Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (4 page)

A sudden shadow transformed into Pinter’s horse, exploding out of the storm into Buckle’s view, wild-eyed, teeth bared in terror, mouth slathered with foam gobbets, still carrying its
headless rider. Buckle jumped aside, half-frozen finger still on his pistol’s trigger, as the animal thundered past, its dead passenger flopping in the saddle, his fire horn still agleam. The mount and its ghastly rider disappeared into the murk again—one heartbeat after they had appeared—but a moment later, the horse screamed, a guttering shriek of agony, followed by a heavy thump that vibrated the earth, followed by the thrashing of legs.

The invisible sabertooths, perhaps a dozen of them, roared.

Silence followed, the deafening silence of the blizzard. Waves of snow, whipped into madness by the wind, flooded sideways, then shot straight up, blotting out the world three feet in front of Buckle’s nose.

He was blind and deaf in a tiger cage.

Buckle could see them in his mind, though, the sabertooths, the green-eyed beasties slouched low, weaving back and forth as they returned to circle him, their long canines dripping with the blood of Pinter’s horse. Buckle backed up against Cronos’s muscled flank, and the horse stood still. His only hope was to run; cut the reins, climb on, and hold on for dear life—and even then, he figured his chances stunk.

Cronos shrieked. Another sabertooth was coming. Buckle felt the shake of the frozen earth under his boots as the heavy, agile claws of the beast bore down. But from which direction, it was impossible to tell. Cronos swung, stamping, to the left, his eyes locked in the opposite direction. Buckle flung out his pistol, aiming where the horse sensed the danger was.

Before Buckle sucked in another breath, the sabertooth was on them: launching airborne from the storm, its green eyes afire, terrible claws extended, the mouth wide open in rows of
bone-yellow, dagger-bladed teeth streaming with saliva, sailing over Buckle’s head.

The beastie was going for the horse.

Buckle fired the pistol up into the sabertooth’s throat; steaming blue blood spewed as the creature instantly went slack, its limp body sailing away in the waves of snow, landing in a skidding crash at some point beyond.

Buckle cast the empty pistol aside and frantically dug inside his coat for the second. Sabertooths attacked in packs, like wolves. He was surprised another one had not hit them yet. Cronos—now bucking and shrieking—bumped into Buckle, nearly knocking him off his feet.

And then it was there. This sabertooth was bigger than the first, surging out of the snowstorm, a locomotive of flesh and fangs, the horrible mouth flung open. Buckle, aiming the wrong way and off balance, could do nothing but accept his doom.

THE BLACK ANGEL COMES

A
MUSKET THUNDERED
. I
T SOUNDED
muted, far off, but inside the maelstrom of wind and snow, it had to be close at hand to be heard at all. The crack of the musket coincided with a brutal jerk of the sabertooth’s head to the right, a blow that split the massive skull open immediately behind the second eye and spun the beastie sideways in a burst of blood and brains. The creature was dead before it slammed into Buckle, but the weight of the blow knocked him down as if an oak tree had been felled across him.

For an instant, Buckle was smothered by beastie, the rolling weight upon his body threatening to crush his bones, his mouth and nose full of sabertooth fur, his nostrils thick with the pungent reek of carrion and the burned-hair stink of the alien mammal. Then the weight was gone.

The momentum of the dead sabertooth’s body sent it somersaulting over Buckle’s head, but he barely saw it go. He was flat on his back, his head spinning like the sky and the twirling torch descending within it, suffocating, his lungs abruptly clapped free of every molecule of air they had once contained.

Something materialized out of the blizzard above Buckle: the head of a black horse with frantic eyes, and above that, a black figure with fluttering, sweeping wings upon its shoulders.
A black angel. Buckle gurgled, trying to speak, trying to recover where his body was in relationship to his mind. His breath suddenly came to him in ravenous gasps, gasps painful due to the freezing air, an agony his oxygen-emptied lungs reveled in.

The air between Buckle and the black angel cleared, a momentary eddy in the gales, and he saw the figure above him, clad in a long, black bear-fur greatcoat and a swirling black cape with the breadth of wings. The figure cast a smoking musket aside. Buckle saw the long, graceful face, pale white adorned with ornate black stripes, a face dominated by a pair of goggles where the large black eyes within burned nebula orange.

What the devil? Max. It was Max. She had defied his orders to stay behind with the
Arabella
. She had defied his orders not to follow him on his fool’s errand up the mountain. And now Max had saved him. Saved him again. He was glad to see her. And angered by the risk she had taken.

“Captain! Get up! You must get up now if you can!” Max shouted. She had pulled her horse aside and, leaning in her saddle, was clawing at Cronos’s tethered reins, which she had yet to realize were hopelessly tangled.

Buckle rolled onto his side and then his stomach—spilling through a skeleton’s rib cage as he did so, scattering the bones—and jumped to his feet, still gripping his pistol, and collecting his fallen torch as it sputtered in the snow.

“Aye! I am up!” Buckle shouted back. He tossed the torch to Max and quickly drew his saber as he advanced on Cronos. “He is caught! I will cut it!”

“Hurry, Captain!”

Buckle took a firm grip on the reins. The horse would bolt once it realized it was free. “You came alone?”

“Aye!”

“You are mad in the head!” Buckle shouted as he lifted his sword.

“That makes us a pair, then, sir!” Max replied, drawing a pistol.

The horses screamed. Max swung her pistol, but she never got the barrel around in time.

The first sabertooth tackled the head of Max’s horse, wrapping its front paws around its neck, the claws sending out spurts of blood as the huge jaws clamped down on the poor creature’s skull. The second sabertooth arrived a fraction of a second after the first, landing on Max’s back before her dead horse had time to drop.

THE BLACK ANGEL FALLS

M
AX WENT DOWN IN A
tangled mess of beasties, horse, and thrashing snow.

Buckle lunged forward. “Max!” he screamed. She lay facedown, her right leg pinned under the quivering mass of her dead horse, the gigantic sabertooth still upon her, its four green eyes afire, its claws punched into her back, its massive canines sunk into the cloak and greatcoat on her left shoulder. The beastie opened its mouth with a jerk, yanking free its incisors awash in Max’s bright-red blood, and cocked its muscle-bound shoulders to land another bite—a killing bite—on Max’s exposed white-and-black striped neck.

Buckle sprang forward, planted the muzzle of his pistol squarely behind the beastie’s second eye, and pulled the trigger. The weapon burped in the storm current, its flash and black discharge instantly sucked way. The sabertooth thrust its head straight up with a smoking hole in its skull; it collapsed, stone dead.

Buckle dropped the spent pistol, snatching the last one from his belt as he strode up to the other sabertooth. It was crouched low, its fangs deep in the deceased horse’s skull; its four green, split-pupilled eyes flashed as it snarled, a throaty, almost musical utterance, clamping its teeth tighter with a splitting crunch.
Aiming into the forebrain, Buckle fired, killing the beastie almost instantly—the sabertooth shuddered in its death throes, its fangs never releasing the horse’s head.

Buckle jammed his last firearm in his belt as he leapt over the near-doused torch in the snow, scrambling to Max. She lay motionless on her stomach, twisted forward at the waist with her lower half still in the saddle, the mass of the horse across her right leg and the dead sabertooth slumped over her torso. When Buckle shoved the heavy bulk of the sabertooth’s body away from Max, he discovered that the animal’s claws were still buried in her back. He gripped the massive forepaw—with all the care he could, but the hooks were sunk deep—and drew each blood-soaked claw out of its fleshy bed beneath the heavy bearskin coat.

“Max!” Buckle shouted, tearing the ripped cloak away from her body. “Max! Can you hear me?”

Max raised her right hand but it dropped instantly, as if it had taken all her remaining strength just to lift it. Buckle felt both a great pang of relief and one of fright. Max was still alive, which was a miracle; by all rights, the sabertooth’s pounce should have broken her spine. But he was shocked by how terribly injured she was. He scrambled around the horse, gently rolled Max more onto her side, and leaned close to Max’s goggles, brushing back a sweep of black hair that had fallen across her face from beneath her pilot helmet.

“Max!” Buckle shouted again. “Stay still—you hear me?”

“Captain. Go,” Max said with a faltering voice. “Leave me.”

“To hell with that suggestion, Chief Engineer!” Buckle replied. He started badger-digging at the snow packed around Max’s thigh, where it lay pinned under the saddle. More sabertooths roared in the wreathing vapors of the blizzard. Cronos
whinnied nearby, less a frantic plea now than a sound of foreboding, as if he had become resigned to his fate, tied to his own butcher block as he was.

Buckle’s spine tingled as he clawed at the snow. The beasties, pack hunters, were closing in again. His back was utterly exposed. But surely the blood stink of the corpses of the dead beasties gave them pause. Of course. It must. To hell with them. Buckle continued digging.

“Captain,” Max gasped.

“If you are trying to talk me into leaving you, I would suggest you save your breath,” Buckle said. He scrabbled on his knees around to Max’s head, shifted her onto her back, and placed his hands under her armpits. “I am going to pull you out.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Buckle eased Max back with half of his strength, hoping that her leg might easily slide free. It did not. Buckle hauled with more desperate force, near lifting Max’s body out of the snow. Max’s shoulders stiffened, but she made no sound. Martians rarely expressed pain, but her eyes betrayed her: inside the aqueous humor of her goggles, they glittered a swimming gold, the Martian color of agony.

“Damn it!” Buckle screamed. But he had to get her loose.

Swinging his body around to cradle Max’s head in his lap, Buckle planted his boots on the withers and croup of the dead horse, bent at the knees, and clamped his hands under Max’s armpits with a grim pressure.

“Out you go!” Buckle shouted. He yanked on Max with every ounce of strength he had. Max threw her head back, her face upside-down just below Buckle’s. Her exposed white-and-black-striped throat quivered; her white teeth were clenched,
the lips drawn back and rigid, stained by a stream of blood running from her left nostril. Her goggles, kept free of ice by the warm aqueous humor within, were covered in a smattering of melting snowflakes, each fantastic, crystalline pattern illuminated by the swirling, golden light from below.

Buckle pulled harder.

The leg suddenly jerked free, sliding out from beneath the horseflesh as smoothly as a sword from its scabbard. Buckle fell backward, still cradling Max’s head in his lap, and as they landed, he heard her grunt and lie still.

“We’ve got it!” Buckle yelled. “You are out, Max!”

Buckle gently laid Max’s head on the snow as he scrambled to his feet. She lay still, her goggles fading to darkness, into some chasm of shock. He saw that his left glove was soaked with warm, steaming blood, bright-crimson Martian blood, absolutely dripping with it. He realized that his legs and the front of his coat were wet with blood, too.

Buckle lifted Max in his arms, leveraging the slender, light mass of her body over his left shoulder. He knelt to snatch up the torch and paused, just for an instant. The light of the flames, playing upon the depression in the snow where Max had been trapped beneath the horse, revealed a large, ever-spreading stain of blood.