“My own countrymen! Had I known then what was to come, I should have been honored to command a cavalry of blind lepers mounted on goats in tin pot armor against that bastard Mauricio.”
He sighed, looking apologetically at the other spirits before turning back to the Rider.
“But I did not.
“We reached the base of these mountains, where Red House lies upon a clear rise, in the shade of the highlands. It was an ancient fort, built by ancestors of the Aztecs. Nothing more than a jumble of worn away walls, shards of pottery and old copper arrow points. It was dark that day,” he said, his eyes wandering. “The sky was very clouded.
“I remember the trees, because I could not understand the sight of them, black as if they had burned, dead and bare of leaf, so close to the walls when we had been by there the year before and seen no such foliage. The horses shied, and so we dismounted and led them on foot. Mauricio suggested we secure them to the trees, and then he would show us where to dig.
“When we approached the grove…” he paused. “I can only say that we were seized. First the horses. The trees bent double, in a way I knew no tree could bend. I remember the sound…like the creaking of a ship’s spars, the groaning of the masts in a storm at sea. The horses became entangled, some with their riders still in the saddle, and were drawn into the sky when the trunks straightened. The Papagos too were snatched up in this way, and men and animals hung from the boughs. I fell from my saddle, and had my sword and pistol in hand, yet I could only watch while the trees shook as if in a high wind, and the horses and the men screamed, the Moors begging to God as they were torn to pieces by the tree limbs themselves. Their blood rained down on me, and coursed down the tree trunks. The bark seemed to drink it.
“Not all of the party was so treated. Some of the Indians and a few of the Moors did not fight and so were spared, bound up in the branches like fireflies lightly held in a child’s fist.
“And of course, Mauricio and the Querechos and the young nobles who followed him. None of them were even touched.
“I rose and tried to fight. I hacked at the nearest tree with my sword, fired into the trunk, and Mother of God have mercy, I believe that it shivered in pain. One of its heavy branches swung down and struck me flat. Then the Querechos were upon me, and though I killed one outright with my heavy pistol and ran the other through, the second brought his hatchet down on my helm, and I was knocked senseless. I wish I had died then, but God was punishing an old man’s folly, and I remained alive to watch what came next.
“Mauricio ordered myself and my men bound up. He commanded the very trees. They lowered their limbs and allowed the renegade caballeros and Indians to tie the men with chords. They made a pair of Indians bear me up between them.”
The eyes of the old conquistador grew ever more distant, and at that point, he seemed a long way off.
“We were taken inside the walls of Red House, and by a means which I cannot now tell, Mauricio led us down some hidden passage that went into the heart of the mountain, below the foundation. Inside was a chamber not of gold, but red stone, decorated with blasphemous images such as I cannot even now recall clearly…I saw my men killed…in terrible ways…and then…I’m sorry. Of my death…that is all I remember.”
“A moment,” excused the radiant form of Chaksusa. To the Rider, he said, “If you will permit me, I can channel Don Amadeo’s final moments to you directly, enabling you to see for yourself what is too difficult for his soul to remember.”
The Rider hesitated, still not entirely believing or trusting. This Chaksusa was asking him to effectively lower his mystic defenses to an unknown entity.
“I understand your trepidation,” said Chaksusa. “But it will be invaluable to your mission.”
“What mission?”
“To destroy the plans of Mauricio. To destroy Mauricio himself.”
The Rider was baffled.
“But these things occurred over two hundred years ago by this spirit’s own admission!”
“Yes,” said Chaksusa. “But Mauricio lives on. I can show you why.”
The Rider was in unknown territory, but he had always been curious. It had been his scholarly nature that attracted the Sons of the Essenes to him.
On his fifth birthday, after being taken to the cheder wrapped in a prayer shawl by his father, his first teacher, a gentle eyed melamed named Mayer had shown him a piece of paper with the Hebrew letters on it, and placed a candy on each letter. For every letter he correctly recited, he was allowed to take the candy from that letter and eat it.
“This,” Mayer had told him, “is to teach you the sweetness of knowledge.”
That simple, childish lesson, a bribe to some of the boys, had impressed him greatly. He had sought to taste that sweetness all his life. His desire to learn had been the reason he had been plucked from yeshiva by the Sons of the Essenes at an early age to study the ancient mystic doctrines. It had been the reason Adon had so easily taught him forbidden practices. If he had not postponed his instruction to fight in the war, it may well have led him to commit the same atrocities. He would never know for certain. Now, it led him to do what his teachers would have called unthinkable.
“You have my permission.”
Chaksusa nodded, and interposed himself between the ancient spirit and the avatar of the Rider. He touched one long finger to the bridge of Amadeo’s nose, between his eyes, and the other on the Rider’s. With a gentle push, he sunk his etheric finger into the corresponding foreheads of both figures simultaneously.
It was an overwhelming feeling, the alien sensation of seeing the world through another man’s eyes. He was instantly immersed in another soul’s experience, flooded with impressions both physical and emotional. There was fear and panic of oncoming death, but the Rider knew better than to dread these things, and so imposed his will, forcing those obfuscating impulses to the edges of his own consciousness where they gnawed like rowdy dogs at a gate. Free of this, he was open to the world around him.
He saw a dark blue boiling sky flecked with lightning and rolling black clouds, receding into the distance as he was borne by two plodding, half naked figures (Indians whom he recognized as being the physical forms of two of the spirits congregated about the fire) down a rough, dark stair. They held him with care, but he was burdensome on the incline, and each step jarred him. He was aware of a dull, blinding physical pain, but it was not really his own, and so it shared a place with the emotions he forced aside.
The passage descended to a large, low chamber dug from the red rock, and here the air was cooler and faintly rank, the light strangely blue.
The Rider was unable to move, being laid low by the same wounds that incapacitated Amadeo, but he could perceive everything clearly in his field of vision, which being free of the distractions of fear and pain, was considerable.
He was part of a train of men being herded like cattle by the sharp swords of a contingent of young Spaniards in armor like Amadeo’s. They were grimly silent except to occasionally urge their charges forward with a clipped curse in Castilian (which he found he could fluently understand). As they reached the edge of the room, the prisoners were stopped, and forced to crowd together in the narrow hall, with armed men behind and in front of them.
At the head of the train a stooped, wild-haired figure in a dark monk’s robe shuffled along the edges of the room, bearing a torch which he used to light a series of old sconces set into the rock walls. These quickly exposed the simple chamber, casting it in orange, yet not entirely routing the faint blue light.
Three small alcoves cut into the back wall of the room housed hand-carved statues of the same red stone that composed the structure. At the foot of each statue was a red stone bowl. The carvings depicted some sort of pagan deities the Rider was not familiar with. One of the idols immediately struck a familiar cord. On the far left, it was a rearing serpentine figure with a humanoid upper body, its muscular arms crossed before it, holding a sword and some sort of baton of off
ice, vaguely Egyptian. A flat, cobra like head topped its sloping shoulders, its jaw open in a silent hiss, fangs bared. Clearly, it was not unlike the creatures they had encountered in the dark on the mountain trail.
The right hand figure was a stylized three-headed goat on its hind legs; one foreleg stretched upward, the other down. It was a variation on the hand gesture of Baphomet, a goat-headed humanoid image thought by some to have been the heretical deity of the Knights Templar. However the Rider suspected from his own studies that it was actually a bizarre dysphemism spread by the Catholic Church to obfuscate the formerly Christian Templars adoption of Muslim beliefs (‘Baphomet’ was similar to the Old French ‘Mahomet,’ a corruption of ‘Muhammad’). It was an expected result of their long service in foreign lands during the Crusades.
Recently the pseudo-magician Eliphas Levi had incorporated the image into a deck of tarot cards. It was all nonsense really, mystic minded amateurs delving into deep mysteries but coming up with half-truths. The goat had rows of ponderous breasts, upon which clung thousands of tiny, hairless, indistinct young. There seemed to be something else odd about the carving, as if something were carved on the backside of the figure, something large and amorphous, hidden in the shadows of the alcove.
The central figure was slightly larger than the other two, and in its position of prominence, the Rider thought that it must be the chief of the three—maybe The Not To Be Named One that Chaksusa mentioned. Unlike the others, it was fashioned from a single black stone, polished to a rich sheen. With the dancing light, it was almost a shadow in the dark, and difficult to make out the details. It was bulky and vaguely worm-like.
He saw great arching bat-like wings and a serpentine neck, rows of bent caterpillar-like legs and six blank, bulbous eyes crafted from inset pearls. Insectoid antennae sprouted from its two most prominent eyes, and its maw was great and sharp, an impossible grin covering most of its face. It was draped in barding, like a harness of carved chains, all of them broken, and the Rider remembered Sheardown’s mention of That Which Strains Against Its Chains. It bore a wicked flail and a shield in a pair of lean, muscular, vaguely humanoid arms. There was something familiar about this bizarre figure, but the Rider was sure he had never encountered it in his travels.
Here the air was coolest, and the faint odor of indefinable rot he smelled on the way down seemed to permeate everything. It was the sour stench of a charnel pit.
One of the Indian slaves began to scream, and was clubbed down by the basket hilt of a conquistador’s sword. This Indian was then hoisted to his feet, head lolling, and dragged to the front of the line, passing finally into the hands of the two old Querechos.
There the hunchback turned, and the Rider got a good look at his drawn face with its patchy beard, thick eyebrows, and matted hair. Despite his boar looks, this Mauricio was no imbecile, as the crafty black eyes that shined beneath that thick brow attested. He sneered at the dazed Indian and reaching up, tore from his own cassock the simple wooden cross that dangled from a bit of rawhide around his twisted neck. This he jammed into the lip of the Indian’s breechclout.
With a gesture, the Querechos forced the Indian to his knees before the hunchback. Mauricio folded his arms, hands hidden within the voluminous sleeves of his robe, and turned slowly to face the row of idols on the far wall. He genuflected, bowing his head, and addressed them in words the Rider could not understand even in his present omniscient state. The intonation was plain however. They were words of supplication, muttered in some guttural tongue that bore no resemblance to any speech he had ever heard in heaven, earth, or hell. These words echoed off the rock walls with a deceptive resonance that made the chamber feel larger than it was. His voice rang over the excited murmurs of the Indians, who shuffled in place and moaned their dread.
Mauricio lurched to his feet and wheeled about to the kneeling Indian again. A bright crescent knife flashed in his hand as it emerged from the sleeve of his robe. He struck straightaway, driving its point into the man’s bare breast with a swift downward stroke.
The Indian shuddered, shoulder muscles bunching, bare legs scrambling in the sand as the two Querechos gripped the man tightly and held him still, allowing Mauricio to continue. The monk stooped over his victim, twisting the knife, popping through bone and shredding brisket. Through Amadeo’s eyes, the Rider was spared the particulars of the grisly slaughter, but blood pooled quickly around the knees of the trembling Indian, and his bowels evacuated, the sudden stench wafting back to fill the Rider’s/Amadeo’s nostrils. In a moment the dead man was drooping in the grip of the Querechos, his head tipped all the way back, hung upside down, his eyes staring emptily back down the line at them all.
The exclamations of the other Indians and the Moors turned to shouts, and some tried to break for the stairs. The conquistadors in the rear of the line worked quickly, drawing their blades and deftly piercing the legs of every man who tried to stumble back toward the stair. In the jostling of close bodies, the Rider lost sight of Mauricio for a moment.
He saw the dead man hoisted above the heads of all by the Querechos. There was a command from Mauricio in that same vile language, and the Indian was cast to the center of the floor.
But there was no impact.
Then the Rider realized the illusion of grandness he first had was no illusion. The unseen floor was in fact a deep well some thirty feet in diameter, its bottom lost in shadow. Mauricio stood at the lip of the abyss and called down to it in a deep bellow. He skirted a narrow pathway around its edge, holding the bloody, still-throbbing heart he extricated from the man’s torn chest aloft in his clenched hands. He moved to the left hand statue of the lizard-man, and wrung the organ over the red stone bowl like a man juicing a pomegranate. The bowl quickly began to brim with cruor, and Mauricio placed the wretched-looking heart into the bowl and turned away.
Mauricio bowed six times like an ecstatic at prayer, and then returned to the captives. The Querechos had already selected another sacrifice—one of the Moors. This man was strong, and it took the Querechos and two of the Spaniards to hold him still as Mauricio repeated the process, taking the heart from the cursing, screaming man, squeezing it out, and placing it this time at the base of the three-headed goat thing’s statue.
The body of the second man was cast into the well, and again there was no sound of impact. The Rider grew aware the blue shine came from somewhere far down in the pit, for its glow shone on the rock ceiling. What was the source of that glow?
Mauricio stepped once more to the edge of the well, but this time when he turned, he made no move to claim a third victim. He held his arms, bloody to the elbow, aloft until the sleeves fell back and the firelight glistened on the front of his robe, spattered as the apron of an abattoir killer.
He stared at the Rider/Amadeo, smiled once, closed his eyes like a man enraptured, and stepped backwards into the pit, the only sound the ruffling of his monk’s robes as he fell.
The Castilians stirred, but the Querechos made no move to save him.
The Indians and the Moors were dead silent at the sudden disappearance of their betrayer. Then the faintest noise echoed deep down in the well. A slow, tentative scraping that seemed to grow steadily louder and more relentless; it was the grating sound of something large working its way up the walls of the pit. The blue glow intensified along with the nearness of the sound, becoming an egg shape on the ceiling that swelled like the spot of a miner’s lantern light.
The Rider shuddered and felt his consciousness slipping, crumbling away like a dilapidated house in an earthquake. He struggled to cling with invisible tendrils of will to Amadeo’s experience as it imploded around him, beset on all sides by the hasty advance of death. What the Rider saw next he perceived as if through deep water. He doubted the man had even been conscious during these last few lingering moments. Only the force of the Rider’s presence occupying his perception maintained his blurring vision and fading hearing.
A hoarse, roaring sound filled the chambe
r, accompanied by an intensified wave of the same noisome stench already hanging in the air. The ground beneath Amadeo shuddered and something black and shining with mucus was vomited over the lip of the well to land with a wet slap on the floor, like a bit of blockage hawked from a great, retching throat. Between the limbs of the milling Indians, the Rider saw the object unfold and shakily ascend on two trembling, animal haunches, like a calf, still soaking with embryonic fluid, taking its first wary step. It was humanoid, and it wore the tatters of a Franciscan’s mantle. It was hunched in the same manner as Mauricio, but there the similarity ceased.
Its body was covered in stringy black hair, dripping heavily with some unnatural, salivary substance, faintly blue tinged. Its feet were horn-hard and cloven, and its hands, though human, were black as night and gloved in dark hair. Its head was greatly disproportionate to its spindly frame, and sprouted with two curling black horns. Its eyes fluttered and opened. They were yellow and shining beneath the dull, heavy lids, with the flat, deficient irises of a goat.
The Black Goat Man. Mauricio, transformed by whatever foul thing resided in the well beneath Red House.
The Indians were screaming, but they seemed far away now. Little at all seemed to matter. He was aware of the conquistadors falling to their hands and knees before the thing that had been Mauricio, and the movement of a half dozen other sinuate humanoid shapes dragging themselves up from the well—misshapen forms that recalled the reptilian Cold Ones that had attacked them on the trail, and yet which were also perversely alluring and strongly feminine in their slow, sultry movements. These crawled and slithered to the Spaniards, embracing them shockingly.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 17
