by Greg Cox
“I see,” the Grandmaster wheezed. He glanced at the Talon, who stood at attention by his side. “Frederick?”
“I have examined the remains, Grandmaster. The young lady was indeed incinerated.”
In truth, Lydia had died painlessly from the injection. Carefully preparing the body in his laboratory, Percy had set fire to it postmortem. He had counted on the fact that the Talon was an assassin, not a scientist. It was doubtful that the man had the expertise to grasp what had truly occurred.
“Where are her remains now?” the Grandmaster asked. “Have they been disposed of properly?”
“Not yet,” Percy said. “With your permission, I have retained the remains for further examination, in order to better study the effects of the formula on her tissues.”
“Very well,” the Grandmaster said. “And what of her… disappearance? Is that being accounted for as well?”
“We are dealing with it appropriately,” Margaret assured him. “A suitable scapegoat has been selected. There will be no hint of the Court’s involvement.”
“See that there isn’t.” The Grandmaster fixed his rheumy eyes on Percy. “I shall speak frankly, Wright. This news is most disappointing. I believe I made it quite clear exactly how desirous the Court is to possess a perfected version of your elixir.”
“But the—” Percy began.
“You did indeed, Grandmaster,” Margaret said, “but let me observe that the news is not entirely bleak. The fatal reaction was delayed for several days, instead of occurring immediately, as before. That very fact suggests that Percy is on course to eliminate this unwanted side effect. Don’t you agree, husband?”
Percy was surprised to hear Margaret speaking up on his behalf. He could only assume that she sought to protect her own position within the Court.
“Just so,” he agreed. “As you have had occasion to remind me, science is a matter of trial and error. We can take comfort in knowing that this poor woman’s sacrifice may have brought us one step closer to success.”
The Grandmaster harrumphed loudly. He seemed disinclined to wax sentimental about Lydia’s tragic fate.
“Better sooner than later, Wright,” he growled. “Keep at your work. The Court of Owls demands your elixir.”
Percy nodded. “Understood, Grandmaster.”
The old man stood, leaning heavily on a polished-wood cane. Together he and the Talon departed, leaving Percy and Margaret alone in the turret.
“I suppose I should thank you,” he said grudgingly, “for taking my side.”
“Do not delude yourself, Percy, that I did so for your benefit.” She gazed at him with icy hauteur. “Any failure—or deceit—on your part would reflect poorly on me as well. I was merely acting in the best interests of our family.” Her cold eyes narrowed in suspicion. “The girl did die as you said, did she not?”
“Yes,” he said honestly. “My elixir destroyed her.”
“Good riddance.” Her lip curled in contempt. “I trust that you understand, Percy, the sole reason you are still alive—despite your grievous indiscretions—is that the Court still has hopes that you will perfect your elixir in due time. Never forget that.”
“You needn’t worry on that account, Margaret,” he replied. “I could not forget if I tried.”
Some things could never be forgotten.
Or forgiven.
The letters were nowhere to be found.
A quick solo excursion to Joanna’s apartment, now sitting empty while Claire remained in Metropolis, confirmed that Percy’s long-lost letters to Lydia had been stolen. Yet the damage was likely to be minimal. Some of the documents had been scanned and were on the thumb drive from the cabin. The rest of the data resided with the one asset the Court had not been able to acquire.
The Court had the letters, but Batman had Joanna.
“So the Owls tested a version of Percy’s elixir on Lydia, who vanished around the same time,” Batman said, reviewing the case with Batgirl and Joanna back in the auxiliary bunker. “Billy Draper was blamed, but there’s nothing to connect him with the Court. So he was just a patsy who took the fall for her disappearance.
“Percy knew the truth, and never got over it,” he continued. “He also hid imagery from Lydia’s visions in his tributes to her, while overtly alluding to an ‘inferno’ that awaited the city.”
“Could that have been the outbreaks of Burning Sickness?” Joanna asked, pacing restlessly. “Maybe Lydia foresaw the fact that the Court would continue Percy’s experiments. It certainly qualifies as serial murder.”
Batman’s mood darkened as he recalled the four charred corpses for which the Owls had been responsible.
“And it’s certain to continue,” Batgirl added. “Vincent thinks Percy somehow hid the formula, and he’s not going to stop until he finds it.” She glanced at Joanna, who was wearing a spare pair of glasses that Batman had procured during his visit to her apartment. A shower and a change of clothes had her looking less like a homeless fugitive. “He thinks your research will lead him to it.”
“That’s just insane,” Joanna said. “I’d never even heard of this ‘elixir’ until Vincent told me about it. Percy never mentioned it in his letters, and I’d never made a connection between Lydia’s disappearance and the Burning Sickness. I’m as much in the dark as the rest of you.”
“Nevertheless,” Batman said, “he thinks you have something he wants, and that gives us an advantage. It may be there’s a pattern of some sort in the posthumous tributes to Lydia, and the warnings Percy snuck into them. They seem to prove that the elixir worked, at least to some degree, but they don’t tell us where the final formula is hidden—if it exists at all.”
“You think there’s a chance it’s all a hoax?” Batgirl asked.
“We have no way of telling,” he admitted, “but given the threat it would pose, we can’t take any chances. And regardless, the Burning Sickness experiments have to be stopped.” He moved to a workstation boasting a modest array of screens, and Batgirl followed suit. Joanna stood just behind them. She kept nervously checking out the entrances and exits, as if she expected one or more of the Talons to charge into their safe haven.
“I can help with the search,” she volunteered. “I know more than any one person should about the figures Percy sculpted after her disappearance.” She laughed bitterly. “Serves me right, I guess. Curiosity killed the cat.”
Selina might disagree, Batman thought. “Show us the sculptures we know about so far.”
“Coming right up,” Batgirl said.
She downloaded the files from a dedicated server at the Clock Tower. Thumbnails of the now-familiar monuments, museum pieces, and architectural adornments spread out across the screen like playing cards dealt from a deck. Separate attachments contained links to the 3D scans their drones had conducted earlier, waiting to be called up as needed. She glanced over at Joanna.
“These figures were all done after Lydia’s disappearance, right?”
“That’s right,” Joanna said confidently. “He’d sculpted her dozens of times before, to be sure, but the hidden prophecies didn’t start showing up until after she was supposedly killed by Billy Draper.”
“Who then burned her body,” Batman said. “Allegedly. Can you help us place these figures in order of their creation or installation?”
She chuckled, far less bitterly than before. “After all those long hours slaving away on my thesis? I can do it in my sleep.”
She squeezed past Batgirl to get at a keyboard. True to her word, she swiftly placed the thumbnails in chronological order. Batman sat back to survey them as a whole. It took him only a moment to spot a pattern.
“The hidden warnings,” he observed. “They’re in chronological order, too, when it comes to the events they seem to be predicting: Martha Wayne’s murder in Crime Alley, Harvey Dent’s mutilation at the Gotham courthouse, the Joker’s toxin in the harbor, Poison Ivy’s first assault on the Botanical Garden, the advent of the Scarecrow… they’re
all in sequence here. Each figure advances the timeline, as foreseen a century in advance.”
Joanna gaped at the screen. “I never realized that before.”
“You’re less familiar with the criminal history of Gotham City,” Batman observed. “Consider yourself lucky.”
“Not that lucky,” she replied, bristling a little.
Batman recalled the tragic deaths of her parents. “You’re right,” he said. “I apologize. I simply meant that you can be forgiven for not memorizing the Joker’s rap sheet.”
“Got it,” she said, and she looked down. “Sorry. Just a bit on edge, you know.”
“Anyone would be, after what you’ve been through,” he said. The case had him on edge, too. The Court of Owls had that effect on him.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I’m not seeing any warning of an inferno, or even of the Burning Sickness,” Batgirl said, scanning the rearranged thumbnails. “If each statue points further ahead, and most of these prophecies have already come true, maybe we should just skip ahead to the very last statue?” She clicked on the final thumbnail, expanding it.
The image showed a bronze door on a mausoleum, where a life-sized female figure was posed in mourning, her bare back and shoulders to the viewer, her downcast face turned toward the door. Batman recognized the pose from the framed sketch in Vincent Wright’s office.
“Whose crypt is that?” he asked, suspecting he already knew the answer.
“Percy’s,” Joanna confirmed. “His will stipulated that he be interred behind the door, regardless of any objections from his survivors.”
“I can’t imagine Mrs. Wright was in love with that arrangement,” Batgirl said, “even if Lydia’s face is tactfully concealed. Got to sting to have your husband’s dead mistress eternally posed at the door to his resting-place.”
“That may have been the intent,” Batman guessed. “Is that the last of the Lydias?”
“As far as I know,” Joanna replied. “There could be others out there, but none that I’ve found. He died very suddenly of natural causes.”
Batman had his suspicions regarding the circumstances of Percy’s passing.
Alan Wayne had died of an “accident.”
“So that was the end of Percy’s career, and his obsession with Lydia,” Batgirl said. “Maybe he never got around to memorializing his final prophecy? If he died suddenly, he might never have committed the formula to paper, or hidden it where he intended.”
“‘My muse is a muse of fire.’” Batman scratched his chin. “‘A deathless inferno that consumes my soul, as it will someday consume all of Gotham.’” Percy said that after Lydia had died, and it sounded like something he was certain would come to pass. How far ahead would Percy have planned his predictions? He was a man of science, an artist who took mounds of clay and gave them form, definition… purpose. How could he have left his greatest work— his masterpiece—to chance?
He couldn’t.
“We’re looking at this from the wrong direction,” he said. “What if the answers we’re looking for can be found by looking backward through time to when this puzzle began?” He moved his gaze back to the beginning of the sequence. “What’s the first sculpture Percy completed after Lydia’s disappearance?”
Joanna didn’t even need to look at the screen.
“The statue of ‘Wisdom’ at Gotham University.”
Batman located the image, and enlarged it. A robed figure was seated on a throne. Behind her, the wide stone steps led up to the front entrance of the university’s main building. A tiara crowned the imposing bronze goddess’s brow. Her left hand held aloft a scepter, while her right hand beckoned to students in search of knowledge. Her face was Lydia’s, which meant she looked like Joanna, as well.
The university, Batman thought. He recalled the scorched remains in Professor Morse’s office. It seemed strangely fitting that the clues led them back there.
“What’s the hidden message in that one?”
“That’s the thing,” Joanna replied. “I hadn’t found one yet. I was still investigating when the Talon first came for me.” She peered at the image. “Maybe something to do with the crown, or the scepter?”
“Batgirl?” he asked.
“Beats me.” She threw up her hands. “Sorry to disappoint you, but nothing leapt out at me, either. If Percy hid a warning in this one, he was much craftier about it… and went to much greater lengths to hide it.”
“Which makes this statue all the more interesting.” Batman leaned forward in his seat. His gut told him they were getting warmer. “Maybe this will help.” He opened the attached scan and a three-dimensional holographic rendition of “Wisdom” appeared in the empty air above an adjacent console, based on the scans Batman had taken at the site. Every detail had been captured in perfect detail.
Joanna gaped. “Whoa,” she said. “I thought this stuff was only possible in the movies.”
“Maybe I’ll share the files with you once this is over,” Batman responded wryly. The trio gathered around the glowing model to examine it from every angle. The weightless image was certainly easier to manipulate than the massive original. Working the controls, Batman was able to rotate it in every direction, enlarging and highlighting individual areas one after another. A separate control bar allowed him to control the lighting, so that he could heighten or lessen the contrast and the shadows defining the planes and edges on the statue. It was as if he could examine the statue with several different kinds of vision.
This must be the way Clark sees things every day.
In the macro view nothing appeared to be unusual, so he turned his attention to less prominent portions of the statue. Forget the tiara or the scepter or the throne—those were too obvious. His gaze prowled the contours and crevices of the sculpture as it might a crime scene, looking for something, anything, that seemed out of place or inexplicable. Something that didn’t add up…
“There,” he said after a few minutes. “What’s that?”
Tucked away in the billowing folds of Wisdom’s robes, just to one side of her draped left leg, there appeared to be something sculpted deep inside a shadowy recess. Batman highlighted the depression, then banished the rest of the 3D model with a single keystroke. All that remained, suspended above the projector, was a single object.
An owl.
“Wow,” Joanna said. “I’ve admired that statue a zillion times, looked at it from every angle, and never spotted this before.”
“Probably because it’s not meant to be seen,” Batgirl said, “unless you’re really looking for it.”
“A confession perhaps?” Joanna speculated. “Or an accusation?”
“Possibly.” Batgirl studied the holographic raptor, which resembled an ordinary barn owl with its beady opaque eyes, long beak, and blank, moon-like expression. “Then again, owls are symbols of wisdom, associated with both Athena and Minerva, so we can’t be sure that—”
“No,” Batman growled. “That’s the Owl. Their Owl.”
The owl hidden within the folds of the statue was a miniature replica of the immense marble figure at the heart of the Court’s subterranean Labyrinth. The Owl that had watched silently over the ordeal that had almost broken him. The Owl that still haunted his nightmares.
I should have known, he thought, that it would come to this.
“The Labyrinth,” he told them. “The Great Owl of the Labyrinth. That’s the very first clue Percy left for the future generations, pointing to their underground nest. If there are any further answers to be found, I’ll lay odds that’s where they’ve been waiting—for at least a century.”
Joanna shot him a puzzled look, but Batgirl looked aghast. She understood what this meant. To stop the Owls from locating the formula, Batman would have to go back to the last place in Gotham he wanted to see again.
The Gotham Towers Hotel, Gotham City, 1918
“Billy Draper, the Court of Owls demands your obedience.”
What? Billy woke from a groggy, whisk
ey-soaked slumber to find an ominous figure dressed in black standing by his bed in the penthouse suite of the Gotham Towers Hotel. Despite his hangover, he was immediately jolted to attention by the sight of the hooded intruder, who peered at him through tinted brass goggles that betrayed no hint of emotion.
“Who—? How did you get in here?”
He opened his mouth to scream for help, only to suddenly feel the point of a sword at his throat.
“Keep your voice down,” the intruder advised. “It will go better for you.”
Billy gulped, afraid to even nod with the blade at his throat.
“I have money,” he croaked. “My family has money.”
The intruder shook his head. “I’m not here for your money, Billy.”
“Then what do you want?” he asked, teetering on the brink of hysteria. “Who are you?”
“Beware the Court of Owls,” the man recited, “that watches all the time…”
Realization dawned on Billy. His eyes bulged as he identified the figure by his bed.
“The Talon.”
“Good,” the boogeyman said. “You know your nursery rhymes.”
The sword at Billy’s throat became even more frightening. He struggled to maintain control of his bladder.
“Are… you here t-to take my h-head?”
“Not if you do as you’re told, Billy.”
Billy seized on that shred of hope. “What do you want me to do?”
“You’re going to get up and get dressed. Then you’re going to walk down to the police station and confess to the murder of Lydia Doyle.”
“What?” He couldn’t believe his ears. “I didn’t… I would never…”
“Nevertheless, that’s what you’re going to do.” As he spoke, he gave the blade a slight nudge, almost breaking skin. Billy struggled to make sense of what was happening. Then the implications of the Talon’s demand struck him.
“Hang on there,” he said. “Did something happen to Lydia?”
