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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “I know what to name her,” Buckle had said as Balthazar threw up his hands and wandered off into the sitting room to smoke his pipe.

  “Kellie of Kells!” Buckle shouted again, the puppy squirming in his hands, her hot tongue working hard under his chin. The Book of Kells was an illustrated Irish manuscript of considerable age, and Buckle’s mother had inherited a copy that had somehow survived The Storming. She loved the book. Buckle did not have many memories of his mother, but he did remember her saying once, as she tucked him into bed after a nightmare, that she often dreamt in its colors.

  For a short time, there had been no response from the sitting room, except a lazy puff of smoke drifting in through the doorway. “Kellie it is, then,” Balthazar finally grumbled.

  “You’d better dunk that mangy hound in vinegar and scrub it until its fur falls off,” Balthazar had shouted with false gruffness. “It is lousy with fleas! And it’s not sleeping in the house. Not over my dead body!”

  Of course Kellie slept in Buckle’s bed that night (both of them ended up having to take a bath in vinegar) and nearly every night since, wherever Buckle laid his head.

  And, on the roof of a zeppelin three years later, it was the bark of this once flea-bitten dog that saved Buckle’s life.

  TANGLERS

  KELLIE’S BARK WAS A HIGH-PITCHED squeal of warning. Buckle knew he was in trouble. A dog could sense a tangler coming. But a tangler came so fast the warning usually only amounted to a second or two.

  But it was enough.

  “Tanglers!” Max shouted.

  Buckle grabbed Boyd by the collar of her work coat and threw both himself and her flat. The skin fabric bounced and snapped back under his weight, and for an instant he feared he might have impaled himself on the repair needle, but it was still clenched in his hand.

  A huge shadow slashed over Buckle, its wings blocking out the sky, the claws snapping like giant scissors. He had an impression of a feathered riot of blue, crimson, green, Roman purple, white, and yellowy orange, the velociraptor body beneath ripped with scaly muscle, the arms and legs tipped with talons as big as butcher’s knives.

  The huge beastie missed and then it was gone, diving over the starboard side.

  Max’s blackbang musket boomed. Buckle jerked his head up to see the wind snatch away a big puff of black smoke as a second tangler dove down upon them.

  The second tangler spun wildly, dead, gut shot. Max’s musket had done its work. But it was plummeting toward them, the great wings blocking out the sky.

  The nightmare head flopped back and forth atop its sinew-wrapped neck, the kookaburra beak and sweeping skull crest dominated by big amber eyes that were bottomless and ancient.

  Even when a tangler was dead, the yellow eyes still glowed for weeks.

  The tangler slammed down with the resounding wet thump of a flesh-bound locomotive.

  Part of the tangler—probably a wing—walloped Buckle, hurling him across the roof, knocking the air out of him. He heard the tangler bounce off the canvas, and caught a glimpse of its spinning corpse disappearing over the starboard side.

  Buckle lay stunned and gasping. It was as if he were staring up at the gray sky from the bottom of a well dancing with white sparkles. The sounds of ripping fabric and snapping tangler bones echoed in his brain. Was Marian Boyd still in his arms? He could not tell.

  Buckle heard shouting. Kellie was barking up a storm. He shook his head to rattle his senses back into order, and he suddenly became aware that he was sliding, the torrent of wind pushing him through something slick. He dug his gloved fingers into the slippery skin until he found the line of a superstructure girder and stopped his movement. Another shake of his head failed to knock the blur out of his vision. Panic surged inside him. One tangler was still out there. And that one had surely zeroed in on him.

  Somewhere in the foggy distance he heard Max shout the order: “Reload!”

  RELOAD!

  MAX KNEW THINGS WERE BAD. Very bad. Hunching back down the stepladder in the breach hole, she grunted as she lowered the stunned Boyd, splattered with blue-green tangler guts, into the waiting arms of Tuck. Boyd had been within easy reach after the tangler strike. Buckle and Kellie, however, had been knocked flying, their safety lines twisting and squeaking at the lip of the hole.

  Ivan and Ambrose frantically reloaded the musket on the catwalk: it took more than thirty seconds to reload a blackbang musket, and they didn’t have thirty seconds. The surviving tangler would have already looped under the zeppelin, climbed high into the sky, and set its angle to dive again.

  They should have prepared two muskets.

  Max drew her pistol and planted her boot on the stepladder, launching her lithe body up onto the roof. She hunched low in the whipping wind. The area around the breach was a mess—the tangler collision had pocked the envelope with five or more jagged sinkholes; wobbling gobs of blue-green guts slimed everything.

  Max couldn’t see Kellie but she could hear her—the dead tangler’s bounce must have knocked the dog into the air and over the side, and left her dangling by her safety cable along the flank of the airship.

  But Kellie, although her situation was probably unpleasant, was not the one in absolute jeopardy. Tanglers had tunnel vision as hunters: once a tangler chose a victim it would continue to attack that one target repeatedly until it made a meal of it or the tangler was dead.

  And the target was Captain Buckle.

  Buckle was about thirty feet aft of Max’s position at the breach. He was obviously discombobulated, head down, crumpled on his stomach with one hand clutching his safety cable and the fingers of the other sunk into the skin, straining for a grip amidst wind-blasted streams of blue-green tangler guts. He might be badly hurt. She couldn’t tell. But one thing was certain—he was a sitting duck.

  Max immediately moved toward her captain in a crouch, the wind causing her to slip and slide along the skin. There was no hesitation in her action: the overwhelming desire to protect Buckle consumed every inch of her being, to the detriment of everything else. She was his protector, the shield on his arm, the body between him and the bullet.

  But she still had to be careful.

  In her haste, she had not hooked up to a safety line.

  She reached Buckle and grabbed the collar of his coat, lifting him up onto all fours. He felt heavy and unsteady. She shot a quick glance at the featureless pale sky and saw nothing. But she could feel the tangler coming. She could feel it in the skin on her back.

  “Captain!” she yelled.

  Buckle raised his head. Splatters of tangler blood, exposed to the wind, skittered across his face in rivers. Max realized that he was looking at her without focusing his eyes. He mumbled something she couldn’t make out. It wasn’t time for conversation anyway. She planted both hands on the scruff of his jacket collar and dragged him back toward the breach.

  She heard Kellie barking. The tangler was back.

  Max released Buckle and spun, whipping out her pistol and pointing it at the sky.

  She caught the tangler fluttering above her barrel sight, hurtling down on them like a meteor.

  Max pulled the trigger. The blackbang pistol erupted with a dull thud, the puff of smoke instantly sucked away by the wind.

  The tangler swerved and dodged her shot. It veered and vanished down the starboard side. Moments later Max heard a smattering of musket shots from below. The alerted crew was firing at the tangler. But only a lucky shot would take the elusive creature down.

  Max had thirty seconds before the tangler came back again. She jammed her pistol in her holster, took hold of Buckle’s safety line, and tried to pull him, but her boots kept slipping in the loose, gooey mire; she couldn’t throw her weight into it, not with the wind brutally straight-arming her, constantly knocking her off balance, threatening to throw her over the side.

  She wasn’t going to get the captain back inside this way. Not in thirty seconds, she wasn’t.

  “Ivan!” Max screamed. Sh
e knew that he could not hear her down inside the Eagle deck.

  Kellie howled with fury. Max pushed Buckle flat and stood over him, her eyes on the sky. She drew her sword.

  Come on, Buckle, stay lucky.

  A CERULEAN SLIP

  TEN SECONDS LATER, MAX REALIZED something wasn’t right. With her head tilted up, the blade of her saber gleaming under her eyes, she saw that the sky above her was empty. She spun around. But she already knew she wasn’t going to make it. She glimpsed a flapping shadow coming at her with only an instant before the impact. The clever beastie had made its third attack low and level and straight at Max’s back.

  An instinctive gasp of terror sucked freezing air into her lungs. Adrenaline and muscle fired, seeking to aid survival, but she didn’t even have time to raise her sword.

  From the corner of her eye she saw a blackbang musket flash at the lip of the hole.

  The tangler swerved and careened to the left, its huge talons, outstretched to their farthest extent, tearing the air as they sliced past. But the monstrous left wing slammed into Max, knocking her over the starboard side of the Pneumatic Zeppelin.

  For a heartbeat Max plummeted in a whirlpool of confusion. She knew she was falling. The dreaded “Cerulean slip.” Her brain shook itself loose of the concussion. She blinked and saw the massive tan flank of the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s envelope rushing upward in front of her. She had one instant left to save herself or there would be nothing between her and her grave but three thousand feet of air. She raised her saber with both hands and drove it into the blurry wall of fabric rushing past her. The blade cut the skin like paper, leaving a long rip down the side of the envelope without slowing her down.

  For a moment Max thought it wasn’t going to work. What a nice fix. Not only would she fail in her attempt to save the captain, but she would cut the airship nearly in half before falling to her own doom.

  In the next moment the sword handle yanked and bit in her hands, slowing down as the blade lost its cutting momentum against the stiffened fabric; it bumped through a set of heavy stitches before jerking to a stop that nearly separated her arms from her shoulder sockets. Max was dangling now, battered about in the slipstream, only ten feet above the drop off where the envelope veered inward to the belly of the balloon. She couldn’t hold on there for long. She looked up: the four-story-high vertical rent slashed by her saber flapped ominously above. It was her only way back in. Leveraging her body up with both of her hands on her sword hilt, she desperately kicked and pulled, but could not reach the gap.

  BUCKLE CAN’T FLY

  ROMULUS BUCKLE SNAPPED OUT OF his haze, assisted by a cold slap of wind. His back hurt. His legs hurt. It hurt when he breathed. His eyes focused on the depthless chasm of the sky and the vast hump of the zeppelin’s back, the gap between him and the breach a rippling swamp of blue-green guts and blood.

  He saw Ivan’s head and shoulders pop up in the breach. He was heaving hand over hand on Buckle’s safety line, yanking Buckle forward in jerks as his hands plowed through the muck. Ivan shouted at him, but the wind stole the sound before he could make it out.

  He heard Kellie, somewhere nearby, barking furiously.

  Buckle’s brain flashed. The tangler.

  His heart leapt in his chest. He scrambled into a crouch, stumbling as his taut safety line yanked him forward.

  He was only ten feet from Ivan and the Eagle’s Walk.

  But once again he was too late.

  He clawed at the pistol in his belt, but his fingers were slick and numb.

  This time the tangler came in unhindered. It swooped into the gap between Buckle and Ivan—so low that the ends of its talons slashed the envelope in long, serrated rips—and snipped the safety line between them as if it were a piece of string. And, having learned a trick from the last pass, the tangler dragged its right wing, catching Buckle flush across the back, catapulting him into the air and over the side.

  Romulus Buckle sailed out into the empty sky. Everything seemed nonsensical. He felt like a horse had just kicked him in the back. He watched his pistol wobbling as it fell, and it was falling much faster than he was for some particular reason.

  In the next moment, as the buffeting air thundered around him, Captain Buckle realized that he was in a world of trouble.

  He saw the Pneumatic Zeppelin above, his gigantic air machine trailing streams of white vapor and black smoke as it churned across the high heavens. And even though the Pneumatic Zeppelin was very big, it was rapidly getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

  The severed end of Buckle’s safety line lashed back and forth above him and he unhooked it from his harness. It slithered away in the air as he fell beyond it. He looked to the earth, where the white-brown Santa Monica Mountains slowly, inexorably rose up to bury him in their bosom with one tremendous slap.

  Buckle had two parachutes—a main and a reserve—ready to deploy from the brass canister on the back of his harness. But if he pulled the rip cord and opened the parachute, he was doomed: suspended in a lazy float, he’d be cut to shreds by the tangler. He searched the sky for any sign of the flying carnivore. There was another attack coming, he was certain of that, and it would be from behind.

  Buckle took a firm grip on his saber and slowly drew it, the vertical force of the air making his arm wobble.

  He twisted around.

  The tangler was there, right on top of him, hurtling in, wings swept out, coming straight at his back.

  Buckle swung his sword in an arc, aiming to lop off the tangler’s head. The beastie flung its head aside. The saber caught nothing but air. The tangler’s talons snapped, snatching the sword out of Buckle’s grasp before chopping the blade in half. The two pieces of sword fell in glittering spirals toward the snowy ground below, chasing after the lost pistol.

  Buckle glanced around. The tangler, of course, had vanished. He considered pulling his rip cord. He only had a few seconds before it was too late to do so. But a parachute just guaranteed a gruesome death by tangler.

  Buckle realized that something was pattering rapidly against his forearm: it was the nine-inch repair needle fluttering alongside his wrist, still attached by its leather strap. A desperate plan bubbled, half-formed but urgent, in his mind. With his cold-numbed hands, he grabbed the needle and buried the base of it in his fist.

  He had one last chance.

  Back and forth his eyes searched the gray sky, seeking the little black dot that would explode into the five-hundred-pound tangler coming at him at the speed of nightmares. If the tangler swooped in with its barbed talons leading the way, Buckle’s plan had a chance. If it didn’t, well, maybe he could take the stinking beastie down with him anyway.

  What a damned pill, a captain falling off his airship. Falling into the sky. Actually he had been knocked off, so maybe that didn’t count.

  Buckle kept whipping his head around, trying to catch a glimpse of the tangler. It was there in a moment, a dark shadow in the upper corner of his right eye, diving down upon him from above. Buckle angled his body so the rushing air spun him around to face his attacker.

  The tangler was coming too fast. It was almost on top of him, its wings spread wide, neck arched, head high, the talons aquiver, coiled to split him wide open.

  Buckle yanked the main chute ripcord. The parachute burst out of its canister and mushroomed open, hitting the tangler with a brutal, buttery wallop. The furious tangler’s beak split though the silk that had swallowed it, followed by the massive head, while the talons shredded their way through beneath. Buckle jerked at the end of his harness and jackknifed upward, crashing into the sprawling mass of tangler and parachute. The force of the collision knocked the wind out of him, but he clamped his arms and legs around the throat of the thrashing beastie.

  The ruptured folds of the parachute pounded Buckle’s body. He saw a splatter of his own bright red blood on the silk flapping against his head. But in that instant, he was immortal, overwhelmed by being so close to the alien monster, the c
obblestoned scales of its neck hot against his cheek, the surge of the gigantic heart pumping just beneath, the overripe vegetable smell of it, the eternal depths of the huge left eye, yellow as all the history of the world, glaring down at him.

  The tangler released a guttural scream that vibrated so violently it stung every inch of Buckle’s skin.

  He had hitched a ride on a tornado.

  The outraged tangler, its wings still largely pinned by the parachute, twisted back and forth as it sought to shake Buckle loose. It whacked him with the length of its beak, each blow threatening to cave in Buckle’s rib cage. The talons whirled beneath, seeking a hold on a boot or calf.

  Buckle only had one chance. He swung his arm back and, with all the force every sinew, muscle, and tendon in his body could muster, plunged the repair needle into the tangler’s left eye. The needle sank its entire length into the socket, soft as a bag of jelly, until it jammed into something hard. A geyser of amber liquid spewed from the gashed orb and was snatched away by the rushing air.

  The tangler released a deafening bellow and wrenched its body violently, throwing Buckle loose before it went limp.

  Buckle didn’t go far. He was now falling alongside the dead tangler, anchored to it in a swirling morass of tattered silk and knotted parachute lines.

  His situation had not markedly improved.

  HOLLYWOOD LAND

  THIRTY SECONDS. THAT WAS IT. Thirty seconds of free fall before his death created a home for a groundhog in the Santa Monica Mountains. Buckle clicked open the safety latch on the main-chute emergency-release switch on his harness. Flipping the emergency switch would fire an explosive bolt inside his main-chute canister, ejecting the main parachute anchor so the reserve chute could be deployed safely without fouling. Buckle hit the switch. The bolt fired—another solid kick in the back—and the parachute lines waffling all around him suddenly went slack, joining in the battering delivered by the loose folds of the parachute.