Oblivion Stone. James Axler

about done here, Baptiste?”

      “I think so,” Brigid told him, still breathless.

      Using the sword’s hilt as a club, Kane slammed another of the undead figures in the chest, forcing it to step backward as a cloud of foul-smelling dust burst from the point of impact. Knocked back, the zombie fell into one of its colleagues, and the two slow-moving figures struggled in the doorway for several seconds. As they did so, Kane turned and indicated the far door—the one through which he and the others had entered with Hurbon.

      “Let’s get moving,” Kane instructed.

      From his place on the floor, the one-legged priest shouted angrily, “You won’t get far. The chair has chosen her lover. You can’t escape it now.”

      As Ohio and Brigid rushed out of the cramped inner room, Kane turned back to look at Hurbon, fixing him with his steely blue-gray glare. “I’ll bring your sword back when I’m done,” he told the corpulent man, whose hands still held his bleeding groin.

      With false bravado, Hurbon laughed for a moment, until he saw the grim look on Kane’s face. “I’ll be ready,” he said, blood pooling beneath him.

      “No, you won’t,” Kane told him as he stepped through the doorway and out of the inner sanctum of the voodoo temple.

      OUTSIDE THE WOODEN STRUCTURE, crouched against the bole of a tree, Grant waited, the SSG-550 sniper rifle leveled in the direction of the building’s rotted doorway. Approximately two hundred feet from the doorway itself, Grant peered through the lens of the rifle’s scope. He had had no further radio contact with Kane since the initial burst when his partner had requested covering fire in two minutes. That had been more than five minutes ago, and Grant was pondering whether he should enter the temple himself and recover his teammates. One thing that was certain was that his Commtact was dead. Not only had he been unable to raise Kane and Brigid, but Grant had also failed to patch through to the Cerberus base. In short, he was out in the field on his own now, with no access to backup.

      Irritated, Grant comforted himself with the fact that he hadn’t heard any gunfire coming from the voodoo temple itself. Kane, Brigid and Ohio had gone in unarmed at the request of Papa Hurbon—a standard indicator of trust between two trading parties in the Outlands—but there was no reason to suspect that Hurbon’s people would remain unarmed if trouble arose. And based on Kane’s record, Grant reckoned that trouble would undoubtedly arise.

      Grant glanced up over the rim of the sniper scope to check that no one was approaching. All he saw were the clouds of insects that buzzed all about the sweltering Louisiana bayou. He fixed his eye back on the scope and waited; he would give Kane one more minute to show himself. If he didn’t appear by then, Grant would have to go inside and find out just what the heck was going on.

      “Come on, Kane,” Grant muttered under his breath, “let’s keep the game in motion.”

      INSIDE THE SINGLE-STORY TEMPLE, Kane, Brigid and Ohio were running through the large Djévo room, their shoes banging loudly against the wooden floorboards.

      “You okay, Baptiste?” Kane asked as he glanced behind them to see a horde of followers, both the living and the apparently undead, clambering through the doorway of the inner sanctum in pursuit. Several of their pursuers were balancing on false legs, Kane noted, recalling the horrific story that Papa Hurbon had told them regarding his deity’s awful request.

      “I’ve been better,” Brigid replied breathlessly, “but I’ll get over it. Just let me breathe some fresh air.”

      Jogging along beside her, Ohio Blue chuckled. “You’ll be lucky, Brigid,” she said. “We’re in the middle of a swamp—all you’ll breathe when we get outside is local stink.”

      “Stink will do,” Brigid assured the blonde woman as the three of them hurried through another doorway and into a corridor lined with shelves. The shelves contained jars filled with fascinating and disturbing items: human ears and pickled fetuses; shrunken heads; a vase full of dyed feathers; a sealed jar brimming with canine teeth.

      “What happened in the chair?” Kane asked, eying the shelves with disdain.

      “I saw stars,” Brigid explained, awe coloring her words.

      “Meaning?” Kane asked.

      “It’s an astrogator’s chair,” Brigid realized. “It projects star charts for the user.”

      “Projects them where?” Kane asked.

      “In your head,” Brigid explained. “Inside your eyes. It’s an Annunaki navigator’s seat. It must operate by physical contact.”

      “Yeah,” Kane growled, “that kind of physical contact I don’t need. Hurbon called it Ezili Coeur Noir’s chair. Any idea how he reached that conclusion?”

      “Lilitu,” Brigid said thoughtfully, “the dark goddess of the Annunaki. Not averse to taking on other forms so that she will be worshipped.”

      “And she’s a sadistic bitch,” Kane recalled as he thought back to his own meetings with the Annunaki female, whose perverted peccadilloes were boundless. “Instructing her worshippers to remove a leg to prove their devotion isn’t out of the bounds of belief.”

      The three of them stopped short as a figure appeared in the far doorway, blocking the exit from the shack. It was a dark-skinned man, so tall his head scraped the ceiling when he stood upright, and with the widest shoulders that Kane had ever seen. A necklace of animal skulls hung over the man’s bare chest. A pair of sweat-stained combat pants ended in ragged cuffs below which his left foot was bare, while his right leg ended at a metal spike that attached to his knee. The man was armed with a thick, curved blade about eighteen inches in length and he smiled wickedly, a sinister half moon across his wide face.

      Sword in hand, Kane eyed the brute for a moment. “Step aside,” he instructed in his authoritative Magistrate voice.

      In response, the brute merely laughed, raising the cruelly curved blade in his hand as he took a single thunderous step toward the three strangers. Behind them, just entering the corridor of odd delights, the first of a dozen voodoo followers were coming to box in Kane and his partners.

      Ohio turned to Kane, fear lacing the songbird tone of her voice. “We don’t have time for this, Kane.”

      “Sure we do,” Kane said. He began charging forward, swinging the sword in a great, sweeping arc as he approached the dark-skinned giant in the bone necklace.

      “Stay close,” Kane heard Brigid instruct Ohio as he closed in on the brute.

      A second later, the corridor resounded with the echoes of clashing steel on steel as Kane’s sword struck the curved edge of the brute’s scimitar. The power in the huge man’s strike was uncanny, and Kane felt the vibration run up and down his arms as he parried the giant’s blows. Even as the towering brute lunged at Kane, thrusting his scimitar forward in a devastating attack, Kane’s mind calmed and his Magistrate training kicked in. Although he was a part of the battle, Kane also seemed to be standing to one side of the action, analyzing his opponent’s strategies and probing for signs of weakness. As he fended off another attack, Kane shifted his balance, kicking off the floor and spinning around. The giant could only watch in amazement as Kane turned in a low arc and slashed the hard edge of his sword against his adversary’s bare leg.

      The huge man stood there, rocking in place for a moment as blood began to blossom in red stains across the left leg of his pants. And then Kane was driving forward once more, his left arm powering upward to slam the heel of his hand into his opponent’s nose. The brute’s nose exploded in a shower of blood and mucus, and the fearsome giant howled in agony.

      Kane stepped back and glanced over his shoulder in time to see the first of the rearguard meet with Brigid Baptiste as Ohio cowered behind her. Brigid delivered a swift and brutal kick to her would-be attacker’s stomach and the man doubled over the pain.

      Trusting Brigid’s abilities, Kane turned back to the brute who