Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Read online

  The Merkabah Rider

  Have Glyphs Will Travel

  Episodes 9 - 13

  By

  Edward M. Erdelac

  To Adonai and my family, and to the fan club.

  Special thanks to the boundlessly imaginative and talented Jeff Carter, who is always ready with a bucket of creative turpentine whenever I paint myself into a corner.

  I pride myself on adhering to a timeline, but in this volume I have necessarily taken some liberties in history both real and imagined. It’s likely that Josephine Marcus had already left Tombstone well before May 26, 1882, but I thought she and the Rider ought to get to say their goodbyes.

  Table of Contents:

  Episode Nine - The Long Sabbath

  Episode Ten - The War Shaman

  Episode Eleven - The Mules of the Mazzikim

  Episode Twelve - The Man Called Other

  Episode Thirteen - The Fire King Triumphant

  Glossary

  About the Author

  For Episodes one through four, see Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter by Edward M. Erdelac; for Episodes five through eight, see Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name also from Damnation Books.

  Episode Nine - The Long Sabbath

  The Rider and Kabede had been pursued for four days across barren sand and blasted rock. In all that time, they dared to stop for more than a few minutes, and then only when the animals demanded it.

  On the second day, Kabede’s donkey refused to budge and they left it behind. Kabede hung his goods on either end of the Rod of Aaron, and put it across his shoulders. The Rider’s onager, however, proceeded with commendable resolve, more than the Rider himself could summon.

  It seemed foolish not to take turns riding the animal, particularly because the Rider was still in a greatly weakened state, but he obstinately adhered to his Essenic vow against burdening the beast until he collapsed on the morning of the third day. Kabede lifted him bodily onto the onager’s back. From then on, the Rider sagged on the hard, rolling shoulders of the animal, and Kabede led them on foot.

  The Rider wasn’t quite as bad off physically as he had been after their first meeting. The scant two days of oblivious rest beneath the protection of the Staff of Aaron, free of Lilith’s nightmares and nursed on hot broth and clean water had helped him some. His triumph over her gibbering minions at the torreón had in turn succored his spirit. Yet, he was only human, and even Kabede, who was in perfect health, was showing the strain of their flight.

  At first they had gone with some speed, and the Rider estimated the horde of walking dead had fallen a day behind them. They did not increase their pace, though the three men on horseback who drove them could have easily left the mob behind and overtaken them at any time. Instead the traitorous riders maintained their easy lope at the rear of the mob, like sleepless nighthawks, never changing speed.

  On the third day, Kabede, looking through the telescoping spyglass, swore to the Rider that the number of their pursuers had doubled.

  Later that day The Rider and Kabede passed a tiny ranchero on the edge of the desert, nestled at the foot of a narrow mountain pass.

  That was when they saw why.

  They had steered towards it, thinking to mount a defense there, but DeKorte split from the group on horseback and went ahead, skirting them by a few miles and then cutting in. He rode in like a bolt of lightning and they watched helplessly from afar as he slaughtered the Mexican family there, his gun cracking clearly across the distance, cutting down a woman on the porch, a skinny boy at the well, and a man who came running out of the stable. Through the spyglass they watched him swing down from the saddle of his white horse and disappear into the house. His pistol snapped a few more times. They could not tell what he did to the bodies, but he spent a few minutes over each of the corpses in the yard, and then mounted and rode back to the ‘herd.’ In a matter of moments three adults and a brood of four teetering children slowly, mechanically rose and followed him, joining the animated dead of Escopeta and the Lord only knew what others they had gathered to them.

  Jeroen DeKorte was formerly of the Amsterdam enclave of the Sons of the Essenes. The Rider had known him by reputation as Het Bot, the name the man had chosen, as all Merkabah Riders did, to confound hostile spirits. It meant ‘The Bone,’ and was a reference to the one indestructible bone all men were said to have in their bodies, the luz, from which it was said that HaShem will resurrect the body for its new life in the world to come, like a tree from a lowly acorn.

  The French rider, Alain Gans, was called Le Bouclier, ‘The Buckler.’ Neither the Rider nor Kabede knew much about him other than his name and that he was once of the Owernah enclave in Alsaice.

  The last renegade the Rider knew personally, or had known him prior to his betrayal. Upon the Rider’s return to San Francisco after the War Between the States, he had been one of the two German riders who had confronted and attacked him, believing him responsible for the destruction of the American enclave. He was known in German as Das Schwert, or ‘The Sword.’ Kabede, who as the secret keeper of the Order’s Book of Life knew all their true names, called him Pinchas Jacobi, late of the Berlin Enclave.

  Jacobi had nearly killed the Rider that time. He was fast, and not prone to discourse. Jacobi had dealt him a wicked wound with a mystical iron short sword that had nearly dislodged the Rider’s soul from his body, and had rendered him delirious almost the entire journey from San Francisco to Ein Gedi. That encounter had given the Rider the idea of weaponizing his own talismans in the golden Volcanic pistol he now carried.

  Only the intervention of Jacobi’s brother rider, a soft voiced man called The Dove had saved him. The Dove had nursed him on the journey, and stayed Jacobi from killing him. The Dove was dead now, probably at the hands of Adon, maybe even Jacobi himself.

  Adon’s crime begat more crimes. Murder upon murder. Heaps of bodies. But it was the Rider who shouldered the guilt. Everywhere he went the killing hands of Adon’s plot sought him, and crushed the guilty and the innocent alike.

  This multitude of dead shuffling along behind them, driving them into the deepest part of the desert, forcing them to keep from all human contact, was like the embodied shades of all the deaths the Rider had caused by his own failures-his failure to recognize Adon’s treacherous nature, his failure in leading Adon to the secret enclaves of the Order, and his chief failure in not being able to find his former teacher and put an end to him.

  In the early morning light of this, their fourth day, they had come to the far edge of the desert valley, and reached an old rutted road that wound up another pass through the mountains—the only other gap they had seen in the impenetrable ring of sky-besieging stone that encircled the hellish Valle del Torreón.

  Having no other recourse, Kabede led them onto the road and up the incline as the Rider dozed on the onager’s back.

  The Rider daydreamed, or rather, he reminisced, his mind wandering back through the years to the war, something he had not given much thought to in a long time. Maybe it was the rhythm of the riding, something he had not felt beneath him in the years since he had renewed his Essenic vows.

  He recalled his stuffy woolen sack coat and Gideon, the palomino that had carried him through the thunder and the gun smoke at Glorieta Pass, Westport, and Mine Creek. He daydreamed of clinking tack and creaking saddle leather, the snapping of Gideon’s creamy mane on his knuckles as he bent low to use his twitching ears as a sight for his Remington, the heaving of the horse’s golden flanks against the insides of his knees and the final buck in his gun hand as a ballyhooing rebel fell off the back of his onrushing sorrel and tumbled behind, one boot tan
gled in the taut stirrup.

  To ride had been a glorious thing then, and though he was ashamed to think of it now, the rapidity with which he had learned to kill from the saddle had emboldened him in his youth. He had taken to it quite well. His aptitude had increased his sense of self-worth, turning him from a strange, nebbish pariah among his hard and mainly Christian comrades to a respected soldier. Belden had called him a natural born yellow leg.

  He found himself smiling, not for the soldier he had been, but in thinking of the friend he’d had. Corporal Dick Belden, of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, who had taught him to ride and pitch a stone with equal mastery.

  He realized the familiar piping that wended in his ears was not a dream.

  He sat bolt upright when he heard the brisk rattle of a military drum accompanying it, and rubbed his eyes and strained to focus on the music.

  The words came into his mind:

  Poor old soldier, poor old soldier.

  If ever I ‘list for a soldier again,

  The devil shall be my sergeant.

  It was the Rogue’s March, the tune played as a disgraced soldier was drummed out of the service.

  They were halfway up the mountainside now, where the incline leveled to a series of wide, flat shelves and a ridge overlooking the valley. They were passing a small cemetery ringed with stacked stones when he abandoned his memories. He could see adobe buildings further up the trail, and sod houses with thatch roofs. All were arranged around an area swept bare of stone and construct, but for one weathered pole that stood twenty feet against the sky. A faded red white and blue banner hung there, limp as a rag put out haphazardly to dry.

  It was a military outpost. Small, and probably not even a full-fledged fort, but definitely manned.

  Kabede looked back at him, his dark eyes sad.

  “We’ve got to turn back,” the Rider croaked, for they had not spoken much in the past week.

  “The animal must rest,” Kabede said. “We must rest.”

  The Rider’s shoulders sagged with fatigue and the burden of knowing they must involve whoever they met in the death struggle they were about to enact. But these were soldiers. Surely if they must stand beside someone, this was better than holing up in some poor family’s house. Fighting was their occupation, after all.

  This was what he told himself as Kabede turned back to the road and pulled the shuffling onager along. But of course, fighters or not, this was no fight of theirs, and who knew what they were up against for that matter. The Rider had faced reanimated corpses before, but he had no idea what the capabilities of Adon’s riders were. What dark magic did they now command? With what boon had Adon enticed them away from the Sons of the Essenes?

  He catalogued his own abilities, knowing they shared his and Kabede’s training. They could attack them in the Yenne Velt, at the very least. They could forcibly possess the physical form of anyone they chose. Further, the undead army could disrupt his and Kabede’s countermeasures in the astral realm simply by occupying their physical attention in this one.

  His heart sank in his chest. Already he regretted having taken Kabede with him. How many of these soldiers would die for their visit?

  As they reached the landing and the outskirts of the post, they saw the lines of men in blue wool lined up on the dismal parade ground. There weren’t many. Maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty. Not even a full battalion.

  Kicking up dust, their rifles and belts rattling, came a detail of four men, driving a fifth in clinking chains, his head bowed before them. The Rider saw a huge, muscled sergeant with a dark beard, a thin, stiff moving officer in a kepi and havelock, and a pair of trooper-musicians. The slim, long fingered fifer was excellent, capturing the tune’s ridiculous marriage of gaiety and melancholy, like a cheery sun struggling to shine through murky clouds. The drummer was less so. He lost the rhythm at regular intervals, as if he could not reconcile his drumming and marching. Indeed, his drumming sounded like a drunkard having trouble negotiating a flight of stairs, always stopping and starting.

  The man before them was in his patchy long red underwear and cavalry boots, the iron chains around his ankles forcing him to adopt a demeaning half-shuffle. His shoulders sagged with the weight of the links that bound his wrists before him. His head had been clumsily shaved in the traditional punitive manner, but he retained thick eyebrows, more like an actor’s greasepaint than real hair.

  There was something familiar to the Rider about those prodigious eyebrows.

  No one took any notice of the Rider or Kabede until the detail reached what was presumably the boundary of the post. Here they slowed to a surprised stop, finding the two men and the onager waiting for them.

  The big sergeant directly behind the prisoner was poised to deliver the literal boot to the unfortunate’s ass flap when he noticed them and ground his foot firmly into the earth again. Around the same time, the fifer stopped and the lieutenant’s lips parted in silent question.

  Up close, the lieutenant was quite a sight. He was a youngish man with startling green eyes and a shock of short orange hair just visible beneath the white havelock hanging from the back of his cap. His pale skin was yellow and purple around the right side of his face, one eye nearly swollen shut. The furrow of a cut marred his mashed lip, a thin little gully filled with crusted blood, just beneath his drooping rusty mustache.

  The drummer, so intent on his duty that the tip of his pink tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth, was the last to become aware of their presence, and only stopped his clumsy rat-a-tatting when the fifer elbowed him.

  The prisoner regarded the newcomers first with surprise, then with a half-lidded interest, and finally with shock again when his eyes fell on the Rider.

  The Rider sighed and eased himself off the onager’s back. He was quite used to being stared at. From a distance, his drab black garb was unremarkable, but up close, when men saw his payot curls, beard, and the fringes of his tallit, he often gave them pause. Still, he had supposed the outlandish Oriental garb of Kabede would have deflected attention, as striking a figure as the Ethiopian was in his white burnoose.

  He opened his mouth to address the officer, but the prisoner cut him off.

  “Rider,” said the man. “You’re just in time to see me off.”

  It was the Rider’s turn to register shock. Who could possibly know him here? His first thought was of the reward posted for his capture, and for the return of the ancient scroll in the case strapped on the cantle of the onager’s pack saddle—the one he had taken from the body of one of Adon’s pupils, Dr. Sheardown. The fight with Sheardown and Lilith’s half-demonic gunmen, the shedim, had wound up destroying the desert watering hole settlement of Varruga Tanks and saddled him with the blame. Varruga Tanks had come to be known as a massacre, and he had gone down as the perpetrator, with no greater person than the territorial governor of New Mexico issuing a reward for his head.

  “If I can recognize you under all that hair, you old demonpuncher, can’t you recollect an old friend who’s lost all his?” the man said, his grim face splitting in an infectious smile. His thick eyebrows leapt meaningfully, and the Rider nearly staggered at the coincidence, for here stood Dick Belden, whom he had been thinking of only moments before and had last seen when he’d mustered out at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas fifteen years ago.

  “Belden,” he allowed cautiously. His first thought was to touch his gun. This had to be some trick of Adon’s riders, or of Lilith. This was some demon in the shape of Belden, or some terrible, unguessed creature that had masked itself with a pleasing face.

  But the Rider had on his Solomonic spectacles. There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of the men before him.

  “You know this man?” Kabede said at his side, the wariness evident in his voice.

  The Rider opened his mouth to answer, but in the instant of hesitation the big sergeant shoved past Belden and interposed himself.

  “What the hell is this?” he demanded in a deep voice. “Who’re you
?”

  “Sergeant Joe Rider, Second Colorado Cavalry,” said Belden, behind the big man’s back. “This man was chasin’ Sibley with me while you were beatin’ on half-starved Rebs for their wedding rings at Camp Douglas, you fuckin’ tub of piss.”

  Joe Rider was the name the Rider enlisted under at Canon City, when he and his best friend Abe Lillard had left San Francisco together. He’d answered to it for three years. It was funny to hear it spoken now, after so long.

  “Shut up, you,” the sergeant snarled, whirling on Belden and cocking one gigantic mitt back to deliver what looked to be a shuddering backhand.

  “Don’t,” the Rider ordered, with all the authority he could muster in his weakened voice.

  The sergeant stiffened and turned back.

  Now the sorry looking 2nd lieutenant stepped out from behind the prisoner.

  “What’s going on here, Sergeant Weeks?”

  “Visitors, sir. Look t’ be civilians, but this one claims to be a soldier.”

  “Former,” the Rider said. “Rider’s my name, sir. This is my traveling companion, Kabede.”

  “Belden says he knows him,” said Weeks, sourly.

  The lieutenant’s eyes flared, and he looked to Belden.

  “Just a funny coincidence, lieutenant,” drawled Belden. “I ain’t plotting a grand escape or anything. You’re rousting me anyway.”

  The Rider was disbelieving. How could this be possible? Could this really be the same man who had been his friend since they’d met at Apache Canyon? Was this the same man who had taught him to ride and pitch stones like David? He reflected for a moment how strange his life had truly become, when he could more readily believe in a plotting malevolent creature from another plane of existence than the happy, coincidental reappearance of an old friend.

  He had often said he had no old friends, of course, but Dick Belden was one. They had saved each other’s lives a few times, and been through hell on horseback together.