52 - The Novel

  She lurched erratically through the snow, dragging the travois and its fragile occupant behind her. Was she even moving in a straight line? Renee had no way of knowing. She tugged out the compass and stared at it in bewilderment.

  "Don't know which way to go," she confessed. "I'm lost, Charlie."

  In more ways than one.

  She slipped on a patch of ice and toppled over onto the snow. Damn it! she thought frantically as the upset litter tipped over onto its side. Scrambling back onto her feet, she hurried to make sure Vic was okay. A trail of bright red blood stained the snow behind them. She heard him choking.

  "Charlie!"

  Righting the litter, she saw that the Question's mask had already begun to peel away from his face. Blood seeped through the false flesh covering his mouth.

  Panic overcame her. "Don't leave me," she begged. "Oh God, oh God-Hold on, Charlie." She remembered Detective Crispus Allen's lifeless body lying in a puddle of blood on a moonlit Gotham street, and that time in Kahndaq when she'd thought she had lost Charlie forever. "Hold on, please hold on, I'm here. I've got you. ..." Her head and shoulders sagged as she bent over him in despair. Bitter tears froze against her cheeks. "I... I can't do this again...."

  The storm was finally starting to ease up a bit, but it was too little, too late. A sense of utter failure sliced her soul to ribbons, cutting even deeper than the wind.

  "You never answered my question," Vic pointed out.

  His voice, faint and hoarse as it was, startled her. Her heart missed a beat and she stared at him in amazement. The flapping mask came away from the top half of his face, exposing his sunken eyes and sweaty brow. Alert blue orbs . met hers. For the first time in days, he was really seeing her.

  He was Vic Sage again, at least for moment.

  "Charlie?"

  "Get this thing off my face," he wheezed. "Hard enough to breathe as is."

  Renee clumsily peeled the rest of the mask away. She let the wind dispose of it; within seconds, the crumpled scrap of pseudo-flesh had disappeared into the snowy wastes. She had no idea what to make of Vic's sudden lucidity. Was this a miracle ... or a momentary blessing before the end?

  Vic grinned up at her. Aside from the blood smeared around his mouth, he almost looked like his old self, at least if you didn't look too hard. "What the hell are you doing, Renee?"

  "Trying to get us to Nanda Parbat." She undid the straps binding him to the litter. Tears blurred her vision as she cradled him against her chest. "Trying to save you, Charlie."

  "But you can't. I told you, some things you just have to accept."

  "I can't!" she blurted from her heart. "I need you. I don't know who I am without you!"

  Vic's tremulous hand touched her cheek. "It's a trick question, Renee." He coughed up blood. "Not who you are, but who are you going to become."

  Exhausted by the effort, his arm dropped to his side. He slumped back into her arms. Renee sobbed inconsolably Please, she prayed desperately. Not now. Not again.

  "Time to change," he murmured with his last breath. "Like a butterfly. .."

  His body shuddered and fell still. His lungs stopped whistling.

  Vic Sage had asked his final Question.

  The storm died away. The wind stopped blowing. The last of the snowfall settled onto Renee as she sat clutching Vic's limp body. Looking back the way they had come, she saw the trail of blood stretching across the snow behind her—almost in the shape of a question mark. One last trick, Charlie? she thought, mourning her friend. It was just like him to leave her with a final puzzle. How'd you pull that off?

  A bright shaft of sunlight penetrated the overcast sky, lighting up the frozen terrain around her. Turning her gaze away from the bloody question mark, she saw before her a remote mountain valley dominated by an imposing pagoda-style temple. A clutch of familiar huts preceded the temple. The tinkle of wind chimes blew down the valley. Prayer flags waved hello.

  "Oh my God," Renee whispered.

  The irony was unbearable.

  She had reached Nanda Parbat.

  WEEK 39

  OOLONG ISLAND.

  Lightning flashed outside, causing the lights in the laboratory to flicker. Thunder competed with the Muzak. Driving sheets of rain pelted the plate glass windows. Turbulent storm clouds concealed the sun and emptied the beaches. Not even Ira Quimby was working on his tan today.

  Dr. Sivana looked up from his microscope in irritation. "Haven't those ridiculous Horsemen left already?"

  It seemed to Sivana, and he had no doubt that a thorough meteorological analysis would bear him out, that the weather had been the pits ever since the final three Horsemen had come off the assembly line. The Monster Society, as he liked to think of them, had long since lost their novelty value, at least as far as Sivana was concerned. He glared impatiently out the window at the island's pier, where even now Roggra, Zorrm, and Azraeuz were being loaded into an unmarked cargo ship for transport to Intergang's staging area in Bialya. Their deployment boded ill for Black Adam and the rest of Kahndaq, not that Sivana cared. Unlike Adam, he had no sentimental attachment to any Third World pigsty. He was simply anxious to see the Horsemen on their way.

  The sooner they're gone, the better.

  He cast a baleful look at the overhead lights, as though daring the impudent LED array to brown out again, then turned back to his work. Notes and diagrams, written on everything from graph paper to cocktail napkins, littered the cluttered cubicle. The chemical formula for an unbreakable synthetic cobweb was scrawled on the back of a lunch menu, next to the schematics for an antifrequency "mute ray" capable of deadening all sounds, including, hopefully, the magic word of a certain Big Red Cheese. Hunching over an acid-stained counter, he sorted through the scattered documents, looking for a particular set of notes. Test tubes, beakers, and a half-finished neutron grenade served as paperweights.

  "You know what's ridiculous?" An unwanted voice disturbed his concentration. Sivana looked up to see Doctor Tyme standing outside his cubicle. The man's clock-faced countenance looked as absurd as ever, as did his garish cape and costume. "They cancelled the Time Tunnel revival after only one season." He quivered in outrage. "The CIA knows that's my favorite show!"

  Sivana glowered disdainfully at his paranoid colleague. He hoped, for Tyme's sake, that the man had more on his mind than the fate of some inane television program. "Well?" he demanded brusquely.

  Bristling at Sivana's tone, Tyme put on a show of pompous indignation. "So, has the 'great' Thaddeus Sivana found any trace of my missing fifty-two seconds?"

  That again?

  “I wasn't even looking." Sivana nodded at his microscope. "But I did find a world of microscopic naked Amazons who worship you as a god."

  "What, really?" Tyme elbowed past Sivana in his haste to get to the microscope. "Let me see!" He bent eagerly over the lenses and fumbled with the focus controls. "I knew there had to be a world somewhere that values the revolutionary work of Doctor Seymour Tyme...."

  His voice trailed off as he quickly realized that there were no nude subatomic sylphs to be seen. Sivana felt embarrassed on behalf of mad scientists everywhere. He shook his head in scornful disbelief. "What are you? An idiot?"

  Tyme sheepishly lifted his eyes from the lenses, just as T.O. Morrow wandered into the cubicle to see what all the excitement was about. As usual, the urbane futurist sported a Hawaiian shirt in lieu of a lab coat. His fruity drink had a tiny umbrella in it. "Something interesting?"

  Sivana reclaimed his microscope. "I'm looking at Time itself," he explained to Morrow, whom he respected rather more than Tyme. Morrow was a credit to the profession, whose deadly androids had bedeviled even the Justice League on occasion. "Particles of Time. I call it Suspendium." Tyme tried to slink away unnoticed, but Sivana wasn't about to let him off so easily. "Maybe you'll think twice about interrupting me again," he called after the humiliated scientist. "You pathetic worm!"

  "That reminds me, Thaddeus," Morrow commented. He leaned agai
nst the wall of the cubicle, stirring his drink. "You never did tell us what happened to Mister Mind. Shouldn't he be here with us?" .

  Dubbed "the world's wickedest worm" by the tabloid press, Mister Mind was actually the larval form of an ancient Venusian life form. The alien caterpillar was an inveterate foe of Captain Marvel—and a former ally of Sivana's.

  "I'd forgotten all about him," he admitted. In fact, Sivana had been experimenting on the tiny extraterrestrial when Intergang's subhuman henchmen had forcibly recruited his services. The details of that rather intriguing project came back to him swiftly. "Mind was trapped in larval form, denied his full potential. I wanted to see what would happen if I irradiated the slimy little creep with Suspendium rays to accelerate his natural processes...

  "And?" Morrow prompted.

  Sivana shrugged. "Then a couple of monsters turned up to drag me here." The last time he'd laid eyes on the small green caterpillar, Mind had been sealed inside a transparent containment cylinder back in Sivana's old labora--tory. "I have no idea what became of Mind, but the Suspendium's been acting tricky for months now...."

  He reclaimed his microscope, just as an unexpected ray of sunlight brightened up his workspace. Looking up, he saw the sun shining outside for the first time in a week. He also noted that no surprise, the nameless cargo ship had left the pier, taking the three Horsemen with them. Stormy black clouds followed the ship out to sea.

  "Finally," Sivana muttered.

  Maybe now he could get some serious work done.

  WEEK 40

  SHIRUTA.

  Sunlight shone down on the palace gardens. Fragrant lilies and narcissuses bloomed amidst the verdant shrubs and arbors. Refugee children, rescued from captivity, joyfully chased each other down the winding paths. The orphans' laughter elicited a faint smile from Isis as she strolled through the garden with Black Adam and Sobek, but only briefly. Despite the idyllic setting, her heart was heavy.

  "Osiris has still not left his room," she lamented to Sobek. "He will not speak to Black Adam or myself about what happened in America." She shuddered at the memory of the Persuader's gruesome death—and of Osiris' horrified reaction afterward. Nearly six weeks had passed, yet the consequences of that terrible day still haunted them all.

  Sobek sighed heavily as he trudged down the path. His reptilian appearance no longer frightened the children, who had grown accustomed to the talking crocodile's presence. Afresh jogging suit clothed his body. "Osiris talks to me about it, Lady Isis. He's my f-friend." ,

  "And what does Osiris say?" Black Adam inquired. Isis knew he shared her concern for her brother. "Perhaps if I should attempt to speak with him again ... ?"

  Sobek shook his saurian skull. "I think a visit from you would only h-hurt right now. He believes—" He snapped his jaws shut in midsentence, as though he had already said too much.

  "What?" Adam demanded. "What does he believe?"

  The crocodile stared glumly at his bare feet. His slitted pupils refused to meet Adam's gaze. "He believes the power inside him m-made him kill. That he's c-cursed. That all of us are cursed."

  Isis gasped and lifted her hand to her mouth. The power inside him, she thought. Black Adam's power. For a fleeting instant, she briefly considered the possibility that Amon might have inherited Adam's murderous wrath as well as his godlike attributes, but she hastily rejected the idea. It can't be true. Osiris was born of Adam's compassion, not his anger. ...

  "That's absurd," Adam said, scowling.

  "He is a boy," she reminded him hastily, lest he take offense at the notion. "He is trying to rationalize something he did. Something he feels incredibly guilty for."

  The image of her brother, liberally splattered with the Persuader's blood, rose unbidden from her memory. She had no doubt that the villain's sundered remains were seldom far from Osiris' thoughts as well.

  Adam nodded. "I understand that, Isis, but my powers did not make him kill." He looked down at his own hands, perhaps remembering the first time he killed a man, millennia ago. "He has the wisdom of Zehuti to tell him that. How can he believe such nonsense?"

  Sometimes even the greatest wisdom is not enough to ease a guilty conscience, she thought. But before she could open her mouth to say as much, a thunderous boom shook the heavens. Dark storm clouds came rushing up from the south, blotting out the sun. Lightning cracked open the sky. Rain poured down upon the gardens. Drenched children ran for cover.

  "By the Goddess!" Isis looked up in alarm. Goose bumps broke out across her skin. She sensed at once that this was no natural storm. Within seconds, she was soaked to the skin.

  "Rain?" Black Adam sounded confused. "There were no clouds in the sky a moment ago." He held up his cape to shield Isis from the storm. His dark eyes questioned her. "Did you—?"

  "No," she assured him. Whatever this unnatural tempest was, it was not her doing. Some other power was at work here. She called upon the power of Isis to calm the air above them, but the turbulent weather resisted her efforts. The wind and rain defied Nature itself.

  "The gardens!" Sobek cried out. "What's happening to our beautiful gardens?" ,

  Peering out from beneath her husband's cape, Isis stared in horror at the formerly lush flowers and shrubs. The unexpected downpour should have been a blessing to the plants, but the driving rain had exactly the opposite effect. Before her eyes, the fresh blossoms withered and turned brown. Rotting petals fell to earth, to be washed away by the torrential rain. They disappeared down polished stone gutters.

  She reached out to lay her healing touch upon a wilting narcissus. But though she felt the Goddess's power flowing through her, as strong as ever, it had no effect upon the fragile flower, which continued to suffer from some terrible unnamed malady. The freakish rain seemed to be poisoning the garden, beyond her power to save. She tried healing a second blossom, only to meet with an equal lack of success. Isis had not felt so helpless in months. She spoke in a hushed tone.

  "They're dying."

  Days later, Osiris soared through the storm, seeking proof of what he already feared. Everywhere he looked was more evidence that all of Kahndaq was cursed.

  His sister knelt in the muddy ruins of what had once been her gardens. Heavy raindrops streamed down her face like tears as she struggled to grow a single flower from the blighted soil. A purple glow shimmered around her extended fingertips, yet not a single green sprout answered her call. Her shoulders sagged in exhaustion. Her elegant face was haggard and drawn. The deadly rain had not stopped for nearly a week and showed no sign of ceasing anytime soon.

  Forgive me, sistef, Osiris begged silently. Although her sorry state tore at his heart, he could not bring himself to face her. I never meant to bring this evil upon us.

  Leaving the palace behind, he flew over the city. He saw quickly that the curse was not confined to his family alone. Food was already running short, as both crops and livestock wasted away almost overnight. Only a meager supply of rotting fruits and vegetables were available in Shiruta's many markets and outdoor bazaars. Even these pitiful foodstuffs drew large, unruly crowds, which threatened to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation.

  "My child is dying! She needs food!" A crazed man, his own face gaunt with hunger, forced his way through a mob of angry citizens to snatch an overripe melon from a fruit stand. Before he could escape with his prize, however, the street vendor drew a knife and stabbed the desperate father in the chest. A woman screamed as the bleeding man tumbled against her. Another customer grabbed onto the melon and tucked it beneath his robe. Greedy hands tried to pry the precious fruit from him. The vendor cursed and slashed at the crowd with his knife, defending the rest of his produce. Blood spilled onto the cobblestone streets. Deep puddles turned red.

  For a moment or two, Osiris considered intervening. Then, to his relief, a regiment of Kahndaqi police rushed onto the scene. Shouting commands, and cracking skulls, the officers broke up the riot... at least for the moment. Osiris guessed that similar scenes were takin
g place all over Shiruta. The starving city was like a powder keg, primed to explode.

  He flew on, grateful to have been spared from having to deal with the violence himself. He didn't trust himself to use his powers anymore, not after what he had done to the Persuader. I don't want any more blood on my hands, he thought. I can't risk killing someone else!

  Alas, famine was not the only predator stalking Kahndaq. Not far from the maddened bazaar, he beheld a nightmarish scene outside the city's largest hospital. Sick and dying patients were lined up for blocks outside the overcrowded facility. Frantic doctors and nurses performed triage on the evergrowing throng of patients, who appeared to suffer from all manner of noxious diseases, including cancer, leprosy, bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, and many other contagions that had not afflicted these lands for generations. Open sores and pus-filled boils scarred suffering flesh. Tumors disfigured faces and bodies. Clotted lungs wheezed for breath. Osiris saw a moaning woman, pronounced beyond hope by an exhausted physician, left to die alone on a sidewalk in front of the hospital. Many more victims looked to share her fate.

  The gods themselves have forsaken us, Osiris thought despairingly. He looked away in agony, knowing there was nothing he could do to save the plague-ridden multitude. There are so many.. . !

  But the hospitals weren't the only places overflowing in Kahndaq.

  So were the cemeteries.

  On the outskirts of the city, he came upon an even more dismal sight. Black Adam, his dark hair soaked by the endless rain, plowed through the earth with his bare fists, digging a mass grave large enough to accommodate a veritable army of the newly dead. Hearses and ambulances carted corpses by the truckload to the desolate setting. Priests and mullahs presided over countless funerals. Grieving friends and relatives wailed for their dead. Lost in sorrow, none of the mourners noticed Osiris hovering above the graveyard, hidden amidst the churning clouds and rain. Black Adam was too intent on his Herculean labors to even glance at the sky.

  I've seen enough, Osiris decided. Tears leaked from his eyes as he squeezed them shut, unable to take any more. With the speed of Heru, he zoomed back toward the palace, but he could not outrace the dreadful truth he had just witnessed. Famine, pestilence, violence, and death were abroad in Kahndaq and he alone was responsible. I brought these plagues upon us with my own bloodstained hands.