Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (21 page)

Tony and Xuasus ignored the metal guide rail and the fifty or so people who were using it to haul themselves up the punishing climb. His early start had given Xuasus a slight lead, but over the sound of his own labored breathing he could hear his brother's footsteps catching up.

A plump, middle-aged woman shouted as they went racing by her, but neither could tell if it was admonishment or encouragement. They didn't slow down to find out.

Xuasus's lungs felt as if they were burning, and his aching leg muscles threatened to quit at any moment. He forced himself on, no longer able to leap from step to step, but using his hands to help him vault up.

Tony was just about to pass his brother when he slipped, slamming his shin against the rough stone. He stopped and clutched his leg, half cursing, half crying.

Xuasus seized his chance and clambered on.

Seconds later, panting and gasping, Xuasus stood alone and victorious at the top. Tony was about twenty feet below, the race forgotten as he rolled up his trouser leg to inspect his injury. Xuasus's grin was
so
broad, his cheeks were beginning to hurt.

He turned himself to the four directions, looking out over the tree-covered mounds that Mr. Perez said were ancient buildings waiting to be discovered. According to the teacher, their ancestors had lived here for many centuries. Beyond the plain, the smog from the city all but blotted out the panorama of surrounding volcanic hills.

On a sudden impulse, Xuasus knelt down on the flattened summit. He stared hard at the square stone in the center, its face worn smooth by centuries of human contact. For this was where mothers brought their children, to touch their heads against the warm rock and allow the pyramid's mystical energies to flow through them. A lot of the younger people laughed at the custom, but all the women said it brought good luck.

Xuasus's own mother had brought him here as a baby–not that touching his head to the stone seemed to have done him much good. He was hopeless at school, and though he was good enough at sports, Tony always beat him. Until today, of course.

Perhaps the energies are like the battery in my radio,
he thought, stooping lower, his forehead only inches from the stone.
They have to be recharged sometimes.

Before he knew what happened, a jet of erupting piezoelectricity took his head clean off.

"That man–the one skulking in the alley mouth. Tell me about him, Cassandra."

They were sitting in the window seat, and Cassandra craned her neck to see where Grandma was pointing. A trolley clattered by, blocking off her view, but the man was still there when it passed.

She couldn't see him distinctly. He appeared to be dressed all in black, and stood so that his face was concealed by shadows.

Cassandra looked at his feet.
Strange. He's not wearing any shoes.

A sudden, unpleasant odor drifted in through the open window. The stench of decaying meat mingled with the old lady's lavender. Cassandra felt a terrible sense of foreboding. Something evil was coming her way.

The man was stepping out of the shadows. Cassandra tried to turn her head away, but it refused to move. Paralyzed, she could only watch, her heart pounding faster and louder in her chest as the figure looked directly up at her.

He had the face of a bull, and golden horns grew from the scalp above his ears.

With a strength of will she didn't know she possessed, Cassandra tore her gaze away. Then she started to shiver uncontrollably, and cowered, whimpering, against her grandmother.

A few time zones to the east of Gotham City, in the Republic of Ireland, Seamus Milligan gunned the engine of his Honda Big Red and sent it hurtling down the narrow, hedge-lined lane.

The cattle were in for the afternoon milking, but a tube had ruptured on the milking machine. No chance of making it to town before the ironmonger closed. Indeed, if old O'Bannion was running true to form, the shop would be closed already and the first pint of stout balanced in the old man's hand.

Milligan decelerated fiercely as the little four-wheel-drive car roared toward a right-angled corner. He swung the car around, the left-hand wheels briefly losing contact with the road. Then all four tires gripped again and he hit the accelerator hard. A couple of late-season tourists scrambled up onto the verge as the 4X4 shot by, and Seamus waved regally.

Visitors to the tomb,
he thought,
disappointed to find the season's over and it's closed until spring.

He threw a glance over his left shoulder toward the stubby green mound that was the Newgrange burial chamber, the largest Neolithic structure in all Ireland. Milligan had lived here all his life, farming dairy cattle in this fertile bend of the River Boyne, yet he'd never set foot inside the vast grave.

At least,
he reflected,
some think it's a grave. Others claim it's the place where the living could speak to the dead, and the future was revealed to the witches. When I was a child, they whispered it was where the demons had gone to live when men stole their world.

Milligan had seen it from the outside, huge white stones laid along its perimeter, their surfaces scrolled with ancient, mystifying symbols.

Once each year, at the winter solstice, a single beam of light entered a receptacle above the doorway. It streamed down the long, narrow passage to the center of the mound and lit it up like summer. For three hundred sixty-five days of the year, the interior lay dark and silent, guarding its secrets well. But for a few brief minutes the sun illumined the intricately carved lining stones, before they returned to darkness for another year.

Milligan was past the turf-covered mound now, onto a long, straight road hedged with hawthorn, elder, and the odd rowan tree. He heard a sound behind him, like the engine of a car impatient to overtake. He risked a glance back, and his jaw dropped at what he saw.

A thin fountain of viscous red liquid was jetting from the center of the mound into the overcast sky.

Lava,
Milligan thought.
Only it can't be lava
–
not here!

Where it fell to the ground, flames sparked up as vegetation caught fire and blazed fiercely.

At the last moment, Milligan noticed that his 4X4 was veering sharply. He tried to correct the steering, but he was going too fast. A front wheel caught the edge of the verge, and the vehicle somersaulted off the road and through the air.

There was a ripping of metal and splintering of wood as it smashed into the trunk of a rowan tree. The old folk called it the witches' tree, and claimed no evil spirit could stand in its presence.

Seamus Milligan lay on the verge, his head twisted unnaturally, his neck broken in the fall. He wouldn't see the fires converge into one huge conflagration that would soon sweep over his farm and spread out until half the valley was in flames.

Sunset in Cairo, a riot of purple, red, and gold gleaming off ten thousand mosques and minarets. The streets resounded with the roar of traffic, mingled with singsong chants calling the faithful to prayer.

Outside the city, up on the Giza Plateau, the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids stood in sand-strewn silence, as they had for at least four thousand five hundred years. The only sound was the occasional grunts of camels as they were led home to their quarters for the night. The tourists would be back tomorrow.

Professor Simon Ferzal, Director of Research at Giza, led his party along the side of the old canal, long empty and dry, knowing they'd get the best view of the Great Pyramid silhouetted against an awesome sky.

"When it was built, of course," the professor said, "the pyramid had a golden capstone. It would have reflected light like this for hundreds of miles, marking Giza as a truly magical place."

"Magical?" Cindy Barnes queried. She and a delegation of American investors were visiting Giza, with a view to sinking money into a noninvasive expedition that would produce the very first sonar mapping of the entire plateau. Rumors of hidden chambers, buried secrets, and hoards of gold that made the treasure of Tutankhamen's tomb pale in comparison, had abounded for years. The American mystic Edgar Cayce had predicted that a chamber would be found containing the written works of fabled Atlantis.

Previous sonar surveys had located several unknown tunnels, caves, and chambers running through the plateau's limestone bedrock. Barnes and her team were willing to bet that there were more.

Of course, they'd receive no payment if they struck lucky–not directly, anyway. The Egyptian government would own whatever was found, and it would be made publicly available as soon as the experts had finished their analysis. But Cindy's husband, Don, was already working on the book; TV and movie rights were secured, and a little professional marketing would help them and the government share equally in the photographic rights.

Now, Cindy Barnes frowned. "I thought the ancient Egyptians were the apex of technology for their times, Professor. Why would they bother with magic?"

Ferzal waited a moment before replying. They'd reached a flight of steps, and he signaled to his aide to light the way with a powerful spotlight. Graciously, the research director took Cindy's elbow and assisted her up the stairs.

"My ancestors were technocrats indeed," he said in his impeccable English, lifting his gaze to the massive bulk of the pyramid. "They were able to quarry, move, and lift an estimated six million tons of stone to produce the Great Pyramid alone. Yet at the same time, they lived mired in a world of ritual and superstition. There was a god or goddess for everything, from domestic cats to the universe. All had to be propitiated, or disaster might follow."

The spotlight marking their path, Ferzal led them over toward the rough-hewn rock enclosure that housed the mighty Sphinx, the most enigmatic of all ancient monuments. Its red sandstone blocks almost glowed in the fast-fading sunlight, changing to purple as the shadows deepened.

Ferzal was about to drop a few pearls of wisdom regarding its age and pedigree when he heard a startled shout from one of the others: Cindy's husband, Don, the lanky bookworm. Ferzal hoped he hadn't tripped and hurt himself.

But Don was looking back at the Great Pyramid. Cobalt blue flames poured from its top and ran down the limestone casing like dry ice, rushing down to the ground below.

Ferzal and the others turned to run, but an avalanche of swirling cold fire engulfed them before they'd gone twenty yards.

All over the world, the sacred sites of the ancients began to reenergize.

At Carnac in northern France, location of the world's largest collection of menhirs, blue light blasted from more than a thousand standing stones.

In Spain, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, hidden caves that knew the dreams and spells of sorcerers before the Ice Age were bathed in violet waves. Those few people in the caves–spelunkers and a University of Vienna anthropology team–suffocated within seconds.

The once-holy Mediterranean island of Malta was engulfed in a green mist that seeped from the ancient, subterranean Goddess sanctuaries.

Lhasa, Tibet's holiest city, lit up in the biggest "fireworks" display ever seen.

In Russia and China, throughout Japan and Southeast Asia, forces that had slumbered for millennia awakened and threatened to bring disaster in their wake.

Fear is the messenger, not the message.

Cassandra heard the words as dearly and distinctly as if Batman was in Grandma's apartment.

Like empathy,
she thought, fear is
a gift. An early warning system. But it's not meant to paralyze. It's supposed to spur you to action. Fight or flight. Your choice. But do something. If you fail to act, your fear will claim you.

Slowly, fearfully, determinedly, Cassandra opened her eyes. Grandma had disappeared. Cassandra looked out the window, her heart pumping with terror at what she would see, but knowing that she had to see it. The bull-headed man had grown to colossal size, until he bestrode the planet. The shrieking of a billion people filled the air. The mountains split open and rolled over everything below, while new peaks burst up from the sea.

"No!" Cassandra screamed, "Never, never, never!" Far away, she heard a voice. "Dr. Valerian! She's awake!"

The teleporter disgorged Batman and J'onn J'onzz within fifty yards of where the base of the Gotham pyramid had been.

It was a beautiful autumn evening, the air crisp and fresh, the sky painted with stars. An almost full moon was rising in the east, its bright light shrouded by a mass of dark clouds low on the horizon. Somewhere in the distance, a fox was barking.

Batman stood staring for a full minute, as if determination alone would enable him to tell if the pyramid was really there or not. Finally, he shook his head.

"If it's there," he admitted, "I'm not seeing it."

"You're not alone," Manhunter replied. He had scanned the site with his peculiar Martian vision, which allowed him to see through virtually any object. "None of my senses is picking up anything out of the ordinary."

"I guess there's only one way to find out."

Batman walked ahead in a straight line, stepping over the barrier erected by the police when they closed off the site. His penlight picked out a path through the low scrub bushes and rough grass. Even with the aid of the infrared lenses in his mask, he could see little except the ground beneath his feet and the steep-sided riverbank ahead.

J'onn watched his companion, his eyes never leaving him. Suddenly, there was a flash of color, as if the air itself had rippled and moved aside.

Batman disappeared from view.

"It's here all right, J'onn," Manhunter heard the vigilante call.

The Martian moved forward, a tingle of static electricity caressing his green skin as he walked through the unseen barrier and joined Batman on the other side.

The pyramid rose before them, its massive bulk blotting out half the night sky.