly, her black eyes rolled up in her head to the white. But the thing that most frightened Buckle was how suddenly pale she was—even the black stripes had faded to a deathly gray.

  “Max! Max!” Buckle shouted, fear a lightning bolt striking his heart. He dropped to straddle her as he grabbed at her flailing arms. Max was strong, even in her weakened state. Martians were damned strong. “Max! I am here! Max!”

  The icy slap of Max’s flesh under Buckle’s palms shocked him. She was panting, rapid and shallow, her mouth flung open, the tongue and gums a sallow pink-gray around the teeth. Her skin was slick with sweat pumping out of the pores, flowing in trickles, her black hair flung out in a silken fan, shivering in the firelight. Her very skin seemed to be shivering independently of the shivering muscles beneath.

  Max had already bled heavily through her bandages, drenching the white gauze with her bright-scarlet blood—bleeding to death.

  “Max, it is me,” Buckle said. “Hold on, girl, you hear me?”

  Max jerked her head to the right, in the direction of Buckle’s voice, and calmed. The thrashing subsided. Buckle pulled her coat-blankets up to her chin, but she still trembled with enough force that her teeth chattered and her breathing rattled—where her hip pressed against his thigh, the sensation was jarring.

  “I am cold,” Max said, her words whispered so weakly Buckle almost did not hear them.

  “It is all right, Max,” Buckle whispered. “It is all right. I shall warm you up.” Buckle tore his shirt open—sending mother-of-pearl buttons skittering across the floor—and swung under the parka to press his bare chest against her freezing skin.

  She was as cold as death.

  It was like being shoved into a snowbank. Max’s body was icy at every point, as if her biological engine could no longer generate its own heat; even her bandages were warmer against his skin than her flesh. Buckle pinned Max’s legs under the crook of his knee, wrapped his arms around hers firmly but gently, so as to not unsettle her dressings, and tried to expose her skin to as much of his as he possibly could.

  They were face-to-face, her breasts soft against his chest. Her breathing, cool against his chin, rose and fell in erratic chokes,
a wheeze sounding in the depths of her chest cavity. A weird fear crept into Buckle; he had never considered a scenario where he might lose Max, and the idea was unsettling to a depth that startled him. She was his friend, yes, an adopted sister raised partially in the same house, but he had never been all that attached to her.

  “Do not you fear, Max,” Buckle whispered. “I shall warm you up. Sabrina says I never fail at warming up the girls.”

  Max stopped shivering. She held very still. Her heart struggled to beat, fluttering erratically.

  “Max?” Buckle asked reflexively. He waited, watching her face, so close to his. The stove crackled with heat; a spark popped, flinging a wave of reddish light, illuminating the numbers haunting the shadows with an endless question Buckle did not understand.

  But Buckle cared nothing for the numbers now. He smelled the warm sweetness of the burned wood and the carnivore mustiness of the bearskin, but he railed against their inability, and that of his own warm body, to impart any heat to Max. She still felt frozen against his chest, and he fought the urge to shiver. She was very still.

  Death crept into the chamber of numbers, slouching over Max, investigating.

  “Max,” Buckle whispered. “Be a good girl, you hear me? You just hang on.”

  Buckle rubbed Max’s back. He was slicked with cold dampness from her body, but beneath the dark blankets he could not tell whether it was sweat or blood.

  Max bucked, the new fit of shaking so violent it knocked Buckle loose.

  “Max! No!” Buckle shouted, snatching at her hands. He clambered atop her thrashing body, pinning her down with his weight.

  Her eyes flung open, all black, unfocused, unhinged, alien. Buckle did not see himself in their reflection.

  “There is a good girl,” Buckle said, having a difficult time holding on to her arms. “Max…Max—try, try to lie still, girl. Try your best, aye?”

  Max wrenched her arms and legs until her right arm twisted free, slamming into the table leg, breaking the old wood away in a spray of spinning splinters.

  “Max! It is me, Romulus!”

  Max’s clawing right hand snatched up the broken end of the table leg, which had struck the wall and rolled back, and before Buckle saw it coming she had swiped it upward in an arc, striking him across the left side of the head.

  Stars and chunks of soft wood exploded in Buckle’s vision; he fell to his right, and as he dropped, he felt Max lurch under him, throwing him off, escaping his weight. His right cheek slapped the cool stone of the floor, the pain balanced against the ache in his left ear, and before he regained his senses, Max was on him, straddling him at the waist, shoving him onto his back, one hand gripping his throat, the other gripping what was left of the half-split table leg.

  Buckle had a knife strapped against his boot, but in the instant he should have drawn it, he could not bring himself to do so.

  Max lifted the wooden club, her sweat-slicked naked torso, swathed in loose bandages and blood, agleam in the firelight, her black hair swirling around her face where the black eyes now burned with surreal flashing prisms of colors, and poised her arm to strike.

  “Max! It is Romulus!” Buckle shouted, raising his arms.

  Max stiffened. The table leg dropped from her hand, hitting the stone floor with a dull thunk next to Buckle’s ear. She released a long, shuddering sigh and fell forward, collapsing atop him, her hair cascading across his face.

  Buckle held still. Max’s heart hammered against his chest, surging through her cold skin, striving too frantically, too hard. He carefully pressed his arms around her, intending to gently roll her over onto her bedding again.

  Max lifted her head above Buckle’s and looked into his eyes. For a long moment she stared at him, stared at him from very far away, the blacks of her irises streaming with purple flickers.

  Max leaned forward and, closing her eyes, brought her trembling lips to his.

  Buckle, his ears still ringing, realized that she was kissing him, her lips cold but velvet, and tasting slightly of blood, a soft, tender lover’s kiss.

  Yet he responded, kissing her back, but what manner of moonlit mess was this? She was near dead, drained of blood, half mad and exhausted. And yet, as her kiss continued, her mouth moving on his, her body upon his, her weak heart suddenly pounding with a vitality he would have been certain was lost to her, he felt a deep-buried yearning rise in his soul.

  Max was cooing in the way that contented Martians cooed. It was faint and small and deep in the recesses of her throat, but Buckle heard it.

  Buckle needed to get her covered up again, back into bed—she was half frozen and so terribly wounded. Gently, oh so gently, he placed his fingers on Max’s cheeks and lifted her head. The cooing stopped. The kiss stopped. Max jerked her head up. Her dark eyes looked deep into Buckle’s, searching for something, groping blind, and then lost their coherence, the sparks vanishing away as if dropped into a bottomless well.

  “Max…” Buckle whispered.

  Max’s eyes closed. She uttered a sigh and went limp, her head dropping on Buckle’s shoulder, the length of her body quivering with a million tiny quakes. Buckle reached for the bearskin and pulled it on top of them, letting Max’s light body remain atop the length of him, her face mere inches away, the eyelids fluttering as the eyeballs beneath. She was dreaming, perhaps. Good. If she was dreaming, a morphine-fueled lotus sleep, then she was far away from the pain and the cold. He would get her good and warmed up by the time she awakened. And she would wake up. Romulus Buckle had cheated death many times before, and, taking Max under his wing, he would do it again.

  Buckle could smell Max, her breath, her skin, and it was a pleasant, sunburned meadow sort of smell, detectable under the sickly-sweet stink of sweat and coppery-scented blood.

  It was so strange to be so close to her.

  He pressed her to him, close, for a long time, and slipped into a mild drowse.

  THE BLACK CARRIAGE

  MAX WAS RIDING IN A carriage; the interior was all black, velvet and leather, and the window curtains were open, the world outside passing in the dark-gray-and-purple blur of night. She heard horses racing, the carriage team, iron shoes pounding the earth, noses snorting breath. She was wearing black, she knew, a heavily stitched gown, but all she could see of it were her tight-fitting sleeves of embroidered satin that covered all but the fingers of her hands, the seams lined with black pearls.

  She was there but she was not there.

  But she was not cold anymore. She was not in pain.

  She did not feel anything.

  Her perspective shifted, and she was outside of herself now, a spectator perched high up on a stone wall studded by burning torches, overlooking the peaks and valleys of a mountain range. Fifty feet below, a trail emerged from the dense pines, winding its way up the throat of the rocky valley. A black carriage appeared, rumbling and rattling, drawn by four horses with gleaming hides the color of midnight, eyes wide but calm, straining against their harnesses. A coachman sat atop the carriage, cracking his whip, completely obscured by a heavy black robe and hood despite the two lanterns jiggling on hooks on both sides of him.

  The coachman pulled back on the reins, and the black carriage creaked to a stop directly below. The carriage door swung open. Max saw herself step out. She wore an ornate black dress, glittering with black pearls and obsidian that formed fantastic patterns along the entire length of the bodice and skirt. The collar of the gown framed her head in a tall sweep of fulsome black feathers, each three feet in height, as if the tail of a peacock sprouted from the back of her neck. Her hair was bound up atop her head in a beautiful contortion pierced with lancets and glittering with dark jewels.

  The patterns on the dress shifted and started streaming, rotating, becoming row after row of numbers, endless variations of numbers.

  The Max at the carriage paused to look at the fluctuating surface of her gown and then looked up at her.

  Max was suddenly below again, looking up. The to
wering stone edifice in front of her, cut out of the face of the mountain, was a monumental riot of alien stonework, its pillars curving, its statues a menagerie of inhuman figures both beautiful and grotesque, adorned with symbols similar to those now alive on the sleeves of her dress.

  And somewhere not too high up squatted the thing that was watching her; she only glimpsed movement, for the dark figure slipped back into the shadows of some impenetrable recess, as if a gargoyle had just slipped out of view.

  The horses behind Max shifted and tossed their heads, impatiently stamping the frozen earth. The coachman sat silent and motionless, a corpse inside a black hood.

  Max smelled burning wood, smoke mixed with blood. She knew she was dreaming. But she was aware of a thousand other dreamers inhabiting the ethereal landscape with her, whispering in the silence, though their journeys did not seem to intersect with hers. She felt exiled, excluded—as if her half-Martian blood was enough to get her to the gates of heaven, but not enough to let her in. Was it no more than a dream? The light wind touching her face felt so real; the thick fabric of her long gown was abrasive, scratching her skin—a gown designed for the dead, not the living, with nerves that still felt such things.

  She stepped forward, placing her black-sheathed shoe on the first of the wide, sweeping stairs that led up to the entrance of the towering alien cathedral. High above her, something big unfolded its wings, two sweeping white wings with gray-black stripes on the interiors, and leapt into the sky, swooping down toward her.

  Max watched it.

  The winged creature landed softly despite its weight, planting its black boots on the steps above Max. It was a full-blooded Martian male, like her but unlike her—it was of a different kind, a great, winged, long-headed species with almost translucent skin, its white flesh laced with the rampant coursing of blue veins beneath and only hints of gray stripes upon it. He wore ancient midnight-colored garments made of cloth and chain mail, draped loosely upon his frame.