Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (25 page)

Recently
the pseudo-magician Eliphas Levi had incorporated the image into a deck of
tarot cards. It was all nonsense really, mystic minded amateurs delving into
deep mysteries but coming up with half-truths. The goat had rows of ponderous
breasts, upon which clung thousands of tiny, hairless, indistinct young. There
seemed to be something else odd about the carving, as if something were carved
on the backside of the figure, something large and amorphous, hidden in the
shadows of the alcove.

The
central figure was slightly larger than the other two, and in its position of
prominence, the Rider thought that it must be the chief of the three—maybe The
Not
To
Be Named One that Chaksusa mentioned. Unlike
the others, it was fashioned from a single black stone, polished to a rich
sheen. With the dancing light, it was almost a shadow in the dark, and
difficult to make out the details. It was bulky and vaguely worm-like.

He
saw great arching bat-like wings and a serpentine neck, rows of bent
caterpillar-like legs and six blank, bulbous eyes crafted from inset pearls.
Insectoid antennae sprouted from its two most prominent eyes, and its maw was
great and sharp, an impossible grin covering most of its face. It was draped in
barding, like a harness of carved chains, all of them broken, and the Rider
remembered Sheardown’s mention of That Which Strains
Against
Its Chains. It bore a wicked flail and a shield in a pair of lean, muscular,
vaguely humanoid arms. There was something familiar about this bizarre figure,
but the Rider was sure he had never encountered it in his travels.

Here
the air was coolest, and the faint odor of indefinable rot he smelled on the
way down seemed to permeate everything. It was the sour stench of a charnel
pit.

One
of the Indian slaves began to scream, and was clubbed down by the basket hilt
of a conquistador’s sword. This Indian was then hoisted to his feet, head
lolling, and dragged to the front of the line, passing finally into the hands
of the two old Querechos.

There
the hunchback turned, and the Rider got a good look at his drawn face with its
patchy beard, thick eyebrows, and matted hair. Despite his boar looks, this
Mauricio was no imbecile, as the crafty black eyes that shined beneath that
thick brow attested. He sneered at the dazed Indian and reaching up, tore from
his own cassock the simple wooden cross that dangled from a bit of rawhide
around his twisted neck. This he jammed into the lip of the Indian’s
breechclout.

With
a gesture, the Querechos forced the Indian to his knees before the hunchback.
Mauricio folded his arms, hands hidden within the voluminous sleeves of his
robe, and turned slowly to face the row of idols on the far wall. He
genuflected, bowing his head, and addressed them in words the Rider could not
understand even in his present omniscient state. The intonation was plain
however. They were words of supplication, muttered in some guttural tongue that
bore no resemblance to any speech he had ever heard in heaven, earth, or hell.
These words echoed off the rock walls with a deceptive resonance that made the
chamber feel larger than it was. His voice rang over the excited murmurs of the
Indians, who shuffled in place and moaned their dread.

Mauricio
lurched to his feet and wheeled about to the kneeling Indian again. A bright
crescent knife flashed in his hand as it emerged from the sleeve of his robe.
He struck straightaway, driving its point into the man’s bare breast with a
swift downward stroke.

The
Indian shuddered, shoulder muscles bunching, bare legs scrambling in the sand
as the two Querechos gripped the man tightly and held him still, allowing
Mauricio to continue. The monk stooped over his victim, twisting the knife,
popping through bone and shredding brisket. Through Amadeo’s eyes, the Rider
was spared the particulars of the grisly slaughter, but blood pooled quickly
around the knees of the trembling Indian, and his bowels evacuated, the sudden
stench wafting back to fill the Rider’s/Amadeo’s nostrils. In a moment the dead
man was drooping in the grip of the Querechos, his head tipped all the way
back, hung upside down, his eyes staring emptily back down the line at them
all.

The
exclamations of the other Indians and the Moors turned to shouts, and some
tried to break for the stairs. The conquistadors in the rear of the line worked
quickly, drawing their blades and deftly piercing the legs of every man who
tried to stumble back toward the stair. In the jostling of close bodies, the
Rider lost sight of Mauricio for a moment.

He
saw the dead man hoisted above the heads of all by the Querechos. There was a
command from Mauricio in that same vile language, and the Indian was cast to
the center of the floor.

But
there was no impact.

Then
the Rider realized the illusion of grandness he first had was no illusion. The
unseen floor was in fact a deep well some thirty feet in diameter, its bottom
lost in shadow. Mauricio stood at the lip of the abyss and called down to it in
a deep bellow. He skirted a narrow pathway around its edge, holding the bloody,
still-throbbing heart he extricated from the man’s torn chest aloft in his
clenched hands. He moved to the left hand statue of the lizard-man, and wrung
the organ over the red stone bowl like a man juicing a pomegranate. The bowl
quickly began to brim with cruor, and Mauricio placed the wretched-looking
heart into the bowl and turned away.

Mauricio
bowed six times like an ecstatic at prayer, and then returned to the captives.
The Querechos had already selected another sacrifice—one of the Moors. This man
was strong, and it took the Querechos and two of the Spaniards to hold him
still as Mauricio repeated the process, taking the heart from the cursing,
screaming man, squeezing it out, and placing it this time at the base of the
three-headed goat thing’s statue.

The
body of the second man was cast into the well, and again there was no sound of
impact. The Rider grew aware the blue shine came from somewhere far down in the
pit, for its glow shone on the rock ceiling. What was the source of that glow?

Mauricio
stepped once more to the edge of the well, but this time when he turned, he
made no move to claim a third victim. He held his arms, bloody to the elbow,
aloft until the sleeves fell back and the firelight glistened on the front of
his robe, spattered as the apron of an abattoir killer.

He
stared at the Rider/Amadeo, smiled once, closed his eyes like a man enraptured,
and stepped backwards into the pit, the only sound the ruffling of his monk’s
robes as he fell.

The
Castilians stirred, but the Querechos made no move to save him.

The
Indians and the Moors were dead silent at the sudden disappearance of their
betrayer. Then the faintest noise echoed deep down in the well. A slow,
tentative scraping that seemed to grow steadily louder and more relentless; it
was the grating sound of something large working its way up the walls of the
pit. The blue glow intensified along with the nearness of the sound, becoming
an egg shape on the ceiling that swelled like the spot of a miner’s lantern
light.

The
Rider shuddered and felt his consciousness slipping, crumbling away like a
dilapidated house in an earthquake. He struggled to cling with invisible
tendrils of will to Amadeo’s experience as it imploded around him, beset on all
sides by the hasty advance of death. What the Rider saw next he perceived as if
through deep water. He doubted the man had even been conscious during these
last few lingering moments. Only the force of the Rider’s presence occupying
his perception maintained his blurring vision and fading hearing.

A
hoarse, roaring sound filled the chamber, accompanied by an intensified wave of
the same noisome stench already hanging in the air. The ground beneath Amadeo
shuddered and something black and shining with mucus was vomited over the lip
of the well to land with a wet slap on the floor, like a bit of blockage hawked
from a great, retching throat. Between the limbs of the milling Indians, the
Rider saw the object unfold and shakily ascend on two trembling, animal
haunches, like a calf, still soaking with embryonic fluid, taking its first
wary step. It was humanoid, and it wore the tatters of a Franciscan’s mantle.
It was hunched in the same manner as Mauricio, but there the similarity ceased.

Its
body was covered in stringy black hair, dripping heavily with some unnatural,
salivary substance, faintly blue tinged. Its feet were horn-hard and cloven,
and its hands, though human, were black as night and gloved in dark hair. Its
head was greatly disproportionate to its spindly frame, and sprouted with two
curling black horns. Its eyes fluttered and opened. They were yellow and
shining beneath the dull, heavy lids, with the flat, deficient irises of a
goat.

The
Black Goat Man. Mauricio, transformed by whatever foul thing resided in the
well beneath Red House.

The
Indians were screaming, but they seemed far away now.
Little
at all seemed to matter.
He was aware of the conquistadors falling to
their hands and knees before the thing that had been Mauricio, and the movement
of a half dozen other sinuate humanoid shapes dragging themselves up from the
well—misshapen forms that recalled the reptilian Cold Ones that had attacked
them on the trail, and yet which were also perversely alluring and strongly
feminine in their slow, sultry movements. These crawled and slithered to the
Spaniards, embracing them shockingly.

The
Indians wailed and writhed. The Black Goat Man clasped his hands and nodded his
great bearded animal head approvingly in the firelight. The viperine women fell
to the floor and entwined with their lustily moaning caballeros and scrabbled
furtively at the fastenings of their armor. The Rider felt himself sinking into
the warm, dark mud of death.

Death
seemed a welcome respite from the horrors he had witnessed, and it took a
maximum effort of discipline to keep his mind from spiraling down into
nothingness with the fleeting Amadeo. But at the last, he shook off the tired,
clinging spirit and the warm blanket of mortality and sought out his own astral
form again.

He
returned to the shadow world as Chaksusa broke the connection between his
avatar and the shade of Amadeo. Amadeo receded into the crowd of Indians,
visibly confused. Chaksusa composed himself. There was a mask of distracted
concern on the Hindi’s form which the Rider could both see and feel.

“What…?”
was all he could at first manage, so overwhelmed he was by the undeniable
reality of what he had seen. He felt like a stumbling acolyte again, having
just returned from his first dizzying exploration of the empyrean.

“There
is not much time now,” Chaksusa said quickly. “You have seen, and beyond that I
have no further arguments to convince you. You will believe or not as you
choose. The minions of Yig you met on the trail tonight are descended from the
Spanish noblemen who embraced his daughters, and they live beneath Red House
with Mauricio and his patroness. For two hundred years they have raided the
people here, taking children and women and men to fuel the furnace heart of
Shub-Niggurath and propagate their unnatural line. In the past weeks the raids
have increased. Perhaps this is due to the approach of this Incursion you spoke
of. I do not know. At all times the Old Ones seek to breach the vale between
this reality and their own. I only know that Mauricio must be destroyed at
last.”

“How?”
the Rider asked.

There
was a ripple throughout the whole of the spirit world, like a concentric wave
that flowed over all of them, distorting avatar and ghost alike for an instant
before subsiding. The Rider felt his mind waver.

“What’s
going on?” the Rider asked warily.

The
avatar of Chaksusa trembled, and his face clenched as if in physical pain. He
whirled on the Rider and gripped him by the insubstantial shoulders. It was a
strange sensation, like being held by a rain cloud about to burst.

“My master’s order knew the ancient ways of
binding the Old Ones. The Elder Sign can destroy their servants. I have seven
arrows for Piishi, made from one of the Greater Star-Stones of Mnar. I know you
have one of the Lesser Stones. Like the Sign, alone, the Stones are nothing to
Shub-Niggurath; they cannot bind her, they cannot even wound her. But combined
with one of the secret words of power, they can be used to some effect. These
words are not spoken lightly, nor even may they be written. It is given to you
to know this,” Chaksusa said, his voice increasing in pitch and alarm. “Though
my imparting it insures my death—
speak
the word
shamblaparn to ward off evil. Remember! Shamblaparn!
SHAMBLA-!”

The
Rider shrunk psychically from the avatar of Chaksusa, and in an instant found
himself once more shouldered with the familiar aches and pains of his body, as
if he had stepped back into a favorite coat.

He
sat before the fire again, and Chaksusa was across from him. The Rider quickly
perceived the reason for his distress. One of the snake things Chaksusa had
called ‘Cold Ones’ had crept upon him in the dark. Its lower body was coiled
about his waist now, its clawed fingers hooked into his bleeding shoulders. As
the Rider shook the usual heavy drowsiness from his body, the Cold One’s head
reared up cobra-like out of the darkness and sank its dripping fangs into the
side of the old man’s face, puncturing flesh, piercing bone and skewering one
gawking eye.