Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (26 page)

Chaksusa’s
good
eye rolled up in his skull while
the other gushed
blood and ukum. He screamed.

The
Rider whisked out his pistol and fired, the bullet blowing the back of the
snake minion’s hooded head across the rocks. Chaksusa slumped to the
ground,
almost face first into the fire. The Rider caught
him, but the Hindi was already trembling all over from the poison flooding his
veins. One of the fangs had broken off in the side of his face. The Rider
gingerly plucked it out, and a yellow ichor oozed from the swelling wound. The
old man’s lips
frothed,
and his muscles knotted in
violent rigor, joints clenching and unclenching without reason as his eye
darted and rolled crazily in his already elephantine head. The Rider said a
quick prayer as the old man’s breath choked in his throat.

He
heard the familiar warning rattle somewhere out in the dark, and took up one of
the brands from the fire and flung it against the rock wall. The light showed
two more of the snake things nimbly descending the wall head first like quick
lizards. Their eyes shimmered blind in the flare of light, and the Rider aimed
for them, picking them off the rock face with a shot each.

He
heard a commotion behind him, and spun, almost killing Piishi as the Indian
came running from his post.

“What
has happened?” Piishi exclaimed when he saw the still form of the man he knew
as Tats’adah lying before the fire. The sight of the three creatures thrashing
in wild death answered his question.

Piishi
sank before the fire, his rifle forgotten beside
him,
his hands limp on his knees like the wings of dead doves. He brooded.

“Hope
is gone,” he muttered. “Without Tats’adah, we are alone.”

The
Rider shook his head. He reached into his bag and took out the warm smooth star
shaped stone with its graven Elder Sign.

“No,
we’re never alone.”

* * *
*

Piishi had no horse, so he and the Rider set out on foot down the steep
trail through the trees. The Rider led his onager, holding a lantern from the
pack to light the way. They passed the site of the previous night’s attack, but
found no corpses, Indian or serpentine.

“It
is foolishness to travel by night,” Piishi whispered for the third time since
they’d started. It was the only part of their plan he questioned, though his
own role was the most dangerous.

“I
didn’t think an Apache would be afraid of the dark,” the Rider answered
finally.

“It’s
not the dark we fear,” Piishi shot back. “But to die in the dark…that is to
become lost, to wander forever without peace.”

“What
is peace to your people?” the Rider asked, trying to steer Piishi away from his
misgivings. “I mean, do they believe in Paradise?”

“I
believe in a land without white men,” Piishi answered.

The
Rider smiled thinly.

“I’ll
be sure you find your way,” he told the Apache seriously. “That alone I can
promise.”

They
made camp at last in the blue before dawn at the base of the mountains. Piishi
pointed up a far slope parallel to the once they’d descended, where a squat,
blocky stone structure could just barely be seen.

“Up
there is Red House,” Piishi said.

“Sleep
while you can,” the Rider said. “In a few hours I’ll wake you.”

Piishi
slept as though there were no danger. It was a mark of his trust. The Rider
made preparations throughout the gathering day, saying prayers and uttering
ancient incantations. Now and then he watched the shadowy place where Red House
sat overlooking the valley. The sun glanced off its low walls briefly, and then
come noontime it slunk again into shadow like a creeping Gila monster probing
the open air before retreating into the dark of its den. He could feel a heavy
dread in the air, like the promise of a hard rain. The place called to
something in him, even as all he knew of it repelled him.

As
the sun passed overhead, Piishi stirred unbidden and awoke.

The
Rider was in the midst of preparatory prayers, and the campfire was pungent
with the smell of strange, heavy incense. Piishi cleaned his rifle and pistol
while he waited for the Rider to finish.

“You
sleep now,” Piishi
said,
when the Rider’s murmurs
ceased.

The
Rider rubbed the dust from his spectacles and then stroked his heavy eyelids
with his thumbs.

“I
don’t need to rest,” the Rider lied.

“If
you sleep here while I’m gone, you won’t wake up.”

“I
won’t sleep. Maybe my donkey will protect me.”

* * *
*

Piishi looked dubiously at the white onager, swishing its tail lazily.
Yet, it had been the only animal to survive the attack by the snake men. He
thought with regret on the pony he had lost, and then on the trial to come. He
had fought hard fights before, but not like this.

The
Rider inscribed symbols in the dirt, and he sat within a circle of power such
as the medicine men sometimes made. He was in strange, sacred regalia, his arm
and head encircled with black bands bearing leather boxes, his body hung with
fetishes and metal talismans which Piishi did not know.

“He
knows we’re here,” the Rider said with assurance. He could feel the cold mind
of Mauricio seeking him out, from somewhere in the dark heart of Red House.
“You’re ready?”

Piishi
nodded, touching the ancient sky iron knife with its handle of lightning struck
wood. It was the magic weapon the Papagos had made to defeat Mauricio so long
ago. They had found it among Tats’adah’s belongings, along with a bow and
polished, red stone arrows. Each crimson arrowhead bore a tiny white etching of
a star in three circles with an eye in the center. These Piishi wrapped in hemp
and dipped in the lantern oil. His rifle was loaded and he had two bandoliers
of cartridges and his pistol besides.

“I’ll
be with you as long as I can,” the Rider told him. “Do you believe this?”

“I
don’t know,” Piishi said.

He
had seen many of his friends and family killed, some by The Black Goat Man,
others by the Indah soldiers. A sister had been taken to Red House by the snake
men. He knew there was such a thing as magic, but in his experience it was all
bad. He still didn’t know if he could trust the strange white man. But if he
was to die, this was as good a way as any.

The
Rider closed his eyes and said a benediction over Piishi in Hebrew. When he
opened his eyes, the Apache was already loping off into the hills, weapons
bouncing, and yet silent as a mountain cat.

He
concerned himself with his own task and began the ritual to step into the Yenne
Velt, for it was his plan to confront Mauricio there.

When
his face at last slackened and his shoulders sank, Piishi was within sight of
Red House and the sun was low and red in the sky.

Surrounding
the Rider in the spirit world were the shades of the Papagos and Moors, with
Don Amadeo at their head. The Rider looked over his own weapons—the amulets and
wards of protection, the Volcanic pistol with its Solomonic embossments, and
his warded cold-iron knife. He found his Lakota horse fetish and conjured the
fiery ethereal stallion from the suprasubstantial energies eddying about them,
and climbed onto its back. A silent understanding passed between him and the
shade of the Spanish knight. Don Amadeo drew his sword and held it up. The
Rider trotted up the embankment, the army of ghosts marching behind him toward
Red House.

* * *
*

The Black Goat Man hung suspended in the depths of Red House, at the
beck of his mistress. He prepared to defend her against the ancient enemy that
had last mounted an offense. She was all to him; a warm, velveteen envelope in
which he dwelt wholly, lazing as in a mother’s womb, dreaming dreams of lives
gone by and some yet to be. She showed him so many things, and their rapport
was less that of mistress and servant and more of dame and favored paramour. To
ease the pain of his own rebirth, she had shared with him the similar
sensations of her own excruciating push through the cloaca of this universe;
had showed him the long black middle passage from the chill void over Aldeberan
that lead to her and her companions’ touching down in fire on this very world,
eons before the first man stood aright. He had seen things through her that no
other human had seen, and she had made him into something much more than simple
Mauricio because of it.

He
loved her so very much; indeed, as he loved no other thing.

He
tried to think of the bitter time before their joining, but it was like trying
to call to mind events prior to one’s earliest memory. Mauricio, the man, had
been lost in the mire of centuries, and only brief impressions of a life lived
scheming and skulking remained. Human infancy, the embarrassment of a bumbling
adolescence, and the unending angst of a disappointing adulthood wasted in
servitude to a doddering faith that held nothing for him; all these were lost,
rendered trivial. Now his first recollection was of finding a twisted stone
statue in the dusty attic of a monastery, a statue depicting her.
The Sign of the Dark Mother.
It had been like discovering
the terrible, up to then unknown face of one’s darkest, truest desire. He left
it there at first, stealing up from his daily chores to stare at it, to caress
its intricate stone curvatures, even, like a confused adolescent acting upon
the merest physical impulse, to love it.

Discovered
in the midst of such base adoration of her mere image had gotten him expelled
from his order. He killed the outraged brother who stumbled upon him—killed him
with the idol itself, smashing his bald pate in with its heavy stone base. He
cracked the base in the process, and found concealed within a parchment that
set him upon a long and winding quest through forgotten libraries and across
trackless sands, down into the depths of the earth and through the rotting
pages of forbidden tomes, finally learning her beauteous name and the loving
call of Ia!
Shub-Niggurath in a long lost copy of Ostanes’
Sapientia Magorum.

The Dark Mother.
She
Of
A Thousand
Young.

Long
years he had spent searching for
her,
and more had he
toiled among the savage peoples of this new land plotting the grand sacrifice
that would win him her favor. The hearts of Don Amadeo and his mud people and
the willing servitude of the Castilian noblemen had at last proven the dowry
that had made his goddess swoon. She had taken him inside and remade him into
her earthly eyes and ears, kept him secure in her mephitic bosom, teaching him
through vivid dreams the mysteries of this and other universes, of the ways of
the Old Ones, of her estranged lover Yig the Father Of Serpents and of The
Magnum Innominandum.
That Which Strains Against Its Chains.
The Black Dragon.

She
had charged him with the honor of securing the lands around Red House as an
entry point for the Mangum Innominandum. She had assured him a place of power
in the free world to come, once the Old Ones had remade this world to their
liking, freeing mankind of the fetters clapped upon them by a nonchalant deity.
He knew the plan of the Old Ones. He looked towards the Hour of the Incursion.

Then
this Chaksusa had appeared to oppose him. This doddering curandero whose blue
robes the mud people had come to cling to for solace against the raids of his
Yiggian minions. They had clashed many times through the centuries, but now the
old pest was dead.

Now
he felt the presence moving steadily up the mountainside to contend. It was not
a physical presence, for the black roots of The Dark Mother ran deep through
this land, and knew the touch of every heel that trod upon it. The earth had
drunk the blood of Chaksusa. They had tasted it together, savoring it as if
they had sunk their teeth into his flesh themselves. No, this was something
moving between the worlds, like an infiltrator creeping between raindrops or
swinging through tree limbs like a monkey. They thought perhaps that they could
not be detected, but Mauricio had taken precautions.

The
Cold Ones were but the first line of their defense, and already they were
scouring the mountain. In the Unknown Country the corrupted souls of the twenty
Castilian nobles and the countless savages who had pledged themselves to him
over the years walked the ramparts of Red House, a phantom garrison whom he had
bound with ancient rites to his command.

He
turned his attention to them now, and to their report of the familiar host of
spirit rabble that ascended the mountain.

Why
had Amadeo’s restless ghost chosen now to interfere? Had the passing of
Chaksusa given him and his quaking entourage a sudden measure of courage?

His
Lady told him of another, maybe as dangerous as Chaksusa—a walker between
worlds who had interfered in
Their
plans on other
occasions. Was this spirit marshaling Amadeo’s shadow army? If so, the Cold
Ones would find his physical form and dispatch him.