Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (46 page)

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 wall
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.