Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (48 page)

“That is a fairytale I tell my
disciples,” he said, fixing the Rider with a meaningful stare. “The truth is,
those who open the gate for them will be spared the suffering to come.”

“By…being devoured first?”

“Yes. You have faced the weakest of
them. Cut off from the source of their strength as they are, they are but
shadows of their former power. Yet you barely survived. There are worse things
yet. There is an unnamable Thing at the center of it all, an amorphous,
bubbling blight which sleeps in a fevered, violent dream. When it turns in its
restless slumber, Creation quakes. When it awakens, this great sham of a
universe will collapse and burn like a false front. As its chief herald among
man, I will meet that oblivion first.”

He turned toward the Rider again,
and now his eyes seemed to be filled with tears.

“You hate me, Rider, because in your
mind, I was the father who turned from you. Can you see that you are the son
who turned from me? I would spare you the tribulation to come, Rider. I would
have you beside me, my boy. At the end of everything.”

He moved to the Rider then, holding
out his hands. The Rider flinched, but Adon gently took the Rider’s head in his
hands, leaned forward, and lightly kissed his eyes, first one, and then the
other. It was the old gesture of the master to the student, when the student
had attained knowledge.

He released him then, and stepped
back. His eyes were glassy and brimming with emotion.

The Rider stared, his lips parted.

He remembered something Adon had
said to him once long ago then.

‘Anyone
who teaches you, loves you.’

He seemed to be saying it now, with
his eyes.

He was insane.

The Rider smirked.

“This is what you have to offer?
First crack at oblivion?”

Adon’s brow furrowed, and he brushed
away a sliding tear.

The Rider lunged then, operating on
a reserve of strength that surprised even him. He pushed past Adon and fell on
his elbows to the desk, snatching up the revolver.

It was empty.

He flung it away into the corner of
the room.

Adon smirked.

The door opened behind them. It was
O’Doyle again. He cleared his throat.

“Time for you to leave,” Adon said,
returning to his chair behind the desk.

“You said you’d answer my questions,”
said the Rider. “All of them. You said you wouldn’t lie, my master.”

“In a universe that is itself but a
lie, can there be lies, my student?” said Adon. “We’ll talk again. But next
time, it will be your turn to answer me.”

Then, to O’Doyle, he said in
English,

“Take him back to his cage, Croc. We’re
through for now.”

It was early evening, and now that
his eyes were used to the light, he surveyed the layout of the yard. The Dark
Cell lay behind the main cell block. He could clearly see the iron door set
into the stone. They skirted the cell block building, and he assumed O’Doyle
was leading him back there, but they turned right to a row of exposed iron
cages, each with one cot and a pot. There were six of them, two occupied with
mangy looking prisoners, one to a cage.

“What’s this?” the Rider asked as O’Doyle
unlocked the furthermost cage.

“Your new home,” said O’Doyle. “You
made it pretty clear you weren’t up to sharing a cell. That makes you an
Incorrigble. Incorrigibles get the privilege of their own accommodations. With
a view.”

The banded iron cage was just like
the ones set in stone, but entirely open and exposed.

“Watch out for snakes,” O’Doyle
leered, pushing him inside and locking the door.

The Rider spent the night in
sleepless misery, shivering in the cot, knees drawn up to his chest, arms
wrapped around them, nose tucked between them.

When the sun was down, the depths of
the night grew as cold as the depths of the ocean. The thin blanket he had been
issued offered little comfort.

He thought of all that Adon told him
and wondered if it was true. He thought perhaps it was.

He thought about Adon’s claim that
HaShem had trapped certain of the Great Old Ones within Creation, to form the
universes from their flesh. That meant that all men were part of these things,
just as they were part of the Lord.

He considered how the flesh tempted
and begged for ease, overpowering the will of the spirit as it had even in
himself. It all made sense then. In every individual, the microscopic echo of a
greater cosmic conflict. As above, so below.

What was the purpose though? Why did
the Lord oppose the Outer Gods? Was He a conqueror, seeking to rule All That
Was?

Worlds within worlds, and wars
within wars.

He was not sure of HaShem’s motives,
but he knew something. He knew there was good in the world. There were good
people. They surely did not come about from any act of the Great Old Ones, and
so whether by reason or by chance, they had come from the acts of the Lord.

Like Kabede had told him, nothing
had really changed. The scope was larger, yes, but the stakes and the
allegiances were basically the same.

Instead of simply opposing evil and
corruption, he was now facing the even greater and more insidious force of
entropy and chaos.

The Lord’s house could fall, yes.
But not if humanity held it up. Not if they fortified it against the attacks of
the Great Old Ones.

He was terrified by Adon’s
revelations, yes. But he was also invigorated. To court the Chaos that
encroached (or was encroached upon?) was utter madness to him. Adon was lost.
He lost himself not to evil, but to his own fear. Fear, like the lesser fear of
the inevitability of death.

Adon had fallen prey to the most
basic pitfall the Sons of the Essenes had taught him to avoid; the appeal of
death, or in his case, the appeal of oblivion.

To Adon, existence was simply too
terrible. Life was a greater horror than death. Already for Adon there was no
death, only the long wait for oblivion. So he sought to rush the cataclysm.
Bring it upon himself and everyone, simply to be done with the dread of it.

The Rider remembered Rabbi Levi and
his strawberries again, expounding upon finding worth in the material world in
the middle of a field with students gathered around him who sweated in their
black hats and
rekel
coats. How he
had gone on about his freshly picked strawberries, describing the warmth of
them in the sun, the satisfactory snap as they were twisted from the vine, the
sweetness of them as they burst on the tongue. At the time it had made them
roll their eyes.

But the Lord’s order, whatever its
purpose, was like a strawberry. Life was sweet. So, too, was death and the
continued existence this cosmic order perpetuated.

The Rider would continue to fight to
maintain that order for as long as he lived. Because it was what he been made
for, and because it was better than the alternative.

Adon said the triumph of Chaos was
inevitable.

Perhaps.

It would not come in the Rider’s
lifetime, however long that might be. He would throw himself into that doorway
before he let the Old Ones in.

That was a pleasing sentiment, but
for the moment he was freezing in an open cage in the desert with a fortress
slowly growing up all around him. He had abandoned his friends. They had no
idea where he was. He had certainly not made any allies among the convicts,
having attacked a likeable and apparently innocent man on his first day.

There was still Adon. What was his
plan?

To clear the way. Always, to clear
the way.

And the Rider was in the way.

There was no doubt in his mind that
Adon meant to kill him at last. But first, he would do all he could to learn where
Kabede and the scroll was.

Then the notion came to him that
Adon needn’t ask him a thing.

He jumped down off the cot and
shoved his arm through the opening at the bottom, pulling as much dirt as he
could inside.

In the morning, two guards stood
outside the Rider’s cage looking down at him from beneath the shade of their
hats.

“What in the hell do you make of all
that chicken scratching?”

“I expect this one’s meant for the
crazy hole.”

“Hell he’s only been here a few
days. Never seen a man go crazy that fast.”

“Yeah, well, never say never.”

The Rider huddled in the center of
the cage. He had spent the rest of the night scooping dirt in, covering the
iron bands beneath him until he had fashioned a dirt floor (and inadvertently,
scooped out a shallow moat around his cage). Then he had scratched a protective
seal on the whole floor.

His unbroken fingertips were raw,
filthy, and bleeding.

Adon was apparently able to not only
possess people almost at will, he could do it indefinitely. How could he hope
to fight him?

Even his ethereal self couldn’t pass
the seal scratched on the ground, though. He had been used to relying on his
talismans for that kind of protection, and realizing he didn’t have them any
more, he had thrown himself into a panic of work. He was exhausted, but he was
safe. Luckily Adon hadn’t tried to possess him.

The work details began to funnel
past, and the convicts stared at him like he was a rare bird, or a sideshow
oddity. He saw his old cellmates go past. Jethro Auspitz, black and blue, his
inflamed lips scabbed over, lingered on him as he shuffled past to the mess
hall.

The Rider watched him.

“I’m sorry,” he called through the
bars.

Jethro Auspitz watched him over his
shoulder as he was lost in the line of men.

The other Incorrigibles were fed,
tin plates of beans and bread and dippers of water slid through a little door
at the bottom of their cages.

But when the workers came to the
Rider, they returned to the mess hall.

The rest of the prisoners went to
their respective jobs, and soon the Rider could hear the ringing of the picks
and the deep voices of the work song cadences.

No one came for him or fed him.

The sun rose high, and by noon the
night’s cold seemed like a pleasant dream. He put the blanket over his cot and
crawled beneath it to escape the sun, and was nearly stung by a scorpion who
had taken up residence there sometime in the night. He kicked it outside.

The armed guard walking up and down
the length of the cages watched the entire ordeal with a smile. Then, when the
Rider went to crawl back under the cot, the guard blew a whistle hanging around
his neck and forbade the Rider from it with the angle of his rifle and a simple
shake of his head.

So, the Rider put the blanket over
his head like a Bedouin and sweated in the stifling heat.

The other Incorrigibles paced in
their cages, cursing the heat and the guards until they were hoarse. One man
passed out. The guards threw water on him until he got up again, but did not
remove him.

The Rider sat on the ground and
closed his eyes. It was too hot to doze, but he was exhausted. His heavy
eyelids closed, but he jumped awake again and again. The skin on the backs of
his hands and neck began to blister and crack.

He asked for water, but none came.

When he saw this, the Incorrigible
on the end cursed the guard again and told him to bring the Rider water.

The guard told him to shut up.

“The hell did you do to deserve
this, mister?” the convict called to him.

“Shut up,” said the guard again.

No one else spoke to him the rest of
the day.

As the blazing blue sky turned red,
the work details began to return. The convicts stared at him as before, but now
he read pity and horror in their eyes. They glanced at each other, at the
guards.

The Rider’s lips were cracked, and the
sun blisters had spread to his face. He could feel them. His nostrils were
packed with bloody mucous and dust and his clothes had soaked through with
sweat and then dried to salty stiffness.

He spied Jaimenacho and Tolliver,
but this time he didn’t see Jethro.

Night fell, and then he was freezing
again.

He tucked his arms into his shirt
and folded his hands between his legs. His belly growled and he stuck a button
from his shirt into his mouth to try and tempt some saliva out. He started to
doze a few times, but his shivering body jolted him awake every time, his mind’s
eye conjuring a vision of Adon lunging at him.

The third time this happened his
door clanked open and someone really was reaching for him.

It was Croc O’Doyle.

What time of the night was it? He
didn’t know, but stumbling across the moonlit yard, he found himself suddenly
propped in the chair in Adon’s office once again.