He did hear the little man’s voice speak rapidly in his ear.
He did feel the hunk of his own flesh splat wetly against his cheek as the black dwarf spit it out and jumped back down.
The blood coursed down over his shoulder and was dripping from the ends of his fingers by the time he fell forward and Purdee caught him in his arms.
“Easy, kid,” the black man whispered close in his ear, straining to ease him down.
He heard shooting, and he felt a flaring fire in his neck, and then he felt nothing.
* * * *
The Rider stood in the circle, leaning for a moment against the ruined wall. There was dried blood on his hand and leg, but the correspondent wounds were already closed and wouldn’t scar. He shook his head like a man trying to let water out of his ears, and he waved feeling back into his prickling arms and lurched unsteadily into the sunlight, fumbling for his pistol, as the first sound that had met his ears upon returning to his body had been gunfire. Gershom was not here.
He nearly fell when he got outside, but something solid and warm stopped him. He blinked his bleary eyes and saw it was the last friend he’d expected to greet him.
The onager’s hide was blackened with soot and ash, and the tips of one of its ears was shorn off, but it seemed otherwise remarkably healthy.
He couldn’t keep the smile from his face.
“How in God’s name did you survive?” he exclaimed, forgetting to be reverent in the unmitigated joy of the moment.
The animal nipped at him, but it was without its earlier malice this time.
“Oh alright, alright, I’m sorry.”
He pressed his forehead against the side of the onager’s head.
“Alright, help me.”
He drew his pistol and leaned heavily against the animal. It seemed as they went that the pale onager relied equally on him. Its gait was slow and stumbling, and the Rider noticed streaks of dried blood leading from both ears. When the artillery had hit the animals, it must have deafened him. But how had it not killed him? He had heard the screaming horses, seen the state of the bull that had been caught in the explosion. Perhaps it had somehow shielded the animal. The onager had a habit of keeping to the far edge of the pen away from other animals after all.
“Mazzamauriello!” the Rider called drunkenly, shaking his head again. The psychic pains Sheardown had inflicted on him in the Yenne Velt had left him groggy upon his return. He’d never experienced anything like being shot with his own implements. The dwarf would kill him if they met now. He wondered where Gershom and the others were, if they were alive.
“The little man’s gone!” Purdee yelled.
The Rider and the onager went around the corner of the ruined saloon in the direction of the black man’s voice.
“But he left you a message,” Purdee said as they came into view.
The Rider closed his eyes and nearly slid down the onager’s flank.
When he opened them, what he had seen and prayed briefly was not so was still there.
The massive youth was lying like a colossal pieta in the arms of Purdee, who had wrapped his bandanna around Gershom’s thick neck in a vain attempt to stop the blood that colored them both scarlet and fed a wide pool in the dirt.
He was pale and sunken, his cheek resting like a sleeping boy’s against Purdee’s breast.
The Colonel was standing nearby with his hat off, and Marina and her boy were weeping, the boy into the belly of his mother, and she into the Colonel’s shoulder.
Trib leaned against the stone wall of the hut, and his tired eyes were red limned.
The Rider left the onager’s side and went to them, sinking to his knees.
As his shadow fell across the pale body, the boy’s eyes fluttered and he stared up, half-lidded.
The Rider brushed aside Gershom’s long hair and gently moved Purdee’s hand, still pressing the blood soaked bandanna to his neck.
When it came away, blood seeped, but only a little. There was not much left in his body. The Rider got a glance of the small, ragged bite wound, then replaced Purdee’s bandanna.
He looked into the boy’s fading eyes. He had not had much time to speak with this boy, but he had been instantly fond of him. When he had seen Gershom weep openly over the death of Hash, the Rider had bled for him. He knew what it meant to lose a father. He had thought once more of his desire to leave all this horror and strife and lead a normal life, perhaps to start a family, perhaps to be a father himself.
Yet in the boy’s willingness to learn about his heritage, the Rider realized he had seen much more than a surrogate son. He had seen a potential student. Someone to whom he could pass on the teachings he had for so long thought would end with him. Perhaps that had been the true desire of his soul. This boy had been something special after all. A living Nazirite. A champion of the Lord, waiting for a knowing hand to point him in the direction of the Adversary.
But to what had the Rider led him, he could not help but ask himself.
Gershom’s lips moved, and the Rider leaned close, realized he was summoning the strength to speak, and laid his ear against them.
“I could have helped you,” he said.
“You did,” the Rider told him.
This seemed to lighten his sorrowful expression, and he nearly drifted away then, but his lids snapped open and his tongue darted. He strained to speak again.
“He said…he said….tell you…he will find you…another time.”
The Rider nodded. He knew that was so. He wanted it to be so.
“Some-thing else…,” he stammered. “Said…said...tell you…Nehema…”
The Rider tensed. Nehema. What about her? Had Lilith’s children learned of her betrayal?
“Ne-hema…”
The Rider stared, willing him to live a little longer.
The boy rattled then in Purdee’s arms, and he stared at the Rider, as if he wanted to take his face with him wherever he was bound.
And then with a hiss, he went there.
“What’d he say? What’s Nehema?” the Colonel pressed.
The Rider said nothing, but gently closed Gershom’s eyelids with his fingertips.
“He was the bravest, most amazin’ boy I ever seen,” Purdee said.
No one could say otherwise.
* * * *
They left together. That is, the Colonel, Purdee, Marina and her son, and Trib, after they saw the dead buried and prayed over.
The Rider said the kaddish over Gershom himself.
Purdee and the Colonel fixed Baines’ wagon, and the Rider caught the two black horses the shedim had rode. They were not entirely natural creatures, having been willing to bear shedim, but when he fashioned horse brass marked with the 22nd and 32nd seals and fixed them to their harness collars, they were bound to obey.
They waved to each other in parting, but said nothing. The Rider and the Colonel made two signs from scrap wood that read ‘Varruga Tanks—DEAD. NO WATER. TURN BACK,’ and Trib wrote the same words over again beneath in Spanish. They took one with them in the wagon and headed down the west trail, and the Rider resolved to take the other east.
First he found Sheardown’s body, and possessions, for the man had spoken of a scroll he was supposed to take to Adon.
The onager shied from the shack where the dead man lay, and would not approach it.
Sheardown’s amulets and pistol bore strange markings that filled the Rider with an instinctual revulsion. They depicted scenes of bestiality and abomination, and belonged to no sect of magic he had personally encountered east or west. He built a hot fire and threw them in, breaking Sheardown’s gun to pieces on a rock and tossing the fragments in after.
At last, he found a bag packed with papers bound in twine, a leather tube containing a brittle old scroll, and an old book bound in leather. The scroll, comprised of frayed papyrus, was written entirely in a language he did not know, composed of various pictograms, some like the images he had seen embossed on Sheardown’s a
mulets. He did notice an Egyptian ankh amid the symbols, and supposed the rest of the work might be Egyptian as well. He hesitated to burn it. Adon wanted one of these works. He would send his turncoat riders to regain it. Maybe, he would come himself. The Rider put the tube and its carrying strap over his shoulder.
The other was a heavy bound book written in old form Greek, which he could read, if not well. It was not as venerable as the scroll, and bore the title The Wisdom And Sacred Magic Of Zylac The Mage. He was familiar with many magical works by reputation, but he had never heard of this one, nor had he ever heard of this ‘Zylac.’
He put it in his bags.
The rest of Sheardown’s papers were bound letters. The Rider leafed through them briefly. Many were written in some sort of cipher, a series of bizarre characters whose ordered repetition convinced the Rider they weren’t just nonsense. These he found folded together in a torn envelope addressed to a box at the Las Vegas, New Mexico post office. He put them aside, thinking perhaps the key to the code might lie in the book or the scroll. There was an official letter from a Dr. Allen Halsey, dean of a new medical school opening in Massachusetts, informing Sheardown that his application to teach anatomy there had been ‘regrettably denied.’ There was also a faded clipping from a Mankato, Minnesota newspaper dated 1862 that mentioned Sheardown as having obtained samples of human skin from a group of condemned Indians publicly executed after the Dakota Sioux uprising there.
Of Amos Sheardown, or how he had come to know Adon, there was nothing more.
The Rider strapped the warning sign to the onager’s back and walked east down the dead trail, the last living man to ever visit Varruga Tanks.
Episode Six - The Damned Dingus
The Rider squinted over the yellow pages of The Wisdom And Sacred Magic Of Zylac The Mage and lost his place once again as a shuddering jolt of the train sent his tired eyes bouncing off the page. He closed the book on his forefinger and rubbed tears from them, then stared through the glass at the empty landscape flashing by. The sky was darkening with the onset of evening. It was full of churning, monolithic clouds that had arrived too late to be burned away by the sun. The sweeping desert and far off mountains were bleeding red, but congealing to an evening blue. It was like running past a wall of John Martin paintings.
He opened the book again, but it was no use. His eyes wouldn’t settle.
Thus far, his study of the book he had taken from Adon’s self-styled ‘favorite pupil’ had proved distracting, but for the most part worthless. It polished his dull command of Greek to a keener edge, but otherwise it was much like reading any number of magical pseudoepigraphical books like The Lesser Key of Solomon or The Book of Abramelin. It was full of precise, complex rituals and rambling invocations, and references to pagan deities with mind-boggling names like Tsathoggua and Shub-Niggurath, but it was mostly nonsense.
The difference was that unlike most books of questionable antiquity that attributed their authorship to ancient Judaic mystics like Solomon and Moses, or Christian and Egyptian luminaries like John Dee, Nicolas Flamel, and Hermes Trismegistus, this book did not purport to be the work of, nor indeed, did it even make mention of any real life personages the Rider was familiar with. There was a great deal on Zon Mezzamalech, Eibon, Milaab, and Gargalesh, but who any of these people were the Rider could only guess. It mentioned places like Commoriom and Phenquor, but gave no hint as to where these locations might be. Of course, place names had changed over the centuries, but, for all the Rider’s learning, he could not even identify a linguistic origin for some of the names in the book. Two places did jump out at him as he studied; Atlantis and Hyperborea.
Of course, Atlantis was the fabled land spoken of by Plato, which supposedly housed a wondrously advanced society that sank beneath the sea nearly ten thousand years before his writings. Most serious scholars discounted its existence, though many esoteric cults of questionable veracity liked to claim their traditions originated there. The author of this work spoke of Atlantis in terms that suggested it was not only a real place, but that it was contemporaneous to his writing.
Hyperborea was an equally idealized land, said to have been somewhere near the top of the world, ‘beyond the Boreas’ or North Winds. The Hyperboreans were supposed to live for a thousand years in perpetual sunlight and bounty and, if the Greek poet Pindar was to be believed, ‘far from labor and battle.’
Pindar had also written of Hyperborea:
‘Never on land or by sea will you find
the marvelous road to the feast of Hyperborea’
It satisfied the Rider that it, too, was a make believe kingdom cited by would-be mystics to lend their gibberish an air of eldritch authority.
The book placed its eponymous subject and his contemporaries within the borders of Hyperborea, and so the Rider had decided that it was either a fanciful work of fiction or a convincing fraud.
Surely the exploits of Zylac and his apprentice Eibon lent itself to the former, with its descriptions of serpent men societies and toad gods and an enchanted tower of black gneiss situated on ‘the peninsula of Mhu Thulan’ (wherever that was). The spells recorded in its pages dealt with detecting invisible creatures, magic lamps that ‘projected abominable mysteries,’ ‘triple circles of protection,’ and many glyphs and runes for the binding of and protection against a being called ‘Azathoth.’
Yet two things kept the Rider from entirely dismissing the book as a useless work of fantasy; the oft-repeated use of the term Great Old Ones. He had heard it before from the dybbukim in possession of the killer Medgar Tooms, and from the Canaanite Hayim Cardin, and he knew it had something to do with The Hour Of Incursion they and Amos Sheardown had spoken of. Was this book some sort of key to their peculiar occult lexicon? He knew there were no such entities, but perhaps they were names by which the Fallen sometimes went. Cryptic names of recent invention that he didn’t know. He had seen instances of demons masquerading as pagan gods before. But the book itself was obviously very old. The printing was of the movable type such as was still used by many of the small frontier newspapers but had mainly been abandoned in larger cities in favor of the rotary press. The paper was extremely old and yellowed. It was puzzling.
The other important thing contained in The Sacred Wisdom and Magic Of Zylac The Mage were its pictograms and glyphs. One delineated as ‘The Elder Sign’ appeared now and then in the crumbling scroll of apparently Egyptian pictographs that was utterly indecipherable to him.
So the two works were related somehow.
The scroll, with its weighty assurance of knowledge, was almost as frustrating to the Rider as the reams of letters written in weird, angular cipher between Sheardown and his undisclosed correspondent; particularly because the Rider recognized the penmanship of that unnamed correspondent as belonging to Adon himself.
What had they written of? Why was this scroll so important to Adon? Why had Sheardown been bringing it to him?
He was stirred from his thoughts by the return of his seatmate from the observation car, a thin, well dressed man in a bowler and black frock who smelled of cigar smoke and liquor and bad breath and leaned on a fashionable walking stick
The man did his best to step over the Rider, but his bum knee jostled the book in his hand and sent it tumbling.
The Rider lunged to catch it, but the other man stooped with surprising quickness and grabbed it first.
“My apologies,” he said, in a slow southern drawl. He smiled behind a long, drooping mustache, and the Rider noticed an old scar above his lip. He had a gaunt, pale face, but his voice made the Rider realize he was a bit younger than he’d first thought. A diamond stickpin twinkled in the fashionable black ascot below his collar.
The Rider reached out for the book, but the man turned it around and frowned at the cover, blue eyes scanning the title.
“Well, graecum est; non legitur,” he quipped, and passed it back.
The Rider accepted it, and the other man settled down in the seat beside hi
m, setting his bowler on his knee and smoothing his ash blonde hair.
He considered the joke. The thin man was still smiling at him, and raised his eyebrows in a playful way when the Rider regarded him again.
The Rider sighed. He knew this was intended as a catalyst towards conversation, and he realized he must oblige, though he had hoped to be left alone.
“You…read Greek?” the Rider asked tentatively.
“Not so’s you’d notice,” the man shrugged. “Latin came up more in my studies. Hippocrates and ‘masasthai’ just about encompass the totality of my prowess in the Greek tongue.”
“Hippocrates,” the Rider said carefully. “You’re a doctor, then?”
“You don’t like doctors?”
The Rider stiffened. Was this another of Adon’s followers? Could they have found him so soon?
“I had a bad experience with one recently,” he said, shifting in his seat so that his gun was at hand.
The man’s eyes flashed to the Rider’s belt and he sat back. The threat was evident, but the man did not falter. His eyes were cool and unaffected, reinforcing the Rider’s wariness. The creaking car was nearly full of passengers. Would the man try something here?
“He must’ve had a helluva bedside manner,” the man drawled. Then he burst into a fit of coughing that lasted an unusually long time.
The Rider watched him stifling the deep, wet sounds in his comically ballooning cheeks as he fumbled for a pocket handkerchief. When at last he produced it from his coat pocket, the Rider saw that it was spotted with old brown dots of blood. He put it to his face and let loose a barrage of shuddering, hacking coughs, enough to draw the attention of several nearby passengers, who craned their necks and stared at him first with concern and then open disgust from the depths of bonnets and beneath hat brims.
He watched the young man—too young really, to be so ill affected, and felt foolish for his prior standoffishness. His skin was very pale, and there were dark rings hanging under his eyes. His neatly combed hair shook loose in undignified strands over his forehead.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 7
