Buckle winked at Nero. “Ballast. Release all hydrogen into the cells. Slam, bang. Up ship!”
“Aye, Captain,” Nero responded, cranking his hydrogen reserve-tank wheels. “All hydrogen across the board. Slam, bang!”
The mighty, eerie hiss of every reserve hydrogen tank heaving open along the length of the ship filled the air. The Pneumatic Zeppelin trembled like a baby bird with new wings.
“Come on, old girl,” Buckle said. “It’s your sky.”
The airship released a mighty shudder and groan.
“Reserve tanks empty, Captain!” Nero shouted. “All cells close to maximum capacity.”
The Pneumatic Zeppelin surged, slowly, even on her keel. She creaked at every joint, knot, and cable as she escaped upward from the press of the earth. The swirling yellow buglights rocked gently outside the gondola, everything inside floating in the bioluminescent green glow of boil in the glass—altimeter dials, deflection pointers, water compasses, gyroscopes, thermometers, thermohygrometers, and the inclinometers with their bubbles. And then the behemoth lifted free with a great sigh of canvas, a small moon breaking away into the moonlit sky.
Buckle’s heart rejoiced with the air under his feet, the sway of the deck cradling his spirit. “Good girl! Good girl!” he shouted. “Max! You and your repair teams are wizards.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Max responded, all business, her eyes close on her instruments. “Positive buoyancy holding steady.”
“Ten feet altitude,” Sabrina announced, watching her dials. “Twenty feet. Equilibrium good. Static inertia good. Thirty feet.”
A voice crackled through the chattertube hood. “Emergency! Emergency! Prisoner has escaped!”
“Of course this could not have gone smoothly,” Buckle said in a droll tone.
“He jumped!” the chattertube voice screamed. “Blue bloody blazes! He jumped! Starboard side!”
Scully leapt to the open starboard gunwale, leveraging his musket over the rail.
Buckle stepped to the gunwale alongside Scully and peered down at the dark, silvery-white mass of Catalina Island, now forty feet below.
“There he is!” Scully shouted, swinging his musket to take aim. The steampiper prisoner had appeared, dashing through a snowy ravine; he was still locked into his wrist manacles, but he had gotten free of his leg irons somehow.
Buckle pushed Scully’s barrel aside. “Let him go, Sergeant.”
Scully gave Buckle an incredulous look. Then he nodded. “Aye, Captain Buckle. Letting him go, sir.”
Buckle ducked back into the gondola and replaced De Quincey at the helm wheel, wanting to feel the life of the rudder with his own hands. He felt strangely encouraged that he had let the steampiper live. There would be far too much killing for anyone’s taste in the days to come.
“Eighty-five souls aboard,” Sabrina announced with a wry smile in her voice.
“Ninety feet,” Welly said.
Buckle could have kissed his zeppelin, his giant daughter, as she rose into the darkling night. The familiar gray clouds, forever shrouding the moon, supported the soft ceiling of the sky, while the black sea anchored the earth beneath. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was a happy shadow, slipping through the netherworld, heading for home.
“All ahead standard,” Buckle said into the chattertube, cocking the chadburn handle forward, ringing the bell. The engineering bell rang immediately after, the sister dial cranking round to match the position of the first.
“All ahead standard, aye!” echoed the affirmation from engineering.
Buckle looked at his crew, nestled around him on the bridge, and felt more fatherly toward them than he ever had before. “We shall get home safe and sound, I am certain, my friends,” he said. “But there are many trials and tribulations ahead. Of that we can be certain as well.”
Everyone nodded.
“Aye. We know this,” Sabrina replied. “And each and every one of us is with you for the long haul, Captain. We shall follow you to the end of the world.”
“Wherever fate might cast us?” Buckle asked warmly, smiling at the strong faces around him. And what of the mysteries afoot in the underground of his mind: the looming threat of the Founders, the tangled tales of Katzenjammer Smelt, Sabrina’s red hair, and where Elizabeth might be at that very moment?
“To the end of the world it is then, mates,” Captain Romulus Buckle said, cranking the rudder wheel over to starboard. “To the end of the world.”
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EVERY NOVEL IS A LABOR of love, and there are many wonderful people who have shared this journey with me. I am fortunate to be the son of Richard and Janet Preston, my stalwart patrons, whose inexhaustible love and support have always fueled my sense of who I am and what I must do. My wife and eagle-eyed reader, Shelley, whose love, positivity, and enthusiasm keeps me afloat, and our two daughters, Sabrina and Amelia, who inspire every word I write. I must also thank my sisters, Marsha and Joanna, and all of the family and friends who have lavished me with encouragement along the way.
Special thanks go out to Julia Kenner, a tremendous writer and friend, who generously opened doors for the manuscript. I must also thank Trident Media Group and my first agent, the fantastic Adrienne Lombardo, who championed this book and believed in Romulus Buckle as much as I did. Heartfelt thanks go out to my new agent, Alyssa Eisner Henkin, my brilliant caretaker, who is currently constructing ambitious plans for our future. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wizardly and most patient editor Alex Carr and everyone on my 47North team, and also to my incomparable development editor, Jeff VanderMeer.
I must also express my thanks to Kellie, a little dog whose memory, in some lovely, wonderful way, inspired the writing of this steampunk series.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD ELLIS PRESTON, JR. IS fascinated by the steampunk genre, which he sees as a unique storytelling landscape. Romulus Buckle and the City of the Founders is the first installment in his new steampunk series, The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin. Richard has also written for film and television. He lives in California and haunts Twitter @RichardEPreston.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders by Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.
The adventure is far from over, and the zeppelin flies again in Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (coming soon). Please enjoy the following excerpt from the author and 47North.
THE MOUNTAINS OF TEHACHAPI
CAPTAIN ROMULUS BUCKLE WAS A zeppelineer, and zeppelineers, with their instinctive affinity for air machines, never felt entirely at home on the steaming back of a horse, especially a horse scrambling up a precarious path cut into the icebound face of a mountain. Buckle grumbled curses, uncomfortable and random, into the mothball-musky wolf fur of his parka hood. Ice particles pricked inside his nose. Through the tunnel of his hood, the trail appeared to jerk back and forth as the horse clambered upward. Now and again a snap of freezing air punched in and stung the still-feeling edges of the otherwise numb skin on his cheeks and nose.
Buckle’s goggles had frozen over a while before, leaving him near blind, but the fur lining insulated a good chunk of his face; the hoary lenses transformed the world into a bouncing shimmer. His horse, a coffee-colored brute named Cronos, was experienced on the trails—Cronos knew every cleft and cranny, according to Buckle’s hired guide, Pinter— and Buckle had been told to leave the horse be and let him mountain-goat the treacherous heights the way he knew how to climb them.
Putting his life in the keeping of an aggressive horse he did not know did not please Buckle. But if he wanted to scale the mountain now, this was the only way he could do it. Dog teams would be useless on this kind of terrain.
“Time to wake up, Captain!” the glassy wobble that was Pinter shouted back over the rump of his horse, five paces ahead. “We’re headin’ over into the soft stretch of the traverse now, you hear? Into the pass. The wind don’t bother to be so cantankerous t
here. But keep yer musket handy—we’re ramblin’ into saber-tooth territory!”
Buckle lifted his chin out of the wolf fur and shouted, “Aye!” He barely trusted the fidgety mountain man—with his gaunt features, uneven head, and half-wild eyes—but the locals down in Tehachapi had insisted that Pinter was the best they had, and one of the few who might, for a sizable payment, be crazy enough to take him high up the mountain in the Bloodfreezer storm season. It was the possibility of the Bloodfreezers that had kept the Arabella, the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s two-hundred-foot launch, moored in the town below, not far from the ruins of the old Crankshaft stronghold, and forced Buckle to make his ascent on horseback. Despite the frowns from Sabrina and Max, Buckle had insisted that he make the journey alone. He was not about to risk the launch and the lives of his crew to prove a theory—to pursue an obsession—of his own.
Buckle clamped his stiff fingers around the stock of his blackbang musket—something of a feat in thick gloves—and lifted it out of its sheath, laying the heavy weapon across his lap and flipping the pommel flap over its middle to protect it from the cold. A wrapping of oily rags kept the firing mechanisms from freezing solid—a necessity that also promised some delay if he ever needed to bring the firearm into action quickly.
Buckle grunted. He had three blackbang pistols holstered inside his parka—their wooden butts poked his kidneys as the horse bounced—and he trusted his own pistols and saber more than a clunky musket in a scrape, in any case.
The horse lunged up the steep path, delivering a whack to Buckle’s spine that made him miss the smooth glide of his airship. The Pneumatic Zeppelin was moored in the dockyard of the Devil’s Punchbowl stronghold, fifty miles to the southeast, undergoing repairs to the extensive damages she had suffered rescuing his father, Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft, from the City of the Founders over three weeks before.
Once freed from the clutches of the Founders, Balthazar had been busy: he and the Crankshaft council dispatched messengers to every corner of the land, each carrying an invitation to a secret parley with the purpose of forming an alliance against the Founders. Many clans had responded—Imperials, Alchemists, Tinskins, Brineboilers, and Gallowglasses—promising to send their ambassadors. Suspicions ran deep in the blood between the clans, but if the rumors were true, if the Founders and their Grand Armada were gearing up for a mass invasion, then to stand alone meant annihilation. And they all knew it.
In the meantime, Balthazar had begrudgingly given Buckle leave to take the Arabella up to Tehachapi in search of a shipwreck. On the night of the Tehachapi Blitz, more than a year before, Buckle had seen one of the attacking Imperial airships suffer a fatal hit—a Crankshaft cannonball had struck home, causing a multichambered hydrogen explosion that had lit up the sky—and the burning sky vessel, ripped wide open, her engineering gondola obliterated, had yawed wildly to starboard and drifted northeast into the mountains.
Buckle wondered if any of the men aboard the crashed enemy airship had survived. The survivors, if any, would be long gone by now, over a year later. But it was not flesh and blood, nor even bones, that concerned Buckle—he’d be damned happy if each and every one of the attackers had burned alive—but rather the artifacts of the airship itself. The body of the fallen machine would most certainly provide evidence of its owner, the murderer of the Crankshaft clanspeople.
Buckle had seen the Imperial iron crosses on the sky vessel’s flanks as she burned, but the Imperial chancellor, Katzenjammer Smelt, had sworn upon his life that his clan had not attacked the Crankshafts. Buckle did not trust Smelt, but he had to know for sure. And if the airship was not Imperial, to whom did it belong? Buckle’s first instinct was to suspect the Founders: it could only benefit them and their treacheries if they could sow the seeds of conflict between the clans they planned to invade and conquer. Someone was stoking the engines of war, Balthazar had said. If the airship proved to be a Founders craft, then Buckle knew where to begin his search for his sister, Elizabeth, if she was alive. She had disappeared during the Tehachapi Blitz, leaving not a trace, and everyone assumed that she had been incinerated in the bomb blast that had obliterated much of Balthazar’s house. But the word, whispered by the zookeeper Osprey Fowler and confirmed by Balthazar himself, was that Elizabeth was alive, and if alive, she had been taken by someone.
And Buckle would burn heaven and earth to rescue her.
With a jerk of his gallows-tree head, Cronos reached the crest of the trail. He turned in to a crevice in the wall, a gap barely as wide as man and horse, which quickly opened to an interior ravine where the sky crushed down upon a plunging, high-walled valley. Buckle pulled his parka hood back, the ice-rimed fur lining swamping his neck. The cold air donkey-kicked his ears despite his pith helmet and its fur havelock flap, but it was very still and it was bearable. Buckle yanked his goggles up over the front of the helmet and squinted. The weak sunlight reflecting off the snow packed an uncomfortable level of glare, but it was a small price to pay to be able to see properly. The sky was gray as old iron, rippled with clouds. Caves dotted the steep walls of the valley, their irregular mouths dark and menacing, half-hidden by dense clutches of fir and pine— the needles glittered with ice and danced with black-and-white chickadees that chirped as they knocked little avalanches of snow from the branches.
Cronos rocked up and down, humping through the deep snow, though his work was eased by following Pinter’s big brown horse as it broke the trail. Buckle coughed; a cloud of vapor burst in the air in front of his face and vanished.
Pinter jerked the reins of his horse and stopped, the bottoms of his stirrups leaving troughs in the deep snow, and turned in the saddle to peer at Buckle. “Best to be quiet as a mole up here, sky dog,” Pinter whispered through vocal cords roughened by cold and gin. “The sabertooths, they tend toward the night, but it would be prudent not to announce the servin’ up of horseflesh on their doorstep, if you catch my meaning, sir.” Pinter smiled, stretching his skin, leathery and large pored, over a long, narrow jaw.
“Aye,” Buckle replied. The blanketing silence of the ravine muffled sound. His voice barely made it to his own ears. The landscape was oppressive. Not enough sky.
Pinter grinned, a sudden tightening of the muscles around his mouth, exposing two stumpy yellow teeth wobbling in purple gums. He drew two torches from his saddlebag. At his waist he carried a hollow bull’s horn that glowed a yellow-cream color with the fire carried within it, fed by slow-burning snake grass. Fire horns were vastly more reliable than a match or tinder on the windswept mountain, a place where torches proved the best defense against the beasties that lurked there. Pinter had given a fire horn to Buckle, and he had laid its long leather strap across his shoulder so the horn was cradled at his waist.
“Just in case, just in case,” Pinter muttered as he pressed the mouth of the horn to each torch in turn, igniting the tar-soaked wrappings at their heads. “The beasties don’t like tar. They shy away from the flame and stink. So they tend not to swallow ye if yer holdin’ one.” The man laughed at his little joke, a rattling, bronchial chuckle.
“I know about sabertooths,” Buckle said, annoyed at the volume of Pinter’s noises. “Keep it down, will you, mate?”
Pinter’s laugh choked off and his eyes narrowed. He thrust one of the torches into Buckle’s hand before whirling his horse around in the snow.
“Then you know enough to keep movin’,” Pinter barked in a whisper. “Keep moving, eh?”
Cronos jerked forward, following Pinter’s lead without a need for spurring.
Buckle did not have any affinity for Pinter. No affinity at all. But the mountain man knew where the wreck of the mysterious airship was located—at least, he claimed he did.
And right now that had to be good enough for Romulus Buckle.
But he did not have to like it.
SHIPWRECK
THE SNOWDRIFTS IN THE RAVINE shallowed, making the movement of the horses smoother, and within twenty minutes, Buckle and Pinter cr
ested the northeast end of the ravine. Buckle found himself overlooking a wide, gentle slope leading down into a snow-bound valley curving between two craggy peaks. Even if he was as odd as a square peg, Pinter proved, pointing his heavily gloved finger, that he was no liar. For there, nearly in the center of the valley floor, flattened except for one towering stretch of her starboard-side girders, lay the sprawling wreck of a gigantic airship that once had been nearly the size of the Pneumatic Zeppelin herself.
“There she lies in her grave,” Pinter announced, lifting his canteen for a swig of something unlikely to be water. “Dead as dead as dead be—but the dead always be a mystery.”
Pinter offered his canteen, but Buckle shrugged it off. It took him a moment to find his voice in his tightened throat. “No thanks, Pinter,” Buckle rasped. “You are a poet as well as a scout, I see.”
“Sometimes I rhyme, perhaps. But only by a happy accident, sir—a strange tripping of the brainpan,” Pinter said as he screwed the cap back onto his canteen, thought better of it, unscrewed it, and fired back another swig. Buckle caught a sharp whiff of the gin.
Buckle heeled Cronos in the ribs, and the big horse accelerated into a gallop. It did not take much coaxing—the animal was happy to run: the open slope, where the wind had scoured away all but a small crust of snow, was a relief after the deep drifts of the ravine. Pinter released a sudden snort, as if he had been caught off guard by Buckle’s taking of the lead, and spurred his horse behind, awkwardly attempting to replace his canteen cap while balancing a burning torch and the musket across his saddle.
Buckle found himself grinning: it felt good to be aboard a horse at speed, even if he was somewhat uncertain of the huge animal, and the air was bracing and clear. Drifting snowflakes occasionally sparkled here and there, floating down from the sky, falling with such ease and curling gyre that they resembled snow fairies of lore, denizens of the mountain, wafting in to see what machinations consumed the mortal men below.
Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) Page 36
