by D. J. Butler
Exiting the farmhouse, the temperature dropped. After weeks on the road, it still impressed him how cold the desert got at night. The sudden cooling of sweat on his forehead made Absalom realize how hot and stuffy the inside of the house had been.
“This way,” he said politely, and marched out along the irrigation ditch.
Wells walked behind him, which put Coltrane’s knife and the pocket it was tucked into conveniently out of the Danite’s line of sight.
Absalom slipped the knife into his hand.
He kept spinning the wheels. They kept failing to catch on anything clever or insightful.
Absalom stopped walking. “Those are my companions over there,” he told Wells. He could see the Striders, silhouettes jutting out around a stand of trees where three fields met. “Will you wait here for me?” He doffed his hat politely with his left hand.
Be brave, he told himself. Be a fighter, like Burton.
Wells spat on the ground. “I reckon not. I reckon I’ll follow you on up closer, so I can hear what you and your companions say to each other. And make sure you talk good and loud, hear?”
Be fearless. Be a bull with a saber.
“Of course.”
Be the warrior Annie wants.
Absalom stabbed with Coltrane’s knife, aiming for the Danite’s jugular.
Chapter Fourteen
“Lie back, Captain,” Roxie instructed him, “and think of England.”
Burton struggled to sit up in the office chair. “Who’s bringing up the steam-truck? Tell me it isn’t O’Shaughnessy.”
Roxie plucked another pellet from Burton’s side and tossed it to the plascrete floor, where it hit with a gentle plink. “You object to giving the wheel of a steam-truck to a man who’s been drinking?”
Burton snarled against the pain and spat on the floor to clear his head. “I object to giving it to him.”
“Not to worry, then,” she told him, wrapping a bandage around his chest. “Poe’s driving.”
“Ekwensu’s slippery shell!” Burton cursed. “Let’s hope the wretch lives long enough to get back here.”
“Captain Burton,” Roxie looked at him reproachfully. “Don’t be a sore loser.” She wrapped some sort of cloth around him as a bandage. It had the sting of alcohol.
Burton growled and grumbled wordlessly, but nodded. “It’s my nature, Mrs. Snow… Mrs. Young… I was never cut out for the soft conversation of the civilized.”
“You can still call me Roxie,” she said, and tied the bandage off.
He shrugged back into his coat and limped with her across the veranda. At the top of the stairs, they gathered up O’Shaughnessy, who was droning on and on about the pipes that were calling him. Burton didn’t dislike the Irish, not any more than he disliked any other race of men, and he decided that, on balance, he almost liked O’Shaughnessy’s singing voice. He helped the other man up and they staggered together down the stairs, to stand in front of the bay doors that now gaped open.
Blue lights jostling up the road showed that Poe had survived the hike down to the steam-truck and was on his way back.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said to Roxie, pointing to the row of squiggles over the top of the bay door. “What language is that? It’s everywhere in this Kingdom, but I haven’t heard a language spoken other than English and Spanish.”
She chuckled slyly. “Why, Dick,” she said, “I’m surprised to see you so easily stumped. That’s perfectly good English. It says Koyle Mining Corporation.”
Burton squinted at the letters. “It’s a cipher, then,” he guessed. “You’ve taken as a nation to writing in code. It’s like the tangled streets of a medieval city, a deliberate device to keep outsiders out.”
“On the contrary,” she told him, “it’s a system to make writing the English language simpler.”
“Simpler!” he snorted. “Some of us find the Latin characters simple enough.”
“Yes?” she asked innocently. “How do you write the sound fffff?”
“Eff,” he retorted, then caught himself. “Or pee-aitch.”
“Or?”
He thought, feeling that he was being baited. “Double-eff.”
“And what sound does gee-aitch make?” she pressed him.
“Dammit, woman,” he rumbled, “what’s your point?”
“The point,” she explained, gesturing at the row of characters that allegedly identified the owners of the mine, “is that those characters are the Deseret Alphabet. They are used to write English, in a manner that is simple, logical and consistent.”
“Once you know the damned code,” Burton growled.
“Yes,” she agreed, “once you know the alphabet.”
“I did not know you Mormons went in for Websterism,” Burton complained.
The steam-truck rumbled up out of the trees and clattered to a puffing halt in front of the big door.
“Oh, we are reformers, all right,” she told him. “But that is the least of our surprises.”
“You people,” O’Shaughnessy belched, “are so fookin’ boring!” He staggered to the side of the steam-truck and started trying to climb up one of its big India rubber tyres.
Burton examined the letters. “Your kay resembles the Egyptian hieroglyph of a woman’s breasts,” he said. “What is that lightning-bolt-and-cross pictogram that follows it?”
“Sound it out, Dick,” she suggested. “That’s the oi in Koyle.”
Burton shook his head. “Was this scheme dreamed up by your Madman Pratt, too?” he asked. He dragged the Irishman over to the ladder and shouldered him up it by main strength. His injured arm, leg and side all hurt, though none of it, he reminded himself, hurt half so much as having a spear thrust through his head.
Roxie climbed the ladder nimbly. “Actually, it was his brother Parley. With some others.”
Burton followed. “And Parley Pratt is at present doing what? Rendering the contents of the Library of Congress into this efficient alphabet of his?”
Roxie sat on the front bench inside the wheelhouse. Burton kicked O’Shaughnessy into a crumpled pile on the second bench and dropped beside him.
“Parley’s dead,” she said quietly. “He was killed two years ago.”
Poe started coughing. He didn’t look well, and Burton did him the courtesy of pretending not to notice.
“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.
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, like he was 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’s 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.
“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.”
