“Samael,” said the Rider.
“Yes,” Kabede agreed, looking up from the book. “The book says they will remake this universe and break down all established order.”
“So Samael would be freed from his duties,” the Rider speculated. “Free to be with Lilith.”
“Oh yes,” Lucifer smiled. “You are clever little men. That’s what he would lead her to believe,” Lucifer said, “and she’s emotional enough to believe it. But Adam Belial’s promises are only words.”
What had these beings promised Adon, the Rider wondered.
“If they did do it….if Samael was no longer the Angel of Death…”
“Then man would cease to be mortal. From one narrow perspective, gods. But there are plenty of things which are immortal and are far from being gods. You fools equate everlasting life with power. What power is there in everlasting poverty? Or ignorance? Those mangled in war or by accident would linger forever in freakish agony. The sick would waste away but never pass on. The earth would clutter with infirm like a cattle pen full of mutilated animals.” Lucifer smiled thinly. “A neverending food supply for The Great Old Ones.”
“But what are they?” Kabede asked. “What can exist outside of Creation?”
“Are you sure you want to know?” Lucifer smiled. “Isn’t such a line of questioning forbidden by your dogma?”
“What are they?” the Rider insisted. “Do you even know?”
“There is little in this universe I don’t know, man,” Lucifer said stiffly, “and more things outside of it than you would care to imagine. It’s said there were things before the Light. Things that floated in the black waters of Chaos, and resisted the order that the Father bestowed. They were driven out or beaten down, unmade by the Word. Some were trapped by the Foundation Stone—that piece of the Holy Throne which bears the Tetragrammaton. Over the ages they have spoken to you men in dreams, for in that reality they can still move with relative ease. Even your King David heard them once, and they persuaded him to move the Foundation Stone into the Temple and nearly destroyed the world. Sometimes they have escaped. The thing you faced, Rider, the Dark Mother, Shub-Niggurath. She was loosed by men in Noah’s time.”
“We are to believe you do not ally yourself with them?” Kabede asked. “That ‘unleashing hell’ is just a turn of phrase? Hell is your domain.”
“Eighteen years ago Adam Belial resurfaced at the head of an army of Grigori with several of my lieutenants. They tried to take control of Gehenna.”
“Eighteen years ago…that would be eighteen sixty two,” the Rider said.
“Yes. The conflict you perceived, Rider. The one you left your Order for. It was The Third Rebellion. Hell’s Civil War.”
“No,” said the Rider. “I saw angels amassing.”
“My allies,” Lucifer said. “The Union of Heaven and Hell. You’ve seen some of them here yourself. They turned the tide against Adam Belial.”
The Rider faltered. He thought he had been taking the side of the Lord on Earth when he left the Sons of the Essenes to join the Union cause. He fought to end slavery and southern oppression. He had been sure the entire Confederate agenda was the Adversary’s own.
“But then…slavery….”
“Oh it was an issue Heaven wanted resolved, to be sure. It would have happened eventually. Personally I didn’t care one way or the other. For me there were greater things at stake than any issues in the mortal realm.”
“Who else joined Adam Belial?”
“Molech,” said Lucifer, “as you know. Lilith and her succubi, the shedim of course, Maschit the slayer of Egypt, Mastemah the enemy of Moses, Adrammelech, a few others. If they had Samael, they might have won.”
“Why did they try to seize control of hell?”
Lucifer pursed his lips.
“Oh, who wouldn’t want to run this place? It’s all so rewarding.”
The Rider got the sense he was being deflected, but then Kabede, pursuing his own line of thought, asked;
“But…if they seek to destroy man, why do you oppose them?”
“Why should I want to destroy the world? The world is already mine. I am its custodian.”
“What?” Kabede exclaimed, looking up again from the book.
“Creation is the crucible of the soul, and I am the fire. That is my true calling. It’s not my task to destroy humanity. I temper it. I make you worthy of God.”
“Oh, so you have our best interests in mind,” the Rider quipped. “I could tell that when we came in here.”
Lucifer shrugged and began to stroll slowly to the great draperies.
“I will admit, over the ages I have developed a jailer’s contempt for his charges. That is why I am here and not in Heaven. That is my sin. But look at yourselves. You were meant to be God’s greatest creation. Hah! Humanity is capable of greater abominations than even I can fathom, and believe me, I have grown quite fluent in the unspeakable over the eons. I have watched you. I have always watched you all. I have watched as you prey upon your own children—as you grind the bones of the poor for your own meal, for love of gain and comfort. What sort of shape do you think your souls will be in to survive the rigors prepared for you this place? What comforts will material wealth buy you here?”
He jerked a scarlet chord then, and the rightmost of the great black draperies slid open, granting a towering view of hell and its greatest horror. Another ceaseless waterfall, which had been obscured from the outside by the structure of Pandæmonium itself, now loomed in grisly glory like a madman’s scenic view before them. It was a fall of bodies, the naked souls of the damned. Hundreds of thousands of naked bodies tumbling like ragdolls from the mouth of hell far above, plunging like squirming fish into the lake of fire and ice.
A gauntlet of demons scourged them with flails of glowing chain as they fell, and some were plucked randomly from the gush to be ravaged and torn and consumed by lustful and savage beastmen and twisted things with erupting volcanoes for heads. Others were swept away to greater tortures. The sight was made more ghastly by the total lack of noise. Something in the makeup of the chamber shut out the sound. The torrent of the damned fell and suffered as quietly as Belphegor’s moving painting of light and shadow.
Lucifer stood with his hands clasped behind his back looking out the window.
“The worst drive the best to apathy and unbelief. You met my man above. The Order of The Peacock Angel,” he scoffed. “They actually worship me. This is particularly baffling because simply believing in me acknowledges the existence of the Almighty Father, yet still they choose to worship me. Like you Israelites in the desert…God split the sea for you and did you build him a Temple on the far bank? No. You built a golden calf.”
He shook his head, and there was real amusement on his face now as he went to the second drapery and grasped the chord.
Kabede was staring open mouthed, tears streaming down his face at the sight of the Fall of the Damned. The Rider did not want to see behind the second curtain, but Lucifer was already drawing it open.
“Let me show you the greatest folly of all,” he said. “Greater than the beinonim who go their whole lives neither wholly good nor wholly evil, greater than the idolaters, greater even than the unrepentant.”
The curtain slid aside and they were treated to a murky blackness outside the window. In it, ghostly, ethereal bodies cluttered close together like jellyfish, yet passed through each other without resistance as they drifted aimlessly in a cloud of starless night. They lay stiff in the attitude of corpses, but the Rider saw their eyes working furiously in their heads, darting all around. Though paralyzed, they were aware. Aware that something was wrong. Several drifted against the window and bounced back into the gloom, spinning slowly as they disappeared in the tangle of rigid bodies.
“What are they?” the Rider gasped.
“These are the deniers. The vehement unbelievers. They lock themselves in an eternal void upon death because they are unwilling to conceive of anything b
eyond the grave, and so come unprepared. Look at them. They are not even aware of each other. Self-centered imbeciles who did good or evil for themselves and gave no thought to the next world. A multitude that increases every day, and each one alone. Like fruit, grown by The Great Old Ones, for The Great Old Ones. This is what Adam Belial would have of all of humanity.”
“How can you claim to serve God and yet conceive of these horrible punishments?” Kabede stammered.
“Hell was here well before me,” said Lucifer guiltlessly. “Only Pandæmonium is of my doing.” He drew the void curtain closed. “The tortures in the belly of hell stem from man’s imagination, not mine. Each soul devises its own suffering. That is the nature of Gehenna.”
“That doesn’t make sense!” Kabede said. “What of the unrepentant?”
“If they are found deserving of punishment,” Lucifer explained as he crossed the room to draw the first curtain closed, “their tortures are prescribed by those they have wronged. Oh, but Gehenna is nothing compared to the things man has in store for his fellows in the next two hundred years. Slaughter and rape will be the order of the day. There will come a time when perversion will be held up as a model for your own children, and they will be encouraged to debase themselves and deny their true existence in favor of the animal. It’s really too bad neither of you will live to see it.”
“Base lies!” Kabede insisted.
The Rider admired Kabede’s passion and shared his growing wrath against Satan. What of all he said was true and what was a lie? The Rider suspected at least some of what Lucifer said was true because he had not yet called him by his true name, only the Rider. And if he truly had no contact with Lilith or Adon, and if what Kabede had told him was true then why did he not call him out? Unless he did not know the Rider’s real name.
Though his senses were reeling from the conversation, he tried to steer back to the Hour of the Incursion. He turned away from the windows to focus.
“You said the succubi were on the side of this Adam Belial and Samael.”
“Yes.”
“Then why was I given this?” the Rider asked producing the rosette token that protected him from Lilith’s children.
“Nehema gave you that. She was my agent. A spy among Lilith’s camp, but only out of convenience. There are familial issues between her and her mother and Samael. She didn’t want them reunited. As I said, I knew of you, and I know your formers master is one of Adam Belial’s servants. I suspected he would try to eliminate you through Lilith, so I asked her to protect you if she saw you.”
“With a Judas draught,” Kabede said. “It has nearly killed him.”
Lucifer shrugged.
“Magic has its price.”
It was odd to again think of Nehema, here in this place. Her face flashed in the Rider’s consciousness, her body, the sound of her voice, and he felt a flush of warmth in his center. But that was quickly dispelled, as if by a draft of cold air.
“Why did you say Nehema ‘was’ your agent?” the Rider asked sharply. “What’s become of her?”
Lucifer smiled. It was a slow, bemused grin that broke into a flashing show of genuine amusement. The Rider saw his mistake in that smile. He had given the Devil power.
“She can be a beauty, can’t she, Rider?” Lucifer said. “So beautiful as to turn a tzadik into a Grigori.”
“What is he saying?” Kabede murmured warily.
“What’s happened to her?” the Rider asked again.
“Oh, her sisters and her mother discovered her treachery almost immediately. She compromised her cover for you, you know.”
“What did they do to her?”
“She was punished…well, she is still punished, as far as I know. In the manner of her kind.”
A succubus was a demon. A demon couldn’t die, not really. They could be disincorporated. They could be imprisoned. They could be tortured indefinitely.
“She’s not here,” Lucifer said, as if reading his mind.
“Where is she?”
“They have put her in a place, where she is watched. Watched and punished, day and night. Would you…like to know where?” he asked with mock innocence.
“This is not to our purpose,” Kabede whispered.
“She helped me.”
“At Satan’s behest.”
“I wish you wouldn’t refer to me that way,” said Lucifer, walking back to his desk. “I’m standing right here.”
“Tell me,” the Rider said.
“She’s a creature of evil,” Kabede warned.
“Shut up!” the Rider snapped. Then, to Lucifer, “Where is she?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Lucifer. “I’ll even help you free her.”
“What do you want?”
“Two things. First, another soldier for my ranks,” Lucifer said. “My Order of the Peacock Angel has come at a disadvantage against your traitorous master’s merkabah riders. Teach them your skills and we’ll work out a deal.”
“Impossible!” Kabede roared.
“Second,” Lucifer went on, “my sources tell me you battled the entity Shub-Niggurath with extra-universal knowledge given to you by one of the blue monks. I want to know what it was they taught you. A sign, a word, what?”
“If I do these things, you’ll help me free her?”
“You won’t!” Kabede insisted.
“Teach me the way to fight the Outer Gods and I’ll tell you where she is,” Lucifer said. “Join me, and I’ll free her myself. Right now, if you wish.”
The Rider held up his hand and drew the Elder Sign he had seen inscribed upon the Star-Stone of Mnar in the air. Combining the action with his will, he instilled some of his residual etheric energy into the end of his finger. The glowing golden sign lingered there like an afterimage.
Lucifer stared at the stylized star and eye design with its pillar of fire iris.
“This sign drove off the Dark Mother?” Lucifer asked excitedly. With a wave of his hand, the Elder Sign drifted through the air and revolved to face him
“It held off the servants of Yig, and combined with the word they taught me, and one of the Star-Stones of Mnar…”
“Star-Stones?”
The Rider described the stone he found in the back of the tunnel on Elk Mountain, and told him all he knew about it.
Lucifer nodded as he listened, and took a piece of parchment from his desk. He held it up and drew the glowing Elder Sign onto it, where it flared and then died, leaving a black scorched outline upon the paper.
“And what was the word they taught you?” Lucifer asked excitedly.
“First…where is Nehema?”
“Yuma,” said Lucifer. “Ask for Lady Pleasant and you’ll find her.”
The Rider nodded. Yuma. Lady Pleasant. It sounded like a prostitute’s pseudonym. His mind raced to conjure a torture Lilith would have found befitting for her wayward daughter. Though he was in the midst of hell, he found he was capable of imagining a great deal which sickened him. Now that he knew she was being held and punished for helping him, his desire to find her became overwhelming.
He looked at Kabede, who stared at him aghast, slowly shaking his head.
He knew he was a step away from becoming Adon. He could see it in Kabede’s expression.
“That’s all,” he managed to say.
Lucifer’s face fell visibly.
“Come now, Rider, you’ve fought for me in the past. Quite well, as a matter of fact.”
“I didn’t know it then.”
“What difference is that?”
“All the difference in the world,” the Rider said, though he spoke to Kabede, who seemed to breathe his relief. He turned back to Lucifer.
“I’m sorry. That’s all I can do.”
“Not sorry yet,” Lucifer said, closing his eyes.
Then the Rider both saw and felt the rosette token disappear from his clenched fist, where he had kept it almost constantly since the night Nehema had given it to him in the Bird’s Nest in Tip
Top. A cold fear came over him then, so strong that his merkabah magen actually flickered all about him.
Lucifer opened his eyes and smiled.
“I’m sorry, Rider. My gifts are for my friends.”
But how? How could Lucifer have penetrated his field to destroy the token? Then the Rider remembered the old hermit back at the torreón. Lucifer’s servant. He must have taken the token from his unconscious body. The circle wouldn’t stop him.
Without the token, his body was open to attack by Lilith’s demons. Kabede said he’d seen them filling the valley…
The Rider looked at Kabede.
“I know!” Kabede snarled, having come to the same conclusion. “Let’s go!”
Without another word, they turned about and went rocketing out of the chamber as fast as their will could take them.
Kabede led the way. Though still seated within his merkabah magen, he drew the Rod of Aaron from his lap and held it before him. He struck the closed doors of Lucifer’s chamber. They flew off the hinges, smashing into the ranks of the marble statues on either side of the hall, sending them toppling in a cloud of dust.
They went faster, blue and gold blurs of light flying down the hall of Pandæmonium. When they reached the outer doors, again Kabede put forth the staff and again the heavy gilded barrier crumbled. The two giant demons that had allowed them to enter before turned to bar their way this time, but as they lunged forward Kabede lashed at them with the staff. Each strike was like a blow from a caber that sent the massive things flying back against the balustrades and tumbling head over heels down the steps.
In open air, the two merkabah riders now left the congested bridge across the lake of fire and soared through the turgid clouds of vermin and blood, turning barrel rolls and loops with all the expertise of diving sparrows as every airborne creature of hell darted to intercept them. Their master’s displeasure with the two mortal interlopers was evident to them somehow, and heavy wings folded to drop savage bodies bristling with claws and barbs down upon them. Arrows of ice and fire launched from the bows of hell, and bullets of iron and steel screamed into the thick air, hell’s defenses swiveling inward to destroy them. Somehow they passed, twisting and turning and plunging at the speed of thought through the maelstrom, their encircling merkabah mginnah buzzing with the impact of tooth, claw, and projectile, the thunder and scream of cannon and beast ringing out all around them.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 26
