by D. J. Butler
“Lee’s plan!” Pratt snapped, and then chortled. He’d have looked jolly, without the exotic and sinister gun in his hands. “Wrong twice!”
What did that mean? Poe wondered, but couldn’t guess. “Your plan, then,” he said. “Why do you want to destroy your home?”
Pratt nodded to his men and they swooped down on Poe and Roxie, drawing guns and grabbing with hard-knuckled hands. Roxie shot Poe an imploring look and he held his face impassive. This was not the time to resist. The men began dragging Poe and Roxie away. There were so many of them, they lifted the two prisoners off the floor entirely.
“I’ll keep the explanation simple,” Pratt shouted over the heads of his hired thugs, trailing in their wake. “John D. Lee killed my brother. Brigham Young, in his infinite wisdom, forgave John Lee.”
“For that you will murder the entire city?” Roxie shouted back. Her face was twisted in anger and surprise and pain.
Pratt ignored her travail. “Lee has done me the favor of punishing Brother Brigham for his virtue,” he further explained. “Tomorrow morning, I, in turn, shall punish John Lee for his vice!”
***
Part the Fourth
Teancum
***
Chapter Sixteen
“Be good for the Captain and Mrs. Rockwell,” Jed told John Moses. He sniffed a little but he told himself he wasn’t crying. It was just cold at night in the desert, that was all, and it made his nose drip a little.
“Can’t you come with us?” the little boy asked. He sobbed openly.
Jed shook his head. Suck it up, Coltrane. “I got things I gotta do,” he said. He wasn’t exactly sure whose side he was on now, really, but he knew Poe wanted him to help Brigham Young and that seemed like the generally right thing to do. At least, all the pit vipers and crazy people seemed to be on the other side, and that was a pretty good weather vane. “You got things you gotta do, too. You gotta get home, so your poppa and your two mammas and Captain Jones can all stop worrying about you.”
John Moses nodded slowly. “And being brave is doing what you gotta do, even when you’re scared.”
“Especially when you’re scared.”
“Don’t you let my silly brother talk you into any notion that I’m leaving,” Abigail Rockwell told her battered, bear-like husband as she wrapped her arms around his chest and squeezed him once. She shot a look of pure venom at the Englishman that made Jed flinch, even though it wasn’t aimed at him. “And don’t you even try.”
Annie Webb flared her nostrils in indignation but Fearnley-Standish answered before she could.
“Do dot worry, dear sister,” he said. The poor bastard’s nose was smashed nearly flat and the injury had taken away his power to pronounce the letter N. “I have do such idtedtions. Besides, my brother-id-law has gived do iddicatiods of beigg susceptible to my limited powers of persuasiod.”
Jed hugged the little boy and then let Abigail Rockwell pry him away. She climbed into a buckboard with Mrs. Kimball at the reins, Mr. Kimball and his scattergun at her side, and the body of Ambassador Armstrong arranged on the floor.
Captain Jones grabbed the dwarf’s hand and shook it vigorously.
“Any time you need a berth, boyo,” the Welshman said gruffly, “come find me.”
Jed nodded. He was numb. “Get him back to John Browning safe,” he mumbled.
“Aye, of course I will.” The Liahona’s skipper joined the others on the buckboard.
Jed turned and followed Sam Clemens and Brigham Young across the stubble-splashed field towards the nearer of the two Striders. The knives at his belt and in his boot were a comforting weight. He had been particularly happy to find one of the dead Danites armed with a Colt Vibro-blade, and he now wore the weapon openly, like a sword.
He caught up to the other two men as they reached the Strider. It crouched low to board its passengers while the other stood guard.
“I don’t understand how we were trapped, Mr. President,” Clemens was saying. “What good is having a prophet along if he can’t warn us of ambushes?”
“A prophet isn’t a fortune-teller,” Young snorted. “No man walks around knowing his future all the time.”
“Oh?” Clemens gave Young a boost and helped him clamber up onto the bent leg of the Strider. “Then what’s a prophet for? I mean, other than to warn people against wearing fornication pants?”
Young scrambled over the side and into the carriage of the Strider. “A prophet carries the word of the Lord, Mr. Clemens,” he barked, “but it’s the Lord who decides what that word will be, not the prophet.”
“Seems like the other fellers are the ones as have the prophet,” Jed muttered. He hadn’t meant it to be audible, but he was cranky and his words came out kind of loud. When Clemens and Young both owled their heads around to look at him, he explained. “They found us awful easy, is all I’m saying.”
Brigham Young coughed. “Yes, well, that’s my fault.”
“Explain, o swami,” Clemens urged him.
“Heber Kimball is my closest friend and has been for years,” Young offered. “Anyone in the Kingdom would know that, and certainly Lee. Aside from one of my own houses, with one of my own wives, there was no more obvious place for me to go for help. In hindsight.”
Sam Clemens started to laugh. “Prophetic hindsight!” he guffawed, and climbed into the carriage himself. “I might have to get myself a signboard and go into the prophet business with you. Or against you. Set up shop across the street.”
Jed hopped easily up the outside of the Strider. “Shut up, Clemens,” he growled.
Sam Clemens jutted out his jaw. “I didn’t realize I had a midget in my chain of command.”
“That’s me, Jed Coltrane, circus freak,” the dwarf conceded. “Jest ’cause you’re taller don’t mean you’re right.”
Clemens shut his trap and chewed on Jed’s words.
“Just because you’re short doesn’t mean you can be a boor,” Brigham Young bristled.
“Jest ’cause I’m helping you don’t make you my prophet,” Jed shot back.
All three of them fell silent then, until Sam Clemens again began to laugh.
“So that’s settled,” he chuckled. “Everyone is his own man.”
“I ain’t!” Orrin Porter Rockwell snapped, hurling himself into the carriage just as the legs extended and the carriage rose into the air. “I’m Brigham’s man, come hell or high water, or even undeserved kicks in the teeth.”
“What about the kicks you actually earn?” Clemens asked.
Pffffffft-ankkkh!
“I don’t know whether the Strider will hold four passengers,” Young said warily, looking over the side of the carriage at the harvested field falling away beneath them.
“What’s the word of the Lord on the subject?” Clemens needled him again, but his voice was gentler this time.
“You ain’t got four,” Jed grunted. “You got three and a half.”
“Don’t joo worry,” the Striderman at the controls called back over his shoulder. Ramirez, Jed thought the fellow’s name was. And the gunner’s name was Polk, which was a queer name for a black man from Mexico, but that’s life. “She’ll hold.”
The other Strider bent low to pick up its passengers. That was the pilot Ortiz and the gunner Jackson, and they’d carry Absalom Fearnley-Standish and the Mormon girl Annie, who wouldn’t stop making eyes at him.
“Where to, Mr. President?” Clemens asked, jolly again.
“As close in to the Great Salt Lake City as we can get,” Young rumbled. “I don’t think we’ll be able to take the Striders all the way, they’re too conspicuous.”
“Don’t you want publicity?” Clemens asked.
“Not the kind that comes from getting shot,” Jed guessed sourly.
“The Jim Smiley is parked in a lot on the east side of the city,” Clemens suggested. “That’s my steam-truck. She’s distinctive, but a lot less distinctive than the Striders. Lee and his boys might not know her.�
�
“They know her,” Young said grimly. “But it can’t hurt us to have the option. Let’s go get your steam-truck, Mr. Clemens.”
The other Strider rose to its height. Absalom Fearnley-Standish sat in it like a Turkish pasha, between two women. He waved, and the Striderman pilots exchanged arm gestures, and then Ramirez turned his machine and began pffft-ankkkkhing across the fields.
“It also can’t hurt us to have a supply of decent cigars,” Clemens added.
The Pinkertons had taken the jar of scarabs. They’d missed the hypocephalus, folded up as it was like a handkerchief, and also the whistle, which looked innocuous. And they couldn’t take away his baritsu training.
Passing the top of a stairwell leading down, Poe made his move.
He simply stepped sharply to his right, planting one foot in front of the fleshy-jowled Pinkerton holding him on that side, and leaned with his body into the man’s elbow. Jowls missed his footing, then missed the floor, crashing hard onto the second step and bouncing down the stairs, wobbling face first.
Before he hit, Poe was already turning to the burly guard holding his left arm. Burly grabbed for Poe’s coat—
—Poe raised his tied hands, as if the knotted rope binding them were a weapon with which he could parry—
—and Burly grabbed the rope.
Poe fell back, pulling Burly, who was much larger than Poe himself, forward with the power of his own lunge. He curved his back to hit the floor rolling and tipped Burly up and over his head with a direction-prompting kick into the man’s crotch.
“Ooomph!” Burly gasped and let go of the ropes.
Poe badly wanted to grab the whistle around his neck and blow it but he resisted. That was his ace in the hole, and he was afraid he’d get the notes wrong—it was so blasted hard when you couldn’t actually hear them yourself—or it would take him too much time to get them just right. And once the Pinkertons realized what he was trying to do, surely they’d take the whistle away.
No, the whistle had to wait.
He blocked a charging hatchet-faced man with a heel in the man’s midriff, kicking off immediately and using the impetus to roll to his feet.
Beyond the crowd of stampeding Pinkertons, Poe saw Orson Pratt again draw his strange weapon.
Two fingers to two beady eyes knocked another Pinkerton to the ground and a quick chop to the throat took down a fourth.
Zottt!
The blue light of the electricks in the hall was pierced and empurpled with a sudden red wave erupting out of Orson Pratt’s weapon. A beam as thick as Poe’s calf burst from the gun and lanced into the plascrete wall beyond Poe. The plascrete bubbled instantly under the touch of the ray, exploding into blisters, melting and running down to the floor. A thick stench, like the foulest stink of a tar pit, assailed Poe’s sinuses.
The beam snapped off.
Poe seized another Pinkerton by shoving one finger up each of the man’s dilated nostrils, pulling his body forward over Poe’s knee and slamming him head-first into the melted segment of wall as Poe deflected another man’s punch with the elbow of his other arm.
The reek of scorched flesh cut sharply into the tarry smell and Nostrils shrieked in pain.
Poe turned to run.
“Stop or I kill her!”
Poe burst into a paroxysm of coughing and stumbled.
Hands grabbed him and he batted them away, but his will evaporated and he didn’t have the strength. Big-knuckled men with bruised faces and wounded pride in their eyes dragged him back and held him before the Madman Pratt.
Pratt held his gun to the back of Roxie’s head. The thing didn’t have a trigger that Poe could see, but it bore some sort of bolt or lever on the side and Pratt kept one thumb carefully on top of it.
“Aaaaaagh!” Nostrils continued to howl. Out of the corner of his eye, Poe saw that the man’s head appeared to be stuck to the melted plascrete of the wall.
“The phlogiston gun.” Poe felt crushed.
“Bit of a misnomer, of course,” Pratt huffed. “It doesn’t shoot out phlogiston, not like you’d think with that name. Phlogiston is already in everything that exists. It’s in you, in me, in the plascrete, in the air. It’s the stuff that burns out when something is incinerated, and what is left behind is the calx.”
“I’ve heard this,” Poe muttered. He could get away himself, but the price would be Roxie’s life. Hers was a death he had fantasized for ten long and lonely years, and now he found it too high a price to pay. “Ether rays.”
“Ether rays? Ha! Ether comes in waves, son! All my weapons do is fire a ray, a simple beam of refracted light, that causes the phlogiston in any targeted object to ignite and rapidly consume itself,” Pratt continued. He sounded like he was lecturing, and liking it. “Phlogiston gun is as ridiculous a name as Calx gun would be. Light beam gun or ray gun would be less preposterous.”
“Aaaaaaagh!” Nostrils kicked against the floor and shuddered. The other Pinkertons looked away from him uneasily.
“I don’t think anyone finds your weapon ridiculous,” Poe murmured. He shook himself mentally, trying to shrug off the feeling of defeat and find a way forward, any information or advantage he could manage to squeeze out of the moment. Pratt hadn’t reacted to the ether rays gambit but it had been a shot in the dark.
“The gun’s real name is the Pratt Ruby-Refracted Matter Enkindler, of course.” Pratt’s voice sounded like he was just getting wound up and might continue forever. “Named in honor of my brother Parley Pratt and not named after myself, which is why its nickname is the Parley. A sophisticated man such as yourself, a writer, even, will be able to appreciate the ironic pun in the nickname. Not that you should care.”
“I do appreciate it. I appreciate it enough that I shall not ask you for a parley, now or ever. And at least if you shoot me with that thing,” Poe said, “I can take comfort in the fact that I didn’t bring you the means of my own destruction.” He coughed again, so hard he nearly shook himself free from his captors.
Pratt laughed, and patted the Enkindler. “No,” he agreed, “Mr. United States did. What you brought me was for the ships.”
The ships? That was surprising. The Kingdom of Deseret had been famous for its airships for several years, since they’d first been spotted (and fired upon) by miners in the silver fields of Colorado. One had flown over the Liahona as it entered the Kingdom just … well, just yesterday now, though it seemed like ages ago to Edgar Allan Poe. Pratt didn’t need any devices from Hunley in order to make his ships fly, obviously.
Therefore he needed the devices to make the ships do something else. But what? Something that required ether-wave devices? Something Pratt didn’t know how to make the ships do on his own?
“Are you really willing to destroy your own ships?” he asked, and scrutinized the Madman’s face for a response.
Pratt cocked a wary eyebrow. “You’re playing games,” the inventor snapped.
Poe said nothing and watched Pratt’s face twitch.
“Hunley would never have sabotaged the canopic jars!” Pratt barked. “He knows I’d never give him the schematics if he did!”
“You didn’t give me the schematics,” Poe pointed out. “And you never intended to, did you? You wanted me on the ground, a known and fixed target, so you could destroy me. You wanted that for me and Clemens both.”
Pratt grinned, a crooked, shifting thing that belonged on the face of a beggar or a drunk. “I can’t very well have you running back to your governments and telling them that I double-crossed you, can I?” he pointed out.
“Why not?” Poe asked. “Before I could get back to Richmond and tell anyone what you’d done, you’d have your revenge. Even if Hunley or Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee wanted to stop you, they couldn’t.”
“Aaaaagh!” Nostrils screamed again, shuddering. Orson Pratt snorted, raised his Parley and pointed it at the suffering man. He clicked the firing bolt once.
Zottt!
Nostrils burst i
nto flame, writhing as his body burnt to cinder. Poe didn’t let himself stare.
“Yes, but what about after my revenge?” Pratt pointed out. “I plan to survive the downfall of the Kingdom and, wherever I decide to go, I’m not interested in living my life under the threat of a bounty offered by the United States of America.”
Poe didn’t care about Pratt’s plans following the mass murder he had planned. He wanted to know what the canopic jars did. Could they be an energy source? Could ether-waves power a device, including an airship? “With the canopic jars in place, how far will your ships take you? Could you get to Mexico City?”
Pratt laughed. “You drop your hook into the fishing hole hoping there’s a big trout down there in the darkness somewhere,” he said.
“I have a hook,” Poe said. “I have to try.” The fact that Pratt had realized he was being probed and cut off the line of conversation didn’t mean that the guess about the canopic jars being a power source was wrong, of course, but it didn’t confirm the guess, either. He sighed. It was so much easier to write a clever detective than actually to be one.
“What you don’t yet realize,” Pratt continued, “is that the fishing hole is home to a terrible monster.” He gestured to the Pinkertons. “Hit him a little bit, but don’t kill him. If he tries anything—anything at all—kill her. After you’ve all had your fun, throw them in with the others.”
Pratt handed his Pratt Enkindler to the nearest Pinkerton, turned and walked away. The Pinkerton, a heavy man in a bowler hat, sneered and shoved the muzzle of the weapon into Roxie’s side.
The first fist rammed Poe in the belly and knocked him against the plascrete wall, only a foot from where the Pinkerton’s skull, now embedded in the ruined material, smoldered away. The blow kicked all the air out of him and triggered his coughing reflex at the same time, so Poe gagged and sucked in and choked on air, his stomach retching up bile and his lungs forcing out blood in the effort. Punches to the face prevented him from even spitting out the polluted fluids, so the sour vermilion mess bubbled from his lips and spattered all over his chin and face and shirt as Poe went down, unresisting and defenseless, with his eye fixed on Roxie.