by James Axler
The big man had seen where patinas of rust had been on the manacles of the prisoners that he, Kane and Brigid had freed, but that was due to interaction with corrosive human sweat and blood, things that could turn even the smoothest of steel surfaces into harsh, pitted terrains of oxidization. The corners of the manacles were just sharp enough to begin rubbing on his skin, causing him a little bit of discomfort. With enough time and effort, though, Grant could see his skin eroding away. He’d only been in them for two hours since being shut into the five-by-eight Spartan cell, complete with crap hole burrowed in one side of the cell and a small dish for gruel and water underneath the door.
Grant adjusted himself to where the manacles were the least likely to dig into his forearms, but that was a little difficult as there were only a short few links between the belt around his waist, keeping his mobility to a minimum. Grant wondered at the hole in the back, especially as he had no slack in his arms in order to pull down his pants to use the toilet. He frowned, realizing that his captors had little interest in feeding him, or even less care if he soiled himself.
Not interested in sharing his pants with his own waste, Grant got to work thinking of how to get out of the cell. He was tempted to take out a spare Commtact plate he’d hidden on himself, but he wasn’t certain what kind of communications technology Durga or Neekra had. He didn’t believe that the vampires relied on electronic transmissions, but Durga was smart enough to have taken whatever equipment was left over from the Panthers of Mashona Warlord Gamal and the Millennium Consortium expedition. As the cells were separated, his captors certainly wanted to keep him from communicating with the other prisoners. There wasn’t much space around the doorway. Even the slots for the candle and the feed tray through the door were barred by hatches that allow no light to get through. Grant leaned in close and tried to feel for any breeze around the entrances, but they were airtight.
Grant frowned. He didn’t think that any sound would get through the doors or the stones. Indeed, the walls were almost seamless, and they were set close enough that he didn’t think a piece of paper could slip between the blocks. Using a tool on the stone might work if their captors left them alone in these cells for a long time, but Grant knew he’d only have three days to work before he became too dehydrated to live. If they did provide moisture, but no food, then he’d have longer—a month. But that was only if they provided more than mere subsistence water.
Steel chains and stone walls didn’t make an unbeatable prison, however. For now, it was a place for Grant to rest. He’d been up all night. Sleep was a gift to him, if only for a few moments. He could recuperate from the fight with the militia and his subsequent capture by the vampire blobs. He let his head rest on the stone of the wall, closed his eyes and drifted off.
Recharging his batteries came first. When he awoke, he’d attack his imprisonment with renewed alertness.
* * *
DURGA ENJOYED stretching, moving his limbs. He loved the feel of the burn in his muscles as he worked his musti-yuddha boxing practice. Utilizing the near-lifeless form of one of the failed militiamen who had not escaped the assault by Kane and the others, Durga worked out his tensions while returning vitality to his body. The sensation of flesh billowing upon impact, the feel of bones crunching as he drove an elbow or forearm into ribs, that was a long-lost joy that he was glad to engage in. The dying African, elevated by his wrists from a hook, was slick with blood from the powerful punches unleashed on him.
Durga stepped back and looked to see that Neekra’s “children” were present. They looked at the dripping form hanging as if it were raw meat. In a way, it was, and the vampiric things looked with rapt attention at the drenched, fading human.
“My children have worked up an appetite in their effort to capture Kane,” Neekra said. “And here you are, splattering their favorite foodstuff.”
Durga looked down at his bloodied arms and fists. The Indian boxing he engaged in was a native art of the Nagah, one they had taught to the people of Varanasi in northern India, an art that was recorded in the Eddas when mythic legends battled with bare hands. Its focus was on punches and gouges, but it spread to knee strikes and standard kicks, as well.
With his scales and physique returned to the prime of his health by Kane’s artifact Nehushtan, he was deadly against a human. His knuckles and forearms were akin to razor-studded clubs, so taking out his vengeance on soft skin was going to be like using a cheese grater on it.
“I might as well have dipped myself in sauce, then,” Durga mused.
“They want his blood,” Neekra said, pointing to the failing slab of humanity.
Durga shrugged, then stepped away. He’d done enough of his workout for now.
The reanimated corpses lurched forward at Neekra’s nearly imperceptible nod.
Durga looked at the woman, remembering what she had done to Gamal. He’d watched as she’d taken a grown man and burst and abused his flesh to the point where he resembled nothing that he’d been born to be. Despite what he knew she’d originally been, he had taken the skin-sculpting queen as a lover. Their bodies had entwined, surging against each other with all the strength and power they both held.
Durga had always been a violent lover, but Neekra didn’t care. Indeed, she relished it, as if every ounce of discomfort that he inflicted in the name of his own pleasure added to hers. Durga realized that she was as much a psychic as physical “vampire” queen; she’d subjected Kane to endless agonies while they had been drawn into her telepathic trap. Durga had enjoyed his sojourn in her realm of reality, where he was not a prisoner or a little mind lost on endless universal planes.
Neekra had spoiled him, giving him every fantasy he’d ever desired, drawing on his cruelty and pleasure as much as she feasted on Kane’s despondence and pain. When they were lovers in the physical sense, she kept that up, bathing in the glow of his psychosis, mixing hatred and lust. There was no way that Durga could permanently harm her new body. Every cut, every bite, every bruise healed at her whim. It was almost as if Neekra didn’t feel it, but Durga didn’t doubt that the pain went nowhere.
Gamal was still inside, trapped in the mutilated and mutated remains of his own body. And when Durga unleashed suffering on Neekra’s shell, Gamal was the filter, the funnel through which she gorged on pain, drinking his agony as if it were ambrosia.
Durga was flabbergasted when she’d become “pregnant.” Her belly had swollen with swiftly growing eggs. She’d passed them out, little translucent orange beans of dense, odd gelatin. Durga had been about to reach out and touch one when she ordered him to stay his hand.
“Despite appearances, this egg is not of your seed,” Neekra warned. “And to touch it...”
The eggs smelled sweet, and Durga wondered briefly at that, but then came small rodents, attracted to the scent of food. And as they came closer, as they nibbled at the shells, the eggs suddenly reacted violently. To Durga’s eyes, it seemed as if they were balloons, bursting, but that “burst” was actually the gel-like material of the eggs expanding, snapping shut around what rodents showed up. Trapped in the enveloping tendrils of Neekra’s spawn, the rats screeched.
The suffering of the small mammals lasted only a minute or two before their furry little bodies disintegrated, breaking down as they were turned into nutrients for the slowly growing creatures.
No longer small beans of jelly, the blobs quickly went out hunting, seeking new warm blood and flesh. Neekra kept them from targeting either Durga or his cloned Nagah soldiers, but she wanted humans, both for herself and her children.
Durga was surprised when the first shipment of “tribute” arrived just the day after she’d conquered Gamal’s body. Neekra had thought ahead, getting her other seduced lover to send out troops to bring her what she’d known she’d need.
Durga frowned at the thought that he was merely a stepping-stone, a future meal or a future
set of clothes for this ancient goddess. Lover, mating subject, piece of food. That was all that men were to her.
But then Durga wasn’t known for being straightforward. He’d made deals with plenty of devils; indeed, his efforts that first brought him in contact with the men and women of Cerberus redoubt had been a ploy pitting Enlil, the Millennium Consortium and those selfsame explorers and heroes against each other. The impatient prince knew that asking any one party to assist him in gaining control of the Nagah’s city-state would lead to that ally screwing him over completely, making his bid for power an exercise in futility. However, asking several different entities for help, allies who would be at odds with each other, gave him an opportunity. He’d specifically held off on his plan until he’d found the means to bring in a noble fourth party, one whose interest was not conquest, but justice and liberation. Kane and his allies lived up to those prerequisites admirably, and it was only Durga’s own greed, basking in what appeared to be unlimited power potential, that had made him overreach and try to destroy Kane and company after they’d valiantly and decisively sent Enlil and the Millennium Consortium packing.
That misstep had left Durga in need of the power of ancient artifacts to return him to the realm of those who could walk under their own abilities. And once again, the exiled prince was working as many angles as he could. And those angles had changed drastically. Where once he had the Panthers of Mashona and the Millennium Consortium—still useful and easily manipulated—he now had the vampiric queen before him. For now, she didn’t show any interest in him as food, merely as ally and a living sex toy, but that could change quickly. Neekra had inserted herself into Durga’s quest, and though she was indeed an attractive ally who had tended to more than one of the prince’s needs, he maintained vigilance.
Enlil had sealed the goddess into a tomb for a good reason, trapping her body in an effort to keep her away from the outside world. Neekra made no bones about the fact that, even with her vampiric children, she needed him to help her out of her prison. And Durga couldn’t discount that somehow she might have been hedging her bets, drawing Kane and his allies along with them. He’d seen how Kane had relented in his attack on her psychic avatar within his mind. Durga could see her take the form of a helpless female, begging for mercy, preventing the human from crushing her once and for all.
“Damned fool,” Durga muttered.
“Speaking of Kane and how he spared me?” Neekra asked as she watched her children feed.
Durga glanced at her. “I don’t have to answer that question.”
“You don’t quite trust me,” Neekra mused. Her bemusement stretched her lips into a smile beneath her dark, smoldering gaze.
“Nor do you trust me,” Durga responded. “You’re keeping Kane’s allies alive. They’re your hostages. And when he comes...you’ll do what? Pit us against each other for your amusement?”
Neekra shook her head. “Nothing so provincial. Enlil hid my true form away. You think that an Annunaki would trust merely stone, even tons of it, sealed airtight, to hold a goddess who could read minds and telekinetically sculpt flesh as if it were clay?”
Durga frowned. “You want the two of us to work together. To defeat the security Enlil put in place against you or your rescuers.”
Neekra nodded.
“And you think that holding his friends hostage will influence him? That he won’t try every trick in his book to free them and leave you alone with me?” Durga asked.
“He does not know where I am sealed,” Neekra said. “He knows of my existence now. My presence. My world-shattering power. He would not dare allow me to continue, even trapped within an Annunaki jail.”
Durga’s eyes narrowed.
“This is a demonstration for him. I am proving myself as a threat that he needs to chase down and nip in the bud,” Neekra told him. “You do not need to fight at his shoulder. He will lead the way.”
Durga nodded. There was still much that this goddess wasn’t saying, holes in her strategy, holes big enough to swallow Durga and make him disappear forever, and Neekra wouldn’t give a damn. In fact, the witch was probably counting on it. Anyone who possessed the abilities to assist her would likely be powerful enough to stop her, or at least inconvenience her. Durga knew that’s what he’d do in her situation.
Durga kept these thoughts tightly under wraps. The last thing he needed was to tip off Neekra over how much he had planned in case things went sideways for himself. He returned to his conversation with her. “Is this why your vampire men aren’t running Kane down? Because you actually want him free and actively hunting you?”
“I’ve been in his mind, and yours, lover. I know what makes either of you tick,” Neekra responded, as if to punctuate Durga’s own fears about her ability to pluck at his surface thoughts. “Kane will want to hunt me down. If I endeavored to seduce him, he would be resistant indeed. I’d be skating uphill against the current misgivings he possesses about me. But if I can play him, I can get a grudging alliance.”
“That’s dicing with damnation,” Durga replied. “I tried that game—”
“A game which lasted up until you got a taste of superhuman power,” Neekra said. “That rush and your impatience left you wide-open for him to bring you down like a sack of bricks.”
Durga frowned.
“You got greedy, overconfident. That is why you failed, why you fell,” Neekra continued. “Unlike you, dear boy, I have the patience of millennia.”
Durga brought down a curtain over the string of responses he wanted to utter, but the glimmering, bloodred goddess smiled and traced her fingertips across his cheek, smirking at the daggers sharpening in his eyes.
“Remember, for all the gifts Enki bestowed upon you and your race, you are merely human. You are soft and temporary, while I and the Annunaki are truly eternal,” Neekra whispered. “There is nothing that you have that I could not plan for.”
Durga continued to stew, anger bubbling and obscuring his deeper thoughts, the plans that he buried deep down, utilizing meditative disciplines that had availed him well in his telepathic dealings with Enlil. His angry turmoil was a good filter, a screen that prevented the thing before him from recognizing that she hadn’t seen everything in Durga’s plans.
The cobra prince’s ace in the hole would remain buried deep within.
Yes, Durga had given in, once, to a moment of impatience and overconfidence. But that misadventure had burned patience into his mind. That lesson was hard earned, at the cost of his mobility, his capacity to live without being subjected to constant pain. And now he was an exile from a realm that was his by blood right.
No, Durga knew the patience of which Neekra spoke. He also knew better than to rely on any one man or woman, no matter how powerful they were.
Durga would survive, goddess of hell or not.
Chapter 14
It was closing in on late afternoon, and Lyta was finished going over her equipment. She didn’t like the quiet, the lack of interest from the necropolis beneath. Kane had said that if it was an underground city packed with vampires, they had one name for it, drawn from historical myths—the undead city of Negari, of which Neekra was the queen.
“You heard this myth and we didn’t?” Lyta asked. “I mean, I’ve lived in this region for twenty years and never heard one lick about any vampire cities.”
“The myths were recounted by an American writer named Robert E. Howard,” Kane answered. “And, unfortunately, the legends he wrote of had a strong undercurrent of historical truth.”
Kane held his tongue for a moment.
“Something else ‘true enough’?” Lyta asked.
“One of the tales, back then, was about an adventurer who went by the name of Solomon Kane...no relation. He found himself taken to the tomb of an imprisoned horror by chance when he encountered a slave train,” the Cerberus explor
er said. “Indeed, Solomon Kane seemed to be the lightning rod for most of these myths we’ve ended up chasing, from the stick itself to winged horrors such as the Kongamato.”
Lyta nodded, remembering Kane’s description of the nightmarish creatures controlled by Thurpa’s former prince, Durga. Those things had come up recently in the news, sightings of the flying, apelike monsters slashing through the skies over the Zambian capital. Each was the size of a gorilla, though their anatomy was more like bats or pterodactyls, with their powerful arms the roots of long-stretched wings.
Kane had tied those horrific marauders to the tales of the Puritan wanderer.
“Luckily for you, when we found you, it wasn’t because of a girl who was whipped to death,” Kane concluded.
Lyta realized Kane’s sudden unwillingness to speak about her condition. “I don’t think I can thank you enough for freeing me and my neighbors.”
“I didn’t do it for the thanks,” Kane replied. “I did it because it was the right thing to do.”
Lyta managed a smile, wishing she knew how she looked. Kane was a tall, handsome man, exotic as very few whites were among the Zambian country folk, though “white” belied the rich hue of his skin, weathered by years of sun and the elements. She wondered if he had a woman somewhere, because despite his obvious affection for the redheaded Brigid, there was no spark of romance between them, no sexual tension, no flirting.
Then again, Lyta hadn’t been with them for long. There could have been much more to their relationship dynamic, but Kane seemed far too no-nonsense for that. His urgency toward rescuing Grant and Brigid seemed rooted more in rushing to the aid of captured family then mere friends or lovers. It was possible that the pair could have been a married couple, except for the fact that Kane often referred to her by her family name, though in a deeply intimate manner for such a reserved form of address.
