Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter Read online

  The Rider’s chin began to fall to his chest, and Scarchilli brought it sharply back up with the sword.

  “Walked,” he repeated.

  “He’s not lying,” said the black man in a musical, French accent. “He can’t.”

  The conjure-man peered at the white man through his spirit-eye. The mystic field of the strange, bearded blanc was awash with the manipulation of magical energy, like a baker dusted with flour. He cast no shadow upon the floor, which meant that like a man at midday, his soul had disappeared or was hidden. In both the penumbra and the real world, he stood unchanging. He was not a zhambi, for his ti bon ange spirit was intact. He was a walker between the worlds, his shoes muddy with ether.

  Kelly Le Malfacteur had been a conjure-man of great renown among the slave huts of lower Arkansas when he had decided to leave his shoddy cabin and find his fortune as a traveling sorcerer. Powerful magic swam the hemic channels of his veins.

  His grandfather had been an outlaw bokor in the mountains around Port Au Prince in the early days of San Dominique, in the Black Republic, a favored horse of wicked Kalfou, the loa of the crossroads. His African born grandmother had married that knowledge to the ways of Hoodoo and taught them to her son. They had fled Haiti not long after the revolution, only to have their ship overtaken by slavers. Kelly’s father had been auctioned to a cotton planter. His grandmother had died on the passage to America.

  Kelly’s father had embraced the white man’s religion for the love of his goodly Christian wife, and disdained the application of magic for many years. There, Kelly had been born in a ramshackle slave cabin under the shadow of the metrize’s great house, the toil song of the field hand his baptismal canticle.

  His mother had been beautiful; dark as a creek bed with glorious, feral hair, her blood untainted by the touch of a white man. His father had been the same. When night fell they had become invisible in each other’s arms. As a boy he had thought it was a special kind of magic that bound them to the darkness and made it their constant protector. He had never been afraid of the dark. Not ever.

  Then came the day when the foul attentions of the metrize had turned toward Kelly’s mother, and his wife, the maîtresse, had beat her ugly with a stick of firewood and sold her down the river. His last sight of his once lovely mother had been as she tried to wipe the bloody tears out of her blind, swollen eyes with broken fingers, her bruised arms draped in clinking chains, struggling for one last look at her family as the trader’s wagon lurched off down the country road.

  Kelly’s father had turned angrily from the white God and looked once more to the old ways. Fingers dipped in black cock’s blood and weaving dark energies, father and son had together wandered down dark roads, calling in the witching hour upon the left handed forces to give their hatred black tentacles with which to wring the churlish metrize and his hated wife free of their baleful souls.

  He himself had laced their breakfast with the yellow poison his papa had taught him to draw from the cotton—that which the blancs called gossypol— creeping through the kitchen on bare feet, invisible to the fat house mammy who later had the audacity to wail and tear her apron when she found the metrize, his lady, and their two fat white weevils scattered and purple faced in the dining room, as if she had lost her own children.

  While the blancs young and old lay dead, Kelly and his papa had drawn out their ti bon anges and sealed their vile souls in the cotton crop. The night their bodies were laid out and wept over by their neighbors and kin in the candlelit house, he and his papa had stood before the quiet field. He remembered how his papa had pointed to the pale bolls waving on their stems in the evening breeze and bid him light the brand for the love of his lost mother. They had set fire to the field, and Kelly had imagined (or had he?) he heard the metrize and his children screaming on the night wind as their souls were consumed.

  How he had loved his papa then! How he had loved the twisting flames in his dark eyes and the strong hand that gripped his shoulder as the fiery field blazed high and bright in the dark, a crop of vengeance sown with bitter seed and watered with white blood in the cursed, ashen soil of Hell.

  They had set out to find his mother then, but the dogs had caught them in the swamp. The whites had boiled his papa alive in a great laundry kettle until the dark flesh slipped from his bones, while the Methodist preacher read words over his screams and the white children pelted him with horseshit. When they dumped out the big black iron pot the dogs fought for what was left, searing their long tongues in their eagerness.

  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 bearded blanc 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. Theirs’ 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. Kelly 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 ag
ainst 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, playing his payot 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 nowhere to be seen.

  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 deeper 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 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. The Rider had removed his spectacles in the low light, and had thus foolishly cast off his protection. The fifth pentacle of Jupiter and fourth pentacle of the Sun 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 wh
irling 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 midsection 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.