Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (30 page)

WHO SAVES OLD SHADRACK?

O
VERHEATED AND SURROUNDED BY THE
glow of fire-lit copper, Buckle stepped through a smoke-wreathed opening in the split and blistered bars of the ammunition cache and drew his sword. “Give me a long fuse, Corporal,” he said. “On the quick!”

Druxbury dug his hand into a side pocket of the sticky-bomb satchel and produced a braided hemp fuse about two feet long. “Five minutes is the best I have, sir.”

“Very good,” Buckle said.

Sabrina hurried in, dodging the warped metal and rivers of fire. “Romulus! We are going!”

“Just one more second,” Buckle replied, cutting a hole in a barrel with his sword. A steady stream of blackbang powder drained from the gash until Buckle jammed one end of the fuse into it, sinking it as deep as he could.

“Balthazar has been injured,” Sabrina said.

Buckle glanced at Sabrina, and she nodded at him, ever so slightly. Balthazar’s convulsions had appeared at a bad time. “Is it severe?”

“No. I took care of him. The soldiers have him now.”

Buckle cursed under his breath, picked up a burning wood splinter, and set it to the end of the fuse, which instantly caught
in a flash, the flame slowly working its way back toward the barrel.

“Now it is really time to go,” Buckle said, slapping Druxbury on the shoulder as they turned and ran.

They charged out into the wafting murk of the corridor to find the Ballblasters and Pluteus near at hand. “About time! Stay with us, boy!” Pluteus growled.

“I left a gift for the Founders,” Buckle announced, searching for Balthazar and finding him, open-eyed and coherent, but leaning heavily on two Ballblasters.

Pluteus immediately understood. “How long is the fuse?”

“About four minutes, now.”

“Then we had better get moving,” Pluteus said. “Sergeant Scully! One volley to cool their heels and then double-quick to the front doors.”

“Aye, General!” Scully replied. “Company, load!”

“You! You!” The shaking, disembodied voice of old Shadrack pierced the dark haze on Buckle’s left. “I ask you: who saves old Shadrack?”

Buckle and Sabrina peered at the wild-haired old man rattling the window bars of his cell, his eyes bugging, somehow even wider than before.

“You there! Ho, angel!” Shadrack screamed, spittle flying. “You have come back for me! I know you have come back for me!”

“Company draw ramrods!” Scully ordered. “Ram!”

Buckle took an unconscious step toward old Shadrack, staring at him as he would a crazed animal in a cage.

“Romulus—be careful,” Sabrina said.

Shadrack thrust his arms through the window bars, wringing his skeletal hands. “Do not abandon me! I know! I know
where the Moonchild hides! I know! Why? Because I am kindred. I, too, have kissed the iron teat, shot through and addled in the brainpan! I can save the Moonchild! But who saves old Shadrack? You! You! You!”

“Company present!” Scully ordered. “Fire!”

The Ballblasters released a musket volley into the void of smoke.

“Fall back! On the double! Go!” Pluteus shouted.

The Ballblasters and Alchemist troopers backed up around Buckle, then turned to jog toward the entrance ramp.

“Romulus! Come on!” Sabrina shouted.

Buckle tossed the master of the watch’s key ring to Shadrack. It was an impulse, but for the most part, Buckle didn’t want to be responsible for killing the harmless old jabberwock in the impending munitions blast he had devised.

Sabrina grabbed Buckle by the arm and pulled him away. “What is wrong with you? Do you want to stay here? Let’s go!”

The last Buckle saw of Shadrack, before he vanished in the smoky haze, was his toothless grin as he shook the bloodstained key ring in front of his eyes.

“Who saves old Shadrack?” Shadrack howled ecstatically.

THE WATCHTOWER

M
AX STARED INTO THE MUDDLED
gray fog. Through her aqueous-humor-filled goggles, her oxygen-mask goggles, and the nose-dome glass, there was enough condensation and fluid distortion to trick and confound even her sharp eyes.

There was nothing to see. Not yet, anyway. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was crawling slowly through the dense miasma, her navigators maintaining course by employing compass, gyroscope, and the art of mathematics. They were on a slow ascent, aiming to breach the surface of the fog bank before they arrived at the walls of the city. A clear view was necessary, for the rescue expedition would be sending up flares and messenger pigeons—and both would be impossible to locate if the airship was locked in the murk.

Max’s ears, sealed inside the helmet with her, were full of the sounds of her own breathing and the
whoosh-puff
of the airship’s oxygen-pumping system. She could hear the ship’s company, too, on the chattertubes, exchanging information on altitude, bearings, and engine status. The farther away in the zeppelin the voices were, the tinnier and more indistinguishable they became.

The large bridge gyroscope, mounted in its wooden frame and agleam with bioluminescent boil—as were the sea of
glass-encased instruments surrounding Max—reassured her that the airship was riding perfectly on her keel. De Quincey and Dunn nudged their control wheels back and forth, their eyes on their compasses, pointers, and the bubbles in their inclinometer tubes. Welly and Banerji were hunched over the navigation stations in the nose, pencils scribbling, clutching pocket watches, counting foot and yard through calculations of airspeed and time.

Max made her own calculations in her head—Martians were excellent at math—factoring in the compass heading on the binnacle and the hummingbird’s touch of drift she could feel in the decking. The survival of the rescue team and of her adoptive father, Balthazar, depended upon the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
arriving exactly at the pickup point, exactly on time—despite flying blind.

Max noticed that her compass needle had hitched over one point to starboard. She opened her mouth to speak.

“Drift correction, helm,” Welly’s voice rattled down the chattertube line and into her helmet. “One degree to port, if you please, Mister De Quincey.”

“One degree to port, aye,” De Quincey replied.

Max folded her arms across her chest, satisfied with the work of her crew. They were a competent bunch, if a bit too rowdy, and they would likely accomplish their mission, plopping the duck in the bucket, without her needing to speak a word.

Max was nervous, but her hands had stopped shaking.

As Max stared into the empty gray void, she became aware of a thought, a question, lurking under her calculations. She wondered if this was what her brother, Tyro, saw—a passing nothingness, always. Wounded in the Imperial Raid nearly a year before, Tyro had since been trapped in a coma, his breathing
sustained by an iron lung. Max felt stricken and lonely without him. She knew little of the peculiarities her Martian blood was supposed to impart to her, but she did know that she and Tyro could share thoughts, even when physically separated.

But since Tyro’s injury, Max could no longer reach him. She would sit beside his bed for hours, waiting, but no communication ever came. She knew he dreamt, however, and what elements of it she could make out appeared to her as a drifting nothingness, much like the fog around her now.

And if Tyro dreamt, no matter the context, his brain was still alive.

The numbers still clicking in her head, Max eyed her compass. “Five minutes to the evacuation point, Mister Bratt.”

“Five minutes, aye,” Welly affirmed.

“Object low off the starboard bow!” Banerji shouted, the startle in his voice plain in the chattertube line. “Two o’clock low!”

Max leapt forward to the nose dome—taking care not to foul her oxygen and chattertube lines—and peered along Banerji’s arm as he pointed into the fog.

A large cylindrical object was slowly emerging from the mist; it was stationary, coming on only at the snail’s pace speed of the zeppelin, and fortunately low enough to pose no threat of collision.

“It is a structure of some kind,” Banerji said.

Welly’s voice burst into the line, fraught with concern. “It looks like—it is a watchtower, Lieutenant!”

“We shall be seen!” Banerji moaned.

“Silence!” Max said. The stone turret was most certainly a watchtower, part of the city battlements that could be glimpsed farther below, but it was long abandoned, streaming with white
and green seabird guano, and near ready to collapse. “The tower is unmanned.”

Max saw the tension ease in Welly and Banerji’s backs as the watchtower slowly slid away beneath them. She looked into the tall, open windows of the watchtower and saw a large, ribbed glass lens hanging at an angle in the shadows; the tower had served as a lighthouse once, before the Founders had cut themselves off from the outside world.

And now the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, having just passed over the outer wall of the City of the Founders, was coming to call.

Max shrugged her shoulders, loosening them up under the thick rubber skirt of her helmet. Her belt was heavy with two pistols and her sword attached, the weight of it riding on the tops of her hips. She wanted to be down below with Buckle and Sabrina and Pluteus, on the run, locking swords with the enemy.

She desperately wanted to be in the bloody fray.

But such was not her duty today.

“City of the Founders below,” Max said.

CUCUMBER PIE

B
UCKLE AND
S
ABRINA RACED UP
the entrance ramp and into the prison anteroom. The air was clearer here, making it easier to breathe. The puttering gray light of the early evening filtered in around the hinges of the huge double doors, mixing with the cold blues of the gas lamps to make the chamber seem lighter than it actually was. Pluteus stood before the doors, jamming pistols into his belt.

The Ballblasters and Alchemist troopers smoothly reloaded their muskets and pistols. They were all coated in sweat and black powder, and the whites of their eyes stood out against their faces. Scorpius had transferred the still-unconscious Andromeda into Kepler’s burly arms. Wolfgang lingered at Kepler’s elbow, gently wiping blood away from Andromeda’s face. Smelt hovered at the edge of the group, reloading his pistol as he peered at it through his monocle.

Buckle’s stomach twisted when he saw Balthazar, his face pale, the lips and eyes an unhealthy purple, his hair cast about his face, propped up by the two Ballblasters supporting him under each arm.

“Last again, Buckle?” Balthazar said weakly, but forcing a grin. “This is getting to be a dangerous habit.”

“Such are many of his habits, father,” Sabrina whispered, stopping to place her hand gently on Balthazar’s chest. Her face was flushed, as it always was when she was in action, the blood rising close to the surface of her cheeks, lending a brightness to her countenance that not even the layer of gray dust could much dampen, and it made Balthazar’s face seem even more sickly by comparison.

Buckle strode immediately to Pluteus, who was in a hasty, low conference with Sergeant Scully.

“We suffered three dead down below, General,” Scully whispered. “Two of ours and one Alchemist trooper. We have seven walking wounded and two supported, including the admiral, sir.”

Pluteus nodded. Sabrina and Scorpius stepped alongside Buckle.

Corporal Druxbury emerged from the crowd. “Loaded and ready, General.”

“Good,” Pluteus said. He turned and looked at Broussard, a Ballblaster who had his ear pressed to the door.

“It is very quiet outside, sir,” Broussard said to Pluteus. “Quiet as a mouse with a loaded cannon, sir.”

“It could be a trap,” Pluteus replied, shrugging as he hefted his musket. “Either way, we charge straight into it.”

A musket ball ripped up the ramp and hit the metal sheathing high on one of the front doors, pinging away and smacking into a granite pillar.

“Time to go!” Pluteus shouted. “Navigator, stay behind me until we re-form up top.”

Sabrina stepped behind Pluteus and Scully, their considerable bulk making her look very small in comparison.

As Buckle moved to join the group, he saw the body of the master of the watch lying on the floor stones just to the right of the doorway. She had been dragged to the side like a sack of dirt, her arms still extended over her head, the hole Buckle’s pistol ball had made in the center of her tunic ringed with a black gunpowder burn from the point-blank shot. He averted his eyes and then forced them back upon her. Look at her, soldier, he told himself. Do not dare try to save yourself the pain of your own handiwork.