Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (11 page)

Buckle answered his own question as he circled the spire. A total of six human figures had been chiseled into the sides of the monument. This was not a Founders statue. It was something else. But the six stone men whose names were inscribed at their statue’s feet—Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Hipparchus, Herschel, Newton—had been lost to history, at least any history Romulus Buckle was aware of.

Buckle gazed at the spire, folding his hands behind his back in a casual fashion, even though his shoulders ached. He didn’t feel like pausing and gazing, but he knew he was being watched. He could smell horses. But still no one had challenged him. Was he going to have to stride up to the front door of the Observatory and rattle the knocker? Apparently so. Well, if that
was what the Alchemists wanted, then that was what he was going to do…

Buckle heard something coming up behind him, something wheezing and puffing and winding and grinding, something with footsteps so heavy they split the ice with sharp cracks and shook the ground under his boots.

WOLFGANG RAMSTEIN AND HIS ROBOT

B
UCKLE SPUN ON HIS HEEL
to see an armored robot stomping toward him. It was nine feet tall, a hulking brute of a machine encased in iron armadillo plates. A breastplate of grinding cogs and gears covered a turbine spinning inside the chest cavity. Oval windows of heavy lead glass lined the sides of the rib cage, revealing compartments churning with steam, boiling water, and fire. The head, a smooth copper dome with two horizontal slits for eyeholes, which glowed a superheated red, had eight brass vent tubes—four on each side—releasing intermittent bursts of hissing steam. The clodhopper legs, thick as tree stumps, swiveled in well-oiled ball sockets at the hips. The right arm had a gigantic metal hand, while the left arm was equipped with a round battery of cannon barrels circling the wrist.

The Alchemists were famous for building robots of fantastic configurations, but Buckle had never seen one before. He could outrun the massive machine but…where would he go?

Surely the Alchemists were familiar with the Gentleman’s Rules.

The robot approached more rapidly than Buckle expected, its iron boots belting the earth with
thud, thud, thud
s that bounced the loose snow with each footfall. It halted when it was
toe-to-toe with him; great sighs of steam shot out of its vent tubes and then petered out.

Buckle swallowed so hard he almost choked himself. His nostrils and the back of his throat were stinging from the pungent stink of hot metal and sizzling whale-oil lubricant. The motionless robot loomed, its inner turbine still whirring, its eye slits alive with the reflections of the fire and heated air within.

Buckle got the odd impression that the behemoth was trying to hypnotize him.

“You didn’t run!” a voice boomed from Buckle’s right. “And it was a crackerjack good thing you didn’t! Crackerjack!”

Buckle snapped a look to his right. A young, thin man roughly equal to his height and age was approaching. He wore a brown leather motorcycle cap festooned with eyewear, a long white double-breasted coat, and dark-brown boots agleam with rows of polished buckles. Long leather gloves encased his hands nearly up to the elbows, and both forearms were crowded with straps loaded with unusual devices. He held some sort of little-box invention studded with winding handles and gears.

“I suspect I could have outrun your little friend, here,” Buckle said, trying to sound calm.

“Ha!” the young Alchemist huffed as he arrived alongside the robot. “You run, you get incinerated. A simple formula with an inevitable result.” The young Alchemist’s face lit up with a lopsided but enthusiastic smile from beneath his thick mustache. He had ruddy skin that looked scrubbed and healthy, and friendly olive eyes set deep under his bushy eyebrows. His dense russet-colored hair jutted out in every direction from beneath his cap, which accommodated a forest of different goggles and lenses, each and every one designed to swing smoothly into position in front of his eyes with the tap of a lever.

“The proof is always in the proverbial pudding!” the young Alchemist shouted. He twisted a number of switches on the control box he held, and it issued a series of odd noises. “Let’s have an exhibition, shall we?”

The robot jerked its shoulders back with a
clank
, its chest turbine accelerating as it heaved out its left arm, which was the one cuffed with the circular ring of small blackbang cannons. The arm straightened, locked, adjusted its aim slightly, and fired a thundering volley in a volcano of black smoke. Buckle instinctively ducked. The echo of the blast boomed across the mountains. He heard a resounding
crack
and turned to see a tall tree fifty yards away collapsing into a fire-ringed hole in its trunk. It toppled in a crash of splintering wood and a shattering of the ice that had long encased it.

The robot swung its smoking arm back to its hip and swiveled its head, attentively watching the young Alchemist.

“Crackerjack!” The young Alchemist chuckled. “Impressive! Am I right? Of course I am right. Eight portable cannons, self-loading, fired singly or in salvo. Explosive rounds. And that’s just for starters.”

“Impressive,” Buckle said. It was what this fellow obviously wanted to hear. And it
was
impressive. He paused, trying to cook up a decent story. He could say he was a Crankshaft ambassador on a diplomatic mission, and needed assistance to return to his home territory. But ambassadors never traveled alone—and not by parachute. And if the Alchemists smelled a lie in his story he would be clapped in irons as a spy.

“Look…” Buckle began, uncertain of what he might say next.

“So,” the Alchemist blurted, interrupting, “you’re a Cranker, are you?”

“Crankshaft. Yes,” Buckle replied.

“And the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
is your gunship,” the young Alchemist stated, grinning wickedly.

“It is. Yes,” Buckle answered, uncertain.

“That was a colossal scrape you had with that tangler,” the young Alchemist continued, affectionately patting the robot’s massive iron hip with his gloved hand as he spoke. “Knocked you off your gasbag and still you survived. The odds on squeaking out of that fix still breathing would have to be astronomical, yes?”

Buckle’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”

The Alchemist pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then pointed them at the sky. “Always watching, Cranker. Watching. We have big eyes down here: telescopes of tremendous proportions and magnifying capacities. We observe, study patterns, collect information.”

“Information on who?” Buckle asked.

The Alchemist’s face soured for a moment—a blabbermouth who suddenly realized he was spilling secrets—and then the grin reappeared. “Hummingbirds and butterflies, of course. I’ve said too much, really. I always talk too much. All nonsense. Such a bore, I am. My goodness, you are quite sticky.”

Buckle was beginning to think that the truth was the best chance to extricate himself from this mess. “Look, I desperately need to get back aboard my airship.”

“Ah, that may be a problem,” the Alchemist said. “They seem to have sailed away without you.”

Buckle looked up at the sky. The
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was now a tiny silver dot high above the ruins of Los Angeles. “If they knew I was alive they would come back. I could order
them to come back. Do you have any way to signal them? You must have a way.”

“
Order
them back?” The young Alchemist asked, cocking his head.

“I am Romulus Buckle, captain of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
, and I must speak with your clan leaders on a matter of utmost importance, which affects us all.”

The young Alchemist’s eyes lit up and he smiled like the cat who caught the mouse. “Captain!” the young Alchemist repeated. “Well, I’ll be carbuncled. A Crankshaft airship captain plunked down here among us. And I was supposed to let my robot squash you, as if you were just some cast-off ballast rat!” He laughed and thrust out his hand, and when Buckle took it, he shook vigorously. “Captain Romulus Buckle, let me properly introduce myself—I am Wolfgang Copernicus Ramstein, and this is my robot, Newton. Welcome to Hollywood.”

THE ALCHEMISTS ARE FRIENDLY?

I
F THE
A
LCHEMISTS WERE A
friendly bunch, the only one who showed it was Wolfgang. Buckle stood before Altair Pollux, an altogether pudgy little lemon of a fellow who, pacing back and forth with his hands folded behind his back, his round belly thrusting out of his long white coat, frowned a hundred different ways as he pondered his visitor’s fate. Altair had become the temporary leader of the Alchemists since the disappearance of his aunt, Andromeda Pollux, who had been abducted along with Balthazar and the Imperial clan leader, Katzenjammer Smelt, at the Palisades Truce. As far as first impressions went, Altair struck one as very bald, very bitter, very egotistical, very untrustworthy, and very stupid.

Altair stopped and glared at Buckle for the fifteenth time. “And what am I supposed to do with you?” he asked for the fifteenth time.

Buckle gave Altair his easy smile to hide his annoyance with the pompous little lazybrat. “I propose that you believe what I have told you, because it is the truth,” he said, removing his pith helmet and tucking it under his arm. “And the circumstances of our situation are both dire and immediate.”

Altair rolled his vapid blue eyes up to the ceiling and sighed in an oh-it’s-so-bothersome way.

Buckle followed Altair’s gaze up to the dome, its plaster riddled with patched cracks. Wolfgang had referred to the grand hall as the Alchemist’s Sky Temple. A gigantic telescope, a beautiful, monolithic tube polished to a gleaming bronze, loomed over all the proceedings, poking up at the sky through a long vertical slot in the roof. The entire floor was a rotating device, the walls encircled with steam-driven shafts ready to propel the entire chamber around in a circle to allow the telescope access to all 360 degrees of the horizon. An Alchemist female was perched in a seat high on the telescope, her eyes pressed to the viewfinder. When her hands intermittently adjusted the control levers, the steam shafts fired, driving a complex system of gears, wheels, and levers, which emitted a heavy but smooth
whir
as the chamber swung around.

Buckle wondered if she was still watching the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
.

The room swung around. To Buckle’s senses it seemed as if the walls were rotating around the floor, but his brain knew the reality was the opposite. He eyed the large oval table where the Alchemist Council had assembled in haste, evident in the disheveled appearance of a few of the ten leaders. The table itself was a grand sample of engineering art, roughly forty feet in diameter and inlaid with interlocking gears of bronze, copper, brass, and iron. This metal decoration had been present on every wall and door that he had seen when Wolfgang and Newton had escorted him inside the narrow corridors of the Observatory. It gave the surfaces a geometric depth, and was not unpleasing to the eye.

And as they entered the interior of the Observatory, Buckle had become aware of profound vibrations rising from beneath
his feet, the rumblings of gigantic furnaces, crucibles of molten metal and fire, deep in the labyrinth of forges and laboratories below. The Alchemists were master inventors, hammer-swinging metalworkers addicted to the steam and bolt. But even more intriguing was their near-magical ability to animate their creatures of metal—Newton, for example—so the machines seemed to be able to think for themselves on a basic level. In that very moment, what phantasmagorical constructions were secretly being birthed, eyes blinking with fire, in the depths of the mountain under Buckle’s feet?

“This is so flabbergastingly ridiculous,” Altair whined, scuffing the floor with the toe of his boot. “How do you say you can you help us, again, Cranker?”

“He’s already told us how, Altair,” a soot-stained Alchemist woman said, the patience in her voice wavering. Her eyes, like those of the other ten Alchemist leaders around the table, measured Buckle with suspicion, but he had noticed that their glances toward Altair were unkind, even embarrassed. The council was made up of seven men and three women; all but one looked to be in their early thirties, older than the twenty-something Altair, all dripping with the gravitas he lacked. They all wore the long white, double-breasted coats of the Alchemist clan. The one older man was obviously the military chief, perhaps forty-five years of age, with dark-brown skin and hefty gray patches in his black beard, and over his white coat he wore an iron breastplate embossed with a copper astrolabe.