Liahona

by D. J. Butler

  Hickman squinted suspiciously, but John Lee nodded and smiled. “Thanks very much,” Lee said. “Welcome to the Kingdom of Deseret. I hope we get to see more of you around the Great Salt Lake City.”

  Then he walked away, tugging Hickman with him by the elbow.

  Absalom stood watching them go, nodding affably, and when they were around the corner, he collapsed like a marionette with cut strings.

  * * *

  Sam sat on the edge of a bunk in the cheap section of the dormitories. Two gas lamps lit the whole room, which looked about a hundred feet long and held maybe fifty beds, upper and lower bunks, all flat and hard and appealing only to the truly exhausted. In the corner opposite the entrance was the all-ages-and-sexes latrine, a squatpot-and-bidet unit whose modesty could be preserved by a tattered and unfortunately stained curtain. As usual in these caravanserais, the Indians, Mexicans and other non-Anglos ended up bunking around the latrine end of the room, so Sam sat staring into twenty-odd copper faces and feeling grateful for the jet of steam and hot water that flushed out the squatpot after each use and kept it smelling, if not nice, then at least not abominable.

  Still, the sight was distracting. “Would you gentlemen mind closing the curtain?” he suggested mildly. “I find my sensibilities are more delicate than I had imagined.”

  They were mostly young, all male, wild-looking and armed to the teeth. Just what he needed.

  “I’m not looking to start a war,” he informed them. “I just need to delay the Liahona a bit.”

  One of the older men—maybe as old as fifty, a man who had been identified to Sam as Chief Pocatello—nodded. “The white men of Deseret are not our enemies,” he said, “but we sometimes have small disagreements with Brigham and his people. Sometimes those disagreements even go so far as skirmishes.”

  “Tell me what sort of thing might cause such a disagreement, Chief Pocatello,” Sam urged the older man.

  “Money talks,” said the older Shoshone. “I hear you speak its language.”

  Sam tossed a small bag of gold coins to the floor; the bag (the strings of which Sam had deliberately loosened) opened and spilled its dully gleaming contents onto the plascrete floor. The crowd gave an appropriately appreciative collective grin and one of the younger men collected up the coins and gave them to Pocatello. “How’s that for a parley-vouz?” Sam asked.

  The old Indian shrugged, but his eyes twinkled. “Is that all?”

  Sam grinned broadly. The hook was in the fish’s mouth. “No, Chief, it isn’t. I’ve got an idea how you can turn an even bigger profit out of this deal, provided you’re willing to do a little trading in commodities.”

  * * *

  Jed crouched behind the pipes above one of the squatpots. The two ’pots sat side by side in the Saloon’s donnicker, in booths separated from each other by a thin slab of plascrete, and the pipes that ran up behind the ’pots and into the ceiling shared a crawlspace behind them for occasional maintenance. A full-grown man might have wormed his way back into the crawlspace with a ladder and some patience; Jed found it a comfortable waiting place, as well as a tactically shrewd one.

  Sooner or later, he thought, everybody shits. When it really came down to it, that’s all people were anyway, skin bags full of blood and snot that sloshed around all day processing their next shit.

  He had a length of piano wire wrapped loosely around one hand and a little ebony canister, inscribed with hieroglyphic writing, beside him in the shadows. He couldn’t read what the hieroglyphs said and he didn’t care to. Hell, he wasn’t even sure Poe could read them, though that man could fake his way out of an iron box if an army of angels was guarding it with flaming swords. If pressed, Poe would no doubt be able to spout acres of bullshit and claim it was the interpretation of the funny old pictures. Jed knew what was in the canister and he knew how to use it and that was all he cared about.

  The latrine door opened and the Pinkerton sauntered in. It was the one with the Bowler Hat, and he seemed to be looking for someone. He peered under both the stall doors, Jed crouching extra low in the shadow of the crawlspace just in case Bowler Hat decided his quarry might be a spider or a monkey, and called out, “Diamond!”

  Was that all he wanted, to find his friend Diamond? Jed wondered. Would he have to spend more time up here waiting, ignoring the vile noises and breathing in the rotten stink of his fellow human beings? As he thought of it, the image struck him as a pretty good description of life generally.

  But no, Bowler Hat had the urge. He selected the stall with the cleanest ’pot, shut himself in, hung his duster over the stall door, and dropped his trousers.

  Why is it, Jed wondered, that naked men looked so damn silly? At least the Pinkerton kept his shirt on.

  Jed wasn’t certain that the Pinkerton had to die. But he had chewed the matter over after his conversation with Poe, watching the two men work the room and flash their calotype, and had come to the conclusion that it was best if the two detectives disappeared. He couldn’t be sure whether they were his enemies or enemies of his enemies, and the uncertainty would complicate all his decisions. He hadn’t discussed his resolution with Poe, had decided to take it into his own hands to cut the Gorgon knot, as Poe himself was fond of saying, and just wipe the problem out. The world was uncertain, unclear, dirty and dangerous, and a man still had to act.

  Bowler Hat grunted, tensed the muscles of his shoulders, emitted an unpleasant odor, and relaxed. Now he was vulnerable. Jed stretched the piano wire from one hand to the other, waited until he heard his target exhale, and then jumped.

  Long years of playing the acrobat or the geek or the animal wrestler in one-horse southern towns made his attack possible. Jed dropped easily onto Bowler Hat’s shoulders and simultaneously threw a loop of the wire around his neck.

  The hat hit the filthy floor as the big Pinkerton jumped back, smashing Jed against the plascrete wall of the stall—

  thud!—

  Jed grunted, but held tight—

  the Pinkerton pulled, kicked, strained—

  Jed squeezed tighter, just like holding shut the jaws of an alligator—

  the Pinkerton clawed, scratching Jed’s arms, and smashed Jed against the walls several more times—

  oomph!

  but by the time the big man realized that his only chance was his pistol and grabbed for it, he was passing out.

  Jed landed hard, wedged into the corner of the stall as Bowler Hat fell back onto the squatpot. He continued the garroting until he was sure the Pinkerton was dead, then climbed down, feeling more irritated than sickened by his surroundings. He quickly stripped the man of interesting personal effects—a Maxim Husher (he raised his eyebrows and whistled), a wallet, a badge—before climbing the cold water pipe back up into the crawlspace where he’d left the canister.

  The attack and the theft had together taken two minutes or less. Now Jed popped open the lid of the canister and shook its contents down onto Bowler Hat’s prone body. Several dozen brass beetles, scarabs Poe would call them, fell onto the bare lower half and into the clothing folds of the dead Pinkerton.

  Inside the hinged lid of the canister there were two buttons. Jed pressed one of them, and the scarabs set to work. With fine brass mandibles, relentless brass claws and tiny jets of powerful acids, they made short work of the corpse, squirting acid onto the man’s body and then plucking away the dissolving and scorching bits and consuming them, like a woman plucking the flesh off a boiled chicken. Like a snowball tossed into a campfire, the man’s body just melted.

  Jed watched, fascinated and a little bit disgusted, though he kept one nervous eye on the door. Not that he was surprised at what the inside of another man looked like, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he looked at every day, not by choice, not if he could help it. In thirty seconds, bones showed through the flesh all over; in a minute, only bones were left; in two minutes, the bones were gone, too, and the brass swarm clicked and clattered uncertainly around the ’pot and rustled the empty c
lothing.

  Jed pressed the second button. Instantly, the swarm stopped its random runabout motion and headed his direction. Slightly unnerved despite his knowledge, he set the canister on the edge of the crawlspace and edged back into the darkness, as if that would save him. He watched uncomfortably as the scarabs marched in orderly ranks, like they were under the spell of some bug-herding Noah, back into the canister, made one last scuttling sound, and then were still.

  Jed closed the lid of the canister on tight and tucked it inside his jacket. Creepy little sons of bitches, but they did the job. He dropped to the ground, washed his hands in the low trough sink, and headed back into the Saloon. Time to pack their gear into the Liahona—he’d deal with the second Pinkerton later.

  Chapter Three

  Sam sat on the deck of the Jim Smiley and scowled into the pale mountain sun of the early morning. He made good and sure that every face that turned from the much bigger and much higher deck of the Liahona to look at him got a scowl in return, fierce and wild, eyebrows on full furrow and jaw jutted out. He could have sat in the wheelhouse and scowled, but he’d dragged the wooden captain’s chair—one of the few things he’d bribed the salvage teams working on the wreck of the Pennsylvania to give to him—out into the sunshine and plunked his narrow hips into its welcoming arms to make sure he was good and visible to all and sundry. He positioned himself carefully to catch the light of the rising sun on the crotch buttons of his Levi-Strauss denim pants.

  He sipped at a mug of hot coffee for show, but he’d already poured two down his gullet since the sun rose. Sam Clemens hadn’t slept and sleep wasn’t on his mind now. He’d worked through the night, which was hard to do in the dark of the boiler room when the electricks weren’t cooperating, and two of the pipes were already patched, with the third on its way. Once the Liahona pulled out, Sam would finish the repair job and be on her tail. She was a fast animal, but if old Chief Pocatello came through, and Sam felt confident that he would, Sam thought his odds of being the first into the Great Salt Lake City were rather good.

  The Liahona was enormous. Giant, rattling metal tracks snapped and ground in an approximately rectangular polyhedron around each of her sides, higher in front than in the back, flattening anything they rode over under tons of steel. Her body was shaped like a sailing ship’s, but more square, and the sides bulked out above the grinding tracks, making them visible before, behind and from the side, but not from above. She had a wheelhouse like the Jim Smiley’s, but where Sam’s wheelhouse might squeeze in a fourth man in a pinch, if that man were willing to stand, the Liahona’s could easily accommodate a platoon of marines. Its deck, too, was vast, and though it was all dusty and weatherstained, the surface was sprinkled with dozens of wooden benches and parasols from the relative comfort of which its passengers could observe the passing scenery; many of the benches and parasols were close enough to the rail to be visible from Sam’s lower observation point.

  Fifteen miles an hour, Sam thought, Pocatello had better come through for me. He chewed the stub of a cigar. For me and the United States taxpayer.

  During the night, one of the Pinkertons had disappeared and the other had been found dead. The dead one presented a relatively minor mystery; someone had cut his face up pretty bad, and no one the bouncers asked about it had cared to fess up to anything. They’d done the obvious thing and thrown the body into the icehouse until the next U.S. Marshal happened through and could investigate. By which time, Sam had intimated wryly to the bouncers when they inquired as to his whereabouts, the trail was likely to be cold.

  O’Shaughnessy had stayed hidden in the Jim Smiley and the bouncers, in their role of makeshift police, hadn’t tried to suggest that they had the authority to board and search her. Sam had been careful not to do anything to give them the idea that they did, and they’d all gotten along famously.

  The missing Pinkerton was rather more of a mystery. His clothing had been found in the Saloon’s latrine, but no other trace of him; apparently the man had taken his wallet and his weapon and had gone running off alone into the wilderness in the middle of the night. Sam was as surprised as everyone else, and as little able to explain it. All in all, it was the sort of behavior he associated not with the Wyoming Territory but more with, say, Canada.

  When the sun had cracked over the horizon, the last few passengers had loaded into the Liahona. Sam had stopped working on the boiler pipes to watch; he loved mighty moving machines, and the Liahona, though she wasn’t handsome, was as mighty as they came. Her Captain, the Welshman Jones, had lowered a cargo door in back to march up a few crates and suitcases, and the passengers had come up the side by ladder. For those without the heart to make such a climb unaided, the crew had hung a pulley from a metal arm above the rungs and dropped a steel-and-leather harness. Several ladies and one man had come up that way, the ladies flashing various expressions of delight, relief and disgruntlement at the heavy-armed truck-men who hoisted them. The fellow who had availed himself of the crew’s assistance was the younger, whiter, and fussier of the two Englishmen. Probably, Sam thought, watching him flap his arms like a turkey and cringe from contact with the side of the great steam-truck, it had been the other Englishman who had punched the holes in the Jim Smiley.

  After the big steam-truck was loaded, some of the Fort’s men climbed up onto the ramparts and walked the full circuit, scanning the horizon for threats with their spyglasses. The enclosure was designed to look like an old wooden stockade, with a jagged top like the shoulder-to-shoulder points of sharpened logs, but the wall was made of thick slabs of plascrete just like Bridger’s Saloon, and all its points were made of iron, and iron was the walkway that ran around the inside, giving the Fort’s defenders a platform from which to watch and defend. The Fort sat squarely astride the road, with one huge tower-shouldered gate looking east, to the Platte and the Mississippi and beyond, and another gazing resolutely west, to New Russia, to California and to the Kingdom of Deseret.

  Once they had confirmed that the horizon was clear of hostiles, the Fort’s people threw levers inside one of the west towers, and with a rush of steam into the center of the gate from both towers, the huge, interlocking steel fingers that comprised the gate itself groaned and withdrew into their plascrete housing, opening the way for outbound traffic.

  Even idling, the Liahona coughed significant fumes into the air, and when Jones blasted the signal from the tin-peaked whistle at the corner of his wheelhouse and engaged the throttle, the black cloud that belched out of the rear of the stream-truck could have entirely covered any two Missouri counties, or the entire state of Rhode Island. Steam hissed out, too, through various chinks in the beast’s body, pfffting out past the gears that worked the tracks, from cracks in the hull and from a pipe that rose out the machine’s back end, alongside the exhaust pipe, for the purpose.

  Twenty-odd passengers on the Liahona’s deck waved hands, hats and scarves at the Fort’s staff lingering in the yard (none stupid enough to linger too close to the truck). The staff waved back, some with polite hats and some with less-polite single fingers and sneers. This was the edge of the United States of America, Sam was reminded; once the Liahona left Fort Bridger she entered the Kingdom of Deseret, and relations between the U.S. and the Kingdom were not always completely friendly.

  Sam looked for the Englishmen and found them sitting by the rail and enjoying the sun. The dark one met his bold gaze, mustache for mustache, and when the Englishman raised his glass in salute, Sam toasted him right back. The pale one looked away.

  Sam pulled his goggles down over his eyes and a scarf up over his mouth and nose.

  To his surprise, as the Liahona thundered by and just before its cloud of dust enveloped him, he thought he saw the gypsy palm reader. So the vagabond showman was going to the Great Salt Lake City, was he? What had he said he was doing, something about a display of mummies? Sam hadn’t really been paying attention, he’d been thinking about death. Death and Henry.

  Well, fine, h
e’d have a good conversation with Mr. Brigham Young and then he’d go see the mummies. Maybe have his palm read again. For that matter, Young had something of a supernatural reputation. Sam tossed aside the last of his cigar and considered what questions he might ask the famous Prophet of the Rockies, if given the chance. Is there an afterlife, Mr. President, and if so, where in its various parts is my brother Henry? That about cut to the heart of the matter.

  When the dust settled, Sam tugged his scarf down, shaking out the red-brown sand it had collected. “O’Shaughnessy!” he roared, and then he saw the man waiting on the gravel at the foot of the ladder.

  “What do you want, Sam Clemens, you bloody slave driver, you?” O’Shaughnessy roared back, stomping up out the stairwell, but when he saw Sam frozen, staring down at the ground, he shut up. From ten feet away, Sam could smell the liquor on the Irishman.

  “Good morning,” Sam called to the stranger. “Can I help you?”

  The man wasn’t tall, but he was stocky and he gave the impression of physical power. His hair and beard were long and streaked with gray, and his body, the body of the horse he rode and the body of the packhorse he led all bristled with guns and knives. He wore buckskins and furs and so did the animals. Sam peeled away his goggles for a more unobstructed view of this genuine western curiosity.

  “You’re headed into Deseret!” the man growled.

  O’Shaughnessy crept across the deck, avian head low, and pulled out a gun. Sam glanced, not meaning to, and noticed that the pistol was unfamiliar and odd-looking, with a big metal bulb on the end of its muzzle and another where the cylinder should be. Did it shoot gas? Sam wondered. He prided himself on being a man who knew mechanicks, but guns were not his strong suit. Where did O’Shaughnessy get such a thing?