Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (31 page)

The vision was gone. Don Elfego
blinked it away. He went for his pistol and his muddy fingers groped at an
empty holster. Even his knife was gone.

The other
rurales
were praying, as if they, murderers and rapists that most
of them were, had any right to call upon the Virgin and the saints to save
them.

Don Elfego knelt, and his eyes moved
from the old Indian man in red to the trickling waterfall behind him, to the
great rock wall from which it flowed.

He saw the veins of glittering gold,
sprouting outward in all directions like a vast system of hemic vessels through
which coursed the glorious sunshine blood of a god on high.

He thought of his old father and his
son and he began to laugh.

The Rider/Piishi blinked and the
rurales
were falling out of the coursing
waterfall, stumbling out of the water, and then tripping over each other in the
circle of Indians like a herd of confused, sickly cattle about to be shot down.

Many were cursing, wide-eyed,
shaking their heads. Many more were praying. Some were even kissing crosses
that dangled from wooden bead rosaries around their necks, tucked into their
dirty shirts so that the Lord did not see the terrible things they did, but so
that He could be gotten to in a pinch if needed.

One among them, an old
vaquero
on his knees, was laughing. The
Rider saw Mendez, the corporal. He stood bewildered, hands snatching at the
empty holsters on his belt.

“They are for you, my brothers!”
Misquamacus hollered above the din of the jabbering Mexicans, his voice
powerful, resounding off the great rock walls. “Do with them what you want to
do!”

And they did. Almost as one body the
Indians fell hungrily upon the cringing Mexicans like a great mouth closing.
Some gamely fought back, but they were unarmed and outnumbered and quickly
dragged down. Not a single bullet was wasted. Those with rifles came at the
rurales
with the heavy butts of their
weapons, dashing skulls open at a swing. Stone axes whistled and sunk into
pleading faces, and were drawn out to scatter brains and teeth and then fall
again. Knives flashed, passing through scalps pulled so tight they came free in
the bronze fists that held them with a single swipe and left glaring patches
bereft of hair and flesh, the faces of their howling victims swiftly vanishing
in a curtain of blood. Machetes swept off hands and fingers interlaced in
desperate prayer.

Big Anger and his Pawnees straddled
their victims and worked vicious arts with their knives, slashing away age,
race, and sex, leaving behind only meat, indiscernible from a butcher’s wares.
Organs leapt into the air like hats on New Year’s Eve.

The Rider/Piishi saw Slim Ghost and
the skinwalkers walking among the dead and dying with curved knives, stooping
to extract eyes, hearts, livers, fingers, genitals, even twisting free bloody
bones, all of which they stuffed into their hide satchels, for later use in
their foul practices, no doubt.

The Ishaks and the Tonkawas fell
wholly upon their kills, burying their faces in the cavernous wounds they
ripped open with their fingers. Piishi’s digestive system reacted with violent
disgust at their display, and the Rider put the back of his hand to his lips
and swallowed rising bile as Moon Cloud and Bloody Jaw wrestled over the bloody
corpse of a fat
rurale
. One end of a
rope of intestines twisted in-between each man’s teeth, the two of them
snarling at each other like wild dogs. Indeed, they looked very much like
animals. Their eyes grew wide and black , and they seemed hairier than before.
Their ears elongated, sharpening in elfish grotesqueness, and their teeth were
suddenly pointed and jagged, wolf-like in their gory mouths, extending in some
kind of perverse, ravenous arousal. They were changing before their very eyes,
something in their doing bringing out their true, inhuman natures, until Bloody
Jaw was more wolf than the black hide and cowl trappings that hung from his
bulky, misshapen shoulders. Moon Cloud matched his bestial visage.

The Rider looked through the
massacre and found Goyaałé. The Bedonkohe war chief had made his way to
the still laughing old caballero, and hoisted him to his feet. He raised his
bloody knife to end him.

“Goyaałé!” The Rider/Piishi
called in as loud a voice as he could manage, which was considerable, given the
acoustics of the rock.

Goyaałé heard, and paused to
look. A moment’s searching and he found the source.

“Look!” The Rider/Piishi yelled,
pointing to Moon Cloud and Bloody Jaw.

Goyaałé followed the indicatory
gesture and his lip curled when he saw the two transformed chiefs. He let the
old
caballero
fall and backed away.
His eyes flitted all around the killing ground, and he saw the other Ishaks and
Tonkawas changing into wolf-beasts.

The Rider watched as Goyaałé
rushed through the crowd and found Lozen and Vittorio. He snatched the rifle
from Lozen’s belt. Before she could react, he levered it and fired it into the
air.

It was a startling sound, and every
man and woman stopped. Even the hairy beasts that had once been Indians raised
their elongated doggish muzzles from the bellies of their kills and regarded
him with feral eyes.

Lozen moved to take the rifle back,
but Goyaałé said something and pointed.

Lozen and Vittorio saw. All the
Apache, their attention momentarily lifted from their bloody work to the two
leaders, followed their shocked gazes and saw.

And as one, just as they had closed
upon the Mexicans, they now recoiled and withdrew. Not a single Mexican was
still alive.

“What is this, Mis-kwa-macus?”
Vittorio yelled, pointing to the wolf creatures. “What are these?”

“They are the Rugarou Ishaks and the
True Tonkawas. The last of their kind,” said Misquamacus. “Just as I told you.”

“They are monsters!”

The blood spattered Apache voiced
their agreement with angry and frightened shouts.

“Not so! Not so!” Misquamacus yelled
over them. “They are your brothers, ready to fight the white man at your side.
Does Usen not teach you that the beasts are your kin? Do you not emulate the
ferocity of the puma and the cunning of the beaver?”

One of the skinwalkers was nearby,
and Goyaałé rushed at him without warning and cut his satchel from his
shoulder with his knife, then shook out its grisly contents on the ground,
where all could see them. The shriveled fist of a child rolled out among the
fresh trophies.

“Usen does not teach us this!” he
called.

“You have said that we must turn
from Usen to defeat the white man,” Vittorio said. He pointed to the
transformed Ishaks and Tonkawas. “Is this what happened to them when they
turned from their god?”

“I offer you the death of the white
man and the Mexicans for all time,” said Misquamacus. “I offer you a thousand
nights like this one, with your enemies beneath your knives. With the power of
my god, I can snatch the Great Father in Washington from his house and bring
him to us. I can pull the rails out from under the iron snakes and fling them
into the air. I can put my hand over the soldier forts that rise like ugly
boils across all the land and send you in to cut their throats in their beds. I
can turn the weapons of the enemy against them, make their ponies burst into
flame between their legs, turn their bullets to raindrops. I can geld the white
man and seal up his women. I can make it so your children will never know those
people but from the stories told around your fires.”

“Who is your god that promises us
these great victories, Mis-kwa-macus?” Goyaałé demanded. “It is time you
told us.”

“Yes,” said Vittorio. “Who is your
god that is so great but would bother with us?”

In answer, Misquamacus raised his
arms for silence.

Slim Ghost and eight of the
skinwalkers went to the base of the stone and knelt in a circle. They upended a
series of small black pouches from their satchels into their hands and closed
them into fists. Colored sand ran through their fingers, and with measured care
they began to let the sand fall in ordered patterns on the bloody red earth. It
was wondrous to see them work, ten men making a large vaguely circular picture,
each acting independently, and yet their labors taking on a unified pattern, as
if they possessed one mind, one vision. Silently, and without pause or
consultation, they worked, forming mystic shapes and figures incomprehensible
to outsiders and yet obviously inspired. As they worked, the colored sand drank
up the spilled blood beneath, darkening in color where it fell.

The others watched them restlessly.
The sun sank, and campfires had to be lit. All this was done in silence. No one
dared to interrupt the skinwalkers’ work.

When it was at last finished, they
rose as one and returned to the ranks of their people, and a mesmerizing sand
painting lay before the stone on which Misquamacus had stood the whole time,
observing. Red and blacks and blues dominated the work, and there were dancing
feathered figures, moons, stars, and geometric patterns. To the Rider, only a
few of these seemed somewhat familiar, some of them not unlike the diagrams found
in the
Book of Zylac
. Yet all were
distinctly Indian in their interpretation. Central to the painting was a
strange faceless humanoid shape of black sand.

Misquamacus removed something from
his satchel then, a polished mirror fragment, the size of a man’s head. He
placed it in the center to the sand painting, over the center shape.

Then, before their eyes, that black
shape began to grow oily and to boil like hot tar.

A lump rose from the center and took
shape, congealing into a man-like form, carrying the fragment of mirror with
it. Steam rose from the thing, as if it was hotter than the cool mountain air
around it. When it had completed its unnatural birth, it stood nearly eight
feet tall, like an earthen statue, black, with bumpy skin, like a flayed corpse,
faceless but for the smooth mirror.

The Rider/Piishi recognized the same
being they had seen in Misquamacus’ wickiup.

The Dark Man.

Black, foul smelling smoke, like the
oily stench of a machine fueled by corpses, pouring from around the edges of the
thing’s mirror mask, billowing unnaturally around the figure, never rising,
cloaking it in a greasy fog.

The Ishaks and Tonkawas fell to all
fours and pressed their jaws to the earth like submitting hounds. They sent up
a bone chilling baying and howling din, so terrible that the Apaches clamped
their hands over their ears to hear it. The Pawnees put their foreheads to the
earth, and even the skinwalkers knelt and bowed their heads.

The Apaches moved away, frightened
of the thing.

Misquamacus turned and went to his
knees, arms still above his head in adoration.

“Behold Tezcatlipoca! The Dark Wind.
We are his slaves. Nyarlathotep.”

Nyarlathotep.

That was the name Faustus had given
the Outer God he and his brother had pursued into this world from their own.

The Dark Man stretched out its arms,
and before their eyes, the golden veins in the rock wall began to resonate
behind him, glowing brightly. Then they flowed, as if molten. They sped through
the natural courses of the rock, then pooled on the ground and coursed over the
stones, forming a golden puddle behind the black figure, which gradually grew
and rose above its head, mirroring its own strange emergence from the ground.
It became the gleaming statue of a naked man, nearly thirty feet high. An Indian,
with broad, stylized features and disconcerting eyes, devoid of expression. A
circle of ten small cavities opened in its chest.

The mirror-faced thing lowered its
arms.

Misquamacus turned and rose, his
eyes aflame.

“My god has built us a giant. It
will march down from the mountains and destroy every Mexican town from here to
the border.”

The glory of the colossal golden man
was undeniable. The campfires danced off its polished surface, reflecting,
turning the entire basin yellow.

At its glimmering feet, the Dark Man
still stood, and that flat, mirror face seeping foul smoke reflected the fires
too, and filled Piishi and the Rider with a dread they knew all too well. This
was an Old One, in physical form.

But this one was different from
Shub-Niggurath. In that vast, foul intelligence they had both sensed only alien
indifference. This thing was somehow closer to their understanding. Perhaps it
had dealt with men more closely, become accustomed to them, even adopted some
of their ways. It was a go-between. A messenger. A harbinger. It bore the
standard of the Great Old Ones before them as Misquamacus had presaged it.

It was evil.

Evil as the Rider and Piishi could
fathom. Cruel. Malevolent. It hated mankind, delighted in their suffering as
even Lucifer himself did not. It toyed with souls like a thoughtless child, but
it was immensely powerful.

And it was insane.

The rock walls seemed to echo with a
silent laughter. Its violence was without reason, and that it made it even more
dangerous. It was The Destroyer. It was an agent of Chaos. Its whims brought
annihilation and oblivion, and it danced to the tune of human souls tearing
apart.