Liahona (13 page)

He ran past the fighting in the wheelhouse and saw that the
truck’s crew was losing ground.
 
Only the Welsh Captain Jones and one other man still resisted, and
surrender must now be inevitable and only moments away.

Jed ducked around the front of the wheelhouse and saw what
he was looking for; the wheelhouse was close enough to the front that the
railing, together with the ridges and gaps formed by the metal-plate
construction of the wheelhouse itself, gave ready footholds to any climber,
even a short one, to get up the ten feet comfortably.
 
He leaped to the railing and then scrambled up the front of
the wheelhouse, hoping no one looked through its windows in the moment he
passed before them, and then he set the canister flat and upright on the
rooftop—still closed, mercifully—and hauled himself up on top,
kneeling at the edge of the space with his toes dangling over behind him.

To Jed’s surprise, he wasn’t alone.

The little boy with the slouch hat sat there, huddled in the
shadow against some kind of speaking horn and staring at Jed with fearful eyes.

“Shoot, kid, I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Jed barked
gruffly.
 
He wondered what the boy
would think at the sight of the returning beetles and then shrugged to himself;
if he saw them at all, there’d be no reason to connect the scarabs to any
passenger disappearances, especially during an attack by local savages.
 
No, best just to keep the kid
calm.
 
“Here, maybe I got a
chocolate bar.”
 
He patted his
jacket pocket, trying to find a Cadbury’s Cocoa Wand he thought he’d squirreled
away—

something grabbed his ankles and jerked him off the roof.

Jed Coltrane the circus midget fell well, like the
professional that he was.
 
He kept
his head, and grabbed with his hands.
 
Both hands gripped the edge of the rooftop and he caught himself,
arresting his downward plunge.
 
He
felt his body
thump
against the windows
of the wheelhouse, but they held, and whatever it was that had grabbed him fell
away.

He snatched with one hand at the canister above
him—whatever happened, he couldn’t let that fall into anyone else’s
hands—then looked down.

Below him, a beaded-shirt Indian jumped, grabbing for Jed’s
ankle again.
 
Hanging by just his
left hand now, he skittered up the wall with his feet, dodging out of the way
of the redskin’s leap.
 
He tried to
continue skittering and get up onto the roof again, but his left hand alone
wasn’t strong enough for the job, and he slipped down, still hanging.

Above him, the little boy burst into tears.
 
“Shh!” the dwarf urged him.
 
What was the boy’s name?
 
Jesus
, or something.

The Indian lunged again, and again Jed Coltrane squirmed up
and out of reach.
 
How often could
he do this?
 
He needed a better
solution.

John Moses
, that was
it.
 
“You got a gun, John Moses?”
he asked, and the little boy shook his head no, weeping.
 

The red man jumped, and Jed dodged, almost losing his grip
this time.

Dammit, Coltrane,
you’ve
got a gun, right in your coat.
 
And
knives to spare.
 
Only you don’t
have a free hand.
 
He looked at the
cylinder; he could set it down on the roof, just for a minute.

“Don’t touch this, kid!” he grunted, and reached up to set
the canister down, when he saw the Indian pull an ax from his belt.

“Hell!” he yelled, out of time.
 
The red man stepped forward, ax raised—

and before he could swing, Jed whacked him with the scarab
cylinder.

He hit the man in his upraised forearm and the lid popped
open.
 
Brass bugs spilled down like
a waterfall of metallic death,
chittering
horribly as they cascaded over the Indian’s face, into his eyes and his open
mouth, and poured hungrily about the soft flesh of his neck and down into his
beaded leather shirt.
 
His screams
came out choked and muffled by his mouthful of death and were lost in the
general clamor.

Mercifully, Jed kept hold of the cylinder.

“Look away, John Moses,” he urged the little boy as he laid
the open canister onto the rooftop and clambered up beside it.
 
It came out sounding like concern for
the boy, but that wasn’t how he meant it; the scarabs were a secret military
technology, and he couldn’t let just anyone watch them in action.
 
Damn it, was he going to have to kill
the child?
 
He didn’t like kids,
but he didn’t like the idea of killing one, either.

The boy had stopped crying, though, or at least he had
calmed himself down to hushed sniffling.
 
Well, if he had to kill him, he’d rather the child weren’t sobbing at
the time.
 
Jed tried his
friendliest grimace on the kid, and it seemed to help; John Moses smiled back
at him.

He looked back down at the swarming beetles and saw that the
flesh and bone were gone, and the beetles still swarmed.
 
They’d look for new targets unless he
stopped them, and for that matter, the scarabs below must have finished their
work.
 
Jed pressed the
recall
button and sat back to watch the cylinder fill as
the beetles all returned to their case.
 
It took a minute or two, and he listened to the sounds of fighting dying
down and looked at the boy John Moses, wondering what to do.

John Moses looked back at him.
 
“I’m brave,” he said finally, lips trembling.
 
That didn’t help.

“Yeah,” Jed agreed, “you’re brave.”
 
He couldn’t turn the scarabs on the boy
at this close range safely, but he could shoot him with the silenced gun, or
just break his neck, and dispose of the body later using the beetles.
 
He found thinking about it
nauseating.
 
Dammit, Coltrane,
what’s wrong with you?

The metallic rustling stopped as the last of the scarabs
nestled away inside the cylinder and fell still.
 
With a heavy heart, Jed closed the lid.
 
Decision time, he thought.
 
It had to be done with a knife; that
would be quieter, even quieter than the Husher.
 
He slowly reached inside his coat—

“You saved me!” John Moses whispered, and lurched forward to
grab the dwarf in an awkward hug.
 
“I’m brave, but you saved me!”

Jed felt a thickness in his throat he hadn’t felt in a long
time.
 
He found himself reaching
past the hilt of his knife and the butt of the Pinkerton’s pistol and digging
into his pocket, finally locating the Cadbury Wand, which he pressed into the
boy’s hands.
 
“Yeah,” he admitted
hoarsely, “I guess I did.”

Bang!

A gun went off on the deck, and other sounds of scuffle
ceased.

With a great shuddering jerk, the
Liahona
rumbled to a halt.

“Shh!” Jed urged, pulling John Moses flat onto the rooftop
with him. The boy followed readily, half the Wand already stuffed into his
eager mouth.

“This is your Captain!” Dan Jones shouted.
 
He was held by two of the Indians and a
third waved a pistol over his head, firing a second time for effect.

Bang!

“This is Captain Jones speaking!” the Welshman shouted
again.
 
“I am surrendering the
Liahona
to these men, who are Shoshone under the command of
Chief Pocatello.
 
Chief Pocatello
is a friend of the Kingdom of Deseret, so I’m certain that this is all a
misunderstanding.
 
Do not be
afraid.
 
Please cooperate with
these men, and we will sort this out.
 
All property will be returned, please be patient and no one will be
hurt.”

Bang!
 
As if to emphasize as ironically as
possible this last claim, the pistol-holder fired a third time into the air,
and then the Shoshone swept Captain Jones and two other crewmen into the
wheelhouse.
 
As they began the
process of herding passengers back below decks, Jed crept away from the edge
and pressed himself as flat as possible.

They wouldn’t find the body of either of the two Shoshone
warriors he’d killed, of course—they’d been consumed.
 
Still, they would find their clothing,
and they might be suspicious, especially if they connected the disappearances
with that of the Pinkerton the previous night.

Just to be on the safe side, Jed Coltrane drew his stolen
pistol.

*
  
*
  
*

Burton endured the indignity with all the grace he could
muster, gritting his teeth against the bile that threatened to rise up in his
throat at the thought of it.
 
Being
captured was one thing—Burton had resisted, as was his manly duty, and
had only been taken prisoner after felling three of the Shoshone, two with one
of the
Liahona’s
iron chairs and the
third with a traditional punch to the teeth—but being held prisoner in
the company of the snake oil salesman was entirely unacceptable.

They sat on the deck in the night’s chill, three to a bench,
as the
Liahona
thundered away from the
main road on some side track, under the alert glare of several Shoshone
braves.
 
The Indians were armed
like desperadoes with a miscellany of powerful personal weapons.
 
Burton saw several electro-knives and
at least one vibro-blade cutlass, Maxim pistols as well as the more usual
Colts, tomahawks, clubs and brass knuckles and one repeating cross-bow, the
vicious head of its loaded bolt staring cruelly at the passengers under guard
and reminding them to sit very, very still.
 
One or two of them carried a Henry or a Remington, but their
standard issue weapon seemed to be the Brunel rifle, long and heavy, which they
leaned on like staffs or spears, heavy coiled-magnet-engine-end down.
 
They didn’t use bayonets, but in the
squabble he’d seen more than one brave use his Brunel like a quarterstaff; the
heavy guns were highly adaptable to this purpose and had proven effective, as a
welt on Burton’s own forehead told him eloquently.
 
A number of the Indians wore dark goggles over their eyes,
and Burton wondered at their purpose—did they confer some sort of
darkness-penetrating vision?
 
He’d
never seen their like.
 
A few wore
metal breastplates, though most covered their chests with leather, bead and
bone.
 
They wore their hair long
down their backs, decorated with feathers and strips of brightly-colored cloth.

To Burton’s left sat Roxie, elegant, cool and collected, and
he wished they were alone.
 
He
would have liked to ask her, indirectly and cleverly, of course, about the
contents of his glass, and whether she had drugged him, or tampered with his
official correspondence, and just who she really was.
 
Also, he would have liked to throw her to the deck and make
passionate love to her, body and soul and damn any watching eyes, like the
savage that his enemies accused him of being.
 
Like the savage that, with half his heart, he wanted to
be.
 
Like the savage he knew he
could never be with Isabel.
 

At least, he thought, he should compliment her on her work
in the stateroom fray.

“You have an impressive right hook, for a woman,” he told
her, and though he meant it as an ungrudging compliment, she looked amused and
underwhelmed.

“You did well enough against the Shoshone yourself, Dick,”
she returned the compliment.
 
“You
might do nicely for yourself in the Rocky Mountains.
 
You could prospect, or trap, or be a bounty hunter.”

Oh, yes? he wanted to shout.
 
Is that because I am a
man of action
?

But he refrained, and said nothing, and threw no one to the
deck for passionate lovemaking.
 
Instead he just harrumphed a not-quite-polite acceptance, and felt a
lesser man for his own emotional stinginess.

“If you learned a little needlework,” she added, “who knows
how many exciting careers might open up to you?”

“I find myself in agreement with the lady,” said the
charlatan Archibald, who sat to the other side of Burton.
 
He seemed to shrink, to melt into
himself, to rest small and inobtrusive in Burton’s own shadow.
 
Burton wondered if Roxie could even see
the man.
 
“I hope there are no hard
feelings on the subject of the antiquities, and in particular the use of the
hypocephalus.
 
I wouldn’t want to
offend a man of your stature and known talents.”

A man of action? Burton wanted to gripe, and then caught
himself.
 
Hanuman’s thumbs, must he
suspect everyone?

Of course not.
 
Roxie was as innocent as the gypsy, he thought, and then he remembered
the mysterious crystals in his glass.
 
However innocent that was.
 
And how did the snake oil Egyptianeer recognize him?
 
Stature and known talents
, indeed.
 
He snorted.
 
Vicious
maneaters, all of them, and he’d do well not to forget it.