Teancum (14 page)

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“Get them now!” John D. Lee cried in the hall outside.
 
“We’re running out of time!”

The shouted commands to the Danites assailing him captured
Absalom’s own thoughts perfectly.
 
Brigham Young was bleeding to death.
 
Orrin Porter Rockwell—his own brother-in-law, he
thought, begrudging the title less than he expected to—lay face-down and
still.
 
Really, that should have
been a cost-free victory for Absalom, allowing him to grieve with his sister
and still bring her home to England, but instead he found that it made him feel
sad.

The dwarf Coltrane, flinging himself out the window with a
crackling vibro-blade in his hand, was the last sight Absalom had seen before
he fell over backward, stumbling and knocking himself down on the outside of
the tables.
 
Then he’d heard the
cacophony of gunshots outside explode into a riot, and Lee’s shouts from the
hall.

This might be it, he thought.
 
He cocked both his pistols and stumbled to his feet,
lurching towards the message room door.
 
The wish in the top of his mind as he did so was that he could be acting
out this scene without the broken nose—he felt that he was doing and
saying heroic things, but with the silly voice of a man with a chronic
head-cold.
 
The wish made him feel
slightly embarrassed, and he ran faster.

He expected to die instantly, cut down by gunfire from all
sides, but he didn’t.
 
He could see
out of the corner of his eye that Coltrane had come back over the clocksprung
horse, and that the dwarf was bleeding and maybe unconscious.
 
Still, he was drawing the fire of the
soldiers outside, sparing Absalom.

And for some reason, Lee’s Danites hadn’t charged through
the door yet.
 
Throwing caution to
the wind, Absalom charged them instead.

He rushed out into the south lobby of the Lion House and
found himself looking at the backs of George Cannon and John Lee.
 
Their men were pressed against the
walls and behind upturned chairs, firing their pistols—

not into the message room, but up the hall, into the Lion House.

Down that hall came a charge the sight of which made Absalom
Fearnley-Standish let out an unprecedented noise.
 
It was partly a roar of triumph, because he knew when he saw
the charging party that they were allies.
 
He didn’t know if they could turn the tide against the soldiers and
Danites combined, but the arrival of any assistance at all at this crucial
moment heartened him.
 
He and his
friends had held the fort, and now the day might still be theirs!
 
The sound was also partly a laugh,
because the allies were the most improbable, even impossible soldiers he had
ever seen.
 
And, finally, the sound
was also partly a quizzical harrumph of animal delight, thrilling purely at the
physical appearance of the saviors rushing to his aid, pistols high and firing.

They were a crowd of beautiful girls, scandalously dressed
in nightclothes and without even a smudge of makeup.
 
They sheltered in the doorways of a long hall and fired at
the Danites with pistols and rifles.
 
Absalom stepped to one side, to be sure none of their stray shots could
whistle through the hall and strike him down.

Absalom felt an urge to simply clap his gun to John Lee’s
head and blow out the man’s brains, but he mastered his wrath, split his aim
between the two pistols, one each on Lee and Cannon, and forced his voice into
a calm, Wellington-worthy baritone.

“Good evenigg, gedtlemed,” he said, and smiled.
 
He regretted that he had no hat to
doff, and, for that matter, no third arm to doff it with, and he regretted even
more that he’d been punched in the nose.

John Lee spun around like lightning, and Absalom saw too
late that the other man had a pistol in his hand, too.
 
He felt the pistol nearly as soon as he
saw it, thrashing across his own cheek and jaw and knocking him back.

Bang!
 
Bang!

Absalom fired, but missed.
 
He saw Cannon rushing out the door, he tried to aim at the
little man, but Lee pistol-whipped him again and he dropped both his guns.
 
Lee raised his pistol a third time,
cocking the hammer and drawing a bead on Absalom’s face—

“Damn,” Absalom cursed.

ZOTTT!

The street outside the lobby’s windows, South Tabernacle,
exploded into flame.
 
Lee staggered
and Absalom seized his chance, kicking at the Danite’s knees.
 
As John Lee fell back and tried to
recover his balance, Absalom grabbed his own fallen pistols and started firing.

Bang!
 
Bang!

They were wild shots, but he was firing point-blank and Lee
ran from them.
 
Absalom looked over
his shoulder just long enough to see the women in nightgowns overwhelming the
remaining Danites, and then he crashed out the doors on John Lee’s heels and
into the street.

At the last moment, it occurred to him to worry about the
Third Virginia, but he needn’t have.
 
The explosion, whatever its source was, seemed to have targeted
them.
 
A ditch of flame and
wreckage ran in a straight line down the middle of the street, and scorched men
and machines lay in it and to either side.
 
Absalom turned to look at the message room windows and saw
that Annie Webb and Consuelo Jackson fought hand to hand with cavalrymen among
the shattered glass.
 
He spared a
single pistol shot, hitting Annie’s man in the back of his thigh, and then he
turned to follow Lee again.

John Lee was no coward.
 
He sprinted straight for the fire and, as Absalom watched,
jumped through it.
 
His movements
were lopsided because one arm still hung useless at his side, but his legs were
strong enough to get him across, and he landed heavily on the other side.
 

Absalom knew he’d never make the leap; he was no long
jumper.
 
He shot his pistols instead,
emptying every last bullet he had remaining and missing with every shot.
 
Lee ducked, he weaved and he stumbled,
but he disappeared from view on the other side of the street, running in smoke
and flame.

ZOTTT!

Remembering the talk of air-ships and phlogiston guns,
Absalom looked up in time to see a great flying thing, like a Viking ship, snap
off its flame-ray from a second shot.
 
This time the shooter had targeted the soldiers on the other side of the
message room, in the garden between it and the Tabernacle, and he had reduced
their horses to slag and the men to charred heaps.

Burton, Absalom thought.
 
It must be Burton.

He raised an empty pistol and waved it in salute at the
ship, and then he saw that something was wrong.
 
The air-ship had four appendages like stubby legs that were
turned-down cups glowing within in the shape of luminescent golden rings, only
two of them were smashed to pieces and evidently not working, because the ship
was slowly sinking and drifting to one side, apparently out of control.

It drifted down and towards the Tabernacle.

“Burton!” he gasped, and lurched towards the impending
collision.
 
He raised a hand, too
little, too late and much too far away.

The air-ship hit the wall of the Tabernacle.
 
The impact looked incongruously gentle
from where Absalom stood, but the Tabernacle was already burning, and as the
ship struck, flames erupted from the point of contact, and then the air-ship
exploded in a ball of flame.

KABOOM!!

Whatever didn’t burst into flame and evaporate crashed through
the wall of the structure, and then the ship was gone.

Absalom dropped both his pistols, stunned.
 
Armed women in nightgowns rushed past
him, chasing Danites and cavalrymen who scattered from their path, but he could
only stand in the bright warm sunshine of the early morning and stare at the
flames and the ruin all about him.
 
Numbness settled over him.
 
He’d come with Burton as a diplomat to the Mormons, fighting with the
man every step of the way, and now the Mormon capital burned and Burton burned
with it, like a dead Viking chieftain aboard his warship.
 
It was fitting, somehow, but it was
horrible, and it was not what Absalom had expected or wanted.

When he was finally able to move, Absalom reached into his
coat pocket and took out his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book.
 
Without even opening it to remind
himself of all the offenses of which he had once kept meticulous track, he took
two weary steps over to the flaming rut that ran down the center of South
Tabernacle and threw the Note-Paper-Book into the fire.
 

As it burned, pages browning and curling up into ash
shavings, he heard the
cloppity-clop-clop
of horses’ hooves about him.
 
Absalom looked up to see Chief Pocatello at the head of forty or fifty
of his men, in rattling bone-and-metal breastplates, with long Brunel rifles
rising high like knights’ lances from special stirrups beside each rider’s
boot.
 

The Third Virginia, or what was left of it, might have
rallied and resisted, but it didn’t.
 
The Virginians’ commander, Captain Morgan, fled first, vanishing away
down one of the city’s right-angled streets, flamboyant facial hair bouncing
with the gallop of his clocksprung horse.
 
His men followed, catch-as-catch-can and mostly on foot.

“Oh good,” Absalom said, mostly to himself.
 
He raised one hand to wave it at Chief
Pocatello, who waved back and grinned.
 
“The Iddiads are here.”

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Richard Burton loaded his Smith & Wesson Model 1.
 
It was fancy enough, but he missed his
1851 Navy, which was much more handsome, and just as deadly.
 
With the loaded pistol tucked into his
pocket, he dragged every Pinkerton body he could find into the hut at the
center of Orson Pratt’s mooring platform and stacked them like cordwood.
 
He ached all over, which made it slow
work, and he slowed it even further by frequently stopping to check the
saw-toothed, rugged horizon for any sign of returning air-ships.

But no air-ships returned, and no other people appeared to
disturb his work.

Last of all he dragged in Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy.
 
The Irishman had been crazy, and a
criminal, but he had fought and died bravely at Burton’s side.
 
Burton propped O’Shaughnessy into
sitting position on top of the stack of dead men like a king on his throne.

Then, emboldened by the cool hush of the morning, he went
down into Pratt’s facility.
 
He
found his own Colt (loaded) and sword in a pile that included the Irishman’s
two silenced pistols.
 
They were
stolen from the Pinkertons in Bridger’s Saloon, Burton thought, but that seemed
to make them all the more appropriate as trophies.
 

He found a galley, too, and appropriated a bottle of whisky.

Back up on the mooring platform, Burton took several slugs
of the whisky, then tucked the bottle into O’Shaughnessy’s dead hand and laid
both Maxim Hushers on the Irishman’s lap.

Then he ransacked his memory for every scrap of lyric he
could think of, and gave the corpses the best rendition he could of “Danny
Boy.”
 
He thought the rictus on
O’Shaughnessy’s face looked almost warm, and certainly pleased.

Then Burton stepped back from the plascrete shed, picked up
Orson Pratt’s hand-held phlogiston gun, and burned the shed, Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy and all the trophies of victory to calx.
 
In less than two minutes, the entire
pile was a heap of smoking ash.

He found the Danite steam-truck in the Bay, its furnace
reasonably full of coal though its tender was empty.
 
A few minutes’ driving down the tunnel, more recklessly than
was really called for, and he burst into daylight again under the Deseret squiggles
that Roxie Snow had taught him to read as
Koyle Mining Corporation
.

Hell of a woman.
 
He wondered where she was, though only idly and for a moment, because he
found that thoughts of her quickly and surprisingly turned to thoughts of
Isabel.
 
He’d had enough adventure
to last him for a good long while, he realized, and enough of these
Hades-damned Mormons, with their Danites and their plotting and their
phlogiston guns and their air-ships.

“Kaveh’s apron,” he grumbled to himself, “I’d like a cup of
hot coffee, a bit of Welsh rarebit,
The Sunday Times,
and my feet before a hot fire.”

And Isabel in a nice house frock.

The Dream Mine’s long gravel drive ended at the highway, and
Burton turned right, towards a shoulder of the mountain that shrugged down
before him and blocked the Salt Lake Valley from view.
 
The highway rose to the shoulder and
then hugged it all around, and at the furthest point out, right above a sodden,
muddy, burnt and blasted ruin that Burton recognized as the remains of Porter
Rockwell’s Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery, he saw a Mexican Strider, southbound
and coming his way.