Liahona

Liahona

City of the Saints, Part the First

By D.J. Butler

Cover Art and Design by Nathan Shumate

Copyright 2012 D.J. Butler

Read more about D.J. Butler at
http://davidjohnbutler.com

I worked hard to produce this book.
 
Pirating this book means stealing from
me; please don’t do it.

City of the Saints
is
an adventure in four parts:

Part the First is
Liahona
.

Part the Second is
Deseret
.

Part the Third is
Timpanogos
.

Part the Fourth is
Teancum
.

If you like
City of the Saints
, you might also enjoy
Rock Band Fights Evil
, my action-horror pulp fiction serial.

Rock Band #1 is
Hellhound
on My Trail
.

Rock Band #2 is
Snake
Handlin’ Man
.

Rock Band #3 is
Crow
Jane
.

Rock Band #4 is
Devil
Sent the Rain
.

Rock Band #5 is
This
World Is Not My Home
.

Chapter One

“This is insubordination, Dick!” the man in the tall top hat
and cravat hissed.

“Well, then, Abby,” Burton growled back at him, “you have
something to write in your little notebook for today.”

“You may address me as
Ambassador
,” the younger, paler man whined, and removed his hat
for a moment to mop sweat from his brow with a white silk handkerchief.
 
The ceiling of the
Jim
Smiley’s
engine room was high enough for
the two men to stand in comfortably, but the heat that its boiler gave off,
even on a low idle, made the chamber feel smaller and infernal, like a smithy
with the windows all shut.

The heat might make Absalom Fearnley-Standish wilt, but it
wasn’t any kind of serious bother to Burton.
 
“If we are to stand on rules of address,” he snarled, “you
may call me
Captain Burton
.”
 
He picked up a heavy tool, spanner at
one end and spike at the other, from a steel crate of similar implements and
hefted it.
 
He leered at the
diplomat, knowing that the red light coming through the furnace’s grate would
give the scars on both sides of his face a devilish cast.
 
“This will do well enough.”

“Again I protest,” Fearnley-Standish said, eyes darting
around in the Vulcan gloom.
 
“My
commission letter says nothing of sabotage.”

“Well, then,” Burton answered in as reasonable a voice as he
could muster, examining the three brass pipes that rose from the iron furnace
to the enormous boiler, “you should have exercised a little more imagination
when you wrote the damned thing.”
 
With a grunt and a swing of his powerful shoulders, he slammed the spike
end of the tool into one of the pipes.
 

Clang!

Fearnley-Standish jumped.
 
Hot air rushed from the hole Burton had made, the room
becoming perceptibly more stifling.
 
“Egad, stop that!” he spat out, and Burton grinned.

“I find that your inexperience in the dark art of sabotage
comforts me,” he told the younger man.
 
“It restores my faith in the moral rectitude of Her Majesty’s Foreign
Service.
 
Moral rectitude, if not
effectiveness.”
 
He swung
again.
 
Clang!
 
“Still,
must do the job right.”

The second pipe was well holed, and Burton looked at the
boiler’s pressure gauge.
 
Its
needle, already low as the boiler idled, steadily dropped now towards
zero.
 
Burton was no mechanick, but
he thought that meant he had done the job.
 
For good measure, he smashed the gauge as well.
 

“That’s enough!
 
The Americans will hear us!”
 
Fearnley-Standish wiped sweat from his face again.
 
He was trembling.
 

“I forget,” Burton mused, “how young you are.
 
You’ve never cut through impenetrable
jungle, never traveled in a foreign country in disguise, never taken a spear to
the face.”
 
He raised his weapon a
final time.
 
“Great Kali’s hips,
you’ve probably never even sailed the Nile.”

“Blowhard!” Fearnley-Standish squealed.

“Coward!” Burton retorted.
 
“Stuffed shirt!”
 
Clang!
 
He smashed a hole in the third pipe.
 
“That should hold them for a day or
two, especially,” he gestured at the crate of spanners and other implements,
“if we take their tools with us.”

Fearnley-Standish stepped away and crossed his arms.
 
“I’m not carrying those.”

Burton grunted.
 
“Say something that surprises me,
Ambassador
.”
 
He
stuffed the spanner back among its fellows and then picked up the box.
 
“You might, for starters, explain why
you bothered to accompany me on this little sortie.
 
If you’re so convinced the Americans are not our enemies, or
at least our rivals, you might have saved yourself a little hysterical panting
and remained on the
Liahona
.”

“Did you hear that?” the diplomat hunched his shoulders and
twisted his neck, cupping a hand to one ear while he craned to look up the
stairs that led to the
Jim Smiley’s
deck.

“Pshaw!” Burton dismissed his fears and pushed past,
slipping effortlessly up the iron-grilled steps.
 
He was nearly forty, he thought proudly, but he was as
muscled as he’d ever been, as strong as he’d been when soldiering in India in
his twenties.

Fearnley-Standish hesitated, and then tapped up the stairs
in Burton’s wake.
 

“I am Her Majesty’s representative,” he buzzed in Burton’s
ear, “responsible for whatever happens on this expedition.
 
I couldn’t risk that you might run off
alone and do something foolish.”

Burton laughed harshly.
 
“Instead, you witnessed the foolishness!”
 
The deck of the
Jim Smiley
was reminiscent of a sailing ship, a flat space with
a railing around it and cabins fore and aft.
 
Everything was iron and India rubber.
 
“I hope you’re taking detailed notes in
your little memorandum-book.”

“Yes, well,” Fearnley-Standish harrumphed.

Something flickered in the corner of Burton’s vision and he
snapped his head around to look at it.
 
Nothing.
 
Just a shadow, a
well of darkness thrown into the lee of the
Jim Smiley’s
wheelhouse by the Franklin Poles, the great
crackling blue electric globes standing guard in front of Bridger’s
Saloon.
 
But was there a darker
shadow within the shadow, a slight stirring?
 
He stared.
 
Nothing.
 
He listened, and
heard the raucous, muffled sounds drifting through the plascrete walls of the
Saloon, but nothing more, nothing that indicated any danger.
 
The shadow was too small to hide a man
in any case, Burton reassured himself, and he turned and headed for the
rail.
 
The grated iron floor, the
deck
, since these truck-men all insisted on talking about
their vehicles as if they were sailing ships, jutted out a few extra feet to
the ladder, to get over the strangely rounded and rubber-cloaked hull of the
vessel.

“What is it?” the diplomat asked him.

“Nothing,” Burton dismissed both the other man and his own
fears with one word.
 
He dropped
the crate of tools to the ground with a rattling
crash!
and slid effortlessly down the ladder after it.

Fearnley-Standish descended more awkwardly.
 
Halfway down the starchy young man
missed a rung.
 
He dangled by his
hands for long and flailing seconds before he managed to reattach himself.
 
“What are you going to do with those?”
he demanded shrilly.

Burton laughed again at the pusillanimity of the other
man.
 
“I’ll put them in the one
place where Clemens and his goon won’t be able to find them in the morning!” he
cried over his shoulder.
 
Bending
at the knees to pick up the crate again, he headed across the yard towards the
great shadowy hulk that was the
Liahona
.

*
  
*
  
*

“Your road ahead is shadowed and perilous,” muttered the
gypsy.
 
He held Sam Clemens’s right
hand clutched in his own, which were armored in fingerless black kidskin
gloves, and peered closely at the creases in Sam’s flesh.
 
Close enough, Sam thought, that the man
could just as easily be
smelling
his future
as
seeing
it.
 
The man’s hair was long and greasy, as
befitted a gypsy, and his coat and vest were threadbare.
 
“Your future is one of failure,
disaster and great sorrow.
 
You
should reconsider your course, sir.
 
You should turn back.”

The gypsy fell silent and arched an eyebrow at Sam, as if
underscoring the fearfulness of his message.
 
The silence between the two men was filled with the babble
of the saloon around them.

“That’s refreshing,” Sam quipped, chomping fiercely on his
Cuban cigar.
 
The air inside
Bridger’s was heavy with smoke, but it was the smoke of cheap American tobacco
rolled into cheap cigarettes, mixed with gas lamp emanations and the occasional
ozone crackle of electricity.
 
Sam
filtered the stink, as well as the rancid smell of sour, sweaty human bodies
and the drifting odors of horse and coal-fire, through a sweet, expensive
Cohiba.
 
Nothing, he thought, beats
a government expense account.

The gypsy stared at him.
 
His gray-streaked black mustache hung asymmetrical under his
bulbous nose, and was no match for Sam’s fine, manly soup-strainer.
 
His jaw looked misshapen, too, sort of
hunched sideways into the thick, mostly gray, beard that veiled it.
 
Above all the facial hair and the
badly-cast features, though, the man had dark, intense eyes, with baggy pouches
under them, and those eyes stared at Sam in surprise.
 
“Did you hear me right, sir?
 
I told you that your future is bleak.”

“Yes,” Sam acknowledged.
 
“Your honesty is marvelous.
 
Most fortune-tellers would take my two bits and tell me what
they thought I wanted to hear.
 
Beautiful
willing women, rivers of smooth whiskey and horses that run faster than the sun
itself are in your future, sir!
 
Come again soon.
”
 
He grinned, took another suck at the
cigar and winked.
 
“I respect your
integrity.”
 
And besides, he
thought, you’re most likely right, anyway.
 
If the Indians don’t kill me, the Mormons will, and that
wily codger Robert Lee must have agents out there somewhere as well.
 
Failure, disaster and sorrow, indeed.

Sam heard a
clatter
from the corner of the common room.
 
A squad of Shoshone braves, proud and alien with their beaded vests and
fringed leggings, their strange hair, clumpy on top and then falling long about
their shoulders, and their long magnet-powered Brunel rifles, had shoved aside
several tables and were beginning some sort of coordinated movement that looked
like it might be competitive interactive hopscotch.
 
They tossed flat disks across the floor and then raced in hopping
motions, each to another man’s disk and then back to his starting
position.
 
They looked like big,
hairy, dangerous, possibly slightly inebriated versions of little girls.
 
Sam forced himself to take a second
look at their guns and suppressed an urge to laugh.
 

Those Brunel rifles hurled bullets faster and farther than
any gunpowder-driven weapon yet made, and punched awful holes right through a
man’s body.
 
They were English in
design and manufacture, portable railguns, and Sam wondered how the Shoshone
found themselves so well armed.
 
He
sobered up quickly at the thought.
 
For that matter, as he looked closer, he spotted electro-knives and
vibro-blades here and there.
 
Somehow, though it was in a picaresque and highly individualized, even
chaotic, fashion, the Shoshone had gotten themselves serious hand-to-hand
weapons.
 
Might they have larger
armaments, too?
 

At this rate, he began to think all the wild talk about
phlogiston guns being tested out in the Rocky Mountains might not be so wild
after all.
 
Maybe he ought to
consider his mission objectives broader than dealing with Deseret alone, or at
least get that recommendation back to Washington.
 
It was bad enough that Deseret had air-ships, and might have
ray guns that rained fiery death on their targets.
 
Once such things got into the hands of the natives, there
might be no end of mischief.

Two of the Saloon’s bouncers, heavy men in buckskins with
knives and guns, didn’t look like they wanted to laugh at all; they moved a
little closer with expressions on their faces that were downright grim.

The gypsy shook his head, perplexed.
 
What had he said his name was…?
 
Archer?
 
He wore a tall boxy beaver hat, a long duster, brown
corduroy pants and a shirt that was striped vertically in purple and gold.
 
Round smoked glasses that might have
hidden his burning eyes rode low on the onion-like bulge of his nose.
 
He didn’t really look out of place
here, Sam reflected, surrounded by New Russia Trail pioneers, steam-truck
mechanicks, black Stridermen from President Tubman’s Mexico, cowboys and the
usual clutter of low-life entertainers that filled any bar west of the
Mississippi.
 

Sam knew that he looked much more at odds with the
environment, in his self-consciously modern attire.
 
He wore a jacket, without tails because tails were
inconvenient, and white because Sam liked to think of himself as the hero of
the story, even though, if pressed, he wouldn’t admit to believing in
heroes.
 
He wore Levi-Strauss denim
pants, brand new and shipped straight from the factory to the U.S. Army at
Sam’s request.
 
They were
comfortable and rugged, and they snapped up the front with a row of metal
buttons for convenience, as well as for a certain masculine flair that shouted
mechanick
.
 
At
least, that’s what they would have shouted to Sam, if he ever took occasion to
look at another man’s crotch and saw it protected by a row of steel snaps.