Liahona

by D. J. Butler

  Liahona

  City of the Saints, Part the First

  By D.J. Butler

  Cover Art and Design by Nathan Shumate

  Copyright 2012 D.J. Butler

  Read more about D.J. Butler at http://davidjohnbutler.com

  I worked hard to produce this book. Pirating this book means stealing from me; please don’t do it.

  City of the Saints is an adventure in four parts:

  Part the First is Liahona.

  Part the Second is Deseret.

  Part the Third is Timpanogos.

  Part the Fourth is Teancum.

  If you like City of the Saints, you might also enjoy Rock Band Fights Evil, my action-horror pulp fiction serial.

  Rock Band #1 is Hellhound on My Trail.

  Rock Band #2 is Snake Handlin’ Man.

  Rock Band #3 is Crow Jane.

  Rock Band #4 is Devil Sent the Rain.

  Rock Band #5 is This World Is Not My Home.

  Chapter One

  “This is insubordination, Dick!” the man in the tall top hat and cravat hissed.

  “Well, then, Abby,” Burton growled back at him, “you have something to write in your little notebook for today.”

  “You may address me as Ambassador,” the younger, paler man whined, and removed his hat for a moment to mop sweat from his brow with a white silk handkerchief. The ceiling of the Jim Smiley’s engine room was high enough for the two men to stand in comfortably, but the heat that its boiler gave off, even on a low idle, made the chamber feel smaller and infernal, like a smithy with the windows all shut.

  The heat might make Absalom Fearnley-Standish wilt, but it wasn’t any kind of serious bother to Burton. “If we are to stand on rules of address,” he snarled, “you may call me Captain Burton.” He picked up a heavy tool, spanner at one end and spike at the other, from a steel crate of similar implements and hefted it. He leered at the diplomat, knowing that the red light coming through the furnace’s grate would give the scars on both sides of his face a devilish cast. “This will do well enough.”

  “Again I protest,” Fearnley-Standish said, eyes darting around in the Vulcan gloom. “My commission letter says nothing of sabotage.”

  “Well, then,” Burton answered in as reasonable a voice as he could muster, examining the three brass pipes that rose from the iron furnace to the enormous boiler, “you should have exercised a little more imagination when you wrote the damned thing.” With a grunt and a swing of his powerful shoulders, he slammed the spike end of the tool into one of the pipes.

  Clang!

  Fearnley-Standish jumped. Hot air rushed from the hole Burton had made, the room becoming perceptibly more stifling. “Egad, stop that!” he spat out, and Burton grinned.

  “I find that your inexperience in the dark art of sabotage comforts me,” he told the younger man. “It restores my faith in the moral rectitude of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service. Moral rectitude, if not effectiveness.” He swung again. Clang! “Still, must do the job right.”

  The second pipe was well holed, and Burton looked at the boiler’s pressure gauge. Its needle, already low as the boiler idled, steadily dropped now towards zero. Burton was no mechanick, but he thought that meant he had done the job. For good measure, he smashed the gauge as well.

  “That’s enough! The Americans will hear us!” Fearnley-Standish wiped sweat from his face again. He was trembling.

  “I forget,” Burton mused, “how young you are. You’ve never cut through impenetrable jungle, never traveled in a foreign country in disguise, never taken a spear to the face.” He raised his weapon a final time. “Great Kali’s hips, you’ve probably never even sailed the Nile.”

  “Blowhard!” Fearnley-Standish squealed.

  “Coward!” Burton retorted. “Stuffed shirt!” Clang! He smashed a hole in the third pipe. “That should hold them for a day or two, especially,” he gestured at the crate of spanners and other implements, “if we take their tools with us.”

  Fearnley-Standish stepped away and crossed his arms. “I’m not carrying those.”

  Burton grunted. “Say something that surprises me, Ambassador.” He stuffed the spanner back among its fellows and then picked up the box. “You might, for starters, explain why you bothered to accompany me on this little sortie. If you’re so convinced the Americans are not our enemies, or at least our rivals, you might have saved yourself a little hysterical panting and remained on the Liahona.”

  “Did you hear that?” the diplomat hunched his shoulders and twisted his neck, cupping a hand to one ear while he craned to look up the stairs that led to the Jim Smiley’s deck.

  “Pshaw!” Burton dismissed his fears and pushed past, slipping effortlessly up the iron-grilled steps. He was nearly forty, he thought proudly, but he was as muscled as he’d ever been, as strong as he’d been when soldiering in India in his twenties.

  Fearnley-Standish hesitated, and then tapped up the stairs in Burton’s wake.

  “I am Her Majesty’s representative,” he buzzed in Burton’s ear, “responsible for whatever happens on this expedition. I couldn’t risk that you might run off alone and do something foolish.”

  Burton laughed harshly. “Instead, you witnessed the foolishness!” The deck of the Jim Smiley was reminiscent of a sailing ship, a flat space with a railing around it and cabins fore and aft. Everything was iron and India rubber. “I hope you’re taking detailed notes in your little memorandum-book.”

  “Yes, well,” Fearnley-Standish harrumphed.

  Something flickered in the corner of Burton’s vision and he snapped his head around to look at it. Nothing. Just a shadow, a well of darkness thrown into the lee of the Jim Smiley’s wheelhouse by the Franklin Poles, the great crackling blue electric globes standing guard in front of Bridger’s Saloon. But was there a darker shadow within the shadow, a slight stirring? He stared. Nothing. He listened, and heard the raucous, muffled sounds drifting through the plascrete walls of the Saloon, but nothing more, nothing that indicated any danger. The shadow was too small to hide a man in any case, Burton reassured himself, and he turned and headed for the rail. The grated iron floor, the deck, since these truck-men all insisted on talking about their vehicles as if they were sailing ships, jutted out a few extra feet to the ladder, to get over the strangely rounded and rubber-cloaked hull of the vessel.

  “What is it?” the diplomat asked him.

  “Nothing,” Burton dismissed both the other man and his own fears with one word. He dropped the crate of tools to the ground with a rattling crash! and slid effortlessly down the ladder after it.

  Fearnley-Standish descended more awkwardly. Halfway down the starchy young man missed a rung. He dangled by his hands for long and flailing seconds before he managed to reattach himself. “What are you going to do with those?” he demanded shrilly.

  Burton laughed again at the pusillanimity of the other man. “I’ll put them in the one place where Clemens and his goon won’t be able to find them in the morning!” he cried over his shoulder. Bending at the knees to pick up the crate again, he headed across the yard towards the great shadowy hulk that was the Liahona.

  * * *

  “Your road ahead is shadowed and perilous,” muttered the gypsy. He held Sam Clemens’s right hand clutched in his own, which were armored in fingerless black kidskin gloves, and peered closely at the creases in Sam’s flesh. Close enough, Sam thought, that the man could just as easily be smelling his future as seeing it. The man’s hair was long and greasy, as befitted a gypsy, and his coat and vest were threadbare. “Your future is one of failure, disaster and great sorrow. You should reconsider your course, sir. You should turn back.”

  The gypsy fell silent and arched an eyebrow at Sam, as if underscoring the fearfulness of his message. The silence between
the two men was filled with the babble of the saloon around them.

  “That’s refreshing,” Sam quipped, chomping fiercely on his Cuban cigar. The air inside Bridger’s was heavy with smoke, but it was the smoke of cheap American tobacco rolled into cheap cigarettes, mixed with gas lamp emanations and the occasional ozone crackle of electricity. Sam filtered the stink, as well as the rancid smell of sour, sweaty human bodies and the drifting odors of horse and coal-fire, through a sweet, expensive Cohiba. Nothing, he thought, beats a government expense account.

  The gypsy stared at him. His gray-streaked black mustache hung asymmetrical under his bulbous nose, and was no match for Sam’s fine, manly soup-strainer. His jaw looked misshapen, too, sort of hunched sideways into the thick, mostly gray, beard that veiled it. Above all the facial hair and the badly-cast features, though, the man had dark, intense eyes, with baggy pouches under them, and those eyes stared at Sam in surprise. “Did you hear me right, sir? I told you that your future is bleak.”

  “Yes,” Sam acknowledged. “Your honesty is marvelous. Most fortune-tellers would take my two bits and tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. Beautiful willing women, rivers of smooth whiskey and horses that run faster than the sun itself are in your future, sir! Come again soon.” He grinned, took another suck at the cigar and winked. “I respect your integrity.” And besides, he thought, you’re most likely right, anyway. If the Indians don’t kill me, the Mormons will, and that wily codger Robert Lee must have agents out there somewhere as well. Failure, disaster and sorrow, indeed.

  Sam heard a clatter from the corner of the common room. A squad of Shoshone braves, proud and alien with their beaded vests and fringed leggings, their strange hair, clumpy on top and then falling long about their shoulders, and their long magnet-powered Brunel rifles, had shoved aside several tables and were beginning some sort of coordinated movement that looked like it might be competitive interactive hopscotch. They tossed flat disks across the floor and then raced in hopping motions, each to another man’s disk and then back to his starting position. They looked like big, hairy, dangerous, possibly slightly inebriated versions of little girls. Sam forced himself to take a second look at their guns and suppressed an urge to laugh.

  Those Brunel rifles hurled bullets faster and farther than any gunpowder-driven weapon yet made, and punched awful holes right through a man’s body. They were English in design and manufacture, portable railguns, and Sam wondered how the Shoshone found themselves so well armed. He sobered up quickly at the thought. For that matter, as he looked closer, he spotted electro-knives and vibro-blades here and there. Somehow, though it was in a picaresque and highly individualized, even chaotic, fashion, the Shoshone had gotten themselves serious hand-to-hand weapons. Might they have larger armaments, too?

  At this rate, he began to think all the wild talk about phlogiston guns being tested out in the Rocky Mountains might not be so wild after all. Maybe he ought to consider his mission objectives broader than dealing with Deseret alone, or at least get that recommendation back to Washington. It was bad enough that Deseret had air-ships, and might have ray guns that rained fiery death on their targets. Once such things got into the hands of the natives, there might be no end of mischief.

  Two of the Saloon’s bouncers, heavy men in buckskins with knives and guns, didn’t look like they wanted to laugh at all; they moved a little closer with expressions on their faces that were downright grim.

  The gypsy shook his head, perplexed. What had he said his name was…? Archer? He wore a tall boxy beaver hat, a long duster, brown corduroy pants and a shirt that was striped vertically in purple and gold. Round smoked glasses that might have hidden his burning eyes rode low on the onion-like bulge of his nose. He didn’t really look out of place here, Sam reflected, surrounded by New Russia Trail pioneers, steam-truck mechanicks, black Stridermen from President Tubman’s Mexico, cowboys and the usual clutter of low-life entertainers that filled any bar west of the Mississippi.

  Sam knew that he looked much more at odds with the environment, in his self-consciously modern attire. He wore a jacket, without tails because tails were inconvenient, and white because Sam liked to think of himself as the hero of the story, even though, if pressed, he wouldn’t admit to believing in heroes. He wore Levi-Strauss denim pants, brand new and shipped straight from the factory to the U.S. Army at Sam’s request. They were comfortable and rugged, and they snapped up the front with a row of metal buttons for convenience, as well as for a certain masculine flair that shouted mechanick. At least, that’s what they would have shouted to Sam, if he ever took occasion to look at another man’s crotch and saw it protected by a row of steel snaps.

  “You don’t understand,” the gypsy said. “You take me for a huckster.”

  “I take every man for a huckster,” Sam agreed. “I find it saves time.”

  “You’re on an errand,” the palm reader pressed, looking down again into Sam’s close-held hand. “You are a knight, and your quest is of supreme importance to your people… your family, perhaps… but your errand will end in irretrievable disaster. You should turn back now, sir.”

  Your family, perhaps. Sam felt sick to his stomach, and another swallow of Cohiba smoke did nothing to relieve him. He pulled his hand away.

  “Gentlemen,” interrupted a crisp New England accent at his shoulder, saving Sam from the terrifying void of his own thoughts. “If you have a moment…”

  Sam turned to look at the intruder, who was brushing his long overcoat aside to reveal his hip. Sam found himself staring at a long metallic pistol, holstered but menacing and obviously meant to be so. The holster itself was unnaturally bulky, with a flap that covered much of the actual weapon and hid it from view, and Sam wondered what kind of gun it must be concealing. Something new by Hunley? Maxim? Colt? Its wearer was a tall, muscular man in a bowler hat. He glared at Sam and the gypsy and in his right hand he thrust forward a black calotype printed on a sheet of cheap paper.

  Where the hell is that Irishman? Sam wondered irascibly. This sort of thing was supposed to be his job. Then again, maybe Sam should start wearing a pistol himself. He spotted O’Shaughnessy against the far wall of the Saloon’s common room and tried to catch his eye, but the Irishman, Sam’s bodyguard and designated man of violence, pulled his porkpie hat as low as the little thing would go over his brow, threw his scarf over his shoulder and slipped through a doorway into the back hall.

  “Pardon the intrusion,” Bowler Hat continued, his smooth, polite tones in sharp contrast to the implied threat of his revealed gun. “Have you seen this man?”

  Sam dragged on the cigar to steady his nerves and shot a look at the gypsy; the other man was as composed as a wooden Indian. Finally, Sam looked at the calotype and almost choked. It was his Irishman, Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy, in black and white and large as life, large as his own hawklike nose, though the picture was not half so vicious as the genuine article, no doubt because the calotype hadn’t been drinking. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “you’ve already concluded that I’m not your man.”

  “Suppose what you like, seeing as you’re neither cuffed nor dead.” Bowler Hat rested his hand on the pistol grip. “But answer the damn question.”

  A second man stepped up, similarly wrapped in a long overcoat but wearing a stovepipe hat the color of charcoal. Sam almost liked the man for his neatly trimmed goatee. “Easy, Bob,” Stovepipe cautioned his comrade. “We’re not looking for either of these two gents.”

  Bob snarled and backed off, champing his teeth like he meant to bite off the smoldering tip of Sam’s Cohiba. Sam eyed him coolly, taking another swallow of sweet smoke. If Bob could have shot bullets from his eyes and sliced Sam in half with that glare, he would have. Well, Sam thought, give Horace Hunley and his crew another twenty years, and they’ll be grinding out soldiers that look just like real men and do shoot bullets out their eyes. This war cannot be allowed to happen.

  “You know the fellow’s name?” Sam asked. “Image that
fuzzy, could be anyone. Mercy, boys, I’m surprised you didn’t think it was me.”

  “He may be using the name Seamus McNamara,” Stovepipe informed him.

  “Hmmn,” Sam chewed his cigar and raised both his thick eyebrows at the gypsy, who continued to be impassive. “You boys haven’t shown me a badge, so I reckon that means you’re bounty hunters. What’s the dividend on this fellow?”

  “We’re with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency,” Bob grunted.

  “Like I said, bounty hunters,” Sam smiled a practiced sarcastic grin at them that he knew was sweet and self-righteous and infuriating at the same time. He wondered why the Pinkertons would be after O’Shaughnessy. Oh well, it hardly mattered—he couldn’t let them have him in any case. “Only you’re the kind of bounty hunters that are too proud to subcontract.”

  “I oughtta—” Bob choked out, stepping forward again, but Stovepipe restrained him by the elbow.

  “Have you seen him, mister?” Stovepipe asked Sam directly.

  Sam felt the thrill of danger in his blood and grinned. The gypsy’s face hadn’t twitched a muscle, but his posture looked taut, like a spring ready to bounce. Sam wondered if he was packing and concluded that he probably was. Every man in the room but Sam was probably packing.

  He looked back to the two Pinkertons. “I haven’t seen the fellow,” he told them. It was a lie, but a half-truth like I don’t know any Seamus McNamara or I don’t know where this man is would have been just as much a lie, and Sam didn’t really object to lying anyway. Lies could be useful and downright entertaining.

  Bob snorted, but didn’t argue. The Pinkertons faded, backing away one step at a time until the jostle of the Saloon swallowed them. Now, what had that gypsy been saying about Sam’s family?