Two members of the pack shifted aside, letting Gaza insert himself into the melee. The mutate hammered Wolverine Stunned by the impact, Logan barely managed to swing his claws. Gaza avoided the razor edges with ease, able to sense their approach better than someone with sight.

A wave of dizziness pulsed through Logan’s head. He hurt in a hundred places. His healing factor strained to cope with • the endless series of wolf bites.

Bam! Gaza’s fist came in again. Logan had been too dazed to notice it; he hadn’t rolled with the punch at all.

The day had started off poorly. It had only gotten worse. Yesterday his hunches were right on the mark. But now the law of averages had come calling.

Law of the jungle. Either you go for the kill, or someone does the same to you.

Another blow above his ear. Now one to his solar plexus. With a wolf clomped onto both wrists, he could no longer summon the strength to raise his hands.

His knees buckled. Everything was hazy.

Through the fog, one huge blurry image was replaced by another, slightly smaller one with four arms. “My turn again,” said Barbaras gleefully. He swung. And swung and swung.

Unconciousness was a mercy.

Bright, sourceless light blazed down on his eyelids, which were almost too swollen to open, but Logan did so anyway.

He was being carried on a pole. He was trussed so tightly he couldn’t wiggle a finger. His hands had been carefully positioned so that even if he extended his claws, he would only be able to poke empty air.

The treetops closed in again, shadowing them. His carriers—Gaza and Barbaras—hung him between two saplings about eight feet off the ground, denying him even such small comfort as lying in the mud.

“Awake already?” Lupo leaned over him, grinning in his lupine way. “Your healing factor is truly impressive, I must say. I’ve heard that you had some trouble with it in the past. Pity you can’t do something about your age as well. You’re getting to be a pushover, old man.”

‘ ‘Stuff it,’ ’ Logan said. His lips were so puffy and bloodied that it sounded like, “Stpppft.”

Lupo grinned at the defiance and picked his teeth with a long, semihuman fingernail. “Good. So full of spunk. You’ll have lots of vital lifeforce to offer the master when he arrives.” The mutate tilted his head to look up at the sky. Logan saw now that they had just crossed a clearing formed by a giant fallen tree. The tree was specked with pteranodon guano. From the smell of the traces, the flying reptiles had landed here mere hours ago.

“He should be here soon,” Lupo continued. “My wolves have relayed the message that we have you. He’d be here already if he didn’t have to avoid being seen by that pesky Archangel.”

Logan no longer wondered when or how Sauron was going to make his big move. The freak had already begun.

The question was, what the hell was he, Logan, going to do about it?

He writhed inside his bonds, but it only made the lashings cut into his skin—his costume had been removed—and even if he did manage to dislodge the poles, he would only flop to the ground amid a pack of wolves that even now were licking their lips and whining for the opportunity to sample more of his blood.

“Now don’t get upset,” Lupo said. “Soon you’ll be feeling much, much more relaxed. Tomorrow moming you’ll awaken surrounded by friends. We have such plans for you and all the other X-Men.”

Storm lay supine in a hammock, her head supported by what was surely the most unique pillow she had ever sampled—an obloid of snakeskin filled with goose feathers. The hammock was strung over the platform where Shanna had earlier rinsed her off, providing her with a roofless, unobstructed view of the clouds.

She could barely raise her hands to rub her forehead, much less rise from her bower. Her bones felt as heavy as those ' of a brontosaurus, her muscles as weak as a snail’s.

But the sky was radiant, the breeze steady and controlled. The coming of night would probably bring more lightning. Frost might nip the highest hills. No matter. Those sorts of disturbances would play themselves out. She was at last free to turn her attention back to the reason why she had come to the Savage Land.

Shanna and Ka-Zar joined her on the platform. Zabu hopped up and nuzzled Ororo’s fingers, rumbling a note of concern.

“Still no word from Wolverine,” Shanna said.

Ororo lifted away from her pillow. The earth seemed to hang on to her. She set her head back down and hoped her temples would stop throbbing. “Hand me my radio, if you would,” she requested.

Shanna gave her the device, which Ororo had removed while she concentrated on the climate healing.

“Better hurry,” Ka-Zar said. “There’s always a long EMP

x-w\

at dusk. It’s due any time now.” He gestured at the lavender and orange tones along the horizon—interestingly, the hues were rising in all directions, since the Savage Land’s “sunlight” stemmed from many sources, some having little connection to Earth’s actual sun.

Ororo nodded, and entered the code to transmit. “Beast? Do you copy?”

“You sound a little faint, my dear.” The reply was tinged with static, and was itself below normal strength.

“Faint is exactly how I feel,” Ororo said.

“How may I be of sendee, O leader mine?”

“Just a status check. Wolverine’s still missing. How are all of you out there?”

“Still chasing Amphibius. We keep coming across his trail. I’d like to recommend that Iceman, Cannonball, and I remain until dark. We can keep up the effort until the last moment.”

Ororo tried to think of objections, but she found it difficult to put two coherent ideas together. She saw silver wings growing closer, heralding Warren’s return. “Very well. Archangel is returning now, emptyhanded, which means Wolverine missed their rendezvous. We’ll focus on that problem. You remain and try to track Amphibius.”

“Will do. Sam will haul us back in—let’s see—about an hour, I would estimate.” In one respect, the Savage Land resembled Antarctica more than the tropics—twilight lingered, rather than clamped down like the lid of a spring-loaded trap.

Archangel walked toward the platform, folding his wings. His shoulders drooped.

“Couldn’t find Logan,” he said. “I flew over the entire area he was supposed to patrol, but there’s no sign of him.” “That isn’t good,” Ororo said. “I’m glad to see you are

back, though. You’ve been up in the air too long without a respite.”

“I couldn’t even think about resting until I had something to show for the effort. Didn’t happen. I thought I saw some pteranodons carrying riders a couple of hours ago, but by the time I made it through the rain to the section of jungle they were over, all I could see were wild, riderless ones.”    ’

“Sauron can’t stay hidden much longer. We’re covering a lot of ground. We’ll stumble across something soon. Maybe Bobby and Hank and Sam already have.” Storm had to say it aloud. Otherwise she would fail to believe.

Warren leaned his head back and breathed deeply. “Something smells good. It’s been a long time since breakfast.”

■ Shanna nodded. ‘ ‘The village women are preparing a warrior’s meal in the lodge. It’s light food—only a little meat— meant to sustain individuals going into combat without making them sluggish. I think you’ll approve.”

“By tomorrow night, Tongah hopes that he can host a victor’s feast,” Ka-Zar added. “That’s for after the fighting, when the participants are free to gorge.”

Ororo tried to smile. It was good to anticipate a victory', but until it actually arrived, she couldn’t manage to get in the spirit.

“We’ll bring you a tray, Ororo,” Shanna said.

“No. Help me up,” she replied. “If I’m going to share in a warrior’s repast, I should at least carry' myself there like a proper one.”

Shanna supported her as she tipped toward vertical and rediscovered what it was like to balance on so small an area as the soles of her feet.

“Goddess,” Ororo muttered. “This is worse than I thought it would be.” But she pressed Shanna’s helping hands away and walked forward. She stumbled off the edge of the platform, but landed upright on the ground. After three or four hurried steps to check her momentum, she settled into a normal walk.

“Don’t worry about me,” she chided her friends, who shadowed her closely, like a parent would hover behind a child learning to ride a bicycle. “By morning I’ll be dancing on the clouds, good as new.”

The wrinkles in their foreheads said she was a liar.

They made their way over to the lodge entrance. Shanna peeked in and announced the meal was not quite ready. Ororo was content to remain standing, if only for the novelty. While Warren and Shanna listened to a scout reporting to Ka-Zar, Storm mulled over possible ways to do more for Wolverine. They couldn’t be sure he had been captured, but it seemed likely. Sitting down to supper would scarcely contribute toward his rescue. But what could they do? Darkness would close in before they could find his trail and follow it.

Klaxons blared. The watchtower!

Ka-Zar, Shanna, and both X-Men whirled toward the sound. The juveniles on guard were blowing their conch shells with all their might, paying no attention to the signal codes.

A dozen riders on pteranodons suddenly careened into view. They came in low, just above the crest of jungle growth, and rushed toward the village barely high enough to clear the stockade spikes.

Archangel shot into the air, flinging wingtip blades. Blood blossomed from the chests of three of the winged reptiles. Two went down like sledgehammered slaughterhouse cattle. The third tucked its wings and crashed into a hut, scattering

bamboo, wicker mats, and grass. All three riders jumped free, but all landed hard.

Warren ducked to avoid the spiked clubs of the main mass of warriors. The weapons missed him, but narrowly—he didn’t have enough altitude yet for proper defensive maneuvers.

Storm tried to rise into the air. A mistake. The wind she summoned whisked her sideways—luckily out of the way of a jabbing pteranodon beak—but her control was miserable. She flopped down in the mud, using a pile of tanned hides to screen her from the view of the attackers, and put her focus where it should have been—into a counterattack.

She called upon the forces of the atmosphere and sent mini-cyclones whirling into the center of the raiders. Pter-.anodons squawked and spun upside down. Three riders fell.

Ororo winced. She should have been able to bowl over half the group with one sweep. Her whirlwinds were flaccid; she had succeeded only with those attackers who had already been struggling to maintain control of their nervous mounts.

Lightning, she decided. She fired a bolt at a burly, scarred rider'. He screamed, but kept going, wheeling his flyer around to renew the attack. The electrical discharge had only stunned him.

She tried again. This time the bolt missed entirely. The rider finished his circle and roared down at her.

Suddenly a figure sprang from the crest of a hut, having just emerged from the smoke hole. Ka-Zar. The Lord of the Savage Land collided with the rider. Both went tumbling to the ground, while the pteranodon flapped on toward the jungle.

The backdraft knocked Storm over. She rolled and came to rest in a kneeling position. Scanning to see who to help first, she saw Ka-Zar successfully pounding his opponent,

Shanna kicking a raider who had risen from the mud to try to club an elder from behind, and Fall People warriors stringing their bows to repel the air assault.

She waved her arms and created a thermal updraft to send a pair of raiders uncontrollably skyward, but her effort had barely borne fruit when her head started to whirl. Not just the spin of weariness she had experienced earlier. This was soul-wrenching dizziness, the oh-Goddess-please-let-me-die sort that brought up her lunch of flatbread and curried beans.

“Wha ... what?’ ’ Storm blurted, barely managing not to fall in her own vomit. She flung lightning in random directions, a reflex spawned by the deep pulse of threat overwhelming her. The bolts were the weakest yet, barely more than filaments of static dancing no higher than the eaves of the..huts. One happened to strike a pterosaur as it swooped low; it did no more than cause the beast’s foot to twitch.

Storm writhed, but forced her eyes to stay open and focused. All around her villagers were twisting and flopping in the mud and puddles. Zabu staggered toward her, only to flop down and curl into a pathetic, kittenish bundle.

Two of the fallen raiders climbed to their feet and began whistling for their mounts. They appeared to be free of dizziness, and unconcerned that anyone nearby might try to thwart their escape.

Storm could hear shouts and clashes elsewhere in the stockade, proving that not all the village was hampered as was she and those near her. The explanation became clear as a young woman stepped out from between two huts, pulling off a wig to reveal hair as white as Storm’s own, streaked disorientingly with green.

“Vertigo,” Ororo hissed.

She had no doubt of the woman’s identity, though Storm had never seen the mutate out of costume before. Vertigo was dressed in the rudimentary fashion of the Fall People. Perhaps that was how, with the wig, she was able to approach near enough to use her power so overwhelmingly.

The only mutate ever to leave the confines of the Savage Land, Vertigo had last been seen as one of Sinister’s assassins, the Marauders. Apparently, Sauron, or perhaps Brainchild, had lured her back. And kept her presence secret as a surprise weapon.

Vertigo frowned at Storm. Abruptly the awful spinning inside Ororo increased. The windrider moaned and felt herself convulse. Her only satisfaction was realizing that, for all her exhaustion, she had managed to ward off some of Vertigo’s initial burst—perhaps the villainess was stretching herself too thin, attacking so many individuals at once?

Stornj was completely unable to fight back as a pteranodon landed atop her. Its talons closed around her. Limp and sickened, she felt herself rising into the air. Below two other raiders climbed close behind, carrying Shanna and Ka-Zar.

At that point, she blacked out.

Archangel burst up through the reptilian squadron, finding clear air just as Storm and the others began to reel from Vertigo’s unexpected intrusion. He levelled off, intending to rocket down at the mutate fast enough that her power wouldn’t have time to daze him. A shadow touched him. He flung himself to the side.

Just in time. An attacker hurtled past him from above. This one had no rider.

“How rude of you,” Sauron cackled. “I offered you the mercy of a surprise hit. You spumed it.”

“I know about your mercy, Sauron,” Warren snarled as Sauron wheeled and raced in for another clash. “It’s the sort that drained Tanya Anderssen of her life.”

“Now is that any way to talk to an old associate? So cynical. I thought something of the sweet Angel I knew might remain, but I see you have left him entirely. Do you miss him, I wonder?”

“Miss thisV' Warren yelled, flinging shards of metal.

The barrage whisked past Sauron, narrowly off target, but off nonetheless. “You nicked me last night,” Sauron called. “No more.”

Warren cursed under his breath. The spraying of the blades had won him only one small gain. In order to totally avoid them, Sauron had been forced to momentarily tuck his wings. The villain sailed beneath Archangel, too low to slash the X-Man, Warren gained a respite before the next charge in which to think. He could sense hypnotic instructions filtering

- into his brain. That was why his projectiles had curved away, as they had the night before.

If there was one thing he had been reminded of during that recent battle, it was that Sauron’s mind-swaying power couldn’t be overwhelmed, it could only be avoided or deflected. Only a potent and forewarned telepath could confront him head-on and alone. Last night, he and Storm had served as diversions for each other. But he could see Storm writhing in the dirt of the village along with Ka-Zar and Shanna, unable to assist.

He activated his radio. “Sam! Come quick! We’re under attack at Tongah’s village!’’

The raucous static of an electromagnetic pulse answered back. The message had no way, for the moment, of getting through to Cannonball.

Archangel was on his own.

Strangely, he felt no fear. What was the worst that Sauron could do? Killing him, even making him a captive in his energy-larder—would that be worse than having his wings ripped off and his personality subsumed until he became an avatar of Death?

“No cavalry^ to your rescue,” Sauron taunted. “Brainchild may not have been able to make your communications devices work for us, but he knew when they wouldn’t work for you, either.”

Fearful that another strafing run would be diverted down toward the innocent villagers, Warren gave up any plan to keep his distance. He raced toward Sauron as Sauron raced toward him. They met in the middle. He pummeled, Sauron clawed and kicked. Archangel’s armored uniform spared him the gashes, but a blow to his midsection sent him fluttering backward. Sauron swooped out of range, shaking his head from the aftereffects of Warren’s fist pounding his long .snout.

“You X-Men know your hand-to-hand combat,” Sauron acknowledged. “But you’ll have to do better than that. Look at me. See how I glow? How refreshed I am? Wolverine’s energies proved so fulfilling. Nor did I suffer from tapping your lovely teammate Psylocke’s strength again this morning.”

Warren refused to let the monster goad him. It was foul news to have it confirmed that Logan had fallen prisoner— that explained not only Sauron’s vigor, but the healing of the wing wounds that Warren had given him less than twenty-four hours earlier. It was numbing to be reminded of Betsy’s condition. But give in to those emotions and he would be useless to both his comrades.

Their brawl carried them beyond the village, removing the chance that the natives would be hit by friendly fire. Warren shot more projectiles. They bulleted past his target. He could almost aim correctly, but the cloud over his mind stole the core of his accuracy.

“Take the gift I offer,” his enemy urged. “Tolkien’s Sauron had his winged Nazgul at his command. Be my Nazgul, Warren Worthington. Serve me. Feed me.”

Those eyes. Those infernal eyes. Sauron was hovering, staring intently at his opponent. Warren made the mistake of looking straight back. Once done, he couldn’t look away. The first time Sauron had ever used his hypnotism against a super-powered being, Warren had been the victim. It was as if Sauron’s ability had manifested specifically to combat the Angel, and fit no one else to such a profound degree.

Warren felt tentacles of outside control invade him. Within a few more moments, all Sauron would have to do was tel-epathically command him and he would do whatever he was asked—even fight or kill his allies. He couldn’t permit that Sort of perversion. He knew he had the strength to hold off long enough to implement a technique Psylocke had taught him. He turned inward and ...

His consciousness dropped away.

“Annoying,” Sauron screeched. “But either way, you’re mine.”

Though Sauron’s influence was keeping Archangel’s eyes open, blackness consumed his vision. With his last bit of awareness, he felt and heard the wind rushing past as he plummeted toward the ground.

Ka-Zar blessed the altitude, because even though he had seen Vertigo lifted aboard a pterosaur and knew she was a mere two hundred meters back among the raider squadron, the dizziness she had broadcast no longer crippled the blondhaired scion of House Plunder.

He was still dangling below a huge flying reptile, tightly confined by its calloused talons, but that was nothing alien to his experience. The creature belonged to the Savage Land. He knew its secrets.

Storm still hung limp beneath the beast just ahead. But though she seemed to be at best semiconscious, she was still fighting. Winds buffeted the pterosaurs and their riders, continually disrupting their formation. If Ororo could regain even a tenth of her strength and alertness, she could make it impossible for them to fly.

Shanna was slung beneath the winged monster just behind him. She was wide awake and her Irish eyes were flashing with a fury that made him glad they were on the same side. He winked a code at her. She nodded.

Then he screeched. The noise that emerged from his throat mimicked a call the wild pteranodons over the lake used whenever they sighted a particularly abundant cluster of their favorite food—fish.

The beast that was carrying him immediately tilted and dipped its head, searching below for a lake and the promised bounty. So did several of its kind nearby, including the gray-tinged specimen that carried Shanna. Its rider lurched forward, nearly tumbling from the saddle and momentarily losing control of the reins.

Ka-Zar was ready as the talons around him relaxed ever so slightly. He had enough wiggle room to draw his knife from his belt sheath and stab the creature in an ankle joint, so that even if it wanted to retain its hold, the pain would force its digits to open.

They did. He grabbed a handful of scaly green hide and vaulted atop the flyer’s back.

The rider whirled, yelled, and swung his club at Ka-Zar. Unfortunately, the jungle lord had nowhere to go but backward. He hopped away, avoiding the club but flying off. He caught the pteranodon’s tail just in time.

Pteranodons had stubby tails, not long, devilish appendages like those of rharnphorynchi or of Sauron. Ka-Zar found almost no purchase for his clutching fingers. The best he could do was hold on just long enough to redirect his fall—

—right onto the back of the raider who was rising up to join in the melee.

Ka-Zar knocked away the man’s club, sliced his hemp safety cord, and shoved. The rider yelped, flailed, and lost his balance.

“Thank you for flying Jurassic Airlines. Do try us again,” said Ka-Zar.

The rider slid free and plummeted. The foliage below quickly swallowed him.

Ka-Zar checked quickly to determine Shanna’s status. His wife, was atop the pteranodon that had been transporting her, but had by no means subdued its husky rider. Only an acrobatic swoop around the beast’s neck spared her a skull-crushing wallop.

A tinge of nausea and dizziness brushed Ka-Zar. He saw Vertigo rushing to close in.

“May you bathe in sloth droppings,” he cursed, borrowing Zira’s favorite insult. He reined his flyer sharply to the right. He would have to trust Shanna to take care of herself— usually a safe bet. For now, what mattered most was to separate, so that Vertigo couldn’t wrench both their guts at the same time.

The reptile fought his control, but he held the reins tight. Ordinarily, the riders controlled their pteranodons by means of a laboriously nurtured rapport. He had no time to make friends with his. He simply insisted it obey. He was Ka-Zar, Lord of the Savage Land. He had once stopped a bull elephant’s charge simply by planting his feet and staring.

Four raiders lashed their mounts, trying to catch him. They soon would; Ka~Zar had not been lucky enough to steal the quickest member of the squadron. No matter. He had no intention of fleeing. He had waited seventy-two long hours to exact vengeance for Immono’s death.

He whipped around and headed straight for a wiry, gaptoothed enemy warrior. The opponent hurriedly forced his creature to buckle its wings, dropping it below the point of collision. Ka-Zar had an instant to take in the scene around him: Shanna was wobbling. Vertigo was gliding next to her, bringing to bear the full brunt of her power. The raider Shanna was clashing was gripping her by the wrists and seemed well on the way to overcoming the last of her resistance.

Before Ka-Zar could begin to deal with that situation, the battle took him over a clearing. Below, nets hung suspended between tree trunks, about twenty feet off the ground. The pteranodon carrying Storm dropped her into the mesh. Raid--ers on the ground moved forward to wrap her up. A wind slapped at their hair and loincloths, and a dusting of snow pelted their faces, indicating that Ororo was still feebly trying to do what she could to save herself. Abruptly those phenomena ceased.

A rock whizzed by Ka-Zar’s head. A raider had pulled up along side and was reaching in a sack for more missiles. The jungle lord banked sharply. He was nearly jabbed by a spear from above as another opponent zipped past.

Shanna was plummeting toward the cluster of nets. Ka-Zar grinned mirthlessly. His wife was proving her toughness. She wasn’t going down alone. Along with her came the raider and his mount.

The nets swallowed them all. The pteranodon flapped like a headless chicken, then all at once went still.

Ka-Zar had no chance to be certain whether Shanna had landed safely. A raider descended upon him. He slashed upward, finding flesh. Reptilian blood splattered him. The attacker rose and backed off.

A host of raiders buzzed around him. The beast carrying Vertigo was rising to join the fray. He reeled from a pulse of projected queasiness, evading further defilement only by wild swoops and sudden changes of direction. His flyer couldn’t exert itself like that for long. The skies were not the place to continue the fight; he had to get to ground, find cover, and make them come after him one or two at a time.

But first, he turned and spurred his reptile toward the nets, knife held tight. He would have one chance to slash at the netting. Perhaps he could win Ororo or Shanna just enough freedom to make a difference. He leaned far over, barely •keeping a grip on the saddle horn, reaching out below with the blade.

He was still in the midst of the approach swoop when his skull seemed to implode. Let go. Let go. Let go.

Sauron! The hypnotic command thrashed deep, unnerving his fingers. In his previous struggles with the monster, he had never felt it so loudly, so brutally.

He was Ka-Zar, Lord Kevin Plunder. He would not yield. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to drive out the foreign, repugnant influence.

Too late. His fingers were already straining too much to regain their hold. The initial, unexpected assault had done its dirty work. Ka-Zar fell.

As the net closed around him, he gazed back at the sky and saw Sauron glide serenely down in his wake. He was clutching Archangel, who hung limply. That explained the potency of Sauron’s hypnotic pulse—he had just drained energy from Warren.

Sauron let go of Archangel, who fell like a stone toward a nearby net.

Ka-Zar wriggled an arm loose. He still had his knife. But even as he began to slash at the cords, he saw a warrior on the ground lift a blowgun. The dart stung his thigh. In moments, muscles stiffened all over his body. The rosy glow of dusk immediately faded to the blackness of deep night.

He was still semiconscious as he was bound, gagged, and tossed on the spongy moss that covered the clearing. His last perception consisted of voices, particularly that of Sauron, berating his underlings to finish up their work before anyone came along to interfere.

“Our plan is almost complete,” the villain cackled. “Just a few loose ends, and my victory will be complete.”

That, Ka-Zar realized grimly, could very well be the truth.

CHAPTER 10

Deep in the swamp, Cannonball gazed up at the dark sky, bidding farewell to the last shreds of daylight. “My li’l sister Joelle calls this type’a thing spook weather,” he told his companions.

Auroras spun from horizon to horizon. Laser-thin, fulgu-rant streaks of light leapt from one clump of cloud to the next, hissing like snakes in boiling water. Standard, but remarkably potent, thunder and lightning flashed and boomed along the hills. So much static electricity hung in the atmosphere that Sam’s hair would have stood on end had it not been drenched with the humidity of the jungle. He wiped another puddle of sweat from the back of his neck, where it had collected inside the collar of his uniform. Next time I come to the Savage Land, he thought, I’m redesignin’ my uniform first.

“You have this kind of weather in Kentucky?” Iceman asked.

“We do when Storm gets a knot in her cape.”

“Ho ho ho,” Bobby replied sourly.

Sam’s cheeks flushed. “Aw, hell. Just trying to make y’all cheerful.” He cringed, wishing he knew how to purge his sense of humor of its juvenile edge. Their team leader had been awfully upset at the way Sauron had perverted her control of the weather. Not a good time to make her the butt of even the lightest of jokes.

His comrade shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I know how it goes.” Their glances met. They shared once again that strand of kinship that came from both having filled, at different times, the role of youngest X-Man on the team.

“This sky does remind me of home, y’know,” Sam added. “The clouds sweep over the Great Lakes and cover up the Appalachians from New York to Georgia. Some of those lightshows make you think y’got ghosts dancin’ from haystack to bam roof.”

‘ ‘You know, the aftereffects of this particular meteorological disruption provide us with unforeseen options,” the Beast stated. He waved at the swirling iridescence reflected in the stagnant pools surrounding them. Though the daylight was no more than a lingering background whisper of deep indigo and violet, they could easily make out the shapes of fronds, trees, logs, and the occasional hump of muddy land such as the one they were standing upon. “Do you see?” “See what?” Sam asked, scanning from branch to tree root, forehead wrinkling.

“I read you loud and clear,” Bobby said, in that quick way that had Cannonball feeling too young again. “There’s enough light to keep moving around by. It’s not black as a woman’s heart like it usually is at night in the Savage Land.’ ’ “Oh.” Sam nodded. Then he raised an eyebrow. “Black as a woman’s heart?”

Bobby pursed his lips. “Well. Black as some women’s hearts. Hank, are you saying you want to continue the search? We haven’t seen Amphibius’s green derriere in hours. These tracks here aren’t very fresh.” He pointed at their feet.

“That’s what I’m saying, for now,” Hank replied. “Another hour or two might prove a profitable investment. It was during a night search that Ororo stumbled across Sauron.

What better time to keep looking than while our enemies may be at their most active?”

Bobby sighed. “All right. Another hour or two. Then we’ll see.”

The Beast nodded, and raised his wrist radio to his mouth. “Beast to base. Do you read?”

A muted hiss came from the radio in response. Hank repeated his statement. Again, no one replied.

“Ill portents,” he muttered. “The EMP has run its course. That’s a clear signal coming at us. We should be hearing them.” He checked the code he’d entered. “Archangel? Ka-Zar? Shanna? Is there anybody out there?’ ’

Cannonball grew more and more antsy watching his big blue companion. “Somethin’ ain’t right. I’ll hightail it to Tongah’s village right now.”

“Cease and desist.” Hank’s raised voice snuffed Sam’s takeoff before it began. ‘ ‘Whatever happened, happened during the blackout. Stay, my young comrade. We need to consult.”

“Consult?” Sam asked. “I ain’t in the mood t’talk, Hank. Not when buddies are in trouble.”

The Beast raised one of his pawlike hands and set it firmly on Cannonball’s shoulder. “I empathize. This is an alarming development. But I’m the eldest of our little trio. Experience tells me we shouldn’t be rushing off. Do you trust me, Samuel?”    ~    '

Cannonball blinked. Hank McCoy could be a serious fellow, but his question displayed an additional, almost funereal gravity.

“ ’Course I do.”

“Then trust me now. I’ve been getting the increasing sense we have been indulging in the wrong approach. It’s time to introduce a variable.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“If you were Sauron, where would you expect the three of us to be right now?”

Sam hated Hank’s little quizzes. They reminded him of the tests Professor X used to give the New Mutants and Cable occasionally gave to the members of X-Force. Too many chances to get the answer wrong. “Uh, I guess I’d figure we'd be in one of two places: rushing back to the village, or still out here chasin’ Amphibius.”

“Correct.”

Sam was so startled at the approval in Hank’s voice that he laughed.

“We will be sure to be in neither place,” Hank continued. “I believe it’s already too late to help our comrades. It seems clear they’ve been captured. Or killed.”

“That’s not a conclusion I’d like to jump to, Hank,” Bobby said.

“Nevertheless, a likely one,” Hank said. “We can take heart in the fact that Sauron requires live mutants to feed off of, so at the very least, our teammates are probably alive, though not enjoying themselves overmuch. In any case, it also stands to reason we wouldn’t find them now anymore than we could locate Psylocke earlier. Sauron probably has them tucked out of sight by now. As for Amphibius, in light of this new information, I conclude that we’ve searched enough for him. Methinks it is tempting fate to loiter where others might expect to find us. That’s predictable. I don’t wish to be predictable.”

“Amen to that,” Cannonball said. “Cable was always warning us to hold on to the advantage of surprise. So, where do we go, and what do we do?”

“For a start, though the bog remains treacherous to navigate, I suggest we use this convenient augmentation of our supply of illumination to find a camping location away from the trail we’ve been dogging.” He gestured again at Am-phibius’s footprints. “After that, I think the prudent course is to dedicate ourselves to sustenance and recuperation.” “Wouldn’t mind a bite to eat,” Cannonball commented. “I’m hungry enough to eat one o’ them giant centipedes I tripped over a ways back. Not sure I could fall asleep out here, though.”

“True, but even a super powered mutant requires sleep to be at his best and cogitate properly,” Hank added. “I, for one, feel as though we’ve been out-thought ever since we arrived in this primordial theme park.”

“You said it,” Bobby declared. “Let’s go, then.” He froze a causeway from their little slab of land to the next, at right angles to the direction they’d been pursuing. They squeezed through a gap in a stand of cypress trees and then through a riot of giant cycads, Iceman thawing the pathway behind so as to erase their trail. Just as they were about to emerge from the umbrella of palmlike fronds, a huge sau-ropod body crossed right in front of them.

They peered upward. A beast with an extremely long neck and a tail to match reached high into the treetops, nibbling the fresh leaves it found there.

“Diplodocus,” Hank murmured. “Perhaps the longest dinosaur that ever trod the earth. Fourteen vertebrae in its neck. Forty-two in its tail. Not as heavy as brachiosaurus or seis-mosaurus, though.”

“It’s big enough,” said Cannonball. “One swipe of that tail would knock over a bus. I say we steer clear of that sucker.”

“Oh, it’s not one of the species we have to be terribly concerned over. Too ponderous. We’ll have abundant opportunity for evasion even if it takes an interest in us. ’Tis the velociraptors or the coelophysis packs that might take an excessive nibble out of us before we perceived we were under attack. Worse yet might be the bird-eating spiders or the bog vipers. Unique to the Savage Land, so there isn’t any antivenom available, and their toxins kill in minutes. Then there’s..

“Y’gonna tell me about the plants, too, ain’tcha?” Sam interrupted.

“Veritably. The flora here can be just as dangerous as the fauna. There are paralyzing nettles, razor bushes ...”

“I think I’ll send up a flare and let Sauron haul my butt off to his nice, safe dungeon.”

“That would be one way to find out where it is,” suggested Bobby.

“See? ’Tis not so unpleasant an abode, once you adjust to its idiosyncrasies,” the Beast said as Cannonball projected tiny bursts of his power at the haunch of dimetrodon that hung above their “firepit”—which contained no fire because they didn’t want flames and smoke to attract unwelcome guests, be they enemies or an inquisitive Tyrannosaurus rex.

The meat steamed, wafting puffs of, Sam had to concede, downright delicious aromas into the air. Hank ripped a strip of the cooked flesh loose and bit into it.

“Mmmm. Tastes just like iguana.”

Sam knelt down and cut a shred off the haunch. After the first swallow, he nodded. Not too bad. Hank was exaggerating, though. No way was this as good as iguana.

Easy to catch, though. The big, fin-backed lizard had wandered right into camp and chomped Cannonball’s arm— which, because he wrapped himself in his kinetic envelope, resulted in no damage other than to the predator’s teeth. Before it could scamper away, Iceman had frozen the arteries in its brain. Instant stroke.

Boy, would that tick ol' Stegron off. Cannonball hoped that ugly mini-Godzilla wasn’t still stomping around the Savage Land, demanding voting rights for reptilians everywhere.

A mosquito speared Sam’s cheek. He slapped, but not before the critter had done some damage. He regarded the bright spot of his own blood in his palm, mingled with the black shreds of the insect. He could feel the welt rising beside where his sideburns would be if he had any. What was that, the three hundredth insect bite tonight?

“Can y’all do something about this?” he complained. The Beast, protected by his thick mat of blue fur, shrugged. Iceman aimed a finger and froze the three or four pests nearest Sam’s face.

Dozens more took their place, whining for his hemoglobin. “Thank you very much,” Cannonball said in his most exaggerated, ya-dumb-Yankee drawl. “I could jus’ blast ’em myself if I wanted to go after ’em one by one.”

“Do forebear, young sir,” the Beast said. “Your mutant power usually lacks the degree of silence we require.” Bobby scratched his chin thoughtfully. “We do need a solution, though. I’m going to have to give up my ice form in order to eat. As soon as I do, they’ll swarm all over me as well.”

“Your selflessness is an inspiration to us all,” Hank declared. He waved a piece of reptile steak. “I have it. Build us an igloo, my good man.”

Bobby nodded. “All right. I guess I have enough juice left. It wears a guy out having to freeze swamp water and quicksand all day long, I’ll have you know.” He waved his hands, fashioning blocks of ice into a domed hut. The water level of the nearby pond dropped momentarily, until replaced

by brackish flows from farther out in the bog.

“Shucks, you froze some salamanders into th' walls,” Sam said.

“You want perfection?” Iceman said. “Make your own ice cubes in the middle of a sweltering jungle with nothing but scummy marsh water to pour in the tray.”

“Amphibians do well in suspended animation,” Hank said. He picked up the cooked slab of meat and crawled into the structure. Iceman followed. Cannonball came last, covering the entrance with a blanket from his pack. A cloud of mosquitoes came in with him, but succumbed to the cold. Sam felt no remorse as he scrambled over their frosted little corpses. Salamanders, he could pity. Even dimetrodons. But blood-sucking little pests went in the same trash bin with certain evil mutants he could name.

The glow from the Beast’s battery-powered camp minilantern turned the interior of the igloo into a cozy genie bottle. They spread their microthin all-weather blankets over the ground and things grew downright homey. Except for the cold, of course, but stoking up the thermal filaments in his uniform was enough to take care of Sam. Hank had his natural insulation, and Bobby never seemed bothered by cold even in his human form.

“Ah, the rustic life,” Hank exclaimed. “Doesn’t it make you gratified to be a part of this mortal existence?”

“Y’mean, happy to be alive?” Cannonball asked.

“ ‘Happy’? Mr. Guthrie, how can you choose such an anemic adjective? Fulfilled, replete, placated beyond measure— these are the sorts of modifiers such a venue as this deserves.”

“Exactly what place are y’talkin’ about? This exact patch’a frozen muck, or the Savage Land in gen’ral?”

The Beast scowled. “Don’t be dense, my boy. Of course the plot of earth on which we sit leaves a modicum to be desired. I mean all this untamed glory.” Hank’s talons almost brushed the low ceiling of the igloo, but his expansive gesture whispered of everything from the depths of the Savage Land’s central lake to the ridges of the Eternity Mountains that surrounded it. “The totality of Ka-Zar’s realm.” “/ know what Hank means,” Bobby said around a mouthful of food. “He’s saying a big, hairy blue guy like him feels right at home among these giant feathered theropods and dragonflies as long as his arms. He doesn’t have to put up with cute society chicks refusing to go to the movies with a dude that looks like he files his teeth.”

“You slay me, old comrade,” Hank said. “You mock my sincere respect for this magnificent preserve. True, I experience less alienation here, but do recall, I still had my human appearance the first two times we visited. Yet I was equally enamored of the setting on both those occasions.”

“Phew, does that take me back,” Iceman said. “I was so young I still had zits.”

“The days of the original X-Men?” Cannonball asked. “No Ororo? No Logan?”

“Just the five of us. Pre-Champions, pre-Defenders, pre-X-Factor. Before Hank defected to the Avengers. Jean, Scott, Warren, Hank, and me. And Professor X, of course, but he usually stayed in the mansion.”

“He certainly did not venture to the Savage Land the way the rest of us did,” the Beast said. “As a matter of fact, when we made that second jaunt, the one in pursuit of Sauron, we were under the mistaken impression that the good Professor was cold in his grave.”

“Well, not all of us. Jean knew it was really the Changeling we buried in that cemetery. The Professor had a big mission that required total concentration—beating the

Z’Nox. So he left us on our own. It was our initiation, I guess. We were getting older. We’d been through some trials by fire. He wanted to see how we’d get along without him to hold our hands.”

“And y’did okay, from what I’ve been told,” Sam said. “Didn’t feel that way to me. We got in over our heads more than once. The Sentinels really whipped our butts. Magneto gave us grief. Funny thing was, Magneto was supposed to be just as dead as Xavier.”

“Only a supposition,” said the Beast. “He plummeted from an aircraft, thanks to a little ‘assistance’ from his sycophantic lackey, the Toad. We never saw a lifeless body as we had with what we believed to be our dear mentor.” Bobby plucked a sliver of dimetrodon hide from between his, front teeth. He chuckled. “I’m still waiting for the Changeling to turn up alive one of these days.”

“I have long pondered what course history might have taken had the Professor been available when Havok’s power first manifested,” Hank mused.

“Oh, that’s right,” Iceman said. “Alex hadn’t even known he was a mutant, and then wham, he turns out to be a real keg of gunpowder. We came back from that incident with the Sentinels not knowing what the heck we could do for him. He had almost no control over his power surges. So what did we do? We took him to Karl Lykos.”

“Lykos had briefly been an associate of Xavier’s,” explained Hank. “He seemed to be one of the few doctors we could trust. Unfortunately I had not yet completed my own medical training.”

“We didn’t know Lykos was an energy vampire, or that he’d been itching for the chance to see what happened when he got a mutant into his ‘therapy couch.’ When he siphoned off Havok’s raw overflow, he became Sauron.”

“I remember readin’ the file on that,” Sam said. “I’d say y’all are taking it too much on your shoulders. Sooner or later Lykos woulda run across a mutant or two to victimize. The guy was a disaster waitin’ to happen.”

“Veritably,” Hank said. “Nor could any value come of allowing Lykos to continue treating patients by milking them of their life force. Eventually his cravings would have mounted until he drained too much and thereby killed innocent victims—as he has since done. In any case, things transpired as they did, and we had to contend with him, then chase him all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and then here to the Savage Land.”

“Chase him, yes,” Bobby said. “But we didn’t even figure out where he’d gone that first time.”

, “Indeed not.”

“Now I’m confused,” Cannonball interrupted. “I thought the X-Men did tangle with Sauron in the Savage Land.” “Eventually. Colossus, Banshee, Nightcrawler, Storm, Wolverine, and Cyclops were the team then. It was a separate journey, all mingled with the business with Zaladane and her god Garokk and so forth. Sauron had been in the Savage Land for quite some interval. But the original five of us never found him.”

“We found Magneto instead, though,” Bobby said. “How could y’all lose Lykos?” Sam queried.

“We thought he had met with his demise in a fall.” Beast swallowed a final chunk of lizard steak and waved his paws expressively. “We had been captured by the Sentinels, had come back with Havok and Polaris—actually, this was before Loma was ever called Polaris—to New York to lick our wounds. Lykos drained Alex’s energy, became Sauron, fought with Angel and gained hypnotic control of him. When we located Angel later I regret to say I had to, uh ...”

“Hank knocked Warren out, to save him from the hallucinations that were still twirling around in his brain.”

“So that’s why Warren was so touchy about cornin’ along on this here mission. Heck, gettin’ the worst of Sauron ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of. He turned me into shish kebob the first time I tried t’pound ’im, that time he and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants decided to give X-Force some grief.” “Alas, it was not just on one occasion. The mysteries of psychology being what they are, Warren has proven repeatedly to be especially vulnerable to Sauron’s hypnotism,” Hank explained. “In any case, the effect of the initial attack lingered, so rendering him unconscious seemed the most convenient course of action.” The Beast combed frozen mosquitoes out of his fur. “Scott, Jean, Bobby, and I left Warren wjth Loma and Alex in order to look for Lykos. Instead, Lykos snuck into the mansion, drained energy from all three of the group there, and went to kidnap Tanya Anderssen, the woman he adored. We showed up just as he attacked Tanya and her father.”

“He was going to kill Mr. Anderssen,” Iceman said.

The Beast nodded. “He might very well have done so if not for our interruption. At that point, his human personality gained a measure of control over the monster. Deeply distraught that he had nearly brought such harm to his beloved, he fled by air. With Angel still unconscious back at the mansion, we couldn’t track him.”

“But Tanya knew where he had gone,” Iceman said. “She wouldn’t admit to that knowledge,” Hank continued. “She didn’t want anyone hurting him. We had to follow her secretly. She took us all the way to Tierra del Fuego, where Lykos’s father had owned a cabin that he maintained for adventurers who wanted to explore the rugged region. It was long abandoned, and so isolated that Lykos knew he would find no one from whom he could siphon the power that Sauron needed to exist. He reverted to human form and confined himself there, amid the snow drifts and the granite peaks. I believe it was his intention to starve himself to death.”

“But Tanya found him before that could happen,” Bobby continued.

“Yes, she did. Lykos was aghast. He knew he wouldn’t be able to prevent himself from vampirically harvesting her if he touched her, so he jumped off a cliff.”

‘ ‘Tanya would have jumped, too, except we came around the comer just then, and I threw up an ice wall in her path.” “That was the last we saw of either Sauron or Lykos for quite some time. Jean lowered us telekinetically into the chasm. I’m afraid we hadn’t had the best view when Lykos "flung himself off. We thought he had surely plummeted all the way to the bottom of the cliff.”

“Actually, he’d only fallen about twenty feet. Aside from a couple of scrapes and braises, he wasn’t hurt at all,” Bobby said. “We just rushed right past him on our way down. Never saw him.”

The Beast nodded. “At the bottom of the cliff was a snow cave. It showed signs of recent entry, so we concluded Lykos had tumbled into it. We squeezed our way inside and dropped into a tremendous cavern brimming with pterano-dons. The flying monstrosities undoubtedly belonged to the same mutant colony that had infected Lykos when he was a boy. One of them was flapping off carrying a bloody chunk of meat. We thought it might be the remains of our antagonist. We followed. Jean ferried us over crevices telekinetically, and Scott chased away the wildlife with optic beams. The chase led us far down a huge natural tunnel. Eventually the pteranodon stopped to feed, and we realized the meat was merely a piece of mountain goat. We decided to forge ahead. The tunnel, to our amazement, led all the way beneath the Drake Passage—”

“I like that name,” Iceman said.

The Beast cleared his throat. “As I was saying, the underground passage seemed endless. It brought us all the way into the Eternity Mountains. We literally dropped down into the Savage Land.”

“Lykos eventually followed us. He wasn’t able to climb back up, so he ended up in the jungle, too. He lived there a long time, stealing just enough energy from animals to get by, retaining his human shape. He was a good guy for a while. Made friends with Ka-Zar and the Fall People. Helped out.”

“The irony is, Lykos fared much better than Warren mak-ing'it through the tunnel. Angel had tracked us to Tierra del Fuego, and Tanya told him where we had gone. When he swooped into the midst of the pteranodon colony, they chased and harassed him all the way down the vast passageway, ultimately knocking him senseless. He plummeted into the Savage Land and was killed when he impacted the swamp—perhaps the very swamp in which we sit.”

“Say what?” Sam asked. “For a corpse, he was acting downright spunky earlier today. If he ain’t alive, then those comments Betsy makes about his cold feet in bed take on a whole new meanin’.”

Hank grinned. “One of many close calls, actually. A spark of life remained. Magneto, who had been hiding out in the Savage Land for some months, found Warren, took him to his sanctuary, and revived him.”

“Warren didn’t know it was Magneto at first. We’d never seen him out of his costume. He was running around calling himself the Creator. He’d rigged up an apparatus that gave natives of the Savage Land altered, super-powered forms. Some of those mutates are the ones we’re dealing with now, like that living pogo-stick we were chasing all day today.” “Now that is a right fancy campfire tale,” Sam concluded. “Who would’ve thought a snowy chasm would lead to any region as hot as this?” Iceman hardened the dripping walls around them. “The Savage Land has got to be the weirdest place I’ve ever seen on this planet.”

Hank’s bushy brow sprang upward. “My stars and garters!” he growled excitedly. “My dear Mr. Drake, do you remember what Tanya blurted when you threw up that shield and saved her from leaping off the cliff? She pounded it with her fists and—’ ’

“Lord, I’d never forget that. She said, ‘The cold! He always hated the cold!’ I tried not to take it personally.” “Yes! Karl Lykos hated cold. Sauron has always hated cold.’ ’ The Beast emphasized every word. ‘ ‘We’ve even used cold as a weapon against him. That’s what Storm was trying to do last night when she unleashed more than she bargained for. It’s standard operating procedure against him.”

“Well, of course. You use what works. I’ve been aching to give him a case of total-body frostbite.”

“Indeed you have. And we are driven to the paradigm of frigid tactics because we naturally think of reptiles having little ability to deal with low temperatures. What if we are being too narrow-minded? Pterosaurs aren’t like modem reptiles. They are at least halfway to being warm-blooded. Much like dinosaurs in that respect. If Sauron at all resembles the mutant creatures that infected him, he has ample tolerance for chill conditions, however much he might hate them. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees Fahrenheit in that cave, and the pteranodons seemed to thrive there. Otherwise why would there be such an abundance of them?”

“Dr. McCoy,” stated Cannonball, “you are, without a doubt, a signed, sealed, and certified genius. I feel so dumb a mule must’ve kicked me upside the head. Human beings don’t like cold, either, but it don’t stop ’em from livin’ in Alaska and places like that. They figure out a way to do it. Sauron could be wearin’ thermal underwear for all we know.”

“We’ve been looking for him in the wrong places,” Bobby said, assuming his ice form in a flush of outrage.

“Let us not rush to judgment,” Hank cautioned. “We may yet be chasing will-o’-the-wisps. But I suspect it is past time we considered the possibility that Sauron’s hidden base of operations lies not in the heart of the Savage Land, but up along the cool fringes, in the Ice Age zone just this side of the peaks that cup the terrain.”

“Remember what Scott and Jean told us about their run-in with Sauron that time Worm and Whiteout kidnapped Ha-vok for him? His fortress was an aerie pretty high up a mountain, near the remnants of Pangea.”

“Ka-Zar said he checked there. It’s empty,” Sam said. ‘ ‘But if Lykos could handle an altitude like that once, he can do it again.”

“Such a location would explain a great deal,” Hank added. “The natives don’t care for the heights. They hazard an expedition to hunt mammoth once in a while, but most of the time there would be few possible witnesses to Sauron’s comings and goings.”

“I say we get out of this bog right now and get our tails to high ground.”

“Not yet,” Hank said. “A far more significant question remains. Namely, if Sauron is up there, why are we here?’ ’ Iceman and Cannonball looked at him blankly. Then their eyes widened.

“Because that’s where Sauron tricked us into coming,” Iceman said. “Using Mr. Hippity-Hoppity to lead us on a wild frog chase.”

“Or worse, into an ambush,” the Beast said.

“Well, that goes unsaid. What with all that’s happened, that’s always been a possibility.”

“A possibility, yes. Now I believe it to be a certainty. Since that is so, it’s relatively transparent what sort of counter-strategy we can assemble.”

“Lay it out for us, buddy,” Bobby said.

“I said before it’s as if Sauron has been out-thinking us all along. He had enough sense to hide his headquarters. He divided us. He seems to have prearranged each encounter he has had with us, except when Storm happened across him l^st night. Why were we so easily misdirected?”

“Because we’re stupid?” Sam suggested.

“Hey, speak for yourself, junior,” Bobby retorted.

“None of us is dimwitted, but we fell victim to a tendency any bright individual, human or mutant, is vulnerable to. We expected our nemesis to act in character.”

“Hmmra,” muttered Iceman. “Yeah. Sauron isn’t just being a little cleverer. It’s like he’s a whole new dude.” “Righteo,” Hank said. “In the past, we’ve never had to devote much energy to luring him into a confrontation. The old Sauron would have dismissed us as insects, attacked us impulsively, or surrendered to his craving for energy and become reckless. Or, as has always been his greatest handicap, his human self—the good Karl who once rescued little Tanya from the brink of death in that pteranodon roost— would have emerged to obliterate any dispassionate, carefully executed offensive Sauron mounted. Somehow in the recesses of our minds, we were depending on him to behave as he always has.”

“But now we’ve wised up,” Bobby said. “Now you’re saying, let’s figure out what the new Sauron behaves like, and maybe if we’re lucky we can second-guess him.” “Yes.”    '

“I see where yer gettin’ at, too,” Cannonball said. “If he ain’t impulsive no more, we know he’s got somethin’ in mind for the three of us. So, do we spring the trap?”

“Yes and no,” Hank replied. “Yes, in that we want him to commit resources to executing what he has so ingeniously prearranged. No, in that his ambush might be as thoroughly successful as the others, which would eliminate the last free members of the team. That would be most unfortunate.” “We’d have to call for reinforcements,” Bobby said. “In fact, maybe we should.”

“If we were elsewhere, that would be the obvious choice, but there’s no convenient pay phone with which to call the Institute. Calling in the cavalry will take time that we don’t have at present. The longer this affair lasts, the sooner Sauron is likely to kill one of us, or murder more of those unfortunate savages that live here.”

“An’ it’s longer that he has th’others for fuel,” Sam added.

“Somebody’s going to have to take the bait,” Iceman said. “One of us, or two?”

“Just one, methinks,” Hank said.

“I’ll do it,” Sam declared.

“No, Sam. You’re better on offense than defense. If you use your power down in the swamp, the noise and glow will reveal you instantly. Should Sauron get in range, he need only hypnotize you for an instant to get you to drop your kinetic envelope, making you all too vulnerable. I suspect we are best served by leaving Iceman to chase Amphibius. Bobby is able to make paths and get across the boggiest patches without excessive hardship. He will be a hard prey to catch, and likely to elude capture altogether amid all this treacherous footing. You and I, Cannonball, will pay a surprise visit to our enemy’s stronghold, if we can find it. If we manage it soon enough, he won’t realize how much we’ve puzzled through.”

“He’ll realize it when I take that pointy tail of his and feed it to ’im.”

“I will do that,” Hank said. “Your job is to pound him into a mountainside until it looks like the rock has acquired a tattoo.”

“As the good book says, ‘It Shall Be Done’.”

Hank leaned back and yawned. “I’ll take the last guard shift. I’ll wake you up at first light, and Sam and I will set out for the foothills. Recharge your batteries, my esteemed allies. Tomorrow is a day of reckoning.”

CHAPTER 11

As Hank and Sam disappeared between the trunks of the cypress trees, cruising away through the dawn shadows with Cannonball muffling his roar to the stealthiest level he could achieve, Bobby Drake was reminded of all the times he had fended for himself. Quite a few. For someone who had literally grown up within the team, he had indulged in a fair share of solo adventuring.

.Why then did he feel so isolated? He wasn’t shivering. His powers being what they were, he never shivered. Yet he understood completely the apprehension of the young hobbit, Frodo Baggins, as he set out to throw the great ring of power into the volcano and thwart the Sauron of his world.

The igloo was melting fast beside him, no longer sustained by frequent refreezing. He accelerated the process, nodding as the salamanders Sam had been so concerned about thawed, flowed into the tepid swamp water, and began wriggling about.

The way back to the spot where they had diverged from Amphibius’s trail barely matched his memory. Fronds that had formed deep, threatening shadows at night offered cool, green arbors in the richness of morning. The incessant twitters, screeches, and groans of the wildlife, which had been so unidentifiable and ominous hours ago, stood out now as the recognizable and appealing racket of parrots, monkeys, bullfrogs, and honeybees. Even the diplodocus, still browsing

the treetops, this time with a mate, did not loom as intimi-datingly nor whip its tail so brusquely.

The land was trying to lull him into a false sense of security, Bobby concluded. Setting him up for a big, bad surprise. Sort of like a quiet stroll through Central Park after curfew.

Rather rude of the Savage Land, after all he and the X-Men had done to preserve it.

In due course he came to the set of giant froggy footprints where he had seen them last. They had been obscured by bird tracks and a drizzly, predawn rain, but enough remained to be sure he had located the right patch of mud. It no longer seemed a lucky break that Cannonball had stumbled across the traces the previous evening. In retrospect, the fact that they had never quite lost the trail was glaringly convenient. Iceman had to give Amphibius credit. The mutate had consistently made it seem as though the X-Men had stumbled across a secret place he wanted to keep them away from— one that he dared not abandon even while eluding them. Bobby had wanted so much to believe he and his teammates were on the verge of a breakthrough.

No new footprints. That would have been a bit too obvious. Yet somewhere nearby he was certain he would find some sort of marker to lead him into the snare.

He marched to the top of the little knoll. A column of ice formed beneath his feet, lifting him higher and higher. Finally his upper body emerged from the treetops.

William and Maddy Drake’s little boy was in a heap of trouble.

He ducked back down, hiding himself in the uppermost leaves. Cruising over the swamp were more than twenty riders on pterosaurs. Iceman keened his gaze to see if Sauron was floating among them, but he saw only pteranodons and a pair of pterodactyls carrying juveniles—messengers to travel quickly, perhaps? No Sauron, no mutates, just the locals who served their cause.

The lack of super-powered foes was of little comfort. Obviously the X-Men’s antagonists no longer felt the need to operate covertly. The remaining members of the team were to be rounded up as rapidly as possible, with no concern how public the effort became.

Well, that solved Iceman’s first problem, namely how to lure attention away from Cannonball and the Beast. Now he faced a more complex dilemma—how to slip through the net long enough to give his comrades a meaningful interval in which to make good on the new strategy. Fortunately none of the riders seemed to have noticed his brief emergence; their eyes were trained on the ground below their positions. If he perceived their search pattern correctly, they wouldn’t pass over his location for several minutes.

He resisted forming chunks of ice around the feet of some of the closer pteranodons so that the added weight would send them crashing into the bog. That would bring too quick a response. However, as he slid down a ramp into the lower canopy, he left his ice tower intact. Eventually it would be noticed and he would have a posse hurrying after his trail of blocks of ice. But not until he had put some distance between himself and the pack.

“Hank, I’ve changed my mind,” he murmured toward his wrist radio. “Let’s trade places.” He spoke without tapping in the code to open a transmission. Neither he nor the others were using the radios, because to do so would give away that the three of them had separated, in the event that Sauron’s contingent had figured out how to listen.

“Just kidding,” Bobby said, forming his cruising ramp as fast as he knew how. He became a blue-white blur racing through the cypress trees, a dozen feet above the misty pools of stagnant water. “I live for this kind of thrill.”

Cold liquid struck Psylocke in the face, jolting her awake. She coughed and raised hdj dripping eyelids. In front of her stood a prune-faced, leathery mare of a woman wearing a loincloth, a lemur-skull pendant, and a sneer.

“Good morning to you, too, Pibah,” Betsy muttered.

The jailor chuckled to herself. She lowered her gourd dipper into her primitive bamboo-and-tar wheelbarrow and flung more water at her captive’s body. When the wheelbarrow trough was empty, she limped over to the well in the comer of the stone chamber to refill. The bucketsful came up icy cold from the depth of the mountain—perhaps from an aquifer outside the tropical Savage Land biosphere.

Pibah laughed louder as the frigid cascades raised goose bumps all over Betsy’s body. She loved this, Betsy knew. Here Pibah was—bent, middle-aged, most of her teeth missing and whatever beauty she had once possessed sacrificed to a harsh life spent with harsh men—able to torment a woman of beauty, youth, unique talents, and an unbroken spirit.

The worst of it was, Pibah’s little abuses were the least of what Psylocke had endured since her abduction. In the end, the servant did only what she was assigned. It was she who had kept Betsy fed the day before, and though she had doled out the morsels with excruciating slowness, she had not stolen any of the food nor sprinkled it with fire peppers, as Brainchild had suggested. And at least these baths did not involve harsh scrubbing or soap in the eyes. Perhaps she was still bound to a tilted slab, unable to tend to her own needs in even the most basic fashion, but at least the layers of sweat and the aromas of captivity and more were being rinsed off.

The overflow dribbled into the trench that ran along the base of all the slabs, vanishing from her presence. And cold as the water was, it refreshed her, in a brutal, tingling sort of way.

It could have been worse. Had been worse.

Pibah moved on and tossed water at Logan, who resided on the next slab. Beyond him Storm slept, still too drained from Sauron’s last feast to awaken. The villain had drawn a huge portion of energy from her. Her just desserts, he called it, for causing him so much trouble in the night sky battle.

Across from Betsy perched Shanna and Ka-Zar. Both were unconscious, their chests rising and falling faintly, their jaws slack. As non-mutants, Sauron’s feeding had hit them hard, but fortunately, with so many other sources of provision, the monster had spared them enough to preserve their lives. For now.

Beyond the two guardians of the Savage Land, intentionally placed at a distance from her to make her suffer, rested Warren. Brainchild had tilted that slab to horizontal in order to study his extraordinary wings. The mutate’s swollenheaded figure blocked her view, but she knew her lover was there.

She wasn’t alone anymore. Psylocke winced, wishing she weren’t so glad of the companionship, and knowing full well the defeat it represented. At least there was hope, as long as the three other X-Men remained at large.

Brainchild finished his examination and wandered off. Betsy saw that Warren was awake—the first time both of them had been conscious since Sauron and his raiders had dragged in the main clump of captives during the night. He turned and looked straight at her. He spoke. Not with his mouth and vocal cords, but by a more profound means.

X-NEN

I remember a ride we took on a ferris wheel. I remember a moonlight swim. I remember...

Betsy barely managed to suppress the huge grin that tried to blossom on her face. Despite supreme effort, the comers of her mouth rose. Warren saw it, and his eyes twinkled.

I remember a walk down Greymalkin Lane, she responded effusively. I remember writing to my brother about that ferris wheel ride. I remember telling him in that letter that / was in love.

She was no longer headblind! The terrible, dispiriting inner silence that had plagued her for more than thirty-six hours was gone. Her mind was now brimming with the glorious, beloved “voice” of her Warren. Her angel in blue.

The bone-aching weariness from Sauron’s latest leeching had not faded. Her powers had not returned in any substantive way. Her fingers twitched, but could form not a shred of her psychic knife. She was certain that she still lacked the ordinary, non-mutant physical strength necessary to stand up if the straps were removed. But that no longer discouraged her. If she continued to show the normal evidence of her defeat, Sauron would assume she was as helpless as ever.

When she had been small, her governess used to say that a rainy day was no disappointment as long as one was prepared for it. Well, nanny, she said to that kind old lady’s ghost, I’ve found my umbrella today.

Who would have thought, she broadcast to Warren, that in granting your request, / would benefit myself most of all?

Warren answered not in sentences, but with images of two nights earlier, when they had sat outside the lodge in Ton-gah’s village, watched only by the curious tribesmen up on the stockade walls, and fashioned the link that currently united them.

Psylocke and Archangel were tethered by a variation of

psionic rapport that Cyclops and Phoenix had long shared. Warren had intended the measure to serve as a crutch in his confrontation with Sauron. Betsy was so proud of him for that. Warren was a prideful man. To be able to let go of ego enough to ask for help touched her heart, because she suspected he could not have done so with anyone else. She had gladly set up the framework that would allow her to instantly send him telepathic countermeasures to the villain’s hypnotism if needed, a strategy that should have worked even if Warren ventured as much as fifty miles away from her during his circuits of the Savage Land.

Ironically, when the time came, Archangel had faced Sauron unsupported, because Psylocke had herself already been taken captive. The link had not been powerful enough to let her reach him through the cavern’s thick stone walls once Sauron had drained her and Brainchild had fitted her with the inhibitor. The psionic construct was not as durable as that of Scott and Jean. Nor would it be permanent. Betsy estimated it would dissipate within a week unless they chose to reinforce it. However, in the meantime, now that Warren was inside the chamber with her, the two of them needed only to be awake and alert to make it function.

We need to open the channel as widely as possible, she said. Now that I have a telepathic anchor, I think I may be able to manage to speak to Ororo and Logan and Ka-Zar and Shanna. There’s even a slight possibility I could reach Hank or Bobby or Sam.

Go for it, he replied.

She surrendered to the delicious intimacy of the rapport. Though he had given permission, Warren resisted momentarily. An understandable reflex. She was, after all, more used to this level of psychic intensity. No matter. He was imbuing his astral armor with no greater force than a soap bubble. Pop. Barrier gone. She was in.

She had only to think of a memory of an occasion when she and Warren had done anything together, and she recalled not only her own impressions, but his as well. The romantic moments drew her—the walks, the intimacy, the long talks in and around the mansion or Warren’s Manhattan loft—but the strongest memories consisted of crisis moments. Those were the most valuable for the purpose at hand. Sharing those riveted the two of them together more than a recalled candlelight dinner could.

She cringed as she saw herself bleeding in Boomer’s arms, nearly eviscerated by Sabretooth’s claws as he escaped the X-Men’s custody. No direct memory of that existed in her own brain. She had been unconscious and all but dead. But Warren had been with Hank and Scott when they rushed to the chamber. He had served as witness as she breathed those shallow, ragged breaths, the rasps nearly inaudible beneath Boomer’s sobs. Betsy knew now what it had been like for Warren, how he had gone blank inside, horror claiming him from the end of every strand of his blond hair to the tips of his bionic wings. His world crumbled to meaninglessness. It was the sort of memory that eradicated any doubt that he loved her.

He saw into her memories as well. She blushed as he touched an incident during the aftermath of the battle fought against Cameron Hodge in Genosha, the huge altercation that set the stage for the return of the original members of X-Men into the core team. It was the first time they had met since she had acquired her Asian body. And how that body had reacted to Warren’s proximity. Though their love affair was not yet a glimmer on the horizon, she had wanted him from that moment forward. The pheromones were ... right.

Could it be that she would never have been interested in Warren if she had retained her original, British-born face and form? How much of romantic love came from the right mixture of scent and other purely physical considerations?

Now Warren was pouring over her memories of... oh, sweet mother of mercy, can’t a girl keep any secrets? She winced, let him share, and quickly went on to the next image.

In a generalized sense, the mingling of their souls was a pale shadow of the other night, when she had fueled it with her full, unsiphoned powers. But bit by bit, the connection regained vitality. Finally she pulled back. The doubled consciousness faded. In its place, she heard the whisper of the other minds in the room. Her telepathy had been rekindled, if at a mere one or two percent efficiency.

Much as she wished, she dared not probe Brainchild or even Pibah for information. With so faint a spark of her normal talent, she lacked the necessary finesse to get into an uncooperative subject and out without setting off alarms. For the time being, she had to approach only cooperative individuals. The circuit to Warren was firm now; even another sapping of their lifeforces would not break it. But as for the others ... ?

Logan, she called.

Wolverine ceased staring at the floor in his usual intense, brooding way. He shook his head as if doing nothing more than flicking away the drips from the dousing Pibah had given him. Betts?

His reply came in faintly, but without distortion. Yes, she said. Hold on. I’U see if I can bring the rest of us into the conversation.

Next came a bigger challenge. She had had an advantage when reaching for Logan. Remnants still existed of the bond forged between them when she had undergone the process that resulted in her ninja abilities—a connection not unlike the rapport. The process resembled building a bridge after the guide cable had already been installed. To connect with Ororo required greater effort, like leaping across a raw chasm.

She tested the doorway of Storm’s mind. Sweat popped from her forehead, mingling with the dew left from Pibah’s anointment. There. The latch turned. She entered.

Instantly the connection with Wolverine stretched out like taffy. The middle separated. Warren’s presence faded to a background whisper, insufficient for decipherable conversation. Betsy lacked the power to keep everyone linked simultaneously. One at a time then. She stayed with Ororo.

A hazy image formed of the Serengeti Plains of Africa. In the distance, snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro jutted up and through a layer of clouds. Storm lay in the mud of a watering hole, her goddess raiment and hair lying like mop strings around her. A pair of lionesses stalked toward her. She couldn’t get up to run. The most she could manage was to raise her hand and push at the air in the direction of the beasts—defiant to the end, but ineffective. Their long, sharp teeth came closer.

A nightmare. Betsy gently influenced the dreamscape. The lions froze into statues and became the guardians of an ivy-covered brick library, a building that she and Ororo had passed on excursions through Salem Center. Ororo, no longer muddy and disarrayed, rose to her feet at the base of the concrete steps.

Betsy emerged from the library foyer and smiled. Good morning, Ororo.

And with that, the co-leader of the X-Men awoke. She scanned the cavern, counted the captives, and sighed in frustration. Her pale eyes settled on Psylocke, but drifted away again so that the guards or Brainchild would not grow suspicious. I see you’ve found some way around our enemy’s slave collars, Ororo broadcast. Good work.

The congratulations may be premature, Betsy replied. She filled in Ororo on her limitations.

It is a start, the wind-rider stated, refusing to be discouraged. See how many of us you can reach, and then hoard your strength. We ’11 do our best to keep the attention focused in our direction to leave you as unmolested as possible.

Betsy smiled. Barely awake and helpless on a slab, and already Ororo was composing strategy. Bless her, she thought.

Psylocke eased out of their contact. After informing Warren and Logan of her progress, she closed her eyes and .braced herself. The next exertion would cause her pain. She thrust her awareness beyond the cavern, probing for the nearest familiar mind. Hank? Bobby? Sam? she called.

Nothing. It was as fruitless as yesterday, when she had tried and tried to get through to Warren.

Then something tickled her deep down. She frowned. What could it be? The emanations flowed with great strength, with a primal quality she couldn’t associate with any person she knew. Even Logan did not have such an aura of untamed, animalistic sentience.

Sauron himself? No. The contact soothed her in a way no hostile presence would. She absorbed not only friendliness, but a hint that the entity had been searching for her even before she had reached out in its direction.

She opened her eyes, still grasping at the astral filaments, trying to touch enough of them to communicate with their owner. Her gaze settled on Ka-Zar’s inert form. Immediately the whispers in her mind gained strength, but to her frustration, they refused to organize into true words or images. How could any telepath be transmitting so loudly and still be so mute?

But, since it seemed to be what was wanted, she continued to stare at Lord Kevin Plunder. Not an onerous chore, admittedly. She gave in to a reminiscence of their warm, almost flirting conversation outside the lodge two nights earlier. And such an excellent smile he'd worn as showed her the path that led to the hot springs. It pained her to see him slung up like a side of beef.

A throb of outrage came through from the observer inside her mind. Good, Psylocke thought. Any ally of Ka-Zar is likely to be an ally of the X-Men.

“Did you sleep well, my honored guests?” screeched a raucous voice. Suddenly the whisper of telepathic presence ceased. Betsy needed every ounce of her power to ward off the hypnotic domination as Sauron stalked into the cavern, grinning his long, toothy grin. She had nothing left to devote to conversation with a new, ethereal friend.

“Slept like a kitten, bub,” Logan muttered. “Mattress was too soft, though.”

Sauron fluffed back his long eyebrows with his talons, unruffled by Wolverine’s sarcasm. “We’re arranging a nice dungeon for all of you. For the time being, these facilities will have to do. At least until Brainchild has checked to be certain your powers will remain nullified no matter where we keep you.”

Psylocke read the monster’s aura, and calculated that he had lost little or none of his borrowed power overnight. That was bad in that it made him as formidable as possible, but it had one definite advantage: He would not be needing to siphon off more lifeforce from them just yet. Her recovery could proceed without interruption.

“We will escape,” Storm said. “We will destroy everything you have built here.”

“My dear weather deity,” Sauron mocked, “you can barely lift your chin. But I am glad to see such spunk. The more vigorously you try to fight, the more energy you generate for me to feast upon.”

“No matter,” Storm declared. “We’ve beaten you before. We’ll do it again.”

“Perhaps, before I go out to supervise the capture of your teammates, a demonstration of your ineffectiveness is in order.” Sauron danced around the room. Brainchild and the guards carefully averted their eyes, maintaining their visages of respect even while their leader acted like a fool. “Let’s see. A song would be good. Something simple, not too taxing for your little intellects. Ah. I have it. A round.”

He began singing “Row, row, row your boat.”

The X-Men stared back at him.

“Oh, come now. That’s not the spirit!” Sauron raised a hand, holding Ka-Zar’s confiscated knife like a conductor’s baton. “Everyone. I insist.”

Psylocke sensed hypnotic commands invading her psyche. She knew how to fight, but also knew that she would lose in the end, and the effort would only deplete her. Instead, she began to sing, doing so just haltingly enough that Sauron, if he didn’t check too closely, would think she was doing so against her will.

Warren joined in the chorus, aware of her reasons for cooperating, playing the part of the weak-minded opponent Sauron considered him to be.

But Storm and Wolverine pressed their mouths shut. As expected, this drew the core of the villain’s anger and scrutiny down upon them. Excellent, Psylocke thought. She would have winked conspiratorially at them if she had dared.

“No good at all!” Sauron yelled. He stepped directly in front of Storm. She clenched her eyes shut, but he forced them open without physically touching her. He placed his huge orbs in front of her face and commanded aloud, “Sing! Sing the round!”

“ ‘Row your boat’ into a whirlpool!” Storm snapped. The muscles of her neck stood out, denying him the surrender he was demanding, but already her words had adhered slightly to the tune. He leaned nearer. Psylocke, even with dampened powers, could see the cascade of ethereal energy pouring from Sauron into his victim.

Storm began to sing. “Row ... row ...” She swallowed hard. “Row your...” She resisted until the end of the lyric, but at the word “dream,” her lips parted and refused to close. At first she mouthed the words, then they emerged in a whisper, and finally she sang at full volume. Only an occasional shift of tone betrayed the uncooperativeness seething inside her.

Sauron turned toward Wolverine. “Now, my Canadian basso prof undo” he proclaimed, “let us hear your contribution!”

Logan opened his mouth, and belched.

Sauron glared at him. “Try again.”

Logan narrowed his eyes, a feral grin forming below. “I only sing when I’m drunk, bub.”

Sauron chuckled. The “bub” had echoed at the same beat as “row row row.”

“Very well,” the monster chirped. “Be drunk.” Wolverine limbs and body went slack. His eyes unfocused. He hiccupped.

“Row, row, row your boat,” Sauron sang.

“Throw, throw, throw yer goat,” Logan sang merrily in a voice Psylocke had only heard the times he and Havok had tried to drink each other under the table. Thanks to his healing factor, Logan could drink an entire fifth of that ghastly Russian vodka of his in an hour and still stand up and walk away.

“Almost,” Sauron declared. “You will get the lyrics right. I will tell you if and when you may improvise.”

Logan grimaced. Psylocke knew the pain of such prolonged resistance was excruciating; the psychic maelstrom around his head was vivid and so unstable snakes of compulsion were radiating outward. Even the guards were humming the tune now.

Gruffly and unmelodiously, he sang. Sauron nodded, wove the tendrils of command tightly into place, and turned to his remaining captives.

.. “Ah, my poor Lord and Lady Plunder,” he trilled. “How rude to snore during our performance. Wake up, my dears.”

He snapped his fingers. Ka-Zar and Shanna’s eyes blinked open. They raised bleary heads and took in their surroundings, expressions hardening as they spotted their tormentor.

“Sing with us,” Sauron told them.

They clenched their teeth and tried to stifle the action of their vocal cords, but they lasted mere seconds. Psylocke could see in their auras what great natural mental resistance they possessed, but it did them little good at the moment. Sauron was at his mightiest, they were at their weakest— they wouldn’t even be conscious yet if he weren’t propping them up psychically.

Wolverine began garbling the lyrics. Sauron whirled and stalked back to him, finally demonstrating impatience. So, thought Psylocke, controlling so many at once is not the casual trick he pretends it is. Taking advantage of the diversion, Psylocke sent out a quick telepathic burst of reassurance to Ka-Zar. She had no time or strength to get across a verbal message—a mere pulse of friendliness and presence was all she could manage.

She sensed his mind open and envelope her offering. He glanced toward her, his scowl softening into the silver-tongued-devil glance he had blessed her with back in the Fall People village. A wave of warmth blossomed between her lungs.

Reaching Shanna proved difficult. The She-Devil’s mental locks were well constructed. Psylocke recognized the signs of an individual who had known tragedy at vulnerable points in life. The barriers thickened against Psylocke’s probe.

Elisabeth Braddock had been a telepath too many years to batter clumsily and futilely at a volatile target. Instead, she rested her astral tendril against the wall and waited.

The rigidity of the wall did not fade. But bit by bit, as Psylocke held back and didn’t push, a counterprobe emerged and tentatively nudged the tendril.

Connection. Psylocke broadcast a gentle message of greeting and all’s-well. Shanna gave a little jump. Then some of the tension vanished from her posture. She darted a glance at Betsy and smiled, eyes only in order to conceal the communication from enemy observation.

Back along the link came emotions of gratitude, counterreassurance, and camaraderie.

Well, well, well, she thought. Not so fiery a vixen at all, if you approached her right.

Psylocke withdrew into herself, hoarding her remaining reserves, little as they were. Any more effort right now might deplete her so much she would begin screaming from the insipidness of that ridiculous song. Brainchild, she noted, had stuffed wax into his ears. Lord, she envied him.

Sauron, having overcome Logan’s latest round of defiance, was stomping gaily across the cold, rough-hewn stone floor, singing loudest of all and flapping his wings until the drenched hair of his captives dried and fluttered in the current. His eyes glittered. He wobbled as if sharing in the inebriation with which he had afflicted Wolverine.

He is still mentally unhinged, thought Psylocke. Insanity still bubbled somewhere beneath the surface. How to uncap it and use it to the X-Men’s advantage? She didn’t know yet, but it was only a matter of time until she uncovered the necessary clue.

Iceman sped through the trees beside a sluggish, ochre-tinged river. From back in the jungle growth came the crashing of savages atop ostrichlike mounts, a ground pursuit crew to go with the squadron of pterosaurs above. Bobby had kept out of their sight for a mile or more, but they had not lost his trail. If he stopped, they would catch up to him faster than he could make a pile of snowballs.

The river presented a problem. For the moment, he was hidden from the sky by lush foliage, but he would have to cross soon. Most likely the flyers would spot him in transit. If not, they would see his ice bridge before it melted.

To make matters worse, he suspected that for the past hour his pursuers had been driving him toward a specific area.

Bam! Something struck him from the left. He sailed over the low bank into the river.

Limbs clutched at him, keeping him under. He forced his eyes open. Amid the silt thrashed Amphibius. Every time Bobby started to rise toward the surface, the black-spotted green mutate gripped him and thrust him down again.

Oh, great. Even in his ice form, he needed air to breathe. Bobby was beginning to grow alarmed when his opponent’s huge foot came crashing through the water into his midsection, driving out much of the dwindling contents of his lungs.

Now he was more than alarmed. The primal fear of drowning suffused him, spooking him more than several battles with Magneto and the Sentinels had done. He acted instinctively: A pillar of ice formed on the river bottom and sprouted upward. He and Amphibius climbed with it, until they were at the height of a spire twenty feet above the surface of the water.

Amphibius squawked and leapt into the river. He reappeared near the bank, beginning a hop to solid ground.

He didn’t make it. Bobby froze the river edge. A slab of ice solidified around the mutate’s ankles, immobilizing him.

“What an amateur,” Bobby called. “A muppet could do better than that.” He had saved that insult for just such an occasion.

. A clamor blared above his head. He turned to see a pair of riders zooming toward him, the one in the rear sounding the alarm on a ram’s horn bugle. He leapt from the pillar just in time to avoid the flying reptile’s outstretched talons. No counterattack. This was his final chance to buy more time. He formed a ramp, skidded down, and sailed on an ice bridge toward the far bank.

The second rider screamed past. Iceman ducked, rolled, and flung a handful of icicles upward. Several struck the creature. It screeched from the pain and fought its rider’s command to turn, earning the X-Man another minuscule breather.

Bobby checked the brightness of the cloud layer, guessing that it was noon. As he was looking upward, a half-dozen more flyers sailed around a bend in the river, flying low. The warriors yelled as they saw him.

Bobby hurried toward the willows that overhung the far bank. Suddenly his head spun. He tumbled off his ramp into the water. The shock of impact cleared his disorientation. He sat up in knee-deep water and frowned skyward, searching for some explanation.

And recognized Vertigo atop one of the pteranodons.

“Uh oh,” he said. Frantically he punched in the code to allow his radio to transmit. “This is it, guys! Going down!”

A pteranodon streaked past, slashing. Bobby dived to the side. Climbing to his feet, he raised an ice shield and fended off a pair of tossed spears. He had almost regained enough balance and coherency to create a new ramp and scoot the remaining twenty yards to the bank when the willows parted. A dozen wolves gazed out at him, growling and licking their chops.

There went the fleeting hope of escape. He might be able to fend off their teeth and claws, but their howling and pursuit would prevent him from slipping away.

Another wave of nausea tumbled him down into the water. He let the current wash him downstream a few yards toward a tirty, reed-strewn islet. What he had thought was a log in the shallows turned out to be a crocodile. It lifted its head, took one step toward him, and he adorned it with a thick muzzle of ice.

The dizziness struck hard and relentlessly. Bobby flopped on his back, only to see Vertigo and her flying reptile circling closely overhead like a buzzard while other riders set up for attack glides. He tried to ice up her mount’s wings, but he couldn’t aim. Snow flurries erupted, scattering this way and that, dusting the swooping enemies but doing them no damage.

Talons battered his hands and arms. He was spared being seized. The creatures screeched and jerked back whenever they touched him—apparently they detested the frigidity of his body.

Iceman groaned and tried to wrap himself in a frozen dome, but he couldn’t concentrate. He barely noticed the warriors dropping into the stream and wading toward him. Two of them seemed unusually large. All seemed to have multiple heads and limbs.

No, that wasn’t right. His vision was blurred. He forced himself to focus.

Wait. One of them did have multiple sets of arms.

Barbaras, with Gaza looming behind him. And Amphibius, freed from the trap, swimming hard toward the scene. With Vertigo above and Lupo no doubt somewhere not far behind his wolves. All the major baddies except Brainchild and Sauron himself. Obviously, this operation had been intended as the final mop-up of X-Men.

He sure hoped Hank and Sam appreciated this.

, Barbaras’s four fists pounded him. Gaza lifted him and slammed him back down into the reeds. When Bobby raised a hand to form an ice club, another pulse of dizziness removed any control he had over his muscles.

Gaza, Barbaras, and Amphibius took turns bashing him until, inevitably, he reverted to standard human form. One big bruise later, he slipped into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER

Hank McCoy emerged from a cleft between two boulders, shielded his eyes from the sourceless glare rebounding off the layer of mists above, and scanned the wildflower-dotted pastures and rocky outcroppings ahead. A small herd of eohippus darted sideways and whinnied, perhaps scenting his fragrant blue body—he wished he could have approached into the wind. A bull au-roch chewed its cud by a small spring, ignoring the armadillo! ike glyptodont browsing in the reeds at the water’s edge. Nothing out of the ordinary for this fragment of the Savage Land.

The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became that this was ideal territory for Sauron. No jungle growth to entangle his wings, far less cover to hide infiltrators. A Lear jet-sized quetzalcoatlus rode past on a thermal draft, considered the auroch and the dawn horses, and whipped upward almost to the inversion layer. Within the past hour, since emerging from the swamp, the Beast had also spotted the biggest harpy eagle he had ever seen.

Cannonball caught up with him. Sam glanced down at his wrist radio. Hank sighed.

Waiting for the right moment to act was the hardest part of strategy and tactics.

An hour had passed since they had received Bobby’s blurted transmission. The lack of any followup confirmed that he had been defeated. That was bad enough. What was worse was that they still didn’t know if his sacrifice had gained them any advantage.

“I could cover a lot more ground if I could coast along on a kinetic envelope,” Cannonball said. His flying ability had already helped considerably in crossing the swamp and the jungle to the base of the foothills, under the cover of the trees.

“As right as a harvest moon over your farm’s weather-vane, my boy. But you endeavored in precisely that man-fjner the first day we searched, and it achieved no tangible result.”

“Well, no, but it felt like I was doin’ somethin’.” Sam sat down on a small boulder and rubbed at the grass stains on the blue knees of his costume. “Don’t kid me now, Dr. McCoy—I’m sure this here ‘patience’ an’ tip-toeing around wasn’t easy for you when you was young.”

“When I was young?” Hank snorted. “Do you take me for some decrepit octogenarian?”

“Nah. You ain’t a day over sixty, are ya? It’s hard to tell with all that hair. You could be dyein’ the gray to blue.”

Sam managed a hint of a smile, which Hank returned, but the jokes were wearing thin. What they needed was some luck. That had been in short supply so far on the mission.

“Look at that,” Sam said. “Somethin’ sure spooked them there li’l horses.”

The Beast turned. The eohippus herd was clattering away up the slope. Like so many deer—they really looked much like fawns, complete with white spots on their rumps—though they galloped, not bounded the way deer would.

“They caught wind of some sort of predator,” Hank said.

He scrutinized the little gully to their left. It contained the muddy prints of and the droppings of mammoth and other animals. The dawn horses were doing their best to avoid that trail, though it would have been the fastest route out of the little dell in which they had been grazing.

Around the shoulder of a hill came a sabretooth tiger, striding along with great purpose. The cat spared the eohip-pus no more than a dismissive glance.

“Hey,” said Cannonball. “Ain’t that... ?”

“Zabu!” Hank called. Not so loudly that his voice echoed over the landscape, but so that it carried to Ka-Zar’s faithful animal.

Zabu paused and regarded them. He emitted a sound midway between a lion’s rumble and a house cat’s inquisitive meow. He remained there no longer than it took to stare at the rumps of the last few eohippus and lick his lips, then he continued up the animal track.

“That boy knows where he’s goin’.” Sam nodded his head firmly. “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

“Of course, my boon companion,” the Beast replied. “We’ve been ignoring one of our most talented allies. Who better than Zabu would know where to find Ka-Zar?”

They pranced down to the trail and jogged behind the tawny feline. The animal acknowledged them with a flick of his ear. He proceeded onward at a pace meant for endurance, pausing regularly as if checking some sort of scent.

“We’re an inordinately long way from Tongah’s village,” the Beast commented. “This must be one fatigued kitty.”

“Tired or not, I wouldn’t want to get on his bad side. He looks like he’s mad enough to tackle a T. rex.”

Fur ruffled on Zabu’s back and he growled softly, as if to say, Bring 'em on.

“How do you suppose he knows where to go?” Sam added.

Hank scratched himself behind one of his tufted ears. “You are gazing upon the super hero of all sabretooths, my boy. His talents surpass the rest of his species the way, oh, the Hulk’s strength exceeds that of yours or mine.”

Zabu turned, snarled, and resumed trotting down the trail,

“You know,” the junior X-Man quipped, “it makes my belly button quiver when he acts that smart.”

The terrain grew rougher and more rocky. The trail dipped into a ravine and wound onward parallel to a brush-filled, frolicking brook. The air took on an alpine crispness, though it was that of the Alps in high summer.

Zabu stopped so abruptly the two X-Men nearly bumped into his haunches.

“What is it, old fellow?” whispered the Beast.

The cat grumbled in reply, abandoned the trail, and began climbing the slope, hopping from rock to rock and checking frequently to determine what he could see farther up the ravine.

Hank bounded after him, leaving Sam playing catch-up, grumbling under his breath about the steepness of the grade and the continued need to avoid flying. Near the top Zabu crept into a fissure and peeked out from the shade of overhanging rock. It was a see-without-being-seen vantage, and Hank made sure to share in the caution. Sam, bless his greenhorn soul, did not require a prompting to act accordingly.

They were finally high enough to see around a bend in the stream channel. One of the steep banks ahead was split by a tall, dim opening.

“A cave?” Sam whispered.

“ ’Twould appear so,” Hank answered in like tones. He tried to imagine how the spot would appear from above, and decided the topography was sufficient to make the gash appear to be nothing more than a shadow. It could only be seen from within the ravine, and only when quite near, as they were now. Given such natural camouflage, it was little wonder it had not been spotted during Storm or Archangel’s reconnaissance flights.

The sound of voices filtered down the ravine. That and heavy footfalls gave away the arrival of a large number of men well before the party rounded a fan of scree and became visible. The newcomers trudged straight for the cave mouth.

'' “We have the right place,” Hank said.

At the head of the procession marched Gaza, tall, broadshouldered, and wearing an expression of proud command. A blind man, leading. Immediately behind him hopped Amphibius. Several burly warriors made up the central group. The largest two of them carried Bobby Drake on a pole suspended atop their shoulders. Vertigo hung close by, her eyes studying the unconscious captive intently— no doubt, Hank concluded, in order to daze him with her power should he demonstrate the slightest sign of awakening. After her came a few more Savage Land natives. Barbaras brought up the rear, positioned as the heavy muscle should they be pursued.

Hank winced to see Bobby jostling along, limp, his uniform tom and at least one big welt rising on his temple—a truly nasty one to be visible from such a distance—and mud spatter everywhere.

“We gotta help him,” Sam said, keeping his voice down, but imbuing his words with all the emotional force of a gut-teral yell.

“No, Sam.”

“But I have a clear shot. All five are out in the open, and not a one of them can stand up to me when I’m blastin’.”

“That’s correct only if you succeed in hitting them, and if Vertigo doesn’t twist your cerebellum upside down inside your skull.”

“Thanks for the vote o’ confidence, old man.”

The Beast clutched Cannonball by the chin and forced him to stare directly back. “Samuel Guthrie, this is not about your competence. Ordinarily I would be pushing you into the fray, and don’t think it’s easy for me holding still this way. But we can’t tip our hand until we’re ready to finish the job. If we attack now, maybe we’d get Bobby back, but we would lose the element of surprise as far as our other comrades are concerned.”

Hank knew he wasn’t saying anything Sam didn’t already know, but it had to be said, merely in order to make the advice real enough to obey himself.

Sam sighed and nodded.

Hank let go and turned back to the raiding party, wishing in a way that his junior colleague had kept arguing and somehow convinced him to be impulsive. Hank’s toes dug into the sand at the bottom of the fissure. He tested the springiness of his foot muscles, wanting so much to leap out of concealment and come thundering down at their enemies like the Juggernaut with a wasp under his helmet.

Before Gaza reached the cave mouth, two muscular guards stepped out of the shadows and lifted their chest axes in welcome. The mutate saluted briefly. The sentinels ducked hastily out of the way of his towering frame. Gaza proceeded inside the arch of native limestone and bat guano, an opening so generous he did not have to stoop. The other mutates and tribesmen poured after him.

Iceman vanished with them. Hank simultaneously felt the pang of lost opportunity, and relief that he no longer had to watch his dear old friend swaying from side to side like a shot and gutted three-point buck.

The guards stepped back into the gloom of the overhang, but spying carefully, Hank could make out the foot and sandal of one of them, confirming that they had been, and were, watching the vicinity for arrivals, friendly or hostile.

They were lax, Hank noted. Probably feeling like they’ve won. The mutates had looked less smug. Their brood had fought the X-Men several times and had probably been considerably less than enthused to realize their major offensive had failed to corral two of their targets. Were the sentries remaining alert enough to worry about? Did they have compatriots hidden in the shrubs and scree?

Hank carefully evaluated the landscape for hidden lookouts, but the only movement that caught his eye was grass swaying in the breeze, birds floating by, and the drifting of leaves and sticks along the channels of the brook. He smelled no warning aromas.

The guards probably had orders not to wander beyond the cave mouth, out of concern their movements would betray the existence of the very hiding place at which they were stationed. Well, that was something, at least—if Hank and Sam couldn’t get in unobserved, at least they could operate in relative freedom while outside.

The large group of raiders had been gone only two or three minutes when Zabu stirred and clambered down the slope again.

Cannonball frowned. “You don’t think he—”

“Yes, 1 do,” the Beast replied. “He’s going in after them. We have to stop him.”

They hurried from rock to rock, finally catching up as the sabretooth reached the trail and turned to continue up the ravine.

Hank placed himself in the way.

Zabu grumbled. Not loudly enough to alert Sauron’s guards, but rich with a threatening, get out of my way tone. He raised a paw, showing his huge, curved, keenly tapered nails.

“We want to help Ka-Zar,” Hank said in a calm, friendly voice. “Help Ka-Zar, yes?”

Zabu put down his paw and gazed at the X-Man, blinking every few seconds and cocking his head at an angle. “Mnrr?”    ’

“Help Ka-Zar,” Hank repeated. “Go that way to help Ka-Zar.” He waved his hand back the way they had come.

Zabu snorted lightly, lifted up on his hind legs, put his front paws on the Beast’s shoulders, and began striding toward the cave, forcing Hank to back up step by step in a bizarre imitation of a circus dance.

“I think he don’t agree,” Sam murmured. “He’s got the veto power, Dr. McCoy, and he’s usin’ it.”

“We could let him go ahead,” Hank conceded, “but he could help us more if we planned an attack.” He placed his face right up against the animal’s nose. “Go that way. Help Ka-Zar more. Pounce on Sauron.”

Zabu dropped to all fours. “Rrrr?”

“Trust me, kitty,” Hank said. “We’ll be back very soon. Pounce on Sauron. Pounce on Gaza. Pounce on Vertigo.” The cat turned. Growling discontentedly, he ambled downstream, in the lead as if going that way were his idea.

Sam shook his head in amazement as he and Hank sashayed along a step behind the feline’s stubby tail. “I thought sure he was gonna carve you into little beast bits if you didn’t get out of his way.”

Hank shrugged. “I could not have perservered had I indulged in such disheartening speculation. I filled my inner being with images of our venerable smilodon as I observed him night before last, licking young Matthew’s noggin and snuggling against him like a mother cat around her kitten. One uses what artifices one can to beguile one’s own fear reflex. That technique, I am gratified to say, worked unusually well.”

“You soothed the savage beast?”

Hank winced. “Oh, puh-lease don’t use that phrase.” “Sorry. It sorta slipped out.” Cannonball paused to watch a covey of chicken-sized compsognathuses as they burst from the concealment of the brush by the stream and raced across a bridge of dead branches to safety on the far bank. “So . .. now that we’re goin’ this way, do you mind telling me why we’re goin’ this way? You ain’t plannin’ to go get Tongah and the villagers to help? That would take an awful lot of time.”    _

Hank spared a moment to admire the way the compsog-nathus’s heads swivelled so adroitly on their necks. Their name meant elegant jaw. They deserved it. “Don’t fret, my brave Samuel. Extended delay is the last quality I care to introduce to our strategy. We’re going back to the meadows we saw earlier. If all goes well, we’ll be hurrying back much better equipped to cope with our enemies’ superior numbers than if you and I and Zabu rushed in right now.”

“How’ll we manage that?”

Hank leaned close. His tone was boisterous. “I have a cunning plan.”

CHAPTER 13

The psychic corona flared so hotly Psylocke shut her eyes and turned away. No good. The image still burned, thrusting right through her skull and bombarding the nexus of her telepathic senses. At the center of the burst hung Iceman, his head trapped between Sauron’s palms, giving up life energy from every chakra of his body. Bobby’s mouth was flung wide in a scream, but no sound was emerging—he had no air left in his lungs to propel through his vocal cords. ✓

She had seen lifeforce caught in such violent outpourings many times. Usually as part of the process of death. That’s what being touched by Sauron felt like—death. Except that the victim had no guarantee of release from suffering. Upon awakening, he or she might be harvested all over again.

Too much. Betsy made it a point not to cry for herself, but her resolve wasn’t as unassailable in regard to the agony of comrades. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Poor Bobby. Brought in like a rag doll, fitted with the collar, trussed up, and before he could even awaken, that fiend had come in waving his devil wings, grabbed hold of him, and started to ingest his essence like a spider from hell.

Bobby was awake now. The pain had yanked him out of his merciful semicoma.

Suddenly, the waves of anguish dissipated. She opened her eyes. Sauron had stepped back from Iceman’s slab, propelled by Gaza and Barbarus’s vise-grip tugging.

“You dare interrupt,” screeched the monster.

“I ordered them to pull you away,” Brainchild hurriedly explained from his perch by his monitoring equipment. “I had to. You are nearing the limit we spoke of. Save this X-Man for later, Master. You have no real need of his energies yet.”

Sauron flung off his servitors’ hold. They backpedalled, flinching. He raised a wing to bat at them both, but refrained from following through. Instead, he stalked to Brainchild, whose knees began trembling.

“I do not care for underlings telling me what to do. Not even one so valuable as you, my melon-headed savant.” Sauron loomed over the little mutate until the latter nearly fell back off his stool.

“For the sake of the ... adjustment, Master, do not draw any more power.” He spoke sotto voce, so that only his frightful lord would hear, but Psylocke “heard” him. By borrowing a little boost from each of her allies for the past several hours, her telepathy was consistently available, if feeble. Brainchild was so entangled in apprehension that he was not only psychically broadcasting everything he wanted to conceal, but doing so in such a way that he was unaware of her eavesdropping.

An adjustment, eh? Psylocke gazed carefully at Sauron. With the final boost of lifeforce, he no longer exuded the orderly, sedate mental flows she had witnessed earlier in her captivity. His aura was popping with spikes of crimson anger, swirling with brown tornadoes of confusion, and more than anything, glittering with the prismatic sheen of the two personalities within.

No. Wait.

Betsy’s almond eyes opened wide. Not two layers. Three. The creature possessed an additional personality beyond that of Karl Lykos and Sauron. This third identity blanketed the other two the way the Angel of Death persona had once overlaid Warren’s true self, back when Apocalypse had wrought his evil handiwork.

She understood fully now why this new Sauron had not moved against the X-Men until she, Psylocke, had been neutralized. Had she been able to get close and scan him before her powers had been drained, she would have understood immediately what had allowed him to stifle the insanity of his other selves and take up a fresh campaign of conquest.

Brainchild’s anxiety was well-placed. The latest infusion of power had altered the balance within Sauron. The third, overlaid psyche had already siphoned as much energy as it could use; much of Iceman’s strength had gone not to it, but to the dormant personas. Somewhere deep down, Karl Lykos was stirring. In the shallows, the other, manic Sauron was contaminating the calm, transcendent version that had outfought the X-Men so thoroughly these past few days.

Brainchild tapped instructions into the console in front of him. A hum emerged from a series of prongs that jutted from the ceiling, near the light fixtures. Psylocke had wondered what the devices might be; Brainchild had outfitted the chamber with so many odd accouterments that the place hardly seemed a part of the Savage Land at all, except for the natural subterranean walls and the animal-skin attire of the guards.

Sauron closed his eyes, shook his long, narrow head, and drew in a deep breath. The psychic gale around him calmed to a fitful, weakened storm. To her surprise, Psylocke began to feel soothed as well. The prongs were emitting some sort of whisper. Not the sort of thing'one could hear with one’s ears, but compelling to someone who possessed the mind of a psi. The murmur reminded Betsy of the white noise of a waterfall, nature’s own sedative. Many was the time she had fallen asleep as a child to the lullaby of the fountain outside her bedroom window back in England.

“Very well,” Sauron said. “I won’t have to execute you for insolence just yet.”

Brainchild gulped.

Gaza’s deep voice rumbled. “You understand, do you not? We don’t want you to revert to what you were when we found you this past season.”

Sauron gazed at the titan with his baleful orbs. Gaza almost tripped over Amphibius while backing away.

“You think I have forgotten?” Sauron murmured.

“No, Master,” Gaza said quickly. “I did not mean that at all.”    '

“ Ah,” Sauron said, this time with a hint of diplomacy and forgiveness. “You were concerned for me. I see. Sometimes I forget the debt I owe you all.”

Gaza visibly relaxed. The other mutates released pent-up breaths.

“Do not worry, my faithful brood,” the villain said. “I have not forgotten.”

Abruptly Psylocke was inundated by powerful impressions. They poured from Sauron as if he had momentarily lost control of his hypnotic ability to project thoughts. Betsy had been sucked into telepathic contact with him without intending it. Hurriedly she severed the feedback loop that would have alerted him to her conscious monitoring. Then she exited his mind. Though she wanted to probe him, this was not the time or the way. Had she not fled, he would have become aware of her within moments despite her precautions. She had to wait until the advantage was hers.

In the instant of contact, she received and memorized recollections so vivid she would sooner forget incidents from her own life. There were two scenes that stood out above all others. In the first, Karl Lykos, still a young man—and still human save for his vampiric hunger—lurked in an alley in Brooklyn. He waited until a derelict, besotted by wine, staggered through the trash heaps and flopped down on the grate of a heating vent to sleep. Lykos drained the unshaven, soursmelling individual of energy, assuaging his addiction, but reinforcing his self-contempt.