Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King Read Online Free PDF Page A

nodded his agreement, and Len Dors's mustache quivered as he growled, "Serve him right, too."
    "It's not as straightforward as that," Jenny said quietly. "Peter has . . . good reason to be upset." Her voice tailed off; she had no desire to go into this, not now, not ever really. She threw the professor a sidelong glance and was glad when he came to her rescue.
    "Peter's been under a lot of stress," Robert Mills said, "with his postgraduate thesis due, and all the work we've been putting in here." He went on, making sure Lorann heard his words. "But we can't just abandon him. We're a team. We have to look out for one another."
    Mills snapped on his flash and walked over to the top of the rope ladder. "You guys finish up here. I'll go on ahead and coax Peter out of . . . whatever's bugging him."
    Without waiting for their reply, Mills swung his body out over the edge and started to descend.
    Peter Glaston played his flashlight over the chamber interior and marveled.
    The stone walls and corbeled ceiling had been constructed without mortar, the stones cut and shaped to fit so precisely that Peter could hardly see where they adjoined. Two larger stones set into the chamber wall had been incised with spiral shapes, and Peter frowned. Almost all of the spirals that he'd seen in Stone Age art were drawn clockwise; the two here were their mirror images, spiraling tightly into their centers but in a counterclockwise direction.
    The left-hand path . . . Unbidden, the phrase popped into Peter's consciousness. The left-hand path–the territory of witches and sorcerers. The path of black magic.
    The chamber was completely empty, except for a large rectangular block of granite that stood against the west-facing wall. By the light of his flashlight, Peter could see a shallow runnel that ran the full length of the stone. He couldn't be sure, of course, but on other artifacts he'd seen, a carved runnel was to allow blood to drain off. The stone was an altar . . . and someone had used it to make blood sacrifices.
    Peter's gaze was drawn to a spot on the floor just in front of the altar stone. It was hard to tell in the flickering shadows, but it seemed that the hard-packed earth floor had at some point been disturbed.
    Eyes narrowing, Peter sank to his knees in front of the altar block. He'd been extra careful not to touch anything in the chamber for fear of contamination–the bacteria on a normal human hand could be enough to do it, and once contaminated, it was near-impossible to get a proper radiocarbon dating fix. Peter and Mills might not get along, but Peter had never forgotten the first rule the professor had taught him: Never do anything to disrupt an ancient site.
    But now Peter's head was pounding. He'd discovered something unknown, something no one else even suspected. His thoughts of Robert Mills, of careful assessment, of nonintrusion, were forgotten as he stared hard at the small patch of disturbed soil. Something had been buried there.
    Balancing the flashlight on the floor to illuminate the spot, he leaned forward and began to scrabble at the surface with his bare hands. He knew that he shouldn't be doing this–that he should call the professor and arrange for a proper stone-by-stone excavation–but his mind was curiously detached, he felt driven, and he didn't even register the pain in his fingertips as they scraped at the stony earth.
    The soil came away more easily than he'd expected, and his heart thudded as his right hand closed around something cold and hard. He tugged at it, twisting it slightly to ease it from the earth that held it. It came free with a jerk, sending an almost electric tingle shooting up his wrist and arm.
    Peter picked up the flashlight in his other hand and focused its beam on his find.
    It was a carved stone ax head, made from some kind of heavy granite rock, four or five inches wide and double that in length. At each end it had been honed to a razor-sharp edge that seemed unaffected by its long