The Indians wailed and writhed. The Black Goat Man clasped his hands and nodded his great bearded animal head approvingly in the firelight. The viperine women fell to the floor and entwined with their lustily moaning caballeros and scrabbled furtively at the fastenings of their armor. The Rider felt himself sinking into the warm, dark mud of death.
Death seemed a welcome respite from the horrors he had witnessed, and it took a maximum effort of discipline to keep his mind from spiraling down into nothingness with the fleeting Amadeo. But at the last, he shook off the tired, clinging spirit and the warm blanket of mortality and sought out his own astral form again.
He returned to the shadow world as Chaksusa broke the connection between his avatar and the shade of Amadeo. Amadeo receded into the crowd of Indians, visibly confused. Chaksusa composed himself. There was a mask of distracted concern on the Hindi’s form which the Rider could both see and feel.
“What…?” was all he could at first manage, so overwhelmed he was by the undeniable reality of what he had seen. He felt like a stumbling acolyte again, having just returned from his first dizzying exploration of the empyrean.
“There is not much time now,” Chaksusa said quickly. “You have seen, and beyond that I have no further arguments to convince you. You will believe or not as you choose. The minions of Yig you met on the trail tonight are descended from the Spanish noblemen who embraced his daughters, and they live beneath Red House with Mauricio and his patroness. For two hundred years they have raided the people here, taking children and women and men to fuel the furnace heart of Shub-Niggurath and propagate their unnatural line. In the past weeks the raids have increased. Perhaps this is due to the approach of this Incursion you spoke of. I do not know. At all times the Old Ones seek to breach the vale between this reality and their own. I only know that Mauricio must be destroyed at last.”
“How?” the Rider asked.
There was a ripple throughout the whole of the spirit world, like a concentric wave that flowed over all of them, distorting avatar and ghost alike for an instant before subsiding. The Rider felt his mind waver.
“What’s going on?” the Rider asked warily.
The avatar of Chaksusa trembled, and his face clenched as if in physical pain. He whirled on the Rider and gripped him by the insubstantial shoulders. It was a strange sensation, like being held by a rain cloud about to burst.
“My master’s order knew the ancient ways of binding the Old Ones. The Elder Sign can destroy their servants. I have seven arrows for Piishi, made from one of the Greater Star-Stones of Mnar. I know you have one of the Lesser Stones. Like the Sign, alone, the Stones are nothing to Shub-Niggurath; they cannot bind her, they cannot even wound her. But combined with one of the secret words of power, they can be used to some effect. These words are not spoken lightly, nor even may they be written. It is given to you to know this,” Chaksusa said, his voice increasing in pitch and alarm. “Though my imparting it insures my death—speak the word shamblaparn to ward off evil. Remember! Shamblaparn! SHAMBLA-!”
The Rider shrunk psychically from the avatar of Chaksusa, and in an instant found himself once more shouldered with the familiar aches and pains of his body, as if he had stepped back into a favorite coat.
He sat before the fire again, and Chaksusa was across from him. The Rider quickly perceived the reason for his distress. One of the snake things Chaksusa had called ‘Cold Ones’ had crept upon him in the dark. Its lower body was coiled about his waist now, its clawed fingers hooked into his bleeding shoulders. As the Rider shook the usual heavy drowsiness from his body, the Cold One’s head reared up cobra-like out of the darkness and sank its dripping fangs into the side of the old man’s face, puncturing flesh, piercing bone and skewering one gawking eye.
Chaksusa’s good eye rolled up in his skull while the other gushed blood and ukum. He screamed.
The Rider whisked out his pistol and fired, the bullet blowing the back of the snake minion’s hooded head across the rocks. Chaksusa slumped to the ground, almost face first into the fire. The Rider caught him, but the Hindi was already trembling all over from the poison flooding his veins. One of the fangs had broken off in the side of his face. The Rider gingerly plucked it out, and a yellow ichor oozed from the swelling wound. The old man’s lips frothed, and his muscles knotted in violent rigor, joints clenching and unclenching without reason as his eye darted and rolled crazily in his already elephantine head. The Rider said a quick prayer as the old man’s breath choked in his throat.
He heard the familiar warning rattle somewhere out in the dark, and took up one of the brands from the fire and flung it against the rock wall. The light showed two more of the snake things nimbly descending the wall head first like quick lizards. Their eyes shimmered blind in the flare of light, and the Rider aimed for them, picking them off the rock face with a shot each.
He heard a commotion behind him, and spun, almost killing Piishi as the Indian came running from his post.
“What has happened?” Piishi exclaimed when he saw the still form of the man he knew as Tats’adah lying before the fire. The sight of the three creatures thrashing in wild death answered his question.
Piishi sank before the fire, his rifle forgotten beside him, his hands limp on his knees like the wings of dead doves. He brooded.
“Hope is gone,” he muttered. “Without Tats’adah, we are alone.”
The Rider shook his head. He reached into his bag and took out the warm smooth star shaped stone with its graven Elder Sign.
“No, we’re never alone.”
* * * *
Piishi had no horse, so he and the Rider set out on foot down the steep trail through the trees. The Rider led his onager, holding a lantern from the pack to light the way. They passed the site of the previous night’s attack, but found no corpses, Indian or serpentine.
“It is foolishness to travel by night,” Piishi whispered for the third time since they’d started. It was the only part of their plan he questioned, though his own role was the most dangerous.
“I didn’t think an Apache would be afraid of the dark,” the Rider answered finally.
“It’s not the dark we fear,” Piishi shot back. “But to die in the dark…that is to become lost, to wander forever without peace.”
“What is peace to your people?” the Rider asked, trying to steer Piishi away from his misgivings. “I mean, do they believe in Paradise?”
“I believe in a land without white men,” Piishi answered.
The Rider smiled thinly.
“I’ll be sure you find your way,” he told the Apache seriously. “That alone I can promise.”
They made camp at last in the blue before dawn at the base of the mountains. Piishi pointed up a far slope parallel to the once they’d descended, where a squat, blocky stone structure could just barely be seen.
“Up there is Red House,” Piishi said.
“Sleep while you can,” the Rider said. “In a few hours I’ll wake you.”
Piishi slept as though there were no danger. It was a mark of his trust. The Rider made preparations throughout the gathering day, saying prayers and uttering ancient incantations. Now and then he watched the shadowy place where Red House sat overlooking the valley. The sun glanced off its low walls briefly, and then come noontime it slunk again into shadow like a creeping Gila monster probing the open air before retreating into the dark of its den. He could feel a heavy dread in the air, like the promise of a hard rain. The place called to something in him, even as all he knew of it repelled him.
As the sun passed overhead, Piishi stirred unbidden and awoke.
The Rider was in the midst of preparatory prayers, and the campfire was pungent with the smell of strange, heavy incense. Piishi cleaned his rifle and pistol while he waited for the Rider to finish.
“You sleep now,” Piishi said, when the Rider’s murmurs ceased.
The Rider rubbed the dust from his spectacles and then stroked his heavy eyelids with his thumbs.
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“I don’t need to rest,” the Rider lied.
“If you sleep here while I’m gone, you won’t wake up.”
“I won’t sleep. Maybe my donkey will protect me.”
* * * *
Piishi looked dubiously at the white onager, swishing its tail lazily. Yet, it had been the only animal to survive the attack by the snake men. He thought with regret on the pony he had lost, and then on the trial to come. He had fought hard fights before, but not like this.
The Rider inscribed symbols in the dirt, and he sat within a circle of power such as the medicine men sometimes made. He was in strange, sacred regalia, his arm and head encircled with black bands bearing leather boxes, his body hung with fetishes and metal talismans which Piishi did not know.
“He knows we’re here,” the Rider said with assurance. He could feel the cold mind of Mauricio seeking him out, from somewhere in the dark heart of Red House. “You’re ready?”
Piishi nodded, touching the ancient sky iron knife with its handle of lightning struck wood. It was the magic weapon the Papagos had made to defeat Mauricio so long ago. They had found it among Tats’adah’s belongings, along with a bow and polished, red stone arrows. Each crimson arrowhead bore a tiny white etching of a star in three circles with an eye in the center. These Piishi wrapped in hemp and dipped in the lantern oil. His rifle was loaded and he had two bandoliers of cartridges and his pistol besides.
“I’ll be with you as long as I can,” the Rider told him. “Do you believe this?”
“I don’t know,” Piishi said.
He had seen many of his friends and family killed, some by The Black Goat Man, others by the Indah soldiers. A sister had been taken to Red House by the snake men. He knew there was such a thing as magic, but in his experience it was all bad. He still didn’t know if he could trust the strange white man. But if he was to die, this was as good a way as any.
The Rider closed his eyes and said a benediction over Piishi in Hebrew. When he opened his eyes, the Apache was already loping off into the hills, weapons bouncing, and yet silent as a mountain cat.
He concerned himself with his own task and began the ritual to step into the Yenne Velt, for it was his plan to confront Mauricio there.
When his face at last slackened and his shoulders sank, Piishi was within sight of Red House and the sun was low and red in the sky.
Surrounding the Rider in the spirit world were the shades of the Papagos and Moors, with Don Amadeo at their head. The Rider looked over his own weapons—the amulets and wards of protection, the Volcanic pistol with its Solomonic embossments, and his warded cold-iron knife. He found his Lakota horse fetish and conjured the fiery ethereal stallion from the suprasubstantial energies eddying about them, and climbed onto its back. A silent understanding passed between him and the shade of the Spanish knight. Don Amadeo drew his sword and held it up. The Rider trotted up the embankment, the army of ghosts marching behind him toward Red House.
* * * *
The Black Goat Man hung suspended in the depths of Red House, at the beck of his mistress. He prepared to defend her against the ancient enemy that had last mounted an offense. She was all to him; a warm, velveteen envelope in which he dwelt wholly, lazing as in a mother’s womb, dreaming dreams of lives gone by and some yet to be. She showed him so many things, and their rapport was less that of mistress and servant and more of dame and favored paramour. To ease the pain of his own rebirth, she had shared with him the similar sensations of her own excruciating push through the cloaca of this universe; had showed him the long black middle passage from the chill void over Aldeberan that lead to her and her companions’ touching down in fire on this very world, eons before the first man stood aright. He had seen things through her that no other human had seen, and she had made him into something much more than simple Mauricio because of it.
He loved her so very much; indeed, as he loved no other thing.
He tried to think of the bitter time before their joining, but it was like trying to call to mind events prior to one’s earliest memory. Mauricio, the man, had been lost in the mire of centuries, and only brief impressions of a life lived scheming and skulking remained. Human infancy, the embarrassment of a bumbling adolescence, and the unending angst of a disappointing adulthood wasted in servitude to a doddering faith that held nothing for him; all these were lost, rendered trivial. Now his first recollection was of finding a twisted stone statue in the dusty attic of a monastery, a statue depicting her. The Sign of the Dark Mother. It had been like discovering the terrible, up to then unknown face of one’s darkest, truest desire. He left it there at first, stealing up from his daily chores to stare at it, to caress its intricate stone curvatures, even, like a confused adolescent acting upon the merest physical impulse, to love it.
Discovered in the midst of such base adoration of her mere image had gotten him expelled from his order. He killed the outraged brother who stumbled upon him—killed him with the idol itself, smashing his bald pate in with its heavy stone base. He cracked the base in the process, and found concealed within a parchment that set him upon a long and winding quest through forgotten libraries and across trackless sands, down into the depths of the earth and through the rotting pages of forbidden tomes, finally learning her beauteous name and the loving call of Ia! Shub-Niggurath in a long lost copy of Ostanes’ Sapientia Magorum.
The Dark Mother. She Of A Thousand Young.
Long years he had spent searching for her, and more had he toiled among the savage peoples of this new land plotting the grand sacrifice that would win him her favor. The hearts of Don Amadeo and his mud people and the willing servitude of the Castilian noblemen had at last proven the dowry that had made his goddess swoon. She had taken him inside and remade him into her earthly eyes and ears, kept him secure in her mephitic bosom, teaching him through vivid dreams the mysteries of this and other universes, of the ways of the Old Ones, of her estranged lover Yig the Father Of Serpents and of The Magnum Innominandum. That Which Strains Against Its Chains. The Black Dragon.
She had charged him with the honor of securing the lands around Red House as an entry point for the Mangum Innominandum. She had assured him a place of power in the free world to come, once the Old Ones had remade this world to their liking, freeing mankind of the fetters clapped upon them by a nonchalant deity. He knew the plan of the Old Ones. He looked towards the Hour of the Incursion.
Then this Chaksusa had appeared to oppose him. This doddering curandero whose blue robes the mud people had come to cling to for solace against the raids of his Yiggian minions. They had clashed many times through the centuries, but now the old pest was dead.
Now he felt the presence moving steadily up the mountainside to contend. It was not a physical presence, for the black roots of The Dark Mother ran deep through this land, and knew the touch of every heel that trod upon it. The earth had drunk the blood of Chaksusa. They had tasted it together, savoring it as if they had sunk their teeth into his flesh themselves. No, this was something moving between the worlds, like an infiltrator creeping between raindrops or swinging through tree limbs like a monkey. They thought perhaps that they could not be detected, but Mauricio had taken precautions.
The Cold Ones were but the first line of their defense, and already they were scouring the mountain. In the Unknown Country the corrupted souls of the twenty Castilian nobles and the countless savages who had pledged themselves to him over the years walked the ramparts of Red House, a phantom garrison whom he had bound with ancient rites to his command.
He turned his attention to them now, and to their report of the familiar host of spirit rabble that ascended the mountain.
Why had Amadeo’s restless ghost chosen now to interfere? Had the passing of Chaksusa given him and his quaking entourage a sudden measure of courage?
His Lady told him of another, maybe as dangerous as Chaksusa—a walker between worlds who had interfered in Their plans on other occasions. Was this spirit marshaling Amadeo’s sha
dow army? If so, the Cold Ones would find his physical form and dispatch him.
The Black Goat Man deployed his forces and turned like a thing preparing for birth.
* * * *
The Rider watched the horde of luminous marchers descending toward them. He saw the ancient arms and the shine of Spanish helms among the vanguard, so like Don Amadeo’s behind him.
He heard the Spanish lord hiss, and glanced back from atop his fiery mount to see a similar fire in the old man’s eyes.
“Traitors,” he said, and several of his black manservants nodded and drew their sabers or primed their ghostly muzzleloaders. “But who are these others?”
The Rider saw hunched, naked forms among the mailed figures, and these were armed with clubs and spears. He could only guess as to their identity, but they were surely the spirits of men aboriginal to these lands.
The Rider took out his pistol. He was uncertain as to what was about to happen. While he had fought in the Yenne Velt before, he had never participated in a full-scale battle between spirits. The Castilians marched in an orderly fashion, as they must have been used to in life. The Indians at the back were staggered in their advance and looked eager to break ranks.
The Indians of their own host milled uncertainly at the rear. Most were unarmed. They had not been warriors in life.
The Rider spurred his horse to the rear and addressed these. He knew they understood, for the curse of Babel did not apply on this plane.
“Fall in behind Don Amadeo and his men. The enemy will come like an arrow with the Spaniards as the point. Don Amadeo will be a shield to you. When they meet the enemy, spread around them like the jaws of a bear and close around them. Do you understand?”
The Indians looked at each other and then slowly they began to nod and one called out:
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 18
