Warren cocked his head. “You complimenting me, Logan?”
“Don’t let it go to yer head,” the other replied. “Just keep this attitude goin’. You didn’t let old green-beak tug yer strings after all. That’s the edge you gotta keep. None of that second-guessing crap you were wallowing in before.” Spoken like a man who could trust his instincts, Warren thought. He never dared do that, for fear his instincts would turn out to be some vestige of Apocalypse still contaminating him, urging him to be the horseman of Death. J‘Of course there are other ways,” he snapped. Last night, he had struck in a rage, without self-control. It turned out okay, but that was luck, not design. He had to insist on higher standards for himself. “Maybe if I’d thought of some alternative attacks, he wouldn’t have had the chance to trick Ororo.”
“Believe that if you want, flyboy,” Logan said. “But don’t let it slow you down.”
“I’ll give that advice the full consideration it deserves,” Warren responded.
Wolverine stepped past, out into the downpour. He tilted his head up toward the clouds as if daring them to wash him away. Archangel watched him for a moment, then slipped inside the structure.
Logan was right about some things. Warren’s state of mind had improved. He no longer agonized over how he would act when he faced Sauron; he had already shown that he would not repeat old mistakes. But the knowledge gave him only a scrap of peace. Sauron was still at large. Betsy was still a prisoner. Closure had not been achieved.
Iceman, the Beast, Cannonball, Ka-Zar, and Shanna sat cross-legged in a circle around platters of fruit, bowls of porridge, a pot of steaming tea, and more. Warren rubbed his belly and savored the aroma. It might be a Stone Age breakfast, but right now it beckoned him more than any at the five-star restaurants he frequented in his spoiled rich-boy days, before his skin turned blue.
And what’s Betsy eating this morning? Would she be fed at all? The thought ruined the first taste of the biscuit he raised to his mouth.
“Today Shanna and I will stay near the village,” Ka-Zar told Warren when he’d taken the edge off his hunger. “Storm is obviously devoting every bit of her attention to the skies. We can’t let her fall victim to the same sort of ambush that claimed Betsy.”
“That’s one reason Wolverine is out there now,” the Beast added.
Warren mentioned the calmer conditions, and offered to help in the transport. “Wolvie going to join you three?” “No, he wants to go out alone again,” Iceman said.
“The man is crazy. It’ll make him a target,” Warren declared.
“Our comrade of the Great White North perceives that eventuality,” Hank said. “He embraces it.”
“In other words,” Cannonball said, “he’s daring Sauron to come get him so he can get a shot at him.”
“Wasn’t that what I said?” Hank asked.
“I’ll say this for Wolvie, he’s the only one of us that won a fight yesterday,” Bobby interjected. “What’s wrong with letting him try again? It’s not like he’d let any of us tell him not to.”
“It’s more than a little inconvenient that Ororo is so thoroughly diverted.” Hank popped an entire kiwifruit into his mouth and swallowed it almost without chewing. “We could benefit from her active leadership today.”
“We’ll just have to muddle through, Hank,” Archangel said. “I was there the first few months Ororo served as leader of the X-Men. She’s come a long way, but we’ve been in plenty of tough situations without her or Scott or the Professor to give orders.”
“I know, old comrade,” Hank said. “It’s not orders I was referring to. There is a synergy that happens when we operate as a team. I am troubled at the way Sauron has managed to disrupt it.”
“It bugs me, too, Hank,” Warren replied. He washed down the last gulp of porridge with a dose of tea—blinking at the jolt of caffeine and wondering what sort of herbs the Fall People had steeped—and stretched out his wings from one bamboo rafter to another. “Who wants to ride with me?”
“I need to go,” Ka-Zar said unexpectedly. “I should speak with the Swamp People scout. I’ll need to serve as translator when he gives his report. Once that’s done, you can bring me back to help Shanna guard Ororo.”
“Very well,” Archangel said, clapping Ka-Zar on the shoulder and heading for the exit. ‘ ‘Grab your barf bag and let’s go. I plan to make it a quick trip.”
Because, Warren thought, I’ll go crazy unless I get back up into the atmosphere, where I can at least pretend I’m doing something to rescue Betsy.
Hank McCoy shaded his eyes, watching as Archangel sailed upward, hauling Ka-Zar back to the village. Warren had been awfully efficient and businesslike about the transport, as if his mind were elsewhere.
’Twas a strange and wonderous phenomenon to behold, Warren so deeply in love. There had been a time when the Beast’s blond teammate had been the quintessential playboy. Not that he had tarnished the reputations of an inordinate number of ladies—after all, one could hardly accumulate a Cassanova-level romantic resume when faced with such awkward impediments as disrobing in a lovely young thing’s boudoir and suddenly having to explain why one possessed a set of feathered appendages sprouting from one’s back— but Warren had broken his share of hearts. Never committing, always on the move, a rich and handsome bachelor always slightly out of reach. How Hank had envied him.
Hank did not envy him now.
The light across the landscape flickered and grew stronger. He looked up at the clouds. “Ah. Excellent work, my dear Ms. Munroe,” he murmured. Storm had finished sewing shut the rip in the Savage Land’s inversion layer. The last of the autumn crispness dissipated, restoring the clinging mugginess characteristic of the valley.
She still had plenty of work to do. Though it wasn’t raining on Hank, Bobby, and Sam here at the edge of the great swamp, thunderheads and funnel clouds still loomed in almost every direction.
Behind the Beast, Iceman and Cannonball were entertaining the scout of the Swamp People that Ka-Zar had just interviewed. Iceman formed a snowball and tossed it toward his teammate, who ducked it, allowing the missle to splatter against the hut wall. When Bobby formed another, the native gestured that they should pause. The burly, loincloth-attired hunter took the snowball from Bobby and lifted it to his cheek, marveling at its cold, soft texture.
“It’s all yours, Gaibanee,” Bobby said.
Hank grinned and led his two companions off along the wide dinosaur track that led into the elephant grass and cypress trees at the border of the marsh. Gaibanee waved farewell.
The native hadn’t been able to tell them much. The previous afternoon, the man had been sitting in a tall tree, waiting for a herd of triceratops to clomp past, when he had observed Sauron carrying Psylocke away. The mutate had disappeared behind a stand of huge camphor trees. When Gaibanee had later ventured to the site, he saw a few pter-anodonlike footprints. Nothing more.
Had Sauron merely been taking a short rest, or hiding as Storm, Archangel, or Cannonball cruised past? Or was he headquartered somewhere in this mucky tangle of vegetation? The latter was a distinct possibility. Even the Swamp People didn’t venture very far into its depths. A group of ne’er-do-wells could operate in secret for months before any of Ka-Zar and Shanna’s allies stumbled across them. And it was this very swamp over which he’d been surprised last night by Storm and Archangel.
They came to a stream of sluggish water choked by lily pads. Hank noticed Sam frown and sigh. The youth wanted to vault across it with his power. Hank shook his head. That’s how they had operated throughout much of the previous day—using Cannonball’s projectile flying and carrying ability to move efficiently from place to place. The problem was, that style of searching had yielded absolutely no results. It was a noisy and attention-grabbing way to travel. Today they would try stealthier tactics, a la Wolverine.
That meant a great deal of walking.
Iceman extended his hand. A bridge of ice formed. The trio trotted across. Th
ey slid into a grove of huge rhododendrons. The clouds opened up again, prompting a pitter-patter through the canopies of foliage above them. It would take half an hour or more to reach the spot Gaibanee had described.
“You know what the worst thing is about not knowing where to find Sauron?’ ’ Hank murmured to Bobby.
“No,” Iceman replied. “It’s too hard to figure out which one is worst. Too many candidates.”
“More than anything, I don’t like that he always has a pretty good idea where to find us.”
“Now that you mention it, that’s true. What are you suggesting? Should we hide?”
- ,“Hide? Probably not. I’ll give myself a few more hours to mull it over. I don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle yet to know if we can do anything that would come to any good. But aren’t you feeling the urge to turn the tables on our vexatious nemesis?”
“Amen to that. Keep that brain working, Dr. McCoy,” Bobby said as he froze a patch of quicksand up ahead.
Ororo dissipated the thunderhead out over the lake. She glided unsteadily over the great body of water, searching for further corruptions of the normal weather patterns. She sensed disquiet. A funnel cloud spun in the roiling air in one of the side valleys, but it had not touched ground and she could sense that it was weakening. Turbulence flogged the waves in the lake to whitecaps, dismaying pelicans and small pterosaurs. The winged predators were out in force despite the conditions, vying for the fish that swam just beneath the surface, feeding off storm debris. Flashes of lightning still coiled over the foothills, but started no fires in the drenched grass.
At last, the situation was stable enough that she could justify a breather. Long hours of study and minor tweaking would be necessary to reverse the subtle, hard-to-isolate flaws in the atmosphere, but the rift was thoroughly closed. Even if she were to stop now, the snow would not return and the flooding would grow no worse.
Despite the friction of the air as she flew, perspiration trickled down her chest, and her hair was a mop against her back. Her spine ached as though she had been practicing weightlifting with the entire planet upon her. As for her general level of energy, she half-believed that Sauron had succeeded in catching her already and had drained her strength with his usual brutal aplomb.
She wobbled toward the village, her flight as tipsy and haphazard as a butterfly’s. Coming to rest on the packed ground, her knees abruptly folded. She collapsed forward between the rain puddles, scuffing her elbows and chin. It took her several heartbeats just to find the vigor to roll over.
Gentle hands rinsed her muddied jawline with a moistened scrap of soft doeskin. Ororo gazed up to find Shanna kneeling over her.
To the X-Men leader’s amazement, she beheld sympathy and gratitude in her hostess’s countenance. Her surprise must have been blatant, because Shanna chuckled.
“I’m not always a she-devil,” she said. “You should see me when I get all mushy and maternal with my little boy.” She helped Ororo sit upright and held out a stalk of some sort of plant.
“What is it?” Storm asked.
“Sugar cane. You looked like you needed a quick carbohydrate fix. This is nature’s own sugar rush. Sorry, but we’re out of Jolt.”
“This will do nicely. Thank you,” Ororo said, putting the juicy pulp to her mouth and sucking a sweet burst.
Shanna guided her weary guest to a bamboo platform where they could be get out of the mud, and rinsed her off with gourd dippers of collected rainwater. “That’s the handy part about dressing native,” Shanna said. “No laundry to worry about. It’s the main reason I moved here, you know.” Ororo laughed.
Shanna’s smile turned back to the comradely expression she had worn prior. “I’m sorry I snapped at you this morning. The Savage Land couldn’t have a better warden than people like you.”
“But it does,” Ororo said. “It has you and Ka-Zar.”
“I believe that’s what I said,” Shanna added cheerfully. “You are like us. Giving two hundred percent to make things right for this land.”
It felt more like three hundred percent, thought Ororo, lowering herself laboriously to one of the log stools that bordered the wash area. She noticed several of the tribe’s older women nodding at her. Apparently stepping up on the platform and being rinsed of mud by a respected local figure was a sign of deep respect. Perhaps she should mention that to some of her inhibited male teammates.
Her head swirled. Good thing she was sitting. Shanna frowned and gestured for a pair of tribeswomen to hurry with the soup and flat bread and vegetables they were bringing. “Eat,” she said. “Get back your strength.”
Ororo did not realize she had kept her eyes closed until she opened them and saw the wicker tray of food right under her nose. “Oh, how wonderful!” she said as she smelled the slightly fermented bread. “This looks like injera. The Ethiopian staple. Do you know it?”
“I’ve tried every kind of African cuisine except raw monkey brains and live dung beetles,” Shanna said. “Yes, this is just like injera.” She tore off a shred of the spongy loaf and tasted it. Her eyelids closed in pleasure. “And no one in the village makes it better than Refira.”
Refira, a short, bosomy woman of obvious strength but little of the hard leanness of other villagers—perhaps she enjoyed her own cooking as much as others did—smiled as she set down the tray, recognizing her name and the complimentary lilt in Shanna’s voice, if not the actual words.
Ororo used a scrap of the bread to scoop up a swallow of curry-fortified beans and hungrily downed it. The Goddess’s blessing that everything was soft and required so little chewing. At the moment, even working her jaw required undue strain.
She was just as weak as a villain would wish her to be.
- CHAPTER 8
One of the things Sam Guthrie didn’t miss about leaving his boyhood home was the odor of the dairy ranch just down the road. As far as he was concerned, Professor Xavier could have included that incentive on the recruiting poster for his School for Gifted Youngsters: Be a mutant. Wear a costume. Travel to exciting places and meet famous people. Get away from fresh cow pies steaming in muddy corrals on summer afternoons, day after day after day.
Looming in front of Cannonball was the carcass of a bra-chiosaums. It was half-immersed in tepid, yellowish swamp water, adorned by flies and scavenger insects, its vertebrae protruding from the collapsing hide on its back. It stank worse than anything back in Kentucky.
“Better radio Storm,” he drawled. “Tell her we found Sauron’s secret headquarters.”
“Droll and perspicacious as ever, my dear Sam,” the Beast declared.
Cannonball enjoyed the chance to joke. As the senior member and field leader of X-Force, he had had to stifle his playfulness more than he liked. Now that he was a junior teammate of the adult squad, he didn’t have to set such a careful example.
“Bobby, my friend,” the Beast said, “do something about that thing before my nose withers and falls off.”
Iceman nodded. He froze the hulk from crest to below water surface, flies and all. The odor diminished until it was only a few times more potent than the fetid, stagnant pools they had been traversing for hours.
Hours. Cannonball grimaced. The problem wasn’t so much the rigors and unpleasantness of the terrain, it was that they had so little to show for it. They had found no trail, even though they had succeeded in locating the spot Gaibanee had described. Hank’s keen eyes had discovered a strand of long, dark human hair caught under a sliver in a log. A purple human hair. It was of the same type as Psylocke’s.
A few talon marks remained on the log, though the rain had wiped out any prints that may have earlier been preserved in the mud or grass of the clearing. They had searched in a widening circle around the site, but no citadels lurked in, the shadows of the cypresses and willows—just ducks, turtles, and alarmingly big crocodiles.
Hank noted the time, and lifted his radio to lips. “This is the Beast. Situation remains the same.”
“Archangel. Nothing new up here.”
“Wolverine. No contact.”
“Base camp quiet,” reported Ka-Zar. “Bird’s in the nest. So far so good otherwise. No new information.”
That was it for the next two hours, assuming another EMP didn’t block their next status check. The circumstances had been unchanged all day. The only news of any sort was the “bird’s in the nest” comment, which meant that Ororo was on the ground in the village, rather than up fiddling with the weather, and was still unavailable to help with the search.
Cannonball rounded the pool containing the dinosaur, heading for a clump of giant ferns within which to answer a call of nature in private. He’d barely stepped out of view of the others when a shape launched at him from the lower branches of the trees above the ferns.
back. The swamp spread out below him. He scanned closely for some sign of the fugitive.
Nothing. No swaying trees branches. No wriggling grass. Amphibius was bounding somewhere near ground level, beneath two to three layers of jungle and swamp canopy. Sam gnashed his teeth. After circling three times, he gave up visual surveillance. He landed in the top of a palm tree, cutting off his power to reduce noise, and proceeded to listen.
Twigs broke in the woods on the other side of an abundant tangle of berry vines. Cannonball launched off his perch, blasting again.
He battered aside leaves and branches. Suddenly the mossy, fern-littered ground appeared. Just to his right was Amphibius, wide-eyed and squawking at the abrupt interception., Sam cut his speed, but couldn’t avoid slamming into the earth.
Amphibius struck him. It didn’t hurt, of course, but the mutate gained momentum from the impact. He sailed up and over a bank of thick fronds before Cannonball could turn around.
“Oh, no y’don’t!” Sam shouted. “I ain’t lettin’ you get away!”
The X-Man hopped over the obstacle. He came down in a knee-deep puddle, scaring a pair of crocodiles. Amphibius was hopping between the tree trunks beyond, just about to vanish from view once more.
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