Shadow Born
“Kahani, take...” the old man sputtered before the slave master pulled the blade away, freeing himself to take a lunge at Solomon Kane.
With all-too-familiar reflexes, the Puritan brought up both hands, still holding a length of chain between them. The links blocked the downward sweep of the deadly blade, and with a twist of his arms and a half pivot, he suddenly wrenched the trapped sword out of his opponent’s grasp.
He then lunged, grabbing for Nehushtan, bringing up the staff to counter any other attack that the richly dressed African could launch.
Unfortunately, at that time, the tomb thundered, its stone lid cracking violently. Screams filled the air, horror sweeping all around them as some slave takers took to flight. Others shrieked out throat-tearing wails of agony as they were sucked through the open doors. In the distance, the slaves were trapped, unable to break and run through the forest as their captors could.
The slave trader whirled, pulling one of his own pistols at the cacophony of suffering and terror rising from the opened crypt.
“I warned you to leave it alone!” Kane heard himself growl.
The African fired a single pistol shot at a shimmering arm of pink. Long talons sank into the slaver’s chest, and he shrieked, still alive even as bloodred nails poked through the back of his silken shirt. Kane moved forward, the only weapon in his hands being the juju staff.
Was this memory or reality?
It didn’t matter because there was Neekra. She resembled an Annunaki, except she was larger, more brutish. Her features were unmistakable, even though they were twisted into a rictus of fury. In one hand, she still held the slaver, red nails hooked around his back. His arms and legs moved less and less of their own volition and only bounced and jostled as she shook him around. She must have been fourteen feet in height, and she was still confined in the mouth of the crypt, only able to reach out with one arm as she bellowed in earth-shaking rage.
The Puritan knew that he was the only thing keeping the pink-skinned horror from escaping, and the closest prey for Neekra would be the slaves, the same helpless humans he had been trying to liberate when he had been captured. He clutched Nehushtan tighter; long, lean arms filled with corded muscle, strength surging through those limbs as he advanced toward the thing rising from the darkness.
He felt the kinship with his predecessor, be it through their mutual contact with the staff, or perhaps because they were all part of the same entity, an ever-existing time worm, each life and death being brief but forming a single segment that would renew, reincarnate and extend through the centuries of human history. Kane had a brief mental glimpse of that “time worm,” a familiar image he had spotted some time ago, when Grant was lost in time and Kane had traveled between dimensions to seek him out.
It was an amazing, yet weird, sight. He could see his spirit’s history, the flex and pump extending backward to the dawn of time, and a shadowy rumor of an image stretching forward.
And then he was fading, spiraling back into his body, hearing Brigid’s voice summoning him home. His hands were around the haft of the artifact, and it had gone from the two-serpent-adorned healing staff to the cat-headed rod, full of odd and dark omens.
“Neekra...she was there,” Kane muttered, still feeling the bruises and the ache of the chains from his dip into history. “She attacked a slave caravan...”
“We know. You related the tale, just as if you were there in person,” Brigid replied.
“Oh,” Kane said, frowning. He looked down at the ground, trying to get a better mental image of the horrific beast that had stood before him. It was indeed similar to the avatar that Neekra had molded Gamal into, but it was larger. The Annunaki scales were thicker, rougher, cruder, scales that Kane hadn’t seen on the goddess’s first simulacrum. The glare of anger and hatred in her eyes was soul chilling, something he never wanted to see again.
Grant managed a chuckle, the sound breaking him from whatever lost trance Kane was falling into. “It sounded like you were having a wonderful time.”
Kane acknowledged his partner. He noticed that he had Nehushtan in his other hand. “Did it give us anything on the location of that tomb?”
Brigid had out a notebook in which she scribbled furiously. “I had a difficult time since your ancestor’s experience was on a cloudy, starless night.
“How long was I under?” Kane asked.
“How long did it feel like?” Grant countered.
“A full evening. After the caravan stopped its march, I was allowed to kneel next to the caravan’s leader,” Kane answered. “He viewed Solomon as a great prize as well as a potential slave for sale. He took my...his sword.”
“She was asking you...him...questions for the past hour and a half,” Grant returned. “He was reluctant to give exact locations, and he said that it was no place for a woman.”
Kane chuckled. “How did she take that?”
“My opinion of his chauvinism was noted and debated for a few seconds, and his chauvinism toward me was defrayed,” Brigid stated, continuing to run figures in her mind. “He found me far more formidable than others he had encountered in his era.”
Kane glanced toward Grant.
“I recorded it,” Grant answered. “It was fun. Especially your British accent.”
Kane grimaced. “British accent? And it’s already recorded?”
Grant nodded. “Back at Cerberus.”
Kane shook his head. “I think I’ll be staying with Sky Dog and the Lakota for a few weeks after we get back home.”
“You could always be eaten by Neekra,” Grant offered.
“Promises, promises,” Kane grumbled. He turned back to Brigid. “So, if the stars were behind clouds that night, how will you know where I went, Baptiste?”
“Solomon was a meticulous navigator. He was fairly good at estimating the distances he covered in a day, and he did have a track that he followed,” Brigid stated. “The only problem is that he came from coastal Africa, to the northeast, whereas we’re coming up from the south. Also, he was utilizing sixteenth-century maps, which were not analogous to current satellite tracking technology.”
“In other words, you’ve got a good start, but you’re going to be working courses for a while,” Kane returned.
Brigid glanced up from her calculations. “That was implied.”
“She’s figuring it out,” Kane surmised. “Otherwise, she’d devote brainpower to a smart-ass remark.”
Brigid waved the two men off, and Grant helped Kane to his feet.
“What’s our plan until she comes through with where we need to go?” Grant asked.
Kane shrugged. “Maybe we could hypnotize Thurpa?”
“Brigid’s busy on that front,” Grant returned. “I mean, I could try, but I don’t think I can put him into a trance.”
Kane looked down at the staff in his hands. “Maybe the stick could do something.”
“Or maybe we could ask Brigid to take a break and do her memory trick on Thurpa?” Grant asked. “Is it like she’ll lose her place?”
Kane rolled his eyes, then raised his voice. “Brigid? Can we interrupt you for a moment?”
Brigid looked up from her notes. “Interview Thurpa or, rather, Durga?”
“If the man’s inside that head,” Grant said, “we’ll find out just how much.”
“There’s one small stumbling block in that,” Brigid said. “Durga utilized Thurpa’s mind as a means of sharing the psychic load of Neekra’s assault on him. What is to prevent Durga from blocking my attempts at hypnosis? Indeed, what if Thurpa were already set up with a preprogrammed response to hypnotic interference?”
“Preprogrammed response,” Grant repeated. He looked to Kane. “That sounds like ‘go psycho and kill people,’ doesn’t it?”
“Even unarmed, he has his fangs and his venom,” Kane agreed. “Tying him up wouldn’t do much because he can spit his venom, as well.”
“We do have environmental faceplates, which we’ve been utilizing for their optic properties,” Brigid said. “But we’re not certain he’d cause harm to himself, or actually become a time bomb, with a delayed violence response.”
“Delayed violence response,” Kane echoed. “I’m surprised we’re not dead just for talking to the poor guy.”
“As am I,” Brigid returned. “I’m uncertain of the extent of Durga’s mental control over Thurpa, but if we try to find Durga through him, the very least of our problems would be alerting him that we know of their psychic relationship.”
Kane’s lip curled in disgust.
“I thought about hypnotizing Thurpa and unfortunately came to this conclusion before you did,” Brigid explained. “Even so, that was the two of you being proactive and insightful.”
“Thanks,” Kane said. “Not that it makes anything easier.”
Brigid shook her head. “But we’re thinking. And when the three of us put our minds to something, we’re generally successful.”
Kane nodded. “The key word is ‘generally.’ We can make all the plans we want, but life is what happens when plans go to shit.”
Grant clapped Kane on the shoulder in support. “Don’t worry. We’re good at surviving when things go to shit, too.”
Chapter 4
It didn’t take Brigid much longer into the night to determine the location of the tomb—the city known as Negari for the entity imprisoned within. She was asleep after noting its whereabouts on her map and managed to get several hours of good rest until sunrise. Kane and Grant traded watch shifts and were surprised to see Brigid poring over her figures after first light.
“Not sure?” Kane asked.
Brigid looked up from her map work. “I don’t want to have us looking and running around in circles while Durga and Neekra get there ahead of us.”
“Neekra’s still a threat,” Kane said. “We destroyed a body she took over, but she’s still a free-roaming psychic entity.”
Kane lowered his eyes to the ground. She’d spent most of a day inside of his skull, and due to her command over his perceptions, the witch goddess made him feel as if he were wandering the multiverse for months, making his concern over the friends he was separated from even deeper. His struggle to return to his body was made even more desperate by the danger of Grant and Brigid in front of both Gamal’s militia and a horde of winged monstrosities without him. That urgency overwhelmed him, and all he could imagine was the horrible tortures and destruction they faced without him to assist them. Being separated from them also meant that he was alone, without someone to act as a beacon to return him to his body.
That anxiety ate at him, concern grown out of love and friendship that was deep and enduring, that had lasted across other universes, across several incarnations throughout the history of humanity. That loyalty had brought earlier incarnations of himself to death for the defense of those others.
It was an emotional layer of scar tissue that Neekra had exacerbated when she had the necropolis “erupt,” separating him once more from Brigid and Grant and leaving them at the mercy of the dark goddess and her corpse-stealing, bloblike spawn. Kane’s nerves were scraped raw, tender to the slightest thought of either of them in peril.
That threat from Neekra, forever lost from his beloved friends, sat freshly in his mind and threatened to drive him to distraction. And then he’d seen, more and more, like the petals peeling from a flowering bud, what the evil entity could do. The latest nightmare, dredged up from the depths of his genetic memory, was simply the icing on a cake of evil. Neekra, separated from her body, had left her “mortal” form as an insane, terrifying force, a beast armed with natural weaponry that it used to rend healthy, fighting men limb from limb.
That body, combined with her intellect and cruelty, would be menace enough across a heavily depopulated, technologically impaired planet. With the addition of Neekra’s ability to produce corpse-reanimating soldiers, the combination was a global scale threat.
Nothing new there, he thought grimly. We’ve been dealing with that since we got out of Cobaltville that first day.
Sooner or later, he realized, their luck was going to run out. Adding to the sudden jolt of harsh realization was that he knew that Neekra was not simply the goal. No. Her body had been left in that tomb as a sentry, one capable of slaughtering almost anyone, human or Annunaki.
Whatever she guarded was something so terrifying that not even Enlil dared leave it unguarded by anything less than a living juggernaut.
“You’ve got us pinpointed?” Kane asked her.
Brigid nodded. “Within a radius of five hundred yards.”
“Pretty good,” Grant said with approval. “We’ll make an adventurer out of you yet.”
Brigid snorted. “The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in time.”
Kane and Grant pored over the map, crowding her a little bit, but she didn’t mind. The three of them had been shoulder to shoulder for years, in much more confining conditions. She ran her finger across the map. “We have two days of travel ahead of us, barring interference or further attack.”
“Two days,” Kane murmured. “No shortcuts?”
Brigid pointed toward one sector of the map. “This was part of my recalculations. This area seems fairly empty, but I had Bry run some cameras over the region.”
“Radioactive?” Kane asked.
“Seismic wasteland,” Brigid replied. “Put on your faceplates and I’ll give you two some visual data.”
Kane and Grant tugged their hoods over their skulls, then affixed their shadow suits’ faceplates. Almost immediately, the same map that had been a mere flat image a moment ago was now a relief sculpture, wrought in first a wire mesh frame following the contours of the broken land, then filling in, showing off rivers of whitish-yellow lava trickling back and forth through the uneven terrain.
“No radioactivity is present, but ever since the earthshakers went off on skydark, they broke the continent,” Brigid said. “You can see this is an accelerated animation of last night. It’s still in dynamic flux.”
Kane looked at the undulations, tilting his head as it allowed him to see around the area. “Can we get a real-time feed?”
“For what?” Brigid asked.
“We could cut our trip time down to half a day,” Kane answered.
“Driving through the streams of molten rock and constantly opening and closing chasms?” Grant asked. “So we have the equal opportunity to be either burnt to a crisp or flattened like rotten fruit?”
Kane nodded.
Grant smirked. “Sounds like fun.”
“We should ask our compatriots if they wish to endanger themselves in that manner,” Brigid offered. “We can arrive for certain...”
“Or we can get there in time to stop my father and his bitch,” a voice cut into the three people’s discussion. They turned and saw Thurpa, standing alongside Nathan and Lyta, forming a strange mirror image to their own group. They were younger, not that Kane, Brigid and Grant were among the elderly by a long shot. However, for the “locals,” they didn’t quite have the half decade of experience that the Cerberus expedition possessed, though Nathan and Lyta both had grown up in the harsh, often unforgiving frontier of the twin city-states straddling their common border of the Zambezi River, and though likely only a year old chronologically, Thurpa had the memories of Durga as a young officer, fighting alongside his father against an expedition sent by the barons into India.
“The three of you weighed in on this?” Brigid inquired.
Thurpa glanced to Nathan to his left, who clapped the young Nagah clone’s shoulder in support. He turned toward Lyta, who laced her fingers with his and squeezed for support. “Yup.”
“I could end up wrecking our truck,” Grant offered. “And then we’d be running on foot through a volcanic wonderland.”
“Better than dying of boredom or getting taken over by a psychotic blob woman,” Nathan countered.
“Too many lives are at stake to take the scenic route,” Lyta added. “Though, I have to admit, the idea of going through a half-molten desert sounds pretty interesting.”
“This isn’t a game,” Kane warned.
Thurpa frowned. “Oh. Like three-hundred-pound mutants and the Panthers of Mashona were only coming over for a game of chess? We get it. This is serious as cancer. Worse, because every living human remaining on the surface of the planet will end up infected.”
“The longer we spend debating the point, the closer Durga gets to his goal,” Grant threw in. “Either we plunge through the fire and the flames, or we do nothing.”
Brigid nodded in agreement.
“Then it’s unanimous,” Kane said.
Thurpa and Nathan turned immediately to begin packing. Lyta nodded to the three members of the Cerberus team, then turned to join her friends.
“And this is the one we were worried that could betray us?” Grant asked.
“I hate being suspicious of him,” Brigid answered, looking as if she’d sucked a lemon dry. “But we’d all be best on our toes around him.”
Kane looked grumpier than usual as he removed his hood and faceplate. She could tell that something was digging at him.
“What’s wrong?” Brigid asked.
“I just hope we’re not damning them like we did Garuda,” Kane said.
“We’re making up for that,” Grant told him.
Kane thought about the city of the Nagah. Even Durga’s attempt to usurp the family tree of the new queen and her consort, Hannah and Manticor, had been a misfire.
The three Cerberus warriors set about loading up the pickup truck. They hadn’t done much in terms of unloading for the night, just enough to sleep and to keep comfortable. Within a few minutes, the truck was packed, and the six people returned to their spots in the vehicle.
It was time to dare the volcanic plain.
* * *
GRANT AND BRIGID looked out over the hood at the wasteland before them.
“Still think this was a good idea?” Grant murmured.
“You were all up for it,” Kane responded through the window at the back of the cab. “And it’s not as if we’re seeing anything new.”
Grant nodded. All three of them had been on a virtual “fly through,” but this was an imposing scene before them. The ground heaved and shifted, and whereas the computer-generated imagery was soundless and scentless, here on the smoky plain the stench of sulfur hung thick in the air and the grumble of grinding stone and burbling steam and bubbling lava was a constant companion.
The three adventurers had sent a message back to Cerberus redoubt in the wake of their battle in Neekra’s necropolis. Their shadow suits had been damaged greatly, and Kane and Grant both agreed that leaving their allies, Nathan, Lyta and Thurpa, unprotected by the unique uniforms was an unnecessary risk, unlike the journey across this field of lava, crumbling stone and thick, noxious gases.
Fortunately, the shadow suits were environmentally sealed when all pieces were in place. Usually, they could be hooked to a portable air supply, but they could also filter out environmental toxins for a good amount of time. The suits’ polymers would protect from impacts, intense heat or biting cold. But the truth was, even the non-Newtonian reactions of the suits couldn’t hold off a point-blank rifle shot and would provide only a few seconds of protection from searing lava. There was a difference between heat that could induce heat stroke and the incredible temperatures of rock that flowed as freely as a mudslide. In fact, Grant even doubted that the shadow suit would do anything to lessen the liquefying heat inside. It had taken them two hours out of their way to get to the replacement garments via interphaser rendezvous, but the thickness of the sulfur and steam made them fully aware of how smart it had been.
Also, all six members of this expedition remembered having to navigate through nearly impossible, darkened necropolis with either flashlights or the advanced optics. The team’s equipment was further enhanced by the addition of headset radios for Lyta, Nathan and Thurpa, hands-free communications that put them much more easily in contact with the Commtact-equipped Kane, Grant and Brigid.
Better vision and better “ears” would give the team a distinct advantage in the near future. They had been only limping along in that deadly encounter, and if there was one thing about the Cerberus explorers and those who had proved brave and resourceful enough to side with them, it was that they could all learn from their mistakes.
“We’ll be fine in the back here,” Kane said, knocking on the roof, even though they could easily hear him over their communications network. “The suits should be able to filter out any noxious fumes. Think that will have any effect on the engine, Baptiste?”
Brigid looked back through the rear window. “Will the smoke have any effect on a standard Toyota internal combustion engine?”
Kane nodded. “It won’t, right?”
“No, the smoke won’t harm the engine,” Brigid replied. “I’m more concerned about spraying bits of lava. If one lands in or on the truck, it’s likely to burn through the chassis, or it’ll burn our suits if it lands on us.”
Grant scanned the terrain ahead, matching it up to the map, which was quickly becoming more and more obsolete as he observed it. He threw the truck into a lower gear, revved the engine and pushed forward. There was no warning as he advanced, but none of the rest of his group expressed dismay at the sudden lurch of the vehicle. One way or another, they had to make their first move onto the plain.
The truck rocked as a chunk of the “cooled” obsidian glass crumpled under one of the tires, and Grant put everything into the brake. Kane swiftly leaped from the cab and padded cautiously forward.
“It’s a hollow tube,” Kane announced over their communications network. “It looks about five feet deep, and we cracked through what must have been a thin spot.”
“How thin?” Grant asked.
Kane knelt and looked at the tire. “Looks like it was an inch at the edges of the break.”
“The tire?” Grant pressed.
“No cuts that I can see,” Kane offered.
Grant put the truck in Reverse and backed from the hole he’d inadvertently punched.
“Things aren’t going to be easy, are they?” Grant murmured.
“If they were, we wouldn’t be paid the big money,” Brigid answered.
“You get paid?” Grant remarked.
Brigid elbowed him in the biceps.
Grant tried to remember the “look” of the tunnel on infrared so he could avoid such thin spots in the near future. One thing that the big, cooled flows of obsidian provided was a fairly unbroken, if somewhat slick and uneven, terrain that wasn’t through the middle of lava.
“You’ll want to head forward by five meters, then hang a left to return to our course,” Brigid directed.
Grant nodded, glad to have the woman’s eidetic memory to rely upon. He followed her directions, and Kane popped over the top of the cab, firing a single shot into the ground before them. As soon as the bullet struck the obsidian glass, it burst like a bubble, producing a circular gap, dropping down into another lava tube. This was dark and empty, thankfully, but the shattered surface now had a hole three feet in diameter. The pickup could span it, but Grant looked at what each side of the truck would be rolling through. The last thing he needed was to drop and crash through the hole and break an axle, but he also didn’t need to put the tires on anything less than sure ground. He hit the optic zoom, switching from infrared to see if there was any sand or other particulate that could compromise their traction.
“Okay, that’s going to be bad,” Nathan spoke up over the line.
Grant glanced to the bed of the truck. “What?”
“I’m picking up something flying,” the young man from Harare said. “Bat-like shapes are the best I can make out through the smoke and from this distance. No way to gauge their size.”
“Bat-like,” Grant repeated. He tromped the gas and shot toward the small hole before them, gritting his teeth and hoping that the lava tube around the burst bubble could hold them. If it didn’t, then he hoped that the sheer speed of the pickup could keep them from getting stuck.