The Rider wasn’t sure which revelation was worse; that the Sons of the Essenes were completely eradicated, or that some of their number had actually escaped death and joined the turncoat Adon.
“What is this new order?”
“Nothing less than the saviors of humanity, Rider. We’re ushering in a glorious new age. We will break the fetters at the Hour of Incursion, and That Which Strains Against Its Chains will swing wide the doors for The Great Old Ones. We will unleash hell and The Great Dying will come upon the Earth, and all of us who aided its coming will become as gods ourselves.”
His eyes glazed for a moment, as if seeing some far off day, and he spoke like one reciting poetry; “That thing is not dead which doth exist eternally, and if the Strange Ones come, then death may cease to be.”
“What does that mean?”
“You needn’t concern yourself overly,” said Sheardown, leveling his pistol and grinning again down the length of the barrel. “You’ll be long dead by then.”
“Wait…,” said the Rider, hurriedly. “Tell me more. Like you said, I left before I could hear the offer.”
“Forget it, Rider,” Sheardown said. “Adon knows you too well to think you’d ever join us now.”
* * * *
Gersh thrust his head into the doorway of the shack.
There was Dr. Sheardown, sitting in the same posture as Rider in the saloon, in a similar circle etched in the floor. He did not react to Gersh’ sudden appearance in the least.
At first, Gersh hesitated. What was going on? What did Sheardown’s name on Rider’s flesh mean? Was it a message to help the doctor, to protect him, or to save Rider from him? Was he with the men on the ridge somehow? Was he helping Rider against them? He peered at Sheardown’s pristine, bright clothes. There was no fresh blood on him anywhere. It was all the dried stuff left over from the shelling. He wore a placid smile on his reposing face. His greatcoat was unbuttoned, and Gersh could see pendants such as Rider wore hanging from around his thin neck. He looked at the designs. No, these were different than the one’s Rider wore. Some of the images carved on their faces harrowed Gersh’s soul. He saw cavorting beasts of shapes he couldn’t place—mismatched forms culled from every crawling thing he had heard tell of, and others he had not.
A strange instinct had led him to catch an artillery round with his bare hands today—to save the lives of four people. He decided to trust that same instinct now. Gersh lifted the cannonball and with a grunt, brought it down on Sheardown’s balding skull, mashing it flat. Blood spurted in four simultaneous gouts from the slight man’s nose and ears. There was a crackling as his head was driven down between his shoulders. The doctor’s little body crumpled inward and sagged to the dirt. He was dead without any protest.
Gersh looked down at the murder he had done, but somehow, felt no shame. Perhaps he had no time. He heard the galloping of horses, and turned and ran from the shack.
* * * *
Sheardown’s pistol disappeared in his hand as his trigger finger twitched with mortal intent. The strange amulets draping his narrow shoulders disappeared also. His whole astral image wavered like firelight on water, and suddenly his feet left the ground.
His expression went from one of self satisfied deliberation, to confusion, to terror in the span of seconds. He stumbled, and like a man suddenly bereft of the assurance of gravity and all physical laws, the momentum carried him head over heels. He seemed to blow every which way, like something carried on the wind. He spun and somersaulted and twisted away.
The Rider stood and drew his Volcanic pistol. Evidently his message to Gersh had gotten through. Bereft of a body to anchor him to the mortal plane, his etheric tether to life severed, Sheardown’s consciousness was adrift like an unmanned skiff in the mostly unpredictable tempest of astral ‘weather.’
Sheardown twitched and cavorted madly, trying to regain control of himself. He was blubbering, in a scared panic. The supernal currents were intent on blowing him into chaos, something only a master traveler’s willpower could even hope to prevent. Favorite pupil or not, Sheardown was obviously no master. He was only a ghost now, subject to the whims of more powerful forces. Adon might call his shade back from the gulf for answers, but he was off to where there was no returning.
“If he asks you, tell him I’m coming! Tell them all I’m coming!” the Rider yelled to be heard.
He aimed at Sheardown and fired, and the blue-white blast struck Sheardown’s face. Sheardown screamed in despairing horror as his ethereal body dispersed like a shattered pain of glass. All that he was went swirling off in twinkling fragments across the green desert on purple, chaotic winds that funneled into the raging red sky. Let Adon look for his pieces in Sheol.
“Thank you, Gershom,” he whispered, and taking out his horse talisman, he conjured his mount once more.
In a moment he was again galloping towards the cannon, all aglow with red-gold fire on the crest of the uneven hogback.
* * * *
Two riders galloped into the settlement on black horses. One was a bald man with a tremendous curling black mustache, big arms rippling from the sleeves of a dirty wool vest, a pair of black bullwhips bouncing on his hips like coiled snakes. His shaven head was covered in densely packed, angry red sores, like a wig of tumors. The other was a pale, willowy girl with great sad eyes and a wild bush of frizzy, dead yellow hair on her head. She wore a red bandana and a raggedy white duster, and gripped a thick cigar between her teeth.
They slowed as they passed through the buildings, and Gersh barely got behind one of the shacks when the girl suddenly gave her boot heels to her horse and rode straight for the shack where he’d killed the doctor.
She swung off her saddle before the horse had stopped, and landed nimbly in the dust. She slipped a sawed-off Winchester from her coat and ducked inside, reappearing a moment later.
“Kaftzefoni!” she called.
“Yeah?” answered the big one.
“The little doctor’s dead!”
“Looks like the Rider’s got a goddamned guardian angel down here somewhere,” Kaftzefoni said, as the girl led her horse back to him.
“Looks like.”
“Well let’s make some angels ourselves,” he mused, touching one of his bullwhips. “Startin’ with this one right here!” he spun quickly. The whip hissed out to its full length and snapped around Wilkes’ head as the shaken drover suddenly broke from cover and made a run for the shotgun Gersh had left laying in the alleyway.
The whip coiled around Wilkes’ face and jerked him off his feet. He landed flat on his back screaming, and Kaftzefoni laughed and began to reel him slowly in, dragging him kicking across the ground.
He stood in his saddle and said loudly;
“Alright, I’m gonna take this one apart scrap by scrap, till I start seein’ faces!”
Gersh stayed where he was, but he heard a rustle behind him, and from the wood shack next to the ruined saloon, Baines stepped out with his shotgun.
The girl picked him out right away and levered her stubby Winchester. She walked towards him as if to take him prisoner.
“Where’s the Rider?” she called.
Baines held his shotgun over his head and came towards her. He was beat. Had seen his friend die, had his nerves rattled. He’d had enough.
“I have no idea,” he said in a tired voice.
The girl shot him in the chin.
He fell to his knees, gurgling, spitting teeth and choking on chunks of jawbone. Then he went to his face, where he kicked a few times as he bled out.
She walked brazenly past the spot where Gersh was crouched. She was pale as bleached bone, and her skin was dotted all over with freckles. Her eyes were yellow.
“Murderin’ bitch!” it was Purdee, and he appeared in the doorway of a shack directly across, and gave her both barrels of his shotgun. The sound was like two Dutch ovens banging together.
She threw up her arm and staggered back, buckshot peppering the side of her
coat. But Sheardown had apparently not loaded Purdee’s shells with rock salt, and the blast did nothing more than knock her down and rip her clothes.
Purdee threw down the shotgun and snagged at his pistol, but the air hissed and cracked and Kaftzefoni’s whip looped around his elbow and jerked him off his feet.
The girl rose shakily to her feet, retrieving her Winchester and glaring at the black man lying in the dirt.
Kaftzefoni still had Wilkes wrapped up in the other whip, kneeling at his horse’s feet, and he withdrew the whip from Purdee’s arm with an expert flick that left a thin, bloody rip in his sleeve.
Gersh stared. There was the shotgun he’d dropped, but had Baines loaded it, or had Sheardown? He saw one of the salt barrels lying nearby too. He could take up that barrel and maybe use it as a weapon, but it would be the girl or the bullwhip man. They were too fast for him to get them both.
The girl jacked her Winchester and went to stand over Purdee. She aimed one handed down at him.
Gersh was about to spring at her when the Colonel slipped out of the same shack Purdee had emerged from, and hit her point blank with both barrels of Cashion’s shotgun, the explosion so close and loud it was like a thunderclap.
The blast flung her slight form right out of her boots and a full eight feet back, splattering the Colonel and Purdee with yellow slime. Baines had loaded that one, then. She slammed hard against the wall of a stone hut and her upper body broke apart in black and brown fragments.
Kaftzefoni howled and kicked his horse. He charged between the buildings, intending to run the Colonel and Purdee both down. He looped his bullwhip around his saddle horn and dragged Wilkes behind as he came. It was horrible to see the man’s body jump and careen off the corners of the shacks.
Gersh ran out into the alleyway, right into the path of the snorting animal. He dug in his feet and thrust his big shoulder at its forelegs. The animal shrieked and crashed into him full speed, but proved the lesser force and flipped entirely over in the air, sending Kaftzefoni tumbling end over end from the saddle.
He landed face first behind Gersh, and his big black horse crashed down on his back with a squeal.
In the time it took for the horse to roll off of him, Gersh retrieved the broken barrel of salt, swinging it up like it was a sack of flour. He turned and hefted it high over his head.
Kaftzefoni pushed himself to his hands and knees, shaking his head, and Gersh brought the heavy barrel down on him. The force drove the bullwhip man flat on his belly again and broke the barrel to hoops and splinters.
The halite inside burst out, burying him in big white heap of crystalline gravel. There was a muffled scream. The crystals grayed swiftly. Only the man’s big bare arms protruded from the rock salt mound, and they clawed at the earth, stiffened, and shriveled to bubbling yellow brown husks that melted away before Gersh’s eyes.
* * * *
The Rider reached the crest of the hogback about the same time the girl shed discovered Sheardown’s broken body. He dropped from the back of the fiery ether-horse and let it return to nothingness. Then he made his way through the boulders on foot.
There, on the black ridge above the green plain, crouched like a boar beneath the red sky sat Ketev Meriri, the demon cannon. In the Yenne Velt it was no bronze cast Napoleon, but a weird amalgam of demon and machine. Its body was covered with tarnished gold scales, but whether this were some kind of unearthly barding or its real hide, the Rider couldn’t tell. Between the scales poked long, quivering black bristles, so the Rider thought perhaps it was the latter. Its bulk at first appearance was round and ponderous, but it seemed to rest or, to be chained upon a great black iron ball, which it clung to with four spindly clawed legs like a ferret’s.
It looked to be able to propel itself by scrabbling at the great ball, turning it beneath like a balancing acrobat. The iron was covered in a myriad of crisscrossing scratches, which showed the lighter metal beneath. It had no real face, just a flared, gaping tube of gold much like a cannon mouth that protruded from the place where had it been a dog, its snout and eyes should have been. It had a kind of mouth, as a long row of wicked, blood encrusted upper teeth hung down like stalactites from a drooping black lip beneath the golden barrel. A long tail hung down its back, a tail of shining, exposed rat-like flesh and bone threaded or fused with links of thick chain.
Mazzamauriello held the end of the chain like a lanyard. He was unaware of the Rider’s presence. He stood poised to order another round of death, squinting his blank white eyes down at Varruga Tanks. Why had he stopped firing in the first place? The Rider didn’t know. The other shedim he had spied through the Colonel’s glasses were not here on the ridge. Why had they gone below? He crept closer. There wasn’t much time.
This was Ketev Meriri, the infernal cannon. A creation of Lucifer, such as it was. Could Lucifer truly create anything though, or could he but splice together some hapless corrupted angel, or some malformed spawn of Lilith’s with alchemical devices and infernal machinery beat out by the glowing hammers of the Fallen in the furnaces of hell?
Whatever it was, the thing had at least an animal’s intelligence, for it stirred at the Rider’s approach. And though it had no eyes or nose that he could tell, there came a hollow snuffling from within the gun muzzle face, and the chain tail rippled and clinked, and a greasy brown salivation spilled from the jawless maw.
He hesitated to approach it. It was said in the midrash that the gaze of this demon was gorgon-like—sure, inalterable death. It was strongest during midday between the middle of the month of Tammuz and the ninth of Av, which it was now. It had to have eyes then, down in the bottom of that cannon muzzle. Perhaps it had been fitted with the tube to bring to heel its power, like a biting dog fitted with a muzzle and leash, or a skittish horse with blinders.
The clawed feet curled and the iron ball groaned and shifted slightly.
The Rider rushed up, drawing his Volcanic. He would jam the barrel into its face and shoot, and hope for the best. He could not possess the soulless Mazzamauriello and thus push the cannon back down the ridge. It had to be destroyed, or disabled at least, here in the Yenne Velt. Between the spiritual and physical planes there was correspondence. If he defeated it here, it couldn’t rain down iron on the people below.
He prepared to leap on the thing if he must, but something strange happened. The creature did not scrabble to turn and fight or lash its chain laced tail to alert Mazzamauriello. Instead, it seemed to relax its clawed feet, laying them flat. The snuffling sound stopped and became a steady, if labored breathing.
The Rider stood beside it, ready to leap off the ridge if it made a move.
But it did not.
It waited.
For how many eons had it existed thus? Was it in pain? Had it volunteered to submit to Lucifer’s art and now regretted it, or had it been an unwilling experiment to begin with?
The Rider didn’t know. He did know that as he placed an ethereal hand on the cold metal and angled the barrel of his pistol inside, Ketev Meriri, Bitter Destruction (Bitter of its fate perhaps?) did nothing to prevent him. Its hot breath beat down on his gun hand.
He pulled the trigger. The gun bucked, and the ring filled with blue-white fire. The entire form of the entity shuddered, and then the ball rolled out from underneath it, and it crashed to the ground and did not move. It was like putting down a suffering animal.
The Rider backed away, and watched Mazzamauriello jump and stare at the cannon. No doubt in the physical world it had simply collapsed, the carriage breaking apart, or the gun inexplicably dislodging.
Mazzamauriello cursed and stomped and flung down the chain tail. He wasted little more time, and leapt onto a black pony (it had white eyes in the Yenne Velt, marking it as an unnatural beast—possibly some kind of demon itself). He kicked the animal and it went down a side path.
The Rider fumbled for his talisman and conjured his ether-horse. The dwarf was headed back to Varruga Tanks.
* * * *
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Gersh hunkered down over Wilkes and turned him over. It was too late for the freighter. He didn’t know when the man’s neck had been broken, probably when he’d struck one of the buildings as he was dragged. He was a mess of bleeding cuts, exposed flesh and dust.
The Colonel helped Purdee to his feet.
“Why the hell did your gun work and mine didn’t?” Purdee wanted to know as he inspected his torn coat sleeve.
“Sheardown loaded yours,” Gersh said.
“That rotten little curandero,” Purdee spat. “He was one of them?”
“He was with them,” Gersh said, getting to his feet, “but not one of them.”
“Don’t hardly make no sense,” Purdee said.
The Colonel had his field glasses out and was looking through them at the ridge.
“I wondered why they’d stopped firin’,” he said.
“Rider do for that gun?” Purdee asked, wiping sweat and grit from his shining forehead.
“He must’ve,” said the Colonel smiling. “It’s off the carriage up there. Don’t know how he did it, but it’s lyin’ busted.”
He lowered his glasses and sighed.
“I’ll tell you what. I never seen nothin’ like what you did today, son,” The Colonel said to Gersh in awe.
Gersh smiled as a cool shadow passed across his face and made him glance up. He had done amazing things this day. He had always been capable of great strength, but he had never felt tested before, even with all the tricks old Hash had got him to do. Something had been born in him this day. Knowing there were things such as these men he had fought, and knowing he had the power to face them, it gave him a sense of worth he had never had before. He felt he had a purpose. And that purpose was with Rider.
Rider could teach him. He could learn from Rider who he was, who his people were, and what he must do with the power God had given him.
His heart felt warm as he thought these things.
When the dwarf leapt at him off the roof of the stone hut, when he landed like a squirrel on his shoulder, and sunk his little needle teeth into the side of his neck, Gersh hardly felt it at all.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 6
