Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  THE RAILWAY STATION

  THE ARMORED MOTORCAR CAME TO an abrupt, steam-wheezing, creaking halt. The armor-plated door was heaved open, and Buckle emerged into a day of cloudy brightness, eyes blinking. The windy bluster of the open air was a fresh wake-up, quite welcome, and under the monumental vault of the sky, he felt more at home. In front of him, behind the Imperial cavalrymen, a double set of railway tracks ran along the edge of the cliff twenty paces beyond.

  Buckle turned around to peer up at the Imperial railway station, an architectural marvel that had been dazzlingly hewn out of the very face of the mountain cliff itself. Overlooking the castle-like facade of ramparts and turrets was a gigantic iron eagle, wings spread, perched atop an iron cross on the highest gable. The exterior metals suffered from severe corrosion, their bolts and undersides running with waterfalls of rust, while the stones showed the omnipresent fissures caused by expanding ice and other signs of erosion.

  Sabrina and Washington were soon at Buckle’s side, followed by Valkyrie, Bismarck, and Rainer. The household cavalrymen surrounded them, forming a cordon of cuirasses and steel helmets.

  A cavalry captain politely ushered the group forward. “Please, Princess, Ambassador, ladies and gentlemen,” the captain urged. “Let us get inside, shall we?”

  “I must say, Captain Albard,” Bismarck said. “Well done.”

  “Thank you, Prince Smelt,” Albard replied, his olive eyes serious between his prodigious brown mustache and the polished brim of his pickelhaube. “It is not safe for you out here,” he said, stepping forward to lead the way. “Quickly, if you please.”

  The cavalrymen escorted Buckle and the others through the towering glass-and-bronze front doors of the railway station, guarded by two magnificently rendered marble statues of warhorses, with armor plates on their skulls and swords on their saddles.

  The towering grandeur and wide-open space of the Imperial railway terminal stunned Buckle’s senses. The walls of the rectangular edifice soared up six stories to a roof constructed almost entirely of glass, the panes coated with a mix of snow and coal debris that imparted a glowing, liquid softness to the sunlight illuminating the room.

  Sabrina elbowed Buckle, blinking and grinning as she looked up alongside him, taking off her derby. “Grand as they get, aye!” she whispered.

  The station was surely nothing short of an architectural and engineering masterpiece, far finer than anything Buckle had ever seen. Arched doorways led away at every cardinal point, set in walls carved in glorious stone reliefs with ornately curved iron crosses. Old, discolored flags hung from marble facades, their folds thick with dust, framed by sculptures of hunting eagles and condors. The huge bronze-and-glass doors dominated the front of the building, opening onto the railway platform and the endless gray sky past the edge of the cliff beyond.

  Light drifts of stone powder, chunky with marble fragments, sloshed around Buckle’s boots as he walked, impregnating the air with dust. The grand Imperial station had been transformed into a sculptors’ work studio: the original wooden benches were stacked high against the back wall to make room for a crowd of haphazardly arranged tables crowding the floor, some covered in small, rough-hewn statues, unfinished, emerging from the marble blocks that held them, others piled under hundreds of stone-cutting implements, buckets for chemical plasters, and smocks.

  At the center of the room stood a huge, mostly completed statue of a pawing stallion, perhaps twenty feet high at the shoulder, nostrils flaring, tongue loose, eyes wide, saddled but riderless, a snapped spear gushing blood from its right flank, every muscle poised to initiate the final, defiant charge, to break free from the fortress of wooden scaffolding penning it in.

  Chancellor Smelt, dressed in his usual military grandeur, stood in the middle of the room with four Imperial household cavalrymen near at hand. “Ambassador Washington, Captain Buckle, and the dauntless Lieutenant Serafim,” Smelt said, without his usual venom. “Welcome to New Berlin.”

  “Thank you, Chancellor,” Washington replied. “I wish our visit came under more auspicious circumstances.”

  “I profoundly apologize for the tight security. I am afraid the day has come that the avenues of New Berlin have become unsafe for the Smelts,” Smelt said ruefully.

  As they approached Chancellor Smelt, Buckle could see that the man was agitated—no, incensed—and his eyes sought out his children.

  “What is it, Father?” Valkyrie asked, also having sensed Smelt’s dismay, a hint of unguarded worry in her voice.

  “There has just been an attempt on your mother’s life,” Smelt said.

  “What?” Rainer gasped. “Where was the guard?”

  Valkyrie and Bismarck stopped before their father; they were well trained, stoic, but their eyes flickered—Buckle knew that their hearts were pounding.

  “What is Mother’s condition?” Bismarck asked calmly.

  Smelt placed his hands on his children’s shoulders. “Fear not, my dear offspring. She is unhurt beyond suffering a shock, and she has Briar Rose and her chambermaids to comfort her now. The assassin was killed in her bedchamber, in the very heart of our manor, just a few moments ago.”

  “Thank the grace of the Oracle,” Bismarck muttered.

  “Thank the household cavalry,” Smelt said, and looked to Albard. “Your brave man, Lieutenant Murat, gutted the fiend on the spot.”

  “The Founders dogs,” Albard snarled under his breath. “The curs!”

  “I am overjoyed that the queen escaped unscathed, Chancellor,” Washington said. “Where is the Founders ambassador?”

  “The man here now, the one that came on the airship—the name of Wallach—is not the ambassador,” Smelt answered. “Just a foul-tongued herald, an envoy. I stalled him, then sent him the long way, in one of my royal carriages, hoping that one of his own assassins might blow him up by mistake. He will probably arrive without incident, unfortunately.” Smelt turned to Valkyrie and Bismarck, his gaunt frame taut with anger. “The snakes are loose, children. Watch yourselves, in everything that you do. In every move that you make.”

  “We shall be vigilant, Father,” Valkyrie replied softly.

  “The cat is out of the bag, Ambassador,” Smelt said, turning to face Washington. “If it ever was in it, which I doubt. I have sent a fast clipper to the Devil’s Punchbowl with a warning for your clan. I cannot imagine but that the Founders have also dispatched assassins to your stronghold as well.”

  “Thank you, Chancellor. You have done us all a great service,” Washington said.

  “I assure you that you are safe here,” Smelt said. “We are sneaking about like cellar mice, but I keep no secrets from the household cavalry.”

  A burly Imperial cavalryman strode in through one of the tall doors. “The Founders envoy has arrived, chancellor.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Krupp,” Smelt said, then turned to Buckle. “I was hoping the infamous brute wouldn’t make it here alive.”

  THE ENVOY

  THE FOUNDERS ENVOY, WALLACH, SLITHERED into the grand Imperial railway station holding a large pewter pocket watch, flanked on each side by two Imperial cavalrymen with their hands on their scabbards. Wallach was a small, slight man, dark eyed, clean shaven, and unsettlingly pale skinned, draped in a long black-hooded cloak with red facings. His four-cornered red biretta stood out oddly against his short-cropped orange hair. Wallach glared at Smelt. “Traveling in armored buggies, are we, Chancellor? Such things do not become you.”

  Buckle saw Wallach immediately notice Sabrina’s red hair, readily visible now that she had tucked her derby under her arm.

  “Our means of conveyance is of no concern to you, sir,” Valkyrie replied dismissively.

  “You are mistaken, Princess,” Wallach snapped. “Since you are a Founders family—bred by us, fathered by us—your well-being is of every concern to me.”

  This is fascinating, Buckle thought. If Wallach represented the attitudes of the Founders—and there was no reason to believe that he d
id not—then the Founders still believed that they ruled the colonies they had lost a hundred years before.

  “Watch your tone, sir,” Albard said, his voice dripping with menace.

  Smelt stepped in front of the much shorter Wallach. “It takes all of my self-control, sir,” Smelt said, “to keep from drawing my sword and piercing your heart right here and now. My wife and nobles have been attacked. I demand you call off your assassins!”

  “You vent your spleen upon an innocent, Chancellor,” Wallach replied, scratching his neck in a detached fashion. “I am nothing more than a lowly envoy, a messenger who knows nothing of what you speak.”

  “I have warned you,” Smelt growled.

  Washington was silent, but he very deliberately stepped up alongside Smelt.

  Buckle decided not to be silent. “If you think that any of us shall stand aside while you Founders try to conquer the world, you are sorely mistaken, sir.”

  If Wallach was perturbed he did not show it, barely glancing at Buckle; he held up his pocket watch, a bizarre timepiece with a red face and black hands. “It is eight fifty-six. Let us assemble on the platform and welcome the ambassador back to his loyal colony, shall we?”

  “We have not been your colony for a very long time,” Smelt snapped.

  “I shall allow the ambassador to resolve that little misunderstanding,” Wallach said. “Shall we?”

  Smelt raised his hand. Two cavalrymen hurried forward to the front doors, slipping aside the bronze latches and swinging one of the great portals open. A whistling burst of mountain air swept in, raising whirlwinds of white stone powder. Wallach led the group out onto the platform, followed closely by Smelt, Washington, Rainer, and Albard.

  It was like following a hangman, Buckle thought.

  Passing out the doors and under the high archways of the train platform overlooking the high cliff, Buckle felt like he was facing the edge of the world.

  “Here it comes,” Albard said, his binoculars pressed to his eyes, looking southwest.

  Buckle drew his telescope from his hat and stepped alongside Albard, finding the train in the lens as it came around a bend in the cliff. Two identical locomotives surged at the head of the train, metal monstrosities, hulking masses of iron plates and riveted window bubbles—the cars were likely sealed for transit through the noxious mustard—their driving wheels issuing rivers of vapor into the freezing air, their double smokestacks wreathed in clouds of black smoke.

  The first locomotive pushed a big armored pod with a cantilevered plow that glowed red hot at the blade edges, melting the ice in great waves of hissing steam as it scraped the rails clear of decades of accumulated debris. Two massive iron arms, affixed to the armored pod, gripped the tracks behind the plow with iron claws, designed to straighten the rails before the locomotive wheels reached them.

  A steam whistle blew. The locomotives slowed to a halt. The hatchways of the armored pod flung open, and men began to pour out of the hatches.

  Buckle flipped his magnifier lens down from his hat and focused on the brawny bodies spilling out of the lead pod. They were work teams—a lot of them—leather-jacketed hammer men following a shift leader to a warped track. As the huge clamp arms, the steam valves at their joints pumping furiously, bent the rail back into shape with a wrenching squeal of bending metal, the hammer men laid newly oiled timbers and pounded spikes into place, their pickaxes sending up bursts of shattered permafrost.

  After only a minute, the work teams hustled back into the armored pod, disappearing into the hatches. The steam whistle blew, its echo rebounding off the cliff, and the wheels of the train started rolling again, boilers thundering as the armored beast lurched up the mountain toward New Berlin.

  LEOPOLD GOETHE

  THE ARMORED TRAIN ARRIVED THREE minutes late—though the wretched Wallach announced it was perfectly on time—coming to a halt alongside the station, its smokestacks belching banks of ashy black smoke. The iron-sheathed cars creaked under their own weight, their driving wheels sending up showers of sparks, every valve gushing waves of steam that eddied around Buckle and the others on the platform.

  The train had seven cars: the boxy utility carrier pod at the very front, three locomotives, two in the lead and one at the rear, and two passenger cars in between, with a gunnery car behind. The gunnery car, even more heavily armored than the rest, had two revolving pillbox turrets, where cannon muzzles poked ominously out of the open gun ports. Buckle guessed they were thirty-two-pounders, judging from the diameter of their mouths.

  Buckle saw Valkyrie’s left hand drift down to the pommel of her sword and grip it reflexively.

  “The duke is here!” Wallach shouted imperiously. “Prepare to receive Colonel Leopold Goethe!”

  The hatches of the forward car banged open, iron on iron, and the hammer men emerged, barrel-chested apes, their long leather coats, and their faces and hands, stained black with tar and oil, their bodies humped from endless hours of backbreaking work, shouldering the tools of their trade—pickaxe, shovel, and hammer—with their cold-gnarled fists. They clambered one after another out of the steam-blurred hatches, forming a line on the tracks.

  Buckle peered at the hammer men. There had to be at least fifty of them.

  The doors of the two passenger cars clanged open as one. A soldier appeared, tall and straight, a sword and pistol at his belt. The sight of the finely fitted uniform gave Buckle a start. The man was not wearing the steam pack or the helmet, but there was no mistaking a steampiper. Nineteen more steampipers marched out, perfect tin soldiers in their silver-piped black coats and caps, their silver cuirasses emblazoned with the phoenix.

  Buckle scrutinized the steampipers, scanning the strong-featured faces, the light-orange and strawberry hair. There were four females in the company, but the redheaded twin of Sabrina he had seen aboard the Pneumatic Zeppelin during the battle over Catalina was not with them.

  “Is this an ambassadorial visit or an invasion?” Albard snarled.

  The ambassador, Leopold Goethe, appeared; he was a man of medium height, gripping his gold-handled sword at his hip so the scabbard did not bang on the hatchway. With the steam swirling around him, Goethe looked every bit the conqueror, clad in a white uniform with silver buttons and draped with a crimson cloak that swirled to the heels of his black jackboots. His long, well-combed hair fell to his shoulders, blond and thick, and his beard, closely trimmed but full, was the same color.

  Buckle sensed immediately—from the fashion in which Goethe strode, casting his glance in the way a slave owner might look upon property—that the duke was already counting New Berlin as Founders territory.

  And there was something about Goethe, something about him…it was slight, but unnervingly familiar. Buckle could not put his finger on it.

  “It is my proud duty to present to you,” Wallach said with a flourish of his arm, “the honorable duke of industry and prime ambassador of the Founders clan, Colonel Leopold Goethe!”

  Goethe stopped in front of Katzenjammer Smelt to bow and offer his hand. “Chancellor Smelt, I presume?” Goethe said in a solid, well-trained baritone voice.

  “Colonel Goethe,” Smelt replied with far less enthusiasm, shaking Goethe’s hand, if almost reluctantly, his monocle gleaming in the swirling mist and harshening wind.

  “It is a great honor to be here in New Berlin, to meet with you face-to-face to discuss the most pressing and urgent matters of our times, Chancellor,” Goethe said.

  Goethe glanced at Sabrina, at her brilliant-red hair, and Buckle saw a flash of dismayed recognition in his blue eyes. Goethe jerked his attention back to Smelt.

  Damn it, Sabrina Serafim—who are you? Buckle thought.

  “Most certainly,” Smelt replied. “Shall we step inside to talk?”

  “Very good, sir,” Goethe said. “Please, after you.”

  Albard and the Imperial cavalrymen, their pickelhaubes glittering with half-crystallized condensation from the locomotive steam, rushed forward to push
open the glass doors as Smelt, Goethe, and the rest followed behind.

  The twenty steampipers swung into single file and marched in after them.

  ULTIMATUM

  LEOPOLD GOETHE HAD BARELY TUGGED his white gloves free of his hands before Smelt launched into him. “I must say, Ambassador,” Smelt announced, “I find your methods of negotiating unacceptable.”

  Goethe smiled, looking up at the roof. “I must say, the sketches I have seen of this edifice simply do not do it justice. Our Founders architects may have done their best work right here.” He then looked over at Smelt, almost as if he had forgotten the man was there, and said, “But we have yet to even begin negotiating, my dear Chancellor.”

  “Do not play the fool’s game with me!” Smelt snapped. “There are assassins loose in my city, killing my officials and threatening the lives of my family. You have attacked the Brineboilers without provocation. And now you show up on my doorstep, uninvited, with a trainload of armed soldiers.”

  “Please, Chancellor,” Goethe answered calmly, a hint of condescending amusement in his face. “We Founders do not endorse assassins. Our conflict with the Brineboilers is our affair, and of no concern to you. And as for my little train and my ceremonial guard, surely you are aware of how perilous it is to travel the outlands without protection.”

  Smelt glared.

  “Why are you here, Ambassador?” Washington asked, stepping forward.

  “And who are you?” Goethe asked.

  “I am Ambassador Rutherford Washington, representative of the Crankshaft clan.”

  “You have no right to be here,” Goethe snapped. “Ragtag clans are of no interest to the Founders. There is no place here for your kind—pirates and swindlers—at the negotiating table of the true clans.”

  Washington’s back stiffened, but he said nothing.

  Buckle raged at Goethe’s dismissiveness, but he held his tongue. Right now the battle was between the Imperials and the Founders.