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 stone
s, 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.
Its madness was reflected in Misquamacus’ eyes. Whatever he truly was, whether he was Faustus’ brother or not, he followed this thing now. He had been infected by its madness. It had played him like a flute.
It loved such trickery. It had delved below human minds since they had existed. It had played fools even of devils and angels.
How did Piishi and the Rider know this?
It told them, of course. It was telling them. Just as Shub-Niggurath’s mind had raked its psychic talons telepathically across their own beneath Red House, so too was Nyarlathotep doing now.
Perhaps it projected a different message into every man and woman standing there, but to the Rider and Piishi, it brimmed with gloating arrogance.
It gave them another name, different from the ones Misquamacus had spluttered at it. One the ancient shaman didn’t even know. One it was positively bursting to tell them.
Adam Belial.
Adam Belial, the false angel that Lucifer claimed had infiltrated the ranks of Heaven and corrupted the greatest of the archangels, inducing him to hopeless rebellion with prodding suggestions and seductive influence.
In a manner of thinking, Adam Belial was the grandfather of all demons. But he was no demon, no former angel.
Nyarlathotep. An insane Outer God.
This thing had set the First Rebellion in motion. It had engineered a further split among the forces of the Fallen fifteen years ago, commanding the worst, the most unrepentant demons against Lucifer and the demons of hell in a failed attempt to wrest control of Gehenna from its appointed custodians. It had spun the world toward the Hour of Incursion and unwittingly initiated the bloody War Between the States.
It just wanted them to know that, if not everything, before it devoured them.
Misquamacus rose to his feet.
“Like the white man’s black engines, it needs only fuel.”
The Rider/Piishi looked about then, and in the golden light, still kneeling among the dead Mexicans, he saw the old caballero. He had ceased his laughter, and was now screaming over and over, unreasoning tears streaking his old face, maddened by whatever truth Nyarlathotep was thrusting into his mind.
Misquamacus regarded him for a moment as if he knew him, then stretched out his arm to him, palm upwards. With a gesture of his fingers, the old man grew rigid, his arms and legs curling. In another instant his heart exploded from his chest and flew into Misquamacus’ palm. He fell like an empty sack to the ground.
Misquamacus held the throbbing heart over his head, and the Dark Man’s head twitched. The heart flew into the air, as if magnetically attracted to the great golden statue’s chest, and slid neatly into one of the empty receptacles.
“The sacrifice of the enemy is made. Now who will give?” Misquamacus called. “Who will give so that our weapon can live?”
One by one, from each of the bands already under Misquamacus’ influence, a single bloody volunteer lay his stained weapons on the ground and stood, head bowed, and stepped forward with his arms outspread. A Pawnee, one of the Navajo skinwalkers, even one of the transformed Tonkawas and a great gray furred Ishak crept forward in the manner of cowering dogs, on all fours, their great ears laid back, noses to the ground.
Misquamacus held out both hands and took their hearts two at a time and gave them to the great golden statue. Nyarlathotep seemed to swell with each sacrifice, growing a few inches in stature as each body fell. When the two wolf things were squirming on their backs, steam rising from their open chests, Misquamacus turned to the Apache.
“And now, who among the Apache will give?”
The Rider/Piishi held his breath.
None of the Apache moved.
Goyaałé shook his head.
“Usen does not care for the petty quarrels of men,” he said. “So I think maybe he is greater than your god, Misquamacus.”
Misquamacus held out his bloody hands in a gesture of beseeching.
“My brothers, you have not seen the future as I have. We will be a conquered people. We will die a slow death among a cold white world of machines.”
“Nobody here doubts your power,” said Vittorio. “It may be you are right. If that is so, we will live well while we live. When death comes, we will walk out to meet it and die as Apache.”
There were calls of agreement among the Chi’hine at their leader’s words. They grew faintly stronger.
“If we die, let it be by the hands of men, not as slaves to an evil spirit,” Naiche called out, and his Chokonen followers unanimously agreed, adding their voices to those of the Chi’hine.
The giant Juh made as if to speak, and Goyaałé went to his side to interpret, but Juh waved him off.
The massive chief put his great hand on Goyaałé’s shoulder and spoke in slow, measured words, fighting a stutter.
“W-what Juh has t-t-t-to say, he will say himself. Muh-muh-muh-Mis-kwa-m-macus w-w-w-ould save the Apache’s lives and k-k-k-k-kill their souls. The Nuh-nuh-nuh-Nedni will fight to k-k-k-keep both as long as they can.”
Juh’s people erupted into ecstatic cheering, as bolstered by their leader’s voice as by his words. The Rider felt a tear well up and run down Piishi’s cheek. Moses too had been a stammerer.
Misquamacus looked at last to Goyaałé.
Goyaałé, called by the Mexicans Geronimo, who had been as Aaron to Juh’s Moses, folded his arms.
“If you ask me, it is better to ride on an ass that carries me home than a horse that throws me,” he said. Then he raised his arms and shouted. “What say the Bedonkohe?”
All the Apache raised their weapons and roared and yipped their agreement. It resounded off the wall of gold, the voice of a people who would not be led to death on a leash.
Misquamacus lowered his dripping hands, a note of sorrow in his shadowed face.
Then the Rider/Piishi felt himself grabbed from behind.
It was Inya, the leader of the clanless Apache.
“Here is an Apache heart for the god, Misquamacus,” he called, pressing a knife to Piishi’s throat.
Then, just as suddenly as he had rose and seized Piishi, something large and heavy fell out
of the dark sky and landed with a wet crunch on the top of Inya’s head. The Rider felt hot blood and brains spew out of Inya’s nose onto Piishi’s shoulders, felt his last surprised breath puff out on the back of his neck as his grip slackened and he sank to his knees.
The Rider/Piishi looked down. A great stone had smashed Inya’s skull, and now protruded from the ruins of the top of his head, as if God himself had dropped it from heaven squarely on the outlaw.
The Rider/Piishi looked up for the source.
Misquamacus saw them at the same time, a row of colorful figures on the rocky lip of the canyon overlooking the basin.
All of them turned as a white and blue-clad figure with dark skin in the midst of the interlopers raised a ram’s horn to his lips and blew a colossal blast that filled the basin. Then he raised a wooden staff with a sling pouch dangling from its end over his head and declared in a booming voice;
“WHO IS ON THE LORD’S SIDE?”
These were the words the Rider heard. But simultaneously, he understood the figure, who was clearly Kabede, speaking in Piishi’s tongue, in which he said, “WHO IS ON USEN’S SIDE?”
He also knew through Piishi, that the five figures flanking Kabede on the rocks with elaborate headdresses, painted bodies, faceless masks, and each with a pair of shining short swords were the Gan. The Mountain Spirits Piishi had seen fall upon the vaqueros.
“The Gan have come to fight for us,” Piishi thought.
The entire assembly stared at the newcomers in apparent shock. The prostrating followers of Misquamacus lifted their heads and looked back over their shoulders. Even Misquamacus, even Nyarlathotep regarded them with naked awe.
As if in answer to Kabede, Lozen the Chi’hine warrior woman drew out the Rider’s knife from her belt and flung it over the heads of the worshipers. It flipped end over end, heavy as it was, and landed with a wet thunk in the center of Misquamacus’ chest.
Misquamacus sighed and staggered as blood ran down his belly. He glared at Lozen, standing defiantly.
“Bitch,” he muttered, blood trickling from between his lips.
He pointed at her.
“Kill them,” he ordered. Then he pointed up at Kabede and the figures on the rocks. “Kill them all!”
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 22