The Steel Ring

by R. A. Jones

  The impact spun him halfway round. The other heroes could see the surprised expression on his face.

  They also saw him stagger backwards and tumble out of sight off the face of the cliff.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  The five remaining heroes rushed forward, only to be brought up short by a second spray of bullets stitching the ground before them.

  The source of the attack was several dark figures slicing through the desert sky, rather than a single air ship. Dressed all in black, each attacker was wearing a strange, winged contraption on his back, which obviously allowed them independent flight.

  A small motor was built into each backpack, feeding power to propellers attached to the tips of the devices’ wings. A tail section for aid in steering ran back from the backpack, from which each pilot’s legs were held in a sling type affair.

  Mounted under the wings were the deadly machine guns, fired by triggering devices held in the flyers’ hands. Three of the dark flyers sprayed the top of the plateau with fresh rounds of bullets before peeling away, following at least four others, those who had initially opened fire on Aman.

  Hard behind them came four more flyers. These did not have machine guns attached to their wings, however, but rather small cannons that fired explosive shells. In perfect unison, they triggered those weapons.

  The same basic tactic that had brought down the Temple of Enlightened Anguish in Tibet worked equally well here.

  Precisely placed explosions pounded the face of the pueblo’s upper terrace. With a rumble like the growl of some ancient titan, the rock wall began to collapse.

  The instant the ground beneath his feet began to crack, Ferret cast desperate eyes about, looking for the Witch. He spotted her just as the spot on which she stood gave way.

  Behind her, the terrace floor was also dropping away from Iron Skull. Rather than activating his boot jets and rocketing away to safety, though, he whipped out one arm to grab the Witch around the waist. As he fell, he pulled her with him.

  Ferret could see her fearful face, mouth twisted in a scream, for only seconds before she was lost to sight amidst a spray of dust shooting upward along the rock face.

  Then he had only time to think of himself, as the bit of rocky ledge upon which he was standing split away from the body of the plateau. Luckily, it slid downward rather than tipping forward, and by crouching and hugging the ground he was able to ride it.

  Finally, though, it slammed into some barrier of stone and began to flip, still at least twenty feet above the desert floor. Drawing his legs up under him, Ferret waited until his stony perch was nearly parallel with the main face of the plateau, then sprang outward with all his strength.

  With arms and legs spread to create as much wind resistance as possible, he still fell rapidly. The ground seemed to rise up to meet him as he curled into a ball before somersaulting over to land on his back.

  An involuntary scream of pain was ripped from his lungs upon impact. Fortunate to have landed atop loose, sandy soil, he still felt electric fire race from nerve to nerve.

  Denied the mercy of unconsciousness, he twisted in agony. As he did, he felt at least one broken rib scrape loudly and harshly across his lung. Tears welled in his eyes and he bit down so hard on his lower lip that he drew blood. Still, he continued to bite down rather than give voice to any further sounds of pain. Sounds of weakness, he would have said.

  He lay where he had fallen for several minutes. Eyes twisted shut, still he saw a blazing ball of red-hot pain. He forced himself to stare directly at the ball of light, willing it to diminish.

  In time (how much time he neither knew nor cared), the light grew cooler, less painful to behold. It didn’t disappear; it simply became irrelevant.

  With great effort, he at last pushed himself to a sitting position, then back on his feet. Gritting his teeth, biting back a moan, he pressed the heel of his left hand against his side. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead as he slowly, firmly forced the broken rib back into place. He knew this would have to do until it naturally healed over the course of the next twenty-four hours or so.

  Movement in the shadows thrown by a mound of collapsed stones brought him into an alert crouch. He relaxed and straightened when he saw the Fantom calmly emerging from those shadows.

  “Hello!” a voice called from above.

  Ferret tilted his head, smiling thinly at the sight presented by Man of War. The masked swashbuckler was still at the top of what remained of the plateau’s face, dangling from the edge by one hand.

  “Is everyone okay?” he asked, totally ignoring his own somewhat precarious position.

  “Too soon to say,” Ferret replied bluntly. “How ‘bout you? Can you make it down on yer own?”

  By the time the question was asked, Man of War had swung to grab rocky purchase with his other hand, climbed upward and was now sitting with his legs swinging idly over the precipice.

  “I expect so,” he replied. “May take a while, though.”

  “Don’t bother,” said a voice from below. “I’ll come up and get you.”

  Fantom was now standing beside Ferret, and both were staring into the billowing cloud of dust still rising from the mounds of rocky rubble that had once been the pueblo. It was from within this gritty curtain that the last voice had come.

  Neither was surprised when Aman came walking out of the minute dust storm. His gait was still, his expression tight. Red welts could still be seen where the machine gun bullets had ripped through his tunic and peppered his chest.

  “Are you all right, Aman?” Fantom asked.

  “I’m feeling more anger than pain, Fantom,” he replied. He was using both hands to slap dust off his clothing.

  “While I was still mostly helpless, one of those air men swooped down and made off with the necklace.”

  “And the speedy little buggers are already out of sight,” Ferret declared, fruitlessly scanning the sky. “Unless your pilot girlfriend spotted ‘em and took off after ‘em, we’ve lost them.”

  “John!” came a cry, as if in response to Ferret. Zona Henderson was running toward them. More precisely, she was running to Aman.

  “I never saw them until they opened fire,” she explained. Her eyes were rapidly scanning Aman for assurance that he was as well as he appeared.

  “Did it ever occur to you to try to follow them?” Ferret snapped.

  “And do what?” she shot back. “Even if I could have gotten a full-blown plane into the air in time, it has no weapons; it’s been trimmed down for speed.

  “Nor would I have been able to contact you and tell you where they were headed. Unless you happen to be carrying a radio on you?”

  Ferret merely growled in response, turning away from the angry gazes aimed at him by both her and Aman. His own eyes narrowed as he looked about.

  “We’re still missing two people,” he snarled.

  “You’re right,” Aman said. “Where are --”

  “Shhh!” Ferret raised a hand for silence. Cocking his head to one side, he strained to pick up the slightest sound. Faintly, he heard the noise of small rocks sliding one across another.

  “This way,” he said, heading toward a particular one of the many piles of rubble now littering the landscape.

  Before he could reach it, the rocks suddenly heaved upward. As they did, he could make out the form of Iron Skull, his bowed back straining against the weight that threatened to drive him back into the ground.

  And huddled beneath him, eyes wide with wonder and a touch of fear, lay the Witch.

  “Natalia!” Ferret cried. Lunging forward, he grabbed her under both arms and pulled her to safety.

  No longer concerned with the safety of the woman, Iron Skull snapped upright, flinging the rocky weight off his back like a dog would shake off water.

  “Are you hurt?” Ferret asked the Witch. Seeing the deep and genuine concern in his eyes, her own slight fear evaporated. She smiled and patted him on one cheek.

  “I’m fine
,” she assured him. “Thanks to the Skull.”

  “Meanwhile,” Ferret said, “we came up a cropper our first time out of the chute.” The expression on the Witch’s face told him she had no idea what he had just said.

  “We failed,” he said. “We lost the jewel and, because none o’ those ambushing fly boys stuck around to fight, we got no prisoners we could question.”

  “Given that they had us outnumbered,” Iron Skull commented, “the odds might have been against us if they had stuck around.”

  “Odds don’t mean squat, Killjoy,” Ferret declared.

  “Oh. Then I stand corrected,” the Skull replied dryly.

  “Spilt milk, Ferret,” Aman said sternly. “If everyone’s all right, we need to get back to New York so we can plan our next move.”

  “You heard the Big Cheese,” Ferret said sarcastically, motioning for the others to follow Aman, who was already heading toward their waiting aeroplane.

  Ferret himself, though, hung back for a moment. Noticing this, Man of War came to stand beside him.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Is my vision still blurred,” Ferret said rhetorically, “or is the robot limping?”

  Indeed, though most eyes wouldn’t have noticed, Man of War could now see that there did appear to be an ever so slight hitch in Iron Skull’s gait.

  “Any machine can be damaged,” he said, shrugging. “Especially by the weight of a landslide.”

  He pointed to a small patch of dark liquid on the ground near the pile of rocks beneath which Iron Skull had been briefly buried.

  “See? He’s probably leaking hydraulic fluid or something.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Ferret concurred. But as Man of War trotted off to catch up with the rest of the team, he still hung back.

  Walking to the small spill Man of War had pointed out, Ferret knelt beside it. After dipping the tips of two fingers into the dark liquid, he raised them near his nose and inhaled the scent.

  His eyes squinted and his lips curled in a snarl.

  Back aboard the aeroplane, Ferret checked once again to assure himself that the Witch had not been seriously injured. At his advice, she laid her head in his lap and quickly slipped into a restorative sleep. He spoke not a word to any of his other comrades for the duration of the flight home.

  But his eyes never left Iron Skull.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  Back in the Fantom’s underground sanctum, the Clock paced nervously back and forth.

  Having always been a man of action, any long periods of inactivity drove him to distraction. Perhaps he should have gone with the others to Arizona, he thought.

  But then again, probably not. As he stared down at his hands, slowly flexing his fingers open and closed, he could almost hear muscle and tendons moaning in mild protest.

  Though still stronger and faster than most men who were half as old, he had to admit to himself if to no other that he was no longer in his prime. He wished he could spit in the face of age, but the great leveler would still continue its inexorable progress.

  Again, he thought that even the Eye, for all his mystical mastery, was not completely immune to the march of time. The ancient sorcerer, now huddled together with the enigmatic Librarian over several arcane books, was slightly stooped at the shoulders. At times, his heavily hooded eyes would disappear, like lights on the brink of flickering out.

  The ways of magic were beyond the Clock, nor was he completely comfortable with its practice, even by an old and trusted friend. At the moment, this left him of no use to the Eye, and so his pacing continued.

  He was too secure in his surroundings, though, and thus less vigilant than he should have been. So it was that he now failed to hear the slightly louder slapping sound made by the waves of the waterway that lay down one of the cavern’s corridors.

  Beside the stone quay there, a long, sleek powerboat rode high in the water, its skin as black as the shadows in which the Fantom lived in this subterranean manse.

  The boat bobbed slightly on fresh waves caused by dark figures slithering just below the water’s inky surface.

  One by one, six men silently emerged from the depths and pulled themselves up on the rocky pier. Within seconds they had shed their scuba tanks and flippers. Still clad in black rubber diving suits, they armed themselves with submachine pistols they had been carrying in waterproof bags.

  Splitting their ranks and hugging either side of the corridor leading away from the pier, they quietly set out in the direction of the voices that drifted back to them.

  “Have you found anything?” the Clock asked, unable to bear the silence any longer.

  The Librarian merely let out a long, exasperated sigh.

  “Sometimes,” the Eye explained, “the search for knowledge yields a flood of information.” He listlessly waved a hand over one of the tomes.

  “Other times, finding the precise information you want or need is like finding a specific needle in a stack of needles.”

  “So you don’t know anything more than you did before?” the Clock asked.

  “That’s not what he said,” the Librarian corrected. “Not at all.”

  “So you have found something?”

  “Well, he didn’t say that, either.”

  Now it was the Clock who sighed heavily, running one hand across his weary eyes.

  “Then, what did he say?”

  “Weren’t you listening?”

  The conversation was cut short by the whine of a bullet. The slug tore through the open book the Librarian was holding, causing the little man to yelp and topple off his stool.

  “Intruders!” the Clock yelled, even as both hands flashed down and came back up holding glistening twin .45s.

  He didn’t bother to aim with the first barrage he unleashed at the figures he saw come spilling out of the corridor through which they had passed. His intent was simply to give them pause and disrupt their own aim until he could more clearly appraise the situation.

  The attackers were disciplined; they barely flinched as hot lead sizzled around them but rather broke into a run straight toward their intended targets.

  Between one step and the next, the foremost attacker seemed to have been grabbed by an unseen hand and yanked backwards. In this case, the “hand” was the flattened .45 slug that had slammed into his chest just to the right of his heart.

  The Clock was now taking time to aim more precisely. From the corner of his right eye he saw the Eye standing near him. He felt a bullet tug lightly at the left sleeve of his coat, just enough to throw his own aim slightly off.

  The result was even worse for the attacker who had nearly winged the masked man. The errant shot fired by the Clock struck the black-clad man not in the chest but in the belly.

  Death for him was just as certain, but not nearly so swift or relatively painless as would otherwise have been the case.

  Meanwhile, the Eye had raised his left arm, holding his hand up palm upward. A circle of light spread outward from it, forming a semi-transparent mystical shield.

  In flashes of light and high-pitched screams, bullets began to ricochet away from its shimmering surface.

  The Eye’s right hand shot forward, and from his fingertips came bolts of eldritch energy.

  One such bolt struck a charging killer in the head. He staggered back a step or two and then began to jerk about violently as if he was being electrocuted. In point of fact, the mystical energy racing down from his head in all directions and dancing its way to the floor did resemble the flickering electrical bands of a Jacob’s Ladder. The man’s knees turned to jelly as he pitched face down on the floor.

  With half their number dead or dying, the remaining three attackers chose the better part of valor, turning to flee.

  If they thought such a move would elicit mercy, they were sadly mistaken.

  A withering hail of solid slugs and immaterial bolts of energy mowed them down before they could even reach the mouth of the corridor from which they had
so confidently charged less than sixty seconds earlier. Like fish tossed to the bottom of a boat, they flopped to the floor lifelessly.

  One of their number, though, still had a few breaths in his lungs. The Clock knelt down beside the man who had been gut shot. The killer was curled up on his side, both hands clutching at his stomach. The Clock flipped him over onto his back, heedless of the groan of pain this elicited.

  “Who sent you?” the masked man demanded.

  The dying assassin’s only response was a gurgling laugh that brought frothy red foam bubbling from between his lips. This was followed by a soft crunching sound. The killer had bitten down on the poison pill secreted inside his mouth and almost instantly began to convulse.

  The Eye unceremoniously elbowed the Clock aside and grabbed the killer’s head in his hands. He knew he now had but seconds in which to magically extract information from the man’s mind before death clouded it forever.

  As if he was peering into the dying man’s very brain, the Eye saw a quick succession of blurred images, almost but not quite in focus. Foremost among them was the prominent but shadowy image of a man who exuded great power. The figure was vaguely familiar to him: someone he knew, or should know.

  He felt with certainty that this figure knew all that he did himself, and more. With even greater certainty he knew this dimly-seen enemy meant to use that knowledge to cause catastrophic harm.

  Simultaneously, the Eye and the killer let out a groan of pain. The assassin expired on the floor, while the Eye seemed almost to be flung away from him.

  The Clock moved to help his old friend up from the floor, only to freeze in place as he saw the dark shadow that had descended over the mage’s face. It made his madly bulging eyes seem to shine out even more brightly.

  As if it was hovering in the air before him, the Eye could still see the final picture he had plucked from the fevered brain of the dying killer.

  It had been an image of Aman … accompanied by a palpable yet contradictory feeling of both hope and dread.