The Steel Ring

by R. A. Jones

  Aman’s only reply was to spring ahead. Even faster than he could react, however, the Question was able to twist a lever hidden atop the left armrest of his stony throne.

  In response to this, a rectangular slab of solid rock fell from the roof of the grotto. Too fast for him to dodge, half a ton of stone fell atop Aman, driving his body savagely to the ground.

  The force of the impact when it and its victim struck the floor shattered the slab into a dozen pieces. Spouts of dust shot upward, obscuring from sight what lay below.

  The Great Question was on his feet, his eyes trying to pierce the haze. As the dust began to settle, he descended from his throne. Reaching the edge of the debris from the broken slab, he bent to lift and remove a fragment that would have proven burdensome for two ordinary men.

  He casually tossed the fragment to one side. Revealed to his gaze now was the head and shoulders of Aman, who had been rendered senseless. Sinking to one knee, the Question placed two fingers against his student’s throat, smiling when he located a strong pulse.

  The lama stood as a panel set in one wall of the grotto now opened. A dozen armed men, dressed in the gray uniforms he had designed for them, marched into the grotto, looking obediently to him for instructions.

  “Pick up our fallen hero,” he commanded, “and follow me. I want to be long gone by the time his unwitting friends get here.”

  Beneath the folds of his cloaking hood, the Question’s smile returned, even broader. He was certain there was no way these pawns of the Steel Ring could find him before he implemented the final stage of his plan:

  The ritual that would pave the way for his conquest of the entire planet.

  CHAPTER XLI

  For several minutes, the only sound that could be heard within the grotto was the soft lapping of the waters in its pool.

  Then a low hum began to vibrate through its stone walls. Dust and tiny pebbles were dislodged from the ceiling, sprinkling downward. The dull thump of a small explosion caused the floor to quake as a large section of the grotto wall was blown inward.

  Two red, glowing orbs pierced the curtain of dust that rose up from the rubble. Iron Skull stepped through the haze, casting his gaze about warily.

  The other members of the Ring crowded in close behind him. Ferret, nostrils flaring, crouched then sprang across the chamber, landing atop the remnants of the stone slab that had felled Aman.

  “He was here,” he told the others. “I can still smell traces of his blood and skin.”

  “Oh, no,” the Witch gasped. “Do you think he’s …?”

  “No,” Man of War declared before she could finish her thought. “If he was dead, whoever did this would most likely have just left the body behind when they fled.”

  “But clearly he’s been injured,” Fantom interjected. “Perhaps mortally so.”

  Ferret ignored their comments. Bent over so his knuckles dragged the floor, and moving forward on his hands and the tips of his feet, he almost resembled an animal hunting for the spoor of its prey.

  “Dead or alive,” he said, “his body went this way.”

  Scrambling away from the pile of broken rock, he straightened and pointed toward the opening of the tunnel down which the Great Question and his minions had carried Aman.

  “This way!” he called back, racing recklessly into the darkness ahead. The others followed without hesitation.

  Luckily, there were no traps to impede them. Within minutes, the floor of the tunnel began to slope upward. Iron Skull switched off the light he had been using to illuminate their path, as the tunnel grew brighter from a soft but discernible source of outside light.

  They spilled out of the mouth of the tunnel into the moist night air, casting their eyes about for any sign of trouble.

  “Look!” Man of War said, pointing skyward.

  Even in the gloom they could make out the darker shape of an aeroplane in the sky. As it flew eastward, the roar of its engines grew fainter.

  Ferret trotted ahead, not stopping until he reached what appeared to be a large meadow. The ruts left by the wheels of the retreating plane were clearly visible in the soggy ground.

  “Aman’s scent continues right up to this spot,” he told his comrades, “then ends. Wherever that plane’s going … he’s going with it.”

  “So our nameless, faceless enemy has Aman,” Fantom said. “And no doubt the final artifact as well.”

  “Which means we just made another trip for biscuits,” Ferret growled.

  “Maybe not,” Man of War declared firmly, turning to Iron Skull. “Can you catch that plane?”

  “Not from this distance. I have neither the power, the speed nor the range to overtake it.”

  “Then we’ve lost him,” the Witch sighed.

  “The hell we have,” Ferret snapped. “He’s one of ours … and wherever they take him, we’ll find him.”

  “How do you suggest we do that, friend Ferret?” Fantom asked.

  “We go the same direction they are,” he replied. “Back to New York. Maybe your creepy old friend the Eye will have a suggestion.”

  “But even if we do find Aman,” Iron Skull said in his hollow, metallic voice, speaking the thought in all their minds, “he could be dead by the time we do. What then?”

  “Then,” Ferret grimly resolved, “we avenge him.”

  They all silently agreed.

  CHAPTER XLII

  Amazing Man slowly opened his eyes, somewhat surprised that he was still alive to do so.

  When he attempted to move, however, he found that he was unable to; neither his arms nor legs would respond to his mental commands.

  He could raise his head, though – enough to see that he was lying spread-eagled on a hard floor, to which his hands and feet had been restrained with metal bands.

  “So glad you’re awake,” that familiar voice said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss this.”

  The chamber in which he lay was only dimly lit, heavy with pockets of deep shadow. But a flickering light lanced through one of those dark patches. From that inky pool stepped forth the Great Question, holding a most curious object in his left hand, the source of the flakes of light.

  The object looked like a great, metal spear, fully six feet in length and ending with a thinly pointed tip that the Question tapped lightly against the floor in cadence with each step he took.

  Affixed to the other end of the spear with a symbol that was growing increasingly well known throughout the Western world. Welded to the shaft of the spear was an iron swastika.

  Aman instantly saw that at the end of each of the hated sigil’s four broken “arms” glistened one of the ancient gems of power which the Great Question had come to possess through murder and thievery.

  The smell of burning ions filled the small chamber. Snaking bands of hissing, popping energy crackled round the swastika like rampant electricity.

  “Where are we?” Aman demanded, stalling for time as much as anything, already beginning to surreptitiously strain upward in an effort to weaken his restraints. He hoped his former mentor remained in his earlier, talkative mood.

  “Let’s have a little quiz, student,” the Question said obligingly, “to see how well you remember the lessons I taught you so long ago.” Aman could hear the gloating glee in the lama’s voice.

  “Do you know what the omphala is?”

  Aman cocked his head to one side, puzzled and surprised by the question.

  “‘The navel of the world’?”

  “Very good!” The Question again lightly tapped the spear against the floor.

  “Yes. It is the symbolic center of the world, of creation – its ‘navel’. Virtually every culture in every era in every place on Earth has designated and revered such a site.

  “For the ancient Greeks, it was Mount Olympus. For the Israelites, it was Sinai. For some American Indians, it was the Black Hills. There are many such places: the Carpathians, Kilimanjaro, Tierra del Fuego. Places of great significance and great power.”
>
  Gripping the spear in both hands, the Question leaned over Aman’s prone figure.

  “That’s where you and I are now, my once pupil. The omphala.”

  “We’re … inside a mountain?”

  “Oh, no. Better than a mountain.” A soft, muffled laugh escaped from beneath the mad monk’s hood.

  “A monument.”

  The Question lifted his eyes to gaze at the nimbus of energy sputtering around the end of the spear he still grasped tightly. He slowly raised his right hand toward the reviled emblem that topped it. As if he had plunged his fingers into a pool of water, his hand seemed to disappear inside the crackling waves.

  When he withdrew it, he had plucked out a smaller ball of eldritch energy. He began to rapidly wave his hand in a circular motion. As he did so, Aman began to make out an image forming in the center of the circle of light now floating in the air.

  It seemed almost as though he was seeing the world through the eyes of a bird in flight. White-fleck waves of ocean water flashed before and below him.

  Then a small, upright structure appeared ahead, seeming to grow larger as his vision neared it. At first he thought it might be an obelisk of some kind, rising up from the tip of a small island. Seconds later, Aman’s eyes widened with amazement as the structure came clearly and recognizably into view.

  “The Statue of Liberty!” he gasped, even as the circle of light in which the image appeared seemed to silently explode in a small, harmless spray of glowing particles. As it vanished, so did the image within.

  “Indeed,” the Question confirmed. “The physical embodiment of all the ideals for which America likes to believe it stands. A shining beacon to the world. Poor, deluded fools.” He stepped closer to his captive.

  “Here’s a scrumptious piece of irony for you, boy. Frederic Bartholdi, the Frenchman who created the statue -- he was a member of your sanctimonious Steel Ring!

  “He’ll never know the ultimate use to which his handiwork will be put.

  “He did, however, know full well that he was erecting the statue atop one of the omphalae. He may have even possessed the slightest knowledge of the significance of such a place. But only the slightest.”

  “Would you care to enlighten me, former master?” Aman asked.

  “With pleasure. Deep within the planet, at its very core, lies the source of all the creative energy that, over the course of time, transformed an inert ball of rock into what you see around you today – a world teeming with life.”

  “And from where does that creative energy originate?”

  “Ah, pupil, that is the true ‘great question’.”

  “One for which you don’t have an answer?”

  “Oh, I could give you a hundred answers. I just don’t know if any of them are right. Maybe we aren’t meant to know. Or maybe learning it is the key to eternity. The search itself is the stuff of which philosophies and religions are made. But expect no answer today; that’s not why we’re here.

  “You see, it is upward and through the omphalae that this wellspring of creative power flowed and spread around the globe. From the first outpourings of primordial energy came all that we associate with life on the planet: the air, the vegetation, the seas, and the creatures that swam within it and eventually crawled without it. Vestiges of that energizing flow still make their way to the surface.

  “And sometimes – not often, but sometimes – a man or woman is born who becomes a vessel into which that stuff of life accumulates in greater than normal quantities.”

  “A man like me,” Aman said softly, astounded by the knowledge that explained so much about his entire life.

  “And me,” the Question was quick to point out. “And, to a lesser extent, that handful of others to whom you have now aligned yourself. It explains their abilities, even their enhanced capacity for healing.

  “But none of them, not even me, nor perhaps any other man in the last millennium, has been so suffused with the power from the world core as are you, my pupil. Like a selfish sponge, you’ve always siphoned off far more than your fair share.”

  A soft creaking sound was followed by an almost imperceptible shifting of the chamber’s floor.

  “This isn’t the most stable part of the edifice,” the Question said, “but I couldn’t resist the symbolism.”

  “Where are we?” Aman asked, now genuinely wanting to know more.

  “Inside the statue’s torch, of course. Do you know it was once actually used as a lighthouse? ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’, they used to say of it.

  “When they came to fear that the lights were weakening the arm, they removed them and closed the stairway leading up to here.

  “Naturally, such restrictions don’t apply to me.”

  “But, why?” Aman asked. “To what purpose?”

  “I guess you wouldn’t know, O mighty savior of the world,” the Question scoffed. “Because you were never as smart as you thought you were – and never so great as those deluded monks continuously told you that you were.”

  “In the end, is that what this is all about?” Aman said incredulously. “You’ve committed murder on a mass scale … because you’re jealous of me?”

  “Don’t be insane!” the Question hissed. “I always knew you weren’t the one foretold by the prophecy. It was I all along. Those brainless sheep on the Council were simply too blind to see the truth that stood in their very midst!”

  “Then why did you let them take me in?” Aman asked, truly puzzled. “Why did you let me live?”

  “Oh, don’t think I didn’t consider snuffing your light out, child – on that very first day and on many others thereafter.”

  “But you didn’t. Why?”

  “At first, I merely thought the wisest course was simply to keep you near me so I could keep an eye on you. I’m not a monster, after all; if you had turned out to be no different than any other boy, there would have been no need, no point in eliminating you.

  “Later, once it became plain that you weren’t ordinary, another thought came to mind. By personally supervising your upbringing, your training, your education, I thought I would be able to bend you to my will, make you a useful tool in my plan to save the world from its own degradation.”

  “I guess that plan didn’t work out well at all, did it?” Aman goaded.

  “Not well at all,” the Question concurred, oblivious to the sarcasm in the query.

  “Any notion I had that you might have seen the light was forever dispelled the day you sided with the rest of the Council and against me.”

  “I was never against you, Great Question.”

  “But you weren’t for me!” the lama snapped. “Not then. Not when it counted the most.”

  The pain in his voice was evident, and for just a moment Aman felt pity for him.

  Then the image of his mother’s lifeless body intruded upon him and he renewed his efforts to burst free from his restraints.

  “Once it became evident that I alone had the foresight and strength of will necessary to make my dream a reality, I began to plot your neutralization in earnest.

  “My first move was sending you away to college, Aman. Half a world away, you would be blind to my actions.

  “I had even hoped the lure of the West might prove so seductive as to keep you away from home forever. But such was not to be. As you traveled about, I even employed agents to lure you into ventures such as might prove to be fatal.”

  “But such was not to be, either,” Aman said.

  “No. We failed to do anything but increase your fame. But with that came an increase in your hubris as well, and you became even easier to manipulate.”

  Aman said nothing, stung into silence by the fear that what the Question had just said was true.

  “Meanwhile,” the monk went on, “I continued to plot with Chancellor Hitler. I also increased my pursuit of knowledge in all things arcane and magical.

  “It was that mystic odyssey that led me to discover the five gems. Some sourc
es say they came from the hearts of five elder gods. Some say they were forged in the ball of fire that created the universe. Some say they are the corporeal representation of the four elements and the ether.

  “All the sources agreed they possessed incalculable power.

  “And one source at last revealed how to trigger and command the release of that power.”

  “And you found that source,” Aman said.

  “I found it. But it was only fairly recently that I gained the means to track them down, one by one.”

  “And how do they fit into your grand scheme?”

  “You speak true, Aman. It is a grand scheme. In a nutshell, as they say, I mean to use the men and resources of the insurgent Third Reich to first conquer all of Europe. Eventually, the vast empires of Japan and the Soviet Union will fall as well. With half the world under my control, the rest of mankind will have little recourse but to bend to my will as well.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I know. As I told you before, in addition to yourself, I felt only the United States might have even the smallest chance of foiling my rise to power.

  “So I began to devise a way to remove you both from the equation.

  “First, using agents I command all over the globe, I began to spread chaos amongst the nations.

  “And not just randomly, either. Oh, no. My mystic pursuit of the five gems had also alerted me to the existence of other gifted individuals. People like you. People whom, if left alone, would, in time, gravitate to you, and join forces with you against me.

  “So they had to be eliminated, too.”

  “You’re claiming you alone are responsible for all that’s happened in the past year?”

  “Not all of it, no. Some of it would have occurred anyway. I merely turned those events to my advantage.

  “Take the earthquake in Chile, for example.

  Aman tensed into immobility.

  “I knew exactly where and when it would happen,” the Question continued, “and made sure you would be at the epicenter.”