anything? Shanna and I have little to show for our morning’s work, I’m afraid.”
“Not much here,” Psylocke admitted. She scratched Zabu behind his ears. “Just one little aberration I noticed in a couple of the accounts.”
“And that is?”
Psylocke liked the way he hovered so near, within an arm’s reach, able to share the aromas of body and breath. That was the insular, private way talking was done among the indigenous peoples. An American or a Brit would have felt their personal space was being invaded, but Betsy found it no intrusion when the other individual was Ka-Zar. That was even more true now that he seemed to have sloughed off most of his fatigue. He brimmed with some of the vigor he’d shown on her first visit to the Savage Land, when he’d literally snapped the chains Zaladane had placed around his wrists.
“Ushatch has traveled with you for years,” she stated as she started to stroll around the village, Ka-Zar matching her stride next to her. ‘ ‘He was with you back when Karl Lykos was part of your entourage.”
“Yes. That’s right.” Ka-Zar winced. His surface reveries, too “loud” for Psylocke to avoid reading, swam with images of the good man Lykos had been then, fighting hard for the welfare of the tribes, putting his medical knowledge to good use whenever he could fend off the jealous interference of the native shamans.
“In spite of his pteranodon shape, Sauron still speaks with a voice that is recognizably that of Karl Lykos,” Betsy added.
“Yes. It’s always been that way.” Ka-Zar shivered. “It’s a bit like hearing the voice of a friend coming out of a crocodile, as if he’s been eaten whole.”
“You heard him speak when you were attacked. Ushatch heard it, also. Same voice, right?”
“Without a doubt. Right down to the accent. It has a trace of Greek in it from his father. Also some Spanish influence, the result of childhood years spent in southern Chile and Argentina. Not a standard mixture.”
“Ushatch doesn’t speak English.”
“Only a smattering. Shanna and I have, uh, ‘contaminated’ quite a few of the Fall People, but he’s not among them.”
Psylocke hadn’t needed the confirmation, since she knew Ushatch’s background thoroughly as a result of the psi scan. “What all this means,” she said, “is that Ushatch didn’t listen to the content of Sauron’s words during the attack, nor to the accent. It was just gibberish to him.”
“That makes sense,” Ka-Zar said. “So?”
“So he was able to pick up on a discrepancy you might have ignored. Sauron’s voice wasn’t modulated the same way as in years past. Everyone alive speaks with a characteristic tone and stress to their sentences. A flavor. Think of Lennon and McCartney back in their salad days. You’ve seen documentaries, or heard the songs?”
“Lennon and McCartney? Of course. I haven’t spent all my life in this jungle, Ms. Braddock. Let’s see. I’d describe their voices back then as young, jocular, full of their Liverpudlian origins. Both of them—all four Beatles, actually— sounded remarkably similar.”
“Right. But even when their visual image wasn’t on screen, you always knew when John Lennon was speaking. There was always the hint of a second meaning, a subtext. Paul’s ‘flavor’ was on-the-surface, more honest, perhaps less sophisticated.”
“Oh, my God,” Ka-Zar murmured softly. His thoughts
were tumbling through the memories of the battle. “Now I see. At no time in the past did Sauron ever speak so... so ... Hell, how do I put it?”
“He was gleeful.”
“Yes. That’s it.” Ka-Zar snapped his fingers. “Karl was always serious. Sauron was dismissive, arrogant, even sadistic. Neither of them ever sounded like what I heard two days ago.”
“Your attacker had a lightheartedness to his speech. I looked at that piece of Ushatch’s memory several times. The creature definitely had an evil quality. He was as boastful as ever. But he also spoke like a man thoroughly enjoying the advantage he had over you.”
“Impossible,” Ka-Zar said. “Neither Karl Lykos nor Sau-rpn is acquainted with the concept of ‘fun’.”
’ ‘ ‘The flavor of one’s speech reflects the personality within. The ability to derive mirthful satisfaction from one’s own success requires an inner stability neither Lykos nor Sauron has ever demonstrated. Could we be facing a new Sauron? A stranger?”
“What are you saying? That someone else was transformed into that half-pteranodon body? Someone who just happens to have Karl Lykos’s voice? He knew me, Betsy. I acknowledge the difference in his tone, but there’s too much about him that’s the same for him to be an imposter.” “You think.”
“Well, yes. I think. It’s an opinion. We’ll have to mention this to the others and see whether it gives us any insights.” “I’ll bring it up when everyone reports back in tonight. I could use the afternoon to probe a few more witnesses, see if I come up with anything better.” She rubbed her gritty scalp. “Meanwhile, is there any place around here that a lady could take a bath?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said brightly, “we have quite remarkable facilities. Let me show you the way.”
He directed her toward a small side gate in the stockade.
Wolverine leapt. The beetle-browed warrior at the end of the group below never knew what hit him.
The sound of the impact caused Lupo and the remaining three renegades to turn, but not fast enough. Wolverine hopped off his victim’s back, extended the claws of his right hand, and charged. His swipe divided the nearest enemy’s club into quarters. Before the raider could react, Logan jabbed him with his left, currently declawed fist. The man staggered back, asleep on his feet.
Logan couldn’t bring himself to kill if he could avoid it. The- raiders might be hypnotic slaves of Sauron, and not responsible for their actions.
The falling body was in the way. Logan leapt over, but the obstacle cost him his best angle of attack. Lupo and the remaining two men jumped to the side.
The advantage of surprise was gone. Too bad. Logan had decided the risk was worth it. He could have waited for Gelm and Aben to back him up, or radioed for reinforcements, but this felt like the right moment. Two down. That was enough, if he didn’t screw up.
The two warriors lowered their spears and thrust, forcing Logan to duck and roll between them. One of his claws sliced the shin of the enemy on the left. The man leapt back, yelping. A painful wound, but not crippling.
Lupo held back. Momentarily free of the chaos, he lifted his head and howled.
More howls answered him from the jungle shadows.
The pack had been downwind. Logan hadn’t detected
them earlier. He’d hoped the two-legged enemies would be the only ones involved in the light. Oh, well. This just made it more interesting. He’d just have to be efficient.
The man with the wounded leg was still stumbling back. Logan went for the other one.
The bugger was fast, he had to give him credit. The spear tip came straight at his guts too quickly to avoid getting poked.
So Logan didn’t even try to evade. He twisted just enough to take the impact in his side, where his adamantium-laced ribs deflected the spear. The maneuver brought him inside of his attacker’s guard. One punch to the solar plexus took him out.
Logan whirled. The gash in his side burned. Blood poured dowh, a streak of crimson from ribs to knee. He’d survived much worse, and his mutant healing ability would take care of the wound soon enough. Without slowing down, he charged the final savage.
This man wasn’t as fast. His spear thrust missed. He was stronger, though. His punch to Logan’s jaw landed like a sledgehammer. Logan returned the favor. His opponent’s jaw, not being enhanced with unbreakable metal, didn’t hold up as well as the X-Man’s had. Logan kicked him away. Four down. •
His skull still rang. Stars twinkled across his field of vision. Lupo raced in, knocked Logan down, and chomped his forearm. Before Logan could jab, the mutate was rolling past, into the clear.
“Afraid to dance up close?” Wolverine taunted. He shut out the pain of the bite as he had the spear wound, though both were still costing him blood. He pretended the blow to his head hadn’t happened.
“I will serve your flesh to my pets for dinner,” Lupo snarled. He pranced through the fems, just out of Wolverine’s range, eyes glittering.
Logan paused, expecting another charge, and realized his error. Lupo wasn’t intending to follow up. He was stalling for time.
The wolves! Vines and shrubbery erupted. Four huge dire wolves vaulted toward the X-Man.
Logan went to ground, covering his exposed face and elbows. Sharp canine teeth savaged him, seldom penetrating thanks to his uniform, but subjecting him to a world of hurt.
The beasts were fast, and accustomed to taking down creatures larger than humans. Logan entered an eye-of-the-hurricane calm—the clarity of pitched battle. Decisions came to him so instantaneously, as effective as any meticulous calculation, but without the need for self-debate.
Too many snapping jaws. Too fast. Couldn’t slash at them, because they’d be somewhere else by the time his claws got there. Had to strike where they would be.
He tilted his head back, exposing his throat. Then he slashed. Tchuk! The animal had been unable to resist plunging into the opening. Now its side was gashed, and though the wounds were survivable, it wanted only to get away.
Logan grabbed the suffering canine and used its body to block the healthy wolf on his left. That left two on the right. He jabbed at the first, kicked at the other. They yelped and darted backward.
Another momentary opening. Logan flung the bloody one into the pair that had retreated and charged the solo animal. One, two. Blood spurted from the target’s snout and from its front shoulder. It screamed and bolted.
The other two jumped Logan from behind, locking teeth into his legs. He went with the impact, rolling and lashing out with his talons. The lovely, wet sound of sharp points penetrating meat echoed off the jungle fronds.
The wolves tucked tail and ran. Red blood stained the ferns as they pelted past.
Lupo turned as if to follow, but Logan shrugged aside the disorientation of head blows and lost blood and caught him in three bounds. They tumbled over a rotting log, littering the air with fungi spores and humus.
Wolverine came up on top, knee on Lupo’s stomach. He pressed a closed fist under the mutate’s jaw. “Snikt,” he said, mimicking the sound of his claws extending.
Lupo’s feral eyes went wide. “Don’t kill me!” he blurted.
,His plea wasn’t quite desperate enough. Without relaxing his hold, Logan glanced behind.
One of Lupo’s human accomplices—the one with the pile driver punch—was charging forward, still alive despite a broken jaw and capable of delivering one last, potent spear thrust.
Before Logan could react, a tomahawk whirled in from the side, caving in the attacker’s head behind his ear. His spear burrowed into the log. Logan took the impact of the stumbling body, but it didn’t knock him off of Lupo. He flung away the spasming remains with a shake of his torso.
“Yer late,” he called. “Y’almost missed the fun.”
Gelm and Aben emerged from the vine-laced trees. Gelm picked up his hand-axe and began wiping off the blood, dirt, and brains from its edge. The two men nodded and flashed the Lake People sign of vengeance—a closed fist held inside the other palm.
“You knew him, eh?” Logan said. That eased his mind about the death. The man apparently had been doing bad
things for a while—long before Sauron could possibly have coerced him. The skull crushing had been deserved.
No smiles from either tribesman, Logan noted. Right. Gotta save the smiles for enemies who were still alive and awake to appreciate it.
Like this dogsled whelp here.
Logan leaned down, staring eye to eye at Lupo’s Lon Chaney Jr. face. “I’d love t’finish the job, but I need you alive for the time bein’. Tell me where to find green beak. The X-Men need to have a few words with ’im.”
Lupo growled.
Wolverine held up his right hand with its projected claws, then twitched his left, the one under Lupo’s jaw, as if to skewer his captive through both carotid arteries.
“I don’t know,” Lupo said through clenched teeth. “Wrong answer,” Logan said. “How couldja not know? Yer workin’ for ’im, ain’tcha?”
“I meet with the master at places and times of his choosing. I am not privileged to know where he lurks the rest of the time. I stay in the jungle. He—I don’t know where.” “Don’t sound likely,” Logan muttered. “I think you’re lyin’.” He pressed harder on Lupo’s larynx.
“I’m not.” The mutate coughed. Wolverine reduced the pressure. A little. “Only Brainchild is with him.”
“Where’s the next rendezvous? When?”
“I don’t know!”
“Bull!” Logan spat. “How could you not know thatT’
‘ ‘The master hypnotizes me. I only know where to go, and when, after I’m there.”
Logan scowled. He glanced at Gelm and Aben, who wore rapt gazes of anticipation. They probably thought they were going to witness the execution of one of their people’s most infamous tormenters. Logan would have liked to accommodate them. Unfortunately, Lupo’s story was believable. Sau-ron’s powers of hypnotism were easily strong enough to do the job. The X-Man lifted his hand away.
“We’ll get what we need out of you one way or another,” Wolverine promised. He dragged Lupo toward a fallen tree, where the jungle canopy was open enough for his flight-capable teammates to land, and coded his wrist radio to transmit.
CHAPTER 5
yrjfT^ he bathing facilities were everything that Ka-Zar
III promised. The Savage Land could pamper a woman
B after all, once she knew her way around.
Psylocke stood beneath a misty, ten-foot waterfall, rinsing the shampoo—no going native there, she’d brought her own—from her long, dark hair. A stone’s throw away, two village women relaxed on a natural stone shelf in knee-deep water near the banks. A trio of adolescent girls were swimming in the center of the pool, giggling at the fish tickling their ankles.
Apparently midday baths were a popular custom here. A way of combating the heat of the jungle. Betsy exchanged smiles with the women from time to time, but didn’t speak. To communicate would have required her to telepathically borrow knowledge of their language. For the moment, she preferred mental solitude. She wanted to partake of the loveliness of the setting as much through her own perceptions as possible.
The women were all fit and strong. The rigors of life in the Savage Land didn’t encourage flabbiness. Betsy knew her ninja-trained body compared well in the buffed-and-beautiful department, but she was envious nonetheless. They could gambol about in a place such as this every day, unassailed by holier-than-thous insisting they had to sequester their loveliness inside swimsuits, denature their skin with layers of sunblock, swim only where insurance companies allowed.
The water poured down over her bare skin. Glorious. She slipped into deeper water and paddled over to a side pool. There a natural hotspring bubbled to the surface. She found the spot where the scalding water and the cool river mingled to produce just the right temperature to soothe her muscles without parboiling them. She sighed and reclined, lower body and back in the water, her head and chest floating just above the waterline. "•
No men around. In a way, that was peculiar. The tribeswomen didn’t let modesty get in the way of mixed company in the village itself. A loincloth was apparently complete or even excessive attire for anyone but chieftains, elders, and shamans. Perhaps the center of the day was simply ladies’ hour at the spa.
• She would have to lure Warren here if they had a chance once the mission was over.
A figure did appear through the rhododendrons that bordered the end of the path from the village.
“You look very relaxed,” Shanna declared in a critical tone. She put her hands on her hips.
Betsy sank down until the water covered her to her neck. “A little revitalization will make the afternoon’s interviews go better.” People who couldn’t read minds never understood how draining the effort was.
“I see,” Shanna said curtly. “Well, if you’re done recharging your batteries, you might want to hurry back to the lodge. While you’ve had your wrist radio off—” she gestured with not a little irritation to the pile of garments and accouterments lying on the bank “—Wolverine called in. He’s captured Lupo. Storm and Archangel are bringing them in. Ka-Zar said to tell you you’re wanted to help with the interrogation.”
“Of course. On my way.”
The She-Devil vanished into the shrubbery before Psy-locke reached the pool’s edge. Betsy pursed her lips, but decided it was just as well Shanna had declined to serve as escort. Betsy knew she wouldn’t have been able to resist tossing a little grease on the fire of their relationship. She had glanced deeply enough into Shanna’s recent memories to know that Ka-Zar had not sent his wife with the errand, as had been implied. Ka-Zar had been going to deliver it himself, until Shanna had heard that Psylocke was located at the bathing pool.
Psylocke arrived at the center of the village just as Storm landed with Wolverine. Archangel sailed in moments later, carrying the bound-and-gagged mutate.
“Quick work,” Betsy complimented Logan. She winced at the bloodstains on his side and the swollen arms dotted with teeth marks. No wounds, though—they had long since healed over. “Looks like you need a breather.”
Logan grinned. “Nah, I’m on a streak. Wanna go back out.”
“Logan .. .” said Ororo.
“I’ll stiffen up if I stop now. I’m good for the rest of the day if I get back to it.’ ’
“The drums just reported that the Swamp People spotted warriors on pterosaurs over their territory,” Ka-Zar said. “They landed briefly. When they took off again, the reptiles weren’t carrying as many riders.”
The X-Men leader nodded her head. “Very well, old friend. I can’t argue with success. I’ll take you there shortly.”
Psylocke leaned over Lupo. The mutate glared back. Lord, what a vile mind. He was fantasizing what he would do if the tables were reversed. Especially if he had her or Storm or Shanna helpless and staked out on the ground. Beneath the bravado simmered a thick streak of fear, because he understood that the tables were not turned, and he was worried that one or more of his captors would prove as unprincipled as he.
Psylocke sent out a sharp mental whipstroke, disrupting the ugly images, reinforcing the fear, demonstrating in reduced measure what her psychic knife would feel like. Lupo yelped.
Storm turned to Psylocke and raised her eyebrows.
“He needed that,” Betsy explained. “That and a lot more.”
' ‘“I’m sure he did. You’ll have an opportunity to, ah, ‘reeducate’ him this afternoon. We need your telepathy to find out what he knows.”
“Logan couldn’t make him talk?” Betsy said wonder-ingly.
Wolverine shrugged. “Sure he talked. Not enough.”
Storm explained. “Sauron has apparently placed a hypnotic block upon any knowledge of his hideout. Lupo can’t tell us what he doesn’t consciously recall. But given time, you can reach in deeper than he can himself, true?”
“I certainly can.” Betsy said it forcefully, so as to intimidate her enemy. Internally she was cringing. She hated having to delve into minds as unappealing as that of the mutate.
“Good. If it turns out Lupo genuinely has no knowledge of Sauron’s hideaway, he must know where they are next scheduled to rendezvous. We want to be able to be there at that time and place to ambush Sauron.”
“You can depend on me,” Psylocke said.
“The rest of us will continue our searching. If you learn anything, call us in by radio.” Storm turned to Logan. “I’ll take you to the location the Swamp People mentioned. You can search the jungle while I scout the vicinity by air to see if the pterosaur riders reappear. Warren can proceed with the broader air reconnaissance.”
Ororo grasped Logan, summoned her winds, and vaulted them both aloft. Psylocke watched them shrink into the distance. Leaning back against Warren affectionately, she said to Ka-Zar and Shanna, “Logan was pushing the limit like that even when his healing factor was down to banked embers. Sometimes I think the only thing that could ever slow him down is having no pain to overcome.”
‘‘You speak as if you envy him,” Shanna said. “Not enough suffering in your life?”
Betsy sighed. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Shanna knows precisely what you’re saying. She’s just being rude,” Ka-Zar said. He ran his fingers along a pale white scar that ran down one of his forearms. “We all know there is something compelling about a life of challenges. Otherwise we’d all be lolling about on chaise lounges right now, listening to the latest Lila Cheney hit on our boom-boxes and contemplating when to take the cat to the vet for a check-up.”
Shanna didn’t correct Ka-Zar, but she gave him one of those you-didn’t-support-me-in-the-argument scowls that came so easily to her features. She took him by the elbow and drew him away. “We have to check in with some of our scouts down by the lake. Good luck with the captive.” By the time Ka-Zar, Shanna, and Zabu were out of the stockade, the villagers had finished stuffing Lupo in a cage.
They put him to one side of the circle, on packed ground, and erected a quick bamboo scaffold, placing cut palm fronds over it as a canopy.
Psylocke knew from a mental glimpse that they were going to all this trouble to secure him in the open because they didn’t want the mutate in any of their huts or in the lodge. According to their beliefs, their enemy’s spirit could contaminate the structures. Betsy had no objection to the arrangement. Outdoors, the sodden air didn’t cling so much, thanks to the breeze.
Warren examined the junctures of the cage. ‘ ‘For primitives, they know how to make sturdy enclosures.” He shook the scaffold. As rapidly as it had gone up, it, too, was sound. One good whack with his metal wings might chop through the bamboo, but Lupo, for all his feral strength, would not be breaking out, even assuming he freed himself from the leather bindings that enclosed his wrists and ankles, or from the muzzle over his snout.
“You needn’t fret over me, lover,” Betsy said, caressing his waist. “But you are welcome to stay and guard me if you like.”
“No. You’re safe enough here. I can’t stay.”
She understood. If he remained, it would reinforce Logan’s suggestion that Warren lacked the backbone to face Sauron. He needed to be up in the sky, actively searching, not down in the huts with his woman.
“Take care, then,” she said, and kissed him. He savored it, hugged her close, and then he was flapping his way toward the unbroken ceiling of mist.
She really loved him. She was still amazed after all these months to find that this was true. And she would keep loving him, Ka-Zar’s appeal notwithstanding.
“Now,” she said, settling down in the shade near the cage—but not so near that Lupo could reach her, “We’ll see what information you have to offer.”
Lupo snarled and wriggled across the packed earth, trying fruitlessly to avoid her psychic probe. He could roll himself all the way to the river and it would do him no good. His memories opened to her.
The boy’s tears made muddy tracks down his cheeks. He cowered from Monom ’s kicks. Monom, at least thirty years old to his own eleven. Monom, heavily muscled and in his prime. And he, scrawny, undernourished, and sickly.
“She’s dead, Rat-Tail. Look closely. Mama’s not here to whine about me giving you what you deserve. You’re an 'orphan now.”
Rat-Tail peered out through eyelids nearly swollen shut from the blows Monom had delivered to his head. His mother, a bony, ill-groomed woman whose dirty hands and sharp tongue had rained abuse upon him marly every day of his life, lay staring sightlessly at the entrance of the family cave, flies already buzzing around her gaping mouth.
Rat-Tail hated his mother. Not for the beatings and scoldings. For dying. Bad as she was, she was his only advocate and protector. She had found one last way to betray him to the enemy.
‘ ‘On with you, ’ ’ Monom roared, kicking him toward the cave opening. The boy stumbled forward. He paused under the last of the overhang, shivering at the pelting thunderstorm outside.
Monom growled and stomped forward.
Don’t hit Rat-Tail, the boy murmured in his thoughts. Don’t hit Rat-Tail. It was the plea his mother had often made on his behalf. He couldn ’/ summon the will to say it aloud. Monom would only mock the phrase, and hit him anyway.
He leapt out into the storm. The rain, at least, washed his face clean. The tears would never come again.
Rat-Tail [Psylocke sensed another, true name somewhere deeper down, but in these particular memories Lupo, like many victims, viewed himself by the title his persecutor had bestowed: Rat-Tail; Fatherless boy; Useless filth] hovered at the fringes of the clan grounds, nearly hidden in the elephant grass.
One of the village women, a companion of his mother’s for whom he had occasionally fetched water, saw him. She furtively checked to see if the men were watching. She picked up a cake of acorn meal that was heating on the stones by the campfire and flung it to the boy. Quickly the woman scooped another bit of meal from the mortar and replaced the missing item, the fear in her eyes reminding Rat-Tail of how the woman’s mate had pulled out an entire lock of her hair for giving away food to the orphan a few days earlier.
He dug the cake out of the dust, retreated to the grass, and gobbled it down. His stomach spasmed, more irritated by the introduction of substance than relieved.
Rat-Tail braced himself for a sudden thumping or jabbing. The clan’s older boys loved to sneak up behind him and pounce whenever he dared to approach closely enough to beg. No ambush came. That was the way of it—sometimes punishment, sometimes not. Sometimes food, sometimes none. The tribe tolerated the orphan’s presence just enough to keep him dependent, denying him true sustenance, denying him the final release from his suffering. They would not kill him, but it would be no tragedy to them if he died—by starvation, by accident, by being too slow to get away from a sabretooth cat or a woolly rhino.
The hollowness in his gut remained. He slipped away from the clan grounds, certain that he would not be lucky twice in the same day. A grasshopper twittered past. He chased it a hundred paces through the grass and finally caught it. It, too, failed to curb his hunger.
His wandering took him over a rugged spur of the foothills. His clan did not live in the jungle. That was for the prosperous, strong tribes. Instead, they skirted its edges, surviving in the savanna or in the foothills, where the herds ran. No banana trees. No prime fishing pools. Food here was gained the hard way, and one juvenile all on his own could barely acquire enough to stagger on from day to day.
Down in a gorge, he heard the growling of adult wolves, the excited yips of their cubs. Hiding behind a boulder, he gazed down and saw the pack feeding on the remains of a mastodon that they had chased to the edge of the precipice until the giant creature had fallen and broken its spine.
They feasted. They waddled away, bellies distended, licking their teeth with their long, floppy tongues.
Rat-Tail hesitated, waiting for the rush of scavengers. But the gorge had trapped the scent of the kill, and its depth had so far concealed the site from the far-seeing eyes of carrion birds, save for two parrot-sized, unintimidating vultures.
The boy rushed down. Ignoring the squawks of the vultures, he broke off a protruding rib to which clung enough meat that he could scarcely carry the load. He ran to an easily defended cleft in the rockface and gnawed at the flesh and marrow until, for the first time that he could remember, he had eaten his fill.
The next morning, when he was able to move again, he found the spoor the pack had left and began to follow it.
Wolf-Shadow, as he had renamed himself, trod tentatively along the forest trail. His companion, another outcast like himself, one of the few humans he had spoken with over the past nine years, set a grueling pace. Wolf-Shadow was used to that. He had run for hours on end when the pack was chasing prey, until he was just as fast as they, with equal endurance. What he was not used to was the dim light and enclosed space beneath the green canopy of leaves.
He contemplated turning around and running back to the savanna and foothills. It had not been an easy life, but he was grown now. He was strong from raiding the carcasses left behind whenever the pack brought down prey too large for them to devour completely—a mammoth, a giant sloth, a musk ox. The pack accepted him, letting him remain near and help warn them of dinosaurs passing or alert them to new game to hunt, as long as he did not try to mingle close enough to touch a cub. They were his benefactors in a way his own people had never been.
His nostrils quivered at the dank, alien aromas. He tipped a pitcher plant and cried out as the acidic nectar stung him. No, he did not like this place, but he remembered his companion’s promise; The Creator knows what it is to be an outcast. The Creator can give you power.
The wolves had not removed the loneliness from his existence, not entirely. He had no woman. No person or people who had to listen to him, be they his female or his children or his clansmen. He no longer possessed the tiny reservoir of purpose that had kept him alive throughout his teenage years. His birth clan had been attacked by a sortie of River People warriors. Some victims had been taken captive. Many more had been killed, including his stepfather, Monom. Deprived of the hope of eventual revenge for childhood mistreatment, Wolf-Shadow’s life had no direction.
He was, so he’d been told, just the sort of individual the Creator was looking for.
The jungle parted. There it was—a structure such as Wolf-Shadow had never seen. Within a palisade of logs, a stone tower climbed as high as ten men. His companion called to the guards, who stepped back from the gates and permitted them to enter. The interior of the tower daunted Wolf-Shadow even more. Strange mounds of metal and glass hummed, blinking with colored lights.
‘ 'Welcome, ’ ’ called a voice. The word was part of the common language of the Savage Land, but had been rendered with an accent unlike any of the tribes Wolf-Shadow had ever encountered.
A tall, powerfully built man stepped to the edge of the bright podium near the center of the chamber, emerging from silhouette. Wolf-Shadow’s eyes widened. The stranger’s hair was white, but he seemed as strong and healthy as Wolf-Shadow himself. He wore a strange, thin garment, not an animal skin, and accouterments of glistening metal. He was as near a god as Wolf-Shadow had ever pictured.
“/ am the Creator,” he said.
[Psylocke halted the progress of the memory and gazed intently at the figure on the podium. She knew him as Magneto. How severe his expression was, tempered with no hint of mercy or doubt toward any who would stand in his way. At that point in his life he was very much still the scourge who had founded the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, showing only the faintest glimmer of the sincere man of conscience he would later become.]
Wolf-Shadow prostrated himself on the floor, and did not look up until the man walked forward and lifted him up. He held a metal object toward his guest’s body. A little black needle twitched from side to side within a niche covered by some sort of clear substance. A light blinked.
“You have within you the quality I seek,” the Creator said. “Prepare to discover a new destiny.”
Throughout the process of transformation, the Creator hovered near, always checking, always murmuring reassurances, explaining when he could. The latter process grew easier after sessions inside one of the Creator’s secondary apparatuses. Suddenly the Creator's language was no longer a jumble of sounds. Terms such as electricity, nations, philosophy, and most of all, mutation, settled into his knowledge base. [Telepathy, Psylocke realized. Magneto built a device rtiat let him teach the mutates telepathically. It was a laborious and inefficient method, a pale shadow of the tutoring Professor Xavier could manage. It forever erased some of the subjects’ initiative. But it permitted him to advance his underlings far beyond the levels they could have reached through traditional instruction.]
The Creator provided the sort of nurturance and attention of a parent. He became the father Wolf-Shadow/Rat-Tail had never had.
The physical alterations were agonizing that first time. His limbs stretched and reformed. His ears stiffened and stood straight upright. His body hair thickened. But the pain meant nothing once the voices began to murmur deep in his brain. The wolf pack howled, and he understood. Bats and monkeys and boars—all spoke in languages he could understand as easily as he now understood the German and English the Creator favored. And he could speak to them in return, in such a way that they were forced to listen.
“Go out among them, my son,” the Creator said. "Win them to our cause. I name you Lupo, master of beasts.' ’
Lupo had his purpose now. He grinned and did as his benefactor requested. He would fight for him. If the Monoms of the world or any other enemy stood in his way, they would regret it deeply.
The memories came thick and fast now, fueled by Psylocke’s knowledge of how they should progress. She shared Lupo’s glee as he harassed the tribes of the Savage Land, taking captives for Magneto’s experiments from the Water People, the River People, or whomever they wished to teach a lesson to. She witnessed his rage when Ka-Zar managed to thwart some of their raids.
His form remained largely human at first, more like his compatriots Gaza or Equilibrius or Piper, unlike Amphibius, but he willingly accepted the Creator’s decree that it would become more feral as time passed. He had a place, and others like himself to join with. He had a reason to exist.
Then came the interlopers. His master's old enemies. First the one with wings, then the other four. [Psylocke was drawn to the images of Archangel (then simply the Angel), Cyclops, the Beast (before he had mutated to his current furry form), Iceman, and Phoenix (then going by the name of Marvel Girl). How young they were. Still teenagers. Heroes, in a persecuted sort of way, while Betsy Braddock, her powers still latent, could only fantasize about the life they led, envying it in the way only someone who has never endured the trauma would.] They and Ka-Zar struck the Creator down.
Lupo survived, but it hardly seemed like survival. The changes the Creator had made were still dependent on his devices. When the machines no longer functioned, Lupo and the others reverted. He was once again no more than a tribal outcast, retaining only a smattering of his affinity with the pack. The lack of initiative, the need for guidance, was the only true inheritance he brought away from the collapsed citadel.
Then came Zaladane. She gave them a focus once more. She set Brainchild to recreate the genetic transformer, and he not only restored them, but found a way to plant the seed of new transformations deep inside, so that even if they should lose their powers, they would recover on their own.
Zaladane suffered defeats, both at the hands of Ka-Zar and a changing cast of X-Men. But Brainchild found Karl Lykos and raised him up as Sauron to be their new leader. And again, the X-Men and Ka-Zar and that accursed She-Devil had thwarted them, devolved them, stolen the meaning from their lives. No matter how much stronger their powers grew—in Lupo’s case, making him truly beastlike in physical form—no matter that their group grew to include such potent members as Vertigo, Whiteout, and Worm, the battles ended in defeat.
As for the Creator, he betrayed his promises. In the end, he personally fought his creations and destroyed Zaladane. Now they had only Sauron to turn to, and he was not himself. He wandered the corners of the Savage Land, gibbering mindlessly, flying off whenever he or Barbarus or Brainchild tried to lure him.
Ah, but that was over now. They had found him, and. ..
Psylocke withdrew. She shuddered. Lupo’s was not the most abhorrent soul she had touched in her career. The Shadow King merited that distinction. Lupo was venal, but was to be pitied more than reviled. That didn’t remove the distastefulness from the process. Looking into memories, even those of a stranger, could be an intimate, comforting experience, like putting her feet into a favorite pair of bedroom slippers. This, however, was like finding that those same slippers were full of maggots. She wanted only to be done, so that she could restore the distance between the two of them, the separateness.
Not yet. The first plunge had, by necessity, been imprecise. She had to gain a sense of the totality of his life before she could look for something specific. This time she could highlight recent experiences. On her way out, she had seen the threads of the hypnotic overlay that Sauron had installed. That would be the focus of her second probing.
She took a deep breath. She could do what needed to be done.
The final memory she had glimpsed had been the most tanjtilizing. The last the X-Men knew, after the battle with Havok, Polaris, Cyclops, and Phoenix, Sauron had been driven into an unresolvable internal battle between his evil self and the part of him that was still Karl Lykos. It was as if someone had posted a sign, no one home. Lupo seemed to have some idea how the monster had been restored to sanity.
She began to unravel the skeins, only to find a knot. Peculiar. And obviously intentional. Someone had taken precautions against a telepathic probe. The barriers were ingenious. Professor Xavier or Phoenix could manage this sort of work, as could Psylocke herself, but not easily. If this was an indication of the depth of Sauron’s mental prowess, it didn’t bode well. The only clear image was that of Brainchild pouring over books and computer screens, but though Lupo had looked over his comrade’s shoulder on many occasions, the text was blurry. Psylocke couldn’t read it, even though Lupo had been able to at the time.
There. She freed another image from the tangle. Sauron was strapped on a table, wings folded, his gaze directed aimlessly at the ceiling of a cave. Suddenly it was later-—hours later, days later, or weeks, she couldn’t sift the information out of Lupo yet—but Sauron was still there, on the table. The difference was that his gaze was steady and his beak curved in one of his hideous smiles.
Psylocke gasped. This new face was not like the Sauron further back in Lupo’s memory. As with Ushatch’s recall of the ambush, she saw a relaxed, almost mirthful Sauron. Gaza came forward and released the straps. Sauron stood, stretched his wings toward the natural stone walls, and turned to greet his mutates as they approached. First Brainchild, then Lupo, then Barbaras, then ...
Then he turned back. He gazed straight at Lupo.
N'q, she thought. He’s not looking at Lupo, though that had been whose eyes she was viewing the scene through. He was looking—
—at her!
Psylocke jerked back, but she was caught. For an instant, she felt herself back in her physical body. She heard the shouts of villagers, thuds of bodies impacting the ground, the screeches of pterosaurs. Then the psychic snare closed completely, taking her astral form, and her awareness, down into a deep, lightless place.
Psylocke woke blind and deaf. Oh, her eyes functioned, showing her a cavern full of elaborate devices, lit by fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling. Her ears worked, bringing her the_noises of machinery whirring and gutteral conversation echoing out of the tunnel to her left. But the murmur and images from other minds had vanished. Inside was only blackness and silence.
She moaned and tried to lift her head. But it, like the rest of her body, was strapped tightly against a tilted platform. She wore a heavy, unfamiliar collar.
A furry, lupine form that she had come to know too well leaned over her and grinned. “Tell me, do you feel. .. vulnerable?”
Her hand twitched. She longed to form her psychic knife and drive it into his brain. Not a single pulse of psychic energy flowed down her arm. Her powers had been thoroughly neutralized.
No. More than neutralized. Drained. She realized that she had so little strength left, she might not have been able to stand on her feet if she were released from the platform.
“How could I feel vulnerable?” she shot back. “I have seen into your soul. You barely know how to blink without a lord to instruct you.”
Lupo reached out and dragged his paw slowly down her body from neck to navel. His blunt claws left long red marks, though to her relief, they did not break the skin. He leaned down and ... sniffed her.
A leather-winged monstrosity stepped out from behind the platform. Lupo backed away.
“I have ordered him not to damage you,” the chimera said. ‘ ‘But I would say you are very fortunate that Lupo must be leaving for the jungle very shortly. I didn’t free him from that cage only to see him amuse himself. He still has work to do.”
“Sauron,” she hissed.
“New and improved, and yet very much my old self,” the pterohuman quipped. “I see you found my little booby trap. I set them in all of my main raiders’ minds, you see, in case Ka-Zar was so rude as to summon a telepathic ally.
Truth be told, I was expecting Jean Grey, but you are just as tasty.” He lifted Lupo’s paw away, and brushed one talon softly along her thigh. “Though I prefer blondes.”
“Like Tanya Anderssen. You tasted her, you pig. To death.”
He shrugged.
That shook her. Sauron shrugging at the death of Karl Lykos’s beloved? According to all X-Men records, Sauron had often expressed no remorse that she was dead, but he had never been casual about it. It was the first and strongest attack she could think of to faze him, given that he had siphoned off all her super powers for the time being.
“I never consume more than I need,” he said matter-of-factly. ' ‘On that occasion, 1 simply needed every bit she had. None of you mutants had offered yourselves in her place.” He nibbed his green hands together. “It’s not my fault Tanya was not as nourishing as you were just now, or the way your companions will be, once I have them strapped to these tables.”
Out of the comers of her eyes, Psylocke saw a row of platforms. Ten or more. He had prepared well. Astoundingly well, she saw to her regret.
He stroked her one last time and let her be, as if to say she was not even a worthy object of lust, but merely food. “You remember Brainchild?” he asked.
The mutate stepped forward into her limited range of vision. He slicked back the fringe of hair on the side of his huge cranium, as if preening for a girlfriend. He smiled.
“As you can see, my servant has assembled quite an array of ingenious equipment,” Sauron cackled. “As long as you remain in this cavern, an inhibitor field will be generated through that collar you’re wearing. You won’t be able to use your abilities even after they begin to reawaken. By the time you’re strong enough to break free, I’ll have feasted upon you again.” •
“You really think you’re going to defeat all of us as easily as you took me? The others won’t be unconscious when you kidnap them.”
“I think I have an excellent chance,” he stated. “You were the critical obstacle. But even if I overestimate my advantage, I have no choice but to make the attempt, don’t you see? I had to lure the X-Men to the Savage Land. True mutants are the only sustainable source of the fuel I require to be all that I am meant to be. I knew from the first that you would come. I only regret that Havok is not among you. His particular power configuration is suited to me better than any other.”
Psylocke refused to show any sign of how daunted she was, but she was definitely intimidated. She and the X-Men had played right into Sauron’s designs. It chilled her to hear how calmly he assessed his situation. He did not boast like the Sauron of old; he was decisive and controlled, without irrationality.
She strained to probe him. A whisper came. A misty image. Behind it, a shadow. Sauron the monster, enslaving Karl Lykos the man. His selves were still divided, but somehow the disharmony no longer impaired him.
“Come, Lupo,” he said cheerfully. “I have to return you to your haunts and rendezvous with Amphibius if our schemes are to unfold correctly. Farewell, telepath. I do hope I can provide you with suitable company soon. It would be a shame if I am forced to kill some of your friends. They are not as useful to me dead.”
Sauron and his bestial mutate marched away down a corridor hewn from native rock. Brainchild remained.
“This was your doing,” she said, “You changed him, somehow.”
Brainchild sniggered. “I tell no secrets. Sauron is as he always should have been. My brood and I have a master to focus our efforts once more. Not that fool Zaladane, always driving us to do too much. Not the Creator who betrayed us. Sauron is one of us. A mutate.”
“And just as ugly as the rest of you,” she growled. She heaved against the straps, but the leather only dug into her skin.
Brainchild licked his lips. He reached down and picked up a loose eyelash that had fallen on her cheek. He kissed it. “Such a beauty you are. And here you are, ail strapped down. Perhaps I should unbuckle you. It would make it easier to ... reposition you.”
She narrowed her gaze. A taunt. Yet she couldn’t stop the flood of images that came to her of all the ways she might win her freedom, if his lust should prove unmanageable and he gave her the freedom he had just suggested.
He laughed deeply. “Your expression betrays you, woman. No, I am not going to be tricked. Storm did that to me once. Besides,” he waved at the exit. A pair of burly, hirsute guards had emerged to assume posts there, now that Sauron had departed. ‘ ‘Even if I released you, the inhibitor collar would still work. I doubt your martial arts skills are enough to deal with the dozens like them you would have to go through to win free of the cavern. Even at your full strength they would overwhelm you, and at the moment you are so, so weak.”
Her muscles shook from the temporary effort she had mounted against the straps. Weak as a kitten. No. A kitten was stronger. Weak as a potato.
“I have work to do to prepare this facility for the other guests,” Brainchild whispered, his mouth no more than a finger’s width from her ear. “But as I do, I will be watching you.”
CHAPTER 6
Shanna saw the smoke signals rising and heard the pounding drums. “Matthew!” she cried. Her feet left divots in the grass as she accelerated.
Maternal alarm flooded her so thoroughly that she whipped past two bends of the trail before she recovered her ability to think. Calm down, she scolded herself. Hysteria won’t help him.
The self-lecture worked. Legs still pumping hard, she settled into the strategic composure she had developed in her earliest days in Africa and India, when her leopards ran with her. She raised her wrist to her mouth, activating the device Hank McCoy had given her.
“Attack on the Fall People village,” she blurted.
Storm’s voice crackled out of the tiny speaker. “How bad?” '
“Don’t know, I’m not there yet,” Shanna puffed. “The drums just say trouble, all warriors come quick. I’ll be at the gates in two minutes.”
“We’re on our way,” Storm replied. “Archangel, Cannonball.”
“I heard,” Archangel replied. “I’m way out by Garokk’s ruined city, but I’ll be there as soon I can.”
“An’ I’ll be—” Cannonball’s transmission drowned in a wave of static. Another EMP. The radios would be out for a bit. No matter. The important part of the communication had already taken place.
The community watchtower swung into view. The juvenile boys stationed on the platform saw her and waved vigorously. She gave them a quick gesture of acknowledgment.
The tower was intact, the boys unhurt. The stockade walls loomed through the trees, unharmed. Whatever the crisis, it was not as widespread as it could be.
She bounded through the gateway. Her first glance darted straight toward the hut she and Ka-Zar were inhabiting while the X-Men were based here. Zira was standing just outside the entrance, clutching little Matthew protectively in her long arms.
He’s safe. Shanna’s heart ceased jumping like a cricket from one side of her chest cavity to another. Her son was
safe.
,She spun to the right through the meat-drying racks and the tanning hoops to the packed circle of ground at the village center, where the mutate had been imprisoned.
The cage hatch was wide open, the occupant gone. A group of warriors was clustered around the scaffold that had been under construction when Shanna had left for the rendezvous by the lake. They were gazing ruefully at the scuff marks on the ground near the cage—marks made by shoes, not bare feet.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“The woman who looks into minds was taken,” stated Bral, an elder. ‘ ‘She cried out and collapsed. Before anyone could rush to her side, the monster appeared from the sky, swooped down, and seized her. We—”
“He clouded our minds,” added Nyo, Bral’s younger brother. “It was only for a moment, but it made every one of us pause.” .
“During that time, he launched back into the air,” Bral continued, pointing upriver. “Two riders on leatherwings swooped down in his wake. They freed the wolf-brother and carried him away as well. My arrow struck the saddle of the second rider, but I fear it drew no blood. The attackers escaped. We are sorry, sister-warrior.”
Shanna blanched. Psylocke taken? The She-Devil immediately regretted all the petty things she had been thinking about the telepath. Despite her annoyingly flirtatious demeanor, she was an ally—and a valuable one. No one deserved to fall into Sauron’s clutches, particularly not when OilC- If ad been put in danger as the result of an invitation Shanna herself had extended.
Dust and particles of grass whirled as Storm landed in the village circle. Shanna rushed toward her.
“Sauron kidnapped Psylocke. They went that way. They might still be in view if you fly high enough.”
“If they are, I will stop him,” the wind-rider vowed. She lofted upward, summoning a jet of air so strong the treetops roiled like tentacles and the watchtower rocked back and forth. Even a pterodactyl in full dive into the lake could not cut the Savage Land atmosphere so swiftly.
To the awe of the villagers, Archangel raced toward them even faster than Storm had left, seeming to be only an azure blur until he braked for his landing. He jogged the last few paces, halting the last of his momentum with his legs.
He saw the opened cage and the empty spot where his lover had sat and let out an inarticulate yell. Shanna told him what had happened.
“I’m on it,” he barked toward Shanna. Then he was in flight, crying out Betsy’s name.
He’s as hot-headed as I about his mate, Shanna thought. She hoped Warren wasn’t rushing headlong into more than he could handle.
“One down, without even a fight,” Logan muttered as the last of twilight faded from purple to black over the village of the Fall People. “Got mud on our faces, people.”
“Y’hand out compliments like Cable, Wolvie,” Cannonball said, referring to his former mentor in the New Mutants and X-Force. “I think we’re feelin’ bad enough as it is.” Sam waited for Wolverine’s comeback, but Logan merely paced stiffly back and forth, rubbing the nearly healed scar on his side, shadows deep beneath his bushy brows. He’s gnawing his foot off, Sam thought. He pushed himself hard all day, caught a bad guy, and now he has nothing positive to show for it.
Sam recalled all the times he’d seen Psylocke and Wolverine tumbling around the gym or the lawns of the Xavier Institute. Kicking, jabbing, rolling. Delighting in the chance to practice lethal moves with a partner who could withstand the intensity. It had been their ritual ever since Betsy had acquired her ninja skills. Though her romantic involvement with Warren had curtailed the frequency of such practices, Sam suspected Logan was remembering them now.
Sam had his own memories to cope with. Such as his first encounter with Sauron. His protective blast envelope disrupted by Phantazia, Sauron’s teammate on that roster of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Sam had proven vulnerable at just the wrong time. The horror of Sauron’s spearlike wingtip thrusting completely through his body still made him shudder. There he’d been, skewered like a cube of lamb at one of his family’s backyard barbecues.
That was the sort of stuff Sauron was made of. That was the type of freak who had Psylocke now.
Sam tried to distract himself by nabbing a strip of dinosaur jerky from a basketful that a lithe young village woman was offering the visitors. Didn’t work. If he’d been capable of distraction, then the mere sight of the all-but-naked server would have done the job. Still, the meat soothed his gullet going down. He had not eaten in many hours.
Ororo was sitting, finally, on the chieftain’s stool Tongah’s aides had brought from the lodge for her. Deep lines etched her usually smooth brown forehead. She, Warren, and Sam had flown from one end of the valley and back again countless times in the hope of spotting Sauron. She hadn’t even taken a break to carry the flightless X-Men back to camp at dusk, leaving that to Sam.
“No telepathic contact whatsoever,” Ororo was saying to Hank and Bobby as Logan and Sam joined them. “She’s disappeared both physically and psychically. Sauron must have a way of dampening her powers.”
.“ ’Twould seem so,” the Beast said. “Not surprising. He's done that before, with the help of Brainchild. The mystery is how he surprised her. The villagers say she was unconscious before Sauron ever swooped down to abduct her.” “She wouldn’t’ve been taken like that if she’d been awake,” Logan said. “Hell, she probably wouldn’t have been taken, period. Green-beak’s hypnotic powers wouldn’t have meant squat against Betts.”
“I’m not certain who would have prevailed in a telepathic melee,” Storm said. “However, it does seem likely that if Psylocke had her shields up, she would have been able to stalemate him for a considerable time. She appears not to have had the opportunity to erect those defenses.”
“He’ll have drained her by now,” Iceman said. “He’ll be stronger and harder to beat.”
“We’ve lost several advantages,” Storm declared. “Including our radios. Sauron has one now. He can listen if we continue to use them.”
“Not to worry,” Hank said. “I set them so that they’ll
only work for a day unless I enter a code I’ve prepared. By midnight the circuits in Psylocke’s unit will fuse themselves together. Once that happens even Brainchild won’t be able to restore it to functional capability.” As he spoke, he went to each person, raised their wrists, and punched in the necessary code. ‘ ‘Of course, it also means we cannot track her down via the radio signal.”
Cannonball lifted his radio to his mouth. “Hey, Warren. Time for dinner, fella. Y’can’t do much more right now.” “Negative,” Archangel replied. “Save the leftovers. I’m staying out here awhile.”
Ororo nodded at the young X-Man. “I appreciate the attempt, Sam, but I already tried. As long as Betsy is in danger, Warren will obsess. He’ll stay out all night even if I order otherwise. I won’t force the issue yet. He has the stamina. My hope is he’ll wear down enough to get some useful sleep before dawn.”
“Okay,” Cannonball responded. “How about the rest of us? What can we do? Do we just rest and try out the same strategy tomorrow?”
“In the absence of new information, I’m afraid that may be all we can do.”
They paused, keening their ears. From far off came the sound of native drums. Ka-Zar soon trotted up.
“Message from the Swamp People,” he said. “It’s old news, but it may help. Not long after the attack here, one of their scouts witnessed Sauron cruising by carrying a woman in a costume. Doesn’t mean the monster stayed in the vicinity, but that does add up to more sightings of him or his riders in that piece of the Savage Land than any other.”
“It may not be as solid a lead as we would like,” Storm said, “but we’ll take it. Tomorrow we’ll devote a squad to that region. Meanwhile I’ll go up after supper. I’m tired, but it’s worth a look right away as long as I know where to concentrate my efforts.”
Sam said, “I’ll help.”
‘ ‘No. If you go up at night, our enemies will see the glow of your kinetic envelope. Probably hear you as well, no matter how silent you’ve learned to be these past couple of years.”
Cannonball looked up into the shrouded heavens. He could barely see the bats swooping over the village in pursuit of insects or fruit-bearing trees. It was a witch’s cauldron up there. In a way, he was glad not to be journeying up into that.
Ororo soared through the blackness. The mist layer was an oppressive weight somewhere above her, depriving her of the starlight she had come to love on her night flights over the Great Rift Valley of Africa, back when she was worshipped as a goddess. Still, the night was the night. The darkness stole away the distractions of color and contrast and movement, leaving her head clear and sharp. A gift.
Below, lights twinkled. The absolute blanking of the heavens made each source vivid. They were fires, mostly, blazing in the villages and camps of the United Tribes. Fires to keep away the wildlife, and fires around which to gather for storytelling. Otherwise the only illumination came from the lava fields on a mountainside to the north—a dull, emberish glower—and from the phosphorescent fish and squid down in the depths of the lake—darting, ghostly streaks.
A warm gust buffeted her hair. She redirected it, using its vigor to sustain the artificial currents that held her at this altitude. Warm. Tropical. Yet a few thousand feet up, beyond the mists, frigid air was roaring past on its way to the Trans-antarctic Range, further chilling an ice pack that had not
melted for thousands, perhaps millions, of years.
Though it was one of the most stunning natural sights Ororo had ever seen, the entire climate of the Savage Land was, in fact, artificial. She reached out with her power and tried, as she had on previous visits, to grasp the scheme behind the magic. It was a work of genius and cosmic technology. Clearly, some of the ancient infrastructure that had warded this place for so many years still operated. The ring of mountains, the geothermal sources, the inversion layer— those all helped, but they didn’t explain it all. She could see it, could revise it here and there the way she did the climate elsewhere on Earth, but she couldn’t have originated it so completely and, once done, expected it to continue without her active guidance. If she were younger and could ever bear to. submit herself to an apprenticeship, she would want to study with a weather sorcerer who could fashion a masterpiece such as this.
What was that?
Her gaze locked on the swamp below. Tiny witchfires danced across its dank waters—methane gas, bubbling up from the putrefying lower layers, the sort of phenomenon sometimes mistaken for UFOs. The glimmers were not significant in themselves, but she was certain that for an instant, something large had passed between her and them.
A flying creature? It would have to have been as large as the flying reptiles she had shared the skies with that day. But wild pterosaurs didn’t fly at night. That meant the being near her was either one of Sauron’s riders on a tamed mount, or Sauron himself.
“Archangel,” she said into her wrist radio. “Meet me over the swamp southeast of the lake.”
“On my way.”
Good. He had heard her. She had feared that this would
be one of those unlucky times when the EMPs would be masking radio contact. No need to stall, then. She took a deep breath. Time for—
Lightning!
The bolts split the sky as she asked, illuminating the whole area. She glimpsed a dark, winged silhouette cruising low over the bog. It suddenly wheeled and started to climb.
Sauron. And he was alone.
I have you now, murderer, she thought.
She formed sleet and more lightning, funneling it toward the speeding figure. The gale pelted him sideways, but he ducked and circled into quieter air in a stunning example of flying agility. The draining of Psylocke had charged him with such vigor he was as fast as a swooping eagle, but as ma-neuyerable as a swallow.
The initial burst of lightning faded, plunging Ororo into gloom. She called up another round.
Sauron was no longer fleeing clockwise as she had anticipated. She had to hurriedly scan about in order to locate him.
He was coming straight for her.
She commanded a thermal current to form and rocketed herself upward. When Sauron plunged into the updraft, she twisted it around like a funnel, intending to disorient him.
To her amazement, he kept his equilibrium. Though he was racing in tight circles, he was apparently avoiding dizziness. All her effort only made it easier for him to catch up to her altitude.
“Goddess!” she blurted.
Look into my eyes, mutant. The voice in her mind was sneering, insistent, penetrating. She clutched her temples, trying to block the mental intrusion. A cold squirt of fear bathed her intestines. She had miscalculated. His hypnotic powers
had greater range than when last she had fought him. Had he always been this strong, or was it a temporary advantage gained by draining the energy of a telepath?
Ororo abandoned the offensive. She needed to guard herself, allow time for Warren to reach the battle site. She released the lightning, letting the Savage Land skies fall once more into deep blackness. If she couldn’t see Sauron’s eyes, she couldn’t be hypnotized completely. A wind rose to her call and whisked her northward.
Slow down. Slow down. Let me hold you in my grasp, called Sauron.
To her horror, she did slow down. She called rain, hoping its pelting spray would knock him downward, but she couldn’t get herself to move faster.
Dry the rain. Don’t try to stop me. Turn around.
She tried to change the rain into sleet as before, but the effort failed. The best she could do was maintain a steady drizzle.
Turn around? No, she must not.
Lightning! he demanded. Give me light!
“No!” she yelled. Yet, each time she disobeyed, waves of agony pulsed through her skull. She spun, dismissing the drizzle. She refused to let him rule her. If he wanted lightning, she would give it to him, but her way. Down his throat.
In the suddenly rainless, silent night, the flapping of his wings revealed his location. She propelled herself toward him, and when the gap closed to mere dozens of meters, she struck at him with a lightning bolt.
The jagged snake of electricity vaulted across the gap. It struck Sauron at belt level.
Then, before the light faded, she realized the bolt had not struck his body, but an odd belt he wore. A nimbus of energy surrounded the belt, consisting of the energy with which she had attacked him. It had been absorbed. Neutralized, as by a lightning rod.
One of Brainchild’s toys, she realized. Sauron had not come out tonight bereft of countermeasures to her power. He had been ready for her.
The continued glow from the belt kept Sauron illuminated. She could see right into his huge, baleful eyes.
Now you are mine. Cease your struggles.
She pulled up, maintaining only enough wind to keep her at her current altitude and coordinates.
“Good, my pretty cloud nymph,” Sauron cackled aloud. “Now stay still. I deserve a taste of you right away for all the abuse you levelled at me tonight, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You ... haven’t... defeated ...me...” she hissed between clenched teeth.
“A detail I’ll remedy immediately,” he said. He reached her and, wings flapping hard in order to maintain position, reached out to grasp her.
She cringed backward. Closing her eyes would reduce his hypnotic effect by at least half, but she found she couldn’t even do that. His eyes seemed to grow until they filled her field of vision. Nothing remained in the universe but those orbs and his raucous, mocking voice.
Silvery fragments of metal whisked between them. Blood fanned from a slit that sprouted in one of her enemy’s wings. A few drops struck her face, jolting her back to a state of control.
She cut the wind that supported her and dropped like a bomb right out of Sauron’s reach. The talons on his left foot grazed her head, tearing loose a lock of her white tresses.
He let her go. She looked up to see him whirl sideways. A moment later another winged shape crossed between her and the fading glow of his lightning-swallowing belt.
Bless you, Warren, she thought.
“Greetings, Archangel,” Sauron shouted. “Too bad you couldn’t fling more blades at me while I was preoccupied, but then you might have killed your teammate. Never willing to do what it takes to win, are you, my old friend?”
Storm halted her plunge fifty meters below Sauron. Her hands were trembling. The wind obeyed her fitfully. The urge to continue fleeing was powerful, but she overruled the desire. Warren had broken Sauron’s hypnotic control over her, not to pave the road of her retreat, but to assist her in winning the battle.
In the agonizingly sluggish moments necessary to take a breath, shake off her disorientation, and initiate a new offensive, she puzzled over what was happening above. Warren had .not yet followed through on his surprise attack. She couldn’t see him in the darkness. The only thing she could truly make out was the tiny blur of light that clung to Sauron’s midsection.
Why was Archangel letting their enemy babble on?
Goddess. Is he afraid to engage?
“Always the most weak-willed of all the X-Men,” Sauron taunted. “Your metal wings haven’t changed the man inside. Give up now, child. I will let you live.”
Fipp-fipp-fipp-fipp.
Sauron squawked and whirled around. Another barrage of Warren’s blades raced past him, just missing. The monster pumped his wings hard, presenting as difficult a target as possible.
Storm finally comprehended. Warren was not afraid to fight. He was playing it smart, gliding in circles out in the darkness where Sauron couldn’t see him and at a distance that would minimize the hypnotic effect. In fact, he had been less rattled than she by the villain’s incredible strength.
The last of the glow from the belt vanished. Now everyone was flying blind again.
No advantage then, to keeping the night dark. Storm called forth more lightning. A continuous round of small bursts, to give herself and Warren a clear shot.
Sauron blinked and covered his eyes. The discharges painted the cloud layer with a steely tone, and turned the jungle to a palate of shadow, charcoal, and ash. Between this ceiling and floor hung the three of them, mutants and mutate snared in a lethal aerial dance.
“There you are,” Sauron screeched at Archangel. “Come to me. Surrender yourself.”
Archangel came, but not passively. He raced directly toward Sauron. “Storm!” he shouted. “Wing-and-Prayer maneuver!”
Ororo smiled and initiated the first move of a strategy she and Warren had practiced time and again in the Danger Room. She hurled gale-force blasts at their enemy, timing it so that Archangel would arrive immediately after they ceased.
Sauron was knocked from his stable glide and sent flailing. Unable to control his trajectory, he tumbled pointed tail over beak toward the terrain below.
Archangel hit him hard with a double kick. Only a last-instant twist saved Sauron from taking the impact on his spine.
“Striking to maim,” the villain screeched. “You want me to suffer, don’t you, Worthington? What a sinister blue creature you’ve become. Your fear of me has stolen your battle ethics.”
Storm was unnerved to hear how composed Sauron still was. He was still able to snatch at ugly truths to use as psychological weapons. First he had implied Warren too reticent to fight hard; now, too eager. But his voice had quavered. Warren had hurt him. In spite of the smug words, the mutate was retreating.
Warren circled and came back strong again. He truly seemed to be intending to inflict the maximum amount of pain. And why not? It was the only thing that might daunt Sauron.
“You did me a favor,” Archangel growled as he closed the gap. “Those other times we fought showed me I needed to work on my willpower. Now eat metal, you—”
Ororo didn’t hear exactly what Warren called their opponent. The slur was buried beneath the noise of wingtip blades erupting like rounds from a machine gun.
Sauron hung in place. The projectiles whisked past. Storm gasped. Warren had missed! At that range, with such a clear shot- and a hovering target, that could only have happened ...
If Sauron had hypnotized him into missing.
Then Sauron folded his wings and dropped. Droplets of blood—dark specks against the lightning glow—scattered in his wake. Warren had not entirely missed. He had nicked the monster in at least two spots, and this time deep enough that the nerve-disruption side effect of the metal properly stunned the villain.
Warren shook his head, swerved, and kept dogging Sauron as he fled. The hypnotic effect was dazing him, but it wasn’t stopping him, and Sauron knew it. The mutate was trying to escape.
Hear me. The voice blossomed in Ororo’s mind, but she forced it out. She wouldn’t be his victim. They had him on the run. He’d given them an ordeal, but the tide had turned. If Archangel didn’t take him down, she would.
The X-Men had defeated Sauron in these very skies. He had tried to escape at the end of that encounter, but she had thwarted him. The memory of it surfaced strong and fresh. She had opened up the cloud layer and shunted the polar air directly at him, until he was so chilled his muscles refused to obey his commands.
What had worked once, would work again. She beseeched the forces of this strange land to heed her.
And they did. The clouds parted, revealing the stark filigin cloth of the Antarctic sky, dotted with the stars so rarely glimpsed by Savage Land natives. The frigid current plunged down.
A wall of air pounded her. She reeled, flipped upside down, and began flailing. What?
A tempest filled the atmosphere. She lost sight of her target, couldn’t find Archangel. She tried to calm the storm with her powers, but the sleet and gusts only intensified. She concentrated harder.
And the disruption grew.
Suddenly she understood. It was her own power that assaulted her. Her body wasn’t doing what her mind commanded at all. She was executing commands thrust covertly into her mind from outside.
Focusing in the manner that Professor Xavier, Phoenix, and Psylocke had taught her over the years, she identified the precise spot where the alien influence had taken hold. She unravelled the noose.
But the skies still flung her about. She was still falling fast, incapable of directing a breeze to keep her aloft. The crisis she had spawned had taken on a life of its own far beyond her capacity to simply abort.
No equilibrium. She struggled to stay conscious. Perhaps, given a few moments, she could at least aim for a landing in the lake. But at her speed, even striking water would be fatal, and the denizens of the waters were not hospitable to guests.
Strong hands gripped her wrists. Her trajectory levelled off.
“Hang on!” Warren shouted. “It’s going to be a rough ride!”
Archangel had a good hold on her, and needed it. The gale whipped him from a different direction every few moments, ridiculing his command of the air. His bionic wings meant little in such unpredictable conditions. He was pumping hard to make landfall somewhere—anywhere—where they could take shelter.
The only consolation, Storm thought grimly, was that Sauron would be struggling against all this as well.
“D.id you get him?” she yelled.
“No,” Warren yelled back. “It was all I could do to notice that you were going down. He went the other way.”
Suddenly the jungle rose up beneath them, revealed by the latest bolt of lightning. A low cliff loomed to their left. Warren leaned to port and aimed them beneath an overhang. They landed hard, rolled, but came up intact and bruised more in spirit than in body.
Even beneath the shelter of the rock, rain whipped in, striking Ororo’s face, muddying the dirt in which she sat.
Another flash illuminated the ruptured heavens. No sign of any flying creature, much less a humanoid pterosaur. Sauron had escaped.
CHAPTER
In the morning, the rupture in the cloud layer remained, revealing, in bizarre contrast to the brightness below, the dark winter Antarctic sky. To Ororo, it was as if the demons of Kenyan myth had tom out a piece of the sky god’s flesh.
She glided above and beyond the village, surveying the nearby region. At least the winds obeyed her that much now, though she was still buffeted at unexpected moments. Rain continued to thrash the grass-and-bamboo huts of the Fall People, leaving the village children to cower in the doorways and stare in awe at the violence of the deluge.
The story was the same across the landscape. Mud slid from drenched hillsides. A drowned rhinoceros bobbed up and down in a swollen river, its bloated body adorned with one very soaked, miserable vulture. On a ridge, spurs of trees stood bereft of the limbs a violent gust had tom from them.
Ororo would have wept, but crying was not something that came easy to her after her hard years as an orphan and child thief in Cairo. She could bear to see no more right now. Reaching the far point of her latest circuit, she gave up and turned back, aiming straight for the village.
A lightning bolt crackled down, bouncing off of the protective aura Storm had woven around herself. The bolt continued to the ground, felling a hadrosaur who had been foolish enough to raise its head from the meadow to regard its herd.
“Oh, Goddess,” she murmured, barely finding the energy to move her lips. She coasted unsteadily the last few miles to the village and darted beneath the none-too-intact thatch roof that extended from the eaves of the lodge. Ka-Zar, Shanna, Zabu, Hank, and Logan stood there, examining the blustery conditions.
Thunder boomed, so loudly it seemed the earth groaned in reply. Ka-Zar frowned at Storm, but said nothing. Zabu shook his mane to rid it of rain droplets and glared accusingly.
“You out-did yourself on this occasion, Ororo m’lady,” the Beast commented.
Storm dipped her chin and sighed. Here she had thought she was acting to administer the coup de grace to Sauron, and in fact, she had been following one of his hypnotic commands: Ruin the weather. Do the worst thing you can think of. How clear that sinister telepathic whisper was in her memory. At the time, she hadn’t consciously heard it at all.
Ruin the weather indeed. The Savage Land climate control system, magnificent as it was, resembled a glass figurine. Tap it in the wrong spot and cracks spread everywhere.
“I can heal it,” she said. “But not with the ease that I set it into chaos. The repair will take all day. Perhaps some of tomorrow.”
“And if we leave things alone?” Hank asked.
‘ ‘The atmosphere will heal itself, but that will take a week. Too long. Given that much opportunity, the snow and winds may have lingering ill effect on the flora and fauna. I cannot participate in the fight against Sauron today. I have to correct this.” ~ '
“Yes,” Shanna said tartly. “You do.”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “You ain’t blamin’ Ororo for this mess.” It was a statement, not a question.
Shanna turned and faced Wolverine squarely, holding a pose that few had the courage to maintain in front of him. “I blame Sauron, of course,” she said. “I’m merely agreeing that Storm is responsible for rectifying the accident before this land suffers any more abuse.”
“Fine,” Logan said. “I just wouldn’t wantcha gettin’ the idea that green-beak doesn’t know how to be real sneaky with that hypnotism of his. He’ll catch you off-guard even when you think you have him dead to rights. I know.” “We’ve all learned that lesson,” Shanna agreed. “Ka-Zar and I know that Ororo treasures this place as much as we do. We can’t help it if it’s difficult to endure the devastation while we’re in the midst of it. We’ve had too many tastes of what happens when our climate mechanisms are corrupted.”
Ororo could not have been more sorry. She had already apologized profusely when she and Archangel had dragged into camp, but she wanted to beg forgiveness again and again. What Wolverine said was true—Sauron’s powers were insidious and devastatingly powerful when he had a source of mutant energy to feed upon. Even so, it was she who had failed last night. She had possessed the strength of will to defy him, if only she had been attentive enough to notice his trickery.
“I will leave the rescue of Psylocke to the rest of you then,” Storm said. “By now enough of the maelstrom’s fury is spent that I can initiate the repair. If you’ll excuse me, it will take a great deal of concentration.”
She stepped out of the shelter into the pelting rain and reached upward with her powers, found a zephyr of polar air, and turned it back toward the vent in the clouds. Then another, and another. Next, she strengthened a pulse of warm air rising from the geysers near the swamp, one of the many sources of heat that supported the tropical, prehistoric environment of the Savage Land. After that, she evaporated a small snow cloud that was assaulting the heat-loving foliage on a hill upriver, not far from the waterfall where the X-Men had emerged when they first arrived.
That was how it would be. One little bit at a time, like sopping up a bucketload of overturned syrup with a single paper towel.
Warren Worthington III saw the rift above him begin to draw shut, one puff of cloud at a time, restricting the blasts of snow and subzero gusts that had been pummeling the ground for hours. The turbulence lessened until it no longer took every bit of his might and skill just to keep flying. He headed back toward the Fall People village. His early morning search had produced no sign of Sauron or any of the mutates. Might as well stop for mm, and eat something, he thought—he’d had no lunch or supper the day before—and help ferry everyone to their patrol sites.
As he descended, he spotted Ororo out in the open. She was shuddering. Her teeth were clenched. Her eyes fluttered open at irregular intervals, remaining tightly shut at all other moments. Such effort.
She looked glorious, though. She was brimming with the aura of a goddess. Long, lean brown arms beckoned the forces of cloud and wind.
Preoccupied with the spectacular sight, he nearly bumped into Wolverine on his way into the lodge.
“Something I can do for you?” Warren asked when Logan didn’t step aside.
“You smell different,” Logan said.
“You’re no rose yourself,” Warren retorted. He lifted a white-gloved hand to push on through. Only then did he notice that his teammate wore a tiny, but friendly, grin.
“I mean,” said Wolverine, “you smell right. Less doubt in you today, Worthington. You proved somethin’ to yourself up there last night.”
Warren cocked his head. “You complimenting me, Logan?”
“Don’t let it go to yer head,” the other replied. “Just keep this attitude goin’. You didn’t let old green-beak tug yer strings after all. That’s the edge you gotta keep. None of that second-guessing crap you were wallowing in before.” Spoken like a man who could trust his instincts, Warren thought. He never dared do that, for fear his instincts would turn out to be some vestige of Apocalypse still contaminating him, urging him to be the horseman of Death. J‘Of course there are other ways,” he snapped. Last night, he had struck in a rage, without self-control. It turned out okay, but that was luck, not design. He had to insist on higher standards for himself. “Maybe if I’d thought of some alternative attacks, he wouldn’t have had the chance to trick Ororo.”
“Believe that if you want, flyboy,” Logan said. “But don’t let it slow you down.”
“I’ll give that advice the full consideration it deserves,” Warren responded.
Wolverine stepped past, out into the downpour. He tilted his head up toward the clouds as if daring them to wash him away. Archangel watched him for a moment, then slipped inside the structure.
Logan was right about some things. Warren’s state of mind had improved. He no longer agonized over how he would act when he faced Sauron; he had already shown that he would not repeat old mistakes. But the knowledge gave him only a scrap of peace. Sauron was still at large. Betsy was still a prisoner. Closure had not been achieved.
Iceman, the Beast, Cannonball, Ka-Zar, and Shanna sat cross-legged in a circle around platters of fruit, bowls of porridge, a pot of steaming tea, and more. Warren rubbed his belly and savored the aroma. It might be a Stone Age breakfast, but right now it beckoned him more than any at the five-star restaurants he frequented in his spoiled rich-boy days, before his skin turned blue.
And what’s Betsy eating this morning? Would she be fed at all? The thought ruined the first taste of the biscuit he raised to his mouth.
“Today Shanna and I will stay near the village,” Ka-Zar told Warren when he’d taken the edge off his hunger. “Storm is obviously devoting every bit of her attention to the skies. We can’t let her fall victim to the same sort of ambush that claimed Betsy.”
“That’s one reason Wolverine is out there now,” the Beast added.
Warren mentioned the calmer conditions, and offered to help in the transport. “Wolvie going to join you three?” “No, he wants to go out alone again,” Iceman said.
“The man is crazy. It’ll make him a target,” Warren declared.
“Our comrade of the Great White North perceives that eventuality,” Hank said. “He embraces it.”
“In other words,” Cannonball said, “he’s daring Sauron to come get him so he can get a shot at him.”
“Wasn’t that what I said?” Hank asked.
“I’ll say this for Wolvie, he’s the only one of us that won a fight yesterday,” Bobby interjected. “What’s wrong with letting him try again? It’s not like he’d let any of us tell him not to.”
“It’s more than a little inconvenient that Ororo is so thoroughly diverted.” Hank popped an entire kiwifruit into his mouth and swallowed it almost without chewing. “We could benefit from her active leadership today.”
“We’ll just have to muddle through, Hank,” Archangel said. “I was there the first few months Ororo served as leader of the X-Men. She’s come a long way, but we’ve been in plenty of tough situations without her or Scott or the Professor to give orders.”
“I know, old comrade,” Hank said. “It’s not orders I was referring to. There is a synergy that happens when we operate as a team. I am troubled at the way Sauron has managed to disrupt it.”
“It bugs me, too, Hank,” Warren replied. He washed down the last gulp of porridge with a dose of tea—blinking at the jolt of caffeine and wondering what sort of herbs the Fall People had steeped—and stretched out his wings from one bamboo rafter to another. “Who wants to ride with me?”
“I need to go,” Ka-Zar said unexpectedly. “I should speak with the Swamp People scout. I’ll need to serve as translator when he gives his report. Once that’s done, you can bring me back to help Shanna guard Ororo.”
“Very well,” Archangel said, clapping Ka-Zar on the shoulder and heading for the exit. ‘ ‘Grab your barf bag and let’s go. I plan to make it a quick trip.”
Because, Warren thought, I’ll go crazy unless I get back up into the atmosphere, where I can at least pretend I’m doing something to rescue Betsy.
Hank McCoy shaded his eyes, watching as Archangel sailed upward, hauling Ka-Zar back to the village. Warren had been awfully efficient and businesslike about the transport, as if his mind were elsewhere.
’Twas a strange and wonderous phenomenon to behold, Warren so deeply in love. There had been a time when the Beast’s blond teammate had been the quintessential playboy. Not that he had tarnished the reputations of an inordinate number of ladies—after all, one could hardly accumulate a Cassanova-level romantic resume when faced with such awkward impediments as disrobing in a lovely young thing’s boudoir and suddenly having to explain why one possessed a set of feathered appendages sprouting from one’s back— but Warren had broken his share of hearts. Never committing, always on the move, a rich and handsome bachelor always slightly out of reach. How Hank had envied him.
Hank did not envy him now.
The light across the landscape flickered and grew stronger. He looked up at the clouds. “Ah. Excellent work, my dear Ms. Munroe,” he murmured. Storm had finished sewing shut the rip in the Savage Land’s inversion layer. The last of the autumn crispness dissipated, restoring the clinging mugginess characteristic of the valley.
She still had plenty of work to do. Though it wasn’t raining on Hank, Bobby, and Sam here at the edge of the great swamp, thunderheads and funnel clouds still loomed in almost every direction.
Behind the Beast, Iceman and Cannonball were entertaining the scout of the Swamp People that Ka-Zar had just interviewed. Iceman formed a snowball and tossed it toward his teammate, who ducked it, allowing the missle to splatter against the hut wall. When Bobby formed another, the native gestured that they should pause. The burly, loincloth-attired hunter took the snowball from Bobby and lifted it to his cheek, marveling at its cold, soft texture.
“It’s all yours, Gaibanee,” Bobby said.
Hank grinned and led his two companions off along the wide dinosaur track that led into the elephant grass and cypress trees at the border of the marsh. Gaibanee waved farewell.
The native hadn’t been able to tell them much. The previous afternoon, the man had been sitting in a tall tree, waiting for a herd of triceratops to clomp past, when he had observed Sauron carrying Psylocke away. The mutate had disappeared behind a stand of huge camphor trees. When Gaibanee had later ventured to the site, he saw a few pter-anodonlike footprints. Nothing more.
Had Sauron merely been taking a short rest, or hiding as Storm, Archangel, or Cannonball cruised past? Or was he headquartered somewhere in this mucky tangle of vegetation? The latter was a distinct possibility. Even the Swamp People didn’t venture very far into its depths. A group of ne’er-do-wells could operate in secret for months before any of Ka-Zar and Shanna’s allies stumbled across them. And it was this very swamp over which he’d been surprised last night by Storm and Archangel.
They came to a stream of sluggish water choked by lily pads. Hank noticed Sam frown and sigh. The youth wanted to vault across it with his power. Hank shook his head. That’s how they had operated throughout much of the previous day—using Cannonball’s projectile flying and carrying ability to move efficiently from place to place. The problem was, that style of searching had yielded absolutely no results. It was a noisy and attention-grabbing way to travel. Today they would try stealthier tactics, a la Wolverine.
That meant a great deal of walking.
Iceman extended his hand. A bridge of ice formed. The trio trotted across. They slid into a grove of huge rhododendrons. The clouds opened up again, prompting a pitter-patter through the canopies of foliage above them. It would take half an hour or more to reach the spot Gaibanee had described.
“You know what the worst thing is about not knowing where to find Sauron?’ ’ Hank murmured to Bobby.
“No,” Iceman replied. “It’s too hard to figure out which one is worst. Too many candidates.”
“More than anything, I don’t like that he always has a pretty good idea where to find us.”
“Now that you mention it, that’s true. What are you suggesting? Should we hide?”
- ,“Hide? Probably not. I’ll give myself a few more hours to mull it over. I don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle yet to know if we can do anything that would come to any good. But aren’t you feeling the urge to turn the tables on our vexatious nemesis?”
“Amen to that. Keep that brain working, Dr. McCoy,” Bobby said as he froze a patch of quicksand up ahead.
Ororo dissipated the thunderhead out over the lake. She glided unsteadily over the great body of water, searching for further corruptions of the normal weather patterns. She sensed disquiet. A funnel cloud spun in the roiling air in one of the side valleys, but it had not touched ground and she could sense that it was weakening. Turbulence flogged the waves in the lake to whitecaps, dismaying pelicans and small pterosaurs. The winged predators were out in force despite the conditions, vying for the fish that swam just beneath the surface, feeding off storm debris. Flashes of lightning still coiled over the foothills, but started no fires in the drenched grass.
At last, the situation was stable enough that she could justify a breather. Long hours of study and minor tweaking would be necessary to reverse the subtle, hard-to-isolate flaws in the atmosphere, but the rift was thoroughly closed. Even if she were to stop now, the snow would not return and the flooding would grow no worse.
Despite the friction of the air as she flew, perspiration trickled down her chest, and her hair was a mop against her back. Her spine ached as though she had been practicing weightlifting with the entire planet upon her. As for her general level of energy, she half-believed that Sauron had succeeded in catching her already and had drained her strength with his usual brutal aplomb.
She wobbled toward the village, her flight as tipsy and haphazard as a butterfly’s. Coming to rest on the packed ground, her knees abruptly folded. She collapsed forward between the rain puddles, scuffing her elbows and chin. It took her several heartbeats just to find the vigor to roll over.
Gentle hands rinsed her muddied jawline with a moistened scrap of soft doeskin. Ororo gazed up to find Shanna kneeling over her.
To the X-Men leader’s amazement, she beheld sympathy and gratitude in her hostess’s countenance. Her surprise must have been blatant, because Shanna chuckled.
“I’m not always a she-devil,” she said. “You should see me when I get all mushy and maternal with my little boy.” She helped Ororo sit upright and held out a stalk of some sort of plant.
“What is it?” Storm asked.
“Sugar cane. You looked like you needed a quick carbohydrate fix. This is nature’s own sugar rush. Sorry, but we’re out of Jolt.”
“This will do nicely. Thank you,” Ororo said, putting the juicy pulp to her mouth and sucking a sweet burst.
Shanna guided her weary guest to a bamboo platform where they could be get out of the mud, and rinsed her off with gourd dippers of collected rainwater. “That’s the handy part about dressing native,” Shanna said. “No laundry to worry about. It’s the main reason I moved here, you know.” Ororo laughed.
Shanna’s smile turned back to the comradely expression she had worn prior. “I’m sorry I snapped at you this morning. The Savage Land couldn’t have a better warden than people like you.”
“But it does,” Ororo said. “It has you and Ka-Zar.”
“I believe that’s what I said,” Shanna added cheerfully. “You are like us. Giving two hundred percent to make things right for this land.”
It felt more like three hundred percent, thought Ororo, lowering herself laboriously to one of the log stools that bordered the wash area. She noticed several of the tribe’s older women nodding at her. Apparently stepping up on the platform and being rinsed of mud by a respected local figure was a sign of deep respect. Perhaps she should mention that to some of her inhibited male teammates.
Her head swirled. Good thing she was sitting. Shanna frowned and gestured for a pair of tribeswomen to hurry with the soup and flat bread and vegetables they were bringing. “Eat,” she said. “Get back your strength.”
Ororo did not realize she had kept her eyes closed until she opened them and saw the wicker tray of food right under her nose. “Oh, how wonderful!” she said as she smelled the slightly fermented bread. “This looks like injera. The Ethiopian staple. Do you know it?”
“I’ve tried every kind of African cuisine except raw monkey brains and live dung beetles,” Shanna said. “Yes, this is just like injera.” She tore off a shred of the spongy loaf and tasted it. Her eyelids closed in pleasure. “And no one in the village makes it better than Refira.”
Refira, a short, bosomy woman of obvious strength but little of the hard leanness of other villagers—perhaps she enjoyed her own cooking as much as others did—smiled as she set down the tray, recognizing her name and the complimentary lilt in Shanna’s voice, if not the actual words.
Ororo used a scrap of the bread to scoop up a swallow of curry-fortified beans and hungrily downed it. The Goddess’s blessing that everything was soft and required so little chewing. At the moment, even working her jaw required undue strain.
She was just as weak as a villain would wish her to be.
- CHAPTER 8
One of the things Sam Guthrie didn’t miss about leaving his boyhood home was the odor of the dairy ranch just down the road. As far as he was concerned, Professor Xavier could have included that incentive on the recruiting poster for his School for Gifted Youngsters: Be a mutant. Wear a costume. Travel to exciting places and meet famous people. Get away from fresh cow pies steaming in muddy corrals on summer afternoons, day after day after day.
Looming in front of Cannonball was the carcass of a bra-chiosaums. It was half-immersed in tepid, yellowish swamp water, adorned by flies and scavenger insects, its vertebrae protruding from the collapsing hide on its back. It stank worse than anything back in Kentucky.
“Better radio Storm,” he drawled. “Tell her we found Sauron’s secret headquarters.”
“Droll and perspicacious as ever, my dear Sam,” the Beast declared.
Cannonball enjoyed the chance to joke. As the senior member and field leader of X-Force, he had had to stifle his playfulness more than he liked. Now that he was a junior teammate of the adult squad, he didn’t have to set such a careful example.
“Bobby, my friend,” the Beast said, “do something about that thing before my nose withers and falls off.”
Iceman nodded. He froze the hulk from crest to below water surface, flies and all. The odor diminished until it was only a few times more potent than the fetid, stagnant pools they had been traversing for hours.
Hours. Cannonball grimaced. The problem wasn’t so much the rigors and unpleasantness of the terrain, it was that they had so little to show for it. They had found no trail, even though they had succeeded in locating the spot Gaibanee had described. Hank’s keen eyes had discovered a strand of long, dark human hair caught under a sliver in a log. A purple human hair. It was of the same type as Psylocke’s.
A few talon marks remained on the log, though the rain had wiped out any prints that may have earlier been preserved in the mud or grass of the clearing. They had searched in a widening circle around the site, but no citadels lurked in, the shadows of the cypresses and willows—just ducks, turtles, and alarmingly big crocodiles.
Hank noted the time, and lifted his radio to lips. “This is the Beast. Situation remains the same.”
“Archangel. Nothing new up here.”
“Wolverine. No contact.”
“Base camp quiet,” reported Ka-Zar. “Bird’s in the nest. So far so good otherwise. No new information.”
That was it for the next two hours, assuming another EMP didn’t block their next status check. The circumstances had been unchanged all day. The only news of any sort was the “bird’s in the nest” comment, which meant that Ororo was on the ground in the village, rather than up fiddling with the weather, and was still unavailable to help with the search.
Cannonball rounded the pool containing the dinosaur, heading for a clump of giant ferns within which to answer a call of nature in private. He’d barely stepped out of view of the others when a shape launched at him from the lower branches of the trees above the ferns.
back. The swamp spread out below him. He scanned closely for some sign of the fugitive.
Nothing. No swaying trees branches. No wriggling grass. Amphibius was bounding somewhere near ground level, beneath two to three layers of jungle and swamp canopy. Sam gnashed his teeth. After circling three times, he gave up visual surveillance. He landed in the top of a palm tree, cutting off his power to reduce noise, and proceeded to listen.
Twigs broke in the woods on the other side of an abundant tangle of berry vines. Cannonball launched off his perch, blasting again.
He battered aside leaves and branches. Suddenly the mossy, fern-littered ground appeared. Just to his right was Amphibius, wide-eyed and squawking at the abrupt interception., Sam cut his speed, but couldn’t avoid slamming into the earth.
Amphibius struck him. It didn’t hurt, of course, but the mutate gained momentum from the impact. He sailed up and over a bank of thick fronds before Cannonball could turn around.
“Oh, no y’don’t!” Sam shouted. “I ain’t lettin’ you get away!”
The X-Man hopped over the obstacle. He came down in a knee-deep puddle, scaring a pair of crocodiles. Amphibius was hopping between the tree trunks beyond, just about to vanish from view once more.
Cannonball thundered forward in a straight shot, aiming for a collision course. But the mutate apparently had anticipated that. The target folded up, dropping abruptly to the earth. Cannonball roared past and slammed into the trunk of a tree.
The trunk groaned and fell on top of him. It took three bursts of energy to get clear.
“What?” Sam blurted. He began blasting even as he fell backward in surprise.
The shape was Amphibius. One of the smaller mutates in the employ of Sauron, he bounced impressively high when he struck Cannonball’s kinetic envelope. Sam, invulnerable as ever inside the energy zone, was harmed neither by the small axe the frog man wielded, nor by the impact as he hit the ground.
Had Sam failed to notice Amphibius’s leap, though, he might have acquired a canyon in his skull.
“Beast! Iceman!” Sam cried. He jumped to his feet, whirling in the direction that Amphibius had just bounded in retreat.
Hank and Bobby must have already heard the altercation, he.cause they crashed into the fern tangle within a fraction of a second.
“Well?” Hank asked.
Cannonball was astounded. Amphibius had already vanished completely. In two quick sentences, Sam blurted what had happened,
“Quit jiggling on your feet like that,” Hank commanded.
“I’m maintainin’ my blast envelope,” Sam explained.
“Yes, and the sizzle of it is too loud.”
Cannonball cut off his power, looking every direction to be sure he wasn’t ambushed again while vulnerable.
Minus the hiss and spit of Sam’s power, they could hear leaves flapping aside as a sizeable creature hurtled through the vegetation. The noises came from the ten o’clock position from the direction Hank was facing.
“Go high,” Hank ordered Sam. “We’ll take low,”
Nodding, Cannonball lit a fire under himself and vaulted above the treetops in a roar he hoped would paint a yellow stripe right down the middle of Amphibius’s speckled green
back. The swamp spread out below him. He scanned closely for some sign of the fugitive.
Nothing. No swaying trees branches. No wriggling grass. Amphibius was bounding somewhere near ground level, beneath two to three layers of jungle and swamp canopy. Sam gnashed his teeth. After circling three times, he gave up visual surveillance. He landed in the top of a palm tree, cutting off his power to reduce noise, and proceeded to listen.
Twigs broke in the woods on the other side of an abundant tangle of berry vines. Cannonball launched off his perch, blasting again.
He battered aside leaves and branches. Suddenly the mossy, fern-littered ground appeared. Just to his right was Amphibius, wide-eyed and squawking at the abrupt interception. Sam cut his speed, but couldn’t avoid slamming into the earth.
Amphibius struck him. It didn’t hurt, of course, but the mutate gained momentum from the impact. He sailed up and over a bank of thick fronds before Cannonball could turn around.
“Oh, no y’don’t!” Sam shouted. “I ain’t lettin’ you get away! ’ ’
The X-Man hopped over the obstacle. He came down in a knee-deep puddle, scaring a pair of crocodiles. Amphibius was hopping between the tree trunks beyond, just about to vanish from view once more.
Cannonball thundered forward in a straight shot, aiming for a collision course. But the mutate apparently had anticipated that. The target folded up, dropping abruptly to the earth. Cannonball roared past and slammed into the trunk of a tree.
The trunk groaned and fell on top of him. It took three bursts of energy to get clear.
Amphibius was nowhere to be seen. Cannonball tossed aside splinters and looked this way and that. A laugh trickled through the vegetation. From where?
Iceman cruised over the fronds on an ice ramp and came to a stop beside his teammate. “Which way?” he demanded.
“I dunno,” Sam replied. “I’m going up again to have a look. He was headed thataway.” He pointed in the direction Amphibius had seemed to be fleeing.
Bobby raced into the forest, flinging a few icicle darts ahead for good measure. Sam rocketed into the sky.
The canopies again interfered. Cannonball spotted the Beast leaping past the site of the recent altercation, and glimpsed Iceman streaking on ahead, but there were just too many leaves. He came to roost on a smooth wide branch, cut his-power, and keened his ears. He could hear nothing over the racket of the parrots and other birds fleeing from Bobby’s strange, frigid appearance.
A splash.
Cannonball thundered off, this time cutting under the uppermost canopy, frightening still more parrots as well as a troop of monkeys. He soon reached a deep channel of water that he hadn’t been able to spot from higher up. Crocs were thrashing about, as if they had taken down prey.
Worth a closer look, Sam decided. He cut his speed and ricocheted from tree trunk to tree trunk, gazing at the panorama of jaws and scaly bodies in the water.
It was not Amphibius. The crocs were subduing an anaconda. The huge snake was a meal that would feed a whole crocodilian family, and they weren’t about to let it escape. Sam's brows rose. Lord, that’s primeval—a sight to gawk at from beginning to end, if not for the urgency of his mission.
Iceman burst through the cycads on the bank and reined up, whistling at the reptilian battle splashing the front end of his ramp. “Well?” he asked Sam.
Sam shrugged. Then he frowned and looked at the water. The channel was one of many winding through the trees here. Muddy, interconnected, deeply shaded, a lot could hide in under the surface.
“I think Amphibius is swimmin’ away from us,” Sam said.
The Beast, huffing slightly, sprinted to the bank and joined Iceman on his chill perch. “Swimming, did you say? I was afraid of that. He’s custom designed for this landscape. He wouldn’t have dared attack us alone if he hadn’t had the ability to hit and run.”
“Are you saying we should give up chasing him?” Iceman asked.
' “Au contraire,” Hank replied. “He wouldn’t just be out here for no reason. There’s something in this vicinity he’s protecting. We’ll take up residence, look for signs of him, but also investigate whatever it is he doesn’t want us to discover. If we get close enough to it, he’ll come to us.”
Sam clenched his fingers together, as if he had them wrapped around a fat, slimy neck. He’d done enough waiting. Time to make life difficult for the bad guys.
Logan knelt down, studying the tracks in the soft clay of the jungle floor. This deep beneath the galleries of branches, the plants grew in scattered clumps, deprived of the light they needed to be profuse. The spoor was easy to follow.
It took an experienced tracker to read the confusion of toe marks, however. He identified the deep, large impressions of the pack leader, the nearly-as-large but more graceful marks of a dominant female, the shallow and smaller holes left by a juvenile with a limp. And more. Still eight of the beasts.
He had come across the trail shortly before the report by radio that Hank, Bobby, and the kid had encountered Amphibius and were trying to comer him. He would have called for Archangel to airlift him to the swamp to add to that effort, but he had decided he might find more fun and games nearby. After all, wolves shouldn’t be traipsing through deep jungle. They liked open terrain or forests like the taiga lands of the Great White North, which Logan had called home in what seemed like the distant past. Ka-Zar said some packs had even ventured out of the Savage Land entirely into the snow fields. The jungle lord had assisted UN environmentalists to barricade a ravine so that the animals wouldn’t find their way down to the penguin rookeries. Talk about banquets in tuxedoes.
,n ,No, wolves shouldn’t be here. Unless they were Lupo’s wolves, summoned to help in one poisonous scheme or another. Maybe the animals were guarding something. Either way, Wolverine longed to put a claw or two between them and their intention.
It raised his hackles that Lupo had escaped so quickly. Worse yet that Betts had been snared in the process.
He sniffed. The scent had intensified. It lacked the pungency of the actual beast, being only a vestige rising from the print, but he guessed the pack had travelled across the patch of ground no more than half an hour earlier. They had been traveling at a leisurely trot. If they kept that pace, he could probably catch up to them faster than his buddies in the swamp could round up old frog-face.
He stood and jogged onward. The spoor led across through a thicket, down a slope to a small creek—burbling with the runoff of the storms Ororo had been quenching all morning— and up the much steeper bank on the other side.
Logan was just reaching the top of the incline when he heard a rush of movement in the viny, flowering plants to which he was clinging. A cascade of wolves rained down on him. More than eight. Twenty. Twenty-five, perhaps. He had no time to actually count.
He crashed spinefirst onto the cobblestones of the creek-bed. A groan tried to burst from his lips, but he swallowed it. His adamantium blades flashed, thudding into wolf ribs. The big male atop his chest yelped and jumped away.
Even as he slashed at the ones continuing to land on his upper body or belly, others sank teeth into whatever parts they could—his knees, his groin, his underarms. Some tried for his throat. His healing factor would deal with it in time, but it still hurt.
He kicked, winning enough clear space to roll to his feet. The wolves hounded him from all sides. Blood dotted their teeth, adding to their frenzy. His blood. They held back only when his claws were actually swiping or thrusting toward them.
“Twenty of you to one of me. I gotcha outnumbered,” Wolverine growled. He strode forward over the slick rock, carrying the battle to his furry opponents.
“Wrong!” shouted a voice. Abruptly Wolverine was tumbling heels over head into the deeper part of the stream, jawbone singing. If not for his unbreakable bones, he would be spitting out teeth.
The wolves leapt in- again, but not before Logan glimpsed the hulking, four-armed figure at the base of the creek bank.
“Howdy, Barbaras,” the X-Man taunted. “You hit me with one fist or four? Whatever it was, didn’t do the job.” He struggled for footing in the thigh-deep current, nearly overwhelmed by the onslaught of lupine weight, but grinning.
Barbarus shrugged. “I’ll try again. No rush.” He lifted both his right arms and snapped fingers.
The wolves backed away. They paced five to six feet away from Wolverine, snarling, their eyes full of bloodlust, barely held in check.
“You did that almost as good as Lupo. Didn’t know his critters would listen to you, too.”
“They don’t.” Wolverine looked up. On the bank stood Lupo, with Gaza towering beside him. ‘ ‘I ordered them back.
I was indulging Barbaras. He wanted you to take a moment to contemplate the depth of your predicament.” The wolfish mutate chuckled.
Wolverine just grinned back, a smile full of teeth but no mirth. “I got business to settle with you.”
“Strange. That was just what I was going to say to you. Ybu are welcome to try to do so, but I’ve already—how do you outsiders so cleverly put it?—‘paid my dues’ yesterday. To get to me today, you’ll have to go through all my animals and Gaza and Barbarus, too.”
As Lupo spoke, Gaza descended the bank in one mighty leap and strode forward to join Barbaras. The giant’s sightless eyes seemed to twinkle in amusement.
Logan wasn’t afraid. The only time he sweated it out anymore was when he was worried about someone else. Fear for his own safety had been burned out of him way back. But he had to admit the odds were lousy. Much as he liked to fight, he didn’t like to lose.
He raised his wrist to his mouth to call for help, hoping an EMP wouldn’t trash the signal.
His wrist was bare.
“Oh, no, no,” Lupo jeered. “We can’t have you calling your friends. We have a schedule to follow.”
As he spoke, a wolf climbed the bank, clutching something between its jaws. Lupo took it, patted the animal on the head, and held up Logan’s radio. “Another trinket for Brainchild’s collection. He does so love to study the unique contraptions you mutants devise."
Wolverine rushed forward. Lupo howled a command, and a barrage of wolves met the X-Man’s charge. He made it only as far as the shallows before he was knocked over.