Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (28 page)

The
remaining four hissed and rattled their displeasure, but kept out of the
firelight, circling in the shadows with newfound respect for the solitary
beast. The animal flicked its tail and shook the blood of their brother from
its lips, mane bristling, heavy hooves pawing the dirt nervously.

Still
its master didn’t move.

* * *
*

Piishi poised at the brim of one of
the foul smelling cracks in the earth and drew back on his bow. He launched a
fiery star arrow into the knot of quivering tubers. There was a gibbering
clamor from somewhere beneath his feet and the tentacles retracted as if stung.
Whether it was the fire or the star symbol on the arrowhead that caused the
thing pain he didn’t know, but he drove the lashing roots back underground with
two more fiery arrows.

He
spun and transfixed a seeking extremity with a fourth arrow and it recoiled and
lurched away, shaking like a finger trying to extricate a biting vermin. He
drew and fired as fast as he could pull the star arrows from his carcage and
light them with the burning rag hanging from between his teeth. He arced them
up and sent them sizzling down into the holes broken in the earth, ceasing the
advance of the deadly trees.

Something
attached itself to his ankle and pulled his feet out from under him. He landed
hard on his back and in a moment the stinking tubers encircled his wrists and
ankles and drew his limbs tight. He felt sure he would be pulled to bloody
pieces, but he was yanked up bodily into the air of a sudden and born by the
rough roots toward the broken walls of Red House.

There
on the wall, awaiting him was a dark, many horned figure he knew to be The
Black Goat Man.

His
coarse hair was wet and plastered to his misshapen form as though he was newborn.
His oversized head was crowned with two sets of black, twisted horns, and two
more sprouted from below the line of his jaw giving him the appearance of some
terrible, petrified blossom.

He
was naked, but only his arms and feverish yellow eyes remained manlike. The
rest was wholly animal, with tapering haunches hung with stringy hair and
ending in black hooves. His gnarled hands were clasped appraisingly behind his
back and he stank like a putrid thing.

* * *
*

Mauricio shivered in the naked air. He had not ventured this long from
the womb of his mistress in ages. The desert wind seemed biting to him compared
to her warmth.

He
looked out on the empty clearing. Besides the waving tendrils poking through
the ground, there was no disturbance. There was no sign that in the Unknown
Country, a great battle was being fought, and won, by his eternal servants.
They were the transfigured shades of those savages that in their desperation
called out to Shub-Niggurath for mercy and been granted a dark boon and
perpetual service in the ranks of
Her
phantom
garrison.

Chaksusa’s
gambit had failed. His army of pitiful ghosts would be disbanded, and he would
bathe in the blood of this, his lone champion.
A wily, but
ineffectual little savage.
He had stung his Lady and like an offending
insect, and must now be swatted.

But
as his Lady bore the struggling animal towards him, he felt the death of the
Cold Ones somewhere down the mountain, and the loss of some of his caballeros
in the Unknown Country.

One
more remained. The one
She
had whispered of.
The walker between worlds.
It was he that threatened to turn
the tide.

He
regarded the Indian bound in the grasp of his Mistress.

Tilting
back his head, he drew in a deep gulp of air, outstretched his arms, and exhaled.
A black breath expelled from his lungs and spread out like smoke from a stack,
blotting out the stars and the waning moon.

Piishi
watched with bugging eyes as the black cloud rolled over him. He felt his lungs
burning as if filled with boiling water. His eyes seemed to leak blood and his
head swam. He fought the grip of the monster, but with the stinking breath of
the Black Goat Man he could not contend. His gorge rose, and his ears pounded
and his head lolled limp. The last thing he saw was the black smoke still
pouring from the Goat Man flowing like fog down the wall, across the ground and
cascading down the mountainside.

* * *
*

The Rider blasted another of the caballeros to nothingness, but the
others retreated behind a screen of savage spirits that pressed his own army
and fought to reach him.

Then
Don Amadeo was at his side, lunging with his blade at the groping hands of the
enemy ghosts.

“An
ill wind is upon us!” Amadeo yelled. “Look!”

The
Rider glanced in the direction indicated and saw a pale green smoke rolling
across the battlefield like an evil fog. He could not understand what he was
looking at, but he sought its source, and saw it was Red House. Some weapon of
Mauricio or his benefactress. Yet even now it flowed around the ankles of the
combatants and seemed to have no effect.

He
looked up at the few clouds in the red sky with its black stars and black bow
of a moon. These weird hues he had grown accustomed to in his excursions to the
Yenne Velt—they were shadows cast by the real world. Then this fog must be
occurring in the real world as well. It was not intended to affect the outcome
of the battle.

He
peered hard at Red House, and saw black trees shuddering about its base, and
more, in the midst of the dark forest a flickering silver light such as he had
seen before. It was a human soul as it appeared in this echo world, a bright
beacon. But it was failing.

He
knew it must be Piishi. He had been captured, and now Mauricio had sent out
this fog to find him.

“I
have to go,” he said to Amadeo.

Amadeo
looked at him.

“If
you leave us we will be destroyed.”

“This
fight can’t be won here,” the Rider said. “Hold out as long as you can.”

He
withdrew himself, and the clatter and screams of the battle died away with the
echoing protests of Amadeo. The stark mirror world was sucked away in his
inward rush, as if it were the checkered pattern on a tablecloth pulled out
from under a place setting.

His
consciousness was drawn back swiftly on a silvery umbilical of will to his waiting
body, and he plunged through the top of his skull, slamming back into his
physical form like a man leaping into a saddle. His eyes snapped open and he
saw the glittering reptilian eyes shining beyond the firelight.

The
onager nudged him anxiously.

He
shrugged past its head and pulled the grey green Star-Stone of Mnar from his
coat pocket and held it aloft in one trembling fist, his skin prickling as it
reawakened.

The
old Hindu’s dying words repeated themselves in his mind.

“SHAMBLAPARN!”
he croaked.

He
felt a thrumming within his palm, as if he held a hatching egg. A flash of
white light burst forth from the center of the stone, projecting the glyph
outward, with a sound like a lightning crack. The star and eye seal lanced into
the dark and fell full upon the chest of one of the lurking Cold Ones. The
hissing creature looked for a moment like a wild thing caught in the spot of a
midnight hunter’s light, reptilian eyes shining like colored glass. Then it
erupted into a figure of living fire and was gone in a puff of ash, like wind
scattering a pile of dry leaves. The stone shook in his hand and emitted an
expanding pulse of white brilliance. The light washed out the orange of the dim
campfire. It flung back the shadows on the surrounding trees and instantly
burned up the rolling black fog filling the dark heavens. It shrunk the irises
of the onager and flared in the faces of the three remaining Cold Ones poised
to strike at the edge of his camp.

He
saw them clearly as the white fire fully illuminated their mottled, scaly
proto-human forms. They hissed in unison like frightened cats and then the
light tripled its intensity and traveled outward in so bright a blast that even
the Rider in his Solomonic spectacles had to look away. He felt the stone
shiver and explode like glass in his hand with a final crack and in an instant
it was engulfed in light and disappeared, leaving his palm blackened and
smoking. He squeezed his eyes shut and the violet silhouettes of the rearing
creatures danced on his eyelids before he could look again.

When
at last he could move, he lit his lantern and shined it outwards.

Of
the Cold Ones there was no sign.

He
calmed the animal with a reassuring scratch behind the ears and scrabbled out
into the dark, revenant lights bouncing before him as he found the trail and
ran up towards Red House.

Near
where he’d seen the trees in the Yenne Velt, he came across Piishi’s bow and
two of the arrows marked with the Elder Sign. He hastily gathered them up and
kept going.

He
found Piishi sitting at the base of the ancient wall with his head drooping
between his knees. At first the Rider thought he was dead. When the lantern
light shined on him, he lifted his head slowly and blinked. He was splattered
in some viscous stuff, tar-like in color and consistency. There was a noxious
odor permeating the whole area.

“What
happened?” he asked, setting down the light and the bow and arrows and looking
him over as the Indian had him after the Cold Ones’ ambush the night before.

Piishi
shook his head.

“I
was held in the arms of the monster,” he said, after finding his voice. “I saw
the Black Goat Man. Then I saw…a bright light. It burned away…everything.” He
rubbed the slime between his fingers. It was all that remained of the thing that
had held him.

“What
about the Goat Man?” The Rider asked.

“Down
there,” Piishi said, nodding past the wall.

The
Rider stood and moved towards the wall. Piishi grabbed the hem of his coat.

“You
are going?”

The
Rider nodded.

Piishi
sighed and stood up, picking up the bow and the arrows.

“Alright.
For Tats’adah, I will go with you.”

The
Rider picked up the lantern and followed its light over the broken stones into
the crumbling ruin of Red House. It wasn’t long before he found a sand-swept passage
gaping black in the foundation, a concealing stone cast aside and shattered
nearby.

He
checked to make sure Piishi was still with him,
then
hurried down the stone steps. He knew the way.

Down
to the black coolness, the light only penetrating a few feet in front of them
though it shone brightly, as though the darkness were a thing tangible—not a
mere shadow to be dispersed by lamplight, but a dense tangle of black webwork
and they dauntless flies pressing through beyond all sense.

The
Rider did not notice the smell this time. It was already all over Piishi, that
yawning compost stink. When they reached the well room with its blasphemous
idols squatting in their age-dusted alcoves, he was not surprised to find the
transfigured Mauricio standing there as though waiting for the two of them.

He
was as Piishi had seen him, but now his fur was patched and singed, and black
skin showed through. One horn had snapped off.

He
uttered some braying, unintelligible words as they gained the room, and the Rider
felt a numbness envelope his throat.

He
tried to again speak the word of power Chaksusa had taught him, but found his
vocal chords were paralyzed, as numb as a limb without circulation. He
swallowed, and found he could hardly work any of the muscles in his throat.
Beside him, Piishi too had been affected by the spell. The bow and arrows
clattered to his feet as the Apache slapped both hands to his constricting
throat and stared wildly at the Rider, not understanding.

The
lantern slipped from the Rider’s hands and fell to the rock floor, but did not
break. It rolled back and forth. The light strobed hypnotically on the Black
Goat Man as he spread his arms wide and turned, the movement jumpy and weird as
he flashed in and out of the dark. He stood at the edge of the well and looked
down.

* * *
*

Mauricio
turned his back contemptuously on the dirty savage and the walker between
worlds, whose power was not near as threatening once robbed of the word of
power the old bastard Chaksusa had taught him.

The
ancient spell had been a powerful one, true. It had even wounded the
extremities of his Love, and blasted him off the top of the wall so suddenly
and with such force he had thought in a moment’s panic the world had ended.
Old fears, instilled in him at an early age by sexless women in
dark robes and ridiculous habits, their shapeless waists encircled by wooden
beads and dangling crucifixes.
Unfounded, now that the Old Gods were
returning. The world would not end. It would begin again; remade in a more perfect
image.