Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Page 10

  They had sold Kelly to an Arkansas tobacco farm, and the pink, piggish women clucked their tongues behind their fans and remarked on what a shame it was to be a bastard little picaninny with a father screaming in hell. He had prayed they were wrong. He did not want his father to spend eternity in the same place as the metrize and his devil wife and children.

  On the banks of Tulip Creek he had continued to advance his powers. In the meantime he had secretly come to rule the downtrodden blacks there, guiding them away from the lying God of the whites and inciting them to rise up against their overseers, making his fortune on their gullibility, luring them into his power with ‘conjers’ and tuberculosis cures whose effectiveness was questionable.

  But eventually the call to real power had superseded his care for the fate of his people—his people? Bah. These cowering wool heads and stooping house niggers were no more his people than were the weakling blancs. He had set out west alone to find new avenues of power. He had become a thief of fortune and a slaver of souls who numbered cruel spirits among his fondest companions. Once he had been tall and strong. But long ago he had abandoned the upkeep of his physical shell for the reinforcement of his mystic self.

  He was already an heir of eldritch traditions when he came to share bowls of blood with a Navajo witch and learned the lore of the skinwalkers and the dark desert spirits. His training had culminated in the revelation of a secret shamanic poudre the witch had blown into his eye. The powder had burned like lemon, and he had touched it with a lightning struck stake, thus blinding the eye to the physical world and opening it to the perception of the pale shadow land of spirits. In addition, the eye gave him wondrous power over the wills of other men.

  That was how Kelly could see the fiery aura of this beardedblanc with the womanly curls. That was how he knew he was dangerous, even fastened to his will as he was now.

  No man should have been able to penetrate the storm he had woven around this town. The wind djab should have turned him aside or torn him to shreds had he persisted. Yet by his own admission, this blanc had simply walked through. He had power.

  Kelly wanted to know the secret of that power.

  The conjurer stepped closer, not breaking his mesmerizing gaze. He pulled open The Rider’s coat and marveled at the many talismans that hung there. Their number rivaled even his own.

  “We give him to the storm,” said Scarchilli, picking his teeth and leaning against the wall. It was not a question.

  Kelly’s fingers moved among the wards, fingering them.

  “He has power, this one.” Kelly inspected a bit of pink coral that hung from one of many leather cords around The Rider’s neck.

  “Greater than yours?”

  Kelly wheeled on the bandit chief. Their’s was already a tenuous alliance. Kelly suspected Scarchilli planned to turn on him once his usefulness had ended. But if that were his plan, the man was more of a fool than he looked. He could command forces that would turn the bandit’s pistol on himself if he so chose.

  Scarchilli winced. He had never believed much in the witchery of the mestizos and fearful talk of ghosts before he’d met Kelly. He had never been entirely sure the things the black brujo did weren’t some fakery that bent weak minds to his will...until he had seen what had become of the marshal the day they had beaten him and strapped him to the windmill. When he closed his eyes he could still see the flesh being stripped from the man’s body by the very wind. Scarchilli made the old sign against the eye, but he did it behind his back, where the black man couldn’t see.

  “Don’t turn that eye on me,” he warned, keeping the tremor from his voice.

  Kelly closed the smoky white glass and regarded him silently behind his lenses.

  “You said no one would be able to come through the storm,” said Scarchilli, putting away his sword.

  “As I said,” Kelly said, turning back to the bearded gringo. “He has power.”

  “Two of my men are dead. Not good men, but mine nonetheless.”

  “Leave me his goods then.” Kelly shrugged. “Give his flesh to the djab. It will appreciate another offering. When he’s in place, take your men indoors. I could barely keep it from killing them the last time it was loosed.”

  Scarchilli nodded.

  “Will it kill him though? Or will this power of his protect him?”

  “No one can withstand the winds of hell,” Kelly said, selecting the coral pendant necklace and slipping it up over The Rider’s head, then putting it over his own before gazing at it thoughtfully.

  * * * *

  When The Rider awoke, it was to a distinct agony in his ankles and wrists. The prickling numbness of his limbs was nearly unbearable. His skull thundered, and the roar of the wind was in his ears, splaying his curls across his face, filling his beard with dust.

  The ruddy face of one of Scarchilli’s Mexicans was inches from his own. As the dark eyed man saw The Rider’s eyes open, he smiled a golden toothed smile and his eyes flitted downward. The Rider realized the source of his pain were the tight leather cords lashed around his extremities and torso, and the full weight of his body which caused them to gnaw into his flesh. He was suspended in the air, tied to the blades of the creaky windmill he’d seen over the roof of the telegraph on the way into town; the one the shopkeeper had said they’d tied the marshal to. The Rider had been stripped of his coat and his shoes, and all his talismans and bodyguards.

  Looking down, he saw Scarchilli himself standing at the foot of the ladder with his fists on his hips, looking up at him. The Rider’s gold and silver chased pistol gleamed in the bandit’s sash. The Rider’s coat lay in a black puddle with his shoes in the sand at Scarchilli’s feet. His amulets were gone.

  A couple of Mexicans stood on either side of him, anxious to go. They kept looking off across the open desert where the dust storm still raged, a beige curtain fluttering over the sky and the distant mountains, making one indistinguishable from the other.

  “Well!” he called. “I hope Miguel did not make the ropes too tight. I would hate for your hands to blue up and drop off before El Diablo comes for you!”

  Miguel, the man on the ladder, laughed and grabbed the edge of one of the mill blades. He gave it a rough pull and The Rider’s head swam as the ground and the sky began to methodically swap places. The windmill’s metallic groaning increased as he spun, and the bonds drew taut first around his ankles and then around his wrists as his posture warranted. He shut a moan behind his teeth.

  Miguel slid down the ladder and landed lightly beside his chief.

  “Just tight enough to keep you where you are, eh?” Scarchilli clapped Miguel on the shoulder appreciatively, raising a puff of filth, which quickly caught the wind and was gone.

  The Rider saw them only in blurred, alternating fits as he turned an endless cartwheel, the blood rushing back and forth from his head to his toes, intoxicating him. The windmill sang a tired song. He bit his lip as the cords creaked against his flesh, pinching the veins in his arms, slowly strangling the life from his fingertips and toes. The wind howled, kicking up a hiss of dust, rattling along the metal fans and through the wooden supports.

  One of the Mexicans gibbered excitedly.

  “Alright, alright, we’ll go,” said Scarchilli. “I wanted to stay and watch your end, Rider, but my men, they are afraid of It. They saw what It did to the marshal and that was enough for them. They are like my children. I don’t want them to have nightmares. I spoil them sometimes.”

  “We should go to the mine, jefe,” Miguel said. “It’s the safest place.”

  “You know, I feel a little like Pontius Pilate leaving a Jew to hang like this,” Scarchilli mused. “Adios, Rider.”

  The Rider saw him salute. He strode off at the head of his pack, who all the while spared anxious glances over their shoulders. “Vámonos paisanos!”

  The Rider could hardly struggle with his fetters; he could barely think at all as his world flip-flopped, the supports creaking as the leather cords sank deep
er into his wrists and ankles. The wind was increasing in volume and violence, and with it quickened the revolution of the mill fan. It flung sand in his eyes and ears and the distant howl became a roar.

  What had become of the last marshal? The shopkeeper had said Scarchilli’s bandits had killed the man and tied him to the windmill, or killed him by tying him to the windmill; he couldn’t remember which. Scarchilli had said something about El Diablo and what it had done to the marshal. He knew only a smattering of Spanish, but his studies had given him a passable knowledge of Latin, and he knew that diablo was devil.

  The black man had overcome him with some powerful magic. That eye. That terrible, milky eye. He had removed his spectacles in the low light, and had thus foolishly cast off his protection. The fifth and thirty sixth seals embossed on the blue glass of the lenses would have guarded him. He dimly remembered being asked about how he had managed to pass through the storm. What was this storm, then? Some kind of spectral force summoned by the black sorcerer to turn aside travelers, or to keep them in? It was unnatural to be sure. In the time since Scarchilli and his men had departed its severity seemed to have doubled, rocking the windmill and churning the world into dust-ridden nonsense about him. He closed his eyes to stop the spinning of his vision. He felt the contents of his body shifting, trying madly to compensate for frequent, drastic changes in his position. He sickened, feeling his stomach shake. He didn’t know how long he could possibly stand this. Was this how the marshal had died? Spun to death, the blood mixed in his body until it had drowned his muddled brain and taxed his vessels to bursting?

  Then suddenly, there was a shuddering impact and he jolted painfully to a stop, his wrists and ankles flaring with bright agony, his brain thrown violently against the inside of his skull. He was thankfully aright. His eyes flew open, but it was a moment’s confused rolling in their sockets before they could again make sense of the jumbled, howling world.

  The Mexican boy from the cantina was on the ladder Miguel had used. He had jammed something into the whirling blades of the windmill. A clothes pole maybe, or some bit of discarded lumber. The force of the turning mill had almost shivered the pole entirely, but it held, quivering. The boy’s hands gripped The Rider’s trunk, holding him steady.

  “Señor!” he called above the storm. “Señor?”

  The Rider nodded slightly, unable to form words that would make sense on his tongue. His stomach heaved dangerously.

  “I’ll cut you down!”

  He took a sharp kitchen knife from his belt and began to saw at the cords. The Rider laid his head against the mill’s axis and clenched his eyes against the wind, willing himself to clarity. When he was able to focus on his surroundings again, his right arm was free, and he held the boy by the shoulder in a weary half-embrace, feeling the needling in his fingertips as the blood rushed back into his dead hand.

  His chin on the boy’s shoulder, he whispered in his ear, “Where are they? Where did they go?”

  “To the mine, where are the others. Pero, they will be back!”

  The mine, yes. Miguel had said something about seeing to a mine.

  “Feet first, or I’ll fall,” The Rider said.

  The boy nodded and crouched to saw at The Rider’s ankle cords.

  He looked over the boy’s shoulder and shivered.

  Gliding towards them across the empty waste was a dark, cyclonic concentration of whirling dust. He had seen such eddies in miniature all across the desert—little tornados that kicked up dry grass and dust in a wild tantrum and then dissipated. Dust devils, he had heard them called. They weren’t devils of course, just frustrated earthbound souls with only will enough to agitate the wind, raging impotently in the boundless wastes. He had stopped to help them when he could.

  But this was nothing like those. It was twice the size of the windmill, a spinning funnel of stinging dust and bits of stone that tapered into a fine point, which wavered drunkenly, threatening to topple over. It made straight for them, gathering up sand and ripping up cacti and brush like a brawler arming itself for a fight with anything it could find. The debris was flung outward at them on the arms of the slashing wind, and The Rider’s face was torn by creosote brambles and cactus thorns. Was this how the marshal had died? Flayed to bones by a demon wind? He hunched his shoulders and shielded the boy with his arm as he worked.

  The boy shouted, but his voice was lost.

  The ladder teetered and the boy flailed for balance. The Rider gripped his shirt, but the sleeve tore and the boy fell backwards with a faraway yell. The Rider slipped and dangled from the rocking windmill, screaming as all his weight fell on his left wrist and the cord around his torso burned up his flanks. Both feet hung free, but he was almost sure his wrist, maybe his arm, was broken. He twisted for an agonizing instant in the wind before his hand popped free, the leather tearing away the flesh from his wrist and knuckles.

  Then he was suspended by the cords around his mid section that burrowed painfully into his underarms. He found his feet on the support beams, pushed up briefly and raised his arms like a boy being taken out of a sweater by his mother. Then he fell hard to the ground, praising God he had not landed on his ankles or shattered either of his legs.

  He rolled on his belly and crawled across the whipping sand on his elbows, reaching the boy, who was flat on his back with the ladder across him. He dragged the ladder off the boy and pulled him near by the shirt front.

  The boy cried out, alive.

  The Rider said another prayer of thanks and dragged the boy to the meager shelter beneath the legs of the windmill itself. Depositing him there between the struts, he saw his coat had been blown up across one of the beams, and he reached for it. As he swept it towards him, he uncovered a long bleached bone stuck half in the sand, on the end of it, the spread of a human hand, like the array of a pipe organ clinging by a thread of browned sinew. It was swathed in a scrap of tattered broadcloth, to which was pinned the faded tin star of a territorial marshal’s badge. So much for the fate of the lawman.

  The Rider searched his coat pocket, finding his spectacle case where he’d left it.

  Crouching in the blowing wind beneath the tower beside the boy, he bit the case open with his teeth and fumbled to put the blue lenses on his nose. Then, peering up at the looming whirlwind, squinting through the Solomonic seals etched into the glass, he knew what it was he faced.

  A long dark shadow dwelt suspended in the center of the whirlwind. As it towered over their heads, The Rider could make out its shape. It was a thin, wraith-like form swaddled in filthy, ragged linen that writhed and snaked like a living corona in the wind. Its overlarge feet and pitiful spindly legs tapered to a point like the cyclone it inhabited, its skeletal arms folded across its wasted chest. From the tangle of swaddling there craned a long, serpentine neck on the end of which drooped a heavy head, hook-beaked, and sheathed in crosshatched sinew and muscle—in overall impression not unlike a skinless flamingo. Glittering avian eyes regarded The Rider with a benevolent glare.

  “Lix Tetrax!” The Rider shouted into the blowing wind, and the ragged wind demon paused and cocked its head to hear its own name. There was power in names, Adon had always said. Here the power was in distraction.

  The Rider looked frantically about and spied the many rusted, iron nails driven into the foundation of the old windmill, in the rotten wood. He fell forward and dug his fingers as far into the wood as he could, at last prying one of the six inch nails free.

  The whirlwind demon’s hooked maw dropped open and let out a harsh condor call only The Rider could distinguish from the scream of the wind, and swept towards him. The tin of the windmill blades rattled violently and the entire tower shook, threatening to uproot.

  The Rider pulled off his glasses and held the nail aloft like a talisman. In his other hand he placed the nail behind one of the lenses with its seal and called out;

  “By the treachery of Ornias, and by the Pentalpha seal granted unto Solomon by the highest Sabaoth,
I seal thee, Lix Tetrax, called Ephippas, by the holy and precious name of the Almighty God! Adonay, Prerai, Tetragrammaton, Anaphexeton, Inessenfatall, Pathatumon, and Itemon! I bind you in iron!”

  Through the lens, The Rider saw the thing in the cyclone throw back its long neck and wail miserably. It seemed to melt like black ice, dissipating on the wind like ink in a running river. The dark fluid concentrated and flowed towards the blue lens and the nail as if into a vortex, and with a shudder and a fiery impact that traveled like a shock up the length of The Rider’s arms and threatened to fling his hands wide, it poured through the lens, siphoned into the nail behind.

  When it was done, the iron nail trembled between The Rider’s two fingers as if it had been charged with lightning. He jammed the nail as hard as he could into the wood from which he’d pried it.

  The Rider fell on his side, panting from the effort. Lix Tetrax was not a demon of the highest order, but a demon nonetheless, and subject to a Solomonic seal—the Pentalpha—and the Ineffable Name.

  But it was not over yet. The wind shrieked and blew, rattling the windmill, and the sand bit at their flesh. Tiny bits of flying stone caused hairline streaks of blood to open on their exposed skin. The fourth pentacle of the sun, which he had used, was not the proper binding seal. It would not last, although the creature was corporeal for the moment.

  The Mexican boy stared as The Rider weakly pushed himself up, tucking his tender wrist to his side and shouldering into his billowing coat.

  There was a colossal snapping sound and a terrible groan from the windmill.

  “It’s going to fall!” the boy squealed, scrambling out from underneath it.

  The Rider had retrieved his shoes, and he caught the boy by the shoulder and led him quickly away.

  “Let’s get to the cantina,” he hollered urgently over the blow. “Be quick, and don’t look back no matter what you hear!”

  They rushed between the outbuildings rattling with flying sand, the boy panting as the crackling and groaning continued behind them. He was terrified at the gringo’s words. Why could he not look back? What would he see? Though they went past the telegraph office and back to the empty street, he could still hear the cracking of the old windmill close, as if they had not left it behind at all. He thought perhaps they were running the length of it as it fell, blown down by the wind. Yet though he expected at any moment to feel and hear the great impact, it never came. Only the snapping and groaning as of breaking wood and twisting tin and the hurricane roar.