Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (42 page)

“He won’t ever love again,” the
Rider said aloud, mostly to himself. “Even Emory will suffer for it.” So much
loss in one life. He might even kill himself, he thought.

“I’m going to tell him now,” she
said. “I just wanted to say goodbye, Rider.” She looked back at the climbing
flames.

A gaggle of men from town had
arrived, the fire brigade presumably, and they were yelling back and forth at
each other in the light of the yard, not doing much of anything to fight the
inferno.

When she turned back to the Rider he
was right before her. He had closed the distance silently. She hadn’t heard
him, and when the knife rammed home just beneath her ribcage, the enchanted
point angling up and pricking her heart, she appeared genuinely surprised.

She fell against him, and stroked
his beard affectionately.

“Thank you, Rider.”

She kissed his cheek gently, and her
head fell against his shoulder.

The Rider eased her body down, and
let her lay crumpled on the dark earth. She did not erode or melt away like the
shed
. She was just a dead woman. No.
He had to remember she was not just a woman. The corrupt spirit that animated
this form was gone, he knew. Back to hell, where she could report to her master
Lucifer all that had happened, and rest for a few hundred years till she could
manifest a new earthly form.

He looked at her lying there in the
night, gilded by the fire. She remained beautiful, as if sleeping. He imagined
this was how she might’ve looked had he woken up beside her some still morning,
or rose in the deep of night to put his ear on his fist and watch her.

He felt sick, and turned back to the
river to wash her blood from his hand.

Harry Haddox was standing there,
leaning on a piece of wood, his eye pinched in anger and spilling tears,
seeming to bleed fire. Emory was thankfully still unconscious against his
shoulder. The Rider could see the rising and falling of her chest.

Haddox’s mouth was in a tight,
trembling line, like a tense wire, or a bowstring set to release.

“Harry,” the Rider said, conscious
of the bloody knife in his hand. He ached for the man, ached for what he had
seen and what the Rider could never hope to make him understand.

“Over here, boys,” he bellowed, his
shoulders trembling, the tears coursing down his face, into that angry beard.

The Rider looked back over his
shoulder.

Men were running down from the
burning house. Men with guns.

“What’s goin’ on here, Haddox?”
called a deep voice.

The Rider sighed and turned to meet
them. The firelight shone on his bloody knife and the body of the woman at his
feet.

One of the shadow men stepped
forward, and the Rider saw a glittering star on his chest just before the
barrel of a pistol snaked out and struck him above the eyebrow, knocking him
into oblivion.

His dreams were a roiling vortex of
blurred images and faces. He saw Mazzamauriello, and the Indian
shed
, and Harry Haddox, and Robert, and
Emory, and Reverend Lessmoor clapping his hands, and the Chinese girl from
Delirium Tremens, and the girl in the market who was Nehema, and Sadie tearful,
thankful, and the boy from Polvo Arrido, and Rabbi Belinski raising a cup of
wine and shouting “Mazeltov!” at his Bar Mitzvah. Abe Lillard was lying dead
from a Texas sharpshooter’s bullet and Dick Belden was pulling him up by the
collar and yelling for him to get his ass moving. Kabede was looking out on the
Valle del Torreon, and there was his mother and father on the day he left for
The Sons and then the angel who had walked with him through the
hekhalots
, and she looked pained, and
she tilted her head and stroked the long locks from the sleeping face of The Child
of Calamity, who was sprawled on his back in her lap like a
pietà
.

She looked at him and opened her
mouth to speak, and someone was singing.

He opened his eyes and saw a stone
ceiling.

A man’s voice was singing
Sweet Betsy from Pike.

He rose slowly, and felt his head. A
deep gash had been stitched shut over his right eyebrow, and another over his
left. He must have looked sort of comical.

He was in his shirtsleeves, his
pockets emptied, his pistol and knife gone.

He sat up on a rope cot and swung
his boots to the floor. His head was pounding, and he put his hands against his
temples and looked between his knees at a cockroach scurrying across the dirty
floor.

The singing man must have heard his
boot heels as the Rider heard a creak of a chair and footsteps.

A burly looking man, about the same
shape as the one who had hit him, stood there in a dark vest and rolled up blue
shirtsleeves, a badge marking him as a Territorial Marshal. He was in his late
thirties or early forties, and had a hardcase look about him, a drooping
mustache that made him perpetually frown, above a well groomed goatee. His blue
eyes were bright as robin’s eggs, but there was nothing cheery about them as
they regarded the Rider.

“Know where you are?” he asked
gruffly.

The Rider stared at the black iron
bars of his cage. He could easily guess.

He nodded.

“Guess you know why then.”

There was no point in arguing his
innocence. He wasn’t innocent. He had for all intents and purposes murdered a
woman in front of witnesses.

“What’s going to happen?”

“You’ll be tried and sentenced.”

The Rider looked up at him.

“Sentenced to hang?”

“Oh, don’t worry. We ain’t
uncivilized here. No, we ain’t gonna stretch your neck. Got a nice big prison
up on the hill. Maybe you seen it comin’ in. They’re expanding every day. Got a
need for laborers, and knifin’ a woman to death in front of her husband signs
you on for twenty, twenty five years at the very least, probably life. That’s
if Harry Haddox don’t decide to come in here and invalidate your contract
first.” He sipped his coffee.

The Rider stood up slowly and came
to the bars.

The marshal took a dutiful step
back, but out of good sense, not fear.

The Rider gripped the cool iron and
winced. He’d forgotten his broken fingers. They were stiffly bound up with
surgical tape. He laid his aching head against them. It was hot in here.

“How is Harry Haddox?”

“That’s a helluva thing for you to
ask.”

“How’s his little girl? Emory?”

The marshal’s look hardened.

“You’d do well to cut that talk.”

The Rider shook his head.

“I mean, is she alright?”

“She’s fine,” the marshal said,
looking at him sideways now. “What happened out there? Haddox says a whole gang
of riders blew up his place, shot his wooden leg out from under him. The little
girl says it too. We found twelve horses and some burned up remains all over
the place. Haddox said they came there asking for you.”

The Rider shrugged. What point was
there in going to any of that? The
shedim
were dead and he had still murdered Nehema.

“What about Robert Haddox? Am I
being charged with killing him?”

“Why would you be?” said the
marshal. “It’s plain that he fell off one of them woodpiles, or maybe a horse
during the shootout. How else could his head get twisted ‘round like that? No,
you’ll go down for Nemmy Haddox and that’s all. Unless there’s somethin’ about
Robert’s death you wanna tell me.”

The Rider said nothing.

The marshal studied the Rider for a
moment.

“I’m supposed to ask your name. For
the court papers.”

“Joe Lillard,” said the Rider.

“Funny,” said Books. “Harry Haddox
says you gave him the name Joe Rider. And the little girl says you’re her
uncle.”

The Rider said nothing again, though
he cursed himself for having used that name. Now it was inevitable that he’d be
traced to his New Mexico warrant.

“What’s
your
name?” he asked the marshal.

“Books,” said the marshal. “Haddox
said you knew his wife, but he didn’t claim no kinship.”

“I knew her. We weren’t kin.”

“She owe you money?”

“No.”

“Jilt you?”

“No.”

“Then what’d you kill her for?”

The Rider shrugged. “You wouldn’t
believe me.”

Marshal Books scratched his nose and
went back to his office out front.

“Between you and your Maker now, I
guess,” he called, settling back into his protesting chair.

“Yes,” said the Rider, closing his
eyes. “I guess it is.”

The Rider turned away and went back
to the cot.

At
thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. They go up
by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast
founded for them. Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they
turn not again to cover the earth. —
Psalms 104:7-9

On his second afternoon in the
county jail across the street from the Yuma courthouse, the Rider watched the
double funeral possession through his barred window as it bore the bodies of
Nehema and Robert Haddox in their coffins up to the military cemetery at Fort
Yuma. Though he glimpsed the tearful little Emory Haddox in the arms of a woman
he didn’t know, he saw nothing of her father, Harry.

The same day, a little man from the
Arizona Sentinel came to interview him, but he declined. Marshal Books told the
reporter the name the Rider had given him and some details of the crime for
which he would likely spend the rest of his life in the Territorial Prison up
on the hill, then sent him away.

Not two days later Books rapped on
his cell bars in the early morning with a tin cup and slid an all-too familiar
New Mexico Territorial wanted poster across the floor to him.

The Rider didn’t have to look at it.
He knew well what it said.

“Looks like you left some minor
details out of our initial interview, Mister Joe Lillard,” Books said, spitting
on the floor. “Or is it Rider? Or Maizel? Either way, our Mister Bantas at the
newspaper recollected your description.”

There was a thousand dollar reward
for his capture in New Mexico Territory. Books must have been kicking himself
for not having collected it himself.

“What happens now?” the Rider asked,
sighing and rubbing his eyes.

He had hoped to avoid drawing the
attention of Adon and his Creed to this town. He was pretty sure that in luring
him to Yuma, Lilith had acted of her own accord, probably at the behest of her
shedim
offspring. But he didn’t want
Adon or the Creed here. The last time he had tangled with the turncoat Merkabah
Riders, an entire town, a valley full of desert dwellers, and a garrison of
soldiers had been killed. Every day he had asked Marshal Books when his trial
was, and every day Books had assured him it was coming. The proceedings had
been on hold in lieu of the circumstances, allowing the family time to mourn
their dead before rounding everybody up in for his trial. He had grown more and
more anxious over the appointed day. Now it didn’t matter anymore.

“Now Judge Berry sends a wire to
Santa Fe informing the governor’s office that we’ve got you. You’ll likely be
extradited.”

“How long will that take?”

“What’re you in a hurry to get to?”
Books asked. “Here you might’ve gotten to live the rest of your life on a rock
pile. Back in New Mexico they’ll hang you for what you done.” He motioned to
the paper. “Says there you swiped somethin’ off H.T. Magwood over in Cochise
County.”

“Do you know the man?” the Rider
asked.

“I know the name, and that he runs
cattle in the San Pedro River Valley. We’ll be wiring him as well. I expect he’ll
come to call on you before the week’s out.”

Magwood. H.T. Magwood of Delirium
Tremens. The man’s name was on the poster, offering an additional reward for
the return of the ancient scroll the Rider had supposedly stolen from him. But
the Rider had never met the man. He was an associate of Adon whoever he was,
and apparently had connections in high places in the New Mexico territorial
government. This was the first he’d heard Magwood was a cattleman.

“You really kill all them fellas in
New Mexico?” Books asked.

“No,” said the Rider.

“But you admit you killed the Haddox
woman.”

“Yes,” the Rider affirmed. “You saw
me.”

Books stared at the Rider and then
returned to his office.

The next day Books announced that a
lady had come to see him.

He had expected Lilith might make a
play for him before the authorities locked him up somewhere she couldn’t easily
get, or dropped him through a gallows’ door.