power imbue

But Lucy was looking up at the sky. Only a little patch of blue showed, away to the south. The rest was cloud, but quite bright. An even, crumpled layer. And yet something funny was going on, directly above. It looked like a darker dot, spinning.

‘Is that a bird?’ whispered Lucy, pointing up.

No, it was a small, dark cloud. Already it seemed to have an odd shape. It seemed to be lowering a strange, spinning wisp of itself. A spinning tail of cloud. And the whole cloud seemed to be growing, as it came lower, and lower. It looked like the pictures of a waterspout at sea. But it wasn’t whirling upwards, it was spiralling downwards, worming its way towards them.

As it came, they heard a faint roar, like the far-off sound of a big aircraft behind the clouds. That is what Hogarth thought it was. But then he realized the sound was coming from that whirling corkscrew of gloom as it descended, louder and louder.

And now the tip of it was only just above the Iron Woman’s head. There it stayed for a while, like a long spinning top, writhing and roaring. Or like a machine drill about to be lowered. The roar was now stupefying, like the roar of a jet plane as it swings towards the runway for takeoff. Lucy and Hogarth covered their ears. The din was painful.

And now it seemed they could see something strange in the spinning cone. As if it kept stopping – just for a moment, like a skater spinning on the toe of one skate who stops just for the fraction of a second at each revolution. And just as you get a fleeting but quite clear glimpse of the whirling dancer’s face, in that momentary stop, so now Lucy and Hogarth saw, in the towering tornado cloud, scales.

Scales!

Yes, there it was, just a glimpse – then another, and another. Scales!

But now the most astonishing thing of all happened. That spinning dark column of scales touched the Iron Woman with its drill point. It touched the top of her head.

Immediately her body seemed to begin to disappear. Actually it began to vibrate. Her body became a blur of vibration. The Iron Man’s hands, which still gripped hers, also disappeared in a blur.

As she vibrated, that whirling tower of darkness and scales was pouring into the Iron Woman. And as it poured into her, she seemed to grow.

For minute after minute it went on. More and more darkness came down the spinning cone. The blurred mass of the Iron Woman grew bigger and began to glow blue. And still it went on. Till they saw the upper end of whatever it was lashing about in the sky like a great tail. Still pouring down into the Iron Woman, it was coming to an end.

The roar grew screechier. Suddenly, with a thin, ripping scream like an express train piling into a tunnel too small for it, that lashing tail dived into the Iron Woman and vanished. The instant silence was shocking.

Her shape had reappeared, but now twice as big as it had been, and glowing blue, like the glass of a blue lamp. The Iron Man, his arms reaching up, still held her hands. As they watched, she darkened, and as she darkened, she shrank. At last, she was her normal size again and the Iron Man released her.

‘Now,’ he said, grinding his voice box, ‘now you have all the power of the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon, my mighty slave from the depths of the universe. It has packed itself inside you. It has become your power.’

- The Iron Woman, Chapter 4