Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One) by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

mountain in HollywoodLand. 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 amagnificent 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