Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (2 page)

Buckle had seen the Imperial iron crosses on the sky vessel’s flanks as she burned, but the Imperial chancellor, Katzenjammer Smelt, had sworn upon his life that his clan had not attacked the Crankshafts. Buckle did not trust Smelt, but he had to know for sure. And if the airship was not Imperial, to whom did it belong? Buckle’s first instinct was to suspect the Founders: it could only benefit them and their treacheries if they could sow the seeds of conflict between the clans they planned to invade and conquer. Someone was stoking the engines of war, Balthazar had said. If the airship proved to be a Founders craft, then Buckle knew where to begin his search for his sister, Elizabeth, if she was alive. She had disappeared during the Tehachapi Blitz, leaving not a trace, and everyone assumed that she had been incinerated in the bomb blast that had obliterated much of Balthazar’s house. But the word, whispered by the zookeeper Osprey Fowler and confirmed by Balthazar himself, was that Elizabeth was alive, and if alive, she had been taken by someone.

And Buckle would burn heaven and earth to rescue her.

With a jerk of his gallows-tree head, Cronos reached the crest of the trail. He turned in to a crevice in the wall, a gap barely as wide as man and horse, which quickly opened to an interior ravine where the sky crushed down upon a plunging, high-walled valley. Buckle pulled his parka hood back, the ice-rimed fur lining swamping his neck. The cold air bit his ears despite his pith helmet and its fur havelock flap, but it was very
still and it was bearable. Buckle yanked his goggles up over the front of the helmet and squinted. The weak sunlight reflecting off the snow packed an uncomfortable level of glare, but it was a small price to pay to be able to see properly. The sky was gray as old iron, rippled with clouds. Caves dotted the steep walls of the valley, their irregular mouths dark and menacing, half-hidden by dense clutches of fir and pine—the needles glittered with ice and danced with black-and-white chickadees that chirped as they knocked little avalanches of snow from the branches.

Cronos rocked up and down, humping through the deep snow, though his work was eased by following Pinter’s big brown horse as it broke the trail. Buckle coughed; a cloud of vapor burst in the air in front of his face and vanished.

Pinter jerked the reins of his horse and stopped, the bottoms of his stirrups leaving troughs in the deep snow, and turned in the saddle to peer at Buckle. “Best to be quiet as a mole up here, sky dog,” Pinter whispered through vocal cords roughened by cold and gin. “The sabertooths, they tend toward the night, but it would be prudent not to announce the servin’ up of horseflesh on their doorstep, if you catch my meaning, sir.” Pinter smiled, stretching his skin, leathery and large-pored, over a long, narrow jaw.

“Aye,” Buckle replied. The blanketing silence of the ravine muffled sound. His voice barely made it to his own ears. The landscape was oppressive. Not enough sky.

Pinter grinned, a sudden tightening of the muscles around his mouth, exposing two stumpy yellow teeth wobbling in purple gums. He drew two torches from his saddlebag. At his waist he carried a hollow bull’s horn that glowed a yellow-cream color with the fire carried within it, fed by slow-burning snake grass. Fire horns were vastly more reliable than a match or tinder
on the windswept mountain, a place where torches proved the best defense against the beasties that lurked there. Pinter had given a fire horn to Buckle, and he had laid its long leather strap across his shoulder so the horn was cradled at his waist.

“Just in case, just in case,” Pinter muttered as he pressed the mouth of the horn to each torch in turn, igniting the tar-soaked wrappings at their heads. “The beasties don’t like tar. They shy away from the flame and stink. So they tend not to swallow ye if yer holdin’ one.” The man laughed at his little joke, a rattling, bronchial chuckle.

“I know about sabertooths,” Buckle said, annoyed at the volume of Pinter’s noises. “Keep it down, will you, mate?”

Pinter’s laugh choked off and his eyes narrowed. He thrust one of the torches into Buckle’s hand before whirling his horse around in the snow.

“Then you know enough to keep movin’,” Pinter barked in a whisper. “Keep moving, eh?”

Cronos jerked forward, following Pinter’s lead without a need for spurring.

Buckle did not have any affinity for Pinter. No affinity at all. But the mountain man knew where the wreck of the mysterious airship was located—at least, he claimed he did.

And right now that had to be good enough for Romulus Buckle.

But he did not have to like it.

SHIPWRECK

T
HE SNOWDRIFTS IN THE RAVINE
shallowed, making the movement of the horses smoother, and within twenty minutes, Buckle and Pinter crested the northeast end of the ravine. Buckle found himself overlooking a wide, gentle slope leading down into a snowbound valley curving between two craggy peaks. Even if he was as odd as a square peg, Pinter proved, pointing his heavily gloved finger, that he was no liar. For there, nearly in the center of the valley floor, flattened except for one towering stretch of her starboard-side girders, lay the sprawling wreck of a gigantic airship that once had been nearly the size of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
herself.

“There she lies in her grave,” Pinter announced, lifting his canteen for a swig of something unlikely to be water. “Dead as dead as dead be—but the dead always be a mystery.”

Pinter offered his canteen, but Buckle shrugged it off. It took him a moment to find his voice in his tightened throat. “No thanks, Pinter,” Buckle rasped. “You are a poet as well as a scout, I see.”

“Sometimes I rhyme, perhaps. But only by a happy accident, sir—a strange tripping of the brainpan,” Pinter said as he screwed the cap back onto his canteen, thought better of it, unscrewed it, and fired back another swig. Buckle caught a sharp whiff of the gin.

Buckle heeled Cronos in the ribs, and the big horse accelerated into a gallop. It did not take much coaxing—the animal was happy to run: the open slope, where the wind had scoured away all but a small crust of snow, was a relief after the deep drifts of the ravine. Pinter released a sudden snort, as if he had been caught off guard by Buckle’s taking of the lead, and spurred his horse behind, awkwardly attempting to replace his canteen cap while balancing a burning torch and the musket across his saddle.

Buckle found himself grinning: it felt good to be aboard a horse at speed, even if he was somewhat uncertain of the huge animal, and the air was bracing and clear. Drifting snowflakes occasionally sparkled here and there, floating down from the sky, falling with such ease and curling gyre that they resembled snow fairies of lore, denizens of the mountain, wafting in to see what machinations consumed the mortal men below.

As he closed the distance to the shipwreck, Buckle’s heart began to pound. The enemy airship had come down brutally, out of control and apparently tail first—the port-side superstructure collapsing upon impact, splitting apart every hydrogen cell that had not already been afire, igniting the volatile gas, and gutting the machine in a final conflagration. Half of the iron superstructure, the starboard flank, still pointed at the sky; its black girders, curved like the ribs of an animal, were wrenched and scorched and painfully reaching for their port-side sisters, which now lay in jumbled, icebound heaps on the ground among the ruin. It was difficult to see the entire wreck as a whole now that Buckle was so close: the tail section had been blasted and flattened beyond recognition, and the crash had displaced the port side of her frame from nose to stern.

Buckle remembered the old zeppelineer’s “Tale of Woe.”

If down to twisted wreck

My wretched fate so be,

Bury not my bones

Nor weep nor moan

Nor tear thy hair to mourn me.

Rather set to bended knee

Gather up my scattered scree

Hammer and nail

To the Bosun’s rail,

And set my sail to eternity.

Buckle spurred Cronos to the left, circling the collapsed nose of the wreck to swing around on the starboard flank, where the fabric skin still clung in great swaths to the ribs. He wanted to find at least a shred of the clan emblem—the iron cross he had seen that terrible night of the raid. And he wanted to discover the airship’s name. Even if the arch board was gone, the name should be everywhere—engraved on the captain’s door, chiseled into the prows of the gondolas, inked in the logbook, and painted on the midshipmen’s plates and mugs. Still, it might be difficult. The gondolas were crushed under the girders, and nearly every inch of machine was charred black, but surely some evidence remained.

The air on the slope was crisp and unnaturally full of echoes. The sounds of Cronos’s hooves across the snow and the jangle of his tack seemed as loud as a charge of cavalry. Buckle could not escape the impression that he was circling the remains of a great monster, fallen facedown upon the earth, its innards incinerated and bones scorched in a death by fire, felled by a lightning bolt cast down from the heavens.

Buckle yanked back on the reins with a sudden jerk, and Cronos released an indignant whinny as he slid to a halt, working his bit. Towering over them, nine stories high, loomed the partially buckled midsection of the airship, where the skin still clung to the girders, ripped and burned but somehow largely intact, and there, black against the fire-seared, light-gray canvas, loomed the Imperial iron cross.

Exhilaration rose in Buckle: now he would prove Katzenjammer Smelt a liar. “Here!” he shouted back at Pinter as he slid out of the saddle, his feet landing hard on the snow. He wound Cronos’s reins around a twisted girder, securing the snorting horse.

“I’m on yer tail, boy!” Pinter called out as he galloped up. “But mind yerself! The ground is spoilt with cutting jags! And mind yer musket, there!”

Buckle heard the mountain man’s warning, but he did not heed it. He was already at full stride through the jumbles of twisted iron and frozen ropes and wires, each footfall disturbing the ground, each boot print revealing black-and-gray ashes beneath the white snow.

Buckle had his evidence. In his mind, he plotted his revenge. He would tear down the flimsy wall of canvas and cut a section of the iron cross free, roll the swath of fabric into a bole, and carry it home. Then he would unfurl it in front of Smelt for everyone to see in Pinyon Hall, in front of Balthazar, Horatio, and the ambassadors. It was damning evidence, unassailable proof that the Imperials had been the ones who had bombed Tehachapi and killed the innocents, killed his mother, Calypso, and either killed or kidnapped Elizabeth.

Buckle’s blood boiled. His ears burned despite the freezing air.

Buckle would demand that Smelt admit his guilt. He would demand that Smelt release Elizabeth from captivity in
some Imperial dungeon. And if Smelt refused, if he even hesitated one whit, Buckle would draw his sword and run the devil through. He would stand over Smelt as the man lay dying upon the skin of his own airship, his lifeblood seeping across the iron cross, and there he would promise the chancellor that his clan would be destroyed, his legacy ground to dust. When Smelt had choked out his last miserable breath, Buckle would ship him home on a tramp with a declaration of war pinned to his bloody shroud.

Buckle reached the base of the zeppelin’s starboard side and halted, looking up at the towering curve of the envelope’s flank. He clutched two handfuls of the loose canvas—it was stiff with ice, but its doping left it still pliable—and yanked downward with a furious twist of sinew and muscle, as if he were attempting to pull the sky itself down from the very heavens.

With a shuddering rip, high up on the curving girders, the whole of the skin fell in one massive wave. It came down hard and fast with the roar of snapping rope hooks, tearing fabric, and splitting ice. Buckle, hearing a muffled shout from Pinter and the startled shrieks of the horses, had to lunge backward, stumbling over broken wood and iron, lest he be buried alive under the avalanche of canvas.

The flank skin collapsed into a long pile at the base of the superstructure, sending up a wall of airborne snow and ashes that forced Buckle to duck and hold his breath. The wave of debris passed over him, and he lifted his head.

He gasped.

He blinked.

The envelope skin of the dead airship and its black iron cross had completely fallen away. But another skin remained, having been hidden beneath it.

And upon this age-yellowed, once-white skin towered a great silver phoenix.