Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (33 page)

“They would, if there were more of them,” Valkyrie said.

“Ah, my wounded manhood. I would be tempted to retort with a criticism of your appearance, but then again, you seem to be perfect.”

“Perhaps all of my flaws are internal, as opposed to yours,” Valkyrie said.

“I think I have just been insulted. A diplomatic incident may ensue.”

Valkyrie’s jaw remained set, but Buckle saw a spark of warmth flash in her glacial eyes. “I do love a good party,” she said.

DISTURBING NEWS

B
UCKLE FOUND HIMSELF ALONE ON
the ballroom balcony, and it pleased him in some small, abstract way. The last vestiges of daylight had ebbed out of the high overcast, to be replaced by the brilliant, silvery issue of the moon. It was too early in the evening for the lovers to seek out the freezing privacy of the balcony to cling to one another behind the pillars, or for the smokers to seek an open space to light their pipes. The outdoor fireplace roared, two freshly oiled logs finding their full expression of flames, the last cinders of the kindling falling away at their haunches, spent and combusted. The two gargoyles guarding each end of the balcony rail seemed alive in the waving light, staring at the world with marble eyes, waiting, knowing that even they, one day, would dissolve away to dust. Festive double rows of oil lanterns hung from the battlement hooks, their tangerine light taking on a liquid, lavalike quality in the places where the frost had taken hold of the rock.

Buckle folded his arms across his chest to ward off the cold. He glanced back at the high ballroom doors with their rippled, murky glass and the beating pulse of light, color, and music within, and he was glad to be outside. He always preferred to be outside. Perhaps his early years in the wilderness were to blame.

It was not that Buckle did not like parties. He loved parties, when the mood was right. But he needed the quiet to clear his head. The two women inside the glass, Sabrina and Valkyrie, stirred him up in a witch’s pot of lizard tongues and rose petals—his newfound attraction to Sabrina, subtle, strong, and unwanted and the undeniable fascination he had with the haughty Valkyrie almost infuriated him. He had a bloody serious job coming up. Negotiating with the wily Russians of Spartak required an unmuddled mind.

Buckle stepped to the balcony rail, overlooking the citadel’s lantern-dotted courtyard and main gates. The portcullis was still raised, and dozens of coachmen and footmen milled about, muttering to one another over their pipes, offhandedly peering at an odd stack of chicken cages piled against the bailey wall, the birds within quiet at the fall of night. High overhead, the
Khartoum
patrolled, running at too great an altitude for Buckle to be able to hear her engines, an ellipsoidal shadow against the clouds, her gondolas twinkling with interior light.

The sight of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
on the airfield, her elephantine back looming over the smaller airships hugging the earth at their mooring towers, her hawsers lined with cheerful rows of buglights, made Buckle’s heart race. He so wanted to leave the party, hurry aboard, run the rudder wheel in his hands, boilers pounding in her guts, propellers awhirl, and drive her into the sky. To have air under his boots again! But, alas, his mighty airship was not quite ready to go. Dozens of buglights clustered under her belly, some in motion, as the ground crews, the copper-sheathed wheels of their mule carts gleaming dully in the lantern light, manned the derricks and swung the
Arabella
—the emergency repair crews still finishing their work aboard her—back into her berth inside the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s launch bay.

Buckle unfolded his arms and leaned on the balcony rail. Late arrivals to the party approached in clattering, lantern-bouncing carriages, coming along the main road as it meandered up from the packed houses and boulders of the town.

In the courtyard, a guardsman strode with an oil lantern, two blackbang pistols gleaming at his belt; it was quiet enough for Buckle to hear the sounds of his footsteps, the leather soles of his boots padding across the flagstones. Buckle was used to the noisy quiet of a zeppelin running at night: the steady drone of the propellers, the hum of the machinery. He was not so familiar with the sounds of the city at night: the distant clang of the ironsmith, the slow rattle of the market carts with their braying donkeys, the random barking of dogs, and the faraway cries of the sweepers and streetlarks, the little boys who collected horse dung from the avenues and ran errands for halfpennies and farthings.

The back of his neck stung where the kraken had ripped him. A memory drifted into Buckle’s mind, a memory of himself as a boy, running with a dragonfire lantern clutched in his small hand, many years ago…

Buckle heard footsteps behind him, soldiers’ boots on stone, and he turned.

It was Balthazar, leading Katzenjammer Smelt apace. Both men smoked their pipes, and the gray tobacco smoke bearded them as they strode, the bowls glowing like red-hot bird’s nests whenever one of them took a pull.

“Ah, Romulus, here you are,” Balthazar said. “We must talk.”

“I suppose we must,” Buckle said, looking at Smelt as the firelight reflected in his monocle.

Then Smelt smiled. It was not much of a smile as such things went, a sort of tight grimace with positive intent, but it was a smile.

“Chancellor Smelt has made a kind effort to assist us,” Balthazar said. “He has most graciously offered that his daughter, Valkyrie, join the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s crew as acting chief engineer. She is of course familiar with the airship design, and she shall hold this position for the duration of the mission to Spartak, and until Max recovers.”

Buckle looked hard at Smelt. If Valkyrie was an effective engineer, then it was not a bad proposal—on the surface. But was Buckle to have a stranger, a foreign officer, acting as his second mate, his third-in-command? One well-placed Founders cannonball could easily make the Imperial princess the acting captain of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. And could Smelt be inveigling his daughter aboard in order to improve his claim if he was still planning to demand the airship’s return to Imperial possession?

“Thank you, Chancellor. I would be honored to have her aboard,” Buckle said. What else could he say? This was Balthazar’s decision, made without consulting him.

Smelt nodded, clamping his pipe between his teeth. “She is highly experienced. She will prove herself the excellent officer that she is.”

“Good,” Balthazar continued. “Romulus, you shall dock briefly in New Berlin and take aboard the Imperial diplomatic team, which shall accompany you to Muscovy.”

“Very well,” Buckle nodded. He was trapped like a rat in a hole.

Someone came running up the staircase behind, out of breath and gasping. Buckle, Balthazar, and Smelt spun around.

It was Jacob Fitzroy, the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
’s young signals midshipman, and one of the officers of the night watch. His mouth was wide open, sucking air, his sweat-slicked face gleaming in the lamplight.

Buckle’s entire body tensed. Something had happened on the airship. And it was bad.

“Captain! Here you are, sir!” Fitzroy coughed as he stumbled up the last step.

“Out with it, man!” Buckle snapped.

“There was a saboteur, Captain—aboard the airship!” Fitzroy gasped.

“What?” Balthazar shouted.

Buckle’s heart lunged into his mouth. “Where? What was done?”

“He was caught in the piloting gondola, but Mister De Quincey thinks he had not had time to do anything yet. We can’t find anything out of order, sir,” Fitzroy continued.

“We may count ourselves lucky, then,” Balthazar muttered, grinding his teeth on his pipe.

“Curse me straight to hell!” Buckle roared, though he actually felt a touch better, felt a touch calmed. But now the specter of well-hidden sabotage could be added to his mountain of worries. “And where is this saboteur now?”

“He escaped, sir,” Fitzroy replied. “Toward town. The guard and the constabulary have been informed and are searching for him.”

Damn it. More cursed bad luck. It would have been a capital revenge to get to interrogate the brute. “Who discovered him?” Buckle asked.

“Mister Banerji, sir.”

“I must get back to the ship,” Buckle said, heading for the stairs as Fitzroy fell in beside him. He cursed his decision to join the party. He should have been on the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
all along.

“Dispatch rider approaching, on the fly!” shouted a guardsman from the main gate below. “Make way! Clear the road!”

Buckle turned back and joined Balthazar and Smelt at the balcony rail. More shouts rang out in the courtyard as the guards hustled the lagging coachmen and footmen away from the gate. Buckle heard the horse approach up the road, its hooves thumping the tightly packed earth at a gallop.

“Who goes there?” the master of the watch howled.

The rider and horse burst in under the portcullis, the animal hitting the flagstones with a clatter of iron horseshoes.

“Quentin Heath, rider from outpost Bengal!” the horseman shouted, out of breath, fighting his mount as it tried to wheel. The horse was exhausted, its body steaming in the torchlight, mouth and flanks streaming with foam, tongue dangling out of the side of its mouth. “I carry an urgent message for the council!”

Buckle recognized Heath, though he would not have been able to recall his name—a small fellow, whose bandolier links glittered under the open flaps of his long duster riding coat, his face a shadow under the brim of a brown leather Akubra hat. Sending a dispatch rider rather than coded lantern signals—the pigeons did not fly at night—meant that the officer at the Bengal outpost considered the news a secret.

“Ho, there, Quentin Heath!” Balthazar shouted down into the courtyard. “I am Balthazar! What news have you to report?”

“Admiral, sir!” Heath saluted. “It is reported that the Brineboiler clan is under attack, sir!”

Buckle’s heart jumped into his throat again. “Under attack from whom?” Balthazar asked.

“The Founders, sir!” Heath shouted, reining in his laboring horse as it spun around in a slew of foam, its hooves scraping loud on the flagstones. “The Founders have attacked the Brineboilers!”

Balthazar turned away from the balcony, his shoulders heaving as he struck his fist into the palm of his hand. “We are caught unprepared! Damn us to hell! While we sat here dancing, the Founders invasion has begun!”

A MARTIAN NEVER LIES

M
AX HEARD
D
OCTOR
L
EE
’
S VOICE
, low, speaking in the kindly way doctors do, and she realized she was in the citadel infirmary. She was aware of Buckle’s presence. He had not spoken, but she
knew
that Buckle was there—the one whom Lee was speaking to.

“She is slowly coming around,” Lee said. “You may speak with her if you like, though I do not know if she will be able to respond.”

“I only have a moment, Doctor,” Buckle said.

Max fought to open her eyes; the lids fluttered, and her wide-open pupils stung at the soft flashes of pumpkin-colored lantern light. It was night. How long had she been unconscious? Her mind slipped away, wanting to drop off a cliff, but she clawed her way back. Sounds rushed in on her, loud in her ears: rustles of clothing, the scrape of a chair leg across the wooden floor, the hiss of the oil lanterns, the steady, metallic wheeze of her brother’s iron lung beside her. Her body, tight with drug-blunted pain, warned her that her wounds were extensive. She could still feel the awful punch of the sabertooth fangs in her flesh, the rip of the claws. She shuddered. She was cold despite the heavy wool hospital blankets on her. And she was thirsty.

There was someone else in the room, Max sensed. A badly injured person, unconscious. She did not know who it was.

A wooden chair creaked at Max’s bedside. She felt a hand, Buckle’s hand, slip around her cold fingers, gently bundling them in his warm flesh.

“Hello, young lady,” Buckle whispered in her ear, so close that she could hear the moistness of his tongue in his mouth. “The sawbones tells me you are recovering nicely.”