Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter Read online

  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 malevolent 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. 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 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.

  His curiosity got the best of him as they reached the boardwalk, and he glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the windmill come crashing down into the street.

  Instead, he saw something he would never see again and yet would carry with him always—something he would remember in his loneliest, darkest moments, up until he lay alone in a dim, still room many years later, waiting for death.

  The base of the windmill stood in the alley between the buildings, uprooted from its foundation. He only wondered how the windmill had come to be there for a half an instant.

  As he watched with unbelieving eyes, the spindly beams of the windmill moved. They scuttled independently, like the legs of a crippled fly or a maimed spider, and, towering over the flapping shop awnings, it lurched out into the street. The splayed face turned jerkily like the head of a questing tin daisy peering up and down the street, seeking them. The blades flashed in the sun as they swiveled with a slow, tortuous squeaking sound and the ‘head’ regarded them. Then it was staggering unnaturally into the middle of the street in pursuit of them, the entire unwieldy structure pitching and shambling like an ungainly, animated milking stool.

  The boy screamed as he had never known he could.

  Then the gringo had him by the shirt front. He pitched him into the open doorway of the cantina, through the clacking doors. He fell to the floor, still screaming.

  “Bring a bottle of liquor and the bung starter! Fast! Now!” he yelled.

  The boy pulled himself up. He caught a glimpse of the windmill’s wooden legs stomping toward the cantina, quivering with each step, and he spun on his belly and got to his feet and ran for the bar, numbly noticing the blood on the floor from the last time the gringo had been in there.

  He dove over the counter top and fell behind. He almost hugged his knees and buried his face and stayed there. Almost. He mumbled as he worked, trembling hands knocking over bottles and smashing whole shelves of liquor as they sought the bung starter. Prayers he had not said since he was very young rattled off so quickly the words made no sense, but they were empowered with a true and desperate desire to be heard and understood. To God and Jesus and Our Lady, and to all the saints.

  He heard a gigantic crash and felt the building shudder. The bung starter fell from the shelf and landed at his feet. He gripped it in one hand and a bottle of clear aguardiente in the other, then he staggered around the edge of the bar.

  The gringo stood spraddle-legged in the doorway, as though he had just ducked inside. Filling up the whole entrance was the turning head of the wind mill. It strained against the frame. The adobe flaked from the wall. Cracks appeared like lightning. The wind gusted in through the door like the thing’s raging breath, tearing away the curtains and sending the playing cards funneling across the room to scatter in every direction.

  The bearded gringo had a shred of flying black fabric torn from his coat. He held out his hand and hollered for him to come. />
  The Rider took the bottle and bit the cork out, jamming the scrap of his coat sleeve into the neck. Then he began striking the bung starter, trying to light the makeshift fuse as the head of the animated windmill pushed further into the entrance, blades squealing and bending backwards, windows smashing, tables overturning.

  The cloth lit, into a lively, fluttering fire.

  He turned to face the unnatural thing, hearing its shrill keening in his ears.

  It was said that the angels had pursued the fugitive Lilith, the mother of all demons to the Red Sea, and spared her life only when she agreed to allow one hundred of her children to die every day.

  Today was this one’s turn.

  The Rider flung the bottle into the face of the windmill and it shattered, splashing liquid fire. The old wood of the tower frame quickly caught and spread down its length. It screamed, a sound like howling wind bending metal and The Rider backed up into the cantina, hands clamped to his ears.

  The metal daisy face withdrew and the flaming tower spun in the middle of the street, flailing as the brittle wood blackened and began to collapse, shedding fiery beams and crackling as it shook itself to pieces.

  The wind lessened almost immediately, and a fine rain of dust fell for a few seconds in a gentle cloud over everything, dwindling the fire and half-burying the broken windmill.

  Nothing truly died, of course, but the shock of disincorporation was akin to death for a demon or any possessing spirit. Defeated on the physical plane, the violent entity would dissipate into the ether and return to whatever hellish wellspring had birthed it to gather its will. It would be a long time before it visited the earth again.

  The Rider fell into one of the empty chairs.

  The boy stood nearby, lips moving soundlessly.

  “I told you not to look,” The Rider admonished him, gripping his own wrist and grimacing.

  The boy reached for one of the clear bottles under the bar and poured the strong smelling liquid into a clean glass, spilling some all around with his shaking hand.

  He had only ever tasted beer and hated it, but the hard clean burning of the aguardinte was not like beer. It spread across his raging stomach and made him pleasantly drowsy, so that it was not long before the blood on the floor and the crackling and popping of the windmill smoldering in the street did not bother him so much, and he felt he could speak without gibbering.

  “They came from the desert,” he said.

  The Rider looked up. He had bound up his wrist tightly with a bar towel and was opening and closing his fingers.

  “The men with the guns,” said the boy. “We thought they were rurales come to water their horses. The big man and the black man were out front. The mayor and the marshal went to the cantina to talk to them, and the big man killed the mayor in the street with his sword…cut off his head.”

  The boy looked into the street, and The Rider was unsure if it was the burning windmill or the rolling head he was seeing.

  “They took the marshal’s guns and they locked him in the jail. One of the men found the telegraph operator. He was trying to wire for help. He killed him, and they cut the wires. We all hoped that the message had gone through....”

  “Where are all the others?” The Rider pressed, pulling on his shoes. “Dead?”

  “Working in the mine. In the gold mine.”

  The town had a gold mine. Probably it was newly discovered. That was why the little hamlet looked on the verge of prosperity. The unfinished manor house, so out of place on the border, the clean buildings. They had foolishly advertised their good fortune like a lady wearing diamonds in an alley, and the first band of renegades that had come along had taken it.

  Scarchilli was an admittedly industrious bandit, forcing the townspeople to work the mine. With the help of the black sorcerer to turn aside unwary travelers with the wind demon, they could have stayed in the town as long as they wanted, eating and drinking their fill, then finally leaving with sacks of gold when they were through.

  It was quite an accomplishment, keeping an entire town hostage with only ten or twenty men, armed or no. Freeing them would be difficult, especially if Scarchilli kept the children or the women in some central place to insure the mens’ obedience.

  “Where are the women and the children?”

  “I told you, señor. In the mine.”

  “When do they take the people out of the mine then for the night?”

  “They do not leave,” the boy said. “They work until they are dead.”

  The Rider stood and went to the door. The sorcerer waited in the big house. But he was ill-equipped to face him without even his enchanted pistol, still shoved through Scarchilli’s waistband.

  “You’d better find another hiding place,” he said. “They might come looking for me.”

  “Señor!” the boy started, gripping his sleeve.

  The Rider turned.

  “In the jail are some of the marshal’s guns. He keeps the key to the rifle rack on a little hook behind the door, and there are bullets in his desk. Maybe the banditos have not got them.”

  The Rider nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  “Señor.”

  The Rider paused again at the doorway.

  “My papa whose cantina this is. Maybe he is not dead yet. He is called Eladio. He is...”

  “I know,” said The Rider. “In the mine.”

  * * * *

  The business in the cantina with the two Mexicans had been more a matter of wits and advantage than the sort of strict gun prowess touted by men who killed for a living. The Rider had practiced drawing quickly, but doubted he could be relied upon to hit anything beyond a few feet. Long years of reading by candlelight had rendered him nearsighted.

  Of course, he had learned to kill.

  He was not the sort of man to dwell on the war, as so many men on the frontier were. Nearly twenty years later, men still died by the relativity of their birthplace to the Mason-Dixon Line.

  The Rider’s participation in the war had been his ultimate reason for breaking with his enclave. The rebbes hadn’t understood his willingness to fight in a conflict that did not directly concern their isolated commune. In their eyes, it had been a war of industry versus agriculture, a conflict of opposing political ideologies, both entirely too Christian for their tastes. At the very least, it was a war to free the unfortunate schvartzes. And while this had been a noble endeavor, in their opinion it was not enough to warrant his breaking from his mystic studies.

  The Rider had tried to tell them of the forces he had observed massing in Heaven and in the Yenne Velt which so mirrored their own—that the opposing forces of the Rebellion were both divinely and infernally inspired. Was it not written in the Bereshit Raba that ‘both Heaven and Earth are balanced by each other?’ ‘As above, so below.’ There was a correspondence to be perceived in all levels of the universe. There had been more at stake than the emancipation of slaves or the preservation of agricultural economics, although these were empirical symptoms of the greater universal War. The Rebellion, like a satellite conflict localized in the mortal world, had sprung from a greater border war, and the borders were between Heaven and Hell.

  They had called him blasphemer, and refused to believe that God or the Adversary would take a direct interest in the wars of men. Blind foolishness. Hadn’t God Himself felled the walls of Jericho? Hadn’t He invigorated Samson against the Philistines, and sent fire and death on the Egyptians? Why these righteous men of faith had readily accepted these doctrines and been so hard hearted against the idea that God favored one army of Christians over another, he hadn’t been able to understand.

  The rebbes had even suggested he had worn the blue so that he could fulfill some ungodly bloodlust fostered in his soul by the forbidden teachings of his master, Adon. For this he had been barred from their company. They had long sought an excuse to expel him. He had given it to them at last when he enlisted in Ford’s Independent Company in Colorado.

 
The war had taught him that men could think themselves righteous and be not so, just as it had taught him to kill. But unlike the lessons of the Merkabah, he had never truly taken to the latter. Anticipation or aftermath, it still caused his hands to shake, his palms to sweat, as if it were the first time he’d held a rifle.

  This time was no different.

  The rifle he held now was a Henry repeater. He had found it, and the box of cartridges, in the jail where the boy had told him they would be. It was cool in his hands, but he knew with a dozen armed men to face, it would soon be hot to the touch.

  The mine was a mile out of town, driven into the base of the rocky hills, a crude cave blasted wide enough for two men to walk abreast.

  Two men stood there now, in the aperture, lighting lamps against the setting sun, their rifles leaned against the stone wall. The Rider recognized them as two of the men who had presided over his would-be execution at the windmill. They had been anxious to go. Now, they seemed fearful to stay. They kept whispering to each other, and looking to the dark sky.

  Nearby, a large remuda of horses slept within a makeshift corral of brambles and rope. It could have been all the horses in the town, and the bandits’ besides.

  He wished he could call forth one of the little whirlwinds now to send them running, but he was no magician.

  His wrist throbbed. The boy had bound it tightly, but he could barely feel his fingers on his left hand. He could move it, with difficulty. At least it wasn’t broken. If he managed to kill these two with his rifle, he might be able to kill a couple more as they ran out of the mine. Scarchilli would not come out though, and the next gunshots heard would probably mean the death of the townspeople inside.

  He needed a way in. He needed to free the people inside, or else kill Scarchilli and the bandits before they could turn on the kidnapped workers.

  Slowly, on quiet feet, he began to make his way around the low hill toward the entrance. The war had taught him how to kill, yes.

  It had taught him other lessons as well.

  * * * *