Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (18 page)

“How’s your marksmanship coming?”
the Rider asked Kabede.

“Fairly well,” Kabede said, picking
up his Guycot rifle again.

“With the amount of rounds in that
contraption, he can afford to miss once or twice,” said Belden.

“He needs to make them all count,”
said the Rider.

“If he can’t bring something down
with eighty bullets he’s got no business shooting at it.”

The Rider snapped his arm down and
the rifle boot fell away, revealing a lever-action Henry ‘Yellow Boy’ Rifle,
its brass finish glittering. Like the Rider’s Volcanic pistol, it was covered
in Solomonic seals and Hebrew inscriptions, newly etched with meticulous care.

“You’ve got a fondness for antiques,”
Belden remarked. “Why’d you do up that old Henry so pretty? There were Spencers
in the armory, maybe even a couple Winchesters that might’ve taken your
embellishments more handsomely.”

“Winchesters have those wood
forends. No good for etching. The Henry has more surface area.” He flipped the
rifle over and pointed out one of the larger sigils to Kabede. “I didn’t have
room for this on my pistol, so I added it here with the twenty two seals.”

Kabede peered at the Elder Sign
glyph, prominent on the side of the rifle. His eyes flitted to the Rider’s
chest, where a new talisman rode, bearing the same star and eye design.

“Take it,” said the Rider. “It’s
yours.”

He held the rifle out.

Kabede stiffened, looking at the
painstaking workmanship. The Rider had been holed up for weeks in the
blacksmith’s with his tools. He slowly shook his head.

“I’ll keep this one,” he said,
hefting the rifle that had once belonged to Gans of Owernah, one of Adon’s
renegade Creed.

“If we’re going to beat Adon and the
Creed, we’ve got to use everything available to us,” the Rider said.

“If we are to save this world from
the Great Old Ones, I believe it will be by the Lord’s works alone,” Kabede
said firmly.

“Now you sound like my teachers,”
the Rider said, pushing a bullet into the Henry’s breech.

“Was it not your trust in infidel
trappings that turned them against you? That put this flaw in your faith to begin
with?”

“I did only what I was taught,” the
Rider reminded him, levering the cartridge into the chamber.

“Taught by the man who is now our
enemy,” Kabede said.

The Rider brought the rifle up to
his cheek and fired at the stone on the flat can on the rock.

He missed.

“The sights need adjusting,” he
said, excusing himself. He walked back to the blacksmith’s.

In a few moments the door was shut
behind him.

“His head doesn’t cast a shadow,”
Belden observed, when he was gone.

Kabede looked at Belden sharply.

“Neither does yours,” Belden
continued.

Kabede looked down at his own
shadow. Sure enough, there was no head on its shoulders.

“I know,” said Kabede.

“Wanna explain that?” Belden asked.

“We’re doomed,” said Kabede. “Both
of us. In a matter of months, we’ll be dead. But we must see our doom through
to the end.”

“That’s it? You’re just…doomed?”

“The Rider thinks if we can find ten
Jews and a Torah scroll, there might be a chance to avert it.”

“Ten Jews and Torah? Sounds like a
party. Any ideas?”

“One,” said Kabede. “Tombstone.”

The Rider emerged for dinner later
that night.

They could have used the mess hall,
but Kabede had opted to cook out under the stars, which were very bright in the
dark sky this night.

Over the stew, Belden said, “The supply
wagon from Fort Whipple ought to be here any day now. I don’t guess we should
be here when they arrive.”

“I thought maybe the Creed would
make another grab at us,” the Rider said, “and I wanted to be as far away from
anybody as we could be if they did. But we’ve been here awhile now. I guess we’ll
pull out in the morning.”

“So, I guess we’ll be heading to
Tombstone,” Belden said.

Kabede looked up from his stew and
caught the Rider’s eyes.

“You’re not going with us, Dick,”
the Rider said quietly.

“That’s how you feel about it?”

“You shouldn’t be involved in this,”
Kabede said.

“Is this a Jew thing?” he snarled,
slamming down his tin plate. “By God, Joe, when you and me were in the army, I
never tolerated nobody taking you to task for your religion.”

“I know it,” the Rider said. “It’s
not that.”

“There are very dark forces at work
in the universe, Dick,” Kabede said.

“No shit!” Belden exclaimed. “I seen
some of ‘em, and if you’ll pardon me, son, I think I seen a helluva lot more
than you. How old are you anyway?”

“I have walked the upper halls of
Heaven,” Kabede said indignantly. “I have conversed with angels and set upon
the Throne of Glory.”

“That ain’t an answer,” Belden said.
“Hell, I’ve seen more war and whorehouses than you’ve seen years, I bet.” He
turned to the Rider. “I don’t know everything, granted, but I’ve had my knife
up to the knuckle in a half-demon’s belly once or twice, and I can see you’ve
got a long road with a hard fight at the end of it, Joe. You really gonna take
this pumpkin’ rollin’ prince of Africa along and not me?”

The Rider looked at his friend. He
was good in a fight. Even in the face of all that had happened. Dick Belden was
no coward. He might be a drunkard and a whoremonger and a Catholic, but he
wouldn’t cut and run. And Kabede, for all his ability, was inexperienced.
Together, the two of them could be a formidable ally. Still, he couldn’t, he
wouldn’t, be responsible for the death of another friend. He wouldn’t consent
to bear the responsibility of yet another soul’s safety. He didn’t even want
Kabede with him. The young man was too rigid, and that would not serve him,
particularly when it came time to go to Yuma and help Nehema. For beyond all
reason, that was the Rider’s intention. He dreaded bringing it up.

“Rider, tell this pigheaded
dohone
—” Kabede began.

“What’d he call me?” Belden asked
the Rider sharply, pointing at Kabede.

The Rider shrugged. In truth, he
didn’t know.

“
Dohone
,”
Kabede explained. “A clay vessel, made of straw. Where I come from the Christians
will not work with fire. The Christian heart is like the
dohone
. Wash it in the water of truth and it falls apart.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Dick rose from the fire, and the
Rider was poised to endure a long argument, but then he set aside his bowl and
took his Schoefield out.

“Dick wait!” The Rider couldn’t
believe his friend was taking this so personal.

Belden looked past Kabede and took a
step away from the fire.

“What’s the matter?” Kabede asked.

“Somethin’ comin’ up the path,” Belden
said.

None of them saw anything crossing
the valley all that day. It was not possible that something could have snuck up
on them. Maybe from the ridge above, but not from the direction of the valley.
Not up the path.

They grabbed their weapons and silently
receded into the darkness, away from the firelight. Dick slipped into the still
standing doorway of the burned out guardhouse, Kabede crouched behind a
boulder, and the Rider lay on his belly with the Henry rifle, trusting to his
black clothes to hide him. Was it Adon’s men? The Rider had dared to tarry here
not only to regain his strength and craft the Henry, but also in the hopes that
DeKorte might return. It was better to remain in this mildly defensible
position than to strike out across that desert again.

The animals began to raise a ruckus
from their pens, including the Rider’s onager, which set his hackles to rising
as the animal almost never spooked or expressed any distress. He took out his
spectacle case and slid the blue glass lenses with their Solomonic seals over
his eyes.

The night became bright and filled
with colors, the fire flickered green. There were ghosts all about, some dozen
or so of the soldiers who had died still wandering about the post in the
Yenne Velt
, disoriented, bearing the
ghastly wounds that had done them in, inflicted by the tramp of maddened cattle
or the undead. He had put off talking to them and guiltily, he realized, he had
forgotten all about them in the past few days.

He turned his attention to the
noises coming up the path, the squealing and groaning as of a wagon and a
series of strange and deep animal growls that were somehow familiar to the
Rider.

“What in God’s name is that?” Belden
called in a hiss.

In a moment the Rider had the
answer. Six dusty camels pulled a swaying and creaking Gypsy vardo behind,
crested the plateau and began to trundle across the parade ground toward the
fire.

The beasts were just camels. Nothing
unusual about them, other than the fact that they were camels, thousands of
miles away from where they ought to be.

The vardo was spectacular. A dark
color, possibly blue painted matchboard with gold colored designs, it was
massive and seemed to bespeak a more magical age. It was covered from
mollicroft to skid-pan in intricate gilt-work. Fanciful horses seemed to prance
before the eyes among tangled vines on the waist boards, and angelic trumpeters
swirled in the gilded porch brackets and danced back and forth in a great
chorus all along the brass crown board over the front porch.

All this was lit in a warm glow by
the two brass and iron carriage lamps which framed the driver. These were
ornate dragon heads, the light glowing from their gaping mouths. Happy cherubic
faces of golden brass laughed on the great wheel hubs like children tumbling
end over end down a hill, and the black iron stovepipe bore a smiling crone’s
visage. The smoke from the stove within curled from a carved pipe (on the bowl
of which yet another face laughed) between her shriveled lips, casting a glow
on her cowl, which was fashioned to look like a wide brimmed bonnet.

When the Rider looked upon the old
man seated on a bench on the front porch, driving the wagon, he was dazzled.
Whenever he focused on the driver, the entirety of his blue lenses flared as if
somehow lit from within, threatening to burn a deep cyanic image on his
corneas. At the first glance, he looked away, and everything instantly returned
to normal. He could perceive a blue glow emanating from the driver’s seat when
he did not directly focus on it, but as soon as he did, again the blue flash.
It reminded him of the red lanterns that had hung outside of Lilith’s door and
which had kept the creature guarding the Star Stone of Mnar at bay. He had been
unable to use his Solomonic lenses in their presence. But those had caused
actual physical discomfort. This blue glare was altogether different. It only
dissuaded his gaze when he focused on its source.

Its source was the man, not some
strange fuel burning in a red lantern, nor, as he’d first thought, the dragon
head lamps on either side. The light came from the man himself. He was made of
light, as brilliant as an angel.

The Rider took the glasses off,
rubbed his eyes, and looked upon the driver as he pulled the big wagon to a
stop at the edge of the firelight and climbed down.

He was a spindly old man, quite
aged, with a clean shaven face but scraggly, shoulder-length hair. He was pale,
and his dress was American, if boldly eccentric.

He wore pinstriped pants and spats,
and a blue velvet frock with absurdly long tails over a handsomely brocaded
blue vest and a high collared white shirt about ten years out of style, with a
garish blue cravat and twinkling sapphire stickpin. Capping his white head was
a tall blue-dyed fur topper.

“I apologize for your animals’
distress,” the old man announced to the darkness as he walked the line of his
camels, patting their flanks, one arm holding a bulky object he had taken with
him from the wagon. His accent was strange. He spoke like an American, but
there were traces of other unidentifiable influences on his speech. It was
rough, but somehow musical. His voice was deep and resounding. “I assure you it’ll
pass once they become used to the scent of my camels. Please don’t shoot.”

He rubbed the lead camels’ chins
(narrowly dodging a cantankerous bite from the left hand one) and went right to
the fire. He sighed, and shook loose the thing he had kept folded under his
arm. It was a small wood and canvas collapsible camp stool, which he snapped
open and proceeded to settle on.

“Please, come back to the fire, my
friends,” he enjoined innocently, as if they were old acquaintances. He took a
bag of tobacco from his trousers and a long stemmed pipe from an inner pocket
of his coat.

“Why should we?” the Rider asked
warily, getting to his feet and keeping the Henry trained on him from the
darkness. There was no point in pretending they weren’t there. “We don’t know
you.”

“Kabede knows me,” the old man said,
smiling pleasantly, packing the bowl.