Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (5 page)

It was a horrific amount of blood for a lithe creature such as Max to lose. Her Martian heart, stout as it was, could barely still be beating.

Buckle ran.

WHITEOUT

B
UCKLE STUMBLED UP TO
C
RONOS
and lifted Max onto his back, ramming his boot into the stirrup and swinging up into the saddle behind her. Cronos threw his head back and forth, scuffing his hooves.

Buckle drew his sword, slashed through the stretch of the reins between Cronos and the girder, and kicked the horse in the ribs. “Hah! On, boy! On!” Cronos, his shivering muscles firing, charged into the blizzard. Buckle leaned forward, gripping Max, letting the horse run. They were on the upslope, as far as he could tell, but he had no sense of direction now—he could see nothing. His whipping torch did no more than illuminate a wavering waterfall of snow that he could not see through.

Buckle clung to Max, who slumped forward like a rag doll, with little tension in her form, her head lolling with the rock of the horse’s motion. Through the raging storm and the battering of the horse’s muscles, through the clutch of his fingers against the blood-smeared coat, he sought to feel a movement from Max, a twitch, a heartbeat, to reassure him that she was still alive—but he could feel nothing.

Confound the disobedient Martian! Buckle thought. She shall not trade her life for mine. She shall not.

Cronos slowed a bit, beginning to tire, but Buckle let the animal run on. Buckle wanted to return to the ravine and hole up in one of the caves for the night—if only the wind would let up a moment, give him a view of the landscape about, he could surely point his mount in the right direction. He hoped that the horse, experienced on the mountain as he was, would instinctively head home along the ravine, seeking his stable and its hanging bag of feed.

A whiteout blinded Buckle for an instant. The memory it triggered came on so hard and fast it startled him, leaping from the darkness and bursting in the forepart of his brain. He was a boy again, in his parents’ cabin on the mountain. He was terrified, perhaps no more than six years old, clutching a sword that was far too big for him. His mother had her arms clutched around him—and Elizabeth. His strongest impression was that of his mother’s heart, a youthful organ, drumming hard against his back.

The sabertooths were attacking. Outside in the night, they roared. A horrible screaming came from the horses in the stable. The two cabin windows, both made of heavy, translucent glass, had been broken in by the beasties, and shards were scattered across the floor rugs in glittering bits. Fangs and claws had torn at the window frames, green-eyed nightmares had peered in, but the heavy timber of the cabin had defeated them.

Buckle was crying. Elizabeth was crying, tears streaming slick and glistening down her round cheeks. Buckle wanted to be brave for her, but he could not muster it. Their mother had snatched them from their beds with a pistol in her hand, and now they huddled in a corner wearing their nightclothes. The fire was low in the hearth, scarlet and orange embers, and the air felt cold.

Buckle remembered watching his father, Alpheus, striding back and forth across the room. He looked very big. His hair was mussed. He gripped both a sword and a pistol, and had a belt strapped around his waist with two more pistols stuck into it. The sabertooths, clever creatures, were slashing at the heavy oak door; its iron hinges, screws popping, threatened to burst.

Wood scraped across the floor, bunching the fur rugs with it, as another man shoved his parents’ heavy oak bed toward the door. Alpheus was alongside the man immediately, throwing his weight into the push.

The other man? Buckle’s mind grasped at a vapor in a fog. He had not remembered the other man being there that night—a detail almost lost to his memory—but Buckle was certain the other man had been there. He could see him now, shoulder to shoulder with his father, a long musket strapped across his back and a pistol at his waist, gripping a burning torch that filled the cabin with smoke. The man was taller than Alpheus, and wiry thin, clad in his day clothes, with knee-high leather boots lined with leather straps and buckles.

A beastie slammed the door with enough force to shake the world. Glittering dust streamed from the rafters. The fire threw sparks up the chimney. Alpheus and the other man froze for an instant.

“The door shall not stand much longer,” Alpheus said. Buckle felt his mother stop sobbing and her spine stiffen. He clutched the handle of the cold sword his father had handed him, telling him to defend his mother and sister to the last, if it came to that, and that he was proud of him being so brave.

The other man clapped a reassuring hand on Alpheus’s shoulder. “It most absolutely shall hold, Alpheus,” he boomed. “I helped you build that door, and we built it to withstand
exactly this, and despite your incompetence as a carpenter, I build damned fine doors!”

Alpheus smiled grimly at the man who was his friend. “And yet you cannot brew a decent cup of tea.”

“No one has ever brewed a decent cup of tea. Vile stuff, it is,” the other man replied heartily.

The cabin shuddered again. A sabertooth clawed furiously at the door, the vibrations of the strokes sounding as if the oak were being carved away at a terrifying rate of speed. The man sprang to the front window, a small portal fixed about five feet to the left of the door, drew his pistol, and stuck his arm outside with it. The pistol boomed, followed by a shriek and a roar from the beastie. The scratching stopped. The man yanked his arm back an instant before sabertooth fangs crunched on the pane in a burst of splinters.

The man punched the beastie’s massive, splayed-nostril nose and it released, vanishing into the darkness beyond the window.

“Good way to lose an arm, Shadrack,” Alpheus observed dryly.

“Tut, tut. No bother,” Shadrack replied, turning to wink at Buckle. “I do have another one.” Shadrack had a narrow, gaunt, but kindly face, bordered by a shock of long, dark hair, and a thick beard framed with gray.

Shadrack. The name roiled around Buckle’s mind like a fox gone mad in a henhouse.

Shadrack! The same Shadrack whom he had seen locked in the prison of the City of the Founders, the skeletal madman, a moonchild who had beseeched him as a savior, with some crazy
hint of recognition. There was no doubt it was the same man—Buckle was certain of it. Oh, what tales the madman might tell!

Buckle gasped, sucking in a huge slap of freezing air loaded with snow, making him cough. His plunge into memory had only lasted a second, yet it seemed as if he had been away from Max and the run of the horse in the blizzard for an eternity.

Who saves old Shadrack?

Buckle clutched Max’s body closer to his chest. He was afraid that she might already be dead.

Something panicked the horse. Cronos neighed and bolted again, cutting left through the snowbound twilight. Buckle glimpsed the low shadow of a sabertooth loping alongside on the right, the glowing green of its eyes visible in the storm.

Cronos veered farther to the left. The roar of another sabertooth somewhere behind made him accelerate, foam spewing from his mouth, his head jerking from side to side as his eyes bugged in their sockets. Tree trunks exploded out of the murk, flying past on each side with high-pitched swishes.

“Easy, boy!” Buckle shouted. “Easy, lad!” But he knew his words could not crack the horse’s terror. He could do no more than stay in the saddle and hold on to Max and the fluttering torch, and hope beyond all hope that the sabertooths did not bring Cronos down.

The loaded musket still lay across the front of the saddle, but Buckle could not reach it, not while holding on to the torch and Max at the same time. One musket shot was not going to save them, anyway. The trees they passed were denser now, whizzing by on either side at breakneck speed, but Cronos somehow avoided them.

Cronos was charging as fast as he could when he ran off the edge of the cliff.

In an instant they were in midair.

Buckle found himself in free fall, out of the saddle, plummeting through swirling whiteness, his arms locked around Max, with the kicking horse descending alongside.

A cliff? That simply wasn’t fair.

THE CAVE

B
UCKLE
, M
AX
,
AND
C
RONOS FELL
into the white void, the yellow orb of the torch waffling weirdly as it dropped through the torrent alongside them. They glanced off a near-vertical wall of snow, and the impact spun their bodies. Buckle kept his arms secure around Max, his face buried in the thick bearskin on her back as they tumbled.

Then they were rolling, bouncing and rolling, down the steeply angled incline, each impact made soft by the snow, bringing down a small avalanche with them. What little Buckle could see of the world spun in rough, white bounces, and dark tufts of grass or splotches of stones.

They rolled to a stop, Buckle on his back, Max’s limp form on top of him. Buckle gasped through the crust of snow coating his face and blinked. Even with the gale thundering in his ears, he heard Cronos stagger upright nearby, and then his frightened whinny trailing away along with the jangle of his tack as he set off running again.

No more musket. No more horse, for that matter.

Buckle carefully slid Max off his chest and leveraged himself to his knees. He should be running, but where? He could see nothing, but he guessed that the horse had dropped them in the ravine. His right forearm burned where the damned
steampiper had cut him, and there were pains in his body, bruises and perhaps lacerations, but they were not injurious enough to slow him down. He leaned over Max, shielding her face from the storm, and yanked his hand from his glove to wipe a carapace of blood-streaked snow from her face and goggles.

Her nose and mouth emerged, striped pale white and black, but whether she breathed or not he had no way to tell. He jammed his hand back into his glove and gathered her body in his arms, cradling her against his chest as he stood. If they were in the ravine there were caves there, caves everywhere. He had to find shelter soon and tend to Max’s wounds, or Max would most surely die.

If she is not dead already. A fear crept over Buckle that had nothing to do with the sabertooths.

Facing the incline they had just rolled down, Buckle turned right. He had no inkling why right was better than left. Given the choice, he preferred to turn right. The snow was deep and forced him to pump his legs high as he staggered forward, Max in his arms, advancing into the teeth of the raging blizzard.

Perhaps it would have been better to turn left.

The icy wind bit at Buckle’s exposed neck—whatever skin his helmet, goggles, and beard did not protect. The goggles were damned near frozen over again, thickening up with even more ice from his frantic exertions. It did not matter much—he could not see anything, anyway. Buckle moved forward, ever forward, his legs slinging snow as they drove like pistons through the snowdrifts cast up against the cliff. He struggled through close-packed trees, his shoulders and Max’s swinging boots shattering the ice encasing their branches.