Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (51 page)

They saw the tiny human life inside,
though from the perspective of the dreaming world the fetus was suddenly
hundreds of feet tall. It revolved slowly in the amniotic fluids like a
planetary system in the sea of space. Lailah, the tiny midwife angel with blurring
hummingbird wings whispering the secrets of Paradise and the Torah in its otic
pits as they began to bloom before their eyes into ears, like great shells
carved by unseen currents. The baby formed at an accelerated rate, organs
budding in bursts of color and form, nervous system sprouting like a branching
tree, heart growing and pumping, tooth buds swelling in its widening mouth. It
was like watching marble or clay melt into a statue without seeing the sculptor’s
hand at work. Then, a baby with dark skin and head of black curling hair,
turned on its head. The angel turned with it.

Lailah leaned forward then, to
deliver the strike on the upper lip that would shock the tiny mind into
forgetting the lessons. The angel turned, looking heavenward, then flitted away
in distress, the task unfinished.

The baby moved, squeezing. The
exertions of a woman, and then the little nasal cries, the flush of oxygen into
the fledgling lungs, flooding the grey skin with the color of life.

“Incredible,” Adon murmured. “Incredible.
The angel Lailah interrupted. He was born with all that knowledge. A
tzadik
. Surely, a true, living
tzadik
.”

The Rider shook his head. He was
giving so much away, but here, Adon was his namesake. Lord and master. He had
no experience with this. It was too wild, too free. He felt like a bushel of
leaves, and Adon could shake him, turn him upside down and look at everything
that fell out.

He had no anchor. No protection.

“Ah,” said Adon, concentrating. “Bal…Bala…Balankab.
Very good, Rider. Now,” he said, as all the Rider knew of Kabede’s life flashed
forward at blinding speed to their violent meeting in Escopeta.

“What about the scroll now, Rider?”
Adon said casually. “Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know it’s with Kabede. Where did
you send him though?”

The image of Balankab was gone. The
figure of Kabede turned, and was then walking with the Rod like a pilgrim along
a lonely desert road. The boiling mist ahead of him broke into a town.
Buildings rose from the dust, a street. People passed up and down the
thoroughfare. Tombstone as he’d last laid eyes upon it, years ago.

“I’ve been to this place,” Adon said
to himself. “Where?
Where
?”

The Rider tried to stop from
thinking, but his mind automatically filled in the gaps. The saloons, the corrals,
a photography studio. He had been through Tombstone years ago. It was
impossible that he remembered every detail. But Adon said he’d been there too,
and he realized then this was a shared memory. What the Rider didn’t remember,
Adon could fill in.

Then a single figure came marching
down the street. A woman.

God,
thought the Rider.
God, no!

Her gait, her dark hair. She was not
yet fully formed, but he knew it was Sadie. Josephine Marcus, the Jewish woman
from Tip Top. She had said she was relocating to Tombstone. Trusting this, he
had told Spates to mail the translation of Sheardown’s correspondence to her.
Why had he unwittingly endangered her? Now, Adon would know of her too.

“Who’s this?” Adon said, pointing to
the approaching woman.

“No,” shouted the Rider.

Then, as if someone had whispered it
in his ear, the angel’s words came back to him.

The answer to a question he had
never asked.

The Thunder of God.

Say
it in your dreams
, she’d said.

“In my dreams,” he murmured, feeling
his soul swell and rise.

“What?” Adon snapped.

He had been turned away from the
Throne of the Lord by Metatron. Else he might’ve recognized her, standing there
at the left before Gabriel himself, presiding over his twelve ministers.

She had given him the name of the
Baal ha-Cholem
who interpreted the
dreams of Nebuchadnezzar for Daniel, and the dreams of Pharaoh for Joseph. The
Sar ha-Cholem,
who by her own admission,
had sent Kabede to him.

Her own name. His guardian angel.
The
Sar ha-Cholem
. The Angel of
Dreams.

Every
blade of grass has its own angel who compels it to grow
, said the Midrash.

Often he had thought of this. There
were angelic names on all of his talismans, calling upon the various celestial
wardens to watch over him according to their specialties. There was an angel
who could turn aside the attacks of serpents. An angel of snow. An angel of
hail.

Adon might be formidable here, but
the Angel of Dreams was the true lord of this dizzying realm.

He could call on her. Just as
Reverend Lessmoor had called on The Lord of Thunderstorms, he could call on the
Thunder of God.

Now.

“Ragshiel,” said the Rider,
concentrating wholly upon that name. It echoed in the wintery silence.

Josephine’s emerging features blew
away, scattered into the chaos of the dreaming by the blazing light that
exploded from within.

She came on, still the figure of a
pale woman, but now a woman of terrible light and fury. Her pale, white-gold
hair was unbound, and whipped about like wheat stalks in a cyclone as she left
the surface of the rutted street and massive elegant wings unfolded from her
back. With one beat of those wings the half-formed backdrop of the town
shattered and exploded into whirling chaos, and she propelled herself towards
the Rider and Adon.

Adon shrank before her.

No parasol in her hand now, she bore
a great drum, suspended by a golden harness.

“You presume to encroach upon
my
domain, mortal?” she accused. Her
voice and expression were tremendous and withering.

Adon threw up his hands, his lips
trembling.

“Skulking, ghostly pissant,”
Ragshiel bellowed as she came. “Long have I hunted you among the dreams of men.
At last here you are.
Acher!
Dweller
on The Threshold.”

Adon regained himself long enough to
stretch his hands in a weird pass and glare defiantly up at the terrible figure
swooping down on him.

Ragshiel beat a thunderous rhythm on
the great drum. Each strike seemed to beat not only the drum, but the world
itself. Adon himself shook to pieces, beginning with his hands and traveling
down his arms to the elbow. Everything the sound touched seemed to simply
crumble away. Then Adon vanished.

Not only him, but the numberless
dreams that surrounded them and filled the gulf began to burst and dissipate
like bubbles.

Ragshiel ceased beating the drum and
looked down at the Rider.

“I have wakened the world, Rider,”
she said. “
Acher
is not dead. He has
fled. Find him.”

Where? He wanted to shout back. How?

But then he was awake in his own
body, and there was a violent hiss close in his ear. He turned his head and opened
his mouth, remembering Adon’s words (and wishing just then that he could
remember the name of that angel whose precinct was serpents), and caught the
rattlesnake around the throat in his teeth. It thrashed and coiled about his
fumbling hands, but he couldn’t imagine it was more terrified than he was.

He staggered to his feet, wrestling
with the thing in the dark, not daring to bite down or to sling it away for
fear that it would slip from his jaws and kill him dead. He had heard a saying
that the truly righteous were immune to snake bites, but he wasn’t about to
test his own righteousness just then.

Then the door to the Dark Cell
opened and a huge form stalked into the doorway.

Things seemed to align in that
instant. The efforts of the snake shifted just so. The Rider opened his mouth
and hurled the hissing, rattling thing straight at the figure in the doorway.

O’Doyle shrieked once, but the sound
died in his throat. The terrified rattler struck half a dozen times before he
fell back against the rock wall, twice darting its snapping head into his
gaping mouth.

The Rider staggered toward the
silvery light, pausing only to dip his hand down and snag O’Doyle’s Winchester.

He left the man gagging and
twitching on the floor and passed out into the darkened yard.

Adon would be in Laird’s office. The
Rider slid along the shadowed walls like a rat keeping to the dark.

The Incorrigible guards were
pointing their guns at the cages, hissing urgent enquiries at the two convicts
who were sitting upright in their cots.

“What’s the matter with you all?”

“What happened?” one of the convicts
asked as the Rider slipped behind them and made for the Yard Office.

“You both woke up screamin’ like a
couple of banshees,” said the other guard. “Scared the piss outta me.”

“Had a nightmare. There was this…big
sound. Noise. Like a…”

“Like big goddamn drum,” finished
the other.

“Yeah,” said the first, staring at
the other.

The Rider slinked on.

He heard hushed conversations
similar to that one echoing in the stone chambers of the main cell block. All
the prisoners had awoken at the same time. Ragshiel had roused the world to
flush Adon out.

The guards were unlocking the cell
block gates to go in and see what the commotion was. A few others were walking
dazed across the yard from their quarters, pulling up their britches and
whispering to each other.

No one noticed the Rider.

No one but the thin figure who came
out of the Yard Office unannounced as he was passing the door and collided with
him.

The Rider threw him against the wall
and drew him down into a dark shadow cast by the door, one hand clamped over
the interloper’s mouth.

It was Jethro Auspitz. The man with
Adon’s face.

The Rider put a finger to his lips
until Auspitz stopped struggling, then slowly moved his hand enough for the man
to speak.

“Oh God,” Auspitz whispered, eyes
bugging. “Don’t kill me. Please…please I…I don’t even know you…”

“I know,” the Rider whispered back. “I
know, and I’m sorry. It was a mistake. What are you doing out here?”

“Darning stockings,” Auspitz said. “They…they
let me walk back to the cell block on my own.”

“You’ve got to come with me.”

“What? No! Please…I thought you said…”

“I won’t hurt you again. But listen
to me. You have to come with me. I can’t let you go back there.”

“Are you…escaping?” he said in an
even lower voice.

The Rider opened his mouth, and
Auspitz grabbed hold of his arms.

“
Please
take me with you. I don’t belong here. I don’t even know how I got here. I didn’t
do
anything. I can’t take it. I can’t
live like this.”

“Alright,” the Rider said. He wasn’t
exactly planning to escape, but alright. “Just stay close. Come on.”

The Rider released his hold on the
man, and true to form, he ducked down and followed the Rider along the wall.

They reached the superintendant’s
office undetected, and for a moment the Rider was sure he and Adon would move
into the shadows and find mud-crusted LaChappa laying in wait there, springing
out of the black with that stubby, painted club to bash their skulls to pieces.
But the Indian was nowhere to be seen. It would be moments before one or more
of the guards went pounding on the door to alert Laird about the weird ruckus
going on all over the prison.

The Rider paused only for a moment
and gestured for Auspitz to stay close and keep quiet.

Then he kicked open the office door.

Adon was seated at the desk,
groggily rubbing his temples with the knuckles of either hand. He half leapt
from the chair as the Rider and Auspitz barged in. He lunged for the desk
drawer, but the Rider lurched across the room and swung the barrel of the rifle
out, catching the man’s jaw and putting him to the floor.

Except it wasn’t Adon anymore. It
was just Laird.

The Rider knew, standing over the
groaning acting superintendant. Something in his eyes. The Rider didn’t know
this man at all.

Still, the Rider levered the
Winchester and put the barrel against his forehead.

“Whoo…whoo…tha…hell’re uuu?” Laird
mumbled over his sagging, broken jaw.

The man didn’t even know him. They
had never met.

Adon was gone.

He had come in here to kill Adon,
though come to think of it, that would have meant murdering the acting
superintendant, an innocent man for all he knew. But Adon had leapt away into
another body. He could be a guard, one of the Quechans, a convict even.

He hadn’t really planned to live
through this.