To her amazement, he kept his equilibrium. Though he was racing in tight circles, he was apparently avoiding dizziness. All her effort only made it easier for him to catch up to her altitude.
“Goddess!” she blurted.
Look into my eyes, mutant. The voice in her mind was sneering, insistent, penetrating. She clutched her temples, trying to block the mental intrusion. A cold squirt of fear bathed her intestines. She had miscalculated. His hypnotic powers
had greater range than when last she had fought him. Had he always been this strong, or was it a temporary advantage gained by draining the energy of a telepath?
Ororo abandoned the offensive. She needed to guard herself, allow time for Warren to reach the battle site. She released the lightning, letting the Savage Land skies fall once more into deep blackness. If she couldn’t see Sauron’s eyes, she couldn’t be hypnotized completely. A wind rose to her call and whisked her northward.
Slow down. Slow down. Let me hold you in my grasp, called Sauron.
To her horror, she did slow down. She called rain, hoping its pelting spray would knock him downward, but she couldn’t get herself to move faster.
Dry the rain. Don’t try to stop me. Turn around.
She tried to change the rain into sleet as before, but the effort failed. The best she could do was maintain a steady drizzle.
Turn around? No, she must not.
Lightning! he demanded. Give me light!
“No!” she yelled. Yet, each time she disobeyed, waves of agony pulsed through her skull. She spun, dismissing the drizzle. She refused to let him rule her. If he wanted lightning, she would give it to him, but her way. Down his throat.
In the suddenly rainless, silent night, the flapping of his wings revealed his location. She propelled herself toward him, and when the gap closed to mere dozens of meters, she struck at him with a lightning bolt.
The jagged snake of electricity vaulted across the gap. It struck Sauron at belt level.
Then, before the light faded, she realized the bolt had not struck his body, but an odd belt he wore. A nimbus of energy surrounded the belt, consisting of the energy with which she had attacked him. It had been absorbed. Neutralized, as by a lightning rod.
One of Brainchild’s toys, she realized. Sauron had not come out tonight bereft of countermeasures to her power. He had been ready for her.
The continued glow from the belt kept Sauron illuminated. She could see right into his huge, baleful eyes.
Now you are mine. Cease your struggles.
She pulled up, maintaining only enough wind to keep her at her current altitude and coordinates.
“Good, my pretty cloud nymph,” Sauron cackled aloud. “Now stay still. I deserve a taste of you right away for all the abuse you levelled at me tonight, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You ... haven’t... defeated ...me...” she hissed between clenched teeth.
“A detail I’ll remedy immediately,” he said. He reached her and, wings flapping hard in order to maintain position, reached out to grasp her.
She cringed backward. Closing her eyes would reduce his hypnotic effect by at least half, but she found she couldn’t even do that. His eyes seemed to grow until they filled her field of vision. Nothing remained in the universe but those orbs and his raucous, mocking voice.
Silvery fragments of metal whisked between them. Blood fanned from a slit that sprouted in one of her enemy’s wings. A few drops struck her face, jolting her back to a state of control.
She cut the wind that supported her and dropped like a bomb right out of Sauron’s reach. The talons on his left foot grazed her head, tearing loose a lock of her white tresses.
He let her go. She looked up to see him whirl sideways. A moment later another winged shape crossed between her and the fading glow of his lightning-swallowing belt.
Bless you, Warren, she thought.
“Greetings, Archangel,” Sauron shouted. “Too bad you couldn’t fling more blades at me while I was preoccupied, but then you might have killed your teammate. Never willing to do what it takes to win, are you, my old friend?”
Storm halted her plunge fifty meters below Sauron. Her hands were trembling. The wind obeyed her fitfully. The urge to continue fleeing was powerful, but she overruled the desire. Warren had broken Sauron’s hypnotic control over her, not to pave the road of her retreat, but to assist her in winning the battle.
In the agonizingly sluggish moments necessary to take a breath, shake off her disorientation, and initiate a new offensive, she puzzled over what was happening above. Warren had .not yet followed through on his surprise attack. She couldn’t see him in the darkness. The only thing she could truly make out was the tiny blur of light that clung to Sauron’s midsection.
Why was Archangel letting their enemy babble on?
Goddess. Is he afraid to engage?
“Always the most weak-willed of all the X-Men,” Sauron taunted. “Your metal wings haven’t changed the man inside. Give up now, child. I will let you live.”
Fipp-fipp-fipp-fipp.
Sauron squawked and whirled around. Another barrage of Warren’s blades raced past him, just missing. The monster pumped his wings hard, presenting as difficult a target as possible.
Storm finally comprehended. Warren was not afraid to fight. He was playing it smart, gliding in circles out in the darkness where Sauron couldn’t see him and at a distance that would minimize the hypnotic effect. In fact, he had been less rattled than she by the villain’s incredible strength.
The last of the glow from the belt vanished. Now everyone was flying blind again.
No advantage then, to keeping the night dark. Storm called forth more lightning. A continuous round of small bursts, to give herself and Warren a clear shot.
Sauron blinked and covered his eyes. The discharges painted the cloud layer with a steely tone, and turned the jungle to a palate of shadow, charcoal, and ash. Between this ceiling and floor hung the three of them, mutants and mutate snared in a lethal aerial dance.
“There you are,” Sauron screeched at Archangel. “Come to me. Surrender yourself.”
Archangel came, but not passively. He raced directly toward Sauron. “Storm!” he shouted. “Wing-and-Prayer maneuver!”
Ororo smiled and initiated the first move of a strategy she and Warren had practiced time and again in the Danger Room. She hurled gale-force blasts at their enemy, timing it so that Archangel would arrive immediately after they ceased.
Sauron was knocked from his stable glide and sent flailing. Unable to control his trajectory, he tumbled pointed tail over beak toward the terrain below.
Archangel hit him hard with a double kick. Only a last-instant twist saved Sauron from taking the impact on his spine.
“Striking to maim,” the villain screeched. “You want me to suffer, don’t you, Worthington? What a sinister blue creature you’ve become. Your fear of me has stolen your battle ethics.”
Storm was unnerved to hear how composed Sauron still was. He was still able to snatch at ugly truths to use as psychological weapons. First he had implied Warren too reticent to fight hard; now, too eager. But his voice had quavered. Warren had hurt him. In spite of the smug words, the mutate was retreating.
Warren circled and came back strong again. He truly seemed to be intending to inflict the maximum amount of pain. And why not? It was the only thing that might daunt Sauron.
“You did me a favor,” Archangel growled as he closed the gap. “Those other times we fought showed me I needed to work on my willpower. Now eat metal, you—”
Ororo didn’t hear exactly what Warren called their opponent. The slur was buried beneath the noise of wingtip blades erupting like rounds from a machine gun.
Sauron hung in place. The projectiles whisked past. Storm gasped. Warren had missed! At that range, with such a clear shot- and a hovering target, that could only have happened ...
If Sauron had hypnotized him into missing.
Then Sauron folded his w
ings and dropped. Droplets of blood—dark specks against the lightning glow—scattered in his wake. Warren had not entirely missed. He had nicked the monster in at least two spots, and this time deep enough that the nerve-disruption side effect of the metal properly stunned the villain.
Warren shook his head, swerved, and kept dogging Sauron as he fled. The hypnotic effect was dazing him, but it wasn’t stopping him, and Sauron knew it. The mutate was trying to escape.
Hear me. The voice blossomed in Ororo’s mind, but she forced it out. She wouldn’t be his victim. They had him on the run. He’d given them an ordeal, but the tide had turned. If Archangel didn’t take him down, she would.
The X-Men had defeated Sauron in these very skies. He had tried to escape at the end of that encounter, but she had thwarted him. The memory of it surfaced strong and fresh. She had opened up the cloud layer and shunted the polar air directly at him, until he was so chilled his muscles refused to obey his commands.
What had worked once, would work again. She beseeched the forces of this strange land to heed her.
And they did. The clouds parted, revealing the stark filigin cloth of the Antarctic sky, dotted with the stars so rarely glimpsed by Savage Land natives. The frigid current plunged down.
A wall of air pounded her. She reeled, flipped upside down, and began flailing. What?
A tempest filled the atmosphere. She lost sight of her target, couldn’t find Archangel. She tried to calm the storm with her powers, but the sleet and gusts only intensified. She concentrated harder.
And the disruption grew.
Suddenly she understood. It was her own power that assaulted her. Her body wasn’t doing what her mind commanded at all. She was executing commands thrust covertly into her mind from outside.
Focusing in the manner that Professor Xavier, Phoenix, and Psylocke had taught her over the years, she identified the precise spot where the alien influence had taken hold. She unravelled the noose.
But the skies still flung her about. She was still falling fast, incapable of directing a breeze to keep her aloft. The crisis she had spawned had taken on a life of its own far beyond her capacity to simply abort.
No equilibrium. She struggled to stay conscious. Perhaps, given a few moments, she could at least aim for a landing in the lake. But at her speed, even striking water would be fatal, and the denizens of the waters were not hospitable to guests.
Strong hands gripped her wrists. Her trajectory levelled off.
“Hang on!” Warren shouted. “It’s going to be a rough ride!”
Archangel had a good hold on her, and needed it. The gale whipped him from a different direction every few moments, ridiculing his command of the air. His bionic wings meant little in such unpredictable conditions. He was pumping hard to make landfall somewhere—anywhere—where they could take shelter.
The only consolation, Storm thought grimly, was that Sauron would be struggling against all this as well.
“D.id you get him?” she yelled.
“No,” Warren yelled back. “It was all I could do to notice that you were going down. He went the other way.”
Suddenly the jungle rose up beneath them, revealed by the latest bolt of lightning. A low cliff loomed to their left. Warren leaned to port and aimed them beneath an overhang. They landed hard, rolled, but came up intact and bruised more in spirit than in body.
Even beneath the shelter of the rock, rain whipped in, striking Ororo’s face, muddying the dirt in which she sat.
Another flash illuminated the ruptured heavens. No sign of any flying creature, much less a humanoid pterosaur. Sauron had escaped.
CHAPTER
In the morning, the rupture in the cloud layer remained, revealing, in bizarre contrast to the brightness below, the dark winter Antarctic sky. To Ororo, it was as if the demons of Kenyan myth had tom out a piece of the sky god’s flesh.
She glided above and beyond the village, surveying the nearby region. At least the winds obeyed her that much now, though she was still buffeted at unexpected moments. Rain continued to thrash the grass-and-bamboo huts of the Fall People, leaving the village children to cower in the doorways and stare in awe at the violence of the deluge.
The story was the same across the landscape. Mud slid from drenched hillsides. A drowned rhinoceros bobbed up and down in a swollen river, its bloated body adorned with one very soaked, miserable vulture. On a ridge, spurs of trees stood bereft of the limbs a violent gust had tom from them.
Ororo would have wept, but crying was not something that came easy to her after her hard years as an orphan and child thief in Cairo. She could bear to see no more right now. Reaching the far point of her latest circuit, she gave up and turned back, aiming straight for the village.
A lightning bolt crackled down, bouncing off of the protective aura Storm had woven around herself. The bolt continued to the ground, felling a hadrosaur who had been foolish enough to raise its head from the meadow to regard its herd.
“Oh, Goddess,” she murmured, barely finding the energy to move her lips. She coasted unsteadily the last few miles to the village and darted beneath the none-too-intact thatch roof that extended from the eaves of the lodge. Ka-Zar, Shanna, Zabu, Hank, and Logan stood there, examining the blustery conditions.
Thunder boomed, so loudly it seemed the earth groaned in reply. Ka-Zar frowned at Storm, but said nothing. Zabu shook his mane to rid it of rain droplets and glared accusingly.
“You out-did yourself on this occasion, Ororo m’lady,” the Beast commented.
Storm dipped her chin and sighed. Here she had thought she was acting to administer the coup de grace to Sauron, and in fact, she had been following one of his hypnotic commands: Ruin the weather. Do the worst thing you can think of. How clear that sinister telepathic whisper was in her memory. At the time, she hadn’t consciously heard it at all.
Ruin the weather indeed. The Savage Land climate control system, magnificent as it was, resembled a glass figurine. Tap it in the wrong spot and cracks spread everywhere.
“I can heal it,” she said. “But not with the ease that I set it into chaos. The repair will take all day. Perhaps some of tomorrow.”
“And if we leave things alone?” Hank asked.
‘ ‘The atmosphere will heal itself, but that will take a week. Too long. Given that much opportunity, the snow and winds may have lingering ill effect on the flora and fauna. I cannot participate in the fight against Sauron today. I have to correct this.” ~ '
“Yes,” Shanna said tartly. “You do.”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “You ain’t blamin’ Ororo for this mess.” It was a statement, not a question.
Shanna turned and faced Wolverine squarely, holding a pose that few had the courage to maintain in front of him. “I blame Sauron, of course,” she said. “I’m merely agreeing that Storm is responsible for rectifying the accident before this land suffers any more abuse.”
“Fine,” Logan said. “I just wouldn’t wantcha gettin’ the idea that green-beak doesn’t know how to be real sneaky with that hypnotism of his. He’ll catch you off-guard even when you think you have him dead to rights. I know.” “We’ve all learned that lesson,” Shanna agreed. “Ka-Zar and I know that Ororo treasures this place as much as we do. We can’t help it if it’s difficult to endure the devastation while we’re in the midst of it. We’ve had too many tastes of what happens when our climate mechanisms are corrupted.”
Ororo could not have been more sorry. She had already apologized profusely when she and Archangel had dragged into camp, but she wanted to beg forgiveness again and again. What Wolverine said was true—Sauron’s powers were insidious and devastatingly powerful when he had a source of mutant energy to feed upon. Even so, it was she who had failed last night. She had possessed the strength of will to defy him, if only she had been attentive enough to notice his trickery.
“I will leave the rescue of Psylocke to the rest of you then,” Storm said. “By now enough of the maelstrom’s fury is sp
ent that I can initiate the repair. If you’ll excuse me, it will take a great deal of concentration.”
She stepped out of the shelter into the pelting rain and reached upward with her powers, found a zephyr of polar air, and turned it back toward the vent in the clouds. Then another, and another. Next, she strengthened a pulse of warm air rising from the geysers near the swamp, one of the many sources of heat that supported the tropical, prehistoric environment of the Savage Land. After that, she evaporated a small snow cloud that was assaulting the heat-loving foliage on a hill upriver, not far from the waterfall where the X-Men had emerged when they first arrived.
That was how it would be. One little bit at a time, like sopping up a bucketload of overturned syrup with a single paper towel.
Warren Worthington III saw the rift above him begin to draw shut, one puff of cloud at a time, restricting the blasts of snow and subzero gusts that had been pummeling the ground for hours. The turbulence lessened until it no longer took every bit of his might and skill just to keep flying. He headed back toward the Fall People village. His early morning search had produced no sign of Sauron or any of the mutates. Might as well stop for mm, and eat something, he thought—he’d had no lunch or supper the day before—and help ferry everyone to their patrol sites.
As he descended, he spotted Ororo out in the open. She was shuddering. Her teeth were clenched. Her eyes fluttered open at irregular intervals, remaining tightly shut at all other moments. Such effort.
She looked glorious, though. She was brimming with the aura of a goddess. Long, lean brown arms beckoned the forces of cloud and wind.
Preoccupied with the spectacular sight, he nearly bumped into Wolverine on his way into the lodge.
“Something I can do for you?” Warren asked when Logan didn’t step aside.
“You smell different,” Logan said.
“You’re no rose yourself,” Warren retorted. He lifted a white-gloved hand to push on through. Only then did he notice that his teammate wore a tiny, but friendly, grin.
“I mean,” said Wolverine, “you smell right. Less doubt in you today, Worthington. You proved somethin’ to yourself up there last night.”
Law of the Jungle Page 9