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

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.
    Buckle answered his own question as he circled the spire. A total of six human figures had been chiseled into the sides of the monument. This was not a Founders statue. It was something else. But the six stone men whose names were inscribed at their statue’s feet—Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Hipparchus, Herschel, Newton—had been lost to history, at least any history Romulus Buckle was aware of.
    Buckle gazed at the spire, folding his hands behind his back in a casual fashion, even though his shoulders ached. He didn’t feel like pausing and gazing, but he knew he was being watched. He could smell horses. But still no one had challenged him. Was he going to have to stride up to the front door of the Observatory and rattle the knocker? Apparently so. Well, if thatwas what the Alchemists wanted, then that was what he was going to do…
    Buckle heard something coming up behind him, something wheezing and puffing and winding and grinding, something with footsteps so heavy they split the ice with sharp cracks and shook the ground under his boots.

WOLFGANG RAMSTEIN AND HIS ROBOT
    B UCKLE SPUN ON HIS HEEL to see an armored robot stomping toward him. It was nine feet tall, a hulking brute of a machine encased in iron armadillo plates. A breastplate of grinding cogs and gears covered a turbine spinning inside the chest cavity. Oval windows of heavy lead glass lined the sides of the rib cage, revealing compartments churning with steam, boiling water, and fire. The head, a smooth copper dome with two horizontal slits for eyeholes, which glowed a superheated red, had eight brass vent tubes—four on each side—releasing intermittent bursts of hissing steam. The clodhopper legs, thick as tree stumps, swiveled in well-oiled ball sockets at the hips. The right arm had a gigantic metal hand, while the left arm was equipped with a round battery of cannon barrels circling the wrist.
    The Alchemists were famous for building robots of fantastic configurations, but Buckle had never seen one before. He could outrun the massive machine but…where would he go?
    Surely the Alchemists were familiar with the Gentleman’s Rules.
    The robot approached more rapidly than Buckle expected, its iron boots belting the earth with
thud, thud, thud
s that bounced the loose snow with each footfall. It halted when it wastoe-to-toe with him; great sighs of steam shot out of its vent tubes and then petered out.
    Buckle swallowed so hard he almost choked himself. His nostrils and the back of his throat were stinging from the pungent stink of hot metal and sizzling whale-oil lubricant. The motionless robot loomed, its inner turbine still whirring, its eye slits alive with the reflections of the fire and heated air within.
    Buckle got the odd impression that the behemoth was trying to hypnotize