Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (56 page)

She smelled burning wood and Fassbinder’s Penicillin Paste. The formulae shifted, transformed, evolved into something else. The caterpillar in the chrysalis broke free, a butterfly.

Suddenly the never-ending flow of numbers stopped. It almost made sense. She was a hair’s breadth, a decimal point, from solving it. The immortality equation. She gasped, fearing that in the next moment the morphine would wash over her and she would lose track of the long line of winding calculations she had just done.

She needed to record the numbers. Without them, she might never be able to find her way so close to the solution again.

She reached for her pencil and paper. She had requested them at one point, and Doctor Lee had accommodated her, placing them on her bedside table.

She lifted her arm and, shaking like a leaf, stretched her fingers toward the paper.

And then she froze.

Someone had arrived in the infirmary.

Someone, or
something
.

Heavy steps approached along the aisle. Max’s heart started pounding. Disinfectant-laden air rushed in and out of her nostrils. She strained against the limits of her vision, but she could not see what was coming.

But she could sense him. Heavy as the end of time. Effortless as the fall of night.

The pencil and papers flew off the table, as if struck away by an invisible arm, the papers falling to the floor like leaves, the pencil rolling away in a small, high-pitched trundle.

The footsteps stopped. It was standing at the foot of her bed.

Max peered down and saw him.

The Gravedigger.

It was he, his face barely visible in the darkness, but his form silhouetted in the lamplight, the tall, black-winged Martian
who had met Max at the entrance to the Edifice of the Dead and refused her entry, cast her away.

Max’s heartbeat almost choked her, it was racing so fast.

Was she dead?

The Gravedigger spoke, his voice weary, layered with warning, but without malice. Max felt his hot breath on her cheek, too—at least she thought it was his breath, even though he was seven feet away. That surprised her. She had always thought that the Gravedigger’s breath would be cold. “You are special, because you are one, and you are the other. Two minds live within you, two souls, two prisms with which to understand the universe.” He paused, and she saw a frightening blue glow rise in his black eyes. “You are too close. The answer you seek would bring you nothing but misery. Turn away from the equation and never return to it again. I have warned you.”

Max’s vision fluttered as her pounding heart overtaxed her greatly weakened body. Her wounds burned like fire. Flinging her eyes wide open, she saw that the Gravedigger was gone.

She did not know if he had ever really been there.

Darkness squeezed out the light.

She fainted.

TO ATLANTIS

T
HE
P
NEUMATIC
Z
EPPELIN
HAD STOPPED
, briefly, to allow the Imperial princess a moment to stand watch over the burned wreckage of the
Cartouche
, the tomb of her brother, Bismarck, and his Imperial crew.

Buckle climbed down the rope ladder from the piloting gondola’s hull-access hatch. The zeppelin was terrain-moored on the sweeping flank of a mountain ridge, anchored twenty feet off the ground in rough territory, and a fresh breeze was making her strain at her hawsers.

Buckle’s boots landed on hard-crusted snow and frozen grass; he immediately strode toward Valkyrie. She was about seventy-five yards away to the north, her slim figure clearly visible against the smoldering skeleton of the
Cartouche
, crumpled like a red-hot spider crushed under the heel of a giant boot.

If the very world itself had been at peace that morning, there was no doubt that she was at war tonight. The colossal fires of Muscovy still raged far away to the northeast, still casting whirlwinds of fiery red embers high into the sky. Across the mountain ridges were scattered the burning pieces of the
Bellerophon
, the
Industria
, and the two Founders mortar barges. Only the ocean seemed untouched in its great, impenetrable blackness. And it was into that blackness Buckle knew he
must now go. Far out there, somewhere, where sharks and sea-monster beasties roamed the depths, lay the fabled city of Atlantis. Elizabeth was in Atlantis, if old Shadrack was to be believed, and he would get there, if Penny Dreadful knew the impossible way in.

Buckle had cast his lot with the asylum inmate and the defective robot.

But if Elizabeth was in Atlantis, he had to find her.

He had to.

Buckle slowed to a stop ten feet behind Valkyrie and paused respectfully, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword and the other on the butt of his pistol.

Valkyrie did not move, but she knew it was time to go.

The armored trains and war fleets of the Founders were coming.

Valkyrie glanced over her shoulder at Buckle and looked at him. Her eyes, silvered by the moonlight, were wet.

Buckle removed his top hat. “Princess, if I may—I cannot describe to you our sadness at your loss of your brother and his crew. You are our crewmate, and we are now given to you as you are to us, through battle and blood, and the entire ship’s company offers its condolences.”

Valkyrie did not respond immediately. She gazed down the snowbound mountain to where its ridges plunged into the sea. The ocean breeze rocked a handful of her fine blonde hairs that had escaped their pinnings back and forth about her cheek and neck. “This wind shall worry us as we try to make headway to the west,” she said.

“Aye,” Buckle replied.

The wind rose, spurring the fires as they slowly consumed themselves on the shattered wreckage of the
Cartouche
, their
whitish-orange illumination slowly dying against the pale-silver moonlight.

“I thank you and the crew for your sympathies, Captain,” Valkyrie said. “You are most kind.”

Buckle nodded, then turned to face the sea as well. The cold wind hummed, giving voice to the void, bringing with it the thunder of the waves breaking upon the white-frothed, iridescent line of the beach. Sea lions barked to the north, far away. Ice-coated tree branches rubbed together, issuing a musical tinkle, joined by the occasional, fragile shattering of falling icicles.

The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
creaked louder on her ropes, the breeze fluttering her canvas with the sound of birds’ wings, whispering to Buckle that she was unhappy being earthbound and begging him to fly. Buckle heard it. So did Valkyrie.

Valkyrie removed her right glove and knelt, picking up a handful of gray ashes from the snow; she let them stream through her stained fingers.

“I can give you another minute,” Buckle said.

“No,” Valkyrie whispered. She stood and turned to Buckle, drawn up to her full length, her beautiful face stern, her eyes dry. “I have said my good-byes, Captain. Thank you.” She placed her Crankshaft pith helmet with its red puggaree on her head. “Let us go and get your sister.”

Buckle smiled grimly at Valkyrie, and for the first time, he saw her smile back—a smile cocooned in sadness, but an honest one.

They strode back up the ridge to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, her huge ellipsoidal shape looming against the night clouds. She was running dark—with interior buglights and night lanterns only—so the Founders lookouts could not espy her from afar.

“Please get the lead out, sirs,” Ivan urged impatiently from the base of the rope ladder. “Or have you forgotten about the fogsucker armada on its way?”

“Just make sure my engines work, Mister Gorky,” Buckle replied.

Ivan sighed, his metal arm and faceplate gleaming, his magnifying goggles making his eyes look overlarge and buggy through the glass. Buckle had asked Ivan, as they prepared to meet with the Russians, if he wished to accompany them—the Spartak clan was his original bloodline. Ivan had refused, saying that though his heart was Russian, he had no desire to shake hands with the bastards who had abandoned him on the streets of Archangel, where Balthazar, visiting on a trade mission, had found him, a filthy infant in a basket, riddled with the carbuncle plague and left in the gutter to die.

Ivan lifted his goggles and gave Valkyrie a respectable bow as she arrived under the ladder. “Princess, my sympathies,” he said.

“Thank you, Mister Gorky,” Valkyrie answered. “You are most kind.”

Buckle clambered up the rope ladder. When he entered the access hatch in the deck of the piloting gondola, he was nearly bowled over by Kellie, as she excitedly dashed about, and found himself at the metal feet of Penny Dreadful, her yellow eyes peering down at him, glowing with the reflection of the bioluminescent green boil.

“Captain is aboard!” De Quincey shouted, looking back from the helm.

“Up ship, if you please, Miss Serafim!” Buckle ordered as he climbed onto the deck and leaned back into the hatchway to offer his hand to Valkyrie. She took it, her long, ash-stained fingers wrapping securely around his as he swung her up.

“All sentries aboard! Prepare to away!” Sabrina shouted into the chattertube hood. “Lift anchor!”

Buckle hauled Ivan up the hatch and then strode to his station. Sabrina tipped her bowler to Buckle and returned to her position in the nose. The bridge was alive, boil glowing in every glass tube, sphere, bubble, and orb, imparting its familiar, otherworldly illumination.

Buckle felt both ebullient and anxious, and let his crew carry out their familiar tasks without any need for his orders. Voices sounded from the ratlines above and the keel deck behind as the anchors were secured home, the mooring lines winched in and coiled into the rope wells, the marine sentries numbered and aboard, and the ballast and hydrogen wheels cranked and poised.

“All hands aboard. Ready to up ship, Captain,” Sabrina said.

“Up ship, five hundred feet,” Buckle ordered.

“Up ship, five hundred!” Sabrina shouted into the chattertube.

Buckle felt the wonderful weightlessness of his huge airship as she escaped the earth.

“We are away,” Sabrina said. “Guns are loaded, tompions in. Sixty-eight souls.”

Sixty-eight souls, Buckle thought. Five killed, ten wounded—three seriously—in the battle with the
Bellerophon
. “All ahead half,” he ordered.

“All ahead half, aye!” Valkyrie repeated, clapping the chadburn dial and ringing the bell.

“All ahead half, aye!” Yardbird responded from engineering, ringing the daughter bell.

Buckle folded his hands behind his back as the ascending
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s turbines launched her driving propellers into gargantuan, chopping whirls. “Helm, bear due west.”

“Bearing due west, aye!” De Quincey answered, turning the rudder wheel a few tocks.

The propellers whirled up to a comfortable hum as the airship smoothly accelerated. Buckle heard the slow whoosh of the water ballast pouring from the scuppers, and felt the upward surge of the extra press of hydrogen into the cells. The snowy mountain ridges fell away below the nose dome as the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
rose, filling the night horizon with the great expanse of overcast sky and the black mass of the ocean.

Buckle turned and looked at Penny Dreadful, the little-girl machine, who stood behind the ball turret of the hammergun, her eyes glowing under their copper lashes. She looked at him but did not speak.

“I have our speed at twenty knots against the headwind, Captain, correcting for drift,” Sabrina said, looking back at Buckle from the nose. “What is our destination?”

“Why, you know our destination, Navigator,” Buckle said wryly, as he looked down at the dark, glittering, endless sea. “We are headed to Atlantis.”

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

E
VERY NOVEL IS A LABOR
of love, and there are many wonderful people who have shared this journey with me. I am fortunate to be the son of Richard and Janet Preston, my stalwart patrons, whose inexhaustible love and support have always fueled my sense of who I am and what I must do. I am lost without my wife and eagle-eyed reader, Shelley, whose love, positivity, and enthusiasm keep me afloat, and our two daughters, Sabrina and Amelia, who inspire every word I write. I must also thank my sisters, Marsha and Joanna, and all of the family and friends who have lavished me with encouragement along the way.

Special thanks go out to Julia Kenner, a tremendous writer and friend, who generously opened doors for the first manuscript. I must also thank Trident Media Group and my first agent, the fantastic Adrienne Lombardo, who championed the first book and believed in Romulus Buckle as much as I did. Heartfelt thanks go out to my new agent, Alyssa Eisner Henkin, my brilliant caretaker, who is currently constructing ambitious plans for our future. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wizardly and most patient editor Alex Carr and everyone on my 47North team, and also to my incomparable development editor, Jeff VanderMeer.

I must also express my thanks to Kellie, a little dog whose memory, in some lovely, wonderful way, inspired the writing of this steampunk series.