Liahona

by D. J. Butler

  Sam turned to ask the gypsy to explain himself, but the ugly man was gone. In his seat instead was a beautiful young lady, her brown hair curled on her head and high on the back of her neck, long pearl-drop earrings hanging from the cherry lobes of her ears. Her face was serious but cheerful, with a thin mouth that was all business. She smiled at Sam, and he had to take another puff of the Cohiba to keep the sudden explosion of songbirds contained within his chest. He glared at the smoldering stump—at this rate, he was no more than a minute away from having to light another, just as a defensive measure.

  “I’m Annie Webb,” the lady said, “and you’re the most handsome man in this saloon.”

  Sam almost choked. “I’m Sam Clemens,” he identified himself, “and I’m certainly the luckiest.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, tonight you are.”

  * * *

  Poe pressed himself deep into the cracked leather seat of the corner booth and let himself feel inconspicuous, unworthy of attention, invisible. He scratched himself with the bare fingertips protruding from his kid gloves and allowed his head to slump with his body, falling into a posture that said that he was just another frontier drunk with idiosyncratic taste in clothing. The scratching was not part of the disguise, but the result of it—Poe’s hair was longer and more oily than he liked under his tall beaver hat, and he couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d picked up fleas somewhere between St. Louis and Fort Bridger. I’m just a gypsy fortune-teller, he thought; it was a role he enjoyed playing, especially when his mark was a man as shrewd as Samuel Clemens. The role was outrageous, and playing it with a smart man made it a game; in this case, it was a game with high stakes.

  Clemens would have a mission counterpart to his own, of course. Ascertain the truth of the phlogiston gun rumors. Influence Brigham Young and the foreign policy of the Kingdom of Deseret, or render Deseret harmless.

  But what about the strange request from the Madman Pratt, the one that had come directly from Pratt to Robert, the one that Robert had told Poe was secret from Brigham Young and Jefferson Davis as well? Was Robert playing some game with Pratt alone, or did Pratt act very discreetly on behalf of his country? And what were the strange objects that Poe had agreed to give to the Madman in exchange for the air-ship designs? Robert had mentioned ether-waves… ether-waves were also Poe’s best guess as to how the scarabs worked, and the same technology could certainly be put to other uses… were the canopic jars communicators of some sort? Of course ether-wave communication was experimental at best, even in Hunley’s laboratories in Atlanta, but he couldn’t imagine what else ether—the mysterious particles that filled the universe, including the apparent void between the planets—could be used for. An ether-wave weapon? A transportation device for small objects?

  A secret hope that maybe the objects were healing devices of some sort rose up in Poe’s breast, and he strangled it.

  Through his smoke-glassed spectacles, Poe continued to survey the room closely.

  The Pinkertons had made him nervous. His heart was still beating a little fast, and the whistle around his neck felt very heavy. He wondered if he was even close enough to be able to use it, or if the cotton batting packed into the crate would muffle the sound too much. If only one of the men came after him, of course, he could probably disable the attacker with some simple baritsu. Two men, though, would be more of a challenge.

  Ah, Robert, he thought. What have you gotten me into?

  Bridger’s Saloon was the heart of Fort Bridger. There were also a commissary, a mechanick’s workshop for the steam-trucks that arrived limping at this junction of the New Russia, California and Mormon Trails, and dormitories, and in any kind of decent combination of good weather and daylight the stockade yard was thronged with merchants of one kind or another. Trappers sold furs; cattlemen sold meat, generally on the hoof; worn out, desperate pioneers sold furniture, books and family heirlooms to lighten their loads. They all came to spend their earnings at the Saloon.

  Out front were two Franklin Poles, huge blue electric globes on iron lampposts, but the interior of Bridger’s place was lit with gas, little gas lamps glowing in sconces all along each wall, smudging the red wallpaper behind them black with soot and heat. The Saloon used electricks, too, though Poe wasn’t exactly sure what for, other than the lights in the yard—to cook, maybe? or to operate locks or security systems?—but he could smell the ozone now and then. The bar crawling down one wall of the common room was a bar like any other, heavy and dark and scarred and stained, clinking dully in the eternal dance of glass- and bottle-bottoms. The faro and poker tables could have been snatched from saloons in the Dakotas, Kansas City or New Orleans.

  The people, though, were a mix such as you’d see nowhere else. Even the pioneers were wildly heterogeneous: there were sober-faced, still-wet-behind-the-ears Mormon immigrants from northern Europe in their thick clouds, and more mixed, smaller bands heading for New Russia, and the California-bound prospectors so excited about the future they couldn’t stop talking about how they’d spend their fortunes, if they hadn’t already done so. There were Russians from the northwest and Frenchmen from Canada and black men from Mexico. There were hunters, trappers and Indians. Were those Shoshone in the corner? Poe wondered. It was out of his area of expertise—they might have been Blackfoot or Ute. There were soldiers, lawmen, outlaws, gamblers, musicians, dancers, dry goods salesmen and even a whore or two. They all rubbed elbows and bumped against each other like so many different species of bees, shoehorned unexpectedly into a single hive and surprised to find themselves not entirely displeased.

  Poe watched them. He took it all in and he forgot nothing.

  Jedediah Coltrane the dwarf drifted across the barroom floor, eyes carefully probing all the corners. He’d had a shot of something at the bar and he moved slowly among the faro tables and the dancers, but it was a slowness of deliberation, not of indecision. Despite his height, he fit in well with the Saloon’s crowd, unshaven as he was, his face craggy under his shapeless hat and his striped shirt, wool trousers and jacket fine but frayed, his suspenders holding on by a few impatient threads. He looked like he had purchased the Sunday outfit of some child second-hand, and thrown away the necktie.

  He was coming to Poe to report.

  “The Irishman slipped out early,” Poe told Coltrane as the little man eased into the seat opposite. “Did he see you?”

  Coltrane shook his grizzled head. “The mark didn’t see me. Ain’t nobody seen me. Then again, wouldn’t matter if they did, ’cause I ain’t had to do nothing.”

  “You’re charmingly cryptic,” Poe laughed softly. “Would you care to explain your statement?”

  “The limeys did it for me. Beat hell outta the boiler pipes with a wrench and then went and stole all the tools. No way the Jim Smiley sloughs it and rolls outta here in the morning, not under her own steam. She’s gaffed.”

  “Mmm,” Poe considered.

  “Whadda we know about the Brits, boss?” Coltrane asked. He fidgeted with the pommel of the knife in his belt, one of several knives Poe knew he kept on his person at all times. “I was damn surprised to get to the Smiley and find ’em there ahead of me.”

  “Captain Richard Francis Burton,” Poe reported, seeing before his eyes Robert’s handwritten files he had memorized in Richmond. “Soldier, swordsman, linguist, explorer. A dangerous man and very nearly a famous one. Author of several books, decorated inventor of a dueling maneuver, arguably discoverer of the sources of the Nile and erstwhile ersatz hajji.”

  The dwarf shook his head irritably. “Jebus, boss, you buffalo me with the big words. I could a swore you jest called that feller an arsehole horse hat sod gee, but that don’t make no damn kinda sense.”

  “He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise,” Poe explained, thinking about the scars on Burton’s face, lingering evidence, he understood, of a spear that had once been thrust entirely through the man’s head. A man that could survive that sort of attack, Poe worried, was an an
tagonist to be feared.

  “That so hard?” Coltrane wondered.

  “It’s very difficult,” Poe affirmed. “The second man is Absalom Fearnley-Standish, a junior member of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service. Harrow, and Cambridge. His only posting prior to this expedition was to a consular position in the Principality of Liechtenstein.”

  Coltrane spat on the floor. Ah, thought Poe, this was what it was to live in the West. Hard liquor and spitting indoors. The sight of the dwarf spitting made his own lungs ache, and he clutched reflexively at a handkerchief in his pocket while he fought down the urge to cough. “Sounds like small fry, don’t he, boss? But don’t he also sound like a feller you’d expect to play the game straight?”

  “Yes,” Poe agreed, “and that worries me. What is such a man doing on this mission? Are we mistaken about what the mission might be? Do we overestimate the importance of this to the Crown? Are Burton and Fearnley-Standish a ruse, distracting us from the real operatives? Or might Fearnley-Standish be more than he appears upon first inspection?”

  Coltrane grunted. “You think a lot, boss.”

  Poe coughed once, then stifled the cough’s siblings. He wondered if he thought enough, and felt dissatisfied. Was he a fool to believe war could still be averted? “There are Pinkertons here,” he told his aide. He nodded almost imperceptibly to where Bowler Bob and Stovepipe stood on the other side of the room, waving their calotype in the pasty faces of a clutch of denim overall- and straw hat-wearing Scandinavians, who answered him with shrugs and uncomprehending stares.

  “After us?” Coltrane dropped a hand to touch the knife in his belt again.

  “I don’t know.” Poe wondered. “They claimed to be after Clemens’s man, the Irishman O’Shaughnessy. Though they knew him as McNamara. Clemens didn’t bat an eye, lied bold as daylight, said he’d never seen the man.”

  “Brass balls on that guy.” The dwarf’s voice sounded admiring. “So we’re safe. Maybe we oughtta find the Irishman and hand him over to those boys. That’d burn the lot, wouldn’t it? Slow Clemens up another few days.”

  Poe squinted at the Pinkertons and considered. “Unless the Pinkertons are in league with Clemens, and their confrontation was a ruse to try to flush us out. We rush to the Pinkertons to turn in the dangerous wanted Irishman, and they clap us in irons and send us back to Washington.”

  “Damn, you think?” Coltrane asked. “You’re making my head spin.”

  Finally losing his struggle with his lungs, Edgar Allan Poe coughed, hard, several times, into his handkerchief. He balled the white square of cotton up quickly, hiding the blood spots from Coltrane. “Best to be careful, Jed,” Poe said to the dwarf as he rolled with a show of laziness and bad posture to his feet. “We’re in the jungle here, and surrounded by man-eaters.” But then, he reflected, he was a man-eater himself.

  That was why Robert had sent him.

  * * *

  Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy huddled his birdlike head deep into the nest of his scarf as he kicked the backdoor of the Saloon open and slipped into the sizzling blue half-light of the stockade yard, leaving behind all the idjits lowing into their shot glasses like cattle bound for slaughter. It was a crisp, cold night and his neck was thin, but the real reason to burrow into the scarf was the bloody-damn-hell Pinkertons. Stupid rotten cheating bastards. He’d known when he’d crossed them that they’d send men after him, but who would have guessed they’d follow him out to the Wyoming Territory? You should have got a pardon, Tamerlane, me boy. Or if not a pardon, at least the Pinkertons could have the decency to look the other way, since he was a paid agent of the Union Government and they were more or less supposed to be on the same side.

  The Union. Tam Sneered at the word in his own inner monologue. You don’t have a side, you stupid Irish lunkhead. Besides, it’s the United States, you idjit, and it’s best it stays that way. Pray Brigit and Anthony that this bloody war don’t ever come, war ain’t good for no one except them that sells guns.

  Crime, now, crime paid. Crime had paid Tam when he was on the Pinkertons’ payroll, digging coal mine shafts in Pennsylvania and listening to the grumbling small talk of would-be dynamite tossers, and it had paid even better when he’d thrown his lot in with the Molly Maguires and been on two payrolls at the same time and robbing from the rich mine owners to boot. It had paid great right up until that snoopy little Welsh bastard Pinkerton Bevan had told Tam that he knew the score, and he would keep quiet so long as Tam sent a little money the Welshman’s way every month. Tam had no objection to greasing palms, of course, but he couldn’t trust the little Taffy to keep his mouth shut, so he’d had to slit his throat, burn the body and go west.

  Another man in Tam’s boots would have crunched the gravel of the stockade yard loudly, but Tam had a long-practiced step that was silent without being stealthy, effortlessly inconspicuous and unnoticeable without looking sneaky. He floated like a ghost around the side of the Saloon, figuring he’d hide in the Jim Smiley for the night.

  He knew Clemens would never give him up, not that stubborn son of Missouri, good old Sam Clemens. He’d spit in the devil’s eye, tell him a joke and swear he’d never seen no Irishman in all his born days before he’d knuckle under to another man. Sam Clemens had taken Tam under his wing, recruited him into Intelligence (ha! Tam thought, as if) when the Pinkertons were on his trail and scuttled him out of the country right under their noses. Clemens was the first person since Mother O’Shaughnessy herself who had ever taken an interest in whether Tam lived or died. Also, Sam had cash.

  “Egad, what if we’re caught?”

  Tam stopped. The words almost sounded like part of his own stream of thoughts, but the voice was the frightened whine of some bloody effete aristo Englishman, some useless Etonian fop. It came from the corner of the stockade yard, ahead of him and to the left, where the blue light of the electricks splashed ineffectually against the bulk of steam-trucks resting from their east- or west-bound labors. The voice was followed by a loud, rattling clank! of metal on metal.

  “Great thundering Ganesha!” barked another English voice, this one stronger and harsher. “You insisted on coming along, now the least you can do—and I do mean the very least—is not get in my way!” A grunt, then more rattling. Tam thought he could tell where the sound was coming from, and a great hulking beast it was, a track-borne iron behemoth, many times larger than the Jim Smiley, hunched in the shadows. Two dark figures lurched across its deck, one straining its shoulders against a heavy load. “Besides, they’ve only a few hours to catch us, and they can’t possibly even know what we’ve done yet.” The figures sank into the deck of the big steam-truck, presumably climbing down some hatch or stair into its belly.

  Suddenly, Tam had a bad feeling about the whole thing. First the Pinkertons showed up on his trail, and now suddenly here were two English bastards up to no good. If there were only the one of them, Tam would kill him without a second thought, just to be on the safe side, but two men always made an attack a little more of a throw of the dice.

  “Hell and begorra.”

  Tam gave the strolling Englishmen a few seconds to get well inside their truck, then crossed the yard to the Jim Smiley. He had to skirt out of reach of the electricks’ blue light, which made his scuttling circuitous and piled additional time into his state of anxiety, but a couple of minutes later, heart beating a little faster than he would have liked, Tam stood next to the Jim Smiley and surveyed her for visible damage.

  She looked fine from the outside. All six of her enormous, heavy India-rubber tyres bulked full and unscathed. The immense inflated India-rubber skirt that wrapped all around her hull was also fine. The big elephantastic wheel in back sat on its axle, unimpeached and unassailed, as far as Tam could see. Black smoke puffed, wispy and hard to spot in the blue-black gloom, from her raised exhaust pipe. Tam almost relaxed.

  Almost.

  He sent himself up the ladder quickly, conscious that he was visible here from the doorway to any vulture that
knew where to look, and then slipped into the wheelhouse for a moment to scan the shadowed deck through its large windows.

  Nothing. Bloody-damn-hell nothing.

  You’re jumping at shadows, me boy.

  Tam crossed the deck again and started down the stairs into the boiler room. He flicked the light switch in the iron stairwell and nothing happened. He flicked it again, and nothing. That wasn’t good. He wasn’t a mechanick like Clemens, but he knew that unless the emergency battery was engaged, the lights were powered by the electricks, which were powered by the boiler. No lights meant the boiler wasn’t on.

  Tam drew his pistol, a shiny Webley Lonsgpur (not his, originally, but Bevan’s, but the weaselly little Taffy didn’t need it now, did he, and him all singing away, Bread of Heaven in the celestial men’s choir?). Saints Brigit, Patrick and Anthony on fire. Could be he let the coal run too low in the furnace and the fire had gone out. Sure, that was it.

  No, you idjit. There’s smoke out the exhaust, means the fire is going.

  Could be a burned out bulb. Didn’t they burn out? They burned out, he was sure of it.

  Sure, it could, and it could be bloody leprechauns opened a valve and let out all the steam. Put your balls back on, O’Shaughnessy, and stop fooling yourself. He shook his head to clear his thoughts, then cocked the hammer of the Webley.

  Gun first, he sprang noiselessly into the boiler room.

  Nothing. Empty, no one there, just the shovel and the pile of coal and the boiler throwing out its mad red grin into the room through slitted teeth.

  He quickly checked the other rooms below decks—locker, galley, bunk room—and determined that he was alone on the Jim Smiley, alone on a steam-truck with no functioning electricks. He was standing, Webley uncocked and reholstered, in the boiler room, scratching his head and beginning to feel relieved when he saw the holes. All the pipes connecting the furnace to the boiler were smashed open. No wonder the electricks didn’t work—there was no steam to power them.

  With no steam, the truck wouldn’t go anywhere either, couldn’t budge an inch if it was pulled by ten Clydesdales. Well, Sam was a dab hand with steam machinery and electricks, he’d fix it proper in short order, he had patches precisely to cover this sort of an occasion, right in his toolbox. Still, how in hell did something like this happen? Some kind of explosion? But that couldn’t be right, the holes in the pipes looked like they’d been smashed inwards, not blown out.