Monom growled and stomped forward.
Don’t hit Rat-Tail, the boy murmured in his thoughts. Don’t hit Rat-Tail. It was the plea his mother had often made on his behalf. He couldn ’/ summon the will to say it aloud. Monom would only mock the phrase, and hit him anyway.
He leapt out into the storm. The rain, at least, washed his face clean. The tears would never come again.
Rat-Tail [Psylocke sensed another, true name somewhere deeper down, but in these particular memories Lupo, like many victims, viewed himself by the title his persecutor had bestowed: Rat-Tail; Fatherless boy; Useless filth] hovered at the fringes of the clan grounds, nearly hidden in the elephant grass.
One of the village women, a companion of his mother’s for whom he had occasionally fetched water, saw him. She furtively checked to see if the men were watching. She picked up a cake of acorn meal that was heating on the stones by the campfire and flung it to the boy. Quickly the woman scooped another bit of meal from the mortar and replaced the missing item, the fear in her eyes reminding Rat-Tail of how the woman’s mate had pulled out an entire lock of her hair for giving away food to the orphan a few days earlier.
He dug the cake out of the dust, retreated to the grass, and gobbled it down. His stomach spasmed, more irritated by the introduction of substance than relieved.
Rat-Tail braced himself for a sudden thumping or jabbing. The clan’s older boys loved to sneak up behind him and pounce whenever he dared to approach closely enough to beg. No ambush came. That was the way of it—sometimes punishment, sometimes not. Sometimes food, sometimes none. The tribe tolerated the orphan’s presence just enough to keep him dependent, denying him true sustenance, denying him the final release from his suffering. They would not kill him, but it would be no tragedy to them if he died—by starvation, by accident, by being too slow to get away from a sabretooth cat or a woolly rhino.
The hollowness in his gut remained. He slipped away from the clan grounds, certain that he would not be lucky twice in the same day. A grasshopper twittered past. He chased it a hundred paces through the grass and finally caught it. It, too, failed to curb his hunger.
His wandering took him over a rugged spur of the foothills. His clan did not live in the jungle. That was for the prosperous, strong tribes. Instead, they skirted its edges, surviving in the savanna or in the foothills, where the herds ran. No banana trees. No prime fishing pools. Food here was gained the hard way, and one juvenile all on his own could barely acquire enough to stagger on from day to day.
Down in a gorge, he heard the growling of adult wolves, the excited yips of their cubs. Hiding behind a boulder, he gazed down and saw the pack feeding on the remains of a mastodon that they had chased to the edge of the precipice until the giant creature had fallen and broken its spine.
They feasted. They waddled away, bellies distended, licking their teeth with their long, floppy tongues.
Rat-Tail hesitated, waiting for the rush of scavengers. But the gorge had trapped the scent of the kill, and its depth had so far concealed the site from the far-seeing eyes of carrion birds, save for two parrot-sized, unintimidating vultures.
The boy rushed down. Ignoring the squawks of the vultures, he broke off a protruding rib to which clung enough meat that he could scarcely carry the load. He ran to an easily defended cleft in the rockface and gnawed at the flesh and marrow until, for the first time that he could remember, he had eaten his fill.
The next morning, when he was able to move again, he found the spoor the pack had left and began to follow it.
Wolf-Shadow, as he had renamed himself, trod tentatively along the forest trail. His companion, another outcast like himself, one of the few humans he had spoken with over the past nine years, set a grueling pace. Wolf-Shadow was used to that. He had run for hours on end when the pack was chasing prey, until he was just as fast as they, with equal endurance. What he was not used to was the dim light and enclosed space beneath the green canopy of leaves.
He contemplated turning around and running back to the savanna and foothills. It had not been an easy life, but he was grown now. He was strong from raiding the carcasses left behind whenever the pack brought down prey too large for them to devour completely—a mammoth, a giant sloth, a musk ox. The pack accepted him, letting him remain near and help warn them of dinosaurs passing or alert them to new game to hunt, as long as he did not try to mingle close enough to touch a cub. They were his benefactors in a way his own people had never been.
His nostrils quivered at the dank, alien aromas. He tipped a pitcher plant and cried out as the acidic nectar stung him. No, he did not like this place, but he remembered his companion’s promise; The Creator knows what it is to be an outcast. The Creator can give you power.
The wolves had not removed the loneliness from his existence, not entirely. He had no woman. No person or people who had to listen to him, be they his female or his children or his clansmen. He no longer possessed the tiny reservoir of purpose that had kept him alive throughout his teenage years. His birth clan had been attacked by a sortie of River People warriors. Some victims had been taken captive. Many more had been killed, including his stepfather, Monom. Deprived of the hope of eventual revenge for childhood mistreatment, Wolf-Shadow’s life had no direction.
He was, so he’d been told, just the sort of individual the Creator was looking for.
The jungle parted. There it was—a structure such as Wolf-Shadow had never seen. Within a palisade of logs, a stone tower climbed as high as ten men. His companion called to the guards, who stepped back from the gates and permitted them to enter. The interior of the tower daunted Wolf-Shadow even more. Strange mounds of metal and glass hummed, blinking with colored lights.
‘ 'Welcome, ’ ’ called a voice. The word was part of the common language of the Savage Land, but had been rendered with an accent unlike any of the tribes Wolf-Shadow had ever encountered.
A tall, powerfully built man stepped to the edge of the bright podium near the center of the chamber, emerging from silhouette. Wolf-Shadow’s eyes widened. The stranger’s hair was white, but he seemed as strong and healthy as Wolf-Shadow himself. He wore a strange, thin garment, not an animal skin, and accouterments of glistening metal. He was as near a god as Wolf-Shadow had ever pictured.
“/ am the Creator,” he said.
[Psylocke halted the progress of the memory and gazed intently at the figure on the podium. She knew him as Magneto. How severe his expression was, tempered with no hint of mercy or doubt toward any who would stand in his way. At that point in his life he was very much still the scourge who had founded the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, showing only the faintest glimmer of the sincere man of conscience he would later become.]
Wolf-Shadow prostrated himself on the floor, and did not look up until the man walked forward and lifted him up. He held a metal object toward his guest’s body. A little black needle twitched from side to side within a niche covered by some sort of clear substance. A light blinked.
“You have within you the quality I seek,” the Creator said. “Prepare to discover a new destiny.”
Throughout the process of transformation, the Creator hovered near, always checking, always murmuring reassurances, explaining when he could. The latter process grew easier after sessions inside one of the Creator’s secondary apparatuses. Suddenly the Creator's language was no longer a jumble of sounds. Terms such as electricity, nations, philosophy, and most of all, mutation, settled into his knowledge base. [Telepathy, Psylocke realized. Magneto built a device rtiat let him teach the mutates telepathically. It was a laborious and inefficient method, a pale shadow of the tutoring Professor Xavier could manage. It forever erased some of the subjects’ initiative. But it permitted him to advance his underlings far beyond the levels they could have reached through traditional instruction.]
The Creator provided the sort of nurturance and attention of a parent. He became the father Wolf-Shadow/Rat-Tail had never had.
The physical al
terations were agonizing that first time. His limbs stretched and reformed. His ears stiffened and stood straight upright. His body hair thickened. But the pain meant nothing once the voices began to murmur deep in his brain. The wolf pack howled, and he understood. Bats and monkeys and boars—all spoke in languages he could understand as easily as he now understood the German and English the Creator favored. And he could speak to them in return, in such a way that they were forced to listen.
“Go out among them, my son,” the Creator said. "Win them to our cause. I name you Lupo, master of beasts.' ’
Lupo had his purpose now. He grinned and did as his benefactor requested. He would fight for him. If the Monoms of the world or any other enemy stood in his way, they would regret it deeply.
The memories came thick and fast now, fueled by Psylocke’s knowledge of how they should progress. She shared Lupo’s glee as he harassed the tribes of the Savage Land, taking captives for Magneto’s experiments from the Water People, the River People, or whomever they wished to teach a lesson to. She witnessed his rage when Ka-Zar managed to thwart some of their raids.
His form remained largely human at first, more like his compatriots Gaza or Equilibrius or Piper, unlike Amphibius, but he willingly accepted the Creator’s decree that it would become more feral as time passed. He had a place, and others like himself to join with. He had a reason to exist.
Then came the interlopers. His master's old enemies. First the one with wings, then the other four. [Psylocke was drawn to the images of Archangel (then simply the Angel), Cyclops, the Beast (before he had mutated to his current furry form), Iceman, and Phoenix (then going by the name of Marvel Girl). How young they were. Still teenagers. Heroes, in a persecuted sort of way, while Betsy Braddock, her powers still latent, could only fantasize about the life they led, envying it in the way only someone who has never endured the trauma would.] They and Ka-Zar struck the Creator down.
Lupo survived, but it hardly seemed like survival. The changes the Creator had made were still dependent on his devices. When the machines no longer functioned, Lupo and the others reverted. He was once again no more than a tribal outcast, retaining only a smattering of his affinity with the pack. The lack of initiative, the need for guidance, was the only true inheritance he brought away from the collapsed citadel.
Then came Zaladane. She gave them a focus once more. She set Brainchild to recreate the genetic transformer, and he not only restored them, but found a way to plant the seed of new transformations deep inside, so that even if they should lose their powers, they would recover on their own.
Zaladane suffered defeats, both at the hands of Ka-Zar and a changing cast of X-Men. But Brainchild found Karl Lykos and raised him up as Sauron to be their new leader. And again, the X-Men and Ka-Zar and that accursed She-Devil had thwarted them, devolved them, stolen the meaning from their lives. No matter how much stronger their powers grew—in Lupo’s case, making him truly beastlike in physical form—no matter that their group grew to include such potent members as Vertigo, Whiteout, and Worm, the battles ended in defeat.
As for the Creator, he betrayed his promises. In the end, he personally fought his creations and destroyed Zaladane. Now they had only Sauron to turn to, and he was not himself. He wandered the corners of the Savage Land, gibbering mindlessly, flying off whenever he or Barbarus or Brainchild tried to lure him.
Ah, but that was over now. They had found him, and. ..
Psylocke withdrew. She shuddered. Lupo’s was not the most abhorrent soul she had touched in her career. The Shadow King merited that distinction. Lupo was venal, but was to be pitied more than reviled. That didn’t remove the distastefulness from the process. Looking into memories, even those of a stranger, could be an intimate, comforting experience, like putting her feet into a favorite pair of bedroom slippers. This, however, was like finding that those same slippers were full of maggots. She wanted only to be done, so that she could restore the distance between the two of them, the separateness.
Not yet. The first plunge had, by necessity, been imprecise. She had to gain a sense of the totality of his life before she could look for something specific. This time she could highlight recent experiences. On her way out, she had seen the threads of the hypnotic overlay that Sauron had installed. That would be the focus of her second probing.
She took a deep breath. She could do what needed to be done.
The final memory she had glimpsed had been the most tanjtilizing. The last the X-Men knew, after the battle with Havok, Polaris, Cyclops, and Phoenix, Sauron had been driven into an unresolvable internal battle between his evil self and the part of him that was still Karl Lykos. It was as if someone had posted a sign, no one home. Lupo seemed to have some idea how the monster had been restored to sanity.
She began to unravel the skeins, only to find a knot. Peculiar. And obviously intentional. Someone had taken precautions against a telepathic probe. The barriers were ingenious. Professor Xavier or Phoenix could manage this sort of work, as could Psylocke herself, but not easily. If this was an indication of the depth of Sauron’s mental prowess, it didn’t bode well. The only clear image was that of Brainchild pouring over books and computer screens, but though Lupo had looked over his comrade’s shoulder on many occasions, the text was blurry. Psylocke couldn’t read it, even though Lupo had been able to at the time.
There. She freed another image from the tangle. Sauron was strapped on a table, wings folded, his gaze directed aimlessly at the ceiling of a cave. Suddenly it was later-—hours later, days later, or weeks, she couldn’t sift the information out of Lupo yet—but Sauron was still there, on the table. The difference was that his gaze was steady and his beak curved in one of his hideous smiles.
Psylocke gasped. This new face was not like the Sauron further back in Lupo’s memory. As with Ushatch’s recall of the ambush, she saw a relaxed, almost mirthful Sauron. Gaza came forward and released the straps. Sauron stood, stretched his wings toward the natural stone walls, and turned to greet his mutates as they approached. First Brainchild, then Lupo, then Barbaras, then ...
Then he turned back. He gazed straight at Lupo.
N'q, she thought. He’s not looking at Lupo, though that had been whose eyes she was viewing the scene through. He was looking—
—at her!
Psylocke jerked back, but she was caught. For an instant, she felt herself back in her physical body. She heard the shouts of villagers, thuds of bodies impacting the ground, the screeches of pterosaurs. Then the psychic snare closed completely, taking her astral form, and her awareness, down into a deep, lightless place.
Psylocke woke blind and deaf. Oh, her eyes functioned, showing her a cavern full of elaborate devices, lit by fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling. Her ears worked, bringing her the_noises of machinery whirring and gutteral conversation echoing out of the tunnel to her left. But the murmur and images from other minds had vanished. Inside was only blackness and silence.
She moaned and tried to lift her head. But it, like the rest of her body, was strapped tightly against a tilted platform. She wore a heavy, unfamiliar collar.
A furry, lupine form that she had come to know too well leaned over her and grinned. “Tell me, do you feel. .. vulnerable?”
Her hand twitched. She longed to form her psychic knife and drive it into his brain. Not a single pulse of psychic energy flowed down her arm. Her powers had been thoroughly neutralized.
No. More than neutralized. Drained. She realized that she had so little strength left, she might not have been able to stand on her feet if she were released from the platform.
“How could I feel vulnerable?” she shot back. “I have seen into your soul. You barely know how to blink without a lord to instruct you.”
Lupo reached out and dragged his paw slowly down her body from neck to navel. His blunt claws left long red marks, though to her relief, they did not break the skin. He leaned down and ... sniffed her.
A leather-winged monstrosity stepped out from be
hind the platform. Lupo backed away.
“I have ordered him not to damage you,” the chimera said. ‘ ‘But I would say you are very fortunate that Lupo must be leaving for the jungle very shortly. I didn’t free him from that cage only to see him amuse himself. He still has work to do.”
“Sauron,” she hissed.
“New and improved, and yet very much my old self,” the pterohuman quipped. “I see you found my little booby trap. I set them in all of my main raiders’ minds, you see, in case Ka-Zar was so rude as to summon a telepathic ally.
x-mN
Truth be told, I was expecting Jean Grey, but you are just as tasty.” He lifted Lupo’s paw away, and brushed one talon softly along her thigh. “Though I prefer blondes.”
“Like Tanya Anderssen. You tasted her, you pig. To death.”
He shrugged.
That shook her. Sauron shrugging at the death of Karl Lykos’s beloved? According to all X-Men records, Sauron had often expressed no remorse that she was dead, but he had never been casual about it. It was the first and strongest attack she could think of to faze him, given that he had siphoned off all her super powers for the time being.
“I never consume more than I need,” he said matter-of-factly. ' ‘On that occasion, 1 simply needed every bit she had. None of you mutants had offered yourselves in her place.” He nibbed his green hands together. “It’s not my fault Tanya was not as nourishing as you were just now, or the way your companions will be, once I have them strapped to these tables.”
Out of the comers of her eyes, Psylocke saw a row of platforms. Ten or more. He had prepared well. Astoundingly well, she saw to her regret.
He stroked her one last time and let her be, as if to say she was not even a worthy object of lust, but merely food. “You remember Brainchild?” he asked.
The mutate stepped forward into her limited range of vision. He slicked back the fringe of hair on the side of his huge cranium, as if preening for a girlfriend. He smiled.
Law of the Jungle Page 7
