by D. J. Butler
They looked like real horses, only larger, especially in the shoulders and the hindquarters. The animal’s back, overly narrow by comparison, was devised in the shape of a saddle. They even had short clubbed tails and stylized curly manes, both hammered out of bronze, at least in the case of the rank and file. A parade of real animals would have twitched and swished collectively at flies and shaken its many heads, but the metallic column stood stock still. At this distance, Burton told himself, it must be his imagination, but he thought he could hear a faint whir and the grinding of tiny clockwork cogs. Even standing still, the faintest traces of steam clung to the beasts’—No, Burton thought, they aren’t animals—to the vehicles’ legs.
The train of soldiers wore the blue uniforms of the United States Army, and they sat astride their mounts two abreast and, Burton guessed, a hundred deep. They were cavalrymen, with sabers and rifles and pistols bristling about them and a confident swagger showing in the way they sat their mounts. At their head rode two officers. Both the officers’ horses were marked out by steel-shining trim in their manes, tails, hooves, and saddle. One of the men, whom Burton guessed to be a Captain or better by his brass shoulder scales and broad-brimmed cavalry hat with crossed brass sabers above the forehead, raised his hand in a sharp salute to Swenson. The other, with similar scales but a stubby-brimmed cap like a blue fez, sat on a mount whose two shoulders bore holsters for flagpoles.
One holster held a flagpole from which snapped a blue flag. Burton could make out its details by squinting: a toga-clad woman stomped victoriously on the chest of a fallen man whose crown lay nearby. Words stitched into the banner proclaimed SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS and identified the flag as belonging to VIRGINIA.
The other holster, ominously, was empty.
“Great Lakshmi’s lotus,” Burton murmured, “has it begun already?”
“Captain Everett Morgan, Third Virginia Cavalry!” the Captain shouted.
“A Welshman!” Captain Jones called. His voice sounded hopeful and a little playful.
“A Virginian!” Captain Morgan shouted back. “Is one of you gentlemen in charge here?”
“That’s a pity,” Jones muttered, and Burton felt he had to agree. The Virginian Captain’s standard bearer wasn’t showing the Flag of the United States. Was this a sign that Virginia was already in revolt? If it was, what was his duty? Should he approach Captain Morgan and propose a joint conversation with Brigham Young? That seemed premature. He should get closer to the Captain and find out more, he decided.
“I’m in charge, Captain,” Swenson called, and shimmied quickly down the ladder to meet the soldiers.
Burton observed the Captain. He was a paunchy man, but had the sort of hard paunch that one sees on a man of action who is also a horseman; he looked hard and fierce and dangerous. His chin and upper lip were scraped meticulously clean, but curly russet hair covered his ears and the angles of his jaw and sprouted above his squinting eyes like an angry thicket. He had two pistols, six-shooters, on his belt, grips pointing forward in the cavalry style, and two more on his steel saddlehorn, and all four holsters looked well-oiled and worn.
Burton had just resolved to climb down and talk to the man when the Liahona jolted again into forward motion. He drifted back along the deck through chatting and scenery-ogling fellow passengers and sat down on one of the last benches so he could watch Swenson and Morgan negotiate the Third Virginia Cavalry’s entrance into the Kingdom of Deseret over the back end of the Liahona. Swenson was business-like, competent, and unconcerned, reviewing papers and talking with the Virginians’ Captain. Burton wished he could hear what they were saying and though after peace, his instructions were to seek alliance with and the benefit of the Southern states, he more than half hoped that young Jerry Swenson would bar entry to Captain Morgan and his Third Virginia.
Then Captain Jones passed the artillery bank and turned a corner, and the mounted soldiers were lost from sight.
Burton heard a loud collective gasp and several cries of alarm. He shifted in his seat to look forward and nearly fell out of his seat.
Above the Liahona, something hung in the sky. His first impression was that it filled the sky, but then he decided that that was only because the sky over the canyon was narrow.
But no, he recovered himself. The sky wasn’t all that narrow.
The thing—could it be a vessel?—was huge.
From beneath, it looked like a sailing ship might look to a fish, complete with copper-sheathed, though flattened, hull. Four cups were affixed to the corners of the craft, turned down, like the four shoulders of a great crawling beast, and the insides of the cups pulsated with golden light. Burton could barely guess from his vantage point what the upper side of the vessel might look like, but it seemed to curve up at its front and back, like an exaggerated Viking ship, or an ancient Sumerian Magur-boat, and some sort of shimmering sail stretched up above it.
Like some mythical beast, some weird Rocky Mountain bakunawa or vârcolac, it rose through the air and blocked out the sun.
And it was immense.
He’d seen his share of montgolfières, big silk bulbs of hot air that Her Majesty’s military forces, like all civilized nations, used for reconnaissance and weather observation. This was something else.
It was impossible to tell its exact size, but Burton realized from their straight wings and soaring flight that the birds passing in front of the … thing … were raptors, hawks or maybe even eagles of some kind. And though he saw their outlines clearly, they were dwarfed by the flying ship. He wished he could see a human figure on board to get a more precise notion of scale, but he guessed roughly that the cups must be ten or fifteen feet across each, and the thing was, more or less, the size of an actual Viking ship.
But it flew.
“Sweet Siduri’s ankles!” Burton cursed softly. It was true, then. This was why Victoria, if there was to be a war, didn’t want Brigham Young and his wild mountain Mormohammedans fighting against her. Flying ships. Put a hundred trained riflemen on her, and they’d be a deadly striking force, especially for raiding.
And what about the rumors of phlogiston guns, then?
The ship turned. It pushed forward slowly, sail bellying out and turning to make the ship tack, though Burton had the uneasy suspicion that the craft’s movements were undetermined and unaffected by the currents of the air. The cups continued to pulse, the light emanating from them intense, but leaving the canyon below unmarked by shadow, as if it were light that an observer could see, but not light any observer could see by. With the splatter of illumination, the vessel pushed off the mountains and flitted away out of sight.
“Yudhisthira’s dice!” he swore again.
“Oh yes, boyo,” he heard Captain Jones say. He shook himself out of his trance and saw that the Welshman stood nearby, watching him with an amused smile on his face. “And that’s the old one. He’s built four of them now and if you think the Captain Moroni is something, wait until you get a glimpse of the Teancum.”
It was good healthy criminal habits that saved Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy from the Pinkertons when he went back to the Deseret Hotel. If he’d still been with Sam Clemens, he might have had no good choice but to follow Sam, right in through the big shiny glass front doors just as he’d come out of them, but since he was alone, he took a less direct route, away from the stinking masses of ordinary law-abiding citizens.
Tam slunk past the Deseret on the opposite side of the street, trying not to limp too much on his injured leg, porkpie pulled down over his brow. There again, on the front of the Hotel, as on the front of the other buildings he looked at, was a scrawl of that ugly wiggly Indian-looking writing he’d seen on the side of the Liahona. What was wrong with these people? Latin characters had worked fine for fifteen hundred years of Irishmen, what on earth made the Mormons think they had to go and start meddling with the alphabet God made? If Jesus and all his bloody-damn-hell apostles could use A, B, and C, who are the Mormons to go and make up some other s
hite?
The streets of the Great Salt Lake City were mastodontic; enormous, wide, and flat and coated with tar. So huge, Tam could see in his mind’s eye a pack of these clean and pressed Mormons chasing a bison herd right down the middle of any one of them. All that was missing was a cliff to drive the bison off of and, queer as this place was, Tam wasn’t so sure that he wasn’t about to turn a corner and find that very thing. Or a herd of bison themselves, for that matter. The width of the street meant that Tam had to really squint hard out of the corners of his eyes and that at the far end of a parabolic sweep of his birdlike skull, to get a good look at the Deseret’s doors.
And there, sure enough, was a Pinkerton.
Tam recognized the man personally—Harris … Harolds … Harlow … Harrow … something, the name didn’t matter, he’d seen the man in Pennsylvania more than once and knew who he was—but even if he hadn’t, the funny mix of stealth and obviousness would have given him away. It was like the cock-of-the-walk trying to sneak a bite of cookie dough from the kitchen. That was how the bloody-damn-hell Pinkertons always looked. They were just too full of themselves to be really sneaky (and wasn’t it like them to stick a man to follow Tam who was so instantly recognizable?)
No wonder the Mollies and others always cottoned on to them so fast.
It was probably also the width of the street that prevented Harris, or whatever his name was, from seeing Tam. That or the Sunday Picnic girls. The Pinkerton loitered in the door smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper, but the paper was held at the level of his chest rather than his face and his eyes scanned the street over the top of it.
He scanned the street and especially he scanned a trio of pretty girls, thirty feet ahead of Tam. The girls giggled and chattered and beamed in that way that only girls who are absolutely convinced of their own unblemished and bouncing perfection can. Tam didn’t know if they were really going to a picnic, but they were too pretty and too silly to be doing anything else. Harris the smoking Pinkerton, though, seemed to feel differently. He watched the flibbertigibbets carefully for any signs of criminal action.
He scanned the girls closely and he missed Tam. Brigit bless poor Mother Harrison for bringing such an idjit into this cold, hard world.
Tam walked around the block and entered the Deseret’s bar by a side door, a little service entrance with no sign, either in or out. He’d known there was a side door—he’d looked for it—before he’d been willing to go in the front the first time. A hot, grimy, humid little hall let him, after a short trot, into the cool, airy bar, chilled by overhead fans. The bar was huge, all marble and dark woods with a high ceiling and stone columns like a cathedral and busier than the number of its guests warranted.
Tam eased into a seat at a tiny booth and slipped out a Husher under the table. Fumbling through instructions printed on a plaque in the center of the table, he wrote a drink order and his room number on a card chit, stuffed it into a glass cylinder, and shoved the cylinder into a tube in the wall. The systems reminded him of the Lion House and made him feel vaguely uneasy. With a soft whumph! the tube sucked the cylinder away and three minutes later his drink jogged around to the table in the hands of a fresh-faced young blonde girl wearing yellow and black stripes. Tam smiled and ogled her once (Doesn’t a man have a duty to affirm their prettiness to all the pretty girls? Otherwise, who do they make themselves pretty for?), but shooed her away to continue his watch on the lobby.
He saw three Pinkertons. One paced back and forth just inside the door and watched the lobby (Tam kept his head well down, like a serious drinker or a man reading over his whisky) and two spoke with the concierge. He was fully prepared to shoot any Pinkerton that came up to him with one of their bloody-damn-hell cheap calotypes, but none did. They must have searched the bar patrons before he’d arrived.
When the Pinkertons finished their conversation, they left by the front door. Tam waited ten careful minutes before putting the gun back into its holster and tossing down the last of his drink. No point in wasting good whisky, me boy.
The Deseret Hotel had a lift and it was a good one. He and Sam Clemens had ridden it up and down earlier, Clemens looking all nonchalant and impressed with his own sophistication, but Tam had barely been able to keep his mouth from either dropping open or spewing out curse words. The lift was smooth and cool, with no jerking in its action and no steam leaking into the carriage. It was a work of genius, ultra-modern and perfect, not like the herky-jerk affairs that shifted men up and down inside the mine shafts of Pennsylvania.
And Tam ignored it. If there were any Pinkertons still lurking around, for sure they’d have their beady little eyes on the lift. Instead, he limped up the Hotel’s stairs, cursing to himself with every twinging step.
His wounded arm and leg ached and so did his ear where it had lost a piece to the midget. He itched to rough the dwarf up, but he had promised Clemens he wouldn’t. He could scare the little bastard, though. He could put the fear of God and all His angels and Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy into the little bugger and if the moment arose when it became necessary to break his word to Clemens, he wouldn’t mind it so much, so long as he was able to explain why he’d had to do it.
No Pinkertons in the stairwell.
Tam kept one hand on the grip of a Husher and the other ready to whip out his spring-loaded stiletto.
Maybe he ought to kill him after all, necessity or not, and just apologize to Sam when the deed was done. Maybe that would be wisdom. What would Mother O’Shaughnessy do if she were in Tam’s position? The Pinkertons were nosing after him, after all, and the dwarf knew that he had killed their man in Fort Bridger.
No Pinkertons in the hall upstairs, either.
But the dwarf had killed the other one. Maybe he could turn the little fellow into the Pinkertons and blame him somehow for both deaths? Or kill him and leave both Hushers on his body somewhere the Pinkertons would find it?
Tam listened at the hotel room door; no sounds of Pinkertons inside.
But even framing the midget wouldn’t make the Pinkertons his friends. He’d still killed their precious little Taffy Bevan and they knew it. There was nothing for it; he had to kill the dwarf.
Tam opened the door.
“Hell and begorra!” he cursed.
Loops of cut rope lay on the floor. He knew even before he ran into the bathroom to check, pistol in hand, that the dwarf was gone.
The boy was gone, too.
In a reflex action he checked his own pocket, and of course the cylinder with its cargo of manic everything-eating beetles was safely stowed away. Bloody idjit, he mocked himself. As if the dwarf might have snuck up on him on the street and picked his pocket.
No, but he might have snuck up to the Pinkertons on the street and turned Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy in. It was a good bloody-damn-hell job that Tam had kept out of sight in the hotel, and no wonder Pinkerton Harvard was standing outside the front doors.
Tam slunk back to the Hotel’s lobby, waiting in obscure shadows and watching to be sure it was Pinkerton-free before he approached the concierge. The man was little and square and clean and the brass nameplate on his chest said SORENSON. This was the same fellow who had just been talking to the Pinkertons, he was sure of it.
“Ah, good afternoon to you, Mr. Sorenson,” Tam started.
“And to you, Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” the desk clerk returned.
Tam grabbed the grip of his Husher and almost drew it. At the same time, he looked involuntarily at his chest and was almost surprised to see that he wasn’t also wearing a nametag. Ah, but he knows you because you’re a hotel guest, me boy, Tam thought. Calm yourself, he’s done nothing to you, and you can always kill him later.
But it wasn’t good that Sorenson knew him. That meant that if the Pinkertons showed the man a calotype, he would have recognized it, even if they called it something bloody stupid like Seamus McNamara.
Or do they finally know my real name? Did they show him a calotype and say Here’s Tam O’Shaugh
nessy, call us when you see him if you want a little bit of that reward money? Maybe that’s how he knows my name now.…
The calotype … suddenly he remembered that he was still carrying it around, in the pocket of his coat. It felt like it burned him. He should get rid of it, somewhere, but the lobby of the biggest hotel in the city was not the right place.
“Ah …” Tam hesitated. Where in bloody-damn-hell is my share of the famous Irish smooth talking now that I need it? The lobby was far too busy with people or he might have shot Sorenson on the spot, out of sheer embarrassment. Or knifed the bastard.
“Some gentlemen were looking for you, Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” Sorenson continued blandly, as if Tam weren’t standing there stammering and drooling like an idjit with his heart all full of murder. “Some foreign gentlemen.”
Foreign? Yes, of course, because this was the Kingdom of Deseret and nothing to do with the United States of America at all. But Sorenson didn’t talk like someone who had just turned Tam in to the Pinkertons. “Oh, ah …”
“I had no instructions from you or Mr. Clemens, so of course I told them I didn’t know you.”
“Jesus, thank you,” Tam blurted out. In his relief, he almost squeezed the Husher’s trigger.
“You can call me Sorenson,” the clerk smiled mildly. “Mister or Brother, depending. Some of our Mexican brothers and sisters are named Jesus, but I was born in Copenhagen and my parents named me Anders.”
“I see.” Tam adjusted his hat on his head and realized he was sweating, silly fool that he was. He had dodged a bullet, and through no clever maneuvering of his own. Still, the Pinkertons were out there somewhere and it would pay to keep that clearly in mind from now on. “Sorry, Mr. Sorenson.”
“I asked where you might contact them in case I did see you,” Sorenson continued, “but the gentlemen declined to give me any further information.”
“Brigit’s dugs, I bet they did, ha!” Tam couldn’t help himself. Stop acting like an amateur and a dunderhead, Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy, he told himself. He straightened up his posture and his coat and felt better for it. He’d have felt even better if he could have kicked the Harris right in his balls at that moment and then stabbed the man in the face.