Batman: The Blind Cut
The Aristocrats
Catherynne M. Valente
Gotham Casino greeted the night in a blaze of finery.
Slabs of blue glass cut to look like ice framed the entrance like curtains. But inside, every surface glittered with jewels and hothouse flowers. The Gotham Symphony Orchestra played to a dancefloor checkered in onyx and pearl like a chessboard. Ice sculptures of beautiful people in ancient clothes slowly melted into pools of warm cider. The central fountain fizzed with pink champagne. Buffet tables groaned on all sides, buried in foods of every nation—each morsel riddled with Galapagos.
All across the cavernous ballroom, waiting for the guests, wandered, waddled, walked, and belly-flopped rare and endangered animals of every kind: pangolins, kakapo birds, ringed seals, pandas chewing on the curtains, and a dozen emperor penguins diving in the champagne fountain for fish they’d never find.
And in the center of it all preened Oswald Cobblepot, looking as healthy and happy as he ever had in all his days, opening his arms in brotherhood to all who entered.
“Welcome! Welcome Citizens of Gotham City! Eat, drink, make yourselves at home . . . in my home! Mi casa es your casa! Everything is absolutely free—tonight is your chance to live like you’ve always dreamed, to indulge in every pleasure without consequence! This is a new world! You are all King . . . for a Night!”
The unlucky of Gotham City drifted past the ice walls and into one of many cloakrooms, their eyes huge, hungry, unbelieving. They drifted out again, still hungry, still unbelieving, but now clothed in suits and shimmering ballgowns that very nearly fit—you could hardly see the duct tape.
Waitstaff descended upon them, carrying trays of Galapagos puffs, Galapagos tarts, deviled Galapagos, spherified Galapagos served like caviar on perfect toast points.
Even Bruce and Zatanna were a bit dazzled. Zatanna gripped his arm a little tighter. It looked like paradise, like madness, like Europe, the astral plane, a place with no rules. But it was very real.
Barbara Gordon sighted them the second they stepped through the door and rushed to meet them, wearing a slim-fitting tux-and-tails of her own.
“Nice outfit,” Bruce said with a wry smile.
“Oh, shut up. I’m not going through the vents in heels and a vintage Ellis. HVAC is murder on the beadwork!” Barbara grinned and held out her hand. Bruce reached into his jacket pocket and passed her a slim cigarette case. Inside lay the vials of antidote.
“Okay,” Barbara said with a curt nod. “It’s just you, me, and a ventilation system older than time itself, Charlie old boy.”
“Charlie?” Zatanna raised one thick eyebrow.
“You know, like Darwin. Galapagos was never the same once Charlie arrived. Whatever. It made sense in my head. I’ll ping you when it’s done.” She tapped her earpiece.
“I still say a quick psychic four-way mindlink spell would be easier,” grumbled Zatanna. “It’s like Zoom but you can taste each other’s thoughts!”
“That sounds horrific,” deadpanned Barbara.
“Z, we’ve done a lot of things your way to get here,” Bruce said. “But we’re in my world now. Please allow me to save the city without having to taste Jason Blood’s grocery list.”
Zatanna rolled her eyes and accepted an earpiece from Bruce’s other coat pocket. “You’re no fun at all,” she sighed.
Barbara laid out the room for them, pointing subtly with her chin. “Sophie’s holding court at the Faberge croquet course. Claudia’s shooting Vox Pops outside the cloakroom. Our man Conrad’s about three whiskeys deep, soaking up the vibes over by the Wheel-O-Rent.”
Zatanna glanced where Barbara’s chin indicted. A deafening cheer went up as the circus-colored wheel spun past One Month, Six Months, and One Year to land reluctantly on Pay Triple.
“Dancy went to shout at the kitchen and Ellis . . . Ellis was mingling, last I saw him.” Barbara’s face fell a little. Her jaw pulsed. Edmund Ellis was currently occupying the body of her father, who had never successfully mingled in his life. “You’ll find Blood making very grim faces at the Pin-the-Crown-on-the-Welfare-Queen station.”
Zatanna looked around at the growing crowd. It was going to be packed.
“You have to hand it to him. I never thought Cobblepot would spring for a party like this. He must really be feeling himself tonight.” Batgirl clapped her hands together. “See you soon! Don’t forget to have fun, kids!”
Barbara disappeared into the throng. “Lent isn’t here yet,” Bruce said quietly.
“Then we’d better get it done, because if we don’t, these people are just going to stand there and smile like Christmas morning while the astral plane uses them to balance its books. When . . . when Nathaniel had control, could you sense any details about their plan?”
Bruce’s eyes grew new shadows. He shook his head. “I remember how Nathaniel felt about tonight. The eagerness. The anticipation. A kind of . . . lust. But I could only access emotions. No specifics.”
Zatanna squeezed his arm reassuringly. “Okay, B. Meet you at the fight.” She moved toward the blackjack tables, invisible among all the other dealers and staff.
The orchestra swung into a waltz.
Zatanna relieved a blackjack dealer who had no reason to question it—he’d seen her working in the casino before. She leaned in close to the gamblers as they placed their bets, stacking up special one-night-only chips stamped with Cobblepot’s maniacally grinning face.
“Easy money, boys,” Zatanna said, and shuffled the cards in a spectacular arc from one hand to the other.
They smiled blissfully and savored their drinks.
“Galapagos en croute, madam?” offered a passing waiter. “Keep your strength up, it’s gonna be a long night.”
Zatanna frowned. She laid a King down on an elderly gentleman’s ten and seven. “How wonderful!” the man cried. “I lost again! Hip hip—”
“HOORAY!” bellowed the rest of the table. But that was too much exertion. They settled back down, sighing with pleasure.
“I’ve eaten,” Zatanna said grimly.
Gotham Casino stretched at the seams. Easily five hundred people plowed through the tables of food, crowded the champagne fountain, waited slackly in line for the games. Bruce waded through the glittering masses, none of whom were swift to clear a path. They stared at the ceiling, at the fountains, at the waddling animals, at him, limply happy, stuffed full of Galapagos. He scanned the scene for his targets. Easy enough to spot the real aristocrats, even in a crowd.
The people who were relaxed in their finery, who chose the right forks without fail, who never shied away from interrupting a conversation, whose posture practically advertised their alma maters.
Bruce stopped himself and grimaced. He hated suddenly how effortlessly he could do that—divide a mob into high society and just . . . society. Nathaniel lived that way. Judging at a glance, trained from birth to see invisible markers: a witch or a human being. And if a witch, no quarter. Bruce’s gaze, too, was trained from birth. It automatically sorted the heiress from the homeless.
And if an heiress, what then? Could he really fight faces he’d known all his life as fiercely as he fought strangers in costumes? Sophie Winters had done nothing wrong, only her body had hunted and killed. Jim Gordon didn’t deserve one ounce of harm. But what walked in his bones, what wore him as surely as the Joker wore his makeup and Bane wore his mask, that thing deserved pain. Bruce felt sick. Maybe Zatanna was right. Maybe magic was better. Easier.
At least with magic, you didn’t have to feel it when you hurt someone.
Bruce glanced toward the ceiling. A distant chandelier quivered slightly. Come on, Barbara.
“Mister Wayne!” came a deep, musical voice as cultivated as a hedgerow. “How utterly marvelous of you to join us for our little party.” He turned and looked into the wide, clear eyes of Sophie Winters. Little Sophie, who took horse riding lessons with him and called him old nag even though they were both seven, who came all alone to his somber birthday parties, every year after his parents died.
But Sophie was not home in those eyes. Something so much older sparkled there, so much cleverer—and more cruel. “Oh, you absolutely must dance with me, I insist.”
She tried to push him onto the dance floor, but Bruce was not a man to be pushed. And yet, somehow, he found his arms around her waist, her hand in his, her deep violet gown swinging wide across the chessboard floor, despite loathing every one of those things and wanting them to stop immediately.
She whispered in his ear, her perfume stinging his eyes. “Come now, you don’t want to make a scene. Not with all these lovely people around! So vulnerable, so innocent. Silly old nag. Give les miserables a bit of a show before they go.”
“They’re not going anywhere, witch,” he growled—and then recoiled, hearing Nathaniel’s voice in his own, biting down on that last terrible word.
Sophie’s charming demeanor snapped like a cut rope. “So you know,” she said stonily.
“Yes.”
She threw back her head and laughed, her emerald earrings flashing. “Oh good, that saves so much time. And where is our Nate, then? One cannot begin the feast until all the family is at table.”
“I have no doubt you’ll find him soon.”
The ancient power wearing Sophie Winters like a bracelet took the unspoken news without expression. “Well, he was an awful stick in the mud anyway.” But her voice caught slightly, far more upset than she let on. “All the more reason to enjoy the time given to us! That’s what it’s all about, you know. Time. That’s what it’s always been about. You can’t hate them for that, surely. For just . . . wanting a little more time.”
“And what about you? You’re older than any of them. You had centuries before they were born. Honestly, this seems like such a cheap trick for the Great Witch of England.”
“Yes, the Great Witch. That’s the trouble with fame. It makes you so easy to find, when folk decide they’ve had enough of starving in an ugly world. Whose fault is that world? Why, the lady in all those jewels and gowns in her high tower, obviously. I saw Goody Winters dancing with the devil in the woods! This is so much better. Now they’re happy to keep me in jewels and towers. They’ll never come knocking with a stake and a torch—not if it means they might lose their favorite moisturizer or signature scent! Oh, Mister Wayne, I have danced with every devil you can name, and let me tell you, unfettered capitalism is better than any spell I’ve ever cast.
“I’m just a businesswoman running a respectable, publicly-traded company, aren’t I? I wear a suit and a Bluetooth headset and neutral earth tones. Who would suspect me? Have you seen the fall lipstick line? To die for.” She waved her free hand in the air. “Don’t look at me like that, old nag. I’ll get tired of this game eventually and move on soon enough. I do find Eddie and the others rather a bore these days. And if I have to look at her mopey little face for one more decade I shall certainly scream.”
“I’m not here to play games,” Bruce warned her. “Where is Lent?”
Morgaine le Fey shrugged her stolen shoulders. “Well, in point of fact, you’re not here to do anything, my dear. Although it certainly was kind of you to attend all the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, only that it’s all finished, darling! There’s nothing you can do for poor Sophie now, or any of the rest of them. It’s all over but the crying, as they say. I am so looking forward to the twenty-first century. Dancy is going to show me how to use something called social media next week. He says you can use it to tell everyone about your lunch and topple governments! What fun. Don’t feel bad! We have some lovely parting gifts for you.”
The pair stopped at the edge of a lush green lawn. A real lawn, planted and growing in the grand ballroom of the Gotham Casino. The grand and the merely grandly dressed hopped about on the grass, swinging huge croquet mallets into jeweled Faberge eggs and squealing with delight as they bounced through golden hoops or shattered on impact.
“Oooh!” The Great Witch of England squealed with delight. “Room for one more? I do hope you’re all enjoying my little collection of baubles!” She gestured at the jeweled eggs. “Save me the black mallet!” Oswald Cobblepot held it up for her, giggling.
Le Fey twirled off the dance floor and Bruce, ever so briefly, turned to find himself in the expansive arms of Jason Blood.
“May I have this dance, Mr. Wayne?”
“Hilarious as always, Jason. Have you seen Lent?”
Blood shook his head. “Everyone else is accounted for, but she is pushing the boundaries of ‘fashionably late.’ Still, I wouldn’t worry. She’ll come. She has to. She’s the conductor for all the energy this horrid night is going to release. It must pass through her on its way out of this plane.” They watched the croquet match proceed across the lush grass. “I rather wish we’d called in a bit more cavalry. As much as I hate to make the comparison, there’s only four of us, and they’re a superpowered team. Lent is . . . their ward.” He sighed heavily. “But in a very real sense she also means nothing to them. She’s just . . . their getaway car. From one era to the next. Take this.”
The demonologist turned and handed his comrade a small brass key.
“One of the soul receptacles,” Blood explained. “We recovered all but one. Destroy it in close proximity to the right body—I can’t promise anything, but it should work. The only one we
couldn’t find was Sophie’s. We’ll have to improvise.” Morgaine le Fey struck her Faberge egg hard and watched it roll clean across the grass. “That one is—”
“Jim,” Bruce said softly. He knew the key, of course he did. Jim always had it on him. it was the key to the roof of G.C.P.D. Headquarters. Where the Bat-Signal was. Where his friend could call him, and he would always come.
Jim Gordon’s soul was inside it. “I’m coming, Jim.”
“Coming where, old chap?” came the voice of the police commissioner, washed clean of the exhaustion and stress that usually roughened it. Bruce’s old friend slapped him vigorously on the shoulder and stepped between them, putting his arms confidently around Bruce and Jason as though they were off to a kegger together. Bruce winced. He didn’t even smell like Jim.
“Can you believe this? They’re real, you know. Splendid stuff.”
“One of these eggs would pay for the new Gotham City Youth Center,” Bruce said through gritted teeth. They heard a sickening crunch.
“And a penguin just squashed one,” Blood observed. The emperor penguin squawked defiance.
“Naughty penguin!” Jim scolded it cheerfully.
“How very dare you.” Oswald Cobblepot marched over, whining in his pinched, indignant voice. “I’ll have you turned out.”
Edmund Ellis, Crazy Quilt, the former Duke of Montrose and master of the Gotham Linenworks, laughed in his face. “You’re welcome to try, you crawling moron.”
Cobblepot sputtered in fury and shock, realizing too late that he was in no way addressing a long-suffering policeman. He pawed ingratiatingly at Gordon’s exquisite suit. “Sir, I didn’t recognize you, my apologies. Mortified, mystified, petrified. Beg your forgiveness, er . . . Ed. Can I call you Ed? Well. When considering how angry you want to be, do remember I’ve done a lot for you.”
Ellis stared icily out of Gordon’s eyes, full of the knowledge of his centuries of experiences—and now Jim’s, too. “I have lived countless lifetimes, tiny flightless man, but I have never once forgotten a favor. You are very much to be thanked! It’s so much nicer when the victims are compliant. Otherwise they run and scream and make such a fuss. So uncouth. Fear not, idiot, you’ll get your reward.”
“What reward?” Blood interrupted, his posture tense.
“Haven’t you heard?” The Penguin sneered. “I’m in.”
Crazy Quilt tousled Blood’s hair like a misbehaving grandson. The demonologist went bright red with rage. “Mr. Cobblepot understands the truth of Gotham City now, lads. He recognizes how foolish he and his compatriots have been, prancing about in their colorful costumes with their clever little punny names and playing at crime and redemption like Baby’s First Id. It’s all so small time. And all the while we’ve done our work in the shadows. The real heist is patient. It is so restrained and refined as to be nearly invisible. You never even knew it was afoot. We do not need headlines; we own the papers. You cannot put us on trial; we own the courts. We do not even need our names; we have transcended them. We need only to win. And we do. Every time. The real caper has gone on for centuries all around you, without gadgets or fistfights, and the loot is the world itself.”
The Penguin gnashed his cigarette holder and crowed: “I’m gettin’ called up to the majors, boys! Looks like you can take it with you, if you know a good enough necromancer, heh heh! I’m gettin’ a new body and a ticket to the future. Jealous? Of course you are. Too bad!”
Murmurs rippled through hundreds of merrymakers. They seemed to part without noticing they were moving, like a magnet repelling its opposite.
A young girl entered Gotham Casino. No more than eighteen or nineteen, slim and lithe and not so terribly tall, long white hair hanging in two ponytails like pale daggers on either side of her head.
She wore a long, long strand of freshwater pearls and a dress the color of fire.
“That can’t be Lent,” Jason whispered. “She was getting the senior discount at the movies last week.”
Morgaine le Fey, impossibly ancient and powerful, jumped up and down, waving like a schoolgirl.
“I should find something to hold onto, if I were you,” Ellis warned.
Palmyra Lent wasted no time on a monologue. She closed her eyes and began to chant. No one could hear a word of it, but her hands began to glow a terrible uncolor. The ground beneath her feet bristled with seals and sigils. No one in the crowd moved. They swayed dreamily in place, exclaiming over the pretty lights.
“How wonderful!” Zatanna’s blackjack player broke through the noise. “I’ve lost again!”
“Now would be superb timing, Barbara,” Bruce subvocalized into his earpiece.
“One more minute, boss,” Batgirl’s voice chimed back.
“May not have a minute.”
Zatanna gave up on the plan.
Her eyes rolled back in her head. She drew power up from the earth below the casino to surround and protect the innocents here. She ignored Lent’s little lightshow and concentrated.
“Sehtolc deworrob ni esoht lla mrah morf evreserp,” Zatanna incanted backwards. Preserve from harm all those in borrowed clothes. She could not include her friends in the spell. They needed to fight, and you couldn’t land a punch from inside a sphere of safekeeping.
Nothing happened. The energy she summoned dissipated the minute it approached the Pearl’s great seals. The necromancer was already deep in her spell, and it would not tolerate competition. Zatanna could see Devin Dancy, his body at least, standing by the half-melted ice sculpture of an august medieval cook, opening a box of long knives with a look of relish on his face.
They were out of time.
“Oh well. Have to do it the new-fashioned way.” She sighed. Zatanna flipped over a dozen cards in quick succession, each one adding to a perfect hand for each gambler. “Twenty-ones for everyone, kiddos. Now go home.”
They didn’t budge.
Zatanna left her table, walked calmly across the floor of the Gotham Casino, ignoring every stock-still partygoer and entranced employee in her path, and punched Devin Dancy, head chef to the gods themselves, directly in the face.
“Abracadabra!” she cried triumphantly.
A gentle hiss floated down from the ceiling, blanketing them all in a cool mist named Charlie. Everything was still for a moment. The crowd looked up, toward the source of the lovely air.
Batgirl and Batman exploded into the room at the same instant, black mirror images, two dark angels plummeting to earth, one out of the security foreman’s observation window, the other out of an air conditioning vent. They hit the priceless floor in unison.
And the stampede began.
The poor of Gotham City bolted from the beautiful madhouse, streaming out of every door. No one had bothered to lock them—Galapagos was the lock, there was supposed to be no key. They spilled into the street, into safety, barreling past the Pearl in her glowing lattice of magic. She stood her ground, moving the mob around her, trusting there would be enough left for her employers to get the job done.
But her employers were very, very busy.
“Hi there, Ricky,” Zatanna said cheerfully as she returned to punching the corporeal form of hedge fund manager Derrick Graves. He spluttered, stumbled backwards, holding his nose. She caught Batgirl’s eye. Her black-gloved hand tossed something glittering into the air. Zatanna caught it without looking. “Watch me pull a man out of your hat,” she said, and dropped the cigarette case on the ground, smashing it with her heel. An invisible gust sighed into the air.
Graves dropped to the ground like a bag of sand on an old stage, sleeping deeply, his face his own once more.
The magician spun around to line up her next target. But the casino was a field of undifferentiated chaos. Batgirl delivered a roundhouse kick to the jaw of a possessed Claudia Crowne and knocked her into the Gotham Symphony Orchestra’s abandoned music stands. Batman had a squealing, wretched Oswold Cobblepot by the throat up against the chip-exchange booths. Then Bruce froze. He seemed to collect himself from some other place. He let go of the Penguin’s throat—never his style. Nathaniel’s, yes. But Nathaniel was gone now. Only then did Zatanna see, in every inch of her friend’s tortured stance, how much the experience had hurt him.
But Batman wasn’t going to just let him go. With a mighty punch straight out of the old days, Cobblepot went careening across the room. Aw, Zatanna said to herself. I wanted to crush that little cretin. He grabbed my skirt every shift. But she couldn’t dwell on that now. The terrified Kings for a Night ran everywhere, desperate to escape, the possessed desperate to cut them down, the Dark Knight desperate to keep them whole.
And a massive golden demon tore up the croquet lawn as he ran across it, bearing down on a broad-shouldered Basil Conrad in his brilliant whaleskin tuxedo.
“Am I meant to be impressed?” the old whaler spat, staring up into Etrigan’s fiery eyes. The demon barreled into him, ignoring his pitiful human words. Crouching over his prey, Etrigan spoke:
YOUR MASTER SANG A NOBLE SONG
THE MORTAL IN ME WELL BELIEVED
BUT I AM OLDER THAN THE TREES
I TAUGHT CAIN HOW TO DECIEVE
YOU ALL WEAR LIES UPON YOUR SLEEVES
I KNOW YOUR KIND OF OLD
“Poetry?” Basil laughed. “You mean to kill me with poetry? I, whom the oceans obey?” Etrigan’s gaze bore into him.
YOU ARE NOT GREATER YET THAN THEY
YOU SEE THE MADMEN OF THIS TOWN
AS GRIME UPON YOUR SATIN GOWN
BUT THOUGH YOU CLUTCH YOUR STOLEN CROWNS
YOU ARE JUST MORE PAINTED CLOWNS
CRUDE THIEVES IN COSTUMES STILL
Conrad had not conquered death and vanquished centuries without some survival instinct. He reached in his pocket for a pistol and aimed it at the Demon.
Etrigan roared. He bent down, snapped the Duke’s wrist, grabbed the gun, and devoured it in one grinding bite.
The Demon hungered to finish his meal. Instead, he held up an old silver ring and breathed fire upon it until it was nothing but slag.
Basil Conrad collapsed into a deep, dreaming sleep.
“You guys gonna leave any for me?” Zatanna laughed.
“I’m here,” intoned the Great Witch of England. “If that makes you feel better.”
The Penguin crashed through the doors of Gotham Casino onto the street. He scrambled up and bolted into the night without a single thought for his new friends.
Batman moved like a hole in space, rimmed in falling jewels and fire. He stopped in front of Palmyra Lent, still chanting, still glowing. He lunged for her, but the girl dodged him nimbly.
The necromancer’s eyes shifted back into reality and focused on Bruce Wayne.
“Just like him,” she whispered. “Just like all of them. Rise out of your sleep of luxury, kill a child, and sleep again.”
“You are no child.”
Lent screamed in his face. “No, a rich man murdered the child I was. He took everything from me and left me to be used by monsters like them forever. You are all the same! I can never be a child again.” A smile curled her lips. “But I can be a witch, Nathaniel.”
“Nathaniel is gone.”
Her smile guttered out.
Batman threw her across the room.
But she didn’t go where he threw her. She levitated into the air on a spinning wheel of symbols and seals, her white hair flying behind her. She raised her arms; half the furniture in the room rose with them. She tossed tables and chairs and couches like they were toys.
One connected with something. Something that had hidden, hoping to remain unseen and slink away when it was all over, like it had always done before. Something that yelped in pain and then went silent.
Edmund Ellis put a hand to Jim Gordon’s head. It came away bloody. He stared in disbelief at it, as if the entire idea of him bleeding was preposterous. One of the ice sculptures rocketed through the air and slammed into his spine. He dropped instantly to the ground, motionless.
“DAD!”
The scream sliced through the chaos like a clean knife.
Batgirl knew that shape slumped on the floor. No matter what lived inside him, she knew her father’s cry of fear and agony. She raced across the ballroom, not caring what hit her or who might get away. She careened into the unconscious form of Jim Gordon, possessed by the ghost of a long-dead Scottish Duke, but her father all the same.
Batman ducked a dealer’s table hurled at his head. He dropped to one knee and skated the brass key across the dance floor toward Barbara. She caught it deftly, snapped it in half, then wrapped her father in her arms and stroked his hair. Batgirl took a cello to the back, but she didn’t even feel it—she would keep all harm from her father if she had to take the whole world between her shoulder blades.
Floating in the air, the Pearl stared at them. Batgirl stared back, her expression full of hate and rage and hurt. Something awful moved in Lent’s face. Her jaw clenched. She bellowed in rage and flung fire from her palms, wildly, with no real target. Batman jack-knifed, changed direction, came at her again.
“Protect me!” Lent screamed to the people she’d served for so long. “Help me!”
But the few who remained ignored her cries. No one lifted a finger for their feral pet.
“She always puts on such a show,” a smooth, icy voice filled Zatanna’s mind. “You should sit back and watch.”
Zatanna slammed backwards into an ornate chair. Blue ropes of light lashed her to it. The perfect new face of Morgaine le Fey beamed down at her. “All comfy? You won’t want to miss her next trick. It’s a crowd-pleaser!”
Zatanna groped in her mind for purchase on the magic that bound her. But it slipped away every time. She watched helplessly as Lent smashed Batman like a rag doll against the fountain. He staggered up and ejected cables from his waist to trap her. Lent turned them to silk ribbons in the air.
Her mind seized on something in the dark. It was a massive spell; she could barely breathe for the power building in her chest. But it had a path—the sorceress wasn’t even trying to block it. It wasn’t a spell for battle or defense.
“Yvi sa eb sepor tel , ssenteews sa eb htgnerts tel,” she whispered quickly. Let strength be as sweetness, let ropes be as ivy.
The shimmering blue ropes that strapped Zatanna to the chair wriggled and rustled into strands of green ivy.
“What are you doing?” the Great Witch snarled. “Taking up gardening in your old age?”
The ivy wound thicker and thicker around Zatanna, swelling with the magician’s power, more and more and more of it until there were no more ropes and no more vines and no more ivy but a woman with red hair sitting in the magician’s lap with her arms around her neck.
Pamela Isley.
“You rang?” Poison Ivy said.
“I told you I’d get you your revenge,” Zatanna said evenly.
“I do so like a girl who keeps her word,” she purred.
“Just . . . try not to stab me in the back,” Zatanna mumbled.
“The vine doesn’t strangle the sunlight. Only those who kept it starving in the dark,” Pamela said very seriously, then sprang out of Zatanna’s arms, twisting in mid-air as hungry hothouse flowers sprouted from her skin, stretching their petals toward le Fay.
“You brought me flowers!” laughed the sorceress, but the laugh became a wracking cough as the cloud of phyto-toxins reached her throat.
A terrifying calm drenched Zatanna Zatara like cold water. She knew what to do. They hadn’t been able to find the object that carried Sophie Winters’ soul. But it had to be here, with her, right now, something she’d treasure and keep a close eye on. It was here.
Pietro had said it was on the move.
Sophie’s collection. Her precious Faberge eggs, lying around the croquet course in pieces. But not that egg. Resting at the starting hoop, never used, ignored by everyone.
Poison Ivy danced out of range of le Fey’s magic as best she could, but the Green couldn’t make this stand forever. Zatanna would have to pull a double act, faster than anything she’d done before.
She felt terrible. It was a dirty trick. The lowest of blows. It felt like a betrayal.
But she was definitely going to do it anyway.
Zatanna took a deep breath and dropped into a roll. As she came out of it, she grabbed the diamond-encrusted egg in one hand and smashed it into the floor with everything she had at the same instant she shouted: “Dlihc devoleb eht fo llac eht ylno raeh cigam tel!”
Let magic hear only the call of the beloved child.
Zatanna’s father loved her all his life. Bruce’s parents loved him fiercely. Pamela Isley’s childhood was sweet and soft. Barbara still held her father close. Even Morgaine le Fey had once been an adored princess whose mother was kind.
But Palmyra Lent’s parents hated her now. She kept them alive because she could not bear to let them go, and they hated her for the prison of love she made for them. And the only reason Zatanna knew that was because Lent had let her in, let her see the horrible grain of sand that created the pearl of her power, and this was a rotten, shameful backhand to a sister in the dark arts. She would never really feel quite right about it—or the fact that the Pearl had stopped firing off spells long before Zatanna got to hers. She just hung there in the air, bathed in light, staring at father and daughter, and Zatanna had shanked her right in the heart.
Sophie Winters hit the ground, fast asleep.
Lent went dark. The magic couldn’t hear her anymore.
Zatanna dropped to the floor and landed in a feral crouch. She called out for Batman, her old friend, who always did believe her when it mattered.
“Now!” Zatanna screamed. “It won’t last!”
Batman closed in. Lent stared up at him in terror. All she saw was the crusader bearing down on her six hundred years ago, implacable and strong and uncaring. Little enough different than her bearing down on that child and her father a moment ago—than what she had become.
Lent flew at the crusader, hands bent into claws.
Batman leapt for her, just trying to immobilize, not to maim.
They twisted together in the air and crashed backwards through the enormous, beautiful stained-glass picture window at the rear of Gotham Casino.
A splash echoed through the ruined palace of luxury. The great banner that read KING FOR A NIGHT blew in the sudden breeze. It fluttered against a brace of candles and began to burn.
Zatanna, the Demon, and Poison Ivy raced to the shattered, gaping hole blown through the building. They peered out into the dark.
“Batman?” Poison Ivy called. Nothing.
Bruce? thought Zatanna.
The Dark Knight stepped gingerly toward them from out of the shadows, his cape ragged and smoking, balanced on the wide ledge on the side of the building.
“She’s gone,” he said roughly, staring into the deep, cold bay. “It’s over.”
It is a year later. An auction house. Far from Gotham City. Lavender and rosemary scent the wind through cross-hatched windows. Very fine ladies and gentlemen sit in velvet chairs and raise their numbers in the air as each item comes up for bid.
“Here we have quite a rarity,” the auctioneer says with real excitement in his voice. “The embalmed heart of Gaweyne de Weyne, the ancient crusader knight whose heroic exploits earned him the love and respect of all who met him. Some even whispered that he was a saint on earth.
“The canonization never quite materialized, but the relic was preserved nonetheless, passing through the House of Montrose over the years and now, into our hands. May I begin the bidding at five thousand pounds?”
Bruce Wayne nods his head slightly. He hopes this will be over quickly. Zatanna waits for him back at their hotel. She’d received a small key in the post, though no one knew they were traveling together. It was not the key to the Police Department roof. It was slender and golden, and it unlocked a secret place that was never meant to become a prison.
It also meant Gotham Bay had once again failed to take care of Gotham City’s problems. “Five thousand pounds. Do I hear six? Marvelous, sir, six. Seven?”
Bruce looks around, trying to see who is so dead set on irritating him that they would bid against Gaweyne de Weyne’s actual heir. But he sees no familiar faces. Only a man in a blue hood near the front of the room, his back turned. And the man in the hood keeps raising his little paddle with his number on it.
The pounds pile up until, finally, Bruce mentions a truly bizarre sum, and the man in the blue hood acquiesces. The auction breaks for lunch; the other bidders stream out of the room, murmuring about how morbid it truly is to buy a human heart.
Bruce rises. Buttons his coat. “Hello, Mr. Savage,” he says.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wayne. Always a pleasure.” Vandal Savage pulls his hood back and turns, his scar livid in the warm spring light. “Meet any eligible young ladies lately?” he asks, with a deeply amused shine in his eye.
“I may have.”
“Ah, I know you have. A gift from yours truly, mailed parcel post from the last millennium. I do hope she arrived in one piece.”
“I don’t believe she was ever yours to send, Vandal.”
“That’s as may be, but she certainly wasn’t Gaweyne’s to slaughter, either.”
“Slaughter? Gaweyne de Weyne may have been a warrior and a man of his time, but that word does not fit the history. He was the Good Crusader. even by those he conquered. There is not one bad word about him written in six hundred years. He was the root of my family.”
Vandal Savage, the great immortal, smiled indulgently. “Bless your heart. Or bless his heart, shall we? Or perhaps we should just slice it up and have it for lunch. The Good Crusader? I was there. There was never any such thing. He cut a canyon of blood through the Levant like all the rest of them. He just had a good marketing team. He killed that girl’s whole family, and her as well. I brought her back. Perhaps I am the Good Crusader!”
Bruce Wayne feels a terrible tightness in his chest. He reaches for a decanter of water on a gorgeously carved sideboard.
“And where is she now, Sir Knight?”
Bruce frowns deeply. “In Arkham. Under close watch. I’ve asked for kindnesses for her,” he adds quickly. “She has a window. Time on the grounds, supervised, of course. Perhaps one day, even visitors, if she proves herself. I’m told she spends her time reading. She’s gone through the whole Arkham library already and begs for more.” Vandal says nothing. He merely lifts an eyebrow. “Don’t look at me like that. She needs care. Serious medical attention. She’s killed a lot of people. There must be such a thing as justice.”
“Oh yes, Arkham Asylum, where the very tenderest of psychological needs are met with love and hugs and cuddles. Perhaps a spot of music therapy and puppet role-playing.”
“I’m doing what I can. There is a debt, I recognize that. A family debt. But getting my ledgers back in black cannot mean letting Lent go free.”
Vandal Savage shrugs silkily. “I’m sure you’re the best judge of that.” He crosses the room to a richly carved sideboard. With easy familiarity, he pops the lock and liberates a decanter of port and two glasses. The ancient man pours for them both. He swirls his wine in the sunlight.
“Tell me, Bruce. Does it trouble you, to have come from conquerors? To be the latest in a line of men who took what they wanted from the world, exulted in their strength, forged their own path, no matter what crossed them? To stand heir to the spirit of the de Weynes?”
Bruce sits down heavily in the empty auction hall. He stares straight ahead.
“It truly does, Savage,” he says. “I have spent my life fighting darkness. I was so certain I knew what it looked like. So certain.”
By the time he stirs from his thoughts, the immortal man has vanished.
It is a year again.
Basil Conrad rises from his bed in the night, troubled by vivid dreams. He ties the sash on his silk robe and pads down the hallway toward his study, past the doors of his wife, his children, all sleeping sound on beds like clouds.
He unlocks his study and turns on the lamps, bending over his work, his latest project. A new Gotham Casino, more lavish and glorious than it has ever been. Rising from the ashes! A symbol of hope and renewal for the city.
And of course, he’ll make an absolute fortune. You couldn’t lose money with a casino. Rivers of sad, hunchbacked souls sitting at the slots, throwing their rent at the cards, their kids’ college fund at the dice. Desperation like perfume in the air. Conrad can see it all laid out before him like a feast. It might sound like suffering, but they made their choices. He is merely providing a service. A product. Hope. And no one can resist that.
People are always willing to gamble their very souls on a chance at a new life.