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

only ten feet above the drop off where the envelope veered inward to the belly of the balloon. She couldn’t hold on there for long. She looked up: the four-story-high vertical rent slashed by her saber flapped ominously above. It was her only way back in. Leveraging her body up with both of her hands on her sword hilt, she desperately kicked and pulled, but could not reach the gap.

BUCKLE CAN’T FLY
    R OMULUS B UCKLE SNAPPED OUT OF his haze, assisted by a cold slap of wind. His back hurt. His legs hurt. It hurt when he breathed. His eyes focused on the depthless chasm of the sky and the vast hump of the zeppelin’s back, the gap between him and the breach a rippling swamp of blue-green guts and blood.
    He saw Ivan’s head and shoulders pop up in the breach. He was heaving hand over hand on Buckle’s safety line, yanking Buckle forward in jerks as his hands plowed through the muck. Ivan shouted at him, but the wind stole the sound before he could make it out.
    He heard Kellie, somewhere nearby, barking furiously.
    Buckle’s brain flashed. The tangler.
    His heart leapt in his chest. He scrambled into a crouch, stumbling as his taut safety line yanked him forward.
    He was only ten feet from Ivan and the Eagle’s Walk.
    But once again he was too late.
    He clawed at the pistol in his belt, but his fingers were slick and numb.
    This time the tangler came in unhindered. It swooped into the gap between Buckle and Ivan—so low that the ends of its talons slashed the envelope in long, serrated rips—and snipped the safety line between them as if it were a piece of string. And,having learned a trick from the last pass, the tangler dragged its right wing, catching Buckle flush across the back, catapulting him into the air and over the side.
    Romulus Buckle sailed out into the empty sky. Everything seemed nonsensical. He felt like a horse had just kicked him in the back. He watched his pistol wobbling as it fell, and it was falling much faster than he was for some particular reason.
    In the next moment, as the buffeting air thundered around him, Captain Buckle realized that he was in a world of trouble.
    He saw the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
above, his gigantic air machine trailing streams of white vapor and black smoke as it churned across the high heavens. And even though the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
was very big, it was rapidly getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
    The severed end of Buckle’s safety line lashed back and forth above him and he unhooked it from his harness. It slithered away in the air as he fell beyond it. He looked to the earth, where the white-brown Santa Monica Mountains slowly, inexorably rose up to bury him in their bosom with one tremendous
slap
.
    Buckle had two parachutes—a main and a reserve—ready to deploy from the brass canister on the back of his harness. But if he pulled the rip cord and opened the parachute, he was doomed: suspended in a lazy float, he’d be cut to shreds by the tangler. He searched the sky for any sign of the flying carnivore. There was another attack coming, he was certain of that, and it would be from behind.
    Buckle took a firm grip on his saber and slowly drew it, the vertical force of the air making his arm wobble.
    He twisted around.
    The tangler was there, right on top of him, hurtling in, wings swept out, coming straight at his back.
    Buckle swung his sword in an arc, aiming to lop off the tangler’s head. The beastie flung its head aside. The saber caught nothing but air. The tangler’s talons snapped, snatching the sword out of Buckle’s grasp before chopping the blade in half. The two pieces of sword fell in glittering spirals toward the snowy ground below, chasing after the lost pistol.
    Buckle glanced around. The tangler, of course, had vanished. He considered pulling his rip cord. He only had a few seconds before it was too late to do so. But a parachute just guaranteed a gruesome death by tangler.
    Buckle realized that something was pattering rapidly against his