by D. J. Butler
The clerk only smiled mildly at him, but Tam saw that the little man’s hands both rested on the counter, palms down. Tam coughed and dug out the double eagle Sam had given him by the Lion House. It was one of the few gold coins he had. Sam Clemens was a good egg and could be counted on, but if Tam had one complaint it was that his boss did have a tendency to keep all the money to himself.
Tam plunked the coin down on the counter and it immediately disappeared, whisked away by the little clerk’s fingers. “And how else can I help you today, Mr. O’Shaughnessy?” Sorenson asked.
Excellent question. “Have you seen a dwarf in the lobby this afternoon?” he asked. “The little fellow might conceivably have been in the company of a small boy.”
“In fact, he was.” The concierge smiled. “I gave them directions to the train station just before the foreign gentlemen arrived.”
***
Chapter Seven
“I could kill you where you stand, Edgar.”
The voice came from behind him and it was Roxie’s. Since it was Roxie talking, the words might be complete and utter lies, a bluff.
Then again, it was Roxie, and she probably could kill him where he stood.
Poe turned around slowly, grateful his pockets were empty.
“Shall I call you Reynolds?” he asked.
He had just put on his biggest overcoat, the one with all the pockets inside. He had put it on intending to carry away, in the coat’s pockets, Hunley’s four canopic jars, designed to specification of the Madman, Orson Pratt. For all his rumination on the subject, Poe had no idea what the jars did, and knew only that the designs had left Hunley’s smartest men scratching their heads and wondering.
But he had seen some of Hunley’s other Egyptiana at work and if he was going to be shot in the body, he didn’t want some pestilential plague of death accidentally unleashed against his own flesh. Years of training and experience kept him from shuddering as his imagination was invaded by a vision of himself thrashing out death throes in the grip of a brass scarab swarm, or melting in a puddle of acid, or bursting into flame.
Roxie sat on Jed’s bunk. He hadn’t seen her because she’d been behind the door, and it had been dark. He kicked himself for moving so quickly. She held something in her hands that looked like a small glass globe, full of sizzling blue light.
“We both know that’s not my name,” she said quietly.
“You have an accomplice,” he inferred. If he was going to die, at least he’d know how. Besides, talking might buy him time.
Roxie nodded. “She replaced the hair you’d left in the door after I came in.”
“I was reckless.”
“You always were.”
“Not since Baltimore,” Poe said, and he meant it. “I learned my lesson, and I’ve been very careful.”
“It only takes one mistake.”
For years he had dreamed of this moment. He thought he had seen it in every possible configuration, the final confrontation between himself and Eliza Roxcy Snow. He had seen himself poisoned, stabbed, strangled, and burned in acid, because that was an outcome he feared and half-expected on a daily basis. Mostly he had seen himself as the one doing the killing, by gun, by knife, by throwing her hated, beautiful body under the wheels of a train, by shoving her head into the clocksprung jaws of a cotton thresher, but always by some means that was satisfyingly physical and violent. And always he imagined himself first delivering a final oration, telling Roxie that she was evil, that she had a heart of stone, that whatever Satan there might be, in whatever hell he could muster, would surely delight in adding her to the infinite ranks of his gibbering minions.
Now here he was, and he didn’t have the will for any of that. “You were my mistake,” he said simply.
“And you were mine.” She looked so sincere that he couldn’t laugh, no matter how outrageous her words were. He wondered what game she was playing.
He considered his weapons. They were virtually none. The Seth-Beast was locked away in the hold of the Liahona. He didn’t carry a gun. He had the hypocephalus tucked into a pocket of his vest—he would have to try to get it out and use it on her. He doubted it would have any effect, though, not with her training and her iron will.
To set up his play, he hazarded a fake cough. It came out a little more forcefully than he meant it and brought several more in its wake, involuntary, before he managed to stop it.
“Consumption?” Roxie asked. She did an excellent job of feigning an expression of heartfelt concern, the straight lines of her face melting into compassion. Poe wanted to applaud and invite her to take a bow for her theatrics.
Instead he nodded. “It hardly matters now. I assume you’ll kill me with that device you’re holding.”
“You know me so well.”
“Poison? That would be appropriate and typical. What is it, a gas?”
“I don’t want to kill you, Edgar,” she said.
“You’ve had a change of heart since Baltimore, then,” he quipped, and he faked another cough, smaller this time, and this time it didn’t trigger anything further.
He wondered if she had seen him hypnotize Lee in the Shoshone stockade. She might not let him get the handkerchief. If he went for the hypocephalus and she attacked, he must be prepared to defend himself. He moved, relaxed, into a more centered and balanced position, a basic and inconspicuous defensive stance of baritsu. For the thousandth time, he thanked Robert in his heart for the years of training and discipline.
Roxie hesitated. “That wasn’t me,” she finally said.
“You probably expect me to believe that,” he rejected her claim of innocence.
She stood up. “I expect you to be shrewd enough to know that sometimes, in our business, the dagger doesn’t know that it’s the dagger.”
Well, that rang true, but then, verisimilitude was the strength of the best lies told by the best liars. And Roxie was the very best.
“And the dagger,” she added, “never wants to be the dagger.”
He coughed and then reached for his vest.
Roxie raised the glass ball over her head.
“Don’t move!” she snapped.
He froze.
“You would deny a dying man a handkerchief into which to cough up fragments of his lung?”
“This is Wyoming; spit it on the floor,” she told him, her voice the perfect mixture of cold steel and tortured pity. “I don’t know which is worse, Edgar. That you might truly be dying, or that you might be faking your own death to take advantage of my feelings.”
So much for the hypocephalus.
It was to be a desperate physical attack, then. Poe braced himself, looked at the way she stood and thought about how he would try to grab her and which direction he would throw her when he did. Would the gas kill both of them? Of course not. It would be something to which she had already taken the antidote, or to which she was immune. Or maybe the Madman had fitted her with a device in her mouth or her throat, which would filter out the toxins.
If Pratt could save her body, his mind lurched desperately and counter to its discipline, couldn’t he save mine? He wrenched his attention back to the moment.
“It’s worse than either of those, my dear,” he mocked her. “I am truly dying and I want to take advantage of your feelings. Sadly for me, you have none.”
Suddenly Roxie backed away, turning and retreating towards the door. “My associate is outside.”
“The pretty young dilettante,” Poe guessed. “The brunette with the freckles, who kicks so high.”
“Even if you survived this,” Roxie brandished the sparkling globe, “she’d kill you with her bare hands. She’s a champion of the Eastern fighting arts and a stone-hearted killer.”
“She’s your protégée. How else could she be?”
Roxie opened the door with a hand behind her. “Remember this,” she told him.
Then she threw the globe down to the floor—
—it shattered into a thousand pieces in
a sparkle of light and a dying pfizzt!—
—she disappeared into the hallway of the Liahona—
—and shut the door behind her.
Poe took a gulp of air and jumped for the door. As he grabbed the knob, he heard a loud click outside. She’s locked the door, he thought. Don’t panic. Just open the lock from the inside.
He thumbed the latch that should have unlocked his cabin door; the latch didn’t budge. Poe felt his own heart beat faster.
He didn’t have a gun. He needed something to smash the door with. He scrambled, fumbled with the combination, lungs bursting, opened his big steamer trunk, and pulled out one of the four canopic jars. It was a little stone thing the size of a pickle jar, pinkish, and with a monkey’s head.
He spun and smashed it against the doorknob, using the monkey end like the head of a hammer.
Crack!
No effect. His lungs were bursting.
Please, don’t let this jar burst open and spill out something evil. He imagined it sprouting octopoid tentacles, a swarm of wasps, a cloud of burning acid.
He swung again.
Crack!
The door and the jar held firm. His body trembled, he desperately needed to cough. She was a devil, to torture him this way, to force him to hold his breath.
Was it some kind of test, to see if he was really consumptive? No, that was both too diabolical and also idiotic. His head was beginning to spin and the room around him was bathed in unnatural white light.
He swung a third time.
Crack!
The door stood steady. The canopic jar was unmarred.
His lungs betrayed him. Poe dropped the jar and sank to his knees in the puddle of glass fragments. He coughed violently, hacking up bloody phlegm onto the carpet, gasping and sucking in air between coughs. The air was canned and stale. Was he being poisoned?
He spat blood onto his own hands and the floor and the glass, blood and phlegm, and he expected to fall over and die.
But he coughed and spat again, drew in a deep breath …
And lived.
The canned air was just the regular stale air of the interior of the big steam-truck.
The poison hadn’t worked.
He looked at the glass fragments, at the little filament inside it, and realized that he’d been a fool. It wasn’t that the poison hadn’t worked.
The little bulb had never had poison inside it at all. It had been an electricks device, some sort of hand-held light.
A bluff.
He laughed, but only for a moment, before sobering up.
What, then, had Roxie wanted?
Poe tore off his false nose and threw it into the corner of the room.
John Moses had been a little bit too confident about their ability to ride the train for free. He told his name and his father’s name and that he needed to go home—to some place called Ogden—and, sure enough, the conductor with the stylized bumblebee on the front of his cap let him on board the shiny brass and steel train. He even gave the boy a warm smile and a pat on his little head.
Jed, though, got a hard stare.
He coughed awkwardly once or twice and scratched at the plascrete with his toes, hoping the conductor would have a heart and usher him aboard as John Moses’s friend. Meanwhile, he looked around the station. Half a dozen platforms lay side by side, linked by parallel catwalks overhead, steel with wheel-and-compass designs alternating in their balustrades with smiling steel suns. Jed knew for certain that no train connected from anywhere in the United States to the Kingdom. If there had been one, he and Poe would have taken it. Did Deseret connect to Mexico, somehow? Or to the Republic of California? Or New Russia?
The conductor didn’t budge and finally Jed gave in. He dug deep for a little cash, the last of his rectangular California pieces, got a return ticket, and was at last allowed onto the same carriage as the boy. The inside of the train was leather and wood and brass, with sliding glass windows and clean red carpet with gold bees woven into it and a restaurant car and everything. It was the nicest train Jed had ever ridden, not that he was a train man.
They took a seat just before the porter reached them.
“Standard English or Deseret?” he asked.
“Deseret,” Jed said, just for kicks, and produced a nickel. It was a mistake—whatever Deseret was, it wasn’t English and the dwarf couldn’t read it. The pages were covered with strange squiggly characters he couldn’t make out. The same kind of incomprehensible gibberish, he realized, as was painted on the side of the Liahona. “Why didn’t anybody tell me they speak Chinese here?” he grumbled.
Only it wasn’t true. They spoke perfectly good English, as good as any American and better than half the people in Arkansas.
So what in hell was all this garbage in the paper?
“Choo, choo!” John Moses yelled as the train lurched forward and pulled out of the station.
His excitement was so infectious that the dwarf felt compelled to holler with him. “Choo, choo!” He knew he was drawing stares from everyone on the car. Secret agent or not, for just one moment, he didn’t care.
Jed wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but looking out his window as the train pulled away, he thought he saw a man in a porkpie hat, jumping onto the very back of the train.
Sam checked the handwritten note he’d been carrying in his alligator-skin billfold twice to be sure. The numbers he’d written down matched the address of a windowless brick building set back inside a city block, away from the Great Salt Lake City’s wide streets and crowded on all sides by the uncaring backs of warehouses. Pipes, including glass message channels, ran out from the brick building in all directions, into and around and above its neighbors. The building hummed with a low, pulsating throb like the distant playing of Indian drums.
“By the shores of Gitchee-Gumee,” Sam found himself chanting. “By the shining Big-Sea-Water.”
This was the place, all right.
Sam was no spy, not in his heart, but he’d been given very precise directions by men who really, truly were spies. He circled the block to be sure he wasn’t followed. Then he found the door. He didn’t knock and he didn’t look around to see if anyone was watching him; if anyone was, that gesture would surely mark him as a trespasser.
He just turned the knob, walked in like he owned the place, and shut the door behind him.
Inside the throbbing got louder and was joined by the steady tumbling sound of falling water.
There were windows to the outside, he now saw, but they were like arrow slits, high on the walls, long and narrow, and the strips of light they cast were brilliant but thin. Sam waited a minute and let his eyes adjust. He stood on a catwalk of plascrete and after a moment he was able to see well enough to realize that only a waist-high iron railing separated him from a serious fall. Below, he heard and smelled churning waters and he felt a faint humid spray on his face and hands, but even when his eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom he could see nothing in the abyss. Mixed in with the cool green smell of the water, he detected the comforting tang of engine oil.
Pipes, brass pipes big enough that if they were lying flat a man could have walked inside them, shot up out of the unseen watery depths below and exploded over his head, radiating outward like flower petals or the spokes of a wheel. The pipes were the immense boles of trees in this strange jungle, and the flowers were a profusion of gauges, dials, wheels, clamps, levers, hanging chains, pulleys, switches, and other paraphernalia. In the dull light it all loomed huge and glowed like old bronze. Staircases climbed up and down.
Sam was curious what the waters below looked like. He imagined an egg yolk hell full of dead sailors and blind, translucent sharks, or the slimy blue seas of creation and a gate to a secret inner world, or at least a vaulted and columned lake like he’d read about under the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
But Sam Clemens had his instructions and left the itch of his curiosity unsatisfied.
Instead, he found the nearest staircase and be
gan to climb.
He had just set foot on the third and uppermost catwalk, grateful that it was too dark inside the water station to really see down to the ground below him, when a second person entered the building. A brilliant square of light opened without warning ahead and slammed shut again with a clang! and then he heard the slow pacing of feet as a man walked towards him.
The catwalk was narrow and Sam fought down a momentary fear that he had been betrayed for the fortune he carried in his pocket. After all, if he were thrown over the catwalk here, he knew he would surely die. On the other hand, his murderer would lose the rubies, too. Still, the plascrete ledge felt humid, clammy, and every-so-slightly slippery under his feet. He rested a hand on the iron railing to reassure himself.
A blue light snapped into being, chest height, in the darkness. The fizzling will-o-the-wisp electricks illuminated the face of an old man, bearded and crag-browed, with goggles over his eyes. He wore a simple dark wool suit, and the white hair on the back of his head was swept straight up behind him to make a kind of crest or cock’s comb that caught the blue crackling light and reflected it like an off-kilter halo.
“The light is for your benefit,” the old man growled. “I can see fine without it.”
“Thanks,” Sam said dryly. “I suppose you must be the—”
“You first!” snapped the old man. “Didn’t you get instructions?” He sounded like a northerner, Sam thought, like a New York or a Vermont man.
“I did,” Sam admitted, “and I apologize. I am neither a cloak and dagger man nor a Freemason, so I find this all a little …” He stopped himself before saying anything insulting and cleared his throat. “I am the Boatman,” he declaimed, trying to imagine that he was in a school play and everyone else was just as embarrassed as he was. He’d felt like an idiot memorizing these lines, but sure enough, this old fellow was going to insist on them. “I come seeking the knowledge of the air. Are you Pratt, by the way?” It had never been made clear to him whom exactly he was supposed to meet.