The Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  One of the most heroic members of West’s team on that mission had been the second son of one of the Emirates’ most senior sheiks, Sheik Anzar al Abbas.

  West, Zoe, Sky Monster, and most of all, Lily, were always welcome in Dubai.

  Alby, needless to say, was impressed. “Whoa…” he said, gazing out the windows at the stunning view.

  Lily just shrugged. She’d stayed here before. “I get dibs on the double bed!” she yelled, racing into a bedroom.

  The doorbell rang, despite the fact it was almost midnight.

  West opened the door to reveal—

  —Sheik Anzar al Abbas and his entourage.

  With his great beard, round belly, deeply etched olive skin, and dressed in a traditional desert robe and headscarf, the regal old sheik could have stepped straight out ofLawrence of Arabia.

  “The hour is late and Captain Jack West Jr. arrives in haste,” Abbas said in his deep voice.

  “I sense trouble.”

  West nodded grimly. “Thank you once again for your hospitality, Lord Sheik. Please, come inside.”

  Abbas entered, his robe flowing, followed by his six attendants. “My son, Zahir, sends his regards. He is currently working as a senior instructor at our special forces training facility in the desert, teaching our best fighters many of the strategies you taught him. He begged me to inform you that he is on his way at all possible speed.”

  West walked with the sheik. “I fear the circumstances are grave, far graver than ever before. Where once we banded together to fight against the desires of selfish men, now, if Wizard’s research is correct, we face a far more sinister threat. Wizard hasn’t arrived here yet, but I imagine he’ll enlighten us further when he gets here.”

  Abbas’s eyes flickered. “You do not know?”

  “Know what?”

  “What has happened to Max Epper, the Wizard.”

  Jack froze. “What’s happened?”

  “We picked it up from Chinese satellite radio chatter last night. Wizard was arrested twentyfour hours ago by Chinese forces not far from the Three Gorges Dam. I fear he won’t be coming here anytime soon.”

  Jack could only stare.

  “Wizard left this file at my home,” he said, once he and the sheik were settled in one of the sitting areas of the suite. Zoe and Sky Monster were there, too, along with Lily and the rather confused Alby.

  Significantly, Sheik Abbas’s entourage had been left in an outer room.

  “The file summarizes his research into a set of six stones called the Ramesean Stones and their relationship with six oblong blocks known as the Pillars of the World, or sometimes, the Pillars of Vishnu.”

  “Vishnu?” Abbas said, recognizing the word. “As in…”

  “Yes,” West said. “As in ‘I am Vishnu, Destroyer of the World.’ The study of the Ramesean Stones was Wizard’s life’s work. Our tenyear mission to locate the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and through them the Golden Capstone was merely a side mission for him. This is the study that has consumed his entire life.

  “And now he’s been arrested in China at the same time Chinese forces attacked my supposedly secret farm in Australia. The Chinese know. About his workand that we have the Firestone, the top piece of the Capstone.”

  Abbas frowned. “The Capstone has greater significance? Beyond the Tartarus Event?”

  “From what I read last night, more significance than we can possibly imagine,” West said.

  “The striking of the Capstone by the Sun during the Tartarus Rotation was just the beginning.”

  At that moment, West seemed to retreat into himself, thinking in silence. Then he said, “I need more time to examine Wizard’s work and make some calls. After that we have to convene a meeting. A new meeting of concerned nations. Give me a day to study all this and then let’s gather here for what might be the most important meeting in the history of mankind.”

  WEST SPENT the whole of the next day reading and sorting through Wizard’s voluminous notes.

  Names were scattered among Wizard’s writing, of which West knew some but not others.

  Tank Tanaka, for instance, he knew. Tank was Wizard’s longtime Japanese colleague;

  West had met him on numerous occasions.

  Others he only knew slightly, like “the Terrible Twins,” Lachlan and Julius Adamson, a pair of mathematical geniuses from Scotland who had studied under Wizard in Dublin.

  Fasttalking, exuberant, and much loved by Wizard, the twins operated as one brain, and taken together they were arguably the most formidable noncomputerized mathematical force in the world. In their spare time, they liked to beat Vegas casinos at the blackjack tables simply by “doing the math.”

  One summary sheet that Wizard had prepared commanded most of Jack’s attention. It was virtually a representation of Wizard’s thoughts, a mixture of diagrams, lists, and handwritten notations by the old professor.

  West recognized a few of the terms on the sheet, like theSaBenben, Firestone, and Abydos.

  Abydos was a littleknown but hugely important Egyptian archaeological site. It had been sacred to the ancient Egyptians from the very beginning to the very end of their civilization, spanning some three thousand years. It bore temples belonging to Seti I and his son, Rameses II, and contained some of the earliest shrines in Egypt.

  Jack had also seen the Mystery of the Circles before, but had no clue what it meant.

  Other things, however, were completely new to him.

  The Great Machine.

  The Six Pillars. That they might be oblong uncutdiamonds was certainly intriguing.

  The obscure references to Fabergé Eggs, Easter, and the sinking of theTitanic at the bottom of the page—well, they completely baffled him.

  And, of course, the unusual diagrams scattered all over it.

  He used this sheet as his central reference point and read on.

  Elsewhere among Wizard’s notes, he found some digital photos of stone carvings written in a language he had not seen since the Seven Wonders mission.

  It was an ancient script known only as the Word of Thoth—named after the Egyptian god of knowledge.

  Mysterious and obscure, it was a language that defied translation even by modern supercomputers. Indeed, its cuneiformlike strokes were often thought to contain secret mystical knowledge.

  Historically, only one person in the world could read it: the Oracle of the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. This person, magically it seemed, was born with the ability to read the Word of Thoth. A long line of Oracles had existed right up to the present day, and although it was unknown to her teachers and friends at school, Lily was one of them.

  She was the daughter of the last Oracle at Siwa, a foul spoiled man who had died shortly after her birth.

  Most unusually for an Oracle, though, Lily was a twin. As Jack had discovered during the Capstone mission, she had a brother named Alexander—like his father, a disagreeable, spoiled boy—who couldalso read the Word of Thoth. After that mission, Alexander had been spirited away to a quiet life in rural Ireland, in County Kerry.

  Jack got Lily to translate many of the Thoth inscriptions in Wizard’s notes. Many were nonsensical to Jack, while some were just plain weird: for instance, one Thoth carving stated that the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur, famous for its huge ziggurat, was an exact replica of “the Second Great TempleShrine,” whatever that was.

  Jack also showed Lily one prominent Word of Thoth carving from Wizard’s notes:

  Lily looked at the complex array of symbols and shrugged, translating it in seconds. “It says:

  “With my beloved, Nefertari,

  I, Rameses, son of Ra,

  Keep watch over the most sacred shrine.

  We shall watch over it forever.

  Great sentinels,

  With our third eyes, we see all.”

  “With our third eyes?” Jack frowned.

  “That’s what it says.”

  “Nefertari was the favorite wife of Rameses II,” Jack
said. “And together they keep watch over the most sacred shrine, whatever that is. Thanks, kiddo.”

  Lily smiled. She loved it when he called her that.

  Later that evening, the outer door to the Presidential Suite opened and Lily rushed into the arms of the man standing in the doorway. “Pooh Bear! Pooh Bear! You came!”

  The man was a shorter, younger version of Sheik Abbas. He was the great sheik’s second son, Zahir al Anzar al Abbas, call signSaladin, but renamed by LilyPooh Bear. Short, rotund, and bushybearded, he had a voice as big as his heart—and that wasbig.

  With him was a taller man, thinner, with skeletal features: a master sniper once known asArcher, nowStretch, having also been rechristened by Lily.

  Israeli by birth, Stretch had once been a member of the Mossad, but after a certain…conflict…with them during the Capstone chase, he was nowpersona non grata in Israel. In fact, it was known that the Mossad had put a price on his head for his actions back then.

  Greetings were exchanged with Zoe, Sky Monster, and when they finally extracted him from his study, West.

  Lily said to Pooh Bear, “And this is my friend, Alby. He’s a whiz at math and computers.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alby,” Pooh Bear roared. “I hope your intentions with my little Lily are pure. No, let me put that another way: if you break her heart, boy, I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the Earth.”

  Alby gulped. “We’re just friends.”

  Pooh Bear smiled, winking at Lily. “So, young Alby, are you joining us on this endeavor?”

  Lily said, “Alby’s parents are currently in South America and out of phone contact. Alby was supposed to be staying with us at the farm. Now I guess he’s staying with us wherever we go.”

  “So, Huntsman!” Pooh Bear exclaimed. “What ails you this time?”

  “It could be bad, Pooh. Really bad. Tartarus has been neutralized, and some people want the Firestone badly. We barely got away at all.”

  “They found you in Australia?”

  “Yes. I’ve called a meeting, one that will bring the original team back together. Fuzzy is the last one. He’s on his way from Jamaica.”

  “And Wizard?”

  “He’s out of the picture for the moment, but he’s sent me enough information to make a start. With Lily’s help, I’ve managed to decipher a few of his recent discoveries.”

  Pooh looked at Lily. “Is that so? How many are you up to now, young one?”

  “Five, plus sign language.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “Never stop learning. Never stop honing your gift.”

  Pooh turned back to West, his face serious. “My father sends a message. At tomorrow’s meeting there will be a few other countries represented. Some not from the original seven.

  Word has got out, it seems.”

  West frowned. This was moving too fast, at a pace beyond his control. It was as if he was still trying to catch up himself.

  He pulled out several copies of a fivepage summary he’d found amid Wizard’s notes and handed them out to the others.

  “This is a summary I’ll be giving to everyone at the meeting tomorrow. It’s about Wizard’s work. Read it beforehand. It’ll be less astonishing that way.”

  Then, looking at them all—his old friends, friends who had bonded over the course of a long, hard, and at times seemingly impossible mission—he smiled.

  “I’m glad you’re all here for this one.”

  THE MEETING

  BURJ AL ARAB TOWER

  DECEMBER 4, 2007

  THE NEXT DAY, as each delegation arrived at the Presidential Suite, they were handed the fivepage briefing.

  It was a peculiar array of national representatives: Of the original seven nations who had sponsored West’s initial quest to locate the Golden Capstone, only four were present now: Australia (West), Ireland (Zoe), the UAE (Pooh Bear), and New Zealand (Sky Monster).

  Canada’s Wizard was missing in China.

  Spain, having lost a man during the first mission, had declined to send a representative to this one. And Jamaica’s man, Fuzzy, was still uncharacteristically late.

  “We’re still waiting for Fuzzy and a few others,” West said. “So, please, while you wait, acquaint yourself with the briefing material.”

  They did so.

  The briefing was headed: “The Six Ramesean Stones and the Pillars of the World.”

  THE SIX RAMESEAN STONES AND

  THE PILLARS OF THE WORLD

  by Professor Max T. Epper,

  Trinity College, University of Dublin

  THE MYSTERY OF THE CIRCLES

  The end of the world has preoccupied humanity for as long as humanity has existed.

  For Hindus, Vishnu will destroy the Earth. Christians fear the Apocalypse prophesied in the final books of the Bible. No less than St. Peter himself famously wrote, “The end of all things is near.”

  I fear it may be nearer than we think.

  THE MARRIAGE OF LIGHT AND DARK

  Our small planet does not exist in a void.

  It exists in concert with our Sun and the other planets of our solar system.

  Certain ancient civilizations knew about these relationships: the Maya, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, even the Neolithic peoples of Britain; all of them saw patterns in the night sky.

  And as I myself discovered during the Tartarus Event of 2006, our Earth is directly linked to our Sun.

  Our Sun begets life. It provides the light that sparks photosynthesis and the temperate warmth that allows our fragile human bodies to exist without the blood in our veins freezing or boiling.

  This, however, is a more delicate situation than many realize.

  To paraphrase the Chinese philosopher, Laozi, nothing exists in isolation. For life to exist, there must be balance. Balance implies the harmonic existence of twothings, what philosophers call “Duality.”

  But not only must there be two of everything—man, woman; heat, cold; light, darkness;

  good, bad—but inside the good there must be some bad, just as inside the bad, there must be some good. This has never been better displayed than in the famous Taijitu, the Yin

  Yang.

  So what does this concept of duality mean in the context of our solar system? It means this:

  Our Sun does not exist alone.

  It has a twin, an opposite, an invisible body of dark matter known as a “zeropoint field.”

  This spherical field roams through the outer regions of our solar system like a moving black hole, not so much possessed of negative energy as no energy at all. It absorbs light.

  It is indescribably cold. It breaks down oxygen at the molecular level. It is, in short, a variety of energy that is anathema to life as we know it.

  And if this zeropoint field—this Dark Sun, if you will—ever sweeps into our solar system, it will destroy all life on Earth.

  Observe the image at the beginning of this article. It is a carving found all over the world from Abu Simbel in Egypt to Newgrange in Ireland to Peru in South America.

  It is called “the Mystery of the Circles.”

  A quick glance at it leads the observer to conclude that it depicts our solar system, with the Sun at the center, orbited by nine planets.

  Not so.

  If you look closely, you will see that the Mystery of the Circles contains ten planets orbiting a central Sun. It also features—somewhat mysteriously—a strange black orb sitting outside the orbits of the ten planets, equal in size to the central Sun.

  It is my belief that the Mystery of the Circles is indeed a depiction of our solar system, but not as we see it today. It is a picture of our solar system as it was a longtime ago.

  Forget the planets for a moment and keep your eyes on the black orb hovering outside the circles.

  This must be the focus of our inquiry.

  For it represents our Sun’s dark twin, and it now approaches, bringing with it our destruction.

  THE MACHINE

  But
a mechanism has been put in place to allow us to avert our destruction.

  Unfortunately the knowledge crucial to our salvation—to the operation of this

  “Machine”—which was known to the ancients, has long since been lost through wars, dark ages, witchhunts, and holocausts.

  However, great men and women throughout history have held pieces of this knowledge: Laozi and his famous student, Confucius; Rameses II, the mighty pharaoh, and his priest

  builder, Imhotep II; Cleopatra VII, the doomed Egyptian queen; the great Mayan ruler, King Pakal; and in more recent times, Isaac Newton, in his obsessive search for the secrets of alchemy.

  In all their writings, there is one common feature. The Machine is always represented by this image:

  What the image actually means, though, remains elusive.

  THE SIX RAMESEAN STONES

  Of all the impressive individuals who have known about this Machine, it is Rameses II—

  greatest of all the pharaohs, greater even than Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid—who has left us the most information about it and indeed identified the key to solving the mystery.

  The Six Sacred Stones.

  Six stones which, in his honor, we now call the Ramesean Stones. They are:

  1. The Philosopher’s Stone

  2. The Altar Stone of the Temple of Ra’s Dark Twin (Stonehenge)

  3. The Twin Tablets of Thutmosis

  4. The Killing Stone of the Maya

  5. The Seeing Stone of the Southern Tribe (Delphi)

  6. The Basin of Rameses II

  In his temple at Abydos in a remote corner of southern Egypt—not far from his famous list of seventysix pharaohs carved into a wall—Rameses left a tablet mentioning the “Six Guidestones of Ra’s Dark Twin.”