by D. J. Butler
“Thoth knows it’d be easy enough to get killed in this wild place,” he said. “If the rattlesnakes, bears, or coyotes don’t get you, the Shoshone or the Pinkertons or the Danites will.”
“Parley was killed in Arkansas,” she said. “Orson has never been the same since.”
Poe was still coughing. Roxie patted him gently on the back.
“I hope the guilty man was brought to justice.” Burton expressed his sympathy a little roughly but he meant it.
“I’m not sure about justice,” Roxie said, “but there was certainly revenge.”
“Sometimes the distinction between the two is fine.”
Roxie nodded. She looked sad. “And sometimes there is a huge gulf between them. Some of the rough men, Danites and others, of our Dixie—that’s the southern part of the Kingdom, where Brother Brigham is trying to grow cotton and wine grapes—ambushed a wagon train passing through from Arkansas. Parley’s killer, a bitter old man named McLean, was with the wagons.”
“Your men killed McLean, I take it?”
Poe hacked violently into his handkerchief. Burton could smell the blood and mucus.
“They killed every last person in the wagon train aged eight and older. Over one hundred people, men, women, and children.”
“Great God of Heaven,” Burton murmured.
“The Danites who ambushed that poor wagon train,” Roxie said, her voice barely above a whisper, “were led by John D. Lee.”
Burton’s heart ached. He wanted to say something but tears stung his eyes and he didn’t trust himself to formulate words. He was astonished at his own reaction and more than a little embarrassed.
Poe straightened up, his breath rasping in his lungs. He hurled his handkerchief out the wheelhouse window, took the wheel, and without saying a word put the steam-truck into gear.
The truck rattled forward, under the big letters in the Deseret Alphabet and into the dark-gaping maw of the Dream Mine.
Absalom plunged the knife into the Danite Wells’s throat. The resistance the blade met sickened him; it felt crunchy and elastic, as if he were cutting through the joints of a chicken.
He shuddered and let go of the knife handle.
Wells staggered back. His face was pale under the moon and washed with dark, deep shadows but Absalom clearly saw the look of surprise, anger, and fear in the man’s eyes. Blood poured down his chest. Absalom felt a burning mixture of shame and pride, knowing that the man was doomed, and it was Absalom who had killed him.
Richard Burton couldn’t have done it any better.
Wells stumbled, but kept his footing—
—his breath came in wet gasps—
—he slowly raised his rifle—
Absalom ducked reflexively and started to scuttle sideways, but then realized that he couldn’t let the rifle go off; Lee would kill Heber Kimball, not to mention the dwarf Coltrane.
Absalom lunged and jerked the rifle out of Wells’s hands.
Wells windmilled his arms and stared. He clawed at his thigh, and Absalom saw that he wore a pistol holstered there. Absalom couldn’t let that be fired, either.
Wells slipped the string off his pistol.
Absalom closed in, grabbing the Danite by the lapel of his coat and reaching for the hilt of the knife that still protruded from the other man’s neck.
Wells jerked the gun from its holster—
—and Absalom gripped the hilt of the knife and drew it across the Danite’s throat in a single swift motion.
Snick!
Blood gushed from Wells’s throat and poured over Absalom’s shoes. It smelled of salt, and meat, and iron, and death.
The Danite dropped his pistol from nerveless fingers, then collapsed to the earth.
Absalom let the knife slip from his hand. Then he fell to his knees and began to vomit.
“We need a plan,” Roxie pointed out.
“Recover the canopic jars,” Poe suggested.
“Sequester the rubies,” Burton added.
“Burn the fookin’ place to the ground,” Tam threw in, focusing to keep his words from slurring. Best not to sound too drunk, me boy. “Excuse me, I meant conflagrate it to the … terrestrium.” He looked out the window of the steam-truck at the tunnel walls. They were rough and rocky and propped up with heavy timbers but the tunnel was surprisingly large, for a mine. Well, it wasn’t really a mine, was it? But it looked like it had been bored by an enormous drill, rather than cut by picks. And of course, it was huge, so big the steam-truck rattled up it at top speed. “Terrarium?”
“Any of the three would do,” Poe noted, and coughed once. He and the woman Roxie sat on the front bench together. He drove and she kept a hand on his shoulder, stroking him like a bloody-damn-hell lapdog. “Or anything else that would prevent the launch of his ships come sunrise.”
“We should split into two parties,” Burton suggested. “At least.”
“Agreed,” Poe said. “I propose to drive the steam-truck into the facility and try to bluff my way through to achieving any of our objectives. Perhaps Roxie can join me, and corroborate my Pinkerton disguise.”
“You don’t look like a fookin’ Pinkerton,” Tam complained. “You look too clever to be a Pinkerton.”
“I could follow on foot,” Burton suggested. The Englishman sounded like someone had pissed in his tea, but then, he’d been stabbed twice, so Tam had compassion for the man. “Or is there another way in? The coal fumes from the trucks must get out of the tunnel somehow, mustn’t they?”
“Ventilation shafts,” Roxie explained. “But they go straight up.”
“There’s doors,” Tam pointed out, jabbing his finger at one in the wall as they passed it. Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t birthed any blind pups and Tam’s drinking hadn’t yet gone that far.
“Those are doors to let emergency maintenance workers in,” Roxie said. “They’re there in case the main tunnel is blocked and something needs to be dragged out or extinguished. They open automatically in case of fire in the tunnel but otherwise they’re locked.”
“And now we’re back to my plan of burning the place down,” Tam pointed out.
“Can anyone pick the lock?” Burton asked. He looked pointedly at Roxie and at Poe.
She shook her head. “Annie’s good with mechanical things. I’m more of a people person and a woman of words.”
“Seduction, forgery, and narcotics, in other words,” Burton said with a brutish leer, “but nothing useful.”
“Stop the Brigit-blessed truck,” Tam grumbled. He felt sick from all the motion anyway. “I’ll open the lock.”
Poe braked the steam-truck and Tam stumbled out. He took a moment once his feet touched the gravel floor of the tunnel to fill his lungs with air and let the walls stop spinning around him. Outside the truck, he could now see that the steam and coal smoke jetting out the back did indeed flow directly up into shafts overhead. The air filling the main tunnel itself was cool and very breathable.
Burton hit the ground behind him, saber clinking against the gravel (and didn’t he strut like that bit of steel made him all important and fancy?). “Wait until we’re sure he can do this,” the Englishman called over his shoulder to Poe.
Tam saw that Poe had conveniently stopped beside a door and he walked over to it. The door was a very ordinary-looking affair, solid, with a brass doorknob and a small, very modern-looking keyhole to its lock.
Burton followed him. “Aren’t you too drunk to do this?” he asked gruffly.
“I’m not drunk,” Tam objected, drawing one of the Maxim Hushers. “I’m Irish.” He pointed the gun at the lock and emptied the cylinder at it.
Zing! Zing! Zing! Zing! Zing! Zing!
Bullets whined through the tunnel and into the darkness but Tam paid them no attention and the explorer was unfazed.
Clang!
The doorknob hit the gravel. Burton stepped forward, hooked a finger into the ragged hole that the mutilated lock had left behind, and jerked the door open.
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br /> “We’re in!” he called to Poe and Roxie. He drew his long Colt pistol with one hand and his rapier with the other and disappeared into the open doorway.
“Sure, and who gets the credit?” Tam muttered. He thumbed open the compartment surrounding the Husher’s cylinder and stumbled after Burton, doing his best to reload while on the move. And a little bit tipsy.
Absalom Fearnley-Standish staggered into the grove of trees. His arms and chest looked strangely blotched in the moonlight and it was only when he got close enough for Sam to smell the iron-loamy stink of blood that he realized why.
“I’ve killed a man,” Fearnley-Standish murmured. He seemed distracted.
“I hope it wasn’t the dwarf,” Sam said. “I was beginning to feel fond of him.”
The Stridermen kept their watch in their big, clanking beasts, but everyone else rushed around the Englishman. The Mormon girl, Annie, pushed harder than the rest, elbowing aside even Brigham Young to get to his side, where she pushed her shoulder under his arm as if to keep him on his feet. He didn’t resist.
In his place, Sam wouldn’t have resisted, either.
“Coltrane was alive, last I saw him,” Fearnley-Standish protested mildly. “He gave me this knife.” He held up an empty hand, fingers smeared with blood.
“I see,” Sam said. “What happened?”
They stood in the grove of cottonwoods, trees tall enough to more or less mask the presence of the Striders, but also tall enough to block out most of the moonlight. Sam would have liked to use Pratt’s Fireless Darklantern but he was afraid it would be visible from the farmhouse.
The Englishman shook himself and snapped to a sort of attention. Sam couldn’t be sure in the darkness but he thought the fellow was squeezing Annie Webb’s shoulders rather more tightly than was strictly necessary to avoid falling down. “There are Danites in the farmhouse,” he informed them. “And the outbuildings. They have Heber Kimball and his family tied up, and Jedediah Coltrane as well. They sent me out to bring you in. I was not to let you think anything suspicious was happening.”
“Is that your blood, Mr. Fearnley-Standish?” Brigham Young asked. Sam found his voice surprisingly tender.
The Foreign Office man shook his head. “They sent one of their men to watch me and make certain I did as they asked. I, ah …” he gestured with his empty fingers, making a vague motion that might have been meant as a stab or a slash. “I killed him.”
“What was the man’s name, do you know?” Young inquired.
Fearnley-Standish cleared his throat. “Ah, Wells, I think.”
“Son of a bitch!” Orrin Porter Rockwell snapped.
“Poor Wells,” Young said thoughtfully. “So they got to you, too.”
“They got to a lot of folks,” Annie Webb said. She was snuggled as close into Absalom Fearnley-Standish’s side as a person could be without actually being in the same set of clothes. Sam snorted at the silliness of his own envy.
“It’s like I was trying to tell you, Brigham,” Rockwell grumbled. He sounded like a hungry bear.
“Hush now, Port,” his wife urged him, and the frontiersman fell quiet.
“We need a plan,” Young announced, sounding ebullient and determined in the darkness. “Port, have you ever been to Heber’s farm?”
“Begging your pardon, Mr. President,” Sam intervened. “But it seems to me that your enemies have made our lives easier. We were looking for a quiet place to stash some of the more egregiously civilian members of our party. John D. Lee has tipped his hand and shown us where he’s lying in wait, which makes the whole rest of the valley safe and fair game for us. Our plan now is the same as our plan was before, only now we go to a different friend’s house of yours. Or a wife’s, whatever is comfortable for you.”
“Aye,” puffed Dan Jones. “Or better still, pick a farm that doesn’t belong to someone in your family or anyone else close to you. The minute he sees you’re alive, any loyal man would be happy to hide John Moses and the Ambassador for you in his shed.”
“To open the blind eyes,” Young recited gently, “to bring out the prisoners from the prison. I’m not leaving Heber Kimball and his family in there. Or Mr. Coltrane. Who sees human beings as mere cogs now, Mr. Clemens?”
Sam was astounded. “That dwarf came out to your Kingdom planning to spy on you, steal from you, and, if necessary, commit acts of sabotage!”
Brigham Young looked at Sam. His eyes were in shadow, and Sam felt like he was looking into infinitely deep wells, rich with the knowledge of human folly. “Is he the only one who came to Deseret with such plans, Mr. Clemens?” Young asked.
Sam hung his head. “No, sir,” he admitted. “But I believe I had good motive for my actions.”
“Most men believe they do,” Young agreed.
Sam chuckled wryly. “I think you’ve stolen my line, Mr. President.” He really wished he had a Partagás to chomp on.
“In any case, Coltrane is my ally now and I won’t abandon him. Also, he came to the rescue of young John Moses Browning, more than once, and for that he deserves to be rescued himself.”
“Amen,” Dan Jones added.
“If joo are worried about your friend Heber, I suppose that rules out simply blowing the farm to esmithereens with my Estriders,” Ambassador Armstrong observed. “But I wish joo to understand that my bodyguards are estill at your disposition. As am I, of course.”
Fearnley-Standish cleared his throat again. “I believe we’re all at your disposition now, Mr. President,” he said, “whatever our prior political positions may have been. I think one of the tactical difficulties with any plan we adopt at this juncture is that if I don’t return up that irrigation ditch shortly, with at least you by my side, and maybe even without Ambassador Armstrong, Mr. Clemens, and Mr. Rockwell, the Danites hiding in the goat shed will tell Lee and he’ll kill all his prisoners.”
Brigham Young smiled. “Oh, that’s no problem,” he said. “That’s no problem at all.”
Burton strode purposefully, shoulders back to keep him at his full height and pistol raised and ready. Fitzzing blue electricks globes lit the passage, embedded into the ceiling at intervals of twenty feet. It was enough light to see by but he worried that shooting would be difficult, especially against moving targets that shot back. He kept his gaze nailed to the end of the passageway ahead; at least in this plascrete tunnel he didn’t need his peripheral vision for anything.
His whole body hurt. He kept going.
“You’re a brave man,” the Irish thug whined behind him. When he wasn’t actually singing, Burton decided, he didn’t like the Irishman’s voice. “And you’re a fast walker, aren’t you?”
“Jamshid’s crook! I’ve been stabbed twice and shot with a scattergun today,” Burton reminded the other man. “What’s slowing you down?”
“I’ve been shot twice and had my bloody-damn-hell ear bit off, is what I’ve done!”
“Unless the missing ear is somehow slowing your pace,” Burton growled, “I think that still means I’ve had the worst of it.”
“Do you hate me because I’m Irish?” Tam wheedled.
“A man serves his own country and cause without hating the countries and causes of other men,” Burton snorted. “Even the Irish.”
“Mother O’Shaughnessy taught me better than that,” Tam said, and his words slurred grossly. “She taught me that every man serves himself, and himself only.”
The passage ended at a staircase, steps leading up to the left and down to the right. Burton stopped to let O’Shaughnessy catch up.
“Milton puts that doctrine in Satan’s mouth.”
“Brigit love you,” the Irishman grunted.
“Is your pistol loaded?” Burton asked him.
“It is.” O’Shaughnessy brandished his strange, silent gun. “Just finished, and the second is still full, all six chambers.”
“I’m glad you can count,” Burton snarled softly, “because when I get to three, you and I are both going to step out
onto the stairs, pistols first. You will turn and look down the stairs, and I will look up.”
“Why’s that, then?”
“We killed the Pinkertons at the bottom of the mountain,” Burton reminded him. “I expect that if we are to see more of them, it’s likely that they will be coming down at us from above.”
“What’s that mean, you reckon you’re the better shot?”
“I know I’m the better shot,” Burton hissed. “I would have taken out the lock with one bullet, not an entire cylinder.”
“Ah, that’s just a question of style,” the Irishman grunted.
“One,” Burton riposted. “Two.”
On three they stepped onto the stairs. Nothing. Burton began briskly marching up, O’Shaughnessy trailing behind.
“Are we going to walk to the top of the bloody mountain, then?”
“We’ll take the first lift we find,” Burton promised. He felt like he was talking to a child. Was this what being a father was like? he wondered. Maybe he didn’t want to get married after all.
“There might have been a lift if we’d gone down, too,” the Irishman wheezed.
“There might have,” Burton agreed. “But if there’s no lift at all, we need to be going up. Besides,” he took a deep breath himself, “you clearly need the exercise.”
“I’m not a weakling,” O’Shaughnessy protested, “I’m just a bit drunk.”
“Keep your pistols aimed down the stairs, then,” Burton urged him. “But you told me before you weren’t drunk. Just Irish, you said.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, Dick,” the Irishman said. “It’s the same fookin’ thing.”
They climbed past several more passages, all leading off to the left. Burton could see that each ended in a dark doorway and he guessed they were further maintenance access tunnels and didn’t waste his time exploring them. He was feeling winded and lightheaded himself when he stepped onto a longer stretch of flat corridor, wider and taller and better lit by two miniature, man-height Franklin Poles against the right wall.
Between them was a glass door beyond which lay a dark shaft. The glass was bound and surrounded by brass, and a brass control panel to one side framed a lever in a vertical slot with three positions: UP, NO CALL, and DOWN. Burton thumbed the lever from NO CALL into the UP position with a loud click! and checked the percussion caps on his 1851 Navy while he waited for the tipsy Irish thug to catch up to him.