Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (3 page)

“It’ll wait, lieutenant.”

“I think—”

“Thinking isn’t really in your line
is it, Mister Cord?” said Manx. He fixed him with a watery eyed glare. “Weeks.
And Quincannon. On the double, if you please.”

Cord pursed his battered lips and saluted.

“Yes, sir.”

He turned smartly and went off
across the parade ground again.

Manx gestured for them to step
inside first, and they did, descending three stone steps into the cool earthen
structure.

The inside was neat and well
maintained, but retained an air of impermanence. Kabede had to stoop to keep
from upsetting his head wrap on the low timbers. Manx’s desk was chipped and
weather-beaten, with a chair that didn’t match, and a stack of faded regulation
manuals under one of the legs. The fine feathered writing quill on it was out
of place. A cheesecloth curtain barely separated his office from a simple cot,
porcelain washbasin, and shaving mirror. A picture of President Hayes had
apparently been unsuccessfully nailed to the earthen wall several times,
judging by the holes, and now sat propped on a crudely chipped ledge, flanked
by a faded little Napoleonic artillery crew made of lead.

It was as if the occupant was trying
to will an importance to the place it just didn’t have.

There was also a faint, rank smell
in the air. A smell of illness. The Rider wondered if the colonel were a
consumptive.

“We don’t get many civilian visitors
to Camp Eckfeldt,” Manx said as he settled into the creaky chair.

Eckfeldt
.
That was amusing. It was like
eckveldt
,
a Yiddish word that meant ‘the end of the Earth.’

The Rider looked about. There was no
place to sit.

“Obviously we’re quite a small
outpost.”

Manx snuffled a bit, and blew his
nose into his handkerchief twice, then tucked it quickly away. “Now, where on
Earth did you two come from? Aside from Africa.”

“We crossed the Valle del Torreón,”
the Rider said.

“On foot?”

“Yes. There’s a little town on the
far side—”

“Escopeta,” said Manx with a curl of
visible distaste to his lip. “I would hardly call it a town. More of an
infestation, really.”

The palm of his hand slammed down on
the desk suddenly, and when he turned it over, a cockroach lay twitching. He
flicked it away into a dark corner of the room to die, and ran his hand down
his trouser leg.

“Damned things. Scorpions,
tarantulas, all these I can abide, even understand. But I’ll never sympathize
with a damned cockroach. Filthy things. They get in the coffee, the sugar,
leave their little black spoors like pepper all over everything. You find them
everywhere. Anywhere there’s people, even out here in the middle of nowhere,
where trails…dissolve in the…emptiness.”

The colonel let his words trail off
and leaned forward, pulling open one of the drawers with a squeaky groan.

“Can I offer you something?”

“Maybe later,” said the Rider. “There’s
not much time, colonel.”

“No?” said Manx, leaning in,
rummaging, not looking up.

“We were pursued across the desert,”
said the Rider.

“From Escopeta?”

The Rider paused.

“Yes.”

“Well,” he sniffled, as he reached
for something, “I would expect that, being as Escopeta’s almost entirely
populated by shiftless assassins and bounty killers.”

The Rider took a step back from the
desk, hearing the sounds of boots crunching closer in the dust outside.

“Sir?”

Manx sat up again in his chair.
There was a Schofield revolver in his hand, cocked and pointed.

“I mean a wanted fugitive like you
must have found himself pretty popular there, Mister Maizel.”

Kabede instantly jolted into a
fighting stance, but the Rider gripped his arm, preventing him from completing
his motion.

“Kabede,” he warned.

The Falashan’s eyes met his, and the
Rider shook his head.

Weeks was in the doorway, a
grizzled, unshaven corporal, presumably Quincannon, behind him, and Lieutenant
Cord standing behind them both. Quincannon and Weeks had their pistols out. Any
further movement of Kabede’s staff would touch off a firing squad.

“Precision timing as always,
sergeant. Corporal Quincannon, disarm these men,” said Manx, still covering
them both. A thin rivulet of blood leaked from his left nostril, but he
evidently didn’t notice.

Quincannon stepped forward, dropping
his pistol into its flap holster. He knocked the Rod of Aaron to the floor and
jerked Kabede’s curved knife from his belt and tossed it aside.

When he moved to the Rider, he
paused, glancing at his eyes, and then at Weeks for reassurance.

“Go on, Quincannon,” Weeks said. “He
ain’t so fast me or the colonel can’t blow a window in his skull.”

Quincannon nodded and undid the
Rider’s tooled belt with his golden Volcanic pistol and engraved Bowie knife.
He threw the belt over his shoulder and patted the Rider down briefly,
whistling at the amount of medallions he found strung about him. When he was
through, he stepped away.

Manx had discovered his nosebleed
and hastily ducked out of sight, cleaning it with his handkerchief again. He
made a point of going through his drawer again, and emerged with a cigarillo
and a folded bill. He smoothed the poster out on the desk. Manx turned it so
the Rider could read the type, though he didn’t need to.

“The Killer Jew of Varruga Tanks,”
Manx read. He leaned back in his chair and bit the end off the cigarillo,
spitting it into a tarnished spittoon that resounded hollowly.

“I didn’t think the Army concerned
itself with civilian law,” the Rider said.

“About a week back some men stopped
by on their way to Escopeta.” He tapped the poster with the end of the
cigarillo. “They left this behind.”

“What men?” asked Kabede suddenly. “A
German? A Frenchman?”

“Foreigners, to be sure,” Manx
nodded, striking a match and lighting his smoke. “You know them?”

Kabede looked at the Rider.

“DeKorte,” he said.

“They wanted you pretty badly,” said
the colonel.

“It’s not how you think,” said the
Rider. “All of Escopeta’s bearing down on this post. Don’t ask me why—”

“I don’t wonder why,” said Manx. “I
think we can deal with a lot of saddle tramps and bushwhackers. Can’t we,
sergeant?” he said to Weeks.

“Yessir,” Weeks said, smiling, as
Quincannon went to his side and drew his pistol again.

“These aren’t normal people,
colonel. They’ve been…altered.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Changed,” the Rider said. “Just
take my word, there’s an army marching on your position right now, and nothing
can stop them. Nothing except maybe myself and my friend here.”

“You’ve a fairly high estimation of
your abilities,” Manx smirked.

“I’m serious, colonel. You’ve got to
mount a defense. They’re only a day behind us. They’re forty, maybe eighty
strong. They’re fanatical—”

“Poppycock,” the colonel stated,
blowing smoke and watching it curl across the ceiling. “I don’t think the
denizens of Escopeta could be roused to piss if their houses were on fire let
alone cross the desert and attack a military outpost to get at one man. Not
that pissing would help any. The amount of whiskey they imbibe, it would
probably make it worse.” He chuckled to himself.

Quincannon snickered. Weeks smiled.

“Besides, there aren’t thirty men in
that place.”

“We’re not talking about just the
men. We’re talking about every man, woman, and child between there and this
post. Any ranchos, haciendas, Indian bands…”

“You talk as if the whole valley
were rising up against us,” Manx said.

Lieutenant Cord cleared his throat.

“Uh, sir? There does appear to be a
large force of some kind moving across the valley. They’re definitely headed in
our direction.”

Manx’s detached cool faltered a
little, and once more his nose bled, so quickly he had to catch it with his
sleeve.

“What?” he said, muffled by his arm.

“It’s just the Mexes movin’ their
cattle, sir,” said Weeks.

“I don’t know about any army,” said
Cord, “but it could be hostile Indians.”

“It’s not Indians,” the Rider said.

“
Indians
,”
Manx said, his eyes suddenly alight.

“Cattle, I say,” Weeks said dryly.

Manx settled back in his chair,
wiping his nose.

“You’re probably right, sergeant,”
sighed Manx. “But in case you’re not, Mister Cord, have Lieutenant Portis take
Jeffries and lead an exploratory patrol out. I want them to determine just what
it is down there and if it’s a threat.”

“You don’t need a patrol,” the Rider
said. “I already told you it’s a threat. They’re coming for us, and they’ll
tear this post apart to get us.”

Manx waved him off.

“Sergeant Weeks, Corporal
Quincannon, take these two to the guardhouse. In the morning we’ll send a
dispatch to let the sheriff know we’ve done his job.”

“Your patrol won’t come back,” the
Rider warned as Quincannon reached out and took him by the elbow again. He
pulled away from the man’s weak grip. “Not as you’d know them, anyway.”

Weeks flourished his pistol.

“Let’s go, war hero,” said Weeks.

The Rider shook his head and stormed
out, so that Quincannon could barely keep up.

A private waited outside, and Weeks
motioned for him to take charge of the Rider’s onager. The Rider watched as the
trooper led the animal away to the stable, the precious scroll case bouncing on
the cantle.

Kabede was soon at his side.

“At least we will be able to pass
the
Sanba adma’I
,” he said.

The Rider looked at him.

“It will fortify us for what is to
come,” Kabede said.

The Rider knew Kabede was right.
Observing the Sabbath would only strengthen their spiritual defense. But the
deep down truth was, the Rider was disinclined to do so. Why should he honor
the Lord? He had seen much in the past few months that was vile and base in the
Creator’s universe. He knew the old answer to the question why HaShem permitted
evil to exist…yet this was boundless, alien evil. It infested Creation and the
Lord did nothing. He appointed a jealous and vengeful angel as steward of the
Earth, and let entities of unimaginable power and malevolence (no, not really
true malevolence, simply complete moral apathy) slip through the cracks to sink
their teeth into the souls of man and suck them dry.

He had led his life for the Lord,
and where was he now? His name had been torn from the
Book of Life
. By Kabede’s hand, yes, in a desperate but ultimately
successful act to save them both from the talons of Lilith’s demonic offspring.
But by all that he believed, he was marked to die within the year. If it was
true, and he had no reason to believe it wasn’t, he was going to die without
ever having truly lived the life intended for a mortal man. No wife, no
children, no home to call his own.

And here was young Kabede, ready to
spend his last day of life in ritual. It all seemed absurd now. He felt
trapped, but not by DeKorte or Gans or Jacobi or their plodding horde. He
suddenly felt restrained by the past and his very nature. Watching the wealthy
men coming into his father’s store as a boy, was this how he had envisioned his
life? He thought about Nehema yet again. She was not a woman, he knew, but he
couldn’t keep from thinking of her as one. She was being tortured somewhere in
Yuma, punished for having helped him.

“You still doubt, Rider?” Kabede
asked, as if sensing his consternation.

“I don’t know,” the Rider admitted. “I
don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to believe.”

The guardhouse was sturdy, thick
adobe. Kabede and the Rider were led inside, and saw a row of three cells. The
middle of which was occupied by Belden, who had been dozing on a straw cot, but
got up at their entrance and came to the black iron bars to peer out. His
shackles were gone, and someone had charitably given him a pair of patchy blue
trousers.

The Rider was placed in the far
cell, Kabede in the one closest to the door. Each of the cells was windowless.
Light came from a single solitary aperture about two hand spans wide in the
middle of the opposite wall and whatever managed to seep through the picket
door.

“Brought you some company, Sarge,”
Weeks said to Belden as he and the trooper on duty placed each man in their
cells and locked the doors.

“Mighty white of you, Weeks,” Belden
said.

“I don’t expect you’ll entertain
them long,” said Weeks. “Once the colonel’s settled down about them Mexican
cattle, I’ll be puttin’ my boot to your ass so hard it’ll wind up between your
shoulder blades.”