“ ’Tis some trick of sorcery!” the Thunder God said to himself. “Our wonder-working adversary must have conjured magical flames, unquenchable by methods either normal or natural. But mayhap wisdom and a solution may be found in an ancient mortal adage—that which doth advocate fighting fire with fire!”
Then the son of Odin took a flat-footed stance in midair, swinging his enchanted hammer high before him, and the sun died slowly before an onslaught of sudden black clouds.
Beneath the rapidly-darkening sky, the Scarlet Witch stood alone before the destructive behemoth that had once been an unpretentious loading crane. She saw Quicksilver tending to the Beast a short distance away and knew that it was now up to her to stop the rampaging machine’s demolition spree. Unfortunately, the supernaturally sentient machine must have sensed this as well, for it swerved and dropped its latticed arm directly toward her. The distaff Avenger dove quickly to her left, leading the monster crane away from her friends, as the half-ton arm came smashing down into the muck of the street. Then, acting with reflexes honed by a lifetime of fighting for survival, she rolled back to her feet, muddy but alive.
Once again the crane raised its hoisting arm for a killing blow, but this time the Scarlet Witch struck first. Standing in a half crouch, she raised both hands in front of her. Then, with a high-pitched hum, concentric rings of violet-tinted hex force streamed from both hands to strike the ground beneath the crane, and almost immediately the massive machine began to sink. The hex was liquifying the normally-solid layer of permafrost beneath the street, turning one section of it into a veritable mire that drew the teetering crane down like a boulder in quicksand. When it was sufficiently buried, the Scarlet Witch thought, she would stop her hex, allowing the ground to resolidify and trap the deadly machine in a prison of frozen earth.
It was then that the shadow crossed her eyes and she looked up to see death only inches away. The angle at which the crane sank was bringing its arm down in an unexpected arc directly at her. Reacting instantly, she leaped to the side—and almost made it. The dropping arm struck her only a glancing blow, sending her skidding along the far sidewalk until she slowed to a stop, a rag doll in red, her only movement the measured rise and fall of breathing.
The skies had now darkened to a dusklike gloom, but Quicksilver could still make out the essentials of the tableau that lay spread before him: the deserted street, the quagmired crane, and the small, still form of his sister. For the second time in less than a day, someone had hurt Wanda. Only this time there was no one to stay him from his revenge. His narrowed eyes scanned the town, then beyond, finally settling on the old shaman as he stood beside some shadowed monolith on a hill a hundred yards away. And in the second that followed that discovery, Quicksilver was halfway up that hill.
Aningan Kenojuak stood atop the rise from which he had first viewed the travesty that had once been his village. It had all gone sour, he thought, holding fast to the gemstone necklace that allowed him to watch Quicksilver, as if in slow motion, sprinting up the slope toward him. But there was still hope. Perhaps he could find another village, another people who would worship him—that is, worship his god—with the love and respect that was proper.
“Don’t worry, My Lord,” he said to the ice block beside him. “They have taken everything else from me, but they will not again take you.”
On the slope, something grabbed Quicksilver’s ankle. His speed instantly cut to a fraction of what it had been, the Avenger tumbled forward, fighting for balance as his palms hit the ground, digging grooves in the hard earth and patchy snow. When he looked to see what had stopped him, his surprise turned quickly to horror.
For slithering up from around rocks and beneath snow were long strands of fibrous, yellow-gray lichens. They had wrapped themselves tightly around both of Quicksilver’s feet and now moved upward, coiling around calves, knees and thighs like living ropes. Overcoming his initial shock, the Silver Avenger grabbed great handfuls of the fungoid mass and ripped them from his body, only to have each gap he made filled immediately by the advancing, grasslike tentacles. In a matter of seconds, he was completely covered by the animate lichens, bound so tightly that he couldn’t even tremble.
Aningan Kenojuak looked down his nose at the gray, grassy lump that had fallen less than an arm’s length away, and raised a single eyebrow.
“So there,” he said.
Meanwhile, the storm clouds continued to gather, centering above the Bantu Junction equipment yard in a mass so thick and black that it actually reflected the light from the fire below. While standing in the air midway between cloud and flame, Thor still swung his hammer, using his divine command of the elements to intensify the ever-building storm. Winds of hurricane force tore at his cape and long, pale hair; sheets of gusting rain rang from his metal helm and pelleted the exposed skin of his face and arms. Yet, incredibly, the entire tempest was confined to the squared-off perimeter of the equipment yard.
Thor stared down, and his scowl of concentration turned to a frown. If he was to prevent an even greater loss of property, and quite possibly life, he had to move rapidly. The oil-based fire—which had remained totally unaffected by the minature gale—had consumed everything in the yard and was beginning to spread to the adjacent buildings. It had to be now.
His features set with grim purpose. Thor brought his left hand up to grab his right, using both to stop Mjolnir’s swing and hold the mighty mallet straight up above his head. Then, without a heartbeat’s pause, he brought the hammer straight down, like a beacon pointing the way to the supernatural holocaust below. The results were as awesome as they were spectacular.
Like living things, the hovering clouds spasmed, groaning with a thunder that shook the very ground and thrusting forth a jagged finger of lightning so bright that it would shame the sun. The lightning struck the oil fire dead center, parting the flames as a stone tossed in a puddle, and for an instant there was the shuddering whine of occult forces clashing. Then, the battle was over. Several small eruptions rocked the compound, one after the other, and the entire equipment yard exploded in a searing geyser of rising fire. The geyser changed colors as it grew, running the gamut of the rainbow, and at its peak shattered into a million splinters of kaleidoscopic flame, each no bigger than a man’s thumb; and each of which was easily doused by the still-falling rain before it had returned even halfway to earth.
The conflagration had ended.
With a tired, almost trivial gesture, Thor flicked his hammer—and the rain stopped. The clouds faded from black to gray to linen white, and then started to disperse. Once more, the sun shone on Bantu Junction.
And what Thor witnessed in that new light quickly changed his fatigue to anger. For besides the senseless destruction that had turned half of the small town to rubble, he saw the Beast sitting not far away, head in hands, disheveled and disoriented. Across the street from that he saw the beautiful and refined Scarlet Witch, now muddy and battered, slowly pulling herself to her knees. Rapidly surveying the entire area, he found the snow-spotted knoll upon which huddled the lichen-covered form that must be Quicksilver, and above which hovered the bizarrely ice-encrusted Captain America.
And atop which stood the elderly, parka-clad cause of it all.
Thor swung his hammer up to a strike popsition, and the sky trembled with residual thunder. “Prepare, base villain,” he spoke coldly, “to face the wrath of a true god!”
On the hill opposite, Aningan Kenojuak swallowed with some difficulty. Was there no stopping these vexing superheroes? With nervous fingers, he began touching out a familiar sequence on the facets of the stones about his neck, calling forth the pink carrier nimbus that would swiftly bear him and his precious ice-god away from possible danger.
But then he glanced over Thor’s shoulder, and all thoughts of prudent flight died. In their place there now grew a hatred, instant and ancient, germinating from an agony that had been the old shaman’s sole companion for so many empty years. It was an agony, he sudde
nly realized with an almost electrical rush of anticipation, that would soon be paid for in full.
For the god-stealer had returned.
Eight
“Heimdall’s horn!”
Thor spat the Nordic oath instinctively, ducking his head low to the left. The figure that had just shot over his right shoulder had taken him totally by surprise, and that shock increased as he recognized the flying man to be Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner. Grimly, he wondered if the hot-tempered Atlantean had come to aid his cause, or that of his enemy. Deciding not to take chances either way, the Thunder God raised his hammer once again—only to receive a second surprise.
“No, Thor! Don’t!”
Turning to the electronically augmented cry, Thor saw Iron Man swooping in to join him, cutting boot jets to minimum thrust so that he floated, nearly vertical, a few feet away.
“Namor’s on our side,” Iron Man called, “at least for the moment.”
“Thine presence gladdens my heart, Iron Man, but thou knowest not the situation. Yon fiend hath already laid low four of our number, and e’en the Prince of Atlantis cannot stand long before such uncanny power. I must fling mine hammer, lest—”
“You’re the mightiest among us, old friend,” Iron Man interrupted, “but your hammer didn’t stop Kenojuak before and there’s no reason to think it will now. But we learned a lot on our little pit stop in Atlantis and we’ve got a plan. So just sit back and let us handle this. Please!”
With that, Iron Man kicked his boot jets back to full thrust and took off, following Namor’s path across the battle-torn town. In his wake, Thor struggled with conflicting emotions. He was a hero, and as such wasn’t used to standing idly by while friends did battle, possibly to the death. But he was also a member of a team, and Iron Man was his leader, duly elected. Thus he remained standing in the air over the blackened equipment yard, gripping his enchanted hammer tightly in one hand and vaguely wondering where the Vision was.
On the low knoll beyond Bantu Junction, Aningan Kenojuak watched as his hated enemy sped through the air toward him. Immediately, he played the String Of Stones to cast a protective, yellow-green shield around his god, and then himself. His old eyes were eager—the longed-for battle had begun.
Namor struck with both fists extended, slamming them into the old magic man with a force like matched pile drivers. But the shaman didn’t move, didn’t stir, and Namor glanced off like a flat stone skipped on water.
“I know not why you’ve returned, defiler!” Aningan cried. “But I rejoice at your coming, for I am no longer helpless, and my god is no longer unprotected. This time it shall be you who will suffer, for the torment your casual act of petulance brought upon me, and for the degradation it brought to my people!
“This time, by the will of the ice-god and the power of the Blue Totem, you shall suffer! And scream! AND DIE!”
Namor turned in midair shortly after caroming off of his target. He was impressed. Incredible as it seemed, what Iron Man had told him about this ancient primitive appeared to be correct. Not that it mattered, of course. No human—magician or otherwise—could long stand against the one true Sub-Mariner!
Swooping low, Namor dug deep into the frozen earth, coming up almost immediately with a craggy, dirt-spotted boulder that must have easily weighed a quarter ton. This he cocked back in one hand, as if to hurl it with smashing finality at his adversary. But he never got to loose his deadly missile. For at that moment, Aningan Kenojuak stabbed a wizened finger at him and yelled, “Writhe!”
And suddenly, Namor was no longer free. The air around him, to a distance of some ten feet on any side, had congealed into a gelatinous, green-black mass. Immediately, his gas-breathing organs shut down and his internal gills came into play, straining to pull the jelly-like substance between their oxygen-absorbing folds. Namor’s ankle wings were also in trouble. The Atlantean was finding it almost impossible to flap in the newly-solidified environment, in a consistency that, nevertheless, kept him suspended in midair. Without thinking, Namor dropped the boulder and it drifted down through the mucusy mass, finally exiting with a slow, sucking plop before dropping to the ground below.
The Prince of Atlantis struggled, fighting to tear his way out of the cloying trap, but just when he seemed to be making some headway, the old shaman thrust his accusing finger forward once more, shouting, “DamnyoudamnyoudamnyouDIE!” And the green-black blob constricted, shrinking to where it extended only six feet beyond the amphibian monarch.
Inside that compacted structure, Namor gasped. He felt no fear, but he suddenly felt a tremendous increase in pressure, greater than any he had experienced beyond the deepest reaches of his watery realm. Breathing became even more difficult, and movement itself slowed to a crawl. From the outside, the Sub-Mariner looked like a pale figure toiling in slow motion, as viewed through a lens smeared with green-black grease.
Standing on the hillock, Aningan Kenojuak frowned. What was this god-thief made of, anyway? Such pressure should have killed him long ago, crushed his lungs to pulp! Could the Totem have been wrong about the limits of his power? But, no. He couldn’t fail now, not after all he’d been through.
Aningan pulled his arm back, then shot his pointing finger out one last time, screaming, “Diieeeeeee!” His lips were pulled back in a grimace, and his brow popped with rigid veins and beads of sweat. In the air before him, the oily dark clot that surrounded the Sub-Mariner shrunk once again, this time to a point that extended a mere two feet on a side.
Namor no longer struggled to escape his diminished prison. For when its size had decreased, the pressure inside had doubled, to an intensity beyond any he had ever endured. He was powerless, immobile . . . and his breathing had stopped.
But the spell was taking a toll on its caster, as well. For as Aningan poured all of his, and the String Of Stones’ energy into the destruction of his enemy, the shielding glow surrounding his body began to flicker, and fade, and finally disappear. It was at this precise moment that Iron Man, who had been keeping out of the shaman’s sight to the rear, dove in low, blasting the ground in front of the old Eskimo with both repulsors. The resulting spray/explosion of dirt, rock, and snow was blinding, and Aningan instinctively raised his arms to protect his face. Iron Man’s pulse quickened as he yelled:
“Now!”
From the ground in front of the shaman, from the pit blasted by the repulsors, the transparent Vision rose like structured smoke. He had been in an ethereal form in the knoll from the beginning, awaiting Iron Man’s signal. Now, he extended a hand as he rose, solidifying it so that when it reached Aningan Kenojuak it grabbed the String Of Stones with crushing force, pulling and snapping the necklace’s cord and sending the glittering gemstones bouncing and scattering down the hill in all directions.
Immediately, the green-black glob around the Sub-Mariner vanished, allowing the semiconscious monarch to fall, gasping, to the ground. And had anyone been inside the toppled mountains at the entrance to the valley outside of Atlantis, they would have been surprised to see Brother Bear also disappearing at that same moment.
Aningan Kenojuak rubbed the grit from his eyes, blinked, and disbelieved. For played out before him he saw a tragic tableau: his enemy freed, his power destroyed, and his dreams tarnished, pocked and bleached as if left too long beneath an unkind sun. Slowly, he turned toward his ice-encrusted god, hands extended as if to show their emptiness, and tears began to overflow his eyes, sliding down the ancient crags of his face like salty shame.
“My Lord,” he said in a voice that was nearly a whisper, “I . . . I’m sorry.”
Then he fell to his knees, the backs of his hands resting on his thighs, his head tilted up and to one side, his eyes tightly shut, and he cried. His frail body trembling with the release of emotions that should have died a decade ago, he cried.
Gathered around him, four mighty heroes—Iron Man, Thor, the Vision, and the still-slightly-stooped-over Sub-Mariner—saw Aningan Kenojuak not as a raving madman, not as
a deadly engine of occult enmity, but as what he really, and finally, was—a tired, broken old man.
“It isn’t melting, Iron Man. Not a drop.”
Inside his gold-and-crimson armor, Tony Stark listened to the Scarlet Witch, and worried. It had been half an hour since they had defeated Aningan Kenojuak; half an hour since they had brought the ice block containing the inert Captain America into the office/jail of Sheriff Lee Cordell, placing it in front of a hissing radiator and positioning several portable electric heaters around it in a semicircle. And in the half hour that the ice block had sat bathed in enough heat to slow-bake an apple pie, it had remained as solid, as glistening and unchanged, as it had on the frost-covered knoll outside.
The Scarlet Witch rose from her kneeling position beside the block, delicately daubing perspiration from her forehead with a Kleenex, and stepped from the semicircle of direct heat. It wasn’t much cooler anywhere else in the room, she thought. The jail was small, officially furnished with desks, wanted posters, and rifle racks, and was obviously built to comfortably house two men—Sheriff Cordell and his single deputy, Kurt Turnbull—as well as the occasional apprehended malefactor. Now, however, the building was crowded, not only with sheriff and deputy, but also an old Eskimo shaman, five super-heroes, two construction-company paramedics who served as Bantu Junction’s hospital and emergency service, and a three-by-seven-foot block of unmelting ice. The only one missing was the Vision.
The cause of the synthezoid’s absence was a matter of courtesy. Moments before, he had stepped outside to act as the Avengers’ representative in seeing off the departing Sub-Mariner. That such an action was mere formality had been evidenced by the fact that neither party had spoken as the Prince of Atlantis had taken to the air and flown swiftly southward. Neither had asked for gratitude; neither had given it.
Marvel Novel Series 10 - The Avengers - The Man Who Stole Tomorrow Page 9
