Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (20 page)

Max peered at the numbers, but she could not see them well—they were blurred, distant, out of focus. Yet they drew her in, endless strings of questions ending in infinity symbols or furious slashes of charcoal. Everything, every number, was a quest to solve the immortality equation.

Furious charcoal scratches.

The immortality equation was a chimera, a dead end, an unsolvable wish.

Who were you? Who was the mathematician who locked himself or herself on a mountain for what must have been
months, perhaps years, to struggle with a mystery he must have known he could not solve?

And yet, there was something there, something hiding under the streams of numbers that Max could sense but could not grasp, something that
did
suggest an answer. It was seductive, inviting obsession.

Immortality.

The bubbling grew louder.

A sharp metal
clang
echoed somewhere. Someone in the infirmary had dropped a bedpan, and it rang a wallowing note as it wobbled on the floor. The stink of disinfectant wafted past.

The numbers started moving, skimming slowly around the walls, positioning and repositioning themselves in never-ending columns, pausing at times, but never locking down.

Max stepped forward, lifting the lantern closer to the wall. Something bumped against the toe of her boot.

Max looked down. A small metal pot sat on the floor, shoved into the middle of a roaring campfire. The pot was full of boiling water, the surge of bubbles rising so violently that they rattled against the iron. A knife rested in the pot, the blade gleaming in the superheated roil.

The water was red. The pot was not full of water. It was full of blood.

Not matter how she tried, Max could not stop moving forward. Her boot struck the pot again, and this time it tumbled over. The blood spilled into the fire, sizzling, flashing, burning. Boiling blood flooded across the frozen floor, melting jagged channels in the ice as it coursed across it.

The floor was awash in blood. Her boots were sloshing in it.

Far away but coming closer, the sabertooths were roaring.

OLD FRIENDS

M
ARTIANS LOOKED IMPLACABLE WHEN THEY
slept, perhaps due to the expansive sweep of the white eyelids over the large eyes, Buckle thought. He sat alongside Max in the
Arabella
’s sick bay, his arms crossed on the back of the chair, his chin tucked on his left forearm, where the sleeve smelled of the rum he had just spilled across it. He felt the urge to close his eyes, to rest, but he did not shut them.

Max was far, far away. She lay buried under the launch’s rough wool blankets, her breathing deep and slow under the morphine drowse. Her skin had lost a fraction of its paleness; her parted lips provided a glimpse of a reassuringly pink tongue nestled behind.

The stillness of the cabin, with the buglight motionless on its hook, encased Buckle in its warm cocoon, and he allowed himself to be lost in it. His body ached, he realized—the muscles racked by effort against ice and beastie, the ribs bruised, the back of his neck a blood-encrusted, stinging mess. He had been leading the
Arabella
’s repair teams for hours, as the crew stitched holes and hammered props up against deformed girders. But the noise of battle fell away from him now; there was only a zeppelineer’s quiet in his ears, the cruising-airship lullaby of throbbing propellers, coursing wind, and creaking decking, matched by the low, soft beat of his heart.

Buckle was, for a moment, cloistered in ease, a man leading a different kind of life.

The man on the upper bunk moaned, and Buckle glanced up. It was Cornelius Valentine, the boilerman, heavily sedated, his right leg splinted and wrapped. Valentine was an old salt of the saltiest variety, older than much of the crew at the age of thirty-one, and a bit of a brawler and a barracks-room lawyer. Valentine had always been standoffish, always instinctively suspicious of officers. Buckle did not know him particularly well. The surgeons would most likely have to amputate the mangled leg, and Valentine was the kind of man whose life
was
his zeppelin—it would ruin him to be retired from the air corps.

The sick bay door sounded with a gentle rap, followed by the squeak of hinges. Sabrina slipped in, easing the hatch shut behind her.

“How is she, Romulus?” Sabrina asked.

“Reported to be resting well,” Buckle whispered. “Nightingale says she is holding her own, despite the terrific bloodletting.”

Sabrina gazed at Max. “Aye,” she said under her breath. “Sabertooths—now there’s a nasty beastie to meet up with in the dark.”

Max was still secured in her bunk—it was a necessary precaution in winter weather, but the leather straps suddenly bothered Buckle. He considered removing them, but thought better of it. “How are things on deck?” he asked.

“We are running at five hundred,” Sabrina answered. “Heading southeast as the crow flies. The damaged stern girder sections are jacketed, propped, and holding. Patches to skin and bags are holding.”

“Very good,” Buckle replied. His voice sounded distant to him, as if somebody else had spoken.

“Considering we just had tea with a Bloodfreezer and a kraken, I would say the launch got off lightly.”

“Casualties?”

“Four lost—all missing,” Sabrina said softly. “Martin Robinson, signalman; Hector Hudson, skinner; Carmen Steinway, skinner; and Henry Stuart, mechanic. Leaves us with eighteen souls aboard.”

Buckle nodded. He had not seen what happened to Stuart. Good people. He knew the names. He knew them all. Zeppelineering was not for the faint of heart.

“Aye,” Sabrina whispered, then carried on. “Injuries are a range of scrapes and bruises. The worst are Valentine, with his leg, and Faraday—a badly twisted left arm, though not broken. He lambasted Nightingale when she tried to sling it. Refuses to leave his post either way.”

Buckle turned back to Max, resting his chin on his forearms again. He heard the fabric on Sabrina’s arms rustle, felt her hands touch the collar of his shirt and pull the blood-crusted linen back.

“Oh, Romulus…” Sabrina sighed, both sympathetic and annoyed. “Why didn’t you have Nightingale take care of this?”

“Forgot about it, really,” Buckle said.

“Bollocks,” Sabrina grunted through pursed lips. She turned to the washing basin and poured water into it from the decanter. Buckle heard the soft wind of a gauze roll unwrapped, the gravelly squeak of an iodine bottle unscrewed. “A kraken sucker latches on to the back of your neck, tears away a pancake of your hide, and it doesn’t hurt like the blue blazes?” she huffed.

Buckle actually
had
forgotten about the wound, or at least, he had decided to ignore it. But
now
it hurt, hurt like hell, hurt like double hell. And Sabrina was about to dump iodine all over it.

Sabrina tugged the back of his shirt collar. “Unbutton the top of your shirt,” she said. Buckle unbuttoned. She tugged again. He heard her huff again. “Sit up straight and put down your arms, will you?”

“Look, Sabrina—”

“Either lower your arms or I’ll cut the shirt off you, Captain,” Sabrina said.

Buckle sat up straight. Sabrina drew the loose collar back and dabbed the wad of wet gauze around the wound.

“The blood is frozen and dried,” Sabrina said. “I lack nurse Nightingale’s tenderness, but you’ll get what you get.”

Buckle winced as Sabrina wiped harder, the gauze feeling like sandpaper. He heard the clink of the iodine bottle and the gurgle of the liquid as she upended it against a bandage. His nostrils caught the brassy bite of the iodine.

“Here we go,” Sabrina said. “Don’t make a fuss.”

Sabrina planted the iodine-soaked bandage on the wound. It felt as if it was covered in burning oil. Buckle refused to tighten up, refused to wince or shrug, but he did smile, it stung so badly.

“Mercy me, that has got to hurt,” Sabrina mused. “This is one pretty rip. And a perfect circle, mind you.”

“If I did not know you better, my dear erstwhile navigator,” Buckle said, “I might suspect that you are somewhat enjoying my discomfort.”

“Hold still, sir, please,” Sabrina said as she scissored tape and secured the bandage into place.

“Of course, Doctor,” Buckle said.

“I would like to say, sir, thank you for saving my skin out there on the roof today. I was certain I would be going over the side with the kraken.”

“Mister Darcy informed me that you were the one who cut me down from the tentacle gallows I was in, so I would say were are quite even—in saving one another’s skins, that is.”

“Perhaps,” Sabrina said.

Sabrina tucked Buckle’s collar up over the bandage. He heard the deck board creak as she stepped back. “You should let Surgeon Fogg look at that when we get home. Either way, it is going to be one odd, round scar.”

Buckle stood up, turning to face Sabrina in the cramped space of the cabin. “Thank you,” Buckle said, buttoning up the top of his shirt. “I appreciate your concern, Doctor Serafim.”

Sabrina nodded with a little smile. It was difficult to tell under her red ringlets, but Buckle thought her cheeks had taken on a hint of a blush. She had looked good up on the roof, swinging the axe and pistol, her fiery red hair loose around her pith helmet and goggles. “You should really just throw that shirt away,” Sabrina whispered. “It being ruined with blood and kraken offal and whatnot.”

“That I shall do.”

“I have been told that there is a new bottle of Irish Standard’s left alone in the captain’s cabin, sir,” Sabrina noted with a wry smile.

“And who told you that, Lieutenant?”

“Why, a little bird, Captain,” Sabrina replied, grinning, her green eyes bluish in the yellow lantern light, and sparkling.

NEW FRIENDS

B
LISTERS WERE RISING ON
B
UCKLE
’
S
hands, the result of frantically wielding an axe into ice and kraken for nearly an hour. He peered at the raised red-and-white bubbles on his palms and fingers as he strode along the main passageway of the
Arabella
, scrutinizing the painful marks with the stoicism of a man who had just escaped death and now felt vaguely surprised at having suffered a hurt so small.

Ducking under a buglight on a thick wooden peg, Buckle shoved open the captain’s door and stepped into a cabin barely a hair greater in length and width than the mole’s den of a sick bay he had just left behind. There was just enough room for a bunk, a logbook desk, and a small table and chair. A fat, green glass bottle with the red-and-black label of Standard’s Irish Rum rested on the table, along with half a dozen glass tumblers. The crew had already received a double ration of rum after the kraken fight, drained from Orkney barrels neat, not watered down, as usual.

The cabin smelled of lacquer—something had been recently varnished, and the gleaming logbook desk was the culprit. Buckle took hold of the desk, scraping its feet across the wood planking and using it to prop the door open to let the chamber air out. He collected the rum bottle and laid out the six glass
tumblers in a line, then twisted the cork. The blisters on his fingers stung. His neck burned. His forearm ached. The three-week-old steampiper sword cut on his forearm still grumbled with pain. Blue blazes, he was well thumped. The cork, squeaking in the neck of the bottle, popped free.

The ponderous, sugary fragrance of the rum birthed a memory, a terrible memory descending from nowhere, unannounced, and he was unprepared for it. He saw his best friend, Sebastian Mitty, looking at him from the burning deck of the
Zanzibar
, the armed trader’s decks collapsing, the hydrogen cells about to explode—a dead man looking out at him from the soft-edged realm of memory.

Buckle shoved the vision away. He did not wish to see the
Zanzibar
incinerate again, as she had done only once in the world, but a thousand times in his mind thereafter. The Imperial raid had been successful. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
had been taken as a Crankshaft prize—as Buckle’s prize. And Sebastian Mitty had lost his life. Such had been the deal that Lady Fortune cut. Such had been the price.