“Eladio!”
Still no answer.
The Rider turned a corner, holding his procured revolver at the ready and shining the light down the passage. He stopped and peered dumbfounded at what he saw.
Seven or eight men and women, filthy and emaciated to skeletons stood or crouched in the dark tunnel, chipping away at the rock with various implements while a few small, silent children on their knees sifted through the fresh gravel and dropped flecks of mineral into iron buckets. Their homespun clothes hung like loose drapery on their wraithlike frames.
They did not react to his appearance, nor cease their drudgery.
“Hey there!” The Rider called.
Nothing.
He took a few steps towards them.
Then, of a sudden, they stopped their work simultaneously and stood upright in one motion, as if choreographed, or possessing of one mind. They turned and looked at him.
The Rider took a few steps backwards, his hackles raising, dread running cold fingers up his spine.
They stared at him with dark, dilated eyes, their expressions mournful from lack of sustenance. Colorless cheeks, fleshless and hollow, black eyes sunken, hair matted on large, embryonic skulls, lips drawn and cracked. Their arms hung at their sides, picks, hammers and shovels dangling from long fingers, swaying at the ends of arms whose musculature had so atrophied that they were like bone painted with flesh and dusted with powder. They looked like bodies excavated from the very mine in which they toiled, mummified archaeological curiosities given a parchment covering and a semblance of life. They were starving, exhausted.
Then as before, they moved as one, with a swiftness that seemed impossible for their wasted forms to muster. They moved towards him, their tools rising to their shoulders, poised to strike, to pick and cut and bash him to pieces.
The only sound they made was the scrabble of their feet on the rock floor. The entire passage filled with pounding and shuffling as they ran.
The Rider dropped the lantern, turned, and fled.
* * * *
A full moon shone on the twisting, rocky avenues between the boulders and over the low sand hills and through to Polvo Arido. The dying glow of the smoldering windmill in the center of town was a faint beacon that drew The Rider like a lost ship.
He had not seen his pursuers since they had vomited gray and shambling from the mouth of the mine in a cloud of ore dust. In the light of the lone lantern and like a many armed wave, they had overcome the groggy Miguel and the guards who were only just coming to. The banditos had no chance to defend themselves from the press of mindless, silent humanity. The Rider had not seen clearly what became of them, but he saw the falling picks and shovels, and heard their screams and the popping of bones. Then it had been only the earth shaking tramp of fifty or more men, women, and children running en masse, full speed across the hills after him.
He noticed as he ran that those among the maddened townspeople who stumbled and fell silently were trampled without hesitation by those bringing up the rear, like herd animals in a stampede.
They ran, but they were limited by the potential of their wasted bodies. The Rider was exhausted and wounded. The blood still ran from the stab wound in his shoulder, his sprained wrist had swollen to three times its size, and his knee sang. Yet he was stronger. He was soon far enough ahead to slow his pace and his racing heart.
The black sorcerer had put some unfathomable spell upon these people, to make them work without food or rest. How many had died already down in those dungeon dark mines? The Rider hesitated to turn and fight them. They were bewitched and starved. One at a time their malnourished bones would break like dry kindling from any blow he gave, but together they were a rabid juggernaut, as the death of the Mexicans at the mouth of the mine attested to. He couldn’t fight them all off, and he didn’t think he could lose them either.
Then he heard the drums. They were a steady, bass rhythm, alien to the silent border village, which should have been swirling with joyous brass, lively guitars, and the boisterous calls of Mexican balladeers. The drums were ominous, promising nothing but oblivion, but making a good argument for coming anyway.
The Rider knew where they were coming from without stopping to listen.
A wooden pipe dangled from a string over the doorway of the unfinished manor house. It brushed against The Rider’s head as he entered. The revolver was in his good hand. When he was inside, he turned and closed the door, then strained to push an abandoned wheelbarrow against it. He overturned it and wedged it close. It wouldn’t hold long.
The room smelled of burning candles and strong liquor.
He moved warily into the grand room, where the drums were thunderous, like the pounding of the hearts of gods, sharing in some Elysian ecstasy. He had taken care to wear his Solomonic lenses this time. The black man’s hypnotic eye would not entrap his mind again.
The sorcerer was there, standing in his coat and hat and smoking a cigar, staring through the hole in the roof up at the moon. The Rider’s amulets and talismans had joined the bone necklaces and fetishes he had been wearing the last time they’d met.
As he crossed the threshold, the sorcerer gestured to a pair of pale figures on the landing overhead, and the blurred hands that beat out the violent rhythm ceased abruptly. The sudden silence was like a violence unto itself.
The Rider looked up and saw two women, one the beautiful black haired woman from the picture in the watch he’d taken from Sucio, the other pale and yellow haired with freckled skin. Both were bare breasted and coated in a sheen of sweat that shined in the moonlight, their smooth shoulders rising and falling from the exertion of their drumming. They wore white cotton skirts, their hair bound up in white kerchiefs. They had the same empty expressions as the people in the mine. Candles flickered on the stairs, making a path.
The sorcerer spoke without turning away from the moon.
“You return, blanc.” He took the cigar from his mouth and pointed it at him. “It was you who did away with my wind djab, wasn’t it? I have been calling it all day.”
“It won’t be coming back,” The Rider said.
He moved further into the room, raising the revolver.
“That won’t do anything,” the black man said.
The Rider pulled the trigger of the pistol, and it clicked on as if on an empty chamber, though he had checked the loads twice outside.
“I told you,” he said, in a sing-song voice, taking a long drag of his cigar.
More magic. The Rider let the pistol fall to the floor.
“What have you done to these people?”
“I have done what pleases Kalfou, and fulfills my own ambitions.”
“Who is Kalfou?”
“Kalfou is the loa of the crossroads, blanc. The master of left-handed magic. It is his power I have wielded over these cattle. I am his favored cheval.”
“Tell Kalfou to release them then,”
“Tell him yourself,” the black man said, turning to look at him for the first time. “He is coming, blanc. When the djab did not answer, I called him.”
The black man raised his milky lens again, favoring him with the pale eye.
Through the blue tint of the Solomonic glass, The Rider observed the energies emanating from the eye in swirling patterns. The eye was like some filter that tapped into the etheric plane and expelled a tangible force into this world.
“That won’t do anything,” The Rider mocked.
The black man frowned and took his spectacles off entirely, focusing all his attention upon The Rider.
“I told you.” The Rider smiled.
Kelly wanted to spit. This strange, bearded blanc was indeed a nuisance. Why had not the wind djab fleshed him to the bone as it had the troublesome marshal? He had heard the commotion in the street and felt the dying of the wind. Immediately, he had called the women and started the drums speaking, but to no avail. Who was this freak out of the desert who could resist and deflect a servant of the Petro loa?
Kelly had thought the destruction of Scarchilli and his band would be the only magic he worked tonight. He had long known of their impending treachery, and assumed the loss of the wind djab would give their shaky courage the bolstering it needed to turn against him, He had set the zhambis to kill anyone and everyone they came across, assuming the unsuspecting bandits and their chief would be overcome in their sleep or torn to scraps in the mines. He had not anticipated this blanc escaping to his very door. The zhambis would be at his heels.
This was all supposed to have been a simple matter; bleed the mine dry, dry gulch Scarchilli and his pawns, and make off with the gold to set himself up somewhere as a king with his two willing brides, churning out followers for Kalfou. He had even entertained thoughts of seeing the land of his ancestors.
Scarchilli’s plotting had necessitated the acceleration of his plan. It was no matter. The gold was already piled high in the stable, and would be sufficient to keep him fat for the rest of his days.
But this blanc. This miserable, tricky blanc with his strings of amulets and powerful talismans. He used magic Kelly was unfamiliar with. He could feel the power humming in the objects he’d stripped from this blanc, but as of yet he’d been unable to unlock their secrets.
Who was this man, and what was he doing here?
He had consulted with Kalfou, and now Kalfou was coming. The matter was in the hands of the master of the crossroads now.
Without another word, Kelly turned his back on the blanc. He glanced up at the two women on the landing, admiring their forms and thinking how it would be to be with them. He smiled and gazed up through the open roof at the clear night sky. He was heady from the rum and potions and the spells he had worked this night, opening himself to the approaching spirit wending down through the stars. He took the cigar from his mouth and lit the veve as a beacon for his master.
The Rider opened his mouth to speak, and stepped back as the black man took his cigar from his lips and dropped it to the floor.
It was the smell that made him recoil, for he knew it well. The gunpowder on the floor flared as the heat of the cigar touched it off, and soon the intricate tetramorph was traced out in brilliant fire. There was rum there too, and it burned, dancing as the black man stood still and raised his thin arms. The pattern seared itself on The Rider’s eyeballs.
The Rider backed further away. He could feel a presence turning its attention to the fire; he could feel it approaching. He crouched down and tore open the seam of his rekel coat, pulling out the lining and a bit of chalk he kept secured there.
Hastily he began to describe a Solomonic seal on the floor, drawing the circle around him and inscribing the Ineffable Name. He did it quickly, with practiced hand, muttering the Psalm of exorcism and the formulas from the Testament of Solomon he had memorized long ago.
He glanced up in his work as a swirling ethereal funnel plunged through the hole in the roof and landed squarely on the black man’s shoulders, staggering him. As it began to take shape, he heard the first of the pounding on the front door.
The townspeople had arrived.
He returned to his work.
He had finished the inscriptions and was sitting in the circle, whispering his ecstatic mantra and loosening the moorings on his soul when a guttural voice like the creak of an ancient chest opening, clattered an inquiry from the black man’s lips, in what sounded like French.
The Rider looked up, and saw the sorcerer had turned to face him. He stood in the hunched posture of a man possessed with a heavy burden, his shoulders sloping and his waist bent as if he bore it on his back. His eyes were blank, rolled up in his skull, and his lower jaw protruded, showing the bottom row of white teeth.
This was the man.
Through the lenses, The Rider saw the spirit.
It was in the form of a small, half naked, withered old black man in torn red breeches and a straw hat clinging to the sorcerer’s back and peering over his shoulder. The hands that gripped the sorcerer’s shoulder were capped in curved, black taloned fingernails that dug into his body like those of a hunting hawk. Agate eyes shown in a dark, prodigiously wrinkled and drawn face, and a terrible smile revealed teeth that were filed to carnivorous points.
The Rider closed his eyes.
When he saw again, it was with his spirit, and he stepped out of his body, facing Kalfou in the Yenne Velt.
“Kalfou,” The Rider said.
“Who are you, white man?” the guttural voice came again, this time in words that The Rider could understand.
“Tell me your name, demon,” The Rider retorted. “You are not what you pretend to be.”
The entity cocked its head, frowning, waiting for an explanation.
“No spirit could have called Lix Tetrax to do its bidding, only a marshal of demons.”
Kalfou’s teeth disappeared, and he removed his straw hat.
“Very well.” He snarled. “Then let us be frank with each other.”
Instantly, ten horn yellow spikes sprouted from the top of the old black man’s skull, splitting it down the middle. The dark eyes flashed, and then the spikes lanced upward, sprouting pale, fleshy arms beneath them. The arms, coated in wiry golden hairs, parted and rent the elderly visage asunder, and a brutish form burst forth from the withered body like an overlarge bird from an egg. Pigeon gray wings, flecked with black markings like peacock’s feathers, unfurled and spread out over the sorcerer’s head. The sorcerer bent further, going to his knees with the weight of the shape that now perched upon his shoulders.
Eyes that glimmered, only hinted at behind the blackened lenses of the facade form of Kalfou, now shone and wavered like yellow fires in a jack-o’lantern from beneath a single bristling orange eyebrow, which capped the distorted, swollen white face that regarded him anew. The densely freckled visage drooped with ponderous jowls and sat upon a double stack of ample chin. It was a face that had once been handsome and masculine, but now seemed disturbingly childlike with the weight of incalculable gluttony. The bright red hair on its head had once been full and shining. It still hung low, spilling over sloping, hairy shoulders, but had grown stringy and greasy, sparse at the source. The upper body seemed like that of a dying athlete, encased in a grub-like, wasted mass. The wrinkles and emaciation of Kalfou had been replaced by faint stretch marks and rolls of fat, sheathed in a brushy carpet of rusty hair that sprung unruly and unkempt inches from the sickly, sagging white flesh. Beneath the tremendous gut was a lower body garbed entirely in dirty orange hair, and possessed of thin haunches and cloven black hooves.
The Rider wavered, but did not give.
“Do you know me, man?” the awful figure demanded, showing decaying, yellow teeth.
“No,” The Rider said, managing not to stammer before the towering apparition that rose above the sorcerer, all of ten feet tall, crouching even beneath the high ceiling of the house. “We’ve never met. But I know what you are, Grigori.”
The despised of the Fallen, shunned as an embarrassment even by Lucifer’s disciples.
“How do you know?” the wasteful shape demanded, bemused at the insignificant thing before him.
“Because of them,” The Rider said, motioning to the women who stood naked on the landing. “You kept the most beautiful for yourself, probably telling your servant they were for him. You are one of Samyaza’s Fallen: The Watchers who turned from their duty to God for the carnal pleasures of mortal women and let loose the bastard Nephilim on the Earth in the days of Enoch.” The Rider curled his lip in disdain. “You’re nothing but a deviant, posing as a god.” The Rider nodded to the sorcerer. “And this man is your pimp.”
The Watcher raged at this, and stooped as if to snatch The Rider with both tremendous black clawed hands, but stopped short at the circle he had inscribed around himself.
“Leave this town and its people, Grigori,” The Rider demanded.
“You will call me by name, wretch!” the Watcher raged, hissing through teeth like jagged tombstones o
f piss-stained limestone. “You address Armoni, once a marshal of the Third Legion of Fire! It was I who taught you bumbling, feckless vermin the working of enchantments ten thousand years before your so called King Solomon was squeezed bloody and bawling into this miserable world; when your race feared flame and was content to roll in shit and fight with jackals over the bones of rotting animals!”
“Once a marshal of the Third Legion of Fire. Now a lecher.” The Rider shrugged.
The Watcher drew closer, enraged.
“You know nothing of what you speak! It was love that drove my kind to fall....”
The Rider laughed in the monstrous face before him.
“Lust! The malachim were born knowing only the love of Ha Shem. You Watchers were sent to record the time of man and strayed from your tasks to root at our women like dogs in heat. Look at you! You’re disgusting! You wear your sin plainly. You bartered magic like a pederast peddling sweets and trinkets to lure young innocents. How many times since have you called yourself a god and promised power only to grope and fumble at human women through some unwary mit like this sorcerer?”
Armoni loomed, its boyish face contorted and ugly in its wrath. Yes, how many cults had this being presided over? The drunken orgies of Bacchus or Pan? And what nameless dark doings had he wrought in the name of this Kalfou, his latest incarnation?
“You insignificant bowel worm!” the Watcher roared. “Do you think your measly scribblings and incantations can turn me aside? It was I who taught this knowledge to your forebears! I could blow you to Hell with a blast of my nostrils! I can even now call upon forty legions of demons to shred your soul to rags!”
“Then why don’t you?” The Rider challenged.
Armoni folded his arms across his sagging chest at that and smiled a crooked smile.
“I don’t have to.”
The Rider glanced about him, and was almost jerked back into his earthly body by what he saw. The heavy doors had not held. They hung shattered inward on their hinges, and the gray, mindless mob was clambering through, stumbling over the wheelbarrow, scrabbling across the floor toward his motionless body.
Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter Page 13
