by D. J. Butler
“No,” she admitted softly. “But whatever afterlife there is, I am bound to Brother Brigham in it.”
“Oh?” Poe couldn’t let that one lie. “And when we first met, weren’t you bound to the King of Nauvoo?”
“Things change,” she acknowledged. “It isn’t wise to resist the inexorable.”
Poe pounded his fist against the control panel. “And is there no choice in it? You were Joseph’s, you are Brigham’s… may you not choose to be mine?”
“There is always choice,” Roxie said, “for all of us. I choose fidelity to the promises I’ve made.” She hesitated. “Fidelity after a fashion. Such fidelity as I can manage. I choose service to the whole, and to the greater good. I choose to play my part in the plan.”
“Edgar Allan Poe be damned.” He started coughing again, his chest shuddering and shaking with the effort. He spat out the window, tasting the blood and phlegm on his tongue even after it was gone.
“I hope not,” she replied softly. “Edgar Allan Poe be saved, and even healed.”
“You believe in miracles, then?”
“I do,” she agreed. “I also believe in the surprising genius of Orson Pratt.”
The light ahead shifted, the tunnel suddenly turning, leveling out, and debouching into a large space stacked with crates, like a warehouse. Men stood arrayed loosely around the opening, including an old man whom Poe recognized instantly as the Apostle Pratt.
“This seems surprisingly direct,” Poe murmured. “It can’t bode well.”
“Follow my lead,” Roxie urged him.
Poe shifted the truck out of gear and attached the brake. Pratt shuffled around to Roxie’s side of the steam-truck and squinted up into the cabin.
“Sister Young!” he squeaked.
Poe did his best not to cringe or gnash his teeth.
“Brother Pratt!” she hallooed back. “My apologies for the late hour!”
“My condolences for the death of your husband,” Orson Pratt responded. “I’d have thought you might be in widow’s weeds by now, comforting your sister-wives in the Beehive House or the Lion House.”
“I would,” she agreed, “only Brother Lee asked me to bring you something.”
Pratt frowned and shook his head. “I’d have thought that snake would have plenty of strong backs to do his work without troubled the bereaved women of the Great Salt Lake City,” he harrumphed. He held up his hand, inviting her down. “Come visit with me. That fellow there can unload the materials, whatever they are.”
Roxie took his hand and hopped lightly down. “Oh, that’s my cousin Jared. He’s new to the valley, and offered to help me. Jared, come join us, would you, please?”
Poe fought off a coughing fit by force of will as he climbed down.
“I didn’t know your cousins were members of the Kingdom,” Pratt said. He arched his bushy eyebrows, which made them jump almost to the top of his bald head.
“Jared isn’t,” Roxie clarified her lie. “He’s come to tell me about a death in the family. An aunt. I’m to have a small inheritance, it seems.”
Pratt’s men climbed into the back of the steam-truck and dragged out the crate they found there, beginning to lower it to the ground.
“Honest Jared,” Pratt mumbled in vague approval.
“He’s something of an amateur technologist,” Roxie continued. “I hoped you might like to show him the Teancum.”
“Your air-ships are famous, sir,” Poe played along, affecting enthusiasm and doing his best to imitate Roxie’s Massachusetts twang in his voice. “They were all the talk at Fort Bridger, flying air-ships and phlogiston guns!”
Pratt chuckled. “I’m pleased to entertain, sir. Perhaps I can entertain you tonight even further.”
“How’s that?” Poe asked.
“Oh, Jared would be thrilled to take even a short ride aboard one of the air-ships,” Roxie gushed.
Pratt’s men pried apart the crate with crowbars and stripped away the cotton batting inside, revealing what Poe had known was in there all along.
The Seth Beast.
It stood stiff and erect, like a shining steel sculpture of a dog, life-sized if the dog in question were a very large hunting hound or a small pony. It wasn’t quite a dog, though; very long, donkey-like ears sprang up at either side of its head, square at their extremities, and the tail that shot straight up into the air from its hindquarters forked at the end. Its muzzle, too, had a little of the anteater about it, or maybe the sloth, curving downward slightly at the nose, over powerful jaws bristling with long steel teeth. Hinges and ball joints all over its body hinted at the movement the machine was capable of.
“My goodness!” Pratt ejaculated. “Brother Lee didn’t make this. No one in the Valley, not even John Browning, made something like this!”
“I don’t know where it came from,” Roxie said. “I do know that John has been dealing with southerners a lot today.”
Pratt paced a circle around the Seth Beast, examining it closely. The whistle on Poe’s breast felt very heavy.
“And how does it work?” Pratt asked. “Where are the controls?” Poe would have sworn that the long hair standing up at the back of his head stood up even straighter as he examined Hunley’s craftsmanship, like curious antennae.
Roxie shrugged and shook her head. “He didn’t say.”
Pratt stopped pacing and clapped his hands together once. “Well,” he said, “there’ll be plenty of time to play with this new toy later. As I was saying, your arrival here is very timely. Tonight… or rather, tomorrow morning, you will be witness to a unique spectacle, a great first time event in the history of mankind.” He turned, and gestured to his men at the Seth Beast. “Leave this here, gentlemen; we can deal with it later.”
“What’s that?” Poe asked uneasily in his false twang.
Pratt turned back to face them, and he held a gun in his hand. Not a weapon of any sort that Poe recognized—it was bulky and square, to be held in two hands, and its muzzle was far too big for anything resembling an ordinary bullet.
“Why, Mr. Poe, the complete destruction of the Great Salt Lake City, of course,” Pratt said calmly. “By aeronautical assault, and phlogiston rays.”
“No!” Roxie gasped.
Poe considered, and couldn’t see any reason that the obliteration of the Mormon capital would serve Lee’s interests. “I thought Lee wanted to be President,” he said mildly, dropping the false accent. No point denying his identity, since Pratt had obviously recognized him. “Either his plan is so Byzantine I cannot penetrate it, or it is misconceived.”
“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!”
Here ends Timpanogos
Part the Third of City of the Saints
Part the Fourth is Teancum
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About D.J. Butler
D.J. Butler (Dave) is a novelist living in the Rocky Mountain northwest. His training is in law, and he worke
d as a securities lawyer at a major international firm and inhouse at two multinational semiconductor manufacturers before taking up writing fiction. He is a lover of language and languages, a guitarist and self-recorder, and a serious reader. He is married to a powerful and clever woman and together they have three devious children.
Dave has been writing fiction since 2010. He writes speculative fiction (roughly, fantasy, science fiction, space opera, steampunk, cyberpunk, superhero, alternate history, dystopian fiction, horror and related genres) for all audiences. He has written and is writing novels for middle grade, young adult and adult readers. He is working on getting published via the traditional route; in the meantime, he is entertaining readers with City of the Saints and Rock Band Fights Evil. Dave has always had a soft spot for good pulp fiction.
Follow Rock Band at http://rockbandfightsevil.com.
Hear about City of the Saints and D.J. Butler’s other writing projects at http://davidjohnbutler.com.