Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (11 page)

Buckle had a knife strapped against his boot, but in the instant he should have drawn it, he could not bring himself to do so.

Max lifted the wooden club, her sweat-slicked naked torso, swathed in loose bandages and blood, agleam in the firelight, her black hair swirling around her face where the black eyes now burned with surreal flashing prisms of colors, and poised her arm to strike.

“Max! It is Romulus!” Buckle shouted, raising his arms.

Max stiffened. The table leg dropped from her hand, hitting the stone floor with a dull
thunk
next to Buckle’s ear. She released a long, shuddering sigh and fell forward, collapsing atop him, her hair cascading across his face.

Buckle held still. Max’s heart hammered against his chest, surging through her cold skin, striving too frantically, too hard. He carefully pressed his arms around her, intending to gently roll her over onto her bedding again.

Max lifted her head above Buckle’s and looked into his eyes. For a long moment she stared at him, stared at him from very far away, the blacks of her irises streaming with purple flickers.

Max leaned forward and, closing her eyes, brought her trembling lips to his.

Buckle, his ears still ringing, realized that she was kissing him, her lips cold but velvet, and tasting slightly of blood, a soft, tender lover’s kiss.

Yet he responded, kissing her back, but what manner of moonlit mess was this? She was near dead, drained of blood, half mad and exhausted. And yet, as her kiss continued, her mouth moving on his, her body upon his, her weak heart suddenly pounding with a vitality he would have been certain was lost to her, he felt a deep-buried yearning rise in his soul.

Max was cooing in the way that contented Martians cooed. It was faint and small and deep in the recesses of her throat, but Buckle heard it.

Buckle needed to get her covered up again, back into bed—she was half frozen and so terribly wounded. Gently, oh so gently, he placed his fingers on Max’s cheeks and lifted her head. The cooing stopped. The kiss stopped. Max jerked her head up. Her dark eyes looked deep into Buckle’s, searching for something, groping blind, and then lost their coherence, the sparks vanishing away as if dropped into a bottomless well.

“Max…” Buckle whispered.

Max’s eyes closed. She uttered a sigh and went limp, her head dropping on Buckle’s shoulder, the length of her body quivering with a million tiny quakes. Buckle reached for the bearskin and pulled it on top of them, letting Max’s light body remain atop the length of him, her face mere inches away, the eyelids fluttering as the eyeballs beneath. She was dreaming, perhaps. Good. If she was dreaming, a morphine-fueled lotus sleep, then she was far away from the pain and the cold. He would get her good and warmed up by the time she awakened.
And she would wake up. Romulus Buckle had cheated death many times before, and, taking Max under his wing, he would do it again.

Buckle could smell Max, her breath, her skin, and it was a pleasant, sunburned meadow sort of smell, detectable under the sickly-sweet stink of sweat and coppery-scented blood.

It was so strange to be so close to her.

He pressed her to him, close, for a long time, and slipped into a mild drowse.

THE BLACK CARRIAGE

M
AX WAS RIDING IN A
carriage; the interior was all black, velvet and leather, and the window curtains were open, the world outside passing in the dark-gray-and-purple blur of night. She heard horses racing, the carriage team, iron shoes pounding the earth, noses snorting breath. She was wearing black, she knew, a heavily stitched gown, but all she could see of it were her tight-fitting sleeves of embroidered satin that covered all but the fingers of her hands, the seams lined with black pearls.

She was there but she was not there.

But she was not cold anymore. She was not in pain.

She did not feel anything.

Her perspective shifted, and she was outside of herself now, a spectator perched high up on a stone wall studded by burning torches, overlooking the peaks and valleys of a mountain range. Fifty feet below, a trail emerged from the dense pines, winding its way up the throat of the rocky valley. A black carriage appeared, rumbling and rattling, drawn by four horses with gleaming hides the color of midnight, eyes wide but calm, straining against their harnesses. A coachman sat atop the carriage, cracking his whip, completely obscured by a heavy black robe and hood despite the two lanterns jiggling on hooks on both sides of him.

The coachman pulled back on the reins, and the black carriage creaked to a stop directly below. The carriage door swung open. Max saw herself step out. She wore an ornate black dress, glittering with black pearls and obsidian that formed fantastic patterns along the entire length of the bodice and skirt. The collar of the gown framed her head in a tall sweep of fulsome black feathers, each three feet in height, as if the tail of a peacock sprouted from the back of her neck. Her hair was bound up atop her head in a beautiful contortion pierced with lancets and glittering with dark jewels.

The patterns on the dress shifted and started streaming, rotating, becoming row after row of numbers, endless variations of numbers.

The Max at the carriage paused to look at the fluctuating surface of her gown and then looked up at her.

Max was suddenly below again, looking up. The towering stone edifice in front of her, cut out of the face of the mountain, was a monumental riot of alien stonework, its pillars curving, its statues a menagerie of inhuman figures both beautiful and grotesque, adorned with symbols similar to those now alive on the sleeves of her dress.

And somewhere not too high up squatted the thing that was watching her; she only glimpsed movement, for the dark figure slipped back into the shadows of some impenetrable recess, as if a gargoyle had just slipped out of view.

The horses behind Max shifted and tossed their heads, impatiently stamping the frozen earth. The coachman sat silent and motionless, a corpse inside a black hood.

Max smelled burning wood, smoke mixed with blood. She knew she was dreaming. But she was aware of a thousand other dreamers inhabiting the ethereal landscape with her, whispering in the silence,
though their journeys did not seem to intersect with hers. She felt exiled, excluded—as if her half-Martian blood was enough to get her to the gates of heaven, but not enough to let her in. Was it no more than a dream? The light wind touching her face felt so real; the thick fabric of her long gown was abrasive, scratching her skin—a gown designed for the dead, not the living, with nerves that still felt such things.

She stepped forward, placing her black-sheathed shoe on the first of the wide, sweeping stairs that led up to the entrance of the towering alien cathedral. High above her, something big unfolded its wings, two sweeping white wings with gray-black stripes on the interiors, and leapt into the sky, swooping down toward her.

Max watched it.

The winged creature landed softly despite its weight, planting its black boots on the steps above Max. It was a full-blooded Martian male, like her but unlike her—it was of a different kind, a great, winged, long-headed species with almost translucent skin, its white flesh laced with the rampant coursing of blue veins beneath and only hints of gray stripes upon it. He wore ancient midnight-colored garments made of cloth and chain mail, draped loosely upon his frame.

The winged Martian folded his wings upon his back and gave Max a desultory look, a look made even more disdainful by the intensity of his large, brooding black eyes, which stood out under the high white forehead.

Max knew who he was. The Gravedigger.

The Gravedigger strode down the stairs to stop very close to her, ten inches taller than the crown of her head, his wings looming even higher. Max smelled him—it was an intense, unrecognizable scent that was still profoundly familiar.

“You do not belong here,” the Gravedigger said in the language of the Martians, a language Max’s father had taught her as a child. The creature’s voice was deep but thin, the voice of a great being worn tired. He raised his right hand, the long fingers splayed.

Max plunged into a void. Then the pain came, a deep, stabbing, unspeakable pain. But worse than the pain was the fear. She screamed as she had never screamed before.

But in her ears she heard only a tiny whisper.

THE IMMORTALITY EQUATION

I
T WAS STILL AND DARK
in the main cavern as Buckle stood over the place where he had bandaged Max the night before, looking at a large pool of brilliant red blood suspended in the clear ice at his feet. He massaged his brow—his brain still ached from the blow Max had landed on him. Lucky that table leg was rotted, or she might have cleaved his skull. Exhaustion blurred his eyes, and he rubbed his fingers against them, the rough, cold leather of his gloves biting the soft skin of the lids.

The cave was as hollow as a tomb, silent except for the sounds of dripping water at the mouth, where the stovepipe expelled its heat in small sizzles, the rock around it bare and trickling.

The storm had died away entirely, taking every trace of the wind with it. Outside, an ambient light leaked into the dark-blue sky, signaling the coming of the dawn. Buckle sniffed. The cave was rich with the fetid reek of sabertooth feces; the ice was scored by their pacing claws, and a frozen trail of green blood spilled in a series of tight circles in the middle of the floor. His torch lay in a corner, nearly snapped in half at the handle.

Buckle drew the flare gun and loaded a magnesium cartridge into the chamber, snapping it shut with a sharp
click
of metal.

Then he heard Max. He probably sensed her more than heard her, a scant whisper through her parched lips, but he
heard
her.

Romulus
was the word, more the sigh of a ghost than a human sound.

Buckle hurried back into the chamber of numbers, where the fire still burned in the potbellied stove, consuming the last orange embers of its fuel in a bed of white ash, pouring illumination into the room that seemed quite bright after the near darkness of the main cavern. The grating cast wavering shadows on the floor, warm shadows and light that played across the number-covered walls and the roof, and over Max’s white skin. The chamber seemed very small, and Max’s form very close, bundled on the floor where Buckle had lain with her in his arms all night. Her body had warmed enough to make him feel better, though it seemed that his body had exchanged its heat with hers, and now he felt cold and was glad for it. She was still, her heart and breathing regular, and seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. But now and again she tensed. The morphine must have been wearing off—but with Martians, you could never tell.

Buckle knelt beside Max, searching for a sign that she might be awake, that the sound he had heard had not been imagined. She looked small and fragile, her eyes closed, her black hair pillowed under her head, and though the fire and his body heat had warmed her, her black stripes remained a ghastly gray, her white skin featureless and slick as alabaster, her lips drained of color.

“Max?” Buckle breathed.

Max opened her eyes, blinking before she focused those deep, endless pools of violet blackness on him.

“Drink a little,” Buckle said, collecting the canteen, full of cool meltwater, and carefully raising Max’s head to bring the metal canister to her lips. She took a few swallows, forcing it down her throat with tortured gulps.

“Hello,” Buckle said, laying her head back on her fur, trying to be lighthearted, unable to suppress a grin. “Are you warm?”

Max nodded. “Romulus,” she whispered again.

Buckle placed his fingers on her cool lips. “No, just rest,” he said. “Unless you are in pain. Tell me if you are in pain.”

Max shook her head a little, and winced.

“Ah, do not move, girl,” Buckle said hastily. “I am going to give you some medicine.” He began unloading the syringe and morphine vials from the emergency pouch.

“I would prefer you hold back on the morphine, Captain,” Max breathed, soft but clear.