“Yes?”
“Thank you for letting me get to this point on my own.” She laughed softly. “If I’d tried to give you advice, you’d have resisted. I’m learning how you work, Warren Worthington. Next thing you know, I’ll know you as well as would a wife.”
He didn’t fall into shock at the word wife. Hmmm, she thought. Inside the shadows beneath his eyebrows, she imagined she saw his eyes twinkle. Surely she was mistaken.
They stepped outside. Beneath the dark canopy of clouds, she summoned psychic energy and began to shape it into the construct that Warren had requested.
CHAPTER 4
olverine will go out alone,” Storm an-■W nounced.
y y The seven X-Men stood with Ka-Zar and Shanna just inside the open gates of the village stockade. The mutant visitors were as well rested as could be expected of a night in a land where mysterious roars and screeches tore through the jungle every five minutes. They were as ready as they were likely to get. Storm’s declaration drew them up short.
“Before we hit the hammocks last night, you were insisting on groups of at least two,” Iceman said.
“I’ve reconsidered,” Storm explained. “You have no objection, do you, Logan?”
“Nope,” answered the Canadian. “Suits me fine. I can produce results quicker if I don’t have to worry ’bout anyone slowin’ me down.”
Psylocke was tempted to probe Storm’s mind to confirm what the team leader was thinking, but she didn’t have to. The wind-rider’s decision was a perfect example why she had been chosen to command the X-Men back when Cyclops had first left the group. Betsy again did not have to be a telepath to see that Wolverine was in one of his moods. The man got on a scent like a bloodhound sometimes and couldn’t be dragged back to the kennel. Had Storm ordered it, he would have been a team player and stayed with whomever she assigned, but he wanted to charge ahead this time on his own.
Was it the jungle? He liked it here. Was it calling him?
The best thing was just to get out of his way. Storm had not only done so, but made it seem like her idea. Ororo had taken a situation that could have exacerbated tensions, and used it to reinforce her authority.
Pretty smooth, Betsy told Ororo mentally. You saw which way the wind was blowing.
Storm didn’t reply, but did smile a small smile before continuing. “I’D drop you in deep jungle, then, where your tracking ability will do the most good,” Ororo told Logan. “Ka-Zar just reported that a clan of the Lake People have located signs of recent enemy presence. Perhaps you can see a,pattern to the comings and goings.”
“You and me are thinkin’ alike,” Logan replied. ‘‘It’s a go. Sooner the better.”
Storm inclined her head.
“As for the other teams,” the wind-rider continued, “Archangel and I are a natural tandem. We’ll reconnoiter the valley by air, covering as much terrain as possible both quickly and quietly. We’ll pursue Sauron or pterosaur riders should they appear, and fetch the rest of you if we should locate anything resembling a stronghold.”
“Ye olde mutant air force,” the Beast quipped.
“Yes.”
“Ka-Zar and I will be coordinating searches by the Fall People and the Swamp People,” Shanna said.
Ororo nodded. “Which leaves four X-Men to pair off into two more teams.”
“Actually, it doesn’t,” Psylocke said. “I was talking with Zira at breakfast. She mentioned that there are two people in the village who survived an early raid by Sauron. And, of course, there are scores of witnesses to the attack upon Ka-Zar. I think it might prove fruitful if I probe the minds of some of these individuals. I may uncover useful information that would help us against Sauron. Something in their memories they don’t realize is important, so they haven’t mentioned it.”
Ka-Zar murmured appreciatively. “That’s a great idea. I’ll round up some volunteers.”
“Some of Tongah’s people won’t care to have someone playing Peeping Tom with their minds,” Shanna interjected.
“But others will,” Ka-Zar said. “Especially if they think it will help put an end to the raids.”
“It does sound like an efficient use of Betsy’s talents,” Storm admitted. “Very well. She’ll stay here, at least for today.”
’ “Which leaves us with an odd number,” commented the Beast, settling his hairy paws on the shoulders of Iceman and Cannonball.
Storm frowned. “It does. So be it. Let’s keep the three of you as a unit. While Archangel and I visit places like Gar-okk’s old city and other farflung locales Sauron frequented in the past, you can serve not only as a search party, but provide firepower along the lake near the villages in the event of new attacks. Cannonball can airlift you if you need to hop from place to place quickly.”
“As you command, fair lady,” Hank said. Iceman and Cannonball nodded.
Storm held up her wrist radio. “Everyone linked up? Good. Then let’s do it.”
Logan bent down and gazed closely at the footprints in the mud of the clearing.
“Four of ’em,” he muttered aloud. “All men, by the depth of the impressions.” The two Lake People warriors that crouched beside him did not respond. They didn’t understand English. Logan pointed at the spoor, and counted off four on his fingers.
The warriors nodded, and then pointed at an additional set that did not match the others.
“Yeah. Lupo.” The prints resembled those of a human only to a degree. The claw marks and toes looked canine.
“Lupo,” said the older warrior with the velociraptor-tooth necklace around his throat. He gave a tiny howl like a wolf.
It had rained just before dawn, but no drops had rinsed away the tracks. They were as fresh as the warriors had promised when they rendezvoused with Wolverine just outside the village where Storm had delivered him.
, So far, so good.
The older warrior, whose name seemed to be Gelm, gestured at the rock outcropping ahead and the pterosaur droppings upon it.
“Yeah, they took to the air, looks like, not too long ago,” Wolverine said. “You think so, Aben?” he asked, winking at the younger tribesman.
Aben nodded, flapping his arms like wings.
“If they’re gone, why’d you bring me here?” Wolverine pointed to himself and shrugged.
The pair tilted their heads back. Their nostrils quivered.
“You guys’re good, y’know that?” Wolverine was impressed. They had noticed the scent of wolf lingered in the air. Nothing as definite as a trail. The mutate and his party definitely had taken to the air. But he was still somewhere in the vicinity, or had been very recently. The flight had been short, perhaps designed only to interrupt the trail and make things difficult for a tracker.
This was a lead he could work with. Lupo and his group were probably setting up for a raid on Gelm and Aben’s camp. It was inhabited by only twenty or so natives—just one clan, and therefore a prime target.
Wouldn’t it just be too bad if their plan developed a few rips and slices?
“C’mon,” Logan said, pointing at the thick jungle beyond the clearing. “Keep up if you can.”
Logan crept carefully along the animal track, nostrils flaring at the panoply of aromas here in the jungle. He had jogged, climbed, and slashed his way through at least four miles of verdant growth—how many species had he seen?
Such a place. True, it was not the conifer wilds of the Canadian taiga, but it still felt like home in so many ways. The; more he gave in to the untamed energies of the land, the more natural it felt. He’d had to go solo. Instinct. Not that he’d wanted to offend his teammates’ abilities, but he’d known how it had to be. He couldn't have explained why in words. Not to worry, though. Storm, perceptive as ever, had figured it out, and let him out of the harness.
He silently brushed aside a frond bigger than his torso. A few feet away, a small, deerlike creature was sipping from the rivulet that dribbled along between the giant trees. A dikdik, perhaps. One of the most
timid of herbivores, the sort that bounded away at the first hint of danger.
It hadn’t detected Wolverine, so furtive had been his approach. He reached out with his hand and gently nudged the animal’s tail.
Viiiippp.
The dikdik, its throat fluttering and its eyes wide as saucers, bounded into the undergrowth, so quickly it seemed to overtake its own little squeak of alarm.
X-1HEN
Wolverine chuckled. He bent and sipped from the same narrow stream.
There in the soft earth beside the water was another wolflike print.
Wolverine narrowed his eyes. Good. The scent had been growing stronger and easier to detect, but now he had a physical trail to follow again. He sketched a big “X” in the soil beside the track, so that Gelm and Aben would immediately know he had come this way. He had long since outpaced them, but there was no reason to make their lives difficult.
He moved even faster than before, nose and eyes picking up the signs of where Lupo had gone. His hands began to twitch, aching to extrude his claws and feel the pitch of battle.
It was a jungle out there. It was a jungle within. Life had a way of balancing out just right sometimes.
Psylocke shaded her eyes as she emerged from the dim light of the lodge into the overcast-but-brilliant Savage Land day. Sweat poured down her sides, and her hair was matted. It was bad enough spending the morning in hard psi labor. To do so without a morning shower and coffee, that was duty above and beyond the call.
As a tough preteen, Betsy Braddock, sister of the future Captain Britain, had always longed for adventure. As an adult with adventures galore in her resume, she understood that her childhood fantasies had somehow glossed over the possibility of missions to places with no softsoap, no comer pharmacies, not even a decent mirror.
But then, she had changed in so many ways since that spoiled, rich English upbringing. Right down to the body— no longer blonde and a trifle on the frail side, but long, dark-tressed, Asian, and powerful. A bizarre body-switch with a
woman named Kwannon—now deceased—had seen to that. To this day, she had yet to fully adjust to the change.
Her latest probe subject, one of the warriors wounded in the melee that had brought down Ka-Zar and killed young Immono—Psylocke shivered at the shared memory of the youth’s neck bent so grotesquely from the fall-—lifted the flaps and came out into the open as well.
“Thank you, Ushatch,” Psylocke said. “My apologies for the dizziness. It will pass by the end of the day.”
“No matter. It is good to be able to help.” The warrior, as Psylocke now knew from having seen inside him, was the kind of man who hated being an invalid. Luckily, his injuries were the sort that would cease to hamper him by the next feastnight, the every-thirty-days ritual the Fall People used as one of their key measures of time, having no moon to observe. He would eventually heal completely. “You found something?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so.”
He nodded optimistically.
As Ushatch limped back to the medicine man’s hut, Betsy stretched out the kinks in her joints and performed a slow-motion version of a white crane kung fu form she had been honing lately. Her ninja-trained muscles complained about the minimal level of physical activity she had endured these past few hours. Another price of losing her birth body.
She awakened the psychic tendril she had woven the night before, at Archangel’s request. Along its length came Warren’s soothing presence, though he was way out over the southern hills, ordinarily far enough to require more effort to make contact. Reassured, she let the connection fade once more into the background.
She heard footfalls, and opened her eyes. Ka-Zar and Zabu were ambling toward her. The jungle lord shrugged. “Learn
x-mm
Two members of the pack shifted aside, letting Gaz
In the other image, a pteranodon-man wandered aiml
x-mm
anything? Shanna and I have little to show for our morning’s work, I’m afraid.”
“Not much here,” Psylocke admitted. She scratched Zabu behind his ears. “Just one little aberration I noticed in a couple of the accounts.”
“And that is?”
Psylocke liked the way he hovered so near, within an arm’s reach, able to share the aromas of body and breath. That was the insular, private way talking was done among the indigenous peoples. An American or a Brit would have felt their personal space was being invaded, but Betsy found it no intrusion when the other individual was Ka-Zar. That was even more true now that he seemed to have sloughed off most of his fatigue. He brimmed with some of the vigor he’d shown on her first visit to the Savage Land, when he’d literally snapped the chains Zaladane had placed around his wrists.
“Ushatch has traveled with you for years,” she stated as she started to stroll around the village, Ka-Zar matching her stride next to her. ‘ ‘He was with you back when Karl Lykos was part of your entourage.”
“Yes. That’s right.” Ka-Zar winced. His surface reveries, too “loud” for Psylocke to avoid reading, swam with images of the good man Lykos had been then, fighting hard for the welfare of the tribes, putting his medical knowledge to good use whenever he could fend off the jealous interference of the native shamans.
“In spite of his pteranodon shape, Sauron still speaks with a voice that is recognizably that of Karl Lykos,” Betsy added.
“Yes. It’s always been that way.” Ka-Zar shivered. “It’s a bit like hearing the voice of a friend coming out of a crocodile, as if he’s been eaten whole.”
“You heard him speak when you were attacked. Ushatch heard it, also. Same voice, right?”
“Without a doubt. Right down to the accent. It has a trace of Greek in it from his father. Also some Spanish influence, the result of childhood years spent in southern Chile and Argentina. Not a standard mixture.”
“Ushatch doesn’t speak English.”
“Only a smattering. Shanna and I have, uh, ‘contaminated’ quite a few of the Fall People, but he’s not among them.”
Psylocke hadn’t needed the confirmation, since she knew Ushatch’s background thoroughly as a result of the psi scan. “What all this means,” she said, “is that Ushatch didn’t listen to the content of Sauron’s words during the attack, nor to the accent. It was just gibberish to him.”
“That makes sense,” Ka-Zar said. “So?”
“So he was able to pick up on a discrepancy you might have ignored. Sauron’s voice wasn’t modulated the same way as in years past. Everyone alive speaks with a characteristic tone and stress to their sentences. A flavor. Think of Lennon and McCartney back in their salad days. You’ve seen documentaries, or heard the songs?”
“Lennon and McCartney? Of course. I haven’t spent all my life in this jungle, Ms. Braddock. Let’s see. I’d describe their voices back then as young, jocular, full of their Liverpudlian origins. Both of them—all four Beatles, actually— sounded remarkably similar.”
“Right. But even when their visual image wasn’t on screen, you always knew when John Lennon was speaking. There was always the hint of a second meaning, a subtext. Paul’s ‘flavor’ was on-the-surface, more honest, perhaps less sophisticated.”
“Oh, my God,” Ka-Zar murmured softly. His thoughts
x-mN
were tumbling through the memories of the battle. “Now I see. At no time in the past did Sauron ever speak so... so ... Hell, how do I put it?”
“He was gleeful.”
“Yes. That’s it.” Ka-Zar snapped his fingers. “Karl was always serious. Sauron was dismissive, arrogant, even sadistic. Neither of them ever sounded like what I heard two days ago.”
“Your attacker had a lightheartedness to his speech. I looked at that piece of Ushatch’s memory several times. The creature definitely had an evil quality. He was as boastful as ever. But he also spoke like a man thoroughly enjoying the advantage he had over you.”
“Impossible,” Ka-Zar said. “Neither Karl Lyk
os nor Sau-rpn is acquainted with the concept of ‘fun’.”
’ ‘ ‘The flavor of one’s speech reflects the personality within. The ability to derive mirthful satisfaction from one’s own success requires an inner stability neither Lykos nor Sauron has ever demonstrated. Could we be facing a new Sauron? A stranger?”
“What are you saying? That someone else was transformed into that half-pteranodon body? Someone who just happens to have Karl Lykos’s voice? He knew me, Betsy. I acknowledge the difference in his tone, but there’s too much about him that’s the same for him to be an imposter.” “You think.”
“Well, yes. I think. It’s an opinion. We’ll have to mention this to the others and see whether it gives us any insights.” “I’ll bring it up when everyone reports back in tonight. I could use the afternoon to probe a few more witnesses, see if I come up with anything better.” She rubbed her gritty scalp. “Meanwhile, is there any place around here that a lady could take a bath?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said brightly, “we have quite remarkable facilities. Let me show you the way.”
He directed her toward a small side gate in the stockade.
Wolverine leapt. The beetle-browed warrior at the end of the group below never knew what hit him.
The sound of the impact caused Lupo and the remaining three renegades to turn, but not fast enough. Wolverine hopped off his victim’s back, extended the claws of his right hand, and charged. His swipe divided the nearest enemy’s club into quarters. Before the raider could react, Logan jabbed him with his left, currently declawed fist. The man staggered back, asleep on his feet.
Logan couldn’t bring himself to kill if he could avoid it. The- raiders might be hypnotic slaves of Sauron, and not responsible for their actions.
The falling body was in the way. Logan leapt over, but the obstacle cost him his best angle of attack. Lupo and the remaining two men jumped to the side.
The advantage of surprise was gone. Too bad. Logan had decided the risk was worth it. He could have waited for Gelm and Aben to back him up, or radioed for reinforcements, but this felt like the right moment. Two down. That was enough, if he didn’t screw up.
Law of the Jungle Page 5
