Liahona (12 page)

He’d have to carry them on his person.
 
Burton tested his frock coat and found
that, by tearing only a couple of stitches to either side of the mouth of its
inside breast pocket, he could make the pocket wide enough to swallow the
document wallet.
 
He put all the
letters into his coat, and was about to put his coat on when his eye caught the
loose sheets of paper and the Self-Inking Stylus on the folding table.

He sighed, sat, and took up the Stylus.

My Dearest Isabel
, he
wrote after dating a clean sheet.
 
I
am a terrible correspondent, and though I know that you deserve a thousand
times better, I find that all I can do is write to say that I think of you
daily, that I consider myself pledged to you and that I shall do my utmost to
serve out this commission for Her Majesty in a fashion that will bring honour
and respect to you and your family.

Vishnu’s hairy belly, he thought, setting the Stylus down
and grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes.
 
Could Roxie have drugged him?

*
  
*
  
*

 
“Behold the
hypocephalus!” Poe cried, and Jed Coltrane, leaning against the wall near the
rear door of the stateroom, resisted snorting out loud.
 
At least, he thought, the poor bastard
wasn’t coughing up a lung.
 
He
wondered how much time the Richmond doctors had given Poe to live—he
didn’t think it could have been very long.
 

It was a bally, in the end, a free show.
 
At least it was free from Jed’s point
of view—the entire price of admission was two cents, and Captain Dan
Jones took both of them.
 
But a
free show now would mean better word of mouth for the paid show later.
 
Even a carnival without a secret
mission put on ballies from time to time.

The hypocephalus, which to the dwarf sounded like the name
of a particularly nasty strain of a soldiers’ disease, was pinned against an
upright display board.
 
It was a
complicated circular diagram, full of little drawings of stick figures,
thrones, animal-headed people, stars and squiggles, all inked onto a tattered
piece of yellow cloth that might have been linen, or something really old,
anyway.

It looked Egyptian.
 
Like the scarabs, though, it was bunkum, and Jed knew it.
 
Some Richmond clever-dick had painted
it.
 
Poe always called it the
hypnotic
hypocephalus
, but Hunley and his boys were
geniuses, and Jed figured you could probably wear the thing over your face and
it would let you breathe underwater or spit flame or deflect bullets.
 
Poe probably knew, but he’d never told
Jed.
 
Still, bunkum aside, he did
his best to look fascinated and attentive, to encourage the audience be fascinated
and attentive, too.

Poe stood to one side of the hypocephalus in his full
carnival-gypsy-snake oil-doctor costume, on a low platform that looked
improvised out of a wooden pallet; for that matter, Jed reflected, he hadn’t
seen his boss out of costume since they’d left Richmond.
 
He hadn’t even taken off the fake nose
and beard, unless he’d done so out of the dwarf’s sight.
 
To the other side of the hypocephalus
stood the Englishman Burton, jaw resolutely clenched and eyes burning like his
stare alone could punch through the walls of the steam-truck.

“Behold,” Burton called out his stubborn
counter-introduction, “Doctor Archibald’s famous ancient Egyptian pillow!”

The old carny in Jed almost laughed at the big
explorer—he’d done such a good job increasing interest and therefore
attendance, Jed doubted any shill could have done any better.
 
The stateroom of the Liahona looked
like it might have been built to seat twenty for dinner.
 
Whatever table usually filled its floor
was gone, though, and in thirty-odd folding wooden chairs, paying passengers sat
and stared.
 
Burton’s associate,
the diplomat Absalom Fearnley-Standish, was one of them.
 
He sat beside a pair of empty seats,
looking lonely and forlorn as he protected them with a battered top hat that
was missing part of its brim.
 
No
sign of the woman Jed was waiting for, though.
 
That was a shame; it wouldn’t hurt to collect a little cash
from the evening’s show, but really, of course, it was supposed to be a
distraction.
 
Oh, well, maybe he’d
have to be satisfied with just dealing with the Englishmen.

Poe smiled at Burton’s jab and continued.
 
Even in the weak electric light of the
stateroom (pulsing blue from glass globes pegged in two rows to the room’s
ceiling), he wore his smoked spectacles.
 
If pressed, he would claim that his eyes were weak, but of course the
glasses were an important component of his disguise.

As was the show.

“My colleague would describe the great pyramids of Giza as
mere tombs,” Poe said with a wise and condescending smile.
 
“The sorcerer-priests of Memphis and of
Thebes have long had the practice, handed down to them by their forefathers,
who learned the dark arts at the feet of Hermes Trismegistos, the great
Ibis-headed Thoth himself, of sleeping with their heads upon cloths such as
this.”
 
He locked his eyes upon a
pair of spinsterly women in the front row and proceeded to talk to them
intimately, as if giving a private lecture, switching his gaze exclusively back
and forth between the two.
 
“You
observe the great throne at the center, the rightways upper section and the inverted
underworld, the stars and the symbols of the great expanse of earth.
 
The hypocephalus is nothing less than a
map of the universe, as known to the ancients, and dreaming Egyptian sorcerers
drew from it the power to control their dreams… and the minds of their
fellows.”

The two ladies gasped a prim objection and a murmur crept
through the audience.

“Rubbish!” roared Burton, his face turning purple.
 
“Poppycock!
 
Nonsense of the highest order, and reeking of base deceit
and fraud!
 
This man owes you all a
refund!
 
There is no basis for any
of this hogwash, these explanations are not scientific!
 
What kind of
doctor
are you, man?”

The front stateroom door opened and the woman Jed was
waiting for slipped in, dark hair, red dress, on the plain-looking side.
 
He let no expression cross his face,
but felt a satisfying mixture of pride in the success of their distraction and
anticipation of the crimes he was about to commit.
 
He discreetly patted the bulges in his jacket to reassure
himself that he was appropriately armed.
 
The woman sat by the diplomat, as Poe had suggested she likely would,
and Jed continued to wait.
 
He’d
give her a minute to settle in before he exited the show, just in case.
 

The pale Englishman looked disappointed at her
arrival—or maybe he was disappointed that he was still holding an empty
seat.

Poe bowed in mock deference.
 
“I’m sure we would all be eager to hear a proper
scientific
explanation of the hypocephalus, sir,” he said in a
wheedling, groveling way that again almost made Jed laugh.

“There is none!” Burton barked loudly, his fists clenched
and punching at the air.
 
“We don’t
know what they’re for!”
 

Poe affected a look of pitying disappointment.
 
“No?” he said.

“No,” Burton growled.
 
He punched his forehead and jaw forward, like a bull glaring at a
matador.
 
“They’ve been found under
the heads of a few mummies, priestly mummies, and there is no scientific
explanation for them.”

Poe let his spectacles wander out over the breathless crowd
in the stateroom.
 
“They lay under
the heads of priestly mummies,” he restated the Englishman, “and science cannot
explain what they were for!”
 
He
smiled puckishly.

The audience laughed.

“Yet!” Burton roared.
 
“Science has no explanation
yet
,
but it will have!”
 
He looked like
he might bite the heads off the two ladies in the front row; they shook their
heads disappointedly and clucked at him.

The audience laughed louder, and Jed let himself out the
door.
 
Just as he shut it behind
him, the quiet semi-darkness of the blue-lit iron hallway erupted into
explosive racket.

“Shoshone!
 
Shoshone!
 
Beat to
quarters!” A crewman of the
Liahona
burst past the dwarf, shouting at the top of his lungs, and banged at the door
of the stateroom he had just left behind.

A bugle squealed out its
tantara-tantara-ta!
into the night.

Jed didn’t know what
beat to quarters
meant, but it didn’t sound good.
 
He picked up his pace to a trot,
heading for the first of the cabins.
 

He heard the soft
hum
behind him of a Brunel gun’s engine warming up, and he threw himself around a
corner just in time.
 
With a sharp whine,
the rifle fired, and he felt the rush of air on his shoulder blades as its
projectile whizzed past him and heard the
foomp!
of the bullet punching a hole in the iron wall where
it struck.

“Dammit,” grumbled Jed as he tucked himself low against the
wall, ready to surprise his pursuer.
 
“You can’t go three steps in this country without rubbing eyeballs with
crazy people.”

He heard a new whine, louder and sharper, and the pounding
of booted feet, and he coiled his body into a tight, tensed spring.
 
When the Shoshone brave ripped around
the corner at full tilt, he was majestic, iron plates and finger bones rattling
about his chest, streaked paint turning his face into a terrifying
apparition.
 
In his hand he waved a
vibro-blade cutlass, two-edged, a nasty piece of work that Sam Colt’s factories
had started turning out alongside their revolver, trying to compete with the
steam- and magnet-powered guns that everyone wanted these days, not to mention
the Maxims coming out of Maine.
 
The vibro-blade ran on electricks, and for the fifteen or twenty minutes
that its charge lasted, the razor-sharp serrated weapon
hummed
back and forth with an intensity that let it cut
through metal plate like butter.

The Indian warrior ran proud and furious and most of all he
ran tall.
 
He never saw the dwarf
squatting low in the shadow, had no warning, and when Jed cannonballed into his
knees he tumbled to the ground, sinking his humming sword straight down into
the floor.

Jed rolled right past the hollering Shoshone and kept
running.
 
He hated to leave a
dangerous man at his back, but he had a job to do.

Chapter Four

This was the lady’s cabin, Jed reflected as he eased the
tumblers into place with his steel picks.
 
He was still breathing hard from his tussle with the Shoshone.
 
A double cabin, though Poe had said he
thought the lady was traveling alone.
 
Or was that what Poe had said, after all?
 
Jed wasn’t always one hundred percent sure he understood
what Poe said.
 
Shame to have to
kill a woman, anyway, but life was hard, and she’d be dead sooner or later of
something, whatever Jed did.
 
Hell,
it’s not like she’d be his first, and why should he care more about killing a
woman than a man?
 

Besides, Poe had been insistent—he
really
wanted this woman dead.

The last pin
clicked
into position and the lock opened.
 
The tramping of boots overhead and the muffled gunshots made the dwarf a
little hesitant, but a moment’s reflection convinced him that all the chaos
would provide further distraction for his errand.
 
He checked the narrow hallway in both directions and then
slipped into the cabin.

The room was dark.
 
Jed groped at the wall and found the metal switch, but toggling it
didn’t turn on any lights.
 
Had the
electricks gone out? he wondered.
 
Maybe the Shoshone had damaged the truck somehow.

No matter.
 
Jed
Coltrane was nothing if not resourceful.
 
He crept by touch around the edges of the room, guessing that the cabins
were more or less standard and he ought to find a cot against either wall, a
few feet from the door.
 
When he
bumped into the first cot, he stopped moving and leaned his hip against it.

Jed pulled the scarab canister from inside his coat and
popped open the lid.
 
It took an
effort of will—he kept envisioning the dead Pinkerton in the squatpot
stall, devoured in seconds by the beetle swarm—but he shoved his hand
inside the cylinder and scooped out a clump of the brass bugs, which he
scattered underneath the cot.

“Don’t be so chickenshit, Jed,” he muttered to himself,
feeling the cold sweat on his forehead.
 

Boots pounded outside the door and he waited, hand on his
knife hilt, until they had passed.
 
For a moment, he thought he heard the hushed wheeze of another person
breathing, but that was crazy; no, it must be the sound of air circulating
through the truck’s vents, or metal slowly settling.

He stepped forwarded cautiously, in a line perpendicular to
the cot behind him, feeling in front of him with his extended foot and fingers,
until he found the other cot.
 
“Here we go, you fraidy-cat,” he cursed at himself, “almost done.”
 
He dug out another handful of insects
and tossed them beneath the second bed, listening to the metallic rattle as
they bounced into place.

He closed the canister, already breathing easier.
 
He was turning to make for the door in
the darkness when the thought caught him that he should really take a look,
just to be sure that the bugs were reasonably hidden from view, and he hadn’t
tossed them into a mousetrap, for instance.

He clambered down into a kneeling position between the two
bunks and dug for a box of lucifers in his pocket.
 
With a practiced twitch of the wrist, he snapped a match
along the outside of the box, and it sputtered into flame—

a hard-toed boot kicked Jed Coltrane in the face, and his
vision exploded into stars.

“The
hell!?
” he
yelled, and tried to roll away.

For his trouble, another kick crashed into his ribs and he
spun through the air, slamming hard into the iron door of the cabin.

Forget the knife.
 
Jed pulled the Pinkerton’s gun from under his arm and squeezed the
trigger.
 
Zing!
 
Zing!
 
The odd weapon only flared slightly in
the pitch black cabin, but as the bullets
clanged
off the room’s walls and bit their way into the
furniture, they threw up sparks, enough for Jed to see a shadowy form looming
up in front of him.
 

Damn thing didn’t seem to have legs—

zing!
—

the boot, or maybe it wasn’t a boot after all, smashed Jed’s
gun hand and his lost his grip on the pistol, which disappeared into the gloom.

“Damn you—” he shouted, and then a strong hand with
long nails, almost like claws, grabbed his throat and threw him bodily to the
floor, a knee on his chest and something cold and hard against his cheek.

He smelled lavender.
 
And soap.
 
Some sort of
cloak fell around him, covering his chest and legs.

“Hold still, shorty, or I’ll cut out your eyeball.”
 
The voice was so incongruously sweet
that it took him a few seconds to realize that it was feminine.

Coltrane, you just got beat down by a woman.

The hand—the soft, sweet-scented hand—came away
from his throat and he heard a
click
.
 
A blue light sprang into being a few
inches above his face, a glimmering globe held in the palm of a woman who was
graceful, fierce, freckle-faced, cute as a button, and kneeling on Jed’s
sternum.
 
She wore dark goggles on
her eyes and held a curving, vicious-looking knife to his face.

Not a woman, dammit.
 
A
girl
.
 
Poe’s gonna kill me.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Fireless Darklantern.”
 
The girl squinted suspiciously at Jed.
 
“I thought you boys worked for Hunley,
or doesn’t he give you the nice toys?”

Jed involuntary shot a glance under one of the cots and then
felt like an idiot.
 
“Hell!” he
growled.

“Don’t worry,” she reassured him with a perky grin, tapping
the Darklantern against her goggles, “I saw it all.
 
The Darklantern is for
your
benefit.”

Feet pounded again in the hall, but Jed hesitated to call
for help—it might be that Shoshone with the vibro-blade, and he was
likely happy as a cat in the crick with Jed Coltrane.
 
Before he could decide whether to yell, or make any move to
try to distract his combatant, she pressed her blade tighter against his cheek,
arching eyebrows at him.
 

He bit his tongue.
 

The pounding died down.
 
“What are the bugs?” she asked.
 
“I mean, besides being part of the medicine show?”

Jed did his best to grimace fiercely.
 
I probably look like an idiot, though,
he realized, pinned under the skirts of a girl.
 
“What are you, fifteen years old?” he asked her.
 
“Your mamma know you’re doing this?”

She slammed the Darklantern down onto his face like a
lightning bolt, and he cried out in pain.
 
Again and again she punched him, and when the room swam in and out of
view and whirled around him, she slid him across the floor, jerked the canister
from inside his coat and rolled him facedown on top of a dozen scarabs.
 
They pushed into his face, cold and
metallic, like studs protruding from the metal floor, and one pressed against
the soft flesh at the corner of his mouth.

He heard a soft
pop
.
 
Twisting his head, he could see that
the girl, keeping him pinned with her knee and one hand, had opened the
canister with the other.
 
He
wondered where she had put the knife, and if he could make a grab for it, but
his head was spinning and he felt like he was on the verge of throwing up.
 
“You got more bugs in here, I see,” she
said, eyeing the contents.
 
“This
some kind of weapon?”

“I ain’t talking,” Jed said doggedly.

“Right,” she said.
 
“Well, I guess I’ll just start pushing these buttons and see what
happens.”

Jed squirmed, his mind flooded with visions of himself,
consumed to nothing by the scarab plague.
 
He wasn’t dazed anymore, but he was starting to feel scared.
 
“Don’t!” he barked through clenched
teeth.

“Oh, but why ever not?” she asked, and out of the corner of
his eye Jed saw her reaching with her thumb, pantomime-like, towards the
buttons inside the canister’s lid.

Bang!

The cabin door crashed open, and the gap was immediately
filled with a man’s body.
 
The
hum
of the vibro-blade came with him, and the dwarf’s
entire body tensed in nervous fear of being stuck with it.

The girl sighed, sounding more irritated than afraid, and
she spun away—

releasing Jed and leaving the canister sitting on the
floor—

and punched the intruder in his stomach.
 

The man grunted and stepped back, and Jed rolled to his
feet, shaking himself and slapping bugs away from his skin in a sort of
chicken-like dance even as he lunged for the cylinder.

The man swung his cutlass at the girl and she stepped under
the blow with amazing nonchalance, punching him once more.
 
She lashed him again and again and he
staggered back, his sword snarling as it chewed chunks out of the walls with
his erratic, unaimed swings.
 

Jed scooped up the canister and tried to sprint around the
whirling skirts of the goggled girl.

“No, you don’t!” she snapped.
 
Her curved knife reappeared in her hand and she slashed at
Jed.

His circus training and experience saved him—as the
blade swooped down, he hurled himself sideways into the shadowed corner of the
cabin, tumbling, then leaping up, and feeling the blade
swooshing
through the space at his shoulders.
 
He bounced against the two walls of the
corner, throwing himself back at his attacker—

she turned away, batting aside the cutlass—

Jed sprinted for the door, grateful to be small as he
slipped past the whirling skirt and thrashing buckskins—

she gripped the attacking Indian by his elbow and threw him
over her hip, planting him heavily on his back and disarming him at the same
time, the cutlass suddenly switching into her hand, where it loomed
incongruously huge and deadly—

Jed saw the Pinkerton’s stolen gun lying just inside the
door, at the fierce Valkyrie’s heel, and he scooped it up at a run—

then he slammed his thumb down on the
attack
button inside the canister lid, snapped the lid shut
and burst out into the hall, running as fast as his legs could carry him.
 

“Aaaaaagh!”
 
A
scream echoed after him down the corridor.
 
A man’s, he thought, and he imagined the redskin being
devoured by Hunley’s brass beetles.
 
He hoped they might also get the girl, or at least slow her down, but he
couldn’t wait around to find out.

He slammed the lid of the cylinder shut just as the beetles
within it began to swarm and shoved the gun back into its shoulder
holster.
 
He needed to find a place
to hide, somewhere sheltered from the fray.
 
He ducked under two men wrestling on a staircase, one a
Liahona
crewman and the other an Indian, and rattled up
towards the hatch.
 

Jed popped out onto the chaos of the deck to find it
brightly lit, all electricks blazing blue.
 
Men struggled hand to hand with sticks, knives, axes, and
improvised clubs made by swinging rifles, grunting and cursing each other as
each man tried to throw his opponent to the deck or, better still, to the
ground.
 
The breeze told him that
the steam-truck was still rolling, but a knot of armed men thrashed each other
back and forth at the wheelhouse, and he feared it would shortly stop.
 
Stopping meant capture, and the dwarf
knew he couldn’t let Hunley’s scarabs falls into the hands of a bunch of
Wyoming Territory redskins.
 
The
Seth-Beast was harder to operate and the hypocephalus, hell, Jed didn’t even
know if it did anything at all, but the beetles were easy to figure out and
they were deadly.
 

He had to hide them.

Could he hide the canister in his room?
 
No, if they were stopped, the whole
point would surely be to rob the passengers, and the cabins would all be
looted.
 
He needed a place up here
on deck where he could stash the cylinder, preferably a place where he could
hunker down with it.
 
He looked
around frantically, seeing no sign of Poe, nor for that matter of Burton among
the many combatants; maybe they were fighting down in the stateroom, too—

his eye fell on the wheelhouse.
 
It was flat- and low-roofed, and if he could get on top of
it he could lie down and be unseen.

He ducked low as he ran, scurrying like a bug among the
benches and parasols and short Franklin Poles that made an obstacle course of
the
Liahona’s
deck.
 
He held the canister in his hand,
afraid to stop the beetle swarm just yet because he wanted to make sure that
both his assailants in the cabin were devoured, and afraid to put it into his
coat pocket, in case the canister opened on accident before the beetles were
done swarming.