Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (20 page)

Batman understood instantly. "Of course, the
pyramid's
invisible!"

"Sometimes the obvious solution is the easiest to overlook," the Martian said ruefully. His voice took on an excitement that Batman couldn't mistake. "If the Stone King can harness natural energies to use against us, invisibility should also be within his power."

"Only one way to find out."

Batman was already striding toward the teleporter chamber, a technology any government or army on Earth would pay any price to possess. Which is why it was fitted with a number of fail-safe and self-destruct options. If it was ever found by anyone outside the Justice League, the whole Watchtower would be disabled and useless within minutes.

The duo stepped into the chamber, their recent frustration and sense of defeat nearly forgotten. There was a low hum as the machine sprang into life, and they were enveloped by a cool fluorescent glow.

Then they were gone.

Gotham City, October 31

The pale morning sun streamed in through the hospital windows, casting a warm glow over the ward where Dr. Clay Valerian stood by Cassandra's bedside. She lay pale and still, her breathing shallow, her white-golden hair tumbled across her pillow.

A pretty young nurse the doctor hadn't seen before handed him the patient's notes. He hoped he'd be seeing
her
at the hospital's Halloween Hellraiser tonight. He smiled at the nurse and ran his eyes over the printed sheet attached to a clipboard.

"Found unconscious, Gotham U. lab," he read. "Cause of injuries unknown."

"Is she a student?" Valerian asked, but the nurse shook her head.

"We don't know who she is, doctor. She had no identification with her."

Valerian pursed his lips. Heartbeat, pulse rate, blood pressure–all body functions were performing normally. Every test the hospital had taken came out negative. Her only visible signs of injury were bruising and abrasions toher arm and back.

And yet she was unconscious.

Frequent blinking and rapid eye movement showed her brain was still engaged, but the possibility of undetected damage remained high.

"Could be internal cranial bleeding," Valerian mused aloud, the young nurse listening attentively, "though there are no other indicators. Nurse, arrange a CAT scan, as soon as possible."

The nurse nodded and removed the receiver from a wall-mounted telephone. She dialed a number, her gaze running absent-mindedly over the woman in the bed.

Replacing the clipboard on the bedframe, ogling the young nurse for a final time, Clay Valerian moved on to his next patient.

Cassandra was a young girl again.

She was perched on her grandmother's knee, safe and secure in the love that radiated from the old woman. Grandma smelled of lavender, and her deep-set wrinkled eyes made her look both ancient and wise. They were seated on the old basket chair in the apartment's window recess, looking out on the afternoon street life of Gotham City.

Grandma pointed to a man hurrying by on the other side of the street, his head bowed, eyes riveted on the ground despite the speed of his pace.

"A man in a hurry," Grandma said. "Not alert to what's around him. He's either deep in thought or worried sick. See his shoes, Cassandra–scuffed and worn. That overcoat may be shabby, but once it cost a lot of money. A rich man down on his luck?"

The old lady sipped from a glass of water. "Now, do you see that woman on the corner? Her makeup's smeared. She's been crying."

Grandma could look at anyone and, with her incredible eye for detail, produce their life story. She picked up on things that were in plain sight, but which most people either didn't notice or glossed over.

"Empathy is a gift," she used to say. "But like anything else on God's good earth, you can't afford to take it for granted. You have to work at it always."

Cassandra spent the happiest years of her life in that apartment with her grandmother. And now she had returned there again, to where she was safe and loved, where no bull-headed monsters roamed the streets, only men with scuffed shoes and women with tearstained faces.

A visual flash: Ourobouros, hooped in a circle, the worm that eats its own tail. The symbol of life and death eternally consuming each other.

"The cycle will complete."

The words were like knives in Peter Glaston's head. Only, it wasn't his head any longer. He was just a passenger on someone else's journey. And yet, that was his voice.

He'd gotten used to the terrible smell of corrupt flesh, hardly noticed it
anymore.
He'd grown used to the ice-cold terror that sometimes gripped him. But he was becoming progressively more horrified as he learned the depth and scope of his possessor's plans. Until now, it had merely been flexing its muscles, making its preparations. Its actions had seemed to be isolated incidents, with no pattern to them that Peter had been able to discern. Now, he could see what the creature had been building up to.

There was going to be a cleansing, a disaster on a planetary scale. And there was nothing Peter could do to prevent this strange consciousness, this force that thought in words and symbols that Peter didn't fully understand, from carrying through with its insane quest.

Peter felt like he was coming apart, slowly disintegrating as the parasitic spirit that had invaded him leeched away his memories, his feelings, his very personality. Sometimes he could sense the intruder combing through his life, seeking anything that would aid it in its dreams of genocide. From Peter's mind, it had learned about super heroes, science, and God only knew what else.

Increasingly, the alien was doing things that Peter didn't know about. He had a confusing memory of a fight. Could he have been in confrontation with the Batman? Where had the pain come from, the pain that burned like acid?

Still he couldn't fit the images into a coherent whole.

He knew that somehow, through ritual and sacrifice, the Stone Age sorcerer was harnessing the energies of Gaia–the Earth Mother herself. He intended to use them against the descendants of his own people.

Peter had come to only moments earlier, to find his body standing in front of a slaughtered rabbit, its entrails looped on the altar stone, warm and steaming.

Extispicy–reading the future from the patterns contained in the spilled entrails of a sacrifice. A philosophy student friend had used the word in a game of Scrabble once, and gained a record word score. Peter had never forgotten it.

The omens were obviously good, because Peter felt a warm, satisfied glow suffuse him. It–he–the Stone King was happy. The intruder was likely to be off guard, his mental defenses down. Maybe this was the time for Peter to reclaim himself, to fight for what belonged to him. His body. His life.

He was walking now, bare soles against hard-packed soil. Four figures trapped in living rock, like sculptures in a Paris park. Why were they captive? Peter didn't know if he'd forgotten, or if he'd never known. If they were his enemies, why were they still alive? What purpose did their continuing existence serve?

Yes, now was definitely the time to act, before his confusion became any worse.

He tried to prepare himself for struggle, for a battle of wills to be fought out in the arena of his own mind. But how does one fight a ghost? How do you drive out a malevolent five-thousand-year-old spirit?

Memory flash: breaking ribs and gushing blood. Something red and throbbing squirming in his hand.

A human heart? Peter wondered if a disembodied consciousness could vomit.

Truth is,
Peter thought,
I don't have a clue. I'm afraid, and I don't mind admitting it. Better to wait. Yes, bide my time. My chance will come. Sooner or later, my chance will come.

The Stone King held a chunk of quartz the size of a tennis ball in the palm of his hand. Slowly, his fingers closed around it, squeezing, exerting more and more pressure until–

Tiny pinpricks of light leaped from the quartz. First a dozen, then a hundred, snaking this way and that in the air, never colliding with each other as they whirled around at incalculable speed.

A practical demonstration of piezoelectricity!

Somewhere far away, Peter Glaston felt impressed. It looked like his theories weren't so far off the mark after all. That'd be one in the eye for the high and mighty Professor Robert Mills!

The quartz lights came together as if magnetized, coalescing into a larger, ovoid ball of plasma. Its internal shape shifted constantly, like the flames of a log fire. Peter gaped at it like a child seeing his first cartoon show. He fancied he saw pictures–of himself and Jenny, of heroes fighting to the bitter end, of distant cities burning.

The plasmoid ball dropped suddenly onto Green Lantern, playing around his head like the auras seen in medieval religious masterpieces. A tendril lanced out around Wonder Woman, then others to Superman and the Flash. None of the heroes reacted.

The light seemed to be performing its own crazed, intricate dance, shooting up in starbursts, rolling and twisting like a dervish in the Persian desert. Without warning it reared up, coiled itself like a living spring, then dove into the ground in a flash of cobalt blue.

The chamber lit up like the inside of a furnace, but the temperature didn't change.

Peter heard laughter issue from deep within himself, rumbling up through his diaphragm, bursting out to echo throughout the chamber. Laughter that might have come from the pits of hell.

Perhaps I'll wait just a little longer, then . . .

It was early afternoon in the Andes Mountains of Peru.

Three luxury tourist coaches and a host of battered minibuses baked in the dusty parking lot at the ruins of the fortress of Ollantaytambo, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Tourists of a dozen nationalities swarmed between the ancient walls, only half listening to the commentary of their guides.

Here and there, a few sat groaning on the ground or trying surreptitiously not to vomit. Altitude sickness. They should have heeded the guides when they recommended drinking coca tea. Far weaker than the refined powder, cocaine, the pale green brew had been used in the mountains for thousands of years for its beneficial properties. There was even a Museum of Coca in Cuzco, the old Incan capital.

Hiram Shipman was one of the afflicted, sitting with his back against a boulder, striving to hold down the bile in his churning stomach and wishing his head didn't feel like a blacksmith's anvil. It was the fourth day of his tour, and he'd already missed the wonders of the lost city of Machu Picchu, perhaps the most incredible engineering feat ever undertaken by man.

At an altitude of around ten thousand feet, the Incas had built an entire city on the vertiginous, near-vertical mountain peak. All Hiram remembered of it was the bright green grass, because every time he looked up he felt that his head was going to fall off his shoulders.

Back at the hotel, someone else on the tour, a loudmouth from Fort Worth, Texas, had suggested a couple of
pisco
sours. Everybody and his dog knew that brandy would settle any stomach. Against his better judgment, Hiram allowed himself to be persuaded. Three of the foul-tasting brandies later, he knew he had made a serious mistake.

Now Hiram was going to miss Ollantaytambo, too.

Folklore had it that the stone fortress was built by a senior Incan general. He'd fallen in love with the Emperor's daughter, a sacred maiden forbidden to mingle with the warrior caste. The couple eloped, accompanied by the general's faithful soldiers. Knowing her father had a duty to the Sun God to reclaim her, the couple built Ollantaytambo to hold the Emperor at bay.

The massive walls withstood siege for many years before there was a reconciliation. Everybody lived happily ever after. That was then. . . .

Hiram was enjoying a rare moment's intestinal peace, his head back against the stone, eyes closed against the fierce sun, when he felt the earth beneath him move. He gagged, his throat on fire, because everything solid had long since been regurgitated.

There was a loud crack, and a chunk of the stone he'd been leaning against broke away. It hit Hiram in the small of the back, knocking him forward. His body twisted as he fell so that he landed on his back, looking up at the stronghold towering above him.

A bright blue light seemed to be emanating from the summit, two hundred feet above him. There was the noise of thunder, but louder than any Hiram had ever heard. A retaining wall near the top gave way, and car-sized boulders began to bounce and slide down the steep slopes.

Someone screamed, and Hiram realized it was he himself, as the entire fortress of Ollantaytambo began to slip down the hillside toward him.

"Race you to the top!"

Tony Torres grinned broadly at his eleven-year-old brother, Xuasus. He gestured upward, and Xuasus swiveled his eyes to follow.

The Pyramid of the Sun loomed above them, backed by an almost luminous blue sky. Mexico City's infamous polluted haze lay miles away. From this angle, the pyramid's steep sides looked as if they were sheer, a climb more suited to professional mountaineers than the tourists and families who straggled up them.

Xuasus snorted. A year younger than Tony, he always lost when they competed at anything. It was a school trip, and their teacher, Mr. Perez, had brought the whole class to visit the Avenue of the Dead and its two pyramids, an hour's drive from the city district where they lived. Xuasus would rather buy an ice cream and check out the souvenir stalls with the pesos his mother had given him.

"I'll do your chores if you win," Tony added slyly, and Xuasus's determination evaporated.

"It's a bet!" he cried, already leaping onto the first of the hundreds of stone steps that made up the pyramid's sides. On some of the lower courses, the gap between steps was three feet and more, and only the energy of youth allowed the boys to take them at a run.

Mr. Perez and the rest of the class were still walking up the wide avenue from the Pyramid of the Moon, the teacher pointing out the carved stone jaguars and serpents that adorned the walls, the boys pretending to listen as they jostled each other and laughed. No one had noticed the Torres brothers stride on ahead.