Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War Read Online Free PDF Page B

were slashing at the heavy oak door; its iron hinges, screws popping, threatened to burst.
    Wood scraped across the floor, bunching the fur rugs with it, as another man shoved his parents’ heavy oak bed toward the door. Alpheus was alongside the man immediately, throwing his weight into the push.
    The other man? Buckle’s mind grasped at a vapor in a fog. He had not remembered the other man being there that night—a detail almost lost to his memory—but Buckle was certain the other man had been there. He could see him now, shoulder to shoulder with his father, a long musket strapped across his back and a pistol at his waist, gripping a burning torch that filled the cabin with smoke. The man was taller than Alpheus, and wiry thin, clad in his day clothes, with knee-high leather boots lined with leather straps and buckles.
    A beastie slammed the door with enough force to shake the world. Glittering dust streamed from the rafters. The fire threw sparks up the chimney. Alpheus and the other man froze for an instant.
    “The door shall not stand much longer,” Alpheus said. Buckle felt his mother stop sobbing and her spine stiffen. He clutched the handle of the cold sword his father had handed him, telling him to defend his mother and sister to the last, if it came to that, and that he was proud of him being so brave.
    The other man clapped a reassuring hand on Alpheus’s shoulder. “It most absolutely shall hold, Alpheus,” he boomed. “I helped you build that door, and we built it to withstandexactly this, and despite your incompetence as a carpenter, I build damned fine doors!”
    Alpheus smiled grimly at the man who was his friend. “And yet you cannot brew a decent cup of tea.”
    “No one has ever brewed a decent cup of tea. Vile stuff, it is,” the other man replied heartily.
    The cabin shuddered again. A sabertooth clawed furiously at the door, the vibrations of the strokes sounding as if the oak were being carved away at a terrifying rate of speed. The man sprang to the front window, a small portal fixed about five feet to the left of the door, drew his pistol, and stuck his arm outside with it. The pistol boomed, followed by a shriek and a roar from the beastie. The scratching stopped. The man yanked his arm back an instant before sabertooth fangs crunched on the pane in a burst of splinters.
    The man punched the beastie’s massive, splayed-nostril nose and it released, vanishing into the darkness beyond the window.
    “Good way to lose an arm, Shadrack,” Alpheus observed dryly.
    “Tut, tut. No bother,” Shadrack replied, turning to wink at Buckle. “I do have another one.” Shadrack had a narrow, gaunt, but kindly face, bordered by a shock of long, dark hair, and a thick beard framed with gray.

    Shadrack. The name roiled around Buckle’s mind like a fox gone mad in a henhouse.
    Shadrack! The same Shadrack whom he had seen locked in the prison of the City of the Founders, the skeletal madman, a moonchild who had beseeched him as a savior, with some crazyhint of recognition. There was no doubt it was the same man—Buckle was certain of it. Oh, what tales the madman might tell!
    Buckle gasped, sucking in a huge slap of freezing air loaded with snow, making him cough. His plunge into memory had only lasted a second, yet it seemed as if he had been away from Max and the run of the horse in the blizzard for an eternity.
    Who saves old Shadrack?
    Buckle clutched Max’s body closer to his chest. He was afraid that she might already be dead.
    Something panicked the horse. Cronos neighed and bolted again, cutting left through the snowbound twilight. Buckle glimpsed the low shadow of a sabertooth loping alongside on the right, the glowing green of its eyes visible in the storm.
    Cronos veered farther to the left. The roar of another sabertooth somewhere behind made him accelerate, foam spewing from his mouth, his head jerking from side to side as his eyes bugged in their sockets. Tree trunks exploded out of