Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3)

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Odessa looked straight ahead, her gaze never wavering from Octavian. She cut a fine figure, buttoned up tight inside the stiff collar and silver buttons of her steampiper uniform with her crimson hair pulled tightly into a bun at the back of her head. In the angle of her jaw, the curve of her nose, she was in every way identical to Sabrina. Buckle realized Odessa was the steampiper he had fought aboard the Pneumatic Zeppelin during Balthazar’s rescue. She was the woman who had jumped from the bowsprit in order to avoid capture. She was the woman who had been shot in the abdomen by Katzenjammer Smelt.

  “Sit down, Vicar,” Octavian said unpleasantly. “And you as well, Marius.”

  The Vicar stopped at the table, taking possession of the stage in a way that Buckle didn’t like, so he stood up as well. “If you shan’t provide the introductions, Octavian, I shall,” the Vicar said, looking at Buckle and Sabrina.

  “You shall address our leader as the First Consul,” Cressida said.

  “I am called the Vicar,” the Vicar said without acknowledging Cressida, “Founders clan envoy and Gentleman of the Tar. With me is First Lieutenant Odessa Fawkes—though you seem to have picked one of her up for yourselves along the way.” He narrowed his small brown eyes to Sabrina. “Yes, Sabrina, the lost sister. We have been looking for you.”

  Sabrina and Odessa stared at each other, neither betraying any emotion at all.

  The Vicar—the name struck Buckle. The representative of the Founders at the Palisades conference where Balthazar had been kidnapped was said to be called the Vicar. The names. The Vicar. Odessa Fawkes. Fawkes. The leader of the Founders clan was Isambard Fawkes. Odessa was Sabrina’s sister so that would make Sabrina a Fawkes as well. “Captain Romulus Buckle of the Crankshafts,” Buckle said.

  “Of course you are,” the Vicar replied to Buckle with the look of the cat who had caught the edible dormouse. “And you have with you the lost daughter of Isambard Fawkes. Impressive. Hello, Sabrina.”

  Sabrina remained silent, bristling.

  “What?” the Vicar grinned. “Do you not remember me, my dear? All those hours you spent riding on my shoulders, bouncing on my knee?”

  “I left that life behind long ago,” Sabrina said slowly.

  The Vicar’s face turned cold. “Shunning Fawkes royalty to become one of Balthazar’s adopted pirate brats. What a shame.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Buckle said.

  The Vicar smiled with a sickly version of being pleasant. “Forgive me if I misspeak, Captain.”

  “Sit down!” Octavian bellowed, pulling Marius into his seat. “Damn you all—I will not have it! Sit down!”

  “Oh, Octavian,” The Vicar sighed. “You and your obsession with food. As you wish. Though I must say I am dearly famished.” He took a seat on the bench opposite Buckle and Sabrina. Odessa sat beside him.

  Buckle sat down and looked into his plate for a moment, at the naked, well-cooked dormouse and the still-jerking octopus tentacles, one of which had slithered onto the table and now, with its last ebb of life, curled around the base of his goblet. He watched the Vicar take a big bite out of a dormouse and, jaws working, swig from his goblet and make an approving nod to Octavian. The Atlanteans glared back at him.

  Oh, how much Buckle missed having Elizabeth alongside him! She would be able to read the people and the circumstances so much better than he. It did feel like the maneuverings before a battle and he was familiar with that, but these were people and not warships and the layers of deception and intrigue were nigh impenetrable to his intuition, stonewalling him. The Vicar had strutted in like he owned the place. The Atlanteans, Octavian, Lady Julia, and the others stood defiant but they also cringed with fury and humiliation. Negotiations between them had been ongoing, perhaps for a considerable length of time. The Vicar had them by the short hairs. Somehow, he had them. The Atlanteans may not have surrendered to the Founders demands quite yet but they were afraid and it was coming. Elizabeth would have handled this properly—but Buckle was on his own. He had to get Octavian and Julia alone, quickly, in order to circumvent whatever devil’s pact the Founders were about to force upon Atlantis.

  If the Founders hadn’t forced it upon them already.

  “It is very kind of you, Captain Buckle,” the Vicar announced through his mouthful of dormouse, “to drop in and congratulate the Founders and Atlantean clans upon the completion of our brand new mutual protection agreement and trade alliance.”

  There it is, Buckle thought without responding. The devil’s pact. More than one, even.

  “We have agreed upon nothing,” Octavian said flatly.

  “Please,” the Vicar replied in a kind but vaguely exasperated fashion, as a parent might gently chide a child, “delaying the inevitable does no one any good, Octavian. Especially you.”

  If there still existed a crack between Octavian and the Vicar, Buckle had to try to jump right into it. “It appears that we have arrived in time to throw our hat into the ring, to represent the interests of a great many other clans.”

  The Vicar smiled as he chewed. “You do not belong here, so very far away from your own sphere of influence, Captain. Why in the world would you think to stick your nose into the business of us here in the west?”

  “Because we are at war,” Buckle said.

  “My dear Crankshaft captain, there is no war here,” the Vicar said. “We are all in neutral territory. There is no reason why we cannot be civil with one another.” His practiced, perfect gentlemanliness could not entirely hide what lurked beneath the skin: the Vicar was a wolf in sheepskin.

  “Why have you blockaded Atlantis?” Buckle asked.

  “The blockade is only temporary, of course,” the Vicar said. “Negotiating tactics, you see, to assure the safety of Founders shipping both above and below the waves until our mutual protection agreement can be put into effect.”

  “And that’s why you’re here,” Buckle said.

  The Vicar grinned. “Of course. “Which brings us to the question of why are you here.”

  “For purposes quite similar to yours, it appears,” Buckle replied.

  “Really?” the Vicar shot back, and Buckle sensed the threat under his words. “Yet you are so very far from home, Captain.”

  “Enough!” Octavian shouted, stabbing angrily at an octopus tentacle with his fork, the tines clinking loudly on his plate. “You act as if Atlantis is a carcass you can fight over. Well, we are not. We belong to the sea and want nothing to do with you surface clans.”

  “The entire Snow World is at war,” Buckle said. “It affects us all.”

  Octavian snorted. “Not Atlantis. Not under the sea. As for you, Vicar, there are and shall be no agreements. You attempt to apply your typically overaggressive diplomacy when you know that my clan responds poorly to threats of force. Enjoy your meal and after that you may take your requests and go.”

  Buckle liked that, liked Octavian bucking the Vicar, but he didn’t know how much of it was some kind of face-saving show.

  The room fell silent, the atmosphere heavy under the glare the Vicar now foisted upon the First Consul. “Go?” the Vicar asked as if he were uttering a curse. “Why, my dear Octavian, you suddenly sing a very different tune now that the Crankshafts have arrived. A very dangerous tune.”

  “Dangerous for you,” Marius said quietly, straight at the Vicar.

  The Vicar looked at Buckle, then to Octavian. “If you send me away now. If you refuse to join our mutual protection agreement and send me home empty-handed, then you shall leave the Founders Parliament with no choice but to act in its own defense. If you are not a friend in this time of conflict then you are an enemy. If you refuse us we shall unleash our sharks and Atlantis shall not survive our wrath. Think well upon what you say next, Octavian, for the fate of your clan hangs in the balance.”

  “You shall address him as the First Consul,” Cressida blurted, her voice shaking.

  The First Consul swallowed hard, a jerky, nervous working of his throat, and Buckle knew t
he man was afraid.

  The Atlanteans were already beaten. Buckle had arrived too late. He wouldn’t get a chance to win them over. The Atlanteans were going to fold, to submit under the Founders’ pressure, and Buckle and the Crankshafts and all that his clan knew could well be doomed.

  Octavian snapped his head around. “Where is the goddamned food!”

  XXIV

  THE ORPHANMAKER IS A FINE DISH

  The kitchen doors burst open with Philo in the lead, followed by four servants hauling a huge silver tray. The tray was leveraged onto the table and Buckle raised an eyebrow as he scrutinized its offering; a gigantic fish-beast, sturgeon-like except for the eyeless, tubular head, perhaps six feet long from the tip of its bulbous nose to the end of its shovel-shaped tail. The fish looked like it had been boiled but now it was cold and the scent of it was bitter with vinegar with salt. Scales nestled along the body in tight rows, each one a slightly different shade of silvery gray with shimmering rainbows in its reflection. The mouth, a long barracuda-dinosaur trap with overlapping rows of teeth, was propped open and stuffed with purple-green sea fruit that looked like the cross between an apple and a cabbage.

  Octavian stood up, looking newly confident, as if his bombast was refueled by the arrival of the elaborate dish. “The orphanmaker—some call it a jawfish—is a rare delicacy here in Atlantis. The flesh is delightful but poisonous unless cooked and served properly and I have had one prepared just for you on this occasion, my distinguished guests. The animal is warm-blooded, an alien transplant, courtesy of the Martians, and it does quite well for itself in our oceans.”

  “It is a most beautiful creature,” the Vicar said. Buckle couldn’t tell if the man was being sarcastic or not.

  Octavian laughed. “A beautiful creature, eh? Don’t let her looks deceive you, ladies and gentlemen, this beastie is a killer.” He tapped a silver serving spoon on the serrated teeth and they made a musical sound, something like a child’s xylophone. “Hollow. You can hear them coming sometimes, if they gnash these hollow teeth. But they still manage to kill our sea farmers with unfortunate regularity—we lose perhaps four dozen citizens to these beasties every year, far more than we lose to sharks, picked off in the seagrass fields—the creature scissors them in half in one bite, usually. That is why we call it the orphanmaker.”

  “They eat you so you eat them,” the Vicar said with a grin and gulped his wine.

  Octavian nodded. “Yes. Such is the way of the underwater world. Eat or be eaten. Destroy or be destroyed. There is no such thing as prisoners.”

  Buckle looked at Sabrina, who stared uncertainly at the beastie. Crankshafts were an inland clan; they lived on meat and greenhouse vegetables. Fish could be traded for and it wasn’t unusual to find common seafood of one sort or another popping up in one of the Punchbowl market stalls, but exotic undersea creatures were unusual and people rarely developed a taste for them.

  “It’s moving,” Sabrina whispered.

  Buckle peered at the orphanmaker. Its flanks rippled back and forth, faintly, the flesh beneath shivering the rainbow prisms on the scales. Something was moving around inside the orphanmaker, indeed.

  “Food should be dead when you eat it,” Buckle muttered.

  “Aye,” Sabrina whispered, stabbing a crawling tentacle appetizer with her fork.

  “I rather like it,” the Vicar said. “It is a food with possibilities.”

  Two more servants entered, carrying small red clay jugs which they uncapped and set at equidistant points along the table. Buckle caught a whiff of the contents of his jug—a horrible reek of rotten fish—and gagged.

  “Ah, the garum sauce is here!” Octavian announced, taking a deep, appreciative sniff from one of the jugs. He clapped his hands and accepted a large bladed knife from Philo. “I suggest that you slather your meal with it—it sweetens it up.”

  The chamber went silent as Octavian plunged the knife into the side of the orphanmaker. The intrusion increased the swarming activity of whatever was moving around inside of it. The wet, rasping slither of the knife sawing through the orphanmaker’s thick scales made Buckle oddly queasy and he took a big swallow of wine.

  The pink flesh of the orphanmaker split open under Octavian’s knife and the dark red gash was immediately filled with what looked like a hundred shaking red worms. Tubular red bodies spilled forth, legs scrambling, antennae jerking, claws slicking. The orphanmaker was stuffed with lobsters.

  Philo moved quickly around the table, placing a small but heavy pewter mallet beside each plate. Marius stepped away from the table at this point but Octavian did not seem to care.

  “Never, never shall you ever eat something as fine as these lobsters,” Octavian enthused. “You see, once the orphanmaker is cooked we stuff it with live lobsters, who gorge themselves on the flesh all night long. The lobsters are immune to the poison, you see, the acids in their bodies absorb it and render it benign. But the orphanmaker’s chemistry cooks the lobsters alive—it cooks the meat without killing them. Isn’t that astounding? Then you can eat the lobster, you see, which, after stuffing itself all night with orphanmaker, marinates its own flesh and takes on the same exquisite taste as the beastie. Break one open and feast—I dare say you shall never taste anything quite like it, or more enjoyable.”

  “I appreciate the expense of serving such delicacies,” the Vicar said, looking at the lobsters as if he had already tired of them. “But now that the show is over I would suggest we return to the matter at hand, Octavian.”

  “Ah, but the show is far from over, my dear Vicar,” Octavian said, grabbing his mallet and bringing it down upon an advancing lobster with a loud, shell-busting crack. “The show is far from over.”

  XXV

  TITUS AND BELARIUS

  The table surface crawled with dozens of red lobsters with rough armor jackets, snapping claws and scrabbling legs, though the creatures were in poor condition from their alien juice cooking, staggering and blind. Philo and servants dashed about, collecting the lobsters, expertly binding their claws and legs with quick twists of green seaweed shoots and delivering them, one after another, into jerking piles on everyone’s plates.

  “Eat, my guests, eat!” Octavian enthused, ripping a large claw off his lobster and cracking it open to expose the light pink meat inside.

  “I’d like an assurance from you,” the Vicar said, his demeanor noticeably darker than it had been the moment before, “that the Atlanteans have made a commitment to their pact with the Founders clan.”

  Buckle looked at Odessa; she hadn’t touched any of her food but rather kept her cool green eyes on Sabrina, who stared right back.

  “All possibilities are still on the table,” Octavian said, full of his own momentum, high in the catbird seat. “So many possibilities and potential outcomes.”

  “That was not what you told me before,” the Vicar replied, his voice shifting low and quiet, menacing.

  Buckle heard a number of boots approaching, leather soles padding softly across carpet from the opposite archway, and fought the urge to jump to his feet. An Atlantean officer marched into the room, a tall man with a rectangular face dressed in high-ranking Roman armor similar to that of Marius except his robe and helmet brush were purple instead of red. Behind the tall officer walked two older men, both wearing white togas with purple trim, both looking indignant and frightened. Two purple-robed soldiers loomed at their backs.

  “Ah! Now the guests are all here, finally,” Octavian announced. “And the scene can be set.”

  “Apologies, First Consul,” the tall officer said. “The senators would not come willingly. They had to be arrested.”

  “That is most unfortunate, Horatus,” Octavian replied. “Senators should be loyal, don’t you think?”

  “What is the meaning of this, Octavian?” the older of the two senators, a man with a shock of white hair and a pugilist’s nose, roared with a powerful voice made for the pulpit. “This is an outrage!” Buckle saw his eyes widen when he notic
ed the Vicar.

  Octavian tossed aside his lobster claw and clapped his hands together. “Captain Buckle, may I introduce to all of you the leader of the official opposition in the senate, my good enemy Titus Septillus, and his boot-lapping lackey Belarius.”

  “Does loyalty to one’s own ideals warrant such name-calling, First Consul?” Belarius asked pleasantly. He was a well-built man with a handsome face and he held himself with far more grace than Titus.

  “I ask again, Octavian. What is the meaning of this?” Titus repeated.

  “You always wish to be included in important matters of state, my dear Titus,” Octavian said. He was relishing the moment, Buckle realized. “And so here we are. This is the Vicar, envoy of the Founders. But wait, I do believe that you and the Vicar have met before, have you not?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure, no,” Titus replied smoothly.

  “I’ve never seen this senator before,” the Vicar said. “Be careful with what games you choose to play, Octavian.”

  “Games?” Octavian said. “I am too old for games. Ah, I am mistaken then. Wouldn’t be the first time.” He laughed. It was a smug, dark, self-satisfied sound. “Everyone please sit and indulge in the orphanmaker. More food is coming, far too much of it. The vomitorium is down the hall should any of you feel the need to overindulge.”

  Philo pulled out an empty bench but Titus and Belarius did not move, staring at it with trepidation. “With all due respect, First Consul,” Titus said. “I want to know why we have been brought here.”

  Octavian swung his mallet down atop another lobster, resulting in another crack of carapace, a splatter of blue-black liquid and the sickly wet smack of crushed flesh. “Sit down, Senator. I have invited you, Titus, not for your brilliant etiquette and table manners, but because we have a problem.”

  “Surely any problem the First Consul may have should be brought to the floor of the Senate and not here, in his private chamber filled with Praetorian knives.” Titus replied.