Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Read Free Page B

cot,
porcelain washbasin, and shaving mirror. A picture of President Hayes had
apparently been unsuccessfully nailed to the earthen wall several times,
judging by the holes, and now sat propped on a crudely chipped ledge, flanked
by a faded little Napoleonic artillery crew made of lead.
    It was as if the occupant was trying
to will an importance to the place it just didn’t have.
    There was also a faint, rank smell
in the air. A smell of illness. The Rider wondered if the colonel were a
consumptive.
    “We don’t get many civilian visitors
to Camp Eckfeldt,” Manx said as he settled into the creaky chair.
    Eckfeldt . That was amusing. It was like eckveldt ,
a Yiddish word that meant ‘the end of the Earth.’
    The Rider looked about. There was no
place to sit.
    “Obviously we’re quite a small
outpost.”
    Manx snuffled a bit, and blew his
nose into his handkerchief twice, then tucked it quickly away. “Now, where on
Earth did you two come from? Aside from Africa.”
    “We crossed the Valle del Torreón,”
the Rider said.
    “On foot?”
    “Yes. There’s a little town on the
far side—”
    “Escopeta,” said Manx with a curl of
visible distaste to his lip. “I would hardly call it a town. More of an
infestation, really.”
    The palm of his hand slammed down on
the desk suddenly, and when he turned it over, a cockroach lay twitching. He
flicked it away into a dark corner of the room to die, and ran his hand down
his trouser leg.
    “Damned things. Scorpions,
tarantulas, all these I can abide, even understand. But I’ll never sympathize
with a damned cockroach. Filthy things. They get in the coffee, the sugar,
leave their little black spoors like pepper all over everything. You find them
everywhere. Anywhere there’s people, even out here in the middle of nowhere,
where trails…dissolve in the…emptiness.”
    The colonel let his words trail off
and leaned forward, pulling open one of the drawers with a squeaky groan.
    “Can I offer you something?”
    “Maybe later,” said the Rider. “There’s
not much time, colonel.”
    “No?” said Manx, leaning in,
rummaging, not looking up.
    “We were pursued across the desert,”
said the Rider.
    “From Escopeta?”
    The Rider paused.
    “Yes.”
    “Well,” he sniffled, as he reached
for something, “I would expect that, being as Escopeta’s almost entirely
populated by shiftless assassins and bounty killers.”
    The Rider took a step back from the
desk, hearing the sounds of boots crunching closer in the dust outside.
    “Sir?”
    Manx sat up again in his chair.
There was a Schofield revolver in his hand, cocked and pointed.
    “I mean a wanted fugitive like you
must have found himself pretty popular there, Mister Maizel.”
    Kabede instantly jolted into a
fighting stance, but the Rider gripped his arm, preventing him from completing
his motion.
    “Kabede,” he warned.
    The Falashan’s eyes met his, and the
Rider shook his head.
    Weeks was in the doorway, a
grizzled, unshaven corporal, presumably Quincannon, behind him, and Lieutenant
Cord standing behind them both. Quincannon and Weeks had their pistols out. Any
further movement of Kabede’s staff would touch off a firing squad.
    “Precision timing as always,
sergeant. Corporal Quincannon, disarm these men,” said Manx, still covering
them both. A thin rivulet of blood leaked from his left nostril, but he
evidently didn’t notice.
    Quincannon stepped forward, dropping
his pistol into its flap holster. He knocked the Rod of Aaron to the floor and
jerked Kabede’s curved knife from his belt and tossed it aside.
    When he moved to the Rider, he
paused, glancing at his eyes, and then at Weeks for reassurance.
    “Go on, Quincannon,” Weeks said. “He
ain’t so fast me or the colonel can’t blow a window in his skull.”
    Quincannon nodded and undid the
Rider’s tooled belt with his golden Volcanic pistol and engraved Bowie knife.
He threw the belt over his shoulder and patted the Rider down