According to midrash, Ketev Meriri was a demon.
“Eight times you have heard him speak this morning!” Mazzamauriello went on. “Eight times he has looked down upon you! Rare and wonderful is he not? He was forged by Lucifer himself, and was used in the First Rebellion to shatter the shields of the archangels! Go back in your shack and wait! He will call you!”
“Is he crazy?” Baines gibbered when the Rider came back into the picket shack. “What was all that he was goin’ on about?”
The Rider thought for a moment. There was no way to cross the open land and get to the cannon without being blasted to pieces by it. But his astral form could pass unmolested to the hogback in the Yenne Velt. What do when he got there though? If the artillerists had been human, he could simply blow a hole in their will with his ethereal pistol and possess them long enough to shove the cannon off the ridge or douse it in water. But the shedim had no souls. He had never attempted to possess one before and had no idea if it were even possible. It was likely they were warded against him by their knowledge of his true name. Lilith might have prepared them in that way somehow. But shedim were bound to the physical world. Though resilient here, they were powerless to affect the higher planes. Maybe that was another weakness he could exploit.
Then there was Mazzamauriello’s claim that the gun had been forged by Lucifer. If that was so (and the supernal accuracy it had demonstrated thus far seemed to bear that out), then this earthly cannon on the ridge was only a physical container for it. It truly existed in the Yenne Velt, and might have powers there that he could not expect.
Nevertheless, the cannon was the key.
He turned to Gersh and clapped his hand on the big man’s shoulder, rousing him from his gloom.
“Gersh, come with me.”
Gersh nodded dully and stood.
“Where are you going?” Sheardown called after them.
The Rider picked his way to the shack where the Colonel and Purdee were huddled. The sun was hot on his back, rising high now.
He ducked inside.
The Colonel was sitting quietly as Purdee gingerly picked splinters from the side of his face.
“Tell me you got some idea on how to get out of this,” the Colonel said.
“I do, but you’re going to have to trust me.”
“You’ve played us all fair so far, ‘cept….,” he shrugged, “for attracting these bloodthirsty sonsofbitches here in the first place. Let’s hear it.”
“I might be able to knock out that cannon. Stay put and don’t show yourselves.”
“You can’t get across that open space,” Purdee said.
“Just let me worry about that,” the Rider said. “I’m going to take Gersh with me.”
“Good luck,” said the Colonel.
The Rider and Gersh ducked back outside as the cannon thumped on the ridge and dropped a shrill round onto the saloon. Most of the structure was blown to fluttering, burning paper and sticks. The roof collapsed as one wall disappeared. The place was a lean-to now.
The Rider stared. Maybe lightning wouldn’t strike twice. He led Gersh into the smoking wreckage.
The back wall and the bar were gone, as was half the right wall. The ceiling sagged so low that one of the cable spool tables was all that supported it, but the wall with the broken piano and the entrance remained. It was just enough shelter to be secluded from the sun.
The Rider kicked aside the crates and cleared a spot in the darkest corner of the room.
“What’re we doing here?” Gersh asked, bewildered.
“This is going to be hard for you to understand, Gersh” the Rider said. “I can stop the cannon, but in order to do it, I can’t be disturbed.”
“What?”
The Rider got out his engraved iron Bowie knife and knelt down. He began to scratch a circle in the dirt floor.
“I need you to try to listen for that gun. If it looks like it’s going to hit here again, I need you to pull my body out. I won’t be able to react.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t be here, Gershom,” the Rider explained, continuing to scratch at the floor, etching out a protective seal, for all the good it would do him. “My body will be here, but I won’t. Look, you can accept that the men who we’re fighting aren’t human? Now you’ve got to just accept this.”
It occurred to him that if any of Lilith’s demonic minions had followed him, they might tear his soul to pieces as soon as he set foot in the Yenne Velt. He had not attempted to leave his body since Tip Top. He had to trust that Nehema’s rosette token would protect him there too.
Ketev Meriri spoke on the ridge again, and in a few moments one of the picket shacks on the edge of Varruga Tanks ceased to be, the impact shuddering underneath them. It would be a test of concentration for him to be able to travel in these conditions, but he was a master. Part of his training had involved leaving his body on a rocky top during a tremendous lightning storm. This would be somewhat similar.
The Rider seated himself cross-legged in the circle and looked up at the bewildered youth towering over him.
“Be strong,” he said, and closed his eyes.
* * * *
Gershom stared at the man seated on the floor. He was unlike any man Gershom had ever known. He felt a kinship with him because he knew the man was of his father’s people—a people he did not know except from childhood memories. All his life he had been the Child of Calamity, alone even with Hash, the man who had known him best.
Hash had been a good friend, and very like a father. He had saved him as a boy from the wrath of the Comanche, after he had wrestled down a warrior who had beaten him and broke the grown man over his small knee. That was the same warrior who had killed his mother and father and taken him to be a slave, and that had given him satisfaction.
At first Hash had viewed him as a freak to be displayed, though over the years they had grown fond of each other. As a half breed, Hash had understood Gershom’s sense of being apart from other people. They had skirted society together, at least. But Hash could tell him no more about his people than Gershom could tell Hash how to be a Comanche or a ‘Polack,’ as Hash had always told him the other half of him was.
But this man, this Rider, in the short time they had known each other, had explained to Gershom one of the great mysteries of his early memory as a matter of course. He had accepted Gershom’s great strength and even explained its source. He had opened Gershom’s world like one who entered a dark room and lit a lamp.
So he knew that whatever Rider was doing, no matter how crazy it seemed, he would protect him as he had been asked. There was more to know, and they both had to live through this.
Gershom took Bill’s shotgun and crouched outside of the circle in the floor. He watched his still and silent charge and their surroundings, and he waited.
* * * *
The Rider stood, emerging from the top of his skull. He hesitated, then stepped out of the protective circle. No rush of talons swept through his etheric form, no clutch of demons settled upon him. The rosette symbol in his fist was potent indeed, or else Mazzamauriello had arranged to take him alone and horde the credit. He reached into his jacket for another token—the clay Cheyenne horse talisman given to him by the great shaman Misquamacus. Concentrating on it, he drew it in easy circles, the innate energies coalescing into an animal form—a fiery horse, which he mounted and steered toward the ridge.
Atop the horse’s back, he would reach the cannon in moments. He spurred it on, passing like a ghost through the wreckage and through the scattered hovels. He reached the open desert and went galloping across the sand, when suddenly there was an audible crack as of a gunshot, and the horse disincorporated between his knees. Instantly he was soaring, and his etheric self tumbled to the ground.
It was a stunning sensation. He wondered what had disrupted the horse’s field. He picked himself up, and twice more heard the jarring crack sounds. Pain—actual pain—ignited in his leg and side, or, m
ore correctly, in the parts of his astral form corresponding to those physical areas, and he fell once more.
He lay on his back, staring up at the black sky and its currents of energy, and then looked at his own body. There was a neat hole in his left leg, just above the knee, bleeding a blazing blue and white light. It was such a hole as he had seen appear when he attacked a person’s latent defenses on this plane with his mystic Volcanic pistol. There was another such hole in his left forearm, bleeding light. What could have caused it?
The Rider sat up slowly, propping himself on one elbow. There, striding towards him across the green desert plain, was a slight figure in blinding white, smiling at him beneath a toothbrush mustache. In the real world he was effete and unassuming. Here, with his blazing greatcoat billowing behind him and the weird etheric light playing along the long barrel of his outstretched forty five, he was imperious and menacing.
“Where were you off to in such a hurry, Rider?” asked Sheardown.
The Rider stared as Sheardown ambled over, covering him the whole time with his pistol. It was too dangerous to snap back into one’s physical form without returning the astral self to the body. There could be terrible psychic side effects. Dementia, or worse, the self could be dislodged. He was trapped.
Sheardown would shoot him if he went for his pistol. He turned slightly, slid his Bowie knife from its sheath, unseen. He considered trying to throw it, but he’d never been much good at throwing a knife. He thought for a second, then pressed the keen knife into the palm of his left hand.
“Sheardown!” he rasped.
“Doctor Sheardown,” said the doctor, a cross expression momentarily spreading across his face. “I bet you’re surprised,” he said, instantly smiling again. “This is just something I learned…from one of your teachers.”
“Adon,” the Rider murmured.
Sheardown nodded.
“He’s going to be so tickled. It’s just blind luck I even ran across you, Rider. I was only supposed to deliver a scroll. Now I’m gonna bring him your head too.”
“Where is he?” the Rider demanded.
“I guess you’ll never know how close you were,” Sheardown said in mock regret, cocking his revolver. The Rider noticed it was a Frontier double-action, the nickel surface etched with symbols, just as his own Volcanic was. They weren’t Judaic, though.
The Rider held up his right hand imploringly, as if to catch the bullet.
“Wait! I don’t understand! Who are you, Sheardown?”
“Doctor Sheardown!” the slight man spluttered. “Doctor!”
“Doctor…,” the Rider agreed, placating.
* * * *
Another shell struck Varruga Tanks, another shack disintegrated, and Gershom listened to the patter of debris on the remains of the roof over his head. He worried that the random shelling would strike the hovel in which the woman and her boy and the two wounded men were hiding. He wanted to go to them, get them to some semblance of safety—but where was there to go? And then there was his charge.
He glanced back at the Rider, motionless in the circle.
He was about to turn back when he noticed a splash of red on the man’s leg.
He crept over and cautiously dabbed at the red stain on Rider’s leg. It was blood, and it was spreading, yet Gersh couldn’t see any kind of hole in the fabric that would account for a wound. He started at the sight of blood trickling down the back of the man’s left hand.
More, there were spots of blood dripping from the hand itself. He laid aside the shotgun and turned the Rider’s hand over.
Cut into the palm, faint enough to be read but deep enough to leak blood, were crude letters; C-O-D.
“Cod,” said Gersh to himself.
Before his amazed eyes, a fourth jagged wound opened over the underside of Rider’s knuckles, overlapping the ‘C’ like a lightning bolt. No, it was a letter ‘S.’
“Cods.’ He shook his head, then started. He turned the hand, looking at it from a new angle. The angle someone writing in their own hand might see. Docs. Or, Doc S.
Doc Sheardown.
What did it mean? Was Sheardown responsible for the wounds? Was he causing his own name to appear on Rider’s flesh somehow? Gersh picked up the shotgun and stepped out of the ruins of the saloon. He ran across the adjoining space to the hovel where they’d left Baines and Sheardown.
He stormed in, making Baines jump.
“Christ!”
“Where’s Doc Sheardown?”
“Hell if I know,” said Baines. “He slipped out not long after you did. Where’s Rider?”
Gersh rushed back outside without answering. A stone shack exploded. He ducked as bits of gravel rained down.
Then he noted the line of leveled structures. They were walking the artillery fire along the outer edge of the settlement, leaving a row of craters scattered with flaming wood and blackened stone—except for one wood shack still standing. Why had they skipped that one?
Gersh started to head for that shack when the cannon burped smoke again in the distance. He glanced at its target, and immediately shifted course and ran for it.
It was the stone hut containing the woman and the boy.
“Get out! Get out of there!” he screamed, breaking into a full tilt run.
The whistling above intensified, and he saw Wilkes, the cowboy with the broken arm, go racing out, head hunched down.
He was nearly at the hut when the woman Marina stumbled out, spilling the young boy in her arms. The two of them drew themselves into a ball and pressed their faces into the dirt and their hands over the sides of their heads and waited for death.
Gershom pumped his arms, dropping the shotgun in his haste. Then he could see it. He could actually see it—the cannonball. It was streaking through the sky in a tall arch, and as he spied it, a tiny dot in the sky, it began its descent.
He screamed, as he knew he was about to see the ball strike the woman and her boy. It would annihilate them. He was already close enough to be bathed in their blood.
He heaved forward, not knowing just what he intended to do, only knowing he had to prevent it. He supposed he meant to tackle the two of them, carry them as far away from the explosion as he could with his own momentum, but something else, some irrational, unearthly notion that flared like a light in the back of his mind, made him skid to a stop over their prostrate forms and hold his hands up.
The ball seemed to be traveling extremely slowly, more like a child’s balloon floating down then twelve pounds of heavy iron. It was lunacy, but he craned his neck and raised his hands. He couldn’t say why he did it. In that precipitous moment at the edge of the dark chasm of death, he felt the mad inspiration that lit in his brain course like a fuse down his body till a tiny explosion popped off in his chest like a Chinese firecracker and spread a fiery light through his limbs. Each of his capillaries contained a trace of gunpowder that flared and streaked in every direction and ignited charges in his arms, his legs.
There was an audible thud as he brought his hands together with trip hammer speed and force and caught the plummeting cannonball. He felt the impact in the heels of his hands, even felt his feet sink a few inches into the sand. His hair blew back, but there was no explosion.
He stood holding the humming twelve pound ball over his head, and slowly lowered his arms, bringing the heavy iron before his eyes.
“Madre de Dios,” someone whispered behind him.
Gersh looked back. It was Trib. He was on his side, bathed in sweat and staring wide eyed.
Gersh looked down at the woman Marina. She was peering up at him in awe, holding her boy and crossing herself.
Then Gersh looked up at the ridge. The figures were scrambling over the cannon. Gersh threw the cannonball aside and lifted up Marina and her boy to their feet.
Wilkes poked his head out from behind the rubble he’d leapt behind.
“Get over here and get that man out of here!” Gersh roared at him, gesturing to Trib as Marina scooped u
p her son and ran back towards the saloon.
Wilkes came over and went into the hut. Gersh saw him hoisting the groaning Trib up, when the cannon fired again.
Gersh turned his attention back to the ridge, and saw the ball approaching as before. The aim had been slightly corrected. There was little arch to its path. Now it was headed straight for him.
He was dimly aware of Wilkes and Trib limping away, when he opened his arms and caught the second screaming cannonball between his hands with a grunt against his chest. It should have blown a sizable hole in him and sent his arms and legs to the compass points, but it was like catching a medicine ball or a tossed sack of flour. The iron was hot, but it quickly cooled between his calloused palms.
He looked at it disbelieving, then turned his attention towards the ridge once more.
The silhouettes on the hogback were mounting their horses. Two came streaming down the front, slaloming among the boulders.
He tucked the cannonball into his elbow and beat his feat toward the single shack still standing in the row of demolished outbuildings. He needed Rider.
* * * *
“I’m your teacher’s favorite pupil, Rider,” said Sheardown.
“His favorite pupil?” the Rider said. “Are their others?”
“Oh yes. He made an offer, well, really an ultimatum to some of your brothers, you see. An ultimatum he intended to give you, but you ran out to fight in that silly war. Really, what is the lot of some dumb coloreds to you? They’re not much better off now are they? At any rate, you mustn’t think he was entirely merciless to the Sons of the Essenes. He gave them all the same chance. Join a new order, or be destroyed. A few joined, most didn’t. Well, he had to replenish the ranks so to speak, so he taught your techniques to others.” He tapped his own breast, which glinted with a multitude of talismans through his open coat. “Me, for instance.”
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 5