Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

chamber was covered, floor to ceiling, in handwritten charcoaled numbers. The long, tortured mathematical musings and equations, hieroglyphic in the candlelight, far surpassed his own ability to understand what mystery the sequestered mathematician had been attempting to crack. Whatever the equation had been, it was complicated. The infinity symbol wasprominent in the lines of numbers, but often it was half-erased, smudged, or furiously crossed out.
    The potbellied stove in the corner pinged as its metal expanded against the fire within it. Buckle watched the red flames glow behind the grate. The thing was old, but just as usable as the day it had been forged, and the stovepipe had been ingeniously constructed, running up to the roof of the chamber, bending at an angle to be lengthened in sections and bolted into the stone with metal brackets, to run across the length of the ceiling and disappear into a hole drilled through the granite above the door.
    Somebody had made a home of the place, but it had been a long time ago. The squat bed frame, a sturdy pine construction crossed with warping slats, had started to cave in, and the spiders had thrown up a community of webs within it. The table and writing desk were made of oak and had fared better, the edges of the wood paled and grayed by the constant cold. Buckle ran his fingers across the surface of the writing desk, where thousands of tiny strokes had been pressed into the wood by a pen furiously scribbling across paper atop it, jotted down hard by a man or woman trapped deep in the agony of the numbers that populated the walls, thousands of numbers crushing inward with a question they could not solve, nor apparently escape.
    What mystery, what question, would have caused someone to come here to live the life of a hermit, at least for a time, every morning waking to the numbers that had accompanied them into their dreams the night before?
    Buckle stood up to stretch his aching legs, holding his scabbard so it did not clank on the furniture. He unclasped the scabbard from its belt frogs and carefully laid it on the desk.He stepped to the opposite wall, where a tiny fan, its mechanism set in motion by the heat of the stove, spun in its metal frame inside a tunnel in the front wall, a three-inch-diameter hole bored through six feet of solid granite and out the front of the cliff face, pulling in a small but steady stream of cool air to ventilate the room. Buckle would have really liked to know how the mathematician managed to make a hole like that.
    Buckle watched the little fan as it spun in the sea of numbers, until time seemed to slip away.
    Then came the bloodcurdling scream.

DELIRIUM
    M AX TWISTED , HER HEAVILY BANDAGED body sprawling out from beneath her furs, her spine arched so her head was thrown back, her hands clawing at the air. She convulsed horribly, her black eyes rolled up in her head to the white. But the thing that most frightened Buckle was how suddenly pale she was—even the black stripes had faded to a deathly gray.
    “Max! Max!” Buckle shouted, fear a lightning bolt striking his heart. He dropped to straddle her as he grabbed at her flailing arms. Max was strong, even in her weakened state. Martians were damned strong. “Max! I am here! Max!”
    The icy slap of Max’s flesh under Buckle’s palms shocked him. She was panting, rapid and shallow, her mouth flung open, the tongue and gums a sallow pink-gray around the teeth. Her skin was slick with sweat pumping out of the pores, flowing in trickles, her black hair flung out in a silken fan, shivering in the firelight. Her very skin seemed to be shivering independently of the shivering muscles beneath.
    Max had already bled heavily through her bandages, drenching the white gauze with her bright-scarlet blood—bleeding to death.
    “Max, it is me,” Buckle said. “Hold on, girl, you hear me?”
    Max jerked her head to the right, in the direction of Buckle’s voice, and calmed. The thrashing subsided.