Teancum (2 page)

“I don’t think anyone finds your weapon ridiculous,” Poe
murmured.
 
He shook himself
mentally, trying to shrug off the feeling of defeat and find a way forward, any
information or advantage he could manage to squeeze out of the moment.
 
Pratt hadn’t reacted to the
ether rays
gambit, but it had been a shot in the dark.

“The gun’s real name is the
Pratt Ruby-Refracted Matter
Enkindler
, of course.”
 
Pratt’s voice sounded like he was just
getting wound up and might continue forever.
 
“Named in honor of my brother Parley Pratt, and not named
after myself, which is why its nickname is the
Parley
.
 
A
sophisticated man such as yourself, a writer, even, will be able to appreciate
the ironic pun in the nickname.
 
Not that you should care.”

“I do appreciate it.
 
I appreciate it enough that I shall not ask you for a parley, now or
ever.
 
And at least if you shoot me
with that thing,” Poe said, “I can take comfort in the fact that I didn’t bring
you the means of my own destruction.”
 
He coughed again, so hard he nearly shook himself free from his captors.

Pratt laughed, and patted the Enkindler.
 
“No,” he agreed, “Mr. United States
did.
 
What you brought me was for
the
ships
.”

The ships?
 
That
was surprising.
 
The Kingdom of
Deseret had been famous for its air-ships for several years, since they’d first
been spotted (and fired upon) by miners in the silver fields of Colorado.
 
One had flown over the
Liahona
as it entered the Kingdom just… well, just yesterday
now, though it seemed like ages ago to Edgar Allan Poe.
 
Pratt didn’t need any devices from
Hunley in order to make his ships fly, obviously.

Therefore he needed the devices to make the ships do
something else.
 
But what?
 
Something that required ether-wave
devices?
 
Something Pratt didn’t
know how to make the ships do on his own?

“Are you really willing to destroy your own ships?” he
asked, and scrutinized the Madman’s face for a response.

Pratt cocked a wary eyebrow.
 
“You’re playing games,” the inventor snapped.

Poe said nothing, and watched Pratt’s face twitch.

“Hunley would never have sabotaged the canopic jars!” Pratt
barked.
 
“He knows I’d never give
him the schematics if he did!”

“You
didn’t
give me
the schematics,” Poe pointed out.
 
“And you never intended to, did you?
 
You wanted me on the ground, a known and fixed target, so you
could destroy me.
 
You wanted that
for me and Clemens both.”

Pratt grinned, a crooked, shifting thing that belonged on
the face of a beggar or a drunk.
 
“I can’t very well have you running back to your governments and telling
them that I double-crossed you, can I?” he pointed out.

“Why not?” Poe asked.
 
“Before I could get back to Richmond and tell anyone what you’d done,
you’d have your revenge.
 
Even if
Hunley or Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee wanted to stop you, they couldn’t.”

“Aaaaagh!” Nostrils screamed again, shuddering.
 
Orson Pratt snorted, raised his Parley
and pointed it at the suffering man.
 
He clicked the firing bolt once.

Zottt!

Nostrils burst into flame, writhing as his body burnt to
cinder.
 
Poe didn’t let himself
stare.

“Yes, but what about
after
my revenge?” Pratt pointed out.
 
“I plan to survive the downfall of the Kingdom and, wherever I decide to
go, I’m not interested in living my life under the threat of a bounty offered
by the United States of America.”

Poe didn’t care about Pratt’s plans following the mass
murder he had planned.
 
He wanted
to know what the canopic jars did.
 
Could they be an energy source?
 
Could ether-waves power a device, including an air-ship?
 
“With the canopic jars in place, how
far will your ships take you?
 
Could you get to Mexico City?”

Pratt laughed.
 
“You drop your hook into the fishing hole hoping there’s a big trout
down there in the darkness somewhere,” he said.
 

“I have a hook,” Poe said.
 
“I have to try.”
 
The fact that Pratt had realized he was being probed and cut off the
line of conversation didn’t mean that the guess about the canopic jars being a
power source was wrong, of course, but it didn’t confirm the guess,
either.
 
He sighed.
 
It was so much easier to
write
a clever detective than actually to
be
one.

“What you don’t yet realize,” Pratt continued, “is that the
fishing hole is home to a terrible monster.”
 
He gestured to the Pinkertons.
 
“Hit him a little bit, but don’t kill him.
 
If he tries anything—anything at
all—kill
her
.
 
After you’ve all had your fun, throw
them in with the others.”

Pratt handed his Pratt Enkindler to the nearest Pinkerton,
turned and walked away.
 
The
Pinkerton, a heavy man in a bowler hat, sneered and shoved the muzzle of the
weapon into Roxie’s side.

The first fist rammed Poe in the belly and knocked him
against the plascrete wall, only a foot from where the Pinkerton’s skull, now
embedded in the ruined material, smoldered away.
 
The blow kicked all the air out of him and triggered his
coughing reflex at the same time, so Poe gagged and sucked in and choked on
air, his stomach retching up bile and his lungs forcing out blood in the
effort.
 
Punches to the face
prevented him from even spitting out the polluted fluids, so the sour vermilion
mess bubbled from his lips and spattered all over his chin and face and shirt
as Poe went down, unresisting and defenseless, with his eye fixed on Roxie.

Her face was dark with despair, and she looked beautiful.

The plascrete floor filled his vision and then pressed
against his face.
 
The blows didn’t
stop, and blood, phlegm and bile oozed betweens his lips and puddled warm and
sticky around his head.

After a while, Poe breathed again.

He was picked up and dragged, knees scraping on the
floor.
 
Blue light globes whizzed
by him impossibly fast, and he thought they might be stars.
 
Was he in the ether, then?
 
Was he stung to death by the Scorpion
and racing around the outline of its celestial body, waiting for the abyss to
take him?
 
Then there was a
door.
 

Had he come a million miles?
 

A hundred feet?

He was hauled through the door and dropped to the plascrete
again.
 
Slam!
 
A
buzzing noise, and for a time he drifted.
 
It was the first day of creation, he decided, and if the world was
without form and void, then the buzzing sounds must be the Spirit of God
hovering upon the waters.
 
He knew
that if he waited long enough, he would eventually hear the Lord’s first words
and then the firmament would divide the waters.

“I think he’s awake,” turned out to be the creative
incantation.
 
That didn’t seem
quite right to Poe, but with the words came light, shaky, elusive and painful,
but enough to see by.
 
Light and a
plain of stone.

“Mrarmgaaaarble,” he tried to say, but failed.
 
Creation responded, though, in the
firmament that seared his body, throwing a violent mass of blood and sputum
from the waters below into the waters above and out upon the dry land.
 
Poe didn’t feel able, in clean
conscience, to pronounce creation good.

“Ick, he’s in bad fookin’ shape, though,” was the second
mantra of creation.

“Poe?”
 
He
recognized Roxie’s voice.
 

“Mmmmmmalive,” Poe managed to mumble.
 
His lips felt like they had been
flattened under hammers.
 
Man,
created in the images of the gods after having been run over by divine
steam-trucks.
 
“I’m alive.”

“Worse luck you,” complained another voice that Poe now
recognized as belonging to the Irishman O’Shaughnessy.
 
“I was hoping you were dead, for your
sake.”

*
  
*
  
*

Pffffffft-ankkkh!
 
Pffffffft-ankkkh!

The two Striders trundled along at a surprisingly good clip,
bobbing up and down as they went like they were picking worms out of the
soil.
 
They weren’t as fast as the
Jim
Smiley
on a straight flat road, of course,
but the chicken-like legs and claws meant that the things could run like wild
animals across the landscape, leaping irrigation ditches, high-stepping over
tangled brush, and vaulting wooden fences.
 
Occasionally, one of the pilots cut it too close and a big
metal claw reduced a shed, or a root cellar, or a gate, to splinters and rubble
in a single blow.

The Mexican machines were impressive, but Sam was pretty
sure they couldn’t swim.
 
The
Jim
Smiley
had them there.

The big metal chickens headed closer to the mountains,
looming up like shadowy giants to block out the stars.
 
Sam had seen plenty of mountains back
east, but nothing like these enormous sprawling Himalayans.
 
It wasn’t just the fact that they were
tall that made them imposing, it was the fact that they were
suddenly
tall—they sprang out of the valley floor and
shot another mile or more nearly straight up into the sky, like a row of teeth
around an immense cultivated tongue.

Pffffffft-ankkkh!

In the absence of a binnacle, Sam watched the stars to keep
his bearing, more by habit than by necessity, since the mountains were such
unavoidable landmarks.
 
They
circled around the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake City (Sam could see the
blue glow of the city center’s many Franklin Poles from miles away), staying
off the roads and away from farmhouses where light showed.
 
Crossing the farmland at a run showed
Sam the vastness of the Mormons’ network of irrigation canals and small roads,
and he was duly impressed.
 
He was
a man who prided himself on valuing industry almost as much as he valued
innovation.

The Mormons had both, in spades.
 
It was too bad, he thought, that they were so hopelessly
strange.
 
They might have made good
Americans.

The night sky was clear, but as the Striders veered left
across the wide, flat benches of the mountains’ foothills, turning to come at
the city on its east side, Sam chanced to look to the south and saw what he
took for flashes of lightning, striking over and over again in the same spot,
high up in the air.

“That’s a queer-looking storm,” he observed.
 
The sight of the city coming closer
made the
Jim Smiley
feel imminent, and
he could almost taste a Cohiba on his tongue.
 
“It’s awfully local to the top of that mountain.
 
Maybe there’s a vein of metal up there
attracting all the electricity.
 
You ought to send prospectors, Mr. President.”

“That’s no storm,” Rockwell growled.
 
“That’s Timpanogos.”

Sam gulped.
 
“Pratt’s place?”
 
He watched
the lightning flash some more, and realized that the ‘storm’ was even more
local than he had at first imagined—the lightning appeared to be striking
over and over again in exactly the same place.
 
“Is it possible those flashes are our comrades, putting an
end to the threat of an airborne assault upon Chicago?”

“Your Irishman’s a lightning wizard, then, is he?” the dwarf
asked belligerently.
 
“O’Franklin,
was that his name?
 
Now he’s jest
shooting lightning bolts at Pratt and his airships?
 
That’s quite a show, then, and I’m sad I’m missing it.”

“It’s possible,” Young said.
 
His voice was cold and hard.
 
“There’s a darker possibility.”

“That’s how he charges up the air-ships,” Rockwell offered.
 

“With lightning bolts?”
 
Sam was dumbfounded.
 
Most electricks were powered by some sort of generator that turned
motion into small amounts of electricity—the motion of a turning,
steam-powered engine, for instance, or the motion of falling water.
 
To reach out and harness the fire of
heaven directly was a Franklinesque act, if not a downright Promethean
one.
 
He felt no small amount of
awe, and his teeth ground upon each other over and over where by rights a good
Cohiba should have been.