Deseret (13 page)

He almost lost the dwarf at the exit, and he almost lost him
again outside the train station.
 
The little man crossed one of Deseret’s exaggeratedly wide boulevards
there and immediately on his heels the street filled with American military
steam-trucks, barreling past at full steam.
 
It was the Massachusetts squaddies again, the same ones he
and Sam Clemens had seen earlier.
 
Before, they had had the practical, slightly underslept,
getting-about-one’s-business look that soldiers everywhere always seemed to
have when not in action or suffering through some drill or actually asleep.

Now, they looked frightened.
 
The steam-trucks bellowed and groaned and squealed like
enormous bellyaching hippopotami as they rushed past, and the soldiers on their
decks clutched their carbines and looked about them like they feared being shot
at from every window they passed, or even by the birds of the air.

What Brigit-blessed nonsense had happened in the short hours
while he’d been gone?
 
Tam stepped
up his pace, easily gaining ground on the little man with his longer strides,
and dragging the boy along, as often as not lifting him off the ground by the
wrist.
 
Not too much, Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy me boy, he warned himself.
 
Don’t want to completely overtake the little goblin.
 

The dwarf crossed the half mile or so of the city center to
the Deseret Hotel.
 
Tam and his
hostage watched from around corners as Coltrane took the lift up (presumably up
to the suite that Tam shared with Sam Clemens, but what in Brigit’s name could
he be doing up there, up to no good, but at least it was Tam who had the
beetles of doom), returned promptly, had a brief word with the desk clerk (it
was still that helpful fellow Sorenson, Tam saw) and then idled on the street
outside.

After half an hour of idling, at some prompt Tam didn’t
detect, the dwarf started moving again, back towards the giant beehive in the
center of the city.
 
He stayed in
public, visible places, and Tam was beginning to feel like a whore in church
from all the eyes on him.
 
If the
dwarf wasn’t going to go into any dark alleys of his own free will and choice,
Tam might just have to show him the boy and force his hand.

Then things took a turn that was surprisingly… sneaky.

Tam and the boy sat on a brass and plascrete bench across
the wide street from the big egg the Mormons called their Tabernacle.
 
The bench was sculpted on its sides
with the image of an angel blowing a long straight trump, with the two trumps
extending along the sides of the brass-slatted seat, and honeybees flying out
the ends of the horn.
 
There was an
open space around and before the bench, a green and planted square, and the
dwarf moved around on the far side of it, so Tam could watch him comfortably
from where he sat.
 
He tried to
ignore the spiderweb of glass piping over his head and the whizzing of objects
being shot through it, the pumping up and down of glass and brass bellows off
in the corner of his eye, and all the glittering surfaces of plascrete and
metal and glass, and pay attention to where the action was.

The dwarf didn’t go to into the egg.
 
He went to one of the buildings across
the square from it.
 
It was a
house, a big fancy house, a lords and ladies house, and it looked really
strange here in the Great Salt Lake City, surrounded by plascrete and brass
pipes and weird fey things scooting around inside glass tubes.
 
The other building was the Lion House
that he had already gone into with Clemens, and the two looked like they might
even be joined at one corner, but this building looked totally different.
 
It had tall columns and a beehive on
the top of it like a cake decoration, and under the second-story balcony held
up by the long white columns, some of its windows were very tall.
 
The dwarf knocked.
 
A young woman came to the door,
listened to him politely but didn’t let him in.

The dwarf Coltrane made as if to leave, but once the door
was shut he sneaked around in the shrubbery, peering in windows.
 
“Dirty little bugger,” Tam
muttered.
 
He was good, quick and
quiet and little, of course, and Tam already knew that he was as agile as any
squirrel.
 
Tam had sharp eyes, but
if he hadn’t been following the little man in the first place, he never would
have been able to spot him creeping about the house with the beehive top.

Then Coltrane ducked, like he was hiding from someone Tam
couldn’t see.

Other men came to the front door of the house and were admitted.
 
Tam didn’t pay them much attention,
except to notice that there were four or five of them and they were armed.
 
But then everyone in this
bloody-damn-hell place carried a gun.

Then a man, a full-sized man, detached himself from the
bushes not far from the dwarf and hurled himself in through one of the
windows.
 
He was a crazy-looking
bastard, with a long beard, a knife in one hand and dressed head to toe in
leather, like some character out of a penny dreadful.

Crash!

Tam was no fool, to grab his gun and go rushing into a fight
that was clearly none of his business.
 
Still, he kept his hand on the weapon, just in case.

Bang!

The little boy sat bolt upright like a bullet had hit
him.
 
Tam tightened his grip on the
Husher, but stayed put.
 

“Did Jed get shot?” John Moses asked, eyes big and round.

“Shut up!” Tam hissed.
 
“No, he didn’t!”
 

A steam-truck, small and boxy and ugly, smashed through a
hedge to Tam’s left and surged up onto the green grass surrounding the
beehive-cake house.
 
Tam was so
surprised he nearly jumped out of his seat, but quick motion wouldn’t do.
 
He kept his nerve, and as the truck
pulled up in front of the shattered window, he crept from the bench with all
the rat-like stealth and grace he could muster (and if prosperity was a sign of
God’s grace, what more blessed creature was there, anyway, than the lowly
rat?
 
no doubt it was due to his
fervid adherence to the first commandment,
be fruitful and multiply
).
 
Tam
dragged the boy with him, and squatted down behind a row of rosebushes to watch
what was happening.

From his new vantage point, he could see in through the
window, and the first thing he saw was Sam Clemens.
 
Clemens’s hands were tied behind his back, and a big man,
one of the armed men Tam had just seen come into the building, maybe, pulled a
sack over his head.

“Jesus, Brigit and the Duke of Wellington!” Tam cursed.
 
He didn’t love the man, but he liked
him, and by any fair calculus he probably was in Clemens’s debt.
 
Besides, in any scenario where armed
thugs were tying up a man to take him prisoner, Tam’s natural sympathy was with
the prisoner.

Almost
any scenario.

Then the men with guns dragged Clemens out the shattered
window and threw him into the back of the truck.

The kidnappers had other prisoners too, and Tam saw their
faces as they were bagged and then tossed on board.
 
There was a big black fellow in a very fancy suit and
cravat, and there was the crazy-looking bastard with beard and buckskins, and
then there was another face he recognized, at least from calotypes.

“Fookin’ hell,” he muttered.
 
“The bastards’re kidnapping Brigham Young.”

What now? Tam wondered.
 
He didn’t have time to plan, he knew, he had to act.
 
He needed to follow the truck, but if
it left the city, any pursuit would instantly be visible.

He needed to get
on
the steam-truck.
 

He could let the boy go—he’d just have to go after the
dwarf later.

Except no, wait a minute, Coltrane was still there in the
bushes, and Tam couldn’t have the little bugger shooting him in the back while
he was trying to mount a rescue for good old Sam Clemens.
 
Bloody-damn-hell.

The steam-truck was a wheeled platform with two metal sheds
on it, one shed being the glass-windowed wheelhouse and the second being a
cargo space.
 
Between the two was
an iron furnace beneath a boiler, and beside it a tender with a short-handled
shovel strapped to its trapdoor lid.
 
The wheelhouse was empty and no one else was about the truck—all
the men were inside, wrestling with the prisoners, and now was the moment to
act.

Tam dragged the boy with him, across the garden space and
towards the truck.
 
As he
approached it with long steps, Jedediah Coltrane stepped out of the
bushes.
 
He had unboxed his machine-gun
and now he raised the hateful thing in Tam’s direction.

Tam drew a Husher and pressed its muzzle against the boy’s
temple.

Don’t even try it, you stupid little fooker
, he mouthed at the dwarf, and then he clambered up
the short iron rungs to the front platform of the steam-truck, by its squatty
little wheelhouse.
 
The boy
cooperated.

Coltrane glared at him with desperation and shifted his grip
on the stubby rifle.

“I’m brave,” John Moses called out softly to the dwarf,
“don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry, you dumb fookin’ midget,” Tam hissed, “he’s
brave.”
 
He grinned threateningly
at the dwarf.
 
“I’ll come back for
you later, you hear?”

He holstered the Husher, grabbed the boy tight under one
arm, and climbed up a second ladder that took him to the roof of the truck’s
cargo compartment.
 
He was careful
to hold the boy in front of his own body, in case the dwarf decided to risk a
shot.

The dwarf’s indecision ended when the truck gate slammed
shut and the armed men came walking out toward the wheelhouse end of the truck
again.
 
He faded back into the
shrubbery, but Tam felt his hard, piggy little eyes still staring in his
direction as he yanked the boy flat on the truck’s roof.
 
It was a wide, flat space, and there
were mooring rings to hold on to.
 
Just to be on the safe side, he unbuckled the boy’s belt and re-buckled
it again through one of the rings.
 
No sense losing your hostage, is there, whether to escape or the
accidents of an overzealous turn?

“The safehouse?” a rough voice asked.
 
“Or the ranch?”

Boots
thudded
dully
on metal as men climbed aboard.

“Nah, Hatch, I got a better idea,” answered a whiny, nasal
voice.
 
“Lee’s gonna find out we
ain’t followed his instructions precisely to the letter, and we need to get
somewhere he won’t expect to find us.
 
And helldammitall, we know Rockwell ain’t home, so I reckon we ought to
go to his place.”

There was the harsh laughter of men, and then the
groan
of the steam-truck shifting into gear.

“Give me back my hat,” Tam snapped, and took his porkpie
back from the little kid.

*
  
*
  
*

“I think it’s time to lay our cards on the table, Captain
Burton,” Poe said.

The two of them stood in the plascrete well, under tens of
thousands of staring eyes but alone.
  
The Apostles huddled on the stage with Lee and Cannon,
the Virginians had filed out and in the aisles it was a slow, somber, but still
chatting every-man-for-himself of Saints filing out the doors.

Burton crossed his arms, looking every inch the muscular and
demonic defier of convention, the flouter of taste, the explorer who would go
where he willed, and damn the consequences.
 
What did Queen Victoria think of the Kingdom of Deseret that
she had sent such a man?
 
What did
she think of Americans generally?
 
“Agreed,” the Englishman said.
 
“Start with your real name.”

“Edgar Allan Poe,” Poe said.

Burton furrowed his brow in doubt.
 
Poe removed his smoked glasses and his hat, and smoothed his
hair down.
 
Burton cocked an
eyebrow.

“Poe,” he murmured.
 
“By the Sapta Rishis, I think you might be telling the truth.
 
I see your nose has shrunk.”

“I am, and it has.”

“Nevermore!” Burton shouted, then laughed at his own
joke.
 
Poe smiled weakly.
 
“But you’re dead.”

“The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Poe
said.
 
“Deliberately so.
 
I am in United States Army
Intelligence.
 
When… enemies…
attempted to kill me and very nearly did so, with no small amount of public
spectacle, my superiors and I simply let them think they had succeeded.”

“Shame to end such a writing career,” Burton
tut-tutted.
 
He was taking the
revelation well, Poe thought.
 
“Ten
years ago, wasn’t it?
 
And I
thought the Hajj was a long time to be in disguise.”

Poe shrugged.
 
“No one reads fiction, anyway.”