Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (23 page)

“Fifty feet to mooring tower five, on the nose, Mister Windermere,” Sabrina announced. “Approaching at four knots.”

“All stop,” Windermere said, cranking the chadburn dial. “Prepare to dock and down ship.”

“All stop, aye!” came the engineering response down the chattertube, the bell dinging on the chadburn.

The
Arabella
responded nicely, her maneuvering propellers a lazy, chopping whirl as she hedged forward.

Soon they would be on the ground with Balthazar and the ambassadors, in the midst of their diplomatic maneuvering and distrust. In a way, Buckle did not want to land.

HORATIO CRANKSHAFT

B
UCKLE AND
S
ABRINA ACCOMPANIED
N
URSE
Nightingale and four stretcher bearers as they carried Max and Valentine’s litters down the
Arabella
’s loading ramp. Buckle could still taste Ilsa’s rum-warmed tongue in his mouth. He remembered Max’s cold lips trembling against his in the cave and felt vaguely guilty. The pleasant atmosphere was quickly erased by the acrid slap of the town air—laden with the smoke of wood and coal fires—and the relentless smell of Burbage tar, cordage, envelope canvas, and the chemical-garlic stench of fabric-stiffening dope permeating everything around the airship docks.

Above them, the
Arabella
floated, the winched-down anchor lines securing her keel to the wooden structure of the repair dock; she was a battered sight, with her stern partially caved in, roof tangled with rigging debris, and the envelope flanks ripped and singed black by reaper’s breath. Repair crews were already clambering up onto the dock platforms, attaching their rope ladders and unloading fabric boles and belts loaded with tools. Mooring dock five, one of the three repair docks, was hemmed in on three sides by docked zeppelins, but if Buckle looked north, straight ahead, he could just see the tops of the citadel’s watchtowers over the boulders between the airfield and the town.

Doctor Fogg, waiting at the bottom of the gangway with his ambulance wagon and its horse team, rushed forward to the litter. “What have we got?” Fogg asked. The stretcher bearers halted as Fogg lifted Valentine’s blanket and peered at his heavily bandaged leg.

“Boilerman Cornelius Valentine. Femur and knee joint are shattered, Doctor,” Nightingale said. “Kraken got hold of him.”

“Kraken?” Fogg muttered with a detached surprise. He pressed the back of his hand against Max’s forehead. She lay nestled under heavy blankets and a thick wool infirmary cap, looking content, asleep under her morphine, the definition between her stark-white skin and the gray stripes looking more ghastly out in the overcast sunlight. Buckle could not escape how much blood he had seen pour from her body.

“Sabertooth attack,” Nightingale said. “A single penetrating bite just above the left clavicle. Severe claw lacerations down the back.”

Fogg nodded in his reassuring fashion, as he always did, even when he dealt with the mortally wounded. He pressed his fingers against Max’s jugular, lowering his head as he concentrated on the pulse.

“When did this happen?”

“Yesterday evening,” Buckle said.

Fogg lifted Max’s eyelids, scrutinizing the jerk of each black iris. “She lost a lot of blood, did she?”

Nightingale nodded. “Yes. Severe exsanguination.”

“I am worried more about infection than the blood loss,” Fogg said, more to himself than anyone else. He motioned for the stretcher bearers to follow him to the cart.

Buckle strode down the gangplank alongside Fogg. “It took a while for me to get to her. I cleaned the wounds as best
I could and slathered them with Fassbinder’s before I bandaged her up.”

“And I changed her dressings when we got her aboard this morning,” Nightingale added. “No sign of infection, Doctor.”

“And she’s been on morphine the entire time?” Fogg asked.

“Yes,” Buckle answered. As they reached the end of the ramp, his boots sank into the churned slush of the access lane, a brown mix of half-frozen snow, horse manure, coal dust, and mud. Buckle followed Fogg to the front of the wagon, while Nightingale led the stretcher bearers to two orderlies in white coats waiting at the rear.

“What is your appraisal of their conditions, Doctor?” Buckle asked Fogg.

“It looks like Valentine will lose the leg. As far as the lieutenant—she is a Martian. What do I know about Martians? Bloody upside-down anatomy,” Fogg said, climbing up into the front seat of the wagon and collecting the reins. A chubby stray dog—the airfield crew must have been feeding him—yipped at the horses before tucking its tail between its legs and scuttling away. “But if I were a gambling man, which I am not, I would not bet against that extraordinary Martian constitution.”

“Nor would I,” Buckle said.

Fogg snapped the reins with a shout of “Ha!”

Buckle watched the four buckskins stamp, lurching forward and settling into a good pace down the lane as the ambulance wagon lumbered behind.

“They will both come out all right, Captain,” Sabrina said at Buckle’s shoulder. “I am sure of it.”

Buckle smiled at Sabrina. She always had the ability to soothe him, even in the worst predicaments. But her red hair—the two red ringlets curling from beneath the sides of her derby—angered him somehow, in an obscure yet intense way, a
dagger behind a curtain. If she had once been a member of the Founders clan, she must know some of their secrets, so she was choosing to keep those secrets from him.

“Your transport is arriving, Captain!” Windermere shouted from the weather deck of the
Arabella
, leaning out under the arch of the envelope skin, pointing to the access road.

“Very good, Mister Windermere,” Buckle said, then turned to Sabrina. “Go over to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
and double-check the repairs with Ivan. I want her ready to go.”

“Aye, aye,” Sabrina said, striding away toward the repair dock.

A tall man riding on a black horse clopped up, leading another mount by the reins; unlike his heavyset brother, Horatio Crankshaft was long and lean and straight as a yardarm, with the pointy-chinned face of a heron. He wore a long gray riding cloak over his dress uniform, with white gloves. His hair and beard were cropped short, and white as snow. Horatio was a field officer to the bone: where his brother Balthazar was diplomatic and resolute, Horatio was brutally honest and daring—not an accomplished tongue biter—and while he was rarely invited to the negotiating table, much to his relief, his inborn aggression made him the best warship captain in the fleet.

Buckle bore great affection for Horatio, whose temperament more closely matched his than Balthazar’s. In the early years, the uncle had proved a far more rambunctious playmate than Balthazar tended to be. Horatio was a tester, a teaser, always challenging his nieces and nephews, not to mention raising five refined but headstrong daughters of his own. And while Balthazar had always kept tight purse strings with his children, thriftiness being a cardinal virtue he admired, Horatio was the uncle who showed up with coins jingling in his pocket that were not there when he left.

“Mount up, nephew,” Horatio said. “Negotiations are about to begin.”

“And you gallop off on escort duty, sir?” Buckle asked, grinning, planting his boot in the second horse’s stirrup and swinging up into the saddle.

“Balthazar wants you there and not I, thank the milk goat’s tits. I am merely the messenger boy,” Horatio said. It was vintage Horatio. “Who is in the ambulance?”

“One of my boilermen. And Max.”

Horatio’s eyes widened a bit. He was quite fond of Max. “Is it bad?”

Buckle nodded. “Sabertooth.”

“Bah!” Horatio grinned, the teeth-gritted kind of grin he got when action was imminent. “If she is still alive, she shall make it. Martian blood courses with particles of steel, do not forget. Now, you need to get inside and get washed up. You look like you’ve been dragged through dung.”

“And kraken dung, at that,” Buckle said with a wink.

Horatio raised an eyebrow at Buckle. “Now, there is a tale I’ll want to hear when I’ve got some rum in me. But now, let us go. Ha!” Horatio dug his spurs into the flanks of his favorite horse, a gray-speckled gelding named Bourbon, and the big animal took off down the access road. Buckle’s horse, a brown mare, spun and followed at a gallop, without Buckle having to do much encouraging at all. It was exhilarating to be on the horse’s back, its unruly mane whipping back and forth under his face, the jangling bridle, the points of his weight in the stirrups, and for a moment Buckle was able to forget his exhaustion, his multitudinous worries.

But nothing could make him forget Elizabeth.

PINYON HALL

B
UCKLE STRAIGHTENED HIS SPINE
,
NOT
wanting his nerves to get the best of him as he strode across the courtyard of the citadel. He looked at his pocket watch, turning the winder, and walked quickly. It had taken him and Horatio over twenty minutes to ride through town to the citadel, and another half hour to get washed and dressed. He feared he would be late, although no one seemed to have any idea of what time the proceedings might begin. A light breeze whirled in through the high gate, fluttering the scarlet-and-white banners festooned across its stone face. The courtyard was bustling—the whole place was buzzing—at the arrival of the ambassadors. Buckle dodged past rushing servants, milling surreys, and soldiers on horses whose hooves clattered on the courtyard flagstones.

This was the first time Balthazar had invited Buckle to attend a negotiation session with an outside clan, and Buckle feared that he had no aptitude for the subtleties and nuances of such a strained parley. At least he looked presentable—he knew that—with his white pith helmet tucked under his right arm and his left hand on the scabbard of his saber. He felt rather proper and pinched inside his crimson dress uniform, with tight gold buttons that made him feel propped up. The high collar choked him—if he took the time to notice it—and the pressure
of the cloth against the bandage on the back of his neck scraped like a branding iron. Damned kraken. He much preferred his airman togs—the leathers and wool fit loosely, and let a man breathe.

Buckle’s head felt tight, his longish hair combed back and held in place in the stiff clamp of Cottington’s Gentleman’s Cream, and he was scrubbed, scrubbed pink, at least about the face and hands. The twins Jasmine and Jericho, the youngest of Balthazar’s adopted imps, had helped the servants lay out Buckle’s uniform in his chamber, pestering him with wide eyes for the story of the kraken as he stripped and dressed. Burgess Sibley, the family butler, had ushered the youngsters out, but not before he had trimmed Buckle’s beard with scissors; picking up a straight razor from his barber’s kit, he had vainly argued that he be allowed to shave off Buckle’s “bird’s nest of a beard.”

Buckle charged up the broad front steps of Pinyon Hall, a sprawling stone-and-log structure and the heart of the Crankshaft government.

“Tin-headed bastards! Too fast!” the captain of the guard shouted from atop the gate, pointing upward.

Buckle glanced behind him. A gigantic oblong shadow passed overhead, like an eclipse blocking out the sky. It was a huge airship, flying very low, the keels of her four gondolas no more than seventy-five feet above the tops of the watchtowers—a Tinskin war zeppelin, emblazoned with old Spanish coats-of-arms, Aztec hieroglyphs, and snake heads, her gun ports bristling with cannons. The sky vessel’s mass appeared so great from Buckle’s position under its shadow, it seemed that if it were to drop, it might crush the entire stronghold under its immensity.

The Tinskin airship was coming into the airfield. Her exhaust pipes sizzled, the engines having just been shut down, leaving her momentum to carry her the last half mile; the strangely quiet airship split the air with the windy
hiss
of her canvas, her six titanic bronze props turning languidly. Tinskin airmen, dressed in overalls gleaming with armor plates and square-lensed goggles strapped over morion helmets, peered stoically down at Buckle as they perched at their docking stations amidst the rigging, mooring ropes at the ready in their hands.