Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) (10 page)

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 cobblestoned 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

T
HIRTY SECONDS
. T
HAT 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.

Buckle shoved himself away from the snake’s-nest mass of tangler, parachute, and ropes. Something jerked him back. He reached down and found a rope wrapped around his ankle. He swung the razor edge of the repair needle to slash the line, kicked free, and pulled the reserve ripcord.

The reserve parachute popped out perfectly, whiplashing Buckle back into a much slower descent. Stunned and adrift, he felt like he was floating as light as a bubble, after plummeting three thousand feet. The mountain loomed a hundred feet below. Beyond that, to the south, lay the massive Los Angeles
basin, its dense clusters of tall buildings the only things visible above a great sea of yellow-brown fog.

Beneath his boots Buckle saw the tangler, its body somersaulting end over end, until it slammed into the crest of the mountain ridge, disturbing the pristine snow with a whopping
sploosh
of blue-green innards.

The mountain rose up at Buckle too quickly. The reserve chute had been deployed too low and late to give him much of a cushion: he was coming in far too fast for a decent landing. This was going to hurt. He tugged on the control lines waffling next to his ears, aiming to land on the open ridge where the thwacked tangler had plopped. He took deep breaths to rein in his pounding heart. He concentrated on the calm, reassuring sound of the air rippling across the parachute silk…rocking him like a baby. No need for concern. He’d find a big fat snowdrift to land on.

Buckle peered up and caught a glimpse of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
in the sky, high, high above. Sabrina, as first mate, would have taken command now. The airship was on course, southbound. She had not turned around. The mission was too critical to turn back for a dead man, even if it was the captain.

Buckle glared at his boots as they swayed beneath him. It was his mission. He was supposed to rescue Balthazar. Now he was out of the picture, perhaps permanently, if luck didn’t go his way.

The mountain crest rushed up to meet him in a dirty white wave of frozen bushes and snow. He swung past the towering letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign, each one stained a weird gray yellow, propped up with timbers, and pied with a patchworks of rusty metals. Actually, they now read as HOLL WOOD, because the tangler’s body had crashed down upon the
Y, smashing it asunder in a blast of splinters, green copper tiles, and intestines.

A shame, Buckle thought. He didn’t know what the sign was ever meant to be, but it was a grand navigational landmark. And it wasn’t so bad, coming down here in Hollywood Land. At least he knew where he was. Alchemist territory. Yes, the Crankshaft and Alchemist clans weren’t on the best of terms, but the animosity was fueled more by suspicion than any actual nose-to-nose conflict. The isolated and xenophobic clans rarely had much contact with each other, and most everyone was locked in a state of uneasy truce or on the verge of conflict with everyone else—except for the Crankshafts and Imperials, who were engaged in an off-and-on skirmish war. But the Gentleman’s Rules would apply to Buckle and the Alchemists, meaning the Alchemists would be required to feed a downed airman some soup and return him to his home clan unharmed.

Ice-sheathed branches crackled at the soles of Buckle’s boots as he raised his knees to clear a bush-covered ridge. A huge snowdrift loomed in the ravine below. He yanked hard on his control line to reduce the parachute’s lift, and it ducked down. He stretched out his legs to catch the crest of the big, soft snow pile. He missed.

Not so lucky today, Buckle thought—just before he slammed into the trunk of a tree.

Everything went black.

A gentle breeze whispered in Buckle’s ear. His eyelids fluttered, stung by the weak sunlight. His whole body ached, but he ignored that. He knew that he was lying on his back in the snow. He knew that he was lying on a mountain in Hollywood
Land. He knew that the Alchemists had not found him yet. He knew that the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was continuing on its mission without him.

Buckle squinted until his eyes adjusted to the light, and focused them painfully on the cold gray sky. He pulled himself upright, his leather jacket squeaking against the dry snow, and sat motionless. The quiet stillness of the mountain was so absolute it seemed to demand that he make no sound of his own. His breath swirled around his face in vaporous puffs, but despite its coldness, the air seemed much warmer here than it was thousands of feet up on the roof of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
.

Something thrashed back and forth under the HOLL WOOD letters, which were only fifty feet away. Buckle reached for a pistol that was no longer there. The movement was coming from the tangler corpse: one leg convulsed erratically, churning up the sea of jade-colored guts steaming in the snow around it.

The one amber eye glowed. The tangler’s massive head was broken—split wide open—and still the surviving orb held its devilish light. Buckle dragged himself to his feet. Every sinew and muscle felt bruised and weak. He whacked the release button at his sternum and the safety harness dropped away into the snow with a
chunk
, taking the reserve chute and its lines with it. Something dripped down his face and he wiped at it, the glove coming back streaked with slushy blue-green tangler blood; he realized that he must be coated with the noxious-smelling stuff from head to toe. Whatever.

He needed a plan. Someplace to go. Lifting his goggles onto the top of his pith helmet, he stared up at the ruins of the Observatory, which were not more than a half mile away on the crest of the mountain: a large dome—said to house a
magnificent telescope, and which served as the main stronghold of the Alchemist clan—towered at the center of the fortress-like structure.

Considering that Buckle had landed smack dab in the middle of Alchemist territory, he was surprised that they hadn’t jumped all over him yet. He decided to make for the Observatory and let the Alchemists take him in according to the Gentlemen’s Rules. What else was he going to do? Walk home? After all, stranded zeppelineers were not uncommon. It should be easy, if awkward—unless he was labeled a spy. Then it could take a forever of negotiations and ransoms to get him home.

Buckle set off at a brisk walk, gritting his teeth against the stringy pains running up and down the length of his body. He didn’t have far to go, and the Alchemist patrols would surely intercept him before he reached the Observatory, anyway. He drew his pocket watch out of his coat—thankful it was still ticking after all of the hits he had taken—and flipped the brass cover open to check the time. He turned the winder round and round between his thumb and forefinger, as he always did when he was nervous about something.

THE OBSERVATORY

I
T TOOK
B
UCKLE ABOUT TWENTY
minutes to slog his way across the snowbound slopes to the approaches to the Observatory. Soon he was crossing a wide-open field in front of the building. There were no signs of activity, no footprints in the snow, no sentries to challenge him. But several times he thought he heard a breech hammer
snick
, perhaps cocked by Alchemist musketeers with trigger fingers poised, hidden in the ruined outbuildings at the edges of the park.

His heart skipped a beat, but he kept on slogging.

Showing fear would get him nowhere. The Alchemists were a mysterious bunch who bolted together hulking machines in their work bays under the mountains, and they didn’t like strangers. Buckle knew that much about them.

As Buckle neared the Observatory, a cream-colored art deco castle capped with a telescope dome, he saw something he had never noticed from the air: a six-pointed spire, perhaps forty feet in height, with a bronze astrolabe perched at its zenith, thrusting skyward from the center of the lawn. The hexagonal spire was battered and chipped—its original white surface stained a mottled yellow—but its basic form had survived remarkably well. Three towering figures in long cloaks,
each nine feet tall, were sculpted into the vertical recesses of the spire’s angles.

At first Buckle assumed that the impressive block was one of the old monuments from the time when the Founders clan was master of all of the stronghold colonies. The figures would represent the Three Founders, two men and one woman, brilliant scientist-engineers, who had been the architects of the new civilization and Founders’ city. Legend had it that a
fourth
Founder, aghast at the rise of the steam machines, had wandered off into the wilderness and never returned. The fourth Founder was mostly forgotten, if he had ever truly existed, though he did pop up as the Old Hermit Monk, a rather nasty character in a fairy tale Buckle’s mother occasionally read to him. But was this truly an old Founder’s statue? It was unthinkable that the Alchemists—who had never been a proper colony clan anyway, much like the Crankshafts—would allow such a thing to remain standing in their own front yard.