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

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

Max folded her arms across her chest, satisfied with the work of her crew. They were a competent bunch, if a bit too rowdy, and they would likely accomplish their mission, plopping the duck in the bucket, without her needing to speak a word.

  Max was nervous, but her hands had stopped shaking.

  As Max stared into the empty gray void, she became aware of a thought, a question, lurking under her calculations. She wondered if this was what her brother, Tyro, saw—a passing nothingness, always. Wounded in the Imperial Raid nearly a year before, Tyro had since been trapped in a coma, his breathing sustained by an iron lung. Max felt stricken and lonely without him. She knew little of the peculiarities her Martian blood was supposed to impart to her, but she did know that she and Tyro could share thoughts, even when physically separated.

  But since Tyro’s injury, Max could no longer reach him. She would sit beside his bed for hours, waiting, but no communication ever came. She knew he dreamt, however, and what elements of it she could make out appeared to her as a drifting nothingness, much like the fog around her now.

  And if Tyro dreamt, no matter the context, his brain was still alive.

  The numbers still clicking in her head, Max eyed her compass. “Five minutes to the evacuation point, Mister Bratt.”

  “Five minutes, aye,” Welly affirmed.

  “Object low off the starboard bow!” Banerji shouted, the startle in his voice plain in the chattertube line. “Two o’clock low!”

  Max leapt forward to the nose dome—taking care not to foul her oxygen and chattertube lines—and peered along Banerji’s arm as he pointed into the fog.

  A large cylindrical object was slowly emerging from the mist; it was stationary, coming on only at the snail’s pace speed of the zeppelin, and fortunately low enough to pose no threat of collision.

  “It is a structure of some kind,” Banerji said.

  Welly’s voice burst into the line, fraught with concern. “It looks like—it is a watchtower, Lieutenant!”

  “We shall be seen!” Banerji moaned.

  “Silence!” Max said. The stone turret was most certainly a watchtower, part of the city battlements that could be glimpsed farther below, but it was long abandoned, streaming with white and green seabird guano, and near ready to collapse. “The tower is unmanned.”

  Max saw the tension ease in Welly and Banerji’s backs as the watchtower slowly slid away beneath them. She looked into the tall, open windows of the watchtower and saw a large, ribbed glass lens hanging at an angle in the shadows; the tower had served as a lighthouse once, before the Founders had cut themselves off from the outside world.

  And now the Pneumatic Zeppelin, having just passed over the outer wall of the City of the Founders, was coming to call.

  Max shrugged her shoulders, loosening them up under the thick rubber skirt of her helmet. Her belt was heavy with two pistols and her sword attached, the weight of it riding on the tops of her hips. She wanted to be down below with Buckle and Sabrina and Pluteus, on the run, locking swords with the enemy.

  She desperately wanted to be in the bloody fray.

  But such was not her duty today.

  “City of the Founders below,” Max said.

  CUCUMBER PIE

  BUCKLE AND SABRINA RACED UP the entrance ramp and into the prison anteroom. The air was clearer here, making it easier to breathe. The puttering gray light of the early evening filtered in around the hinges of the huge double doors, mixing with the cold blues of the gas lamps to make the chamber seem lighter than it actually was. Pluteus stood before the doors, jamming pistols into his belt.

  The Ballblasters and Alchemist troopers smoothly reloaded their muskets and pistols. They were all coated in sweat and black powder, and the whites of their eyes stood out against their faces. Scorpius had transferred the still-unconscious Andromeda into Kepler’s burly arms. Wolfgang lingered at Kepler’s elbow, gently wiping blood away from Andromeda’s face. Smelt hovered at the edge of the group, reloading his pistol as he peered at it through his monocle.

  Buckle’s stomach twisted when he saw Balthazar, his face pale, the lips and eyes an unhealthy purple, his hair cast about his face, propped up by the two Ballblasters supporting him under each arm.

  “Last again, Buckle?” Balthazar said weakly, but forcing a grin. “This is getting to be a dangerous habit.”

  “Such are many of his habits, father,” Sabrina whispered, stopping to place her hand gently on Balthazar’s chest. Her face was flushed, as it always was when she was in action, the blood rising close to the surface of her cheeks, lending a brightness to her countenance that not even the layer of gray dust could much dampen, and it made Balthazar’s face seem even more sickly by comparison.

  Buckle strode immediately to Pluteus, who was in a hasty, low conference with Sergeant Scully.

  “We suffered three dead down below, General,” Scully whispered. “Two of ours and one Alchemist trooper. We have seven walking wounded and two supported, including the admiral, sir.”

  Pluteus nodded. Sabrina and Scorpius stepped alongside Buckle.

  Corporal Druxbury emerged from the crowd. “Loaded and ready, General.”

  “Good,” Pluteus said. He turned and looked at Broussard, a Ballblaster who had his ear pressed to the door.

  “It is very quiet outside, sir,” Broussard said to Pluteus. “Quiet as a mouse with a loaded cannon, sir.”

  “It could be a trap,” Pluteus replied, shrugging as he hefted his musket. “Either way, we charge straight into it.”

  A musket ball ripped up the ramp and hit the metal sheathing high on one of the front doors, pinging away and smacking into a granite pillar.

  “Time to go!” Pluteus shouted. “Navigator, stay behind me until we re-form up top.”

  Sabrina stepped behind Pluteus and Scully, their considerable bulk making her look very small in comparison.

  As Buckle moved to join the group, he saw the body of the master of the watch lying on the floor stones just to the right of the doorway. She had been dragged to the side like a sack of dirt, her arms still extended over her head, the hole Buckle’s pistol ball had made in the center of her tunic ringed with a black gunpowder burn from the point-blank shot. He averted his eyes and then forced them back upon her. Look at her, soldier, he told himself. Do not dare try to save yourself the pain of your own handiwork.

  “Now!” Pluteus shouted. He and Scully shoved the doors open as the troopers pointed their thicket of muskets into the widening gap between.

  Wreaths of sea fog surged in upon them in an exhilarating cold, damp slap of fresh air.

  The City of the Founders. The city of eternal fog.

  Buckle did not know what he had expected, but he had not expected this. There was not a soul there to meet them.

  Buckle sucked the salty air into his smoke-tortured lungs in gasps, as did the rest of the company, who stood poised, uncertain, their gun barrels wavering. The gray daylight was weak, bleeding away into the evening. Buckle’s eyes quickly adjusted to the twilight haze after being buried so long in the shadows of the gas-lit subterranean dark.

  Pluteus motioned for the company to move forward and led the way up a cobblestoned ramp; Buckle followed at his shoulder, glancing back and forth. Along with the sea-air salt, he could smell horses, whale oil, and burning coal. This was no ghost town.

  Where were the enemy soldiers? Where was anybody?

  “Quickly, now,” Pluteus hissed, glancing up as a canary sailed out of the prison doorway and flapped up to vanish in the fog.

  Sabrina moved ahead of Pluteus and took a sharp right as the group emerged onto a narrow street. The fog thinned and it became easier to see. Buckle gripped his pistol, searching the high, bulky buildings hemming them in on both sides, his gut cringing as he waited for the sharp crack of a musket blast that never came.

  The fog wrapped the world in near silence, but the jangling of the rescue expedition’s gear and their glove-muffled coughing sounded unsettlingly loud.

 
; Buckle’s boots padded across the neat cobblestones. The street surface, scattered with relatively fresh horse dung and sliced by a deeply cut set of railroad tracks, glistened wetly in the blue-white light of gas lamps affixed at regular intervals to the stone walls. The buildings, mortared blocks of gray-black granite, loomed along both flanks of the street, studded with doorways and staircases, but no windows. The wooden doors, jambs, and lintels were slightly swollen and split from their constant exposure to moisture, but this decay only added depth to their elegantly carved representations of trees, vines, and flowers. It was difficult to measure how tall the buildings were: their upper floors disappeared into a fog ceiling about twenty-five feet up.

  Buckle felt as if he was striding down a tunnel, a tunnel with walls of stone and a ceiling of fog that shifted in density as it drifted, its currents morphing from dark to light and back again, and seemed unearthly.

  Could the rescue expedition be running into a trap? Buckle did not think so. The genius of this operation was the sheer audacity of it: the external defenses of the Founders’ city were legion, but he suspected they were highly vulnerable to exactly this sort of incursion—from the inside. The leaders of the Founders, always looking outward for threats, would have naturally suffered a brief period of confusion, of disbelief, before initiating a response.

  But it had been too long. The authorities in the city surely had been warned. Somebody with a musket should have showed up by now.

  “Keep the pace up, old salts!” Pluteus whispered.

  Pluteus did not need to prod his company; the walking wounded and the unscathed humped along at best speed, carrying Balthazar and the incapacitated Ballblaster with them. Buckle was worried about Balthazar, but he knew the old lion would recover. Buckle was far more concerned about Andromeda Pollux, bloody and limp in Kepler’s arms: with the Founders about to embark on a war of domination, a defensive coalition of Snow World clans would be crippled without Andromeda there to help negotiate the alliances. And there was Katzenjammer Smelt, loping along nearby, his giraffe-like frame conspicuous among the squatter, armor-bound Ballblasters. Buckle would have enjoyed tossing the monocled hyena back into the prison, with the magazine with the bomb in it.

  Buckle caught up with Sabrina as she advanced at a hurried stride, making a sharp left turn down another misty avenue.

  “We are in the Rookeries,” Sabrina said in a low voice, then coughed. “The homes of the workers are here. They will be employed in the underground factories until after sundown. The quitting whistle has yet to sound, so we should not run into too many of them between here and the rendezvous point. But we are approaching the market square and that may pose a problem, even if it’s not active. The children like to play in the open space. And there are often constables loitering there, attempting to seduce the mothers.”

  “But where are the soldiers?” Buckle asked.

  Sabrina shook her head. “It is confounding. I have no answer for it.”

  They passed three horses, scrawny nags shivering under wool blankets, tethered to a hitching post, when the street suddenly opened into a courtyard. Empty tables and stalls emerged from the fog. The building faces and walls were near-black, mottled with coal dust and wet dirt, and punctuated with the occasional yellow burst of caged canaries. There was a surprising amount of color overhead—banners, ribbons, and pennons hung limply from every balcony and window sash, all bright with silken crimson, white, and purple, emblazoned with the silver phoenix. In the middle of the square stood a cracked fountain and three statues—two men and one woman—wearing granite robes, all draped in ribbon. At the base of the statues, four young children stood frozen, staring, their wooden swords and dolls clutched in their hands, emerging like ghosts from the mists of the empty city.

  Buckle took a deep breath. The sight of the urchins, who looked thin and dirty in patchy oilskin jackets, each wrapped at the waist with a colorful sash, did not alarm him. He was worried about the mothers and grandmothers, huddled in a small group just beyond. The women stood still with shock, watching, slack-jawed, as the expedition of foreign clansmen—a bizarre sight as they swung out of the fog in their blood-splattered, gunpowder-blackened armor, carrying their wounded with them—jogged past.

  Once the invaders had clanked and rattled away into the mist, the adults would surely raise the alarm.

  Sabrina continued on across the square, ignoring the citizens, and Buckle hurried to keep pace with her.

  “The cat is out of the bag, now,” Buckle said to Sabrina.

  “They will not do anything,” Sabrina replied, never taking her eyes off the fog ahead.

  “They will not raise the alarm? Why not?” Buckle asked.

  “They just won’t,” Sabrina said.

  There was a distant ba-thump, deep and heavy. A small shockwave shook the earth underfoot, causing the courtyard banners to ripple. The horses stamped and whinnied. The canaries shrieked. Buckle’s fuse had just reached the munitions cache and blown up the underground prison.

  “Alarm raised anyway,” Buckle muttered.

  Sabrina pointed to one of the few tables that sported wares—it was lined with pies, green pies whose tops oozed with a whitish glaze. “Do you see those awful-looking things?” Sabrina asked as they passed the table.

  “Yes,” Buckle answered, glancing back at the mothers and children, who still had not moved, remaining as motionless as the dark statues around them.

  “Cucumber pies,” Sabrina said. “It’s one of the few edible plants they can grow here, cucumbers, and they serve it up so often the people say it will turn your ears green if you live long enough. There is an old Founders nursery rhyme…” Sabrina said with a smile, and to Buckle’s surprise, in a low, sweet, breathless whisper, she sang it:

  “Cucumber, cucumber, cucumber pie,

  I’d rather gnaw on a dead rat raw, or fried.”

  THE TAR PIT GARGOYLES

  BUCKLE INHALED GREAT DRAUGHTS OF cold air as Sabrina led the rescue expedition at a half jog out of the gloomy warrens of the Rookeries and into a wide-open section of the city that contained a railroad yard and huge, circular roundhouses looming in the mist.

  Pluteus signaled for the troopers to form a skirmish line, and they fanned out, their equipment rattling on their belts, their boots clomping across oily gravel and railway tracks. Buckle’s spine tingled. Again, the place was empty, but furnaces still glowed orange in the near distance, and the air was thick with the smell of burning coke. Huge locomotives, sealed up in glass and iron pods to fend off the mustard, sat on the rails, their boilers cold, furnaces dark—with the exception of one, recently arrived, condensation sizzling on her boiler, loud with the pings of contracting metal.

  Canary cages hung everywhere. The little birds were silent, their heads tucked under their shivering wings. Teams of horses, their backs steaming in the wet cold, bobbed their heads in their traces, attached to wagons half unloaded.

  Half unloaded. Buckle tapped Sabrina on the shoulder. “You see the wagons?” he asked.

  “Aye,” Sabrina replied. “Somebody has cleared the road in a hurry.”

  “We are running straight into it,” Pluteus grouched, close at hand.

  Buckle gripped his pistol a little tighter. “Well, there is no going back now, is there?”

  “We are only a few yards from the pickup point,” Sabrina replied.

  They cleared the railway yard and followed Sabrina up the ramp of a large causeway that spanned a good fifty feet across and stretched straight ahead, until it vanished into a vast, silent wall of drifting fog. Even though the mists and the diminishing daylight limited his view, the sense of the vast space around him made Buckle feel a bit heady. Beyond the low walls of the causeway, he could see on both sides huge fountains, each more impressive than the next, each flowing with jet-black water, each topped by great granite gargoyles chiseled from dark corners of the imagination. Ghostly shadows of tall structures lurked in the near distance and where the mists thinned: gothic
arches, ribbed vaulting, and flying buttresses that ascended into slender spires with copper roofs turned ocean green by oxidation.

  “The tar pits!” Sabrina reported.

  Buckle knew where they were. The dark swamp of smoldering oil under the causeways, the black water in the fountains—this was the center of the Founders’ city, the very heart of its foundation: the La Brea tar pits.

  “How much farther to the evacuation point?” Buckle asked Sabrina, who was at his left hip.

  “About a quarter mile,” Sabrina replied. “Two hundred yards as the crow flies.”

  “Hold here a moment, Pluteus,” Buckle said, raising his hand.

  “Halt!” Pluteus ordered softly. “Eyes up!”

  The expedition stopped, everyone breathing heavily and coughing. They were looking a bit too ragged; this was a good time to give them thirty seconds to catch their breath.

  “Pluteus. Wing the message, ‘All is well,’” Buckle said.

  Pluteus looked at Moss, the Ballblaster signalman. “You heard the captain, Mossy. Wings up. All is well.”

  “Yes, General,” Moss replied, twisting a lever on the front of his breastplate. The hermetically sealed bird capsule built into the armor opened with a small hiss of air. He reached into the hatch and pulled out a somewhat frazzled-looking homing pigeon, its blue-green head rapidly cocking back and forth. “All is well,” Moss repeated, selecting one of several prepared scrolls pegged inside the bird chamber and tucking it into a leather sheath attached to the pigeon’s leg. He tossed the pigeon into the air, and after an initial fluttering circle to get its bearings, the bird angled upward and vanished in the mist.

  “Let’s go,” Buckle whispered.

  “Forward!” Pluteus urged, and the expedition resumed its advance along the causeway.

  “Fifty yards to La Brea Square,” Sabrina said, checking her compass.

  The rescue expedition advanced along the causeway in good order as La Brea Square, the center of the sprawling plaza and the Founders’ city, slowly emerged from the fog. The causeway ran between large spheres of fantastic engineering, their glass domes, some at least thirty-five feet high, stained a beautiful amber color by the noxious gases rising from the tar pits. Towering hoods of burnished metal stood between the domes at regular intervals, housing dozens of large fans that hummed quietly, vibrating the atmosphere as they sucked in streaming columns of fog, forcing fresh air down into the labyrinths of factories, mines, foundries, and smithies below.