Two guards were kneeling on his chest and arms, and others were running past into the cell.
Croc O’Doyle sauntered out, glaring down at him.
“Dark Cell it is,” he said, and to prevent further struggling, lashed out at him with the butt of the rifle.
It struck the Rider above the eye and his head bounced off the stone. His overwhelmed brain doused the lights.
The Rider did not entirely realize he was awake when at last he did wake. If not for the gritty sensation of the stone beneath him and the dime-sized shaft of silver light coming down from the ceiling to pierce the otherwise total blackness, he would have contentedly continued to believe O’Doyle’s blows had put him in a coma.
Then again, perhaps they had. His head surely suffered an all encompassing ache that started at the top of his head and pulsed down to the base of his skull when he tried to move.
He had no idea how much time had passed, where he was, or what time of the day it was.
He opened his eyes as wide as he could. The little light to his left actually hurt to look at, so he turned away from it. It was cool here. There was a noxious scent in the air, but it wasn’t as close or powerful as it had been in the cell. He put out his hand and tentatively stretched his arm as far as it would go, only just brushing against a rocky wall with his straining fingertips.
Was he in a room? The wall was hewn stone, not smooth like the granite cell. Was he underground? In some kind of cave?
He rolled on his side and dragged himself across the ground. It took several minutes before he could finally press his body between the floor and the wall.
He felt his face. It was crusted with dried blood, and there was a puffy, scabbed over furrow on his cheek.
He closed his eyes and waited for the ringing in his head to cease.
It did not totally, but when it had dwindled to an echo, he slowly sat up with his back to the hard, jutting wall and drew up his knees, resting his face forward on them.
His head seemed to weigh thirty pounds.
He sat that way for a long time, and then, when his aching brain suspended between his knees could spare the energy to consider, he thought about what had happened.
It didn’t make sense that Adon was lying in a Yuma jail cell, pilfering arsenic to fight the bed bugs of a bunch of convicts.
But the Rider knew Adon as he knew no other. Though he had not seen him in over a decade, his face, his voice were etched into his brain. The image of the man had gone ahead of him always, like a carrot dangling from a stick. It just wasn’t possible he had been mistaken.
Was it some game Adon was playing? Some twisted trick? Had he allowed himself to be arrested for some minor offense and somehow manipulated events so that they had wound up cellmates? Why would he do such a thing?
It was quite possible that Adon could have anticipated his coming to Yuma. He got the sense that Lilith and her children had perhaps been pursuing him independently of Adon’s wishes, but Adon surely knew of their feud. How could he have known the Rider would be arrested, though? And what could he possibly hope to gain by goading him into an attack? Compounding his sentence? No, as the perceived murderer of an innocent woman, an attack on a fellow convict wasn’t going to make things much worse for him.
Books and O’Doyle had both mentioned a Mister Laird. Who was he? Whoever he was, it was he who was responsible for the Rider coming to the prison. Adon could have manipulated this Mister Laird. But again, why? The Rider had nearly killed him on sight. He had surely done him grievous injury.
His head began to ache again, and he lay back down on his side, letting his pounding temple rest against the cool stone.
Jethro was the name Kabede had read in the Order’s Book of Life. The false name Adon had enrolled under years ago. Jethro Auspitz. That was irrefutable.
There was something wrong about Adon.
There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in the Rider’s mind that the man who the others knew as Jethro was Adon, but why had he pretended not to know him? Did he think the Rider would refrain from attacking him around the other prisoners?
Let him get out of this black hole…then he’d see.
He cursed himself for not having broken Adon’ scrawny neck when he had the chance.
Would he have another?
Something else nagged at him.
Adon’s demeanor had been different. Now that he was removed from the passion of their encounter, he could see it. The Rider had been incensed by his appearance, but his inflections, his mannerisms, they were wrong. Not assured and haughty as his old teacher’s had been. The man in the cell had been too facile, too likable; too folksy. Adon had always disdained the use of colloquialisms in his speech. He had told the Rider once that he found them unbecoming in a scholar, and he had actively discouraged the Rider from salting his speech with the little Yiddish phrases and words he had picked up from his family and friends. Almost always Adon had spoken to him in the old Aramaic the Sons of The Essenes conversed in.
Not so with the man in the cell.
But…he was Adon.
Wasn’t he?
His name was Jethro and he was identical in every physical way to the Adon he knew. It was entirely impossible that it was a coincidence.
After so many years of single-minded purpose, how could he possibly have mistaken an innocent man for Adon?
Innocent? Well, he was a convict. But of the five prisoners in the cell, he was the only one who had claimed innocence, at least according to Tolliver.
Aside from being named Jethro, he was a Jew. The only Jew in the cell. How many Jews were incarcerated here? Could Adon have a brother? He had never mentioned one. Could Jethro Auspitz in fact be the name of Adon’s twin?
What was going on here? He felt as though he had been taken in some kind of a trap, but what kind, and by who?
He wondered idly if Kabede and Dick had heard from Spates yet.
He did not know how long he pondered these things. He didn’t even know he had fallen asleep. Time was impossible to gauge in the darkness.
The toe of Croc O’Doyle’s boot convinced him he had been asleep, and that it was time to get up. He didn’t need to say it out loud, but he did.
“Come on, 1748. Time to go see Mister Laird.”
Well, that was something.
He rose stiffly. The throbbing in his skull had subsided, no longer nauseating in its insistence.
He found that he was in neither a room nor a cave, but both-a chamber carved out of the stone itself. Blinding light was pouring in from an open doorway at the end of a short passage. The light was so white it might have led into a holy hekhalot for all he knew.
O’Doyle’s big fist closed around the back of his collar and thrust him ahead.
He stumbled blindly several times as the guard pushed him forward, always holding him up by the shirt like a kitten by its scruff.
His eyes spilled involuntary tears as he came out into the hot sun and white blindness of the prison yard. He had no idea if it was the same day he had entered.
He put the backs of his hands to his eyes to shield the full force of the light as O’Doyle drove him on. He couldn’t tell where he was going. He kept his stinging eyes focused on his feet.
When at last he could raise is head, he found he was marching alongside the Yard Office to a smaller two room adobe building adjoining.
The sign outside marked it was the Superintendant’s Office.
An Indian lounged outside, powerful legs extended, ankles crossed, whittling. One of the Quechans he had noticed on his way in. The Rider almost didn’t see him sitting there in the shade, as he was entirely caked in dried mud too keep cool. Like most of his kind, he wore a patchy soldier’s sack coat unbuttoned and no pants, but his head was shaved. It was unusual for an Indian, and with the mud, it lent him a mean, unearthly look. The sleeves of his jacket were cut off, and his thick arms rivaled O’Doyle’s, muscular where O’Doyle was fat.
His rifle leaned against the w
all beside him. It was well cared for, and bore a decorative beaded carrying strap. Hanging from his belt by a thong, the Rider noticed a squat, carved wooden club with a heavy, painted end shaped like a potato masher.
The dark little eyes in his hard, bony face flashed at the Rider, sized him up, and promptly disregarded him. The ring in his nose solidified the Rider’s initial impression of the man. He looked like a bull fresh from a mud wallow.
“The hell you doin’ inside the yard, LaChappa?” said O’Doyle.
LaChappa didn’t even look at the man, but continued whittling away at a block of wood in his thick hands with a pocket knife.
O’Doyle muttered something under his breath and rapped once on the door and opened it, ushering the Rider inside.
The office was small, not much more than thirty feet square, and consisted of a plain wood desk, a shelf of law books, and a rifle rack. The chair behind the desk was its most impressive asset, cushioned with thick red leather held in place by shining brass studs. A squat bronze incense burner sat on the corner of the desk, a whimsical little thing, shaped in the form of a lotus blossom.
In the chair sat a lean man in a clean gray pinstriped suit, with a stiff paper collar and a black string tie. His receding silver and red hair was slicked back, emphasizing a rounded, prominent brow, his hawkish face flanked by a pair of heavy sideburns, his naturally sneering lips capped by a neat mustache. His dark eyes were narrow almost to slits, and they looked on the Rider as he entered with strange, vigorous interest, and an unmistakable bemusement.
A cavalry officer’s saber hung on the wall behind his head.
“Welcome to the hell hole, Rider,” he said, in flawless Old Aramaic.
It was not the sort of language one heard spoken in this corner of the world. Certainly not by the superintendant of a far flung prison on the edge of Arizona Territory. The last time he’d heard it spoken was by one of his old teachers, a former member of the Sons of the Essenes. It had been the Order’s primary language, even above Hebrew.
The Rider stood thunderstruck.
“Or should I say, 1748?” Laird went on, in English by way of Texas.
“Who…Who are you?” he asked, struggling to find the words in Aramaic. It had been years since he’d spoken it.
Mister Laird smiled a vulture’s smile. His teeth were neat and perfect, small, like a hen’s, all the same size, it seemed.
“Will you try to smash my head into the floor if I say?” he said, switching to Aramaic again. “Because I warn you. The big uncircumcised brute behind you won’t stand for it.”
The Rider felt his legs waver beneath him. His aching skull pounded all the more.
“Fetch the man a chair, Croc,” Laird said in English. “Before he falls down.”
The Rider heard a chair dragged across the floor, he felt it bump against the backs of his calves. He collapsed into it. It took the place of his skeleton. He felt that had it not been there, he would have melted and seeped through the floorboards. He was suddenly utterly exhausted, weighed down with the burden he had carried all these years.
There was none of the wrath or the fury he had felt when the face of Adon had turned toward him in the dim cell. This was different. An inevitable sureness, like the doom of death settled on him.
Laird’s speech, his posture, the way he cradled his chin in the backs of his fingers and waited patiently for the Rider to speak, just as in the old days, when he had presented a problem to his student and watched him in the same manner, as if observing and judging his unseen reasoning with his penetrating eyes alone.
“Adon,” the Rider sighed.
This perfect stranger, this rawboned, well-dressed Texas man, smiled.
And it was Adon’s smile.
“Very good,” he said in Aramaic.
The Rider was too tired suddenly. Too beaten down to rise and kill this man whom he had once loved as a father and now hated as a traitor and the physical epiphany of all the evil that had infested his life.
The man he had sought all these years, maybe he was indeed the man called Jethro Auspitz. That was the man whose face had represented all the anger and outrage and the undeniable need for revenge he had felt these long years.
But Jethro Auspitz was not Adon.
“He stinks,” said Adon, wrinkling his nose.
“He knocked over the pisspot,” O’Doyle said. “He spent the night in the Dark Cell.”
“Go and get him some clean clothes.”
“You sure?” Croc asked.
“We’re going to have a nice long talk,” he said, taking a revolver out of the drawer of his desk and laying it on the blotter.
“If you say so,” Croc said.
In a few moments he was gone, the door closing behind him.
“The man…the man in the cell?”
“Oh yes,” said Laird, who was Adon. “Jethro. Jethro Auspitz. I was him, until a week ago. Just a tailor, he was, a forger of checks. A simple man with a simple mind and a weak soul. He was quite easy to inhabit. It took a long time to establish him in San Francisco, to attract the attention of the Order and earn his induction into the Sons. Many more years to rise as one of the Enclave’s great teachers. He was a young man when I found him. Younger than this body you see before you even. When I left him, he was disoriented. Raved like a lunatic. He had only passing memories of the past twenty years, after all.”
Tolliver had said the man had spent two days protesting his innocence and saying he didn’t remember how he’d got to Arizona. They had caught him trying to buy a ticket home.
“I’ve seen your astral form,” the Rider said. “Plenty of times, when you were teaching me. It was always Auspitz I saw. He has to be your true self.”
“My soul takes the appearance of whichever body I inhabit. It’s a skill I developed oh, ages ago. Were you to look upon me now through your lenses, you would see this man. It’s part of what allowed me to infiltrate the Order.” He looked at his fingernails admiringly. “Not a bad body, this one. Infinitely preferable to Auspitz. But this one has a smoker’s lungs.” He showed his fingernails to the Rider. “See the yellow beneath the nails? Tobacco. Filthy habit. I don’t know how long I’ll hold onto him. Till Captain Meder returns anyway. It all worked out so well, Rider. When I learned of Lilith’s trap for you, I knew you’d slip out of it. My subordinates had failed enough times to recover what I required, so I decided to come here and get it myself. Then you were arrested for killing that succubus, and the superintendant went to California to bury his father. I knew I wouldn’t have a better chance to get you alone like this, undisturbed. I doused myself in whiskey, stole a checkbook, got myself arrested, and traded Auspitz for the acting superintendant here.”
“Why would you do all this?” the Rider asked. “Why did you go to such effort to destroy the Order? What did you want from them?”
“They were an impediment to the Hour of the Incursion. I sought only to wipe them away. Everything I have done has been to clear the path.”
“For the Great Old Ones.”
“Yes. The Order was the first to fall. Then I introduced the dybbukim to Medgar Tooms, and directed him against various obstacles. I sent Lilith and her daughters to fortify Tip Top.”
“And Hayim Cardin in Little Jerusalem...” said the Rider.
“Yes.”
The Rider saw his eyes flit momentarily. Mention of Cardin or Little Jerusalem had put him off. Why? He hadn’t been sure Cardin had acted under Adon’s direct orders until now. Tooms neither. What obstacles had Adon directed him against? He knew only of the Franciscan mission Tooms had massacred. Had there been other religious centers destroyed? Like the fledgling Temple in Little Jerusalem? Had Chaksusa been a target?
The door opened then, and O’Doyle returned with the fresh prisoner uniform and a new cap.
Adon nodded for him to change.
The Rider took the clothes from O’Doyle, changed as quick as he could, slower than he would’ve liked.
“Take
those rags away and come back in…” Adon paused to consult a golden watch on chain in his waistcoat, “oh, an hour.”
O’Doyle nodded and departed once more, holding the bundle at arm’s length.
The Rider sat back down. What about the scroll? Until recently his hunt for Adon had been a one way ordeal. But after he had acquired that strange scroll from Amos Sheardown, in what had most assuredly been an accidental, though perhaps fortuitous meeting, Adon’s agents had turned to hunting him down.
“What about DeKorte and Jacobi? What about Amos Sheardown? Your greatest pupil?”
Adon smiled thinly, an unmistakable flash of annoyance in his expression.
Yes, Sheardown had said he’d acted on his own initiative, sought to kill the Rider to impress Adon. The scroll he had been carrying was not supposed to have been endangered.
Rather than address that, Adon deflected the question.
“You were my greatest pupil, Rider. Such a prodigy. I saw in you the young man I was, back when I lived, when I was a hungry student, eager for the truth.”
Alright. They would return to the scroll later. He knew they would.
“Then you are…Elisha ben Abuyah.”
Adon raised his eyebrows. It was so strange to see his expressions on the face of this man. It was like picking out a masked acquaintance by his gait alone, or more perhaps, like seeing the untaught habits of a parent reflected inexplicably in a child.
“I am impressed, Rider. You have been studying. But not alone, I think. Who told you who I was?” He arched an eyebrow. “And where is Kabede?”
The Rider stiffened. Had DeKorte heard his name and told it to Adon? How much did he know? Surely he didn’t know about the secret Balankab Enclave, or the Falashan Riders. But he must know that whoever Kabede was, he had the scroll.
When he did not answer, Adon shrugged and seemed to relax. He sank back into the chair.
“There is plenty of time for that later, my boy,” he said. “Later, I will ask and you will answer. But now, for old time’s sake, I will answer you. I know how unforthcoming everyone has been with your questions. That must be frustrating. You will remember, in all our years together, I never answered a question from you but with the truth.”
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 32
