Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (42 page)

Then, using his thumb, he applied very carefully the rest of the reservoir onto the great
tulwar
blade, coating it thoroughly, but so thinly that it would not attract notice, looking now like dried brown gore.

Once that was accomplished, the bronze giant left the blade where he found it, and disappeared from the vicinity. His going was ghostly.

Chapter LXIV

GENIE UNEXPECTED

PRINCE SATSU COULD hear a great commotion as he paced the guest house to which he had been consigned. It was the kind of vocal tumult he associated with an angry mob.

Pressing an ear to the front door, Satsu listened carefully. While his command of Mongolian was adequate enough to understand one person speaking, this was a cacophony of many voices raised in anger. The Prince could make out very little of it.

In time, the hubbub settled down. Shortly after that, General Chinua approached and entered the domicile.

“His Highness, Timur Khan, will speak with you now,” he announced.

Satsu bristled. It sounded like a summons or, worse, a dictate. Prince Satsu was not used to being ordered around.

Stepping out into the dying afternoon light, he told Chinua blandly, “Please to summon Imperial Marines.”

Chinua said without expression, “They are resting.”

Satsu’s purring voice stiffened. “Kindly inform them that they are needed at my side. A prince of the Imperial House cannot treat with a foreign dignitary without his honor guard being present. It is unacceptable to do otherwise.”

Prince Satsu stood stubbornly on the brick step of the guest house, refusing to budge. In his own mind, he was an emissary of the Emperor of Japan, which all civilized persons understood to be a literal God on earth.

A dark gleam deep in his wolfish eyes, General Chinua barked orders to his retinue. They swiftly trooped away, returning a few minutes later, bearing on litters the fallen honor guard.

Each of the six parties were laid out on an individual litter, while a number of green steel helmets were piled in a seventh container. Most were affixed to human heads, which glared and goggled in glassy-eyed horror.

The Mongol warriors who did this arrived very poker faced.

“Your honor guard,” declared General Chinua blandly. “They will follow us without shirking.”

Prince Satsu began sputtering inarticulately, his tea-colored face darkening with rage. The frustrated fists he made were fattish, without distinct knuckles.

“Do you not understand that I serve the Emperor, who is God for the whole world?” he demanded, in his righteous rage lapsing back into his native language.

General Chinua ignored this display, blandly wondering how long before mortal fear would overtake the Japanese’s angry countenance.

But Chinua could not wait for that. His Khan awaited him.

“Follow,” he directed, as if speaking to a dog.

Having no other recourse, Prince Satsu walked stiffly along behind General Chinua, surrounded by the Mongols bearing his defeated honor guard. The Japanese dignitary kept his eyes averted from the severed heads and bodies, and one hand on the scabbard of his sword, steadying it, but also in the likely event he required its keen edge.

Turning a corner, the procession came to the town square where the prisoners from America hung helpless in great bamboo cages.

But that was not what drew Prince Satsu’s smoldering gaze.

In the dusty center, Tamerlane was seated on an ornate iron chair resembling a throne, one evidently scavenged from some local temple. He wore his lamellar armor, as well as his ogre mask and battle helmet. The Iron Khan’s grotesque face was concealed from the sight of his troops, none of whom had belonged to the bandit clan that he had first recruited to his bloody cause on the Mongolian steppe. For all of Chinua’s original followers had perished in service to Tamerlane.

Placed before him stood a great block of bloodstained wood, and beside it stood a broad-faced Mongol holding a great
tulwar
at the ready. Juxtaposition of the sword and the sanguinary block of wood meant only one thing to Prince Satsu.

Someone was about to be beheaded.

The Japanese prince felt his mouth drying. He swallowed twice as he approached the throne of the Iron Khan.

Seeing the approaching Japanese, Timur’s feral eyes lit up in his immobile countenance, and his cruel mouth opened in a kind of a chortle. Peg-like teeth were disclosed, as yellow as old kernels of corn.

The Mongols frog-marched him up to the throne, and Prince Satsu offered the glaring Khan a stiffly formal bow.

This brought more chortling from the hard gash of a mouth.

“What is it you want, Prince of Japan?” demanded Timur.

“I am the Royal Highness Prince Satsu, fourth in line to the throne of Japan.”

“So I am told,” spat Timur. “You have not answered my question. Out with it!”

Satsu flinched at the vulgar words. He made an effort to compose himself and said, “I must protest in the strongest terms the treatment of my honor guard.”

“Treatment! You mean execution! I am sure that, wherever their souls now reside, they agree with you,” sneered Timur in a contemptuous tone. “I will ask you one final time. What is it you want?”

Prince Satsu’s fists tightened as he performed his duty. “I am empowered by my Emperor to make the following offer. We applaud your success in cutting swordlike through the heart of China. But your army is small, and not mechanized. My esteemed Emperor is prepared to offer you support in the way of tanks, modern weapons, fighter planes to support your military advances, and anything else you need in order to vanquish this nation.”

“This is most generous of your Emperor,” purred Chinua.

“In return,” continued Prince Satsu, “we are prepared to give you a province of China. Any province you wish, so long as it resides in the interior and not along the coast.”

Timur Khan fell to laughing. His entire body shook in a different way than usual.

“Generous! Most generous!” he roared.

His aide, General Chinua, joined in the merriment. Other Mongols chimed in, their laughter coarse as their slovenly surroundings.

“I am pleased that you see it this way,” said Prince Satsu formally. For he did not know what to make of all this rude barking.

When the unpleasant mirth had died down, the canine yellow eyes of Timur focused again on the Japanese emissary, and out of his slit metal mouth came growling words.

“Most generous to offer me any province of my choosing after I have already undertaken the conquest of all of China!”

Prince Satsu flinched. His eyes veered toward the impassive headsman and his wooden block. He became apprehensive that he was about to join his retinue—and his honored ancestors—at any moment.

Just then, however, fate took a hand.

Around a corner came a group of Mongols dragging a starved-looking white man. This collection of skin and bones was dragged forward and laid unceremoniously at Timur’s boots. He did not move. He might have been dead.

A Mongol warrior said, “Sire, we found him attempting to escape, along with the oracle in the box.”

Another Mongol stepped forward, offering the closed teakwood casket to Timur.

The Khan took up this container and demanded of it, “Why did you seek to escape, slave?”

“I didn’t have any choice,” returned the deep voice of Cadwiller Olden. “He picked me up and carried me off.”

The Mongol who had offered the box said, “The worm requested that his head be removed at the earliest opportunity.”

Timur demanded, “Oracle, is this so?”

“Yes,” admitted the midget.

“Do I not feed you? Do I not treat you like the prince of all princes?”

“By consigning me to live in my own coffin? I just want to end it all….”

“I refuse to grant you that boon,” said Timur, laughing rustily.

“What good is keeping me around?”

“You amuse me,” croaked Timur. “You dared to offer yourself as an equal and co-ruler of China with me. Such audaciousness is admirable. I will keep you around until I am bored with you.”

“Thanks for nothing,” spat the midget.

“You are very welcome for nothing,” grunted the Khan, without humor.

TURNING his attention back to the Japanese dignitary, Timur announced, “You are just in time to witness the execution of these prisoners.”

“Who are they?” asked Prince Satsu, more out of the desire to turn the conversation away from his uncertain future, than out of true curiosity.

“These are the war-dogs who follow the brazen devil who is called Doc Savage.”

“He is a very, very dangerous man,” admitted Prince Satsu. “My Emperor would be most pleased if you rendered Doc Savage harmless. But know that they are worth more alive than dead.”

The Iron Khan nodded somberly, and flicked his gaze to the unmoving form of the waiting executioner.

The latter broke his imperious pose, strode over, and roughly seized Johnny by his long hair. Dragging him over to the wooden block, the Mongol executioner laid his bony neck on the chopping block, like a hapless chicken about to be decapitated.

As he lay unconscious, the painfully thin archeologist bore some startling resemblance to a medical skeleton enclosed in a gray skin and some loose, disheveled clothing. A newspaper journalist had once described Johnny as resembling an advance agent for a famine. Now, he looked like the proverbial death warmed over.

From the cages suspended on scaffolding not far away, Doc Savage’s men, Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks and the others called down their vituperative complaints.

“You let him go,” bellowed Renny, “or so help me, I’ll break every Mongol neck I catch!”

“That goes double!” howled Monk.

But their threats meant nothing to the assemblage, who spoke no English.

Prince Satsu regarded them coldly, then turned his dark gaze back to the chopping block.

After arranging Johnny’s head in the proper position, the Mongol headsman used one hand to expose the back of Johnny’s long neck, then he stood off and raised his great curved sword.

All eyes were upon the elongated figure who lay supine, oblivious to his imminent execution. Thus no one noticed a figure creeping along nearby rooftops, who pitched something small and round out into the town square.

The object landed with a modest sound, but almost immediately erupted into a black cloud of vapor.

It was as if a dragon’s egg had arrived from some celestial welkin, and began hatching.

Astonished gazes were torn from Johnny Littlejohn’s thin frame, to take in the unexpected spectacle.

The smoke was intensely black. It billowed up and out in great coils, as if angry serpents were being born.

Even in the Twentieth Century, the Oriental mind is filled superstition. Belief in ancestors, demons, and dragons coiled high up in the sky have yet to fully die out. The Mongols, who are not the product of cities, but of portable villages and open steppe watched the smoke expanding, and the thought uppermost in their minds was that a sky dragon had come to earth.

The hissing that accompanied the eruption of this imagined dragon added to that impression.

Yet, although many cowered and retreated from the convulsing pall, no one fled. For Timur stood up from his iron throne and commanded all to remain by his side.

As fearful as the Mongols were of erupting dragons, they feared their Iron Khan even more. Every warrior remained rooted in their sheepskin boots, watching as the “dragon” expanded boisterously until its outer edges began to thin.

Out of this great pall of darkness, stepped a tall, imposing figure who was stripped to the waist, displaying tremendous muscles which stood out in startling relief.

He stood taller than any. He was as bronze as an idol. His face was as hard as the forged mask that sat upon the true countenance of Tamerlane. Eyes as gold as a lion’s raked the faces of all who beheld him.

“Seidohito!”
Prince Satsu breathed in wonderment. “The bronze man!”

Tamerlane barked, “You were a fool to come here!”

But Doc Savage ignored them both. His eyes locked with those of the burly Mongol headsman.

The bronze giant lifted a commanding finger and directed it. “Should you raise your sword against that man, you will be struck down before you can deliver the fatal blow.”

The Iron Khan saw this as an immediate challenge to his authority. Pointing his own mailed finger at the executioner, he roared, “Behead him at once!”

His wide face firm, the headsman made an elaborate show of displaying his great curved
tulwar,
and as a gesture to theatricality, he ran a forefinger along the edge of the blade and lifted it to show how sharp it was.

A thin line of scarlet was visible for all to see.

Grinning evilly, he gripped the sword in both hands and swung it up above his head.

Inarticulate yells came from the big cages in which Doc Savage’s men were suspended. As the downward stroke commenced, they averted their eyes.

Ham Brooks pleaded, “Doc, do something!”

The bronze man merely folded his bare arms and stood as resolute as a statue. He might have been some brazen genie who had emerged from the spreading smoke.

All participants stiffened in expectation of the downward stroke. But it never came.

At the apex of the upward swing, the headsman rolled up his eyes. His gripping fingers loosened. Overbalanced, the heavy scimitar tumbled back over his broad shoulder.

Sprawling, he fell backward upon his own blade, covering it, lying utterly still.

Chapter LXV

NEMESIS IN BRONZE

DOC SAVAGE, MIGHTY MAN OF BRONZE, stood in the center of the town square with the coiling black smoke slowly turning gray around him, the evident master of the situation.

His face working with fury, Timur Khan commenced hectoring his Mongols to pick up the headsman’s fallen
tulwar
and finish the task which the brawny executioner had failed to accomplish.

One warrior leapt in, and dug his hands under the fallen executioner, seeking the smothered sword. He had no sooner touched the edge than he let out a sigh, and collapsed beside the headsman.