Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  THE BURNING GALLOWS

  THAT ROMULUS BUCKLE WAS ABLE to save the wretched hide of old Shadrack was a near-run thing. He charged into a small square surrounded by bomb-gutted, burning buildings, where the gallows towered like the spire of some terrible, fire-ringed church. A sea of heavy-lidded, death-dealing faces turned to Buckle; the Spartak clanspeople had dispatched a good tally of “spies,” judging from the stack of dead bodies piled like cordwood at the edge of the square.

  Buckle shoved his way into the crowd. The grumbling mass, their sense of revenge boiling, glared at his foreign clothes and closed in, grabbing, sticks and fists raised. Buckle would have found himself in considerable trouble if Zhukov’s two horsemen had not arrived at a gallop, robes flying and pistols drawn, ordering a halt to everything.

  The mob stood silent, still clutching Buckle, the fires crackling, the horses stamping uneasily, the prisoner motionless on the gallows. It seemed to take forever for Zhukov and the others to arrive.

  “Why, Captain Buckle, do you step in on behalf of the accused?” Zhukov asked as he hurried up along the road, red-faced and puffing, Washington, Sabrina, Valkyrie, and the others close at his heels.

  “I believe he is a Crankshaft with whom I am acquainted,” Buckle replied. A lie, perhaps. But if it was Shadrack, if it was the same man whom Buckle remembered as a boy, then it was surely possible that he was a clansman.

  “A Crankshaft here?” Zhukov sputtered. “Wearing Founders black?”

  Buckle eyed the prisoner on the scaffold platform, his head still obscured by the hood, his bones poking against the oversize black Founders prison-guard uniform that hung on his body as if upon an undersize hangar.

  “I cannot explain his current predicament. I must see him, Captain,” Buckle said, shrugging off the now halfhearted grips of the clanspeople who had seized him.

  “Bring the prisoner down,” Zhukov ordered.

  The hangman, a portly toad with perfectly styled black hair and a frightened sneer, removed the noose and propelled the accused man down the steps in a series of tugs and shoves, keeping him upright by jerking on the ropes that bound his hands behind his back.

  “Remove this man’s hood,” Buckle said to the hangman as he brought his victim to the foot of the steps.

  The hangman eyed Buckle with contempt. “Who are you, stranger, to spit orders at me? Perhaps you are no more than a spy, like the rest!”

  The crowd murmured its approval of the suggestion and edged in with refueled menace. Buckle was in no mood for dallying; the heat of the fires stung the already fire-pinked skin of his face and back, his jaw hurt like hell, and the kraken-sucker wound on the nape of his neck felt like it was full of razors. He tore away the hood, nearly taking the prisoner’s head off with it.

  The crowd howled its vicious disapproval.

  “Enough, good people!” Zhukov bellowed at the mob. “Let the mystery be solved!”

  The crowd cringed and stepped back.

  The hood slipped out of Buckle’s hand. Under an explosion of tangled white hair lit up by the gallows flames, out of the gaunt, skull-like, tight-skinned face, bulged the huge, wild, bloodshot eyes of Shadrack, peering straight up into the heavens.

  Shadrack gasped as if he had not taken a breath for a hundred years. His forehead purpled about the temples and he lowered his terrible eyes, fixing them on Buckle. He smiled, a near-toothless, fanatical smirk, oblivious to the stink of death about him.

  “You have saved old Shadrack, boy, as he knew you would!” Shadrack sputtered, his voice quavering but loud. “I was waiting for you here. Waiting. It is difficult to wait. Even when one is told to wait. Difficult. Who saves old Shadrack? Ah, the question has twice been answered—perhaps even thrice! You, sir, have saved old Shadrack!”

  “You do know this moonchild?” Zhukov asked.

  “Yes,” Buckle replied.

  “And I know you, Romulus,” Shadrack said, his eyes focusing normally on Buckle, his mind freed from something that had long tormented it, but only for an instant. The crazy glare returned, snatching his sanity away.

  “Release the prisoner,” Zhukov ordered. One of his officers cut Shadrack’s bindings away.

  A Russian woman, a lovely young girl with a face contorted by rage, flung a finger at Sabrina and screamed. “A scarlet! A redhead as red as blood! A Founders bitch! Hang her! Hang her!”

  The voices of the mob rose to a bloodthirsty roar. Zhukov, clambering up on the stairs, cut it off. “Silence, you fools!” Zhukov bellowed. The young woman dropped to her knees as Zhukov glared at her. “Which one of my officers has organized these executions? Where is my officer?”

  The mob responded with a terrified silence, heads down. The fires crackled, matched by the crimson embers raining down from the sky, reinforcing the atmosphere of Zhukov’s dangerous displeasure.

  “A lynch mob? How dare you? How dare you! I am Zhukov, the boyar of Muscovy, and only I can sentence a citizen to death! The city may lie in ruins, but the rule of law is still upon you, and I am the rule of law!”

  Zhukov calmly turned to one of his officers and pointed at the hangman. “Hang this traitor immediately,” he said.

  “No!” The hangman shrieked, sobbing. “Please, Boyar—I seek mercy! Mercy!”

  It was too late. Two of Zhukov’s officers snatched him up, lifting his boots off the ground, and carted him up the steps.

  Zhukov slapped Buckle on the back as an old drinking friend would. “My apologies to you, Captain Buckle, that you were forced to witness such disarray. You may take your man with you, of course.”

  “Saved! And I have brought the answer for you!” Shadrack shouted with a ferocity that made both Buckle and Zhukov jump. “I am commanded to bring you the answer, and I have brought you the answer!”

  “What answer?” Buckle asked.

  “Elizabeth,” Shadrack replied.

  THE MELTING POT

  BUCKLE STARED AT SHADRACK. THIS was the man who had helped his father fight off the sabertooths that night long ago in the Tehachapi Mountains. Surely, perhaps, somewhere in that shambling brain, now plunged into the whirl of insanity, the truth still lurked. The truth of what had happened to Buckle’s parents. And Elizabeth.

  Buckle found nothing to trust in the bulging, crazed eyes. But Shadrack had to know something.

  “What nonsense is this?” Washington groaned, stepping forward. “Oh, no, no, no!”

  “Who is Elizabeth?” Valkyrie asked.

  “Captain Buckle’s blood sister,” Sabrina whispered. “Missing and believed dead.”

  “It is nothing!” Washington blustered. “A myth about the captain’s lost sister.”

  “Elizabeth,” Shadrack muttered. “We must…” His voice trailed off, along with his mind.

  Buckle grabbed the old man by the shoulders, trying to make him focus by staring into his swimming eyes. Whatever the old jabberwock knew, he was going to either coax or throttle it out of him. “What do you mean when you say the answer is Elizabeth?”

  “I know where she be, or will be,” Shadrack mumbled. “It is difficult, the knowing, for it is dark to me.”

  Buckle would have shaken Shadrack like a wet rag if he had not feared the rickety old skeleton would fall part.

  “Where?” Buckle asked rapidly.

  “Atlantis,” Shadrack said quickly, matter-of-factly, as if he knew he must spit it out before his brain betrayed him again.

  “Of course!” Washington said. “The maddest place she could be tucked into. Captain, it is time to go. The Founders will be upon us shortly. You must return home to Balthazar at best speed.”

  Barely listening to Washington, Buckle chewed on the name, unable to take his eyes off Shadrack, whose mouth now worked soundlessly. Atlantis? The mysterious clan city long hidden under the western sea? What damned reason would the Atlanteans have to keep Elizabeth?

  “Why Atlantis?” Buckle asked.

  “Why not?” Shadrack chuckled.

  “Do not play
three-legged riddles with me,” Buckle snapped.

  Shadrack nodded gravely, his jaw shuddering, not from fear but from some awful tic. “If you go there, she will be there, when you go there.”

  “Captain!” Washington exclaimed with exasperation. “This is intolerable. We must abandon the lunatic and depart.”

  Zhukov laughed.

  “If Elizabeth is in Atlantis,” Sabrina said softly to Buckle, “we could never reach her. No one knows the way into the underwater city.”

  “No one knew the way into the city of the Founders, either,” Buckle replied.

  “No one is going to Atlantis,” Washington said.

  “Not going?” Shadrack shrieked, his emaciated, sinewy arms twisting under the fabric beneath Buckle’s hands. “Do you not see what old Shadrack has done? What answer old Shadrack has given you?”

  “What answer?” Buckle asked. “I know you. I know you. From the cabin on the mountain. You were there with us, with my father, Alpheus, at Tehachapi.”

  “We must go!” Washington howled.

  “Of course I know you, little fellow. That is why I brought Penny for you,” Shadrack pleaded, his eyes welling up with tears. “Penny Dreadful—she knows the way! She knows the way!”

  “Who is Penny Dreadful?” Sabrina asked.

  Shadrack’s weak brain collapsed. He stared up at the red rain of cinders and mumbled incoherently.

  Penny Dreadful? Hopefully this person was sane.

  Buckle spun to the crowd. “Was there someone with this man? A girl? Speak up!”

  “Tell this officer what you know, if you know anything,” Zhukov ordered.

  The young woman stepped forward, shaking. “When we captured the spy—when we found him, he was in the company of a beastly little automaton, one of the old Atlantean machines.”

  “And where is that automaton now?” Buckle asked the woman.

  The woman turned a frightened glance toward Zhukov. “They tossed it in the melting pot.”

  “Where?” Buckle snapped, grabbing the woman by the arm. She pointed a quivering finger at a small foundry building across the square. The outer wall was collapsed and Buckle saw a group of clanspeople within, collected around a crucible furnace fired up with glowing red coke.

  Buckle dashed forward, hearing the sharp thump of the gallows trapdoor behind him. The Muscovy hangman had met his doom.

  It only took a matter of seconds for Buckle to reach the foundry, charging over the rubble of the wall and into waves of stinging heat flowing out through rows of cupolas, molds, and hydrogen collectors. Four Russians in leather aprons were shoveling more coke into the furnace, while a dozen more peered down into the melting pot, their faces glowing with an eerie dance of red and amber light.

  Buckle saw the Penny Dreadful, a metal robot constructed in the bulky form of a nine-year-old girl, lying in the bottom of the bowl like a discarded doll. It was a ghastly looking iron, copper, and bronze thing, strange in its metalwork and the foreign art of its forging. Its feet were fashioned into high-laced boots, its skeletal legs disappearing under a pinafore of shimmering, cloth-like metal. Octagonal glass bubbles lined both sides of the torso, cold and dark. The arms, designed to look much more human than the legs, ended in beautiful multijointed hands. The automaton’s neck, poking up out of its brass lace collar, seemed to approximate human anatomy, as if the metal skin concealed metal muscles and ligatures. The face, a stylized representation of a young female, slept, its mouth a black hollow, the nose small, the eyes hidden behind bronze lids with copper eyelashes pressed shut over smoothly polished cheeks. It had hair, a flowing, industrial version of hair, thousands of tiny copper strands braided along each side of the skull and hanging down to the shoulders.

  The Penny Dreadful robot looked dead. The edges of it that touched the crucible sizzled, throwing sparks as the metal softened, preparing to melt against the rising heat.

  “Remove the automaton!” Buckle shouted. “Get it out of there immediately!”

  “And who the hell are you?” One of the Russians laughed unpleasantly. “Another foreigner? How about we toss you in the pot with the machine and find out what you are made of?”

  Buckle reached for his pistol.

  “That will not be necessary, Captain Buckle,” Zhukov said, stepping in through the collapsed wall with Valkyrie and Sabrina at his back. “Now! Take the robot out of the pot!” he ordered the Russians. “And with alacrity, you swine!”

  The Russians hastily collected their steel tongs in their heavily gloved hands, took hold of the Penny Dreadful by head and ankle, and dragged it, smoldering and smoking, up and out of its crematorium. The four men shifted the robot—it was apparently lightweight, despite its appearance—to a table and dropped it there. One of the smiths threw a bucket of water across the body, the liquid exploding in a hissing blanket of steam as it cooled the red-hot edges of its metals.

  Buckle stepped over the smoldering figure of the automaton. Up close, the metalwork was worn but elegant, though melting had occurred on the heels and rump, as well as the elbows and the right side of the head, where the intricate surfaces were now smoothly rippled.

  It was too late, Buckle despaired. The Penny Dreadful and the secrets it might contain, if any at all, were probably lost.

  “If you want the melted robot, Captain, you may have it,” Zhukov said, giving the Penny Dreadful a disapproving glance. “Though it is not much of a reward for the man who is most certainly the savior of myself and the Czarina.”

  Suddenly, the Penny Dreadful awoke. A soft yellow illumination pulsed in the region of the heart, coursing outward along hundreds of tiny liquid-bearing glass tubes to the arms and legs. The glow traveled up the neck and into the skull, swirling within, the fringes of the eyelids spilling newly kindled brightness.

  Buckle leaned over the Penny Dreadful. “Do you hear me, machine?” he asked.

  The bronze eyelids flicked open with a clank, revealing two glass orbs with copper irises full of swirling, sparkling, lemon-gold incandescence. The eyes whirled to Buckle with such exactitude that he jerked back.

  “Who are you?” the Penny Dreadful asked, in a voice surprisingly similar to that of a human female child.

  “I am Captain Romulus Buckle. Who are you?”

  “Why, I am Penny, Penny Dreadful, of course.”

  Buckle stared into the bizarre little-girl face, hearing the automaton’s gears and springs winding and clicking inside the skull. “Penny Dreadful, do you know the way to Atlantis?”

  “Of course I do,” Penny Dreadful replied brightly. “I was born there, after all.”

  THE PENNY DREADFUL

  CAPTAIN BUCKLE STRODE INTO THE cramped chart room at the rear of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s piloting gondola, Ambassador Washington hard on his heels. Buckle was greatly annoyed, and even more displeased when he saw Howard Hampton and Penny Dreadful—the half-girl, half-metal goblin—sitting in the chairs, both patting Kellie. Kellie looked a bit unsure about the robot, but she was not inclined to turn down a good scratching, from a human or otherwise.

  “This is not your mission,” Washington said. “Captain, you go too far.”

  Buckle turned back to face Washington. There was little free space in the cabin, and it was dark—it took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the rich green boil illumination on the bridge. His face was close to Washington’s, his right leg pressing against the Penny Dreadful’s iron knees.

  “It is an opportunity, sir,” Buckle whispered back. He could hear the bridge crew relaying orders in preparation for liftoff. He desperately wanted to be out on the deck with them. “With the invasion under way, every clan is in peril. The people of Atlantis shall understand this.”

  “The people of Atlantis,” Washington said, punching the word people in an unfriendly way, “care for no clan but themselves. They are absolutely neutral. Have you given thought to the fact that you shall not be able to find their city under the sea? The Atlanteans have no door to go knocking on, and I
doubt they shall be popping up to greet you.”

  “Penny Dreadful knows the way in.”

  Washington uttered an unformed, frustrated sound. “This bashed-in automaton the Russians were about to melt down for scrap? You are going to risk this airship and the lives of your crew chasing the mumblings of an ancient robot and the insane prisoner who led it here?”

  Buckle said nothing. He thought of Shadrack, who had vanished after the group charged to the rescue of Penny Dreadful. It irked Buckle to have lost the old man; he had so many questions for him. Buckle looked at Penny Dreadful, who returned his gaze with her shimmering eyes. Howard Hampton looked uncomfortable, not wanting to be trapped in a small room with an angry ambassador and a defiant captain.

  “It is your duty to return home,” Washington pressed. “You can no longer afford to jump every time some rusty bucket of bolts starts yammering about your poor, dear sister.”

  Buckle locked eyes with Washington. “My sister is important, but I shall bring Atlantis into the Grand Alliance.”

  “Do not lie to me, Romulus,” Washington whispered, almost sadly. “I have known Balthazar all of his life and I love his children, you and Elizabeth included, as a blooded uncle might. And you know this. But Elizabeth is dead, Romulus. The Founders killed her at Tehachapi. Whispers and rumors will never bring her back, and if you chase her ghost in the night now, you will achieve nothing but your own death and the death of every crew member aboard the Pneumatic Zeppelin.”

  Buckle was at the battle station in his brain, a place where all bomb blasts and insults passed by him like water in a river, clear and unscathing. He looked into the passageway, where the stained wood planks gleamed with the bioluminescent green glow of the boil lamp overhead. Normally, he would have agreed with Washington and returned to a safe Crankshaft harbor. But Lady Andromeda’s words from the night before never left him; they haunted him. You must find a way to rescue Elizabeth. Elizabeth is the key to winning this war, the key to all of our futures. She must be rescued at all costs. Never in a thousand years would Buckle have thought that he would trust a foreign clan member so utterly as he trusted Andromeda. For an instant, he tried to doubt himself and his belief in her words, but his forced uncertainty did not stick, passing in a heartbeat.