Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

“Sabertooth attack,” Nightingale said. “A single penetrating bite just above the left clavicle. Severe claw lacerations down the back.”

  Fogg nodded in his reassuring fashion, as he always did, even when he dealt with the mortally wounded. He pressed his fingers against Max’s jugular, lowering his head as he concentrated on the pulse.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Yesterday evening,” Buckle said.

  Fogg lifted Max’s eyelids, scrutinizing the jerk of each black iris. “She lost a lot of blood, did she?”

  Nightingale nodded. “Yes. Severe exsanguination.”

  “I am worried more about infection than the blood loss,” Fogg said, more to himself than anyone else. He motioned for the stretcher bearers to follow him to the cart.

  Buckle strode down the gangplank alongside Fogg. “It took a while for me to get to her. I cleaned the wounds as best I could and slathered them with Fassbinder’s before I bandaged her up.”

  “And I changed her dressings when we got her aboard this morning,” Nightingale added. “No sign of infection, Doctor.”

  “And she’s been on morphine the entire time?” Fogg asked.

  “Yes,” Buckle answered. As they reached the end of the ramp, his boots sank into the churned slush of the access lane, a brown mix of half-frozen snow, horse manure, coal dust, and mud. Buckle followed Fogg to the front of the wagon, while Nightingale led the stretcher bearers to two orderlies in white coats waiting at the rear.

  “What is your appraisal of their conditions, Doctor?” Buckle asked Fogg.

  “It looks like Valentine will lose the leg. As far as the lieutenant—she is a Martian. What do I know about Martians? Bloody upside-down anatomy,” Fogg said, climbing up into the front seat of the wagon and collecting the reins. A chubby stray dog—the airfield crew must have been feeding him—yipped at the horses before tucking its tail between its legs and scuttling away. “But if I were a gambling man, which I am not, I would not bet against that extraordinary Martian constitution.”

  “Nor would I,” Buckle said.

  Fogg snapped the reins with a shout of “Ha!”

  Buckle watched the four buckskins stamp, lurching forward and settling into a good pace down the lane as the ambulance wagon lumbered behind.

  “They will both come out all right, Captain,” Sabrina said at Buckle’s shoulder. “I am sure of it.”

  Buckle smiled at Sabrina. She always had the ability to soothe him, even in the worst predicaments. But her red hair—the two red ringlets curling from beneath the sides of her derby—angered him somehow, in an obscure yet intense way, a dagger behind a curtain. If she had once been a member of the Founders clan, she must know some of their secrets, so she was choosing to keep those secrets from him.

  “Your transport is arriving, Captain!” Windermere shouted from the weather deck of the Arabella, leaning out under the arch of the envelope skin, pointing to the access road.

  “Very good, Mister Windermere,” Buckle said, then turned to Sabrina. “Go over to the Pneumatic Zeppelin and double-check the repairs with Ivan. I want her ready to go.”

  “Aye, aye,” Sabrina said, striding away toward the repair dock.

  A tall man riding on a black horse clopped up, leading another mount by the reins; unlike his heavyset brother, Horatio Crankshaft was long and lean and straight as a yardarm, with the pointy-chinned face of a heron. He wore a long gray riding cloak over his dress uniform, with white gloves. His hair and beard were cropped short, and white as snow. Horatio was a field officer to the bone: where his brother Balthazar was diplomatic and resolute, Horatio was brutally honest and daring—not an accomplished tongue biter—and while he was rarely invited to the negotiating table, much to his relief, his inborn aggression made him the best warship captain in the fleet.

  Buckle bore great affection for Horatio, whose temperament more closely matched his than Balthazar’s. In the early years, the uncle had proved a far more rambunctious playmate than Balthazar tended to be. Horatio was a tester, a teaser, always challenging his nieces and nephews, not to mention raising five refined but headstrong daughters of his own. And while Balthazar had always kept tight purse strings with his children, thriftiness being a cardinal virtue he admired, Horatio was the uncle who showed up with coins jingling in his pocket that were not there when he left.

  “Mount up, nephew,” Horatio said. “Negotiations are about to begin.”

  “And you gallop off on escort duty, sir?” Buckle asked, grinning, planting his boot in the second horse’s stirrup and swinging up into the saddle.

  “Balthazar wants you there and not I, thank the milk goat’s tits. I am merely the messenger boy,” Horatio said. It was vintage Horatio. “Who is in the ambulance?”

  “One of my boilermen. And Max.”

  Horatio’s eyes widened a bit. He was quite fond of Max. “Is it bad?”

  Buckle nodded. “Sabertooth.”

  “Bah!” Horatio grinned, the teeth-gritted kind of grin he got when action was imminent. “If she is still alive, she shall make it. Martian blood courses with particles of steel, do not forget. Now, you need to get inside and get washed up. You look like you’ve been dragged through dung.”

  “And kraken dung, at that,” Buckle said with a wink.

  Horatio raised an eyebrow at Buckle. “Now, there is a tale I’ll want to hear when I’ve got some rum in me. But now, let us go. Ha!” Horatio dug his spurs into the flanks of his favorite horse, a gray-speckled gelding named Bourbon, and the big animal took off down the access road. Buckle’s horse, a brown mare, spun and followed at a gallop, without Buckle having to do much encouraging at all. It was exhilarating to be on the horse’s back, its unruly mane whipping back and forth under his face, the jangling bridle, the points of his weight in the stirrups, and for a moment Buckle was able to forget his exhaustion, his multitudinous worries.

  But nothing could make him forget Elizabeth.

  PINYON HALL

  BUCKLE STRAIGHTENED HIS SPINE, NOT wanting his nerves to get the best of him as he strode across the courtyard of the citadel. He looked at his pocket watch, turning the winder, and walked quickly. It had taken him and Horatio over twenty minutes to ride through town to the citadel, and another half hour to get washed and dressed. He feared he would be late, although no one seemed to have any idea of what time the proceedings might begin. A light breeze whirled in through the high gate, fluttering the scarlet-and-white banners festooned across its stone face. The courtyard was bustling—the whole place was buzzing—at the arrival of the ambassadors. Buckle dodged past rushing servants, milling surreys, and soldiers on horses whose hooves clattered on the courtyard flagstones.

  This was the first time Balthazar had invited Buckle to attend a negotiation session with an outside clan, and Buckle feared that he had no aptitude for the subtleties and nuances of such a strained parley. At least he looked presentable—he knew that—with his white pith helmet tucked under his right arm and his left hand on the scabbard of his saber. He felt rather proper and pinched inside his crimson dress uniform, with tight gold buttons that made him feel propped up. The high collar choked him—if he took the time to notice it—and the pressure of the cloth against the bandage on the back of his neck scraped like a branding iron. Damned kraken. He much preferred his airman togs—the leathers and wool fit loosely, and let a man breathe.

  Buckle’s head felt tight, his longish hair combed back and held in place in the stiff clamp of Cottington’s Gentleman’s Cream, and he was scrubbed, scrubbed pink, at least about the face and hands. The twins Jasmine and Jericho, the youngest of Balthazar’s adopted imps, had helped the servants lay out Buckle’s uniform in his chamber, pestering him with wide eyes for the story of the kraken as he stripped and dressed. Burgess Sibley, the family butler, had ushered the youngsters out, but not before he had trimmed Buckle’s beard with scissors; picking up a straight razor from his barber’s kit, he had vainly argued that he be allowed to shave off Buckle’s “bird�
��s nest of a beard.”

  Buckle charged up the broad front steps of Pinyon Hall, a sprawling stone-and-log structure and the heart of the Crankshaft government.

  “Tin-headed bastards! Too fast!” the captain of the guard shouted from atop the gate, pointing upward.

  Buckle glanced behind him. A gigantic oblong shadow passed overhead, like an eclipse blocking out the sky. It was a huge airship, flying very low, the keels of her four gondolas no more than seventy-five feet above the tops of the watchtowers—a Tinskin war zeppelin, emblazoned with old Spanish coats-of-arms, Aztec hieroglyphs, and snake heads, her gun ports bristling with cannons. The sky vessel’s mass appeared so great from Buckle’s position under its shadow, it seemed that if it were to drop, it might crush the entire stronghold under its immensity.

  The Tinskin airship was coming into the airfield. Her exhaust pipes sizzled, the engines having just been shut down, leaving her momentum to carry her the last half mile; the strangely quiet airship split the air with the windy hiss of her canvas, her six titanic bronze props turning languidly. Tinskin airmen, dressed in overalls gleaming with armor plates and square-lensed goggles strapped over morion helmets, peered stoically down at Buckle as they perched at their docking stations amidst the rigging, mooring ropes at the ready in their hands.

  The zeppelin Khartoum, wheeling above, obviously unhappy with the appearance of a first-rate warship, had fired up her boilers with great blasts of white steam from her exhausts, and had dropped to four hundred feet to shadow the Tinskin behemoth.

  Buckle stumbled on the steps. It was difficult to take his eyes off the Tinskin zeppelin as it swept off to the south, the great length of its underbelly ending in a bank of gleaming propellers and revealing the bright sky behind its rudder. Buckle studied the black emblem of an eagle clutching a snake looming on its straw-yellow flank and experienced a mixture of awe and anger. He had never seen a Tinskin airship up close before—it was an awesome construction—but he was also infuriated by the clan’s lack of decorum; it was brutally indecent to dispatch a warship on an ambassadorial mission.

  Buckle did not know a great deal about the Tinskins, but Balthazar had once told him that intimidation, veiled thinly if veiled at all, was the primary grease of their negotiating tactics. The Tinskins were a military clan, operating dozens of well-outfitted zeppelins in the skies to the far south, and their suzerainty over those lands made them haughty, overbearing, and aggressive. “Bring a Tinskin to the negotiating table,” Balthazar would say, laughing but with a serious blue coldness behind his gray eyes, “and treat him as a poisonous snake whose venom you need for an antidote.”

  But the Crankshafts needed the Tinskins, especially if the Spartak clan remained aloof from the proceedings. And the Tinskins would be well aware of it.

  Within the towering pine doors of Pinyon Hall, the great public chamber of the citadel, servants dashed about with decanters and chair cushions. The ambassadors were still sequestered, making their own last-minute preparations. Buckle marched alongside the huge pine table that dominated the center of the rectangular chamber, thirty chairs on each side. Narrow glass windows in cast-iron frames soared up three stories on each flank, all the way to the heavy timber crossbeams of the roof, allowing sunlight to flood the hall. It was the best lit room in the citadel, and there was no need for lanterns or candles during daylight hours.

  Balthazar’s ready chamber was located behind a small door at the head of the hall. Four Gallowglass attendants—three men and one woman, none of them peacocked enough to be the ambassador—emerged from an adjoining corridor and stopped, eyeing Buckle with a muted hostility. They wore light-green tricornered hats and fine dark-green cloaks clamped at the throat with gold frogs, but despite their finery, their faces seemed tavern lit, bull eyed, quick to take offense, oozing a street-hardened brawn.

  Buckle offered the Irish nary a sideways glance, walking straight on to Balthazar’s door, where he delivered a rap of his knuckles to the wood. The eyes of the Gallowglasses bored into his back, and he felt a touch of relief when Balthazar’s voice boomed from within.

  “Enter!”

  He stepped into the chamber, a medium-size compartment with a low timber roof. A crackling fire burned in the stone hearth on the left wall, its yellow glow lost in the gray light flooding in through the large window at the front; a seven-foot-tall grandfather clock hugged the wall opposite the fireplace, the tight click of its pendulum mechanism beating behind the quiet. The large desk had a lantern on it, the oil wick lit—strange for that time of day, but not if it had been brought in by someone emerging from one of the pitch-black secret passages that abounded in the stronghold. The pirates who had built the place had been overly fond of secret chambers and passageways—even after thirty years of occupation, the Crankshafts would stumble across new ones now and again.

  Balthazar stood behind the desk, leaning on his hands, his black evening coat bunched about his armpits, peering down at a set of papers. To his left stood Ryder, his only natural-born child and the eldest (not counting the unknown ages of the half-Martians), who had inherited the short, burly form of his father, though he was well squared in his dress cavalry reds.

  Balthazar’s hoary head jerked up. “Romulus. Good of you to make it.”

  “Hello, Father,” Buckle said, shutting the door behind him.

  “Hello, brother,” Ryder said.

  “Good to see you, Ryder,” Buckle answered. Although his relationship with Ryder had always been a cool one, he did feel a healthy connection to his brother. There had been a surly competitiveness between them as boys, but once they had outgrown the eye-spitting and fistfights, with maturity, they found common ground. Buckle had shown an early affinity for daring and zeppelins, but Ryder had eschewed such wild pursuits, preferring rather to develop himself into a cavalry officer, and one of Balthazar’s most capable diplomats. Buckle had won his captaincy early—by taking the Pneumatic Zeppelin as a prize—and Buckle knew that it irked Ryder to watch his more flamboyant brother achieve such glories.

  Ryder’s right arm was in a sling; he was still recovering from the wound he had received—a sword thrust to the ribs while defending a doorway—attempting to shield his father the night he was abducted by the Founders at the Palisades Truce. It had pained Ryder greatly to be left behind, unable to participate in the raid to rescue Balthazar from the City of the Founders.

  “It was Max in the ambulance wagon, was it?” Balthazar asked, his face tight.

  “Yes, Father,” Buckle said. Seeing the worry in Balthazar’s eyes for his daughter almost hurt Buckle more than when he held her, bloody and near death, in his arms.

  “Are her wounds grave?” Balthazar asked. Buckle noticed Balthazar’s left hand twitching—not in a convulsive, uncontrollable way, but a rapid rubbing of the fingers.

  “Aye. Sabertooths. She lost a great deal of blood.”

  Balthazar nodded, his gaze angled toward the floor. He pulled at his white silk tie with a thick finger—Buckle knew he hated it. “Well, she is in Doctor Lee’s capable hands now.”

  “And Surgeon Fogg is with her as well,” Buckle added.

  “I shall check in on her immediately after the proceedings,” Balthazar said. He drew his ornate pipe out of his pocket and clamped it between his teeth, making no attempt to light it. It was something he did when he was upset.

  “Martians are resilient, Father,” Ryder offered.

  “She is only half-Martian,” Balthazar said softly, turning to look out the window with its murky glass that overlooked the back of the citadel, the town, and the snowy foothills beyond. The daylight was softening, preparing for its long fade into night. He cleared his throat. “That I relented—that I let you go on that damn fool mission up into the mountains…”

  “I found what I was looking for,” Buckle said. He reached into his pocket and placed the silver Founders phoenix collar pip on the oak table with a solid little click.

  The sound made Balthazar turn around
; both he and Ryder stared at the pin. Ryder made a low, barely audible whistle and picked it up, scrutinizing it in a shaft of sunlight.

  “Ripped from the collar of a frozen corpse, an officer, trapped in the ruins of a Founders zeppelin—the one we shot down over Tehachapi—a zeppelin disguised as an Imperial war machine,” Buckle said.

  Balthazar looked at Buckle and then to Ryder. “So it was the Founders who attacked us at Tehachapi.”

  “I owe Katzenjammer Smelt an apology,” Buckle said, even though he could not believe that he was saying it. It actually pained him to say it. “He was telling the truth, after all.”

  “I still would not trust him,” Ryder said.

  “Have I taught you nothing, Ryder? One can trust one’s ally without exposing one’s back,” Balthazar said. “We were fools,” he growled. “Falling for the Founders’ deceptions, lock, stock, and barrel. They bomb us and we raid the Imperials in return. The cutthroat dogs!”

  “And we did a fairly good job of it, did we not?” Ryder added. “We limped over to New Berlin and tore the Imperials up nicely.”

  The three men stood in silence, the profound ticktock of the grandfather clock suddenly loud in Buckle’s ears. Balthazar switched his cold pipe back and forth between his teeth a few times, stopped, and looked at Buckle. “Anything else?”

  “Just this,” Romulus said, pulling the Founders papers he had liberated from the wreck out of his pocket and laying them on the table. The thin parchments, yellowed and brittle from frost, were covered in handwritten notes. “I found these in the wreck, but they are nothing more than provision and navigation records.”

  “Have Silas look them over,” Balthazar said to Ryder.

  “Yes, Father,” Ryder answered, carefully folding the papers into his uniform pocket.

  Balthazar set his jaw. “Our only hope against the Founders is a grand alliance, an alliance we must forge this very day. We have near a full house: Alchemists, Imperials, Brineboilers—even the Gallowglasses. And the Tinskins have just arrived.”