Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (10 page)

“Aye!” Windermere replied, striding forward onto the bridge, barking orders.

“What about me horses?” Caruthers snapped. He was a skinny stableman with a light brown beard, who reeked of manure, horse sweat, and hay, and when his breath hit Sabrina, it was vastly more vile than all the other stinks put together. “You sky dogs paid for only one! Yer captain only rented my black, and if he dies I want satisfaction!”

“The captain’s horse,” Welly said. “The horse named Cronos that the captain was riding, it was badly clawed across the haunches. Caruthers says it is a sabertooth wound, says beastie wounds often get infected and the animal dies.”

Sabrina drew in another breath through her nose, the kind of inhalation that reached the bottom of the lungs and was not so cold as air drawn in through the mouth. But it was not the air that chilled her nerves. If Buckle had gotten into a scrap with some sabertooths and lost his horse in the melee, then he was lucky if he was not already eaten and digested by now.

“What does he mean, ‘horses’?” Sabrina asked. “The captain only took one.”

“Your weird-eyed Martian took me other, me good mare,” Caruthers chomped. “But I ne’er trust no zebe, so I made her pay full price for her, and good thing, considerin’ she’s already in a beastie gut!”

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

B
UCKLE 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

M
AX 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.