Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (4 page)

“Be looking forward to that,” Belden
said.

Weeks grunted in answer and went
outside with Quincannon and the trooper. The picket door closed and the bar
fell across it. They sat in the dim as the sentry outside whistled ”Old Joe
Clark.”

“Well,” said Belden after a bit. “If
nobody’s said it yet, welcome to Camp Eckfeldt.”

“Your commanding officer gave us
quite a welcome,” the Rider said, leaning through the bars to speak to his
unseen friend.

“He’s not my commanding officer,”
Belden corrected him. “Not anymore.”

“I saw. How did that all come about,
Dick?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Manx and I don’t
share the same perspective on discipline, I’m afraid. The man’s a goddamn
martinet. Remember what General Ford used to say? ‘You can tell an officer’s
worth by the stripes on his horse.’ If he could, Manx would flay a bugler to
the bone for blowing a bum note at reveille.”

“It’s a good thing they outlawed
flogging then,” said the Rider, “or your drummer would’ve been beaten to death
long ago.”

Belden chuckled.

“Ah, you heard our Trooper Hutch? He’s
a piss poor percussionist, I’ll grant, but I’d rather have him drum me out than
John Lincoln Clem. His problem is nobody can stand to let him practice. He
loves that drum, though. The man’s got this little candle he keeps in his kit,
but never lights—just keeps it to wax the threading.”

Belden settled to the floor by the
sound of him, and put his head back against the wall.

“Manx just doesn’t understand his
post. He was aide-de-camp to some general all through the war, never saw any
action. Now he wants medals, so he pestered some poor bastard day and night for
a command smack dab in the middle of the great big Indian Wars. But his higher
up got the better of him in the end, assigned him to a nowhere outpost of no
military significance. This place has held the camp designation for four years.
Four years. The War Department established it to guard a railroad route that
never came. Surveyors moved the route forty miles in another direction. Found a
better source of water. Got to keep those big black engines steaming, you know.
Railroad left, most of the settlers and the speculators who’d been anticipating
the route, they all left. Hell, even the hostiles left. Who’d fight over a
patch of sand like this? But, due to some clerical oversight, Camp Eckfeldt
stayed. When I got here, the last commanding officer, Colonel Kliegg, he
spelled it out for me pretty plain.

“An outpost like this,” he said, “the
well-being of the enlisted men is the primary concern of the officers,
commissioned and non-commissioned alike.”

“See, Kliegg understood. In a place
like this, men go crazy if you’re not careful. They shoot each other or
themselves. They got to have an outlet. Drillin’ don’t work. You get a man all
geed up, if there’s nothin’ to fight on the end of it, they start into each
other. Since there were no women available, Kliegg called on my particular
expertise.”

“What expertise is that?” the Rider
asked.

“Moonshine,” Belden snickered. “Like
Sherman said, ‘the glory of war is all moonshine.’ Old Kliegg had himself a
helluva time with some local whiskey peddlers. They’d jacked up the going
prices on busthead so high he was having difficulty keeping the men wet. But,
you know, my pa taught me how to build and run a still when I was knee high to
a grasshopper. So, my first duty as sergeant major was to make Camp Eckfeldt
self-sufficient.” He laughed and slapped his leg. “Old Kliegg put me through
for a commendation on the sly. Ah, he was a good old soldier.”

Belden was quiet for a moment.

“What happened to him?” the Rider
asked, settling on the floor himself, back to back with his old comrade except
for the adobe wall between them.

“He was a champion drunkard himself.
Pickled his liver, I expect. I found him in his cot one morning when he didn’t
turn out for reveille. Then they sent us Manx.”

The Rider watched a roach crawl up
the wall.

“Why did you beat up Lieutenant
Cord?”

“Manx tell you that?”

“I saw your knuckles.”

“Well, the first and second
lieutenants, Portis and Cord, they never cared much for Kliegg’s ways. Manx was
more their type. They just about jumped for joy when he showed up. First thing
Manx did was call me in and order me to bust up the still. Then he had Weeks
and Quincannon and me drag all the whiskey barrels to the parade ground and
assemble the men. He said somethin’ like…oh yeah—
Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune
. Took an axe to the
whole stock. Sand drank up the lot.

“Then he started into drillin’ the
boys. Marched ‘em around, took ‘em to task for every spit and polish bit of
minute bullshit he could find. Then came the patrols. We hadn’t had regular patrols
in the four years I’d been under Kliegg. Nobody comes around here. Sometimes
the Mexicans down at the edge of the valley have trouble with their neighbors,
or rustlers passin’ through, then we mount up, sure. But his patrols turned
into expeditions. Some trooper made off with an extra sack of sugar in the
night, Manx blamed it on Indians or Mexican thieves, led punitive squads down
into the valley and rousted the little
ranchitos
and the Yaqui villages, busted up that cafe in Escopeta one time. Pissed off
all our neighbors, is all he did. God forbid he ever came across a band of real
hostiles.

“The boys started gettin’ mean under
him. They needed something, so I rebuilt the still in one of the picket
storehouses. It was stupid of me really, to trust a buncha dumb kids to keep
quiet. Cord found out, and he figured he’d butter up to Manx with his
discovery, but he had to do it big, so he set the damn still on fire. All that
pressure, and the alcohol…it burned real hot. Fire nearly reached the armory. All
that dynamite left over from clearing this place…I don’t like to think what
could’ve happened. As it was, it burned up a lot of the outbuildings. We had a
trooper, a Polack named Skonicki. He got caught up in it. Burned all his hair
and most of his hide off. Burned him so bad you couldn’t tell his coat from his
flesh. He just laid there cryin’ and tremblin,’ begging for somebody to go to
his bunk and bring him his rosary.

“So, that’s when Cord walks up and
says, “None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t rebuilt that damned still,
Sergeant.”

“I don’t know what come over me
after that. I kept hearin’ that boy gaspin’ in my ears. Weeks laid a carbine
upside my head to get me off of Cord.

“You know, Manx wanted to have me
shot. He said we were in war time. Doc Milton, that’s our surgeon, said he’d do
everything he could to bring Manx up on charges if they shot me. I guess he
saved my life; what’s left of it.”

“What do you mean, what’s left of
it?” It was Kabede who asked that.

“I mean, I been in the Army for
fifteen years. All I got that’s mine is my saddle and my boots and twenty-five
dollars tucked in my sock. I don’t even have a horse for the saddle. Before you
two showed up I was thinkin’ about walkin’ down to a hacienda on the east end
of the valley. There’s a fat Mexican gal there does our washin’ sometimes, who
favors me now and again with a smile. Past that, I’ve got no plans for the rest
of my life.”

The Rider thought on Belden’s words.
The rest of their lives could be quite finite indeed if they didn’t find a way
out of course, but beyond even the impending attack by Adon’s riders, he’d
thought now and again about life after he found Adon. Like Belden, he had
little in the way of possessions or skills even, outside of his mystic
training. What use was that when you came down to it? He was thirty-five
years-old, and still living the life of a transient. How long could it go on?

Then of course, how much time was
allotted to him now? According to what he believed, only a single year. He had
spent the past ten years looking towards something. Had the years without
fulfillment taken their toll upon him at last? He felt as if incessantly
looking to a future of violence, he had neglected all the peaceful moments of
his existence.

What if in the end, he did kill
Adon? Would it even stop the doom of the Hour of Incursion? What could one man
really do to aide or defy the Great Old Ones?

Outside, there was a commotion of
horses and the tinkling of harnesses and gear. They observed shadows moving
across the picket door.

“That must be the patrol the colonel
ordered,” Kabede observed.

“That fool,” said the Rider. “They
won’t come back.”

“Why not?” Belden asked. “What’s
comin’ Joe? What’s this flapdoodle about you bein’ responsible for a massacre?”

“I was there,” the Rider said. “But
I wasn’t responsible.”

“I figured as much. Now, what about
those three who’re are after you?”

Belden was no babe in the woods when
it came to the preternatural undercurrent of the world. He’d experienced it
firsthand alongside the Rider a few times during the war. The first time the
Rider had ever fought
shedim
they had
been Missouri bushwhackers, and Belden had been right there beside him. But
Belden didn’t know everything.

“You know, I saw ‘em when they were
here,” Belden went on. “Three of ‘em. Odd bunch. One was a Dutchman, and he
spoke for the other two. Didn’t have a lick of hair between them. Not even
eyebrows.”

The Rider wondered at that. Some
deliberate statement on their part, or a side-effect of whatever powers they
were calling on?

“That
is
strange,” Kabede remarked. “What else do you remember about
them?”

“Well, we took them for pilgrims or
something at first,” said Belden. “They were strung with more medallions and
doodads than a
penitente
come Easter.
Actually, they spent two days here.”

“They
did
?” said the Rider sharply.

“Yeah. One of ‘em was sick. Doc
Milton tended to him. Manx hit it off with the Dutchman. He claims some German
on his mother’s side, I guess, and they talked about…well, whatever Germans talk
about.”

“Do you mean…DeKorte, or Jacobi?”
asked Kabede.

“When Americans say ‘Dutchman’ they
usually mean German,” the Rider explained. It was a colloquialism that had
taken him some getting used to in his youth.

“Shvurt, or Shvert, was the name of
the one that Manx took a shine to,” Belden confirmed. “He gave Manx your wanted
poster. I didn’t know it was you at first. The beard and all. Milton said the
one he doctored was called…LeBook-lee-yay? A Frenchman. I never heard the
others’ name. They’re not just bounty hunters, are they?” he pressed.

“No,” the Rider said. “It’s hard to
say what they are.”

“Old friends?” Belden ventured. “Pardon
me for sayin,’ but you look to share the same flare for
bijouterie
. You always carried a couple lucky charms when I knew
you, but you’ve picked up a lot more since.”

“I need more luck these days,” the
Rider said absently. “What was the matter with Le Bouclier, the one the surgeon
saw?”

“Twisted ankle. His horse threw him,
they said. And that ain’t all. They had a corpse with ‘em.”

“A corpse?”

“Yep,” Belden affirmed. “Their
comrade in arms. They said they’d come across your camp and you’d killed him.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, he sure smelled dead. They
buried him in the post cemetery.”

“Why would they do that?” the Rider
wondered aloud.

“They did it themselves too. Wouldn’t
let nobody else attend to it. They said it was agin their religion.”

“I think we should probably dig up
that corpse,” said Kabede.

“Yes,” said the Rider. “Where’s the
post cemetery?”

“You passed it on the way up. It’s
easy to miss. There ain’t but six graves, including the stranger’s. You gonna
tell me what’s going on?” Belden asked. “I’ve seen some strange things in your
company, ‘member. I learned a long time ago not to discount your explanations.
But something tells me rock salt and demonpunching ain’t going to be enough for
this bunch. Am I right?”

“The trouble is,” said the Rider, “we
don’t really know what they’re capable of, or what their weaknesses are. These
aren’t like the
shedim
bushwhackers
you and I fought.”

“Well that’s a relief, anyway,” said
Belden.

“No it’s not, Dick. They could be
far worse. For one thing, they can project themselves into another man’s body,
wear him around like a suit.”

“Jesus. What else?”

“They have an army of walking dead
at their command,” said Kabede.

“Walking dead?”

“All of Escopeta at least. Maybe
every man, woman, and child in the vicinity,” said the Rider. “We saw them fall
en masse
down a mountain and get up
on broken legs. They’re slow, but they don’t feel pain.”

“Anything else?” Belden chuckled
nervously.

“Maybe,” said the Rider. “These men
are in league with the darkest powers I’ve ever run across.”