Necropolis

He felt for the pouch and found the other magazines; their steel shells were bent and crushed by impacts. Kane figured he could pry shells from the damaged pair of clips to feed the one already in the gun, which meant that he was good for about eight shots before needing to retreat and spend minutes thumbing bullets into the remaining magazine. He checked the pistol for signs of damage, but the frame of the gun was thick enough not to have bent or warped under his impacts against the chasm walls. The grip was splintered on one side, though.

Luckily, Kane still had some duct tape in his kit. He wound it around the splintered wood, evening it out. He made sure the tape didn’t interfere with the magazine release or block the magazine well, but other than that, his pistol was much like himself. Battered, held together by a reliable wonder material, but still ready to fight.

He also had his knife in its leg sheath. The one part of him that felt like it hadn’t been swung at with a sledgehammer was his leg below the knee, where the fighting blade rested.

A knife. A gun. His shadow suit, sans optics. Two grenades. A flickering LED flashlight.

He touched his face. The Commtact plate must have been jarred loose when the face of his shadow suit hood had been torn off. He patted himself down, reaching down the neck of the suit, but he couldn’t find the contact plate.

Maybe it was better this way.

Brigid and Grant had shadow suits, as well, clothing that could have cushioned their plummet down the chasm.

But that was an advantage denied to Nathan, Thurpa and the new girl, Lyta.

He looked up. The sky was gone. Had the earth closed up? And had it been only he and Grant who had fallen? Indeed, had Grant fallen? Or was he still trapped aboveground, kept from advancing by the rift that had opened ahead of him?

Alone in the darkness, Kane knew that there were two ways to go. Up the inclined ledge, toward the surface where his friends may or may not be, or down, deeper into the belly of the underground, where he was certain the trouble originated.

His enemies were likely ahead of him. That meant going down.

Kane descended into the abyss.

Chapter 6

Neekra rode in Warlord Gamal’s skin. She’d carved his psyche out using the telepathic equivalent of a rusted fork, hurling the man’s personality into the void. His body, despite the loss of a foot when his truck-bed platform imploded on it, was more than sufficient for her needs.

Neekra infected his body, occupying his nervous system and limbs, consigning the original mind of the man to a hellish oblivion. She felt a disjointed sense of pain as she took the flesh from one part of his anatomy and turned it into a new foot for her. The effort and the laws of matter conservation had stolen inches of height from Gamal’s skeletal structure, but it also provided her with more room to play with and forge him into a brand-new shape. She took his manhood and much of his muscle and transferred it to fat, to curves, to feminine bits.

Once again Neekra had a body, and it befit the body of the seductress, the queen of the damned who drew men to their doom. Gamal had been one of her first consorts in a good hundred years, mainly because she didn’t find that much ambition, that much grandeur, in the lesser men scurrying past her tomb. Her telepathy projected from where the Annunaki overlords had interred her, but it could only stretch so far. In all that stretching, all she’d encountered were desperate men whose thoughts were living to the next dawn, whose desires were a mere crumb of food, to slay or elude their enemies.

The warlord Gamal was different. He’d organized the Panthers of Mashona into a teeming army, built on a bedrock of terror and brutality. Gamal had the promise to expand beyond being a mere robber baron and seizing the world by the reins. Unfortunately, there were others who had arrived on the continent, others who had their own agendas that were attractive to her.

And Gamal? He’d made the mistake of hurling his might against a set of opponents whose will was simply too much for him to overcome. His failure, even bolstered by his militia and swarms of winged mutates, cooled her interest in the man as a lover, as the savior who would raise her from her tomb. But Durga had been correct in retrieving the fallen warrior from the battlefield.

Neekra now had a skinsuit, a hunk of flesh with which she could interact with the world, even as she flowed through his cells like quicksilver, shaping him into a blood-skinned goddess.

And as her host, as her consort, she had a dozen snake men and their prince, a king cobra who had dared to challenge even the god who’d entombed her, far from man, entrapped without a hope of freedom.

Prince Durga of the Nagah was part of a race of genetically altered humans, spawned by Enki, brother and rival of Enlil, and kept vital for millennia by the cobra baths that could transform human to Nagah or back again, using cellular manipulation similar to what Neekra used on Gamal’s carcass. Durga had cut deals with Enlil and then the Millennium Consortium, in order to cement his place as the emperor of the Nagah’s underground kingdom. His plan would have worked had it not been for the resistance of the other man Neekra had been drawn to. As it was, Durga’s attempt at domination was undone, but not before a thousand had died and he’d wrecked Enki’s fountain of genetic alteration.

Durga had come to her, to Africa, because he sought the means of returning to health. He’d barely survived an immense explosion, thousands of bullets, grenades and knives hacking at him. Durga had abused the cobra baths, utilizing them to make himself into a living juggernaut, but even that invulnerability paled in the face of the efforts of Kane, her other target, and his allies from North America.

Kane, Neekra mused. I tortured him, ripped him from his friends and family, did everything in my power to shatter his spirit. And yet, when he had me on the ropes, he offered me mercy.

Mercy was a concept that Neekra had utilized before; she’d manipulated it in foes who assumed she was a mere mortal, a weakling. She’d appealed to the mercy of others to draw them into her trap.

But for all she had subjected Kane to, he’d stayed his hand and offered her a chance to walk away from the battle. As far as he was concerned, he’d won, and that meant he had no need or desire to murder her cold. That was something she’d never encountered, at least in her memory. At her current age, she wasn’t quite certain of her earlier days, when she had still been mortal.

Neekra would have had no problem with Kane putting the finishing blow upon her. The peace of oblivion would have been just as fine a reward for her as freedom. Anything would be better than confinement within her prison. Right now, inside Gamal’s head, she was only a sliver of what she had been, despite her ability to effect his cellular structure.

In her own body, alive and free, she was nigh unlimited, rather than being a ghost shredding minds on the mental plane or pulling parlor tricks with musculoskeletal reformation. Her senses were dulled, as if she were interacting with the world through a woolen blanket. Trapped in human flesh, she couldn’t even reach out to touch Durga’s consciousness, let alone reach out to locate Kane, the mighty and the merciful, the attractive human who had drawn her to his nobility and strength.

To corrupt such a figure would be delicious. To do it and retrieve her body, to become the goddess she was meant to be, not a corpse buried in concrete, that would be the ultimate. To attempt it, to fail and to be utterly destroyed by such a warrior would be the end of her imprisonment, her torment.

Either way, it was win-win for Neekra.

“My queen,” the prince spoke softly, awakening her from her reveries. “The other has arrived.”

Neekra regarded Durga, realizing that he made no secret of his disdain and jealousy of Kane and her newly spawned interest in him. She smiled at him. “How do you know?”

“The Panthers of Mashona have arrived with their tribute to your servants,” Durga stated. “And now they are under attack. They retreated.”

Neekra pursed her full, lush lips. The face she’d molded was a near approximation of her true beauty, but it was as nothing to her original self. She’d had to deal with mere human flesh, and, as such, it could only hold so much of her majesty. She recalled the tales of Zeus, and one in particular, how even at his most diminished in power, a glance upon his visage by a human turned them to ash.

She wondered if modern man could withstand her true beauty.

“Then send up my children,” Neekra told Durga. “Open the earth, and let them take those on the surface.”

“You would have those things kill Kane, after all the moony eyes you’ve cast his way?” Durga asked.

Neekra smirked. Durga had spirit. Certainly, he had positioned himself as enchanted by her sexuality and her promises of power, but he still retained his own individuality, an unflinching fear of stating his mind in contrast to her wishes. “They will not kill those who I do not wish to harm. I control them.”

Durga barely concealed a shudder of revulsion. When the Nagah had first come to this underground city, encountering the minions within, he had been disgusted by their translucent, wormlike flesh. However, they were among the layers of warriors for the city of Negari, which she’d ruled for centuries until the arrival of a black-clad European. He had traversed Africa, seeking out a young woman, a relative of some other man to whom he owed a debt. In the space of a few days, the traveler had brought the city down, wrecking it completely, causing the death of the pitiful human shell she’d used at that time and bringing dark slaughter to the cultists who’d clung to her.

Neekra could not help but recognize a small spark of that dark, grim Puritan within Kane. She even sensed an echo of the man’s voice within the wails of the tortured twenty-second-century adventurer, as well as a flash of familiarity with his profile as he rose from his psychic dungeon, armed for battle.

She closed her eyes and extended her consciousness to the minions.

They would rue the day they’d come to her city.

* * *

BRIGID BAPTISTE WATCHED as the earth that the prisoners had occupied suddenly began to crack open, then slanted down as if on a ramp. At first her mind reeled. That was exactly where the dozens of captives would have been had they not been freed; they’d be rolling down a slide of stone. The change of the terrain was sudden and dramatic, and as the dust and dirt tumbled down the preconstructed ramp, she realized that this was an ancient design.

She looked as the ramp disappeared into an arched entrance and segments of the floor slid and crunched out into the open. It all slid together with uncanny precision, producing one smooth inclined plane that stretched down into the darkness and out of sight. Even more boggling to her was that as the floor extended, she could see little lips of stone rising, forming a railing.

“What the hell?” Nathan muttered, gripping the artifact Nehushtan tightly.

“It’s an entrance to hell,” Lyta spoke up. “They brought us to the city of the damned...Negari!”

“Negari?” Thurpa asked.

“It was a realm which was thought to be made up by authors in the early twentieth century,” Brigid spoke. “A hidden city, ruled by an eternal...queen.”

Brigid kicked herself. This was the void entity that Kane had described as his tormentor, the one who’d plucked out his mind, taken it to another plane and tortured him on multiple levels.

“Neekra,” Thurpa snapped. “That blood-skinned bitch!”