“No shit!” Belden exclaimed. “I seen some of ‘em, and if you’ll pardon me, son, I think I seen a helluva lot more than you. How old are you anyway?”
“I have walked the upper halls of Heaven,” Kabede said indignantly. “I have conversed with angels and set upon the Throne of Glory.”
“That ain’t an answer,” Belden said. “Hell, I’ve seen more war and whorehouses than you’ve seen years, I bet.” He turned to the Rider. “I don’t know everything, granted, but I’ve had my knife up to the knuckle in a half-demon’s belly once or twice, and I can see you’ve got a long road with a hard fight at the end of it, Joe. You really gonna take this pumpkin’ rollin’ prince of Africa along and not me?”
The Rider looked at his friend. He was good in a fight. Even in the face of all that had happened. Dick Belden was no coward. He might be a drunkard and a whoremonger and a Catholic, but he wouldn’t cut and run. And Kabede, for all his ability, was inexperienced. Together, the two of them could be a formidable ally. Still, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, be responsible for the death of another friend. He wouldn’t consent to bear the responsibility of yet another soul’s safety. He didn’t even want Kabede with him. The young man was too rigid, and that would not serve him, particularly when it came time to go to Yuma and help Nehema. For beyond all reason, that was the Rider’s intention. He dreaded bringing it up.
“Rider, tell this pigheaded dohone—” Kabede began.
“What’d he call me?” Belden asked the Rider sharply, pointing at Kabede.
The Rider shrugged. In truth, he didn’t know.
“Dohone,” Kabede explained. “A clay vessel, made of straw. Where I come from the Christians will not work with fire. The Christian heart is like the dohone. Wash it in the water of truth and it falls apart.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Dick rose from the fire, and the Rider was poised to endure a long argument, but then he set aside his bowl and took his Schoefield out.
“Dick wait!” The Rider couldn’t believe his friend was taking this so personal.
Belden looked past Kabede and took a step away from the fire.
“What’s the matter?” Kabede asked.
“Somethin’ comin’ up the path,” Belden said.
None of them saw anything crossing the valley all that day. It was not possible that something could have snuck up on them. Maybe from the ridge above, but not from the direction of the valley. Not up the path.
They grabbed their weapons and silently receded into the darkness, away from the firelight. Dick slipped into the still standing doorway of the burned out guardhouse, Kabede crouched behind a boulder, and the Rider lay on his belly with the Henry rifle, trusting to his black clothes to hide him. Was it Adon’s men? The Rider had dared to tarry here not only to regain his strength and craft the Henry, but also in the hopes that DeKorte might return. It was better to remain in this mildly defensible position than to strike out across that desert again.
The animals began to raise a ruckus from their pens, including the Rider’s onager, which set his hackles to rising as the animal almost never spooked or expressed any distress. He took out his spectacle case and slid the blue glass lenses with their Solomonic seals over his eyes.
The night became bright and filled with colors, the fire flickered green. There were ghosts all about, some dozen or so of the soldiers who had died still wandering about the post in the Yenne Velt, disoriented, bearing the ghastly wounds that had done them in, inflicted by the tramp of maddened cattle or the undead. He had put off talking to them and guiltily, he realized, he had forgotten all about them in the past few days.
He turned his attention to the noises coming up the path, the squealing and groaning as of a wagon and a series of strange and deep animal growls that were somehow familiar to the Rider.
“What in God’s name is that?” Belden called in a hiss.
In a moment the Rider had the answer. Six dusty camels pulled a swaying and creaking Gypsy vardo behind, crested the plateau and began to trundle across the parade ground toward the fire.
The beasts were just camels. Nothing unusual about them, other than the fact that they were camels, thousands of miles away from where they ought to be.
The vardo was spectacular. A dark color, possibly blue painted matchboard with gold colored designs, it was massive and seemed to bespeak a more magical age. It was covered from mollicroft to skid-pan in intricate gilt-work. Fanciful horses seemed to prance before the eyes among tangled vines on the waist boards, and angelic trumpeters swirled in the gilded porch brackets and danced back and forth in a great chorus all along the brass crown board over the front porch.
All this was lit in a warm glow by the two brass and iron carriage lamps which framed the driver. These were ornate dragon heads, the light glowing from their gaping mouths. Happy cherubic faces of golden brass laughed on the great wheel hubs like children tumbling end over end down a hill, and the black iron stovepipe bore a smiling crone’s visage. The smoke from the stove within curled from a carved pipe (on the bowl of which yet another face laughed) between her shriveled lips, casting a glow on her cowl, which was fashioned to look like a wide brimmed bonnet.
When the Rider looked upon the old man seated on a bench on the front porch, driving the wagon, he was dazzled. Whenever he focused on the driver, the entirety of his blue lenses flared as if somehow lit from within, threatening to burn a deep cyanic image on his corneas. At the first glance, he looked away, and everything instantly returned to normal. He could perceive a blue glow emanating from the driver’s seat when he did not directly focus on it, but as soon as he did, again the blue flash. It reminded him of the red lanterns that had hung outside of Lilith’s door and which had kept the creature guarding the Star Stone of Mnar at bay. He had been unable to use his Solomonic lenses in their presence. But those had caused actual physical discomfort. This blue glare was altogether different. It only dissuaded his gaze when he focused on its source.
Its source was the man, not some strange fuel burning in a red lantern, nor, as he’d first thought, the dragon head lamps on either side. The light came from the man himself. He was made of light, as brilliant as an angel.
The Rider took the glasses off, rubbed his eyes, and looked upon the driver as he pulled the big wagon to a stop at the edge of the firelight and climbed down.
He was a spindly old man, quite aged, with a clean shaven face but scraggly, shoulder-length hair. He was pale, and his dress was American, if boldly eccentric.
He wore pinstriped pants and spats, and a blue velvet frock with absurdly long tails over a handsomely brocaded blue vest and a high collared white shirt about ten years out of style, with a garish blue cravat and twinkling sapphire stickpin. Capping his white head was a tall blue-dyed fur topper.
“I apologize for your animals’ distress,” the old man announced to the darkness as he walked the line of his camels, patting their flanks, one arm holding a bulky object he had taken with him from the wagon. His accent was strange. He spoke like an American, but there were traces of other unidentifiable influences on his speech. It was rough, but somehow musical. His voice was deep and resounding. “I assure you it’ll pass once they become used to the scent of my camels. Please don’t shoot.”
He rubbed the lead camels’ chins (narrowly dodging a cantankerous bite from the left hand one) and went right to the fire. He sighed, and shook loose the thing he had kept folded under his arm. It was a small wood and canvas collapsible camp stool, which he snapped open and proceeded to settle on.
“Please, come back to the fire, my friends,” he enjoined innocently, as if they were old acquaintances. He took a bag of tobacco from his trousers and a long stemmed pipe from an inner pocket of his coat.
“Why should we?” the Rider asked warily, getting to his feet and keeping the Henry trained on him from the darkness. There was no point in pretending they weren’t there. “We don’t know you.”
“Kabede knows m
e,” the old man said, smiling pleasantly, packing the bowl.
The Rider stiffened, as he heard the rustle of Kabede’s burnoose. In a few moments the black man was standing in the light of the fire looking down at the old man, his rifle over his shoulder and the Rod of Aaron in his hand. By the look on his face, he was not pleased to see this person.
The old man turned, smoke escaping from his straight-toothed grin. He tipped his hat.
If the African was unafraid of this being, whoever and whatever he was, that was good enough for the Rider; for now.
He too entered the firelight from the opposite direction, and Belden followed, though unlike the Rider and Kabede he did not lay aside his Schofield pistol for the sake of propriety. He kept it pointed squarely at the old man.
“Please forgive me for not rising,” the old man said. “My back.”
“Who are you?” the Rider demanded.
“His name is Shar-rogs Pa,” said Kabede. “The blue abbot of Shambhala.”
Chaksusa’s master, the Rider thought. Chaksusa, the Hindoo monk who had first told him of the Great Old Ones, when he’d battled Shub-Niggurath, the Yiggians, and the Black Goat Man at Red House. But this man was no Oriental.
“In these parts, I go by Montague. Faustus Montague.” He tipped his hat and motioned to the wagon behind him, where his name was emblazoned on the sides in fanciful script. “Worldly purveyor of wards, remedies, bodyguards, and charms.”
“Where do you come from?” the Rider asked pointedly. “What’s your real name?”
“You should know by now, Rider,” Faustus Montague said, winking one crafty eye, “the dangers of giving out your name.”
“Who the hell’re you, mister?” Belden piped up. He was still pointing his pistol at the old man.
“Oh, put that away,” Faustus said offhandedly. “Come and sit down.”
To their amazement, and apparently to Belden’s own, he did as he was told.
“How did you do that?” Belden asked, an uncharacteristic waver in his voice, after he had settled down across the fire.
“Forgive me, my good man,” said Faustus, touching a hand to the sapphire stickpin at his breast. It seemed to shine bright in the firelight for a moment. “Time is short, and we don’t have time to explain everything to you tonight. Why don’t you get some sleep? You’ll need the rest for the journey.”
Belden yawned, and before the old man had even finished speaking he had slumped to his side, made a pillow of his hands, and was snoring to beat the band.
“What did you do to him?” the Rider snarled, going to Belden’s side.
“He’s only sleeping,” Faustus said, as the Rider confirmed it. “It’s probably the best sleep he’ll ever have. In the morning he’ll be quite refreshed. As I said, he’ll need it. We’ve a long way ahead of us.”
“What’re you talking about? Why would we go with you anywhere?”
“You said after your brother’s actions among the Mexica you were forbidden from interfering here,” Kabede said.
The Rider had heard that story from Chaksusa. He had said his master’s brother, Mun Gsod, led the Mexica to Texcoco and set himself up as a god there. So both had been punished for Mun Gsod’s actions, but by whom? The Lord? The Rider wasn’t overly familiar with Mesoamerican history, but he did know the Mexica had come to Texcoco before Europeans had ever set foot in the Americas. Extra-universal jabber aside, the Rider had assumed Chaksusa had been speaking about the actions of a long dead man, and that the blue abbot Kabede had claimed to have met was just the latest to hold the office, that Shar-rogs Pa was some kind of hereditary title. Now this Montague was intimating that the Mun Gsod of the Mexicas was his actual brother. How old was he? What was he?
“I am,” Faustus answered. “But nothing was ever said about working through intermediaries.”
“How do you two know each other?” the Rider asked, sitting down next to Belden.
“I told you, Rider,” Kabede began, “I met him and a few of his students in Arabia. It was not long after I had begun my journey here. They had guessed my intention and tried to force me to tell them where the Rod of Aaron was.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Faustus said hastily. “Some of my more impetuous acolytes did get a bit exuberant, but that was never my intention.” He turned to the Rider. “We only wanted to persuade Kabede to use the staff to a certain end.”
“Several certain ends,” Kabede said, folding his arms. “They also wanted to know about various other treasures whose locations were known to the Balankab Enclave. The Garments of Adam, the Ark of the Covenant…”
“Yes, but the one we needed most, your enclave didn’t have,” Faustus said.
“What’s that?” the Rider asked.
“You call it the Tzohar,” Faustus said. “It is a gemstone which contains the primordial light of Creation. The undivided light of pure spirit.”
“I know the legend of the Tzohar,” the Rider said. “The angel Raziel supposedly gave it to Adam. Noah used it to light the Ark, and Joseph used it to interpret dreams.”
“It is no legend. In every generation it comes to the righteous,” said Kabede. “To the tzadikim. The true tzadikim, whoever they may be.”
“Without it,” said Faustus, “you cannot hope to defeat Samael, the Angel of Death, Adon’s most powerful ally in this universe. For now I believe it is the scabbard for the Sixteen Sided Sword of the Almighty.”
“The what?” the Rider repeated.
“Don’t listen to this thing,” Kabede said, pursing his lips. “He knows nothing of what he speaks.” Then he folded his arms and looked to Faustus. “Besides, you told me before that the staff was the scabbard for the Sixteen Sided Sword.”
“I thought it was,” he said, opening his hands. “But I may have been mistaken.”
Kabede sighed.
“Look now,” Faustus said, “this is not my universe. I’m not intimately familiar with all your lore.”
“What is the Sixteen Sided Sword of the Almighty?” the Rider repeated. He had never heard of this.
“You know the story of Simon bar Yochai?” Kabede asked.
“Which story?”
Rabbi Simon bar Yochai’s miraculous fables were as numerous as they were apocryphal. In the second century he had exorcised a demon from Aurelia Fadilla, the daughter of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius. He was responsible for the writing of the prime Kabalistic tome, the Zohar.
“How he hid from the Romans in the cave at Peki’in with his son,” said Kabede, “and they studied Torah until they achieved illumination.”
He knew it. The last time he had been in the Holy Land, just prior to the slaughter of the Council of Yahad at Ein Gedi by Adon, he had traveled to Peki’in and secretly prayed for the power and resolve to find and defeat his old teacher.
“Or, it may be that the Tzohar came to them,” Faustus said. “When they left the cave, everything they looked upon that was not righteous was consumed by fire. This was the Sixteen Sided Sword of the Almighty. It is the only thing that Samael cannot stand against.”
“Then you think it is in the cave at Peki’in?” Kabede asked.
“It is not. My pupils searched for it there and didn’t find it,” Faustus said.
“Do you know where it is?” the Rider asked Kabede.
“Each member of the Balankab Enclave is entrusted with the location and history of one sacred object,” Kabede said to the Rider. “That way none may divulge the hiding places of them all. I only knew the location of the Rod of Aaron.”
“No one knows where the Tzohar is,” Faustus said. “As Kabede said, it comes to those who need it.”
“How do you know any of this?” the Rider said. “What are you? You’re not human and you’re not an angel.”
“In my universe,” Faustus began, “what you call HaShem sent me down to serve man, to help them in the fight against the Great Old Ones. We were victorious, but one such being escaped through a rift between worlds. My brot
her and I pursued it here.”
“Chaksusa told me this story,” the Rider said. “He told me all about these other universes.”
“Did he tell you that Creation is an unending process and that the number of realities is infinite?”
“Yes,” the Rider said, rolling his eyes.
“Really? And you didn’t believe him any more than you believe me.” Faustus threw an amused look at Kabede. “Any more than this one believes me.”
“I don’t know what you are,” Kabede said.
“That’s why you don’t trust me.” Faustus shrugged. “My friends, all things are real. All things. That is the simple truth of reality.” He stared into the fire, the light shivering in his eyes. “Somewhere out there, a whaler with an Indian figurehead pursues a pale leviathan to the doom of her crew and her scarred captain. Somewhere, a young boy puts his hand on a sword and draws it lightly from a stone, and becomes the greatest king the world has ever known. Somewhere, thirteen heroes with two hearts between them set themselves between an insignificant world and all the evil that time and space can muster. Good and evil. They clash again and again in countless different forms and in millions of different settings, and do you know why?
“Because God is within every living being. And every living being holds the power of creation. Whatever men dream becomes real somewhere out there,” he said, waving his long, branch-like fingers at the stars, “and that is why Creation is neverending.”
“Fairy stories,” Kabede said dismissively.
“Yes,” Faustus laughed. “Exactly! Fairy stories. Adam and Lilith’s first children were fairies. The children of their imagination— unfettered by the limitations of the flesh and the chemical and biological restrictions of the more profane act of creation. What are angels and men but the fairy stories of God? And if God is within man, then what are the fairy stories of men?”
Kabede looked as if any minute he would clap his hands over his ears to shut out this nonsense, but something the old man had said struck a cord with the Rider.
“You’re talking about kellipot and tikkun,” said the Rider thoughtfully.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 13
