Shadow Born

So far, three enemy vehicles had been taken out. The two left weren’t pulling off the chase.

“How much punishment can these idiots take?” Nathan shouted.

“Their egos won’t let them back off,” Thurpa answered, even though his friend wasn’t looking for an answer. “At least not yet!”

Kane’s rifle barked and growled, peppering the last two pursuit vehicles. They were slowing down, even though the gunmen in the back still fired their guns. This time, however, they were simply blasting lead into the sky, making noise.

Grant cut a path through the trees, a slender road that forced Kane to duck before he was clobbered in the back of his head by a low-hanging branch. Just as they passed the tree line, Kane pulled one more grenade from his harness and dropped it at the mouth of the skinny dirt road. Grant kept up his speed, and by the time the grenade’s fuse burned down, they were out of the blast radius of the explosive. A thick, ugly cloud roared at the end of the trail, and though the barrier formed was nothing more than airborne particulate matter, Kane might have slammed a steel door in the face of the angry militia’s survivors. The blast at the mouth of the road through the forest was exactly the kind of face-saving out that the Panthers of Mashona survivors could take.

And they did.

They howled and honked their horns and fired their guns into the sky, standing their ground at the edge of the barren stretch of land. The marauders had driven Kane and his group from the lifeless terrain into “hiding.” They were victorious, and when they returned to their base, they would tell tales of the mighty army that they had driven off at great cost to their comrades who were now scattered and smashed, their blood ground into the already rust-colored dirt.

“If they’d ‘beaten us’ any more, they’d all be dead,” Brigid mused, agreeing with Thurpa and all of the others’ unspoken thoughts.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kane grunted. “Anyone hit?”

“Not by bullets,” Nathan said. Even through his dark, coffee-colored skin, Thurpa could see the redness and swelling of the bruise where his arm had slammed against the side of the truck bed. Thurpa remembered his own aches, the bumps and bruises he’d received as he was jostled about.

The pickup slowed, and Kane kept watch over the tailgate, staring into the distance. He was never going to let his guard down, not until he was dead certain that the militia was sufficiently discouraged and no longer interested in continuing the chase. It was a half hour and three miles of dirt road before he finally allowed himself a moment to relax.

By then, it was late enough in the afternoon for the truck to pull off to the side of the dirt road so they could set up camp amid the trees.

Thurpa found himself sitting close to Lyta as they ate. It was a long time before his thoughts returned to existential worry.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_40e6b4b7-56dd-5e76-9622-b9066fba1632)

Stopping for the night, the six companions set up a secure camp for themselves. They had things to do aside from resting themselves and keeping their pickup truck from overheating; first among them was finding the location of the tomb that Neekra had sought.

Once the campfire was lit, Brigid sat Kane down across from her.

“I’m going to hypnotize you, Kane,” Brigid informed him.

Kane nodded. “You think part of the reason Neekra wanted me so bad was that I might have a clue as to where her body is.”

Brigid smiled. “Correct.”

“You’d think I’d remember something like that,” Kane returned.

“Not necessarily,” Brigid explained. “You were affected by the staff in your dreams, intertwining your memories with the memories of a predecessor of yours.”

“Solomon Kane, the Puritan,” Kane stated.

“His adventures here in Africa had been related but imperfectly. However, his connection to the staff Nehushtan and his encounters with non-terrestrial and pan-terrestrial entities have, so far, given us an inclusive view into the secret history of this continent,” Brigid added. “However, locations in those missives are vague at best.”

Kane looked to Nathan, who had fallen into the role of bearer of the artifact. “I thought only weak minds could be hypnotized.”

Brigid turned Kane’s attention back to her. “Willing minds can be put under, as well. In fact, just the very act of focusing on a subject, distracting the part of the mind that can be distracted, works. Just falling asleep is a form of self-hypnosis.”

Kane nodded.

“Get Zen,” Brigid ordered, giving him a backhanded slap on the chest.

Though outwardly Kane didn’t change his stance or position in the slightest, inside his mind he put his intellect to work, ordering his thoughts so that he could enter the mental state Brigid requested of him. The woman lifted her hand, holding her index finger straight in the air. His eyes locked on that finger, and even as he did so, he heard her voice, soft, soothing, a low, constant beat in his hearing. He didn’t know what she was saying, and it could have been gibberish syllables, her way of creating a metronome-like beat to keep his ears focused as his eyes. He allowed himself to mentally drift.

The next thing Kane knew, he was in chains. His clothes had changed. Previously, he had worn a spare shadow suit to replace the one that had been left mostly tattered by the events at the necropolis Neekra had chosen as her base. Now he was clad in folded-over leather boots, belted just below his knees, and, except for the white, simple shirt he wore beneath his vest, he was clad all in black. His hair seemed longer. He felt for his Sin Eater, but it was nowhere to be found, nor was his hydraulic forearm holster. He took inventory of his face, and he became aware of bruises that hadn’t been there moments ago. His wrists were bound together by iron manacles, and the weight of chains pulled hard on his shoulders.

He tried to activate his Commtact, but neither the plate nor the implanted pintles were present. All he had was whiskers there.

He glanced to one side and saw several well-dressed Africans and Arabs, some of them possessing familiar arms. He recognized the fine Spanish steel sword, complete with its simple basket handle, and his belt dangling from the shoulder of a tall, burly African. His pistols were stuffed into sash-belts of others.

And an old Arab man held the shaft of Nehushtan. Kane realized that the man was speaking to him.

“...and Suleiman, he who you were named for, Kahani, chased the demons from his lands into Africa,” the old man told him.

“Enough, you superstitious old lout!” the finest dressed of the Africans, the one who now owned Kahani’s sword, snapped. It didn’t take a genius to figure that the black man earned his clothing and sense of authority from one of the foulest sins of mankind: slavery. Kane did not know if the slave master put his own tribesmen into chains, sending them around the world to toil away until death, or whether he profited from war and conquest, sending the surviving warriors of other nations to buckle under to the white man.

Something about the swagger of the African slave master set Kane’s teeth on edge. Maybe the bastard didn’t give a damn who he imprisoned and condemned to lifelong servitude. As long as the gold that crossed his palm was good, as long as it paid for the rings in his ears and on his fingers and adorned his back and head with the finest silk shirts and turbans, perhaps the slave master would throw anyone in chains.

The Arab who spoke of the legends of Nehushtan, the rod of biblical King Solomon, cringed at the bark in the slave master’s voice and could not meet his gaze.

Others were in the caravan, and they appeared all too similar to the procession of Zambian prisoners whom he, Grant and Brigid had rescued from another group of African human predators. Kane could feel his ancestors’ ire at his own impatience.

The bruises were the only result of his assault on the slavers. Although his sword and pistols had accounted for some of the security force, it had not been enough, not this time. He could still feel the vibrations rolling up his forearms where he’d brought down the knurled butt of a pistol, breaking a shoulder or crushing a jaw. His other hand had swept and sliced, but an injured African slaver trapped the blade against the side of his body, wrenching it from Solomon Kane’s desperate fingers.

The weight of the slavers was too much for even the fanatic’s strength that drove the Puritan to protect and liberate his fellow man, no matter the skin color.

The leader of the caravan had demanded Solomon Kane be taken captive, alive. His reputation preceded him, and the African slave master knew that there were many who would pay exorbitant prices, either to slay him, or to take him as a captive. For now, Kane was trapped in the skin of a defeated warrior, about to be sold for a king’s ransom as enemies would undoubtedly assemble, seeking his hide, tattered or intact.

“Great place to wake up,” Kane muttered to himself.

“Kahani?” the old Arab asked.

Kane narrowed his eyes. Nehushtan had gone through yet another change. Now it was a cat-headed obscenity, almost as if the original face upon the top of the staff had been erased with chisel and sandpaper. No matter the new appearance; the “cat-head” was merely redesigned, but the blasphemy beneath still remained.

It was an unusual aspect, Kane noted, for a many-storied scepter wielded by prophets who were the chosen emissaries of God. Nehushtan, as far as Brigid related, was a holy relic. But in this form, the “juju stick” had an air of dark magic.

“You are to carry this juju staff with you, brother Kane,” came half-remembered words from a witch doctor.

N’Longa, the seer of his tribe, had fought alongside Kane’s Puritan ancestor, just as Nathan Longa, his descendant seven hundred years from now, battled shoulder to shoulder with him, against Neekra, against the Panthers of Mashona, against the inhuman Kongamato and vampire-like blobs and reanimated corpses. After their first battle, side by side, N’Longa handed over the cat-headed staff as a walking stick to guide the Puritan on his journeys for the rest of his days.

The staff returned to N’Longa and remained under his family’s protection since or at least long enough for Nathan to recall it being in his family’s possession for generations.

“Kahani?” the Arab asked, interrupting Kane’s thoughts.

“Why are you so concerned for me?” Kane asked him.

The old Arab looked back to Nehushtan. “This is an amazing piece of history. This stick came from the age of Atlantis. It was entrusted to you, Kahani.”