Liahona (2 page)

“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?

Sam turned to ask the gypsy to explain himself, but the ugly
man was gone.
 
In his seat instead
was a beautiful young lady, her brown hair curled on her head and high on the
back of her neck, long pearl-drop earrings hanging from the cherry lobes of her
ears.
 
Her face was serious but
cheerful, with a thin mouth that was all business.
 
She smiled at Sam, and he had to take another puff of the
Cohiba to keep the sudden explosion of songbirds contained within his
chest.
 
He glared at the smoldering
stump—at this rate, he was no more than a minute away from having to
light another, just as a defensive measure.

“I’m Annie Webb,” the lady said, “and you’re the most
handsome man in this saloon.”

Sam almost choked.
 
“I’m Sam Clemens,” he identified himself, “and I’m certainly the
luckiest.”

“Yes,” she agreed.
 
“Yes, tonight you are.”

*
  
*
  
*

Poe pressed himself deep into the cracked leather seat of
the corner booth and let himself feel inconspicuous, unworthy of attention,
invisible.
 
He scratched himself
with the bare fingertips protruding from his kid gloves and allowed his head to
slump with his body, falling into a posture that said that he was just another
frontier drunk with idiosyncratic taste in clothing.
 
The scratching was not part of the disguise, but the result
of it—Poe’s hair was longer and more oily than he liked under his tall beaver
hat, and he couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d picked up fleas somewhere
between St. Louis and Fort Bridger.
 
I’m just a gypsy fortune-teller, he thought; it was a role he enjoyed
playing, especially when his mark was a man as shrewd as Samuel Clemens.
 
The role was outrageous, and playing it
with a smart man made it a game; in this case, it was a game with high
stakes.
 

Clemens would have a mission counterpart to his own, of
course.
 
Ascertain the truth of the
phlogiston gun rumors.
 
Influence
Brigham Young and the foreign policy of the Kingdom of Deseret, or render
Deseret harmless.

But what about the strange request from the Madman Pratt,
the one that had come directly from Pratt to Robert, the one that Robert had
told Poe was secret from Brigham Young and Jefferson Davis as well?
 
Was Robert playing some game with Pratt
alone, or did Pratt act very discreetly on behalf of his country?
 
And what were the strange objects that
Poe had agreed to give to the Madman in exchange for the air-ship designs?
 
Robert had mentioned ether-waves…
ether-waves were also Poe’s best guess as to how the scarabs worked, and the
same technology could certainly be put to other uses… were the canopic jars
communicators of some sort?
 
Of
course ether-wave communication was experimental at best, even in Hunley’s
laboratories in Atlanta, but he couldn’t imagine what else ether—the
mysterious particles that filled the universe, including the apparent void
between the planets—could be used for.
 
An ether-wave weapon?
 
A transportation device for small objects?

A secret hope that maybe the objects were healing devices of
some sort rose up in Poe’s breast, and he strangled it.

Through his smoke-glassed spectacles, Poe continued to
survey the room closely.

The Pinkertons had made him nervous.
 
His heart was still beating a little fast,
and the whistle around his neck felt very heavy.
 
He wondered if he was even close enough to be able to use
it, or if the cotton batting packed into the crate would muffle the sound too
much.
 
If only one of the men came
after him, of course, he could probably disable the attacker with some simple
baritsu.
 
Two men, though, would be
more of a challenge.

Ah, Robert, he thought.
 
What have you gotten me into?

Bridger’s Saloon was the heart of Fort Bridger.
 
There were also a commissary, a
mechanick’s workshop for the steam-trucks that arrived limping at this junction
of the New Russia, California and Mormon Trails, and dormitories, and in any
kind of decent combination of good weather and daylight the stockade yard was
thronged with merchants of one kind or another.
 
Trappers sold furs; cattlemen sold meat, generally on the
hoof; worn out, desperate pioneers sold furniture, books and family heirlooms
to lighten their loads.
 
They all
came to spend their earnings at the Saloon.

Out front were two Franklin Poles, huge blue electric globes
on iron lampposts, but the interior of Bridger’s place was lit with gas, little
gas lamps glowing in sconces all along each wall, smudging the red wallpaper
behind them black with soot and heat.
 
The Saloon used electricks, too, though Poe wasn’t exactly sure what
for, other than the lights in the yard—to cook, maybe? or to operate
locks or security systems?—but he could smell the ozone now and
then.
 
The bar crawling down one
wall of the common room was a bar like any other, heavy and dark and scarred
and stained, clinking dully in the eternal dance of glass- and
bottle-bottoms.
 
The faro and poker
tables could have been snatched from saloons in the Dakotas, Kansas City or New
Orleans.

The people, though, were a mix such as you’d see nowhere
else.
 
Even the pioneers were
wildly heterogeneous: there were sober-faced, still-wet-behind-the-ears Mormon
immigrants from northern Europe in their thick clouds, and more mixed, smaller
bands heading for New Russia, and the California-bound prospectors so excited
about the future they couldn’t stop talking about how they’d spend their
fortunes, if they hadn’t already done so.
 
There were Russians from the northwest and Frenchmen from Canada and
black men from Mexico.
 
There were
hunters, trappers and Indians.
 
Were those Shoshone in the corner? Poe wondered.
 
It was out of his area of
expertise—they might have been Blackfoot or Ute.
 
There were soldiers, lawmen, outlaws,
gamblers, musicians, dancers, dry goods salesmen and even a whore or two.
 
They all rubbed elbows and bumped
against each other like so many different species of bees, shoehorned
unexpectedly into a single hive and surprised to find themselves not entirely
displeased.

Poe watched them.
 
He took it all in and he forgot nothing.

Jedediah Coltrane the dwarf drifted across the barroom
floor, eyes carefully probing all the corners.
 
He’d had a shot of something at the bar and he moved slowly
among the faro tables and the dancers, but it was a slowness of deliberation,
not of indecision.
 
Despite his
height, he fit in well with the Saloon’s crowd, unshaven as he was, his face
craggy under his shapeless hat and his striped shirt, wool trousers and jacket
fine but frayed, his suspenders holding on by a few impatient threads.
 
He looked like he had purchased the
Sunday outfit of some child second-hand, and thrown away the necktie.

He was coming to Poe to report.

“The Irishman slipped out early,” Poe told Coltrane as the
little man eased into the seat opposite.
 
“Did he see you?”