The Steel Ring

by R. A. Jones

  The rocket hit one of the temple’s upper floors head-on, burrowing with ease through its thick stone façade.

  Next came an explosion more powerful than that of a crate of dynamite. Almost the entire upper level of the temple flew apart in all directions.

  “No!” Aman wailed, his anguish palpable.

  Legs churning, he began to run as fast as he could up the narrow trail leading to the temple. Zona tried to keep up with him as best she could, but was soon left far behind.

  Even Aman’s extra-human speed was not the equal to that of the strange aeroplane: It had already executed a turn and was again heading toward the temple.

  Coming in at treetop level, the plane fired a second rocket even as it started to climb and bank sharply, seeming almost to then slingshot the projectile forward.

  Aman stopped in his tracks, wild eyes following the track of the rocket. This one also found its target, plowing into the lower levels of the temple. As with the first, a massive, explosive fireball was the consequence.

  Aman’s mouth hung slack and he now moved only slowly forward on wooden legs. Swirling mountain winds whipped the smoke and dust away from the impact point, and for a desperate moment he dared to hope the structure had withstood the attack.

  A deep rumbling from within the temple signaled the futility of this hope. With a sound like the keening of a million lost souls, the ancient holy place imploded, each level crashing straight down upon the one below it until all were gone.

  With a heart-rending roar, Aman again raced forward, plunging straight ahead into a spreading cloud of dust and debris.

  It was several minutes later before Zona Henderson reached the spot. She sagged against a boulder, wheezing loudly as she tried to fill her aching lungs with the thin air of this high altitude.

  Still panting, she pushed ahead into the diminishing cloud of destruction: she protected her eyes by putting on her pilot’s helmet and lowering its goggles. Only when she passed through the gritty cloud and came out on the other side did she remove them so as to better survey the scene.

  Where once had stood a magnificent shrine dedicated to man’s eternal quest to learn the unknowable, now there was nothing but shattered stone piled upon stone.

  The sound of deep, powerful sobs drew her attention to one side. Aman, with his back to her, was kneeling before one of the many smaller stacks of rubble. His head was bowed and his shoulders shook tremulously up and down.

  Approaching as quietly as she could manage, Zona moaned softly as she looked down at the debris facing Aman. From near the bottom of the pile, the lifeless arm of a woman was protruding.

  Aman was clutching its tiny, delicate hand in his own.

  “My mother,” he groaned.

  He looked up helplessly at Zona. His face was nearly white, covered as it was by a fine layer of dust, save for the muddy furrows made by the tears spilling without shame down his cheeks.

  “They were all here,” he whispered. “Brother Han, Brother Chun … the servants … Great Question … all gone.”

  “Maybe some of them survived …?”

  “I don’t see how. The temple is gone … the Council of Seven is gone. All is gone.”

  He bowed lower still and kissed the palm of the hand he still held in his own, the hand of the only true parent he had ever known.

  “This is my fault, Mother,” he gasped. “Please forgive me.”

  “No, John,” Zona said. “You’re not to blame.”

  “Then who is?” he snarled. “Do you think this would have happened if not for me?”

  Without thought, Zona retreated a step before the wildness in his eyes. Recognizing the fear in her face, Aman flinched and his expression changed from that of anger to one of shame. He turned away from the aviatrix and again bowed low over the remains of Prahmasung.

  A buzzing sound began to whistle in Zona’s ears: a lingering remnant, she assumed, of the bellowing explosions that had so recently assaulted her senses. When the sound persisted and even grew, she looked to the east, shielding her eyes with one hand.

  “John,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “Go away, Zona,” he replied. “Please.”

  Instead, she dropped to one knee beside him.

  “The plane, John.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s coming back!”

  Aman dropped his mother’s hand and leaped to his feet. When he saw that the murderous aircraft was indeed heading back toward them, his features twisted with rage and hatred.

  “Step away, Zona,” he ordered, lightly but firmly shoving her to make sure she did just that.

  He dropped to one knee, bowing his head as though in prayer. It just as quickly snapped up, and in the same movement he launched himself straight in the air. Cracks appeared in the earth where he had pushed off and a small shock wave washed over the startled Zona.

  More than a hundred feet into the air he soared, in what Zona assumed had been merely a prodigious leap. But when he reached its apex he did not begin to fall back to Earth, but rather stayed hovering in the air.

  He hadn’t jumped into the sky, Zona realized with amazement.

  He had flown!

  Aman’s eyes blazed with awful light as they honed in on the rapidly approaching aeroplane. As if launched from a cannon, he shot forward, arms straight out, his body perpendicular to the ground far below.

  In the cockpit of the plane, the pilot was looking toward the ground, scanning for any viable targets that may have escaped his initial onslaught.

  It never occurred to him that he might face danger in the air – until he looked up to see the impossible: a man hurtling toward him, flying under his own power like a human rocket!

  Not trusting his own eyes cost the pilot precious seconds before he decided that, real or not, he should shoot this vision from the sky. His fingers tightened on the trigger of his wing machine guns. But his intended target was too small, too fast and too close for them to be effective.

  On the ground below, Zona had been stumbling along, picking her way through rubble as she tried to follow Aman’s flight as best she could.

  “Pull up,” she whispered desperately, seeing that his trajectory had him on a direct collision course with the oncoming plane.

  “Pull up, John!” she screamed.

  Too late.

  The pilot of the plane lived just long enough to stare directly into the face of his own demise: a face devoid of mercy. Aman lowered his head just before ramming into the front end of the deadly plane.

  The nose of the aircraft collapsed inward, crushing the screaming pilot like so much over-ripe fruit. Grinding metal ignited streams of spewing fuel and a massive fireball ripped the plane into a hundred jagged pieces.

  Below, Zona gasped as one of those pieces – longer than a man and spinning in flaming circles – came plunging toward her. She threw herself to the ground and it missed her by inches, plowing into the earth behind her and spraying her with a shower of dirt.

  Spitting out grime and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she rose and looked skyward for any sign of Aman. What she saw was the remnants of the main body of the mystery plane, still laced with flames and now plummeting earthward. Another, smaller explosion erupted as the wreckage struck the earth.

  As Zona cautiously edged toward the crash site, she could see the plane had left a crater in the ground some ten feet in diameter. Smoke rose in several swirling tendrils from its floor, and the ground around the lip was littered with bits of fiery fuselage.

  Her hand flew to her mouth as she suddenly spied a trembling human hand reaching skyward from below the rim of the crater. Hoping against hope, she ran forward and grabbed the scorched hand, unmindful of the blood covering it.

  Bracing her feet, she pulled mightily – and up from the crater came Aman, clearly still very much alive! His clothing was all but gone, his flesh had been severely burned and he was bleeding rather profusely from multiple wounds.


  But he was alive – and would soon be well.

  “How is it possible?” she stammered. “Can’t anything hurt you?”

  “Oh, believe me,” he grunted, “I’m hurting plenty.”

  “But you’re all right?”

  “I will be.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Clearly, I’m not invulnerable,” he said, casually plucking a piece of shrapnel from his shoulder and tossing it aside.

  “But I heal fast … and I don’t die easy.”

  Still, his knees buckled slightly beneath him, and Zona ran to his side. Unfazed by his near nakedness, she slung his left arm over her shoulders and looped her own right arm around his waist.

  “You’re incredible!” she said, making no attempt to hide her awe at what she had just witnessed.

  “Incredibly stupid,” he replied, clearly upset.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I should have taken at least one prisoner alive. Now there’s no one left who could give us a name or a reason behind this atrocity.”

  She could think of no reply that might assuage either his anger or his guilt, so she said nothing.

  “Over there,” he said, motioning to a nearby rise in the landscape. Limping to this vantage point, he slowly swung his head from one side to the other. His gaze swept from the ruins of the temple down to the village below. Not a single structure there was still standing intact, and the only movement came from a solitary goat, its shaggy coat bloody as it made its way around the bodies littering the ground.

  “I’ve lost it all,” he muttered sadly.

  Zona didn’t know what to say, so for several minutes she said nothing as Aman continued to stare blankly at the carnage all around them. Then she looked up at him.

  “John … I don’t mean to be insensitive … but I think it’s more important than ever that you come back to America with me.”

  Inhaling deeply and stiffening his spine, Aman turned a stern gaze on the woman.

  “Before I do anything, Zona, before I go anywhere … there’s one question I’ve got to ask you. And you’ve got to tell me the truth.”

  “Of course, John. Anything.”

  “Did you know this was going to happen?”

  Her reaction was such that he might just as well have punched her in the stomach. Her mouth dropped and she seemed almost to gag.

  “God, no, John! I swear by all that’s holy.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. Releasing her hold on him, she fell to her knees, head bowed so as not to look at his face.

  “I don’t know if your powers give you the ability to tell what’s truly in a person’s heart,” she said, “but if you have one scintilla of suspicion that I would ever try to harm you or those you love … then just kill me now.”

  Air hissed through his teeth as her words slapped his sensibilities. As he stared down at her, he wished he did have some infallible sense of what was true and what wasn’t. But he didn’t. In this he had only the guide that all humans must follow.

  His heart.

  Zona’s own heart was pounding as the seconds ticked away. She had put her life in the hands of a man who could snuff out that life like a small, weak candle. One blow and it would be over.

  She flinched and gasped as his hands grabbed her upper arms. But they were gentle, and used for no purpose other than to raise her back to her feet.

  She lifted her head hesitantly, to see his eyes gazing down on her with nothing but sympathy.

  “There’s one thing I have to do,” he said softly, “before I go anywhere.”

  The sun had already slipped below the uppermost lip of the mountains by the time Aman had finished this final chore. With nothing but a crude shovel, he had dug individual graves for every man, woman and child of the village who had been slain. Each had been wrapped as best he could manage and gently laid to rest.

  He had taken more time and care with the final grave, the one that now served as the final abode for his mother Prahmasung.

  Hers had been the only body he had been able to retrieve from the debris of the temple. For the Great Question and the others, the rubble itself would have to serve as both tomb and monument.

  As Aman knelt on the ground and lovingly smoothed the dirt over his mother’s body, Zona stood nearby, making no effort to stifle the tears that flowed freely down her cheeks. Having seen the horrible damage the falling stones had inflicted on the woman’s tiny body, having seen the effect seeing this had upon her loving son, Zona cried as much for Aman as for Prahmasung.

  Aman had planted one of the fallen blocks of stone from the temple as a headstone for his mother, using his bare hands to chisel an epitaph upon it in her native language.

  “Could I be alone with her for just a few minutes, Zona?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, John,” she said. “Take as long as you need.”

  She quietly retreated a respectful distance away and took a perch atop a small boulder. Only the faintest of sounds reached her, enough for her to tell that Aman was speaking to his mother one final time.

  Although she had only known this remarkable man for a few hours, she felt certain he was offering thanks to the woman who had so selflessly raised him as her own. She was equally sure he was once again begging her forgiveness for his perceived failure to save her, though he truly was faultless.

  When the sound of his voice stopped, Zona saw him bow even lower and softly kiss the earth of Prahmasung’s grave.

  Taking the torch in his hand, Aman rose and turned to walk away from the gravesite. His face had now grown stoic, showing no sign of any emotion. He didn’t stop when he came abreast of where Zona sat, but continued on.

  “Come with me,” he said firmly.

  Practically trotting in order to keep pace with his long, swift strides, Zona followed him to the place the Great Question had taken him so long ago, to the shrine that opened the portal to the treasure trove hidden below.

  Zona was even more astounded when she laid eyes on the immeasurable wealth within than he had been that first and only time he had previously entered the vault.

  “Who does this belong to?” she asked breathlessly.

  “To me, now,” Aman replied. “With such wealth at my command, I guess my mother needn’t worry so much about me now as she always did when she was alive.”

  His voice had grown wistful, and Zona reached out to place a hand on his arm.

  “Do you think your plane can hold all this?” he asked her.

  “I believe so, yes,” she replied. “It was designed to carry cargo or passengers, or both. And if it can’t hold it all, my people can send another plane to retrieve the rest.”

  “Then I’ll start moving it,” he said with cold resolve. “Come first light, we should be ready to set out for America.”

  What Aman didn’t bother to tell the aviatrix was that, although he had only been in this vault once, and that many years past, he could tell that a small but not inconsequential amount of the treasure stored here had gone missing since last he viewed it.

  It seemed to him there were two possible reasons for this.

  The most likely was that the Great Question had merely used some of it over the years since first Aman had seen the treasure, as was his right, both for the needs of the Temple and to finance Aman’s education and travels.

  But it was also possible that an outsider had somehow discovered the treasure and its hiding – and had stolen part of it, most likely to finance his maniacal enterprises. It was this same unknown intruder who had engineered the murder of his mother, his mentors and his friends. Who had destroyed his home and who doubtless had intended to pillage the rest of the treasure after killing Aman as well.

  If the latter was true, Aman intended to track down any such intruder … and make him pay dearly for his crimes.

  CHAPTER XIX

  February, 1922

  The Great Question held the Earth in his powerful hands.

  The globe of the planet was carved from mult
iple pieces of ivory, skillfully fitted together nearly seamlessly. A brown patina of age had dulled its whiteness somewhat, but it was still a beautiful piece of work.

  The monk’s gleaming eyes were focused on the spot that corresponded to the location of the island nation of Japan. He seemed intent on sending his gaze boring through the skin of the globe so as to see its very core. This was a favorite meditation tool of his own devising.

  A gasp escaped his lips and his body jerked involuntarily. The globe slipped from his fingers, fell into his lap, then rolled down and across the floor.

  He sat still for a long moment, head cocked slightly to one side as if listening for a sound that wasn’t there. Concerned, he rose smoothly to his feet and swept through the thick door leading out of his private quarters.

  On surprisingly light feet he moved down the corridor that led to one of the temple’s common areas. When he entered it, he immediately saw the Council member named Huang sitting on the floor. The lama had been poring over an ancient manuscript, but drew his eyes away from it when the Question strode into his field of vision.

  “Where is Aman?” the Question asked without preface. “Shouldn’t he be here with you, studying?”

  “Indeed he should,” Brother Huang replied. He let out a sigh of exasperation and allowed the now forgotten manuscript to roll back up within itself.

  “Then where is he?”

  Huang was a bit puzzled by his superior’s obvious agitation.

  “He was here,” Huang explained. “He arrived right on time, as always, and we began our lesson.”

  “And what was the lesson?”

  “We were studying the life of the Buddha.”

  “Commendable. So where is Aman? Surely the lesson isn’t already ended.”

  “Hardly,” Huang snorted. “As you know, you could study your whole life and still not plumb every depth that was the Enlightened One.”

  “Then why isn’t the boy here?” The Question was clearly losing patience.