Free Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel by Edward M. Erdelac Page B

that
was the secret of his friend’s bravery. They’d seen a lot of death during the
war. A lot of men blown to dust. He had heard such words from chaplains and
preachers many times, but something in the way Joe had told it had always given
him comfort. Joe had never said ‘I think this is how it is’—not out loud and
not by way of tone. Joe seemed to speak from experience.
    Then later, the things they’d seen
together;bushwhackers that were tickled to giggling by twelve gauge buck but
melted to a bubbling mess when blasted with plain rock salt;hoodoo queens
trafficking in dead soldiers, trailing the armies like buzzards, picking over
the battlefields in the night to pluck the eyes from the slain for use in their
deviltry. Belden had seen them himself, loading up bodies and carting them off
to some cave, where they were sewn up and sold off and made to work until they
rotted. All these horrors and more had pointed him back to Joe’s words in the
dark night, and given him comfort. For if these dark hoodoos and fiends from
hell could exist, then it followed that the spirit Joe talked of must also.
    So, Belden leaned against the wall
and watched his friend. He would watch him like a friend watches a neighbor’s
house till they returned.
    One thing was for sure. Wherever Joe
Rider had gone, whatever he’d been up to in the past fifteen years, it showed
on his face. Up close, his skin was a trellis of miniscule crisscrossed scars,
as if he’d run through the walls of a greenhouse or been bit near to pieces by
vermin. Inspecting the cut on his arm, he’d found evidence of past knife and
bullet wounds too, scars he knew for a fact had not come from their time in the
army.
    Whatever he had gone through, he had
come out the other side. If anybody could save the men from whatever weird
happening was causing them to shoot each other, it was Joe Rider.
    Kabede met the six cavalrymen in the
center of the parade ground after they’d finished tracing a circle around the
post. All of their horses were covered in foam, their flanks heaving.
    “All finished?” he asked.
    They nodded.
    “There can be no breaks in the
circles. Are you absolutely sure?”
    They nodded again.
    “Alright. Two of you draw a line
from this point to the edge of the inner circle, headed north. You two do the
same headed west, and you two draw a line to the east. I’ll head south.”
    This would make a cross, completing
the gigantic Third Seal of Solomon he had been busily inscribing all over the
post as the soldiers had drawn the circle. It was not as exact as he would have
liked, but if successful (and he hoped using the Rod of Aaron as a stencil
would count for something), no spirit would be able to pass in or out of it
when it was completed.
    He gave his heels to the horse and
dragged the point of the Rod of Aaron behind as the other troopers did the same
in their respective directions. What would have taken most of the day for a
single man to accomplish would hopefully be completed in a matter of minutes.
    In the meantime he did not know how
the Rider was faring. It was time to find out.
    After he completed his portion of
the seal, Kabede swung down from his horse.
    He went to his knees and laid the
staff across them. His eyes fluttered in his head, and he slumped over.
    To the watching soldiers, he
appeared to have passed out.
    The Rider took his attention from
Jacobi for an instant as another form shimmered into his vision. It was Kabede’s
astral body, rising from where it knelt about thirty yards away. The Rod of
Aaron was all ablaze in his hands, like a bar of brilliant white light,
constantly shifting to include all the colors of the world and more besides.
    Jacobi took advantage of the Rider’s
distraction and suddenly coalesced from the bouncing blur he had been, into a
solid shape beside him.
    It was a strange sensation to feel
another astral form touch his own. There was a crackle, as if of static
electricity, wherever they touched.