The Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  Staggering and breathless, he toppled forward—only to feel Stretch spring up alongside him, loop an arm under his armpit and drag him over the last three steps until they both went sprawling onto solid ground, sliding to a halt on their bellies right at Wizard’s feet.

  “Goodness gracious me!” Wizard blurted, helping Jack to his feet.

  Sweating and gasping and held up only by Wizard and Stretch, Jack sucked in air by the gulpful.

  When at last he could speak again, he uttered two glorious words: “Got it.”

  JACK AND HIS team would be out of China by the end of the day, having left the trap system via the lower route—thus avoiding Mao’s men—and rendezvousing with theHalicarnassus at the Burmese border.

  Once they were safely back on board theHali, Wizard and Tank were sent straight to the infirmary to be treated by Stretch.

  Sky Monster said to Jack: “Huntsman. I just got a call from Zoe. She said the mission at Stonehenge wasvery successful. Says she has a ton of data that Wizard will want to see.”

  “Excellent,” Jack said, his clothes still covered in blood, grime, and splashes of mercury.

  “Set a course for England and call Zoe back. Tell her to send through any images she thinks we need to see beforehand.”

  “Assembly point?”

  “Tell her we’re coming to her, time and location to be advised. We’re going to have to take the long route.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Astro, call your American bosses and get them to send the Killing Stone of the Maya to England. And if they know the location of any of the Pillars—which I’m pretty sure they do—tell them to bring those, too.”

  “Got it.”

  “Oh, and tell our CIA friend, Robertson, that we need him to pull some strings with America’s old friends, the House of SaxeCoburgGotha, and get them to bring their Pillar.”

  “The House of Saxewhat?” Astro was confused.

  “He’ll understand.”

  “OK…” Astro said, heading for a comms console.

  Jack turned to Vulture, sitting nearby. “I’m also gonna need the House of Saud’s Pillar, Vulture.”

  Vulture stood. “I knew you had a reputation for daring, Captain, but this, this borders on rank impudence. You reallyare a bold one.”

  “Yeah, real bold.” West headed aft in the direction of his quarters. “Now, if nobody minds, I’m going to boldly take a shower and then I’m going to boldly hit the sack. Wake me when we hit eastern Europe.”

  A few minutes later, Jack was all cleaned up and lying in his bunk, eyes open in the darkness, when something occurred to him.

  He keyed the intercom button above his bunk.

  “Yes, Huntsman?”Sky Monster’s voice said from the cockpit.

  “Have you spoken to Zoe yet?”

  “Just finished talking to her a second ago.”

  “Can you call her back for me and tell her to pass on this message to Lily: ‘Daddy says, I love you and I miss you. Good night.’”

  “Sure, bro.”

  Jack clicked off the intercom and within seconds he was lost in a deep, deep sleep.

  He dreamed of many things—memories mostly, some of them happy, others horrific—but most of all, he dreamed of Lily, of her bright smiling face and the home they’d made together in the remote northwest corner of Australia…

  GREAT SANDY DESERT

  NORTHWESTERN AUSTRALIA

  MARCH 2006–DECEMBER 2007

  IN THE MONTHS after the Tartarus Rotation of March 2006, Jack West’s team returned to their countries of origin—with the exception of Stretch, since his home nation, Israel, had declared himpersona non grata after his actions during that mission. He variously stayed with Jack, Wizard, and Pooh Bear.

  Reports had to be filed, careers had to be restarted. After all, it was not exactly common for a professional soldier to disappear on a tenyear mission, and such an absence had to be explained to the various bureaucracies. Backdated promotions, for instance, were given to all of them.

  Naturally, this disbanding of the team had an effect on Lily, for that team of soldiers was the closest thing to family she had ever known.

  She felt like Frodo at the end of her favorite book,The Lord of the Rings. Having completed a huge Earthchanging mission, now they all had to return to normal life—and how could life ever satisfy someone who had participated in such an adventure. Worse, how did you deal withordinary people who didn’t—couldn’t—know of the great deeds you’d done on their behalf.

  Fortunately, the team came to visit her and Jack at the farm often; and once she got her own cell phone—a big day—Lily kept in touch with them by SMS. And of course, whenever it could be arranged, she went to visit them: seeing Pooh Bear in Dubai, Fuzzy in Jamaica, Wizard all over the place, and Zoe in Ireland.

  Zoe.

  Lily’s favorite times, of course, were Zoe’s visits to Australia. But at first this had been difficult, since an insensitive lieutenant colonel in the Irish Army—ignorant of the heroic role she had played in the Seven Wonders mission—had insisted she retrain and be regraded in the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm.

  Ordinary people, Lily sighed. Urgh.

  Naturally, Jack was aware of this. Indeed, sometimes he felt the same way himself.

  The solution was simple.

  They had to find new challenges to occupy them.

  Which was OK for him, Lily thought, as Wizard would often send him queries and conundrums via email. Things like: “Jack, can you look up the Neetha Tribe for me, from the Congo?” Or: “Can you get an authoritative translation of Aristotle’s Riddles?” Or:

  “Can you find out the names of all the BirdMen of Easter Island?”

  But then, just when she had been at a loss for interesting challenges, Jack had provided Lily with a startling new one that she had not been prepared for: School.

  Since schools were kind of hard to come by in the northern deserts of Australia, Lily was sent to a prestigious boarding school for gifted children in Perth.

  But prestigious or not, kids are kids, and for a little girl who had grown up as an only child among crack troops on an isolated farm in Kenya, school proved to be a confusing and tough experience.

  Of course, Jack had known this would be the case—but he also knew that it was necessary.

  Just how tough it had been, however, became clear at his first parentteacher meeting.

  Dressed in jeans and a jacket that concealed his muscular physique and work gloves that hid his artificial left hand, Jack West Jr.—commando, adventurer, and owner of two master’s degrees in ancient history—sat in a low plastic chair at a tiny plastic desk in front of Lily’s personal guidance counselor, a bespectacled woman named Brooke. A “guidance counselor,” Jack was told, was simply a teacher assigned to monitor Lily’s overall progress at school.

  Brooke’s long list of comments made Jack smile behind his concerned exterior:

  “Lily has been embarrassing her Latin teacher in class. Correcting her in front of the other students.”

  “She’s scoring excellently in all her subjects, averaging over ninety percent, but I get the feeling that she can do better. She seems only to be doing what is necessary to get a tick, not what she is truly capable of. Our syllabus is the most advanced in the country, yet she seems, well, bored.”

  “She’s very choosy when it comes to friends. She hangs out with Alby Calvin, which is great, but from what I’ve seen she appears to have no female friends at all.”

  “Oh, and she made young Tyson Bradley cry by bending his wrist backward with a strange grip. The school nurse says she almost broke his arm.”

  Jack knew about that one.

  Young Tyson Bradley was a little ratbastard and gardenvariety bully, and one day he’d tried to bully Alby into giving up his lunch money.

  Lily had intervened, and when Tyson had reached out for her throat, she had grabbed his wrist and twisted it inside out, forcing Tyson to his knees, almost breaking his wrist
—

  exactly as West had trained her to do.

  Young Tyson had not bothered Alby or Lily again.

  It was at that parent teacher night that West had first met Alby’s mother, Lois Calvin.

  A sweet, timid woman from America, she was living in Perth with her mining executive husband. Anxious and nervous, she worried constantly about her gifted son.

  “That awful sportsmaster just terrorizes him,” she complained to Jack over coffee. “I honestly don’t see why a gentle boy like Alby should have to play a sport. What if he gets a knock to the head? My son can do amazing things in mathematics—things his teachers couldn’t evendream of doing—and that could all be ruined by a single head injury in a soccer game. But that horrible sportsmaster insists that sport is compulsory and I can’t persuade him to excuse Alby.”

  Lois was a lovely woman and she clearly adored Alby, but Jack felt she must be exaggerating things—until later that evening when he himself met the sportsmaster, Mr. Naismith.

  Mr. Todd Naismith was a great hulking man who wore tootight tennis shorts and a polo shirt that accentuated his thick biceps. To a kid, he would have appeared gigantic. To Jack, he was just a bigger version of Tyson Bradley—an adult bully.

  The big sportsmaster seemed to assess West’s size and stature as he sat down. He pulled out Lily’s file, absently tossing a softball in his spare hand as he did so.

  “Lily West…” he said, perusing the file. “Ah, yes. How could I forget. She refused to participate in a game of dodgeball one day. Said it was a stupid game and that I was a ‘dumb jockmoron who didn’t know anything about the real world,’ if I recall correctly.”

  Oh dear,Jack had thought. He hadn’t heard about this.

  “Geez,” he said. “I’m really sor—”

  “Not much of an athlete, your girl,” Mr. Naismith went on anyway, bringing Jack up short. “But her teachers tell me she’s a bright one. Now booksmarts are one thing, and sure, this school focuses on the academic. But between us, I like sports. You know why I like ’em?”

  “I can’t imagine—”

  “Because they engender a team mentality.Team. The idea of selflessness. If the chips were down and their backs were to the wall, would Lily stand up and put herself on the line for her friends? I would, and I know I would, from my experiences in sport.”

  Jack felt his jaw begin to grind, knowing full well what Lily had done on behalf of dipshits like this guy.

  “Is that so?” he said slowly.

  “It sure is.” Naismith kept tossing his ball and—

  Quick as a whip, Jack snatched the softball in midair and held it in his gloved left hand between their faces, his icecold blue eyes levelled at the big sportsmaster’s.

  “Mr. Naismith. Todd. My daughter, she’s a good kid. And I have no problem with her conceptions of loyalty and team spirit. I apologize for any offense she might have caused you. She gets her stubbornness from me. But then—”

  West squeezed the softball with his mechanical left hand…and with a softcrunch, cracked it to pieces, stringy pieces that fell through his fingers to the floor, the ball’s leather cover sliding limply after it.

  Mr. Naismith’s eyes went wide, his previous confidence vanishing in a second.

  “—perhaps you should try appealing to her on a more intellectual level. You might get a better response that way. Oh, and, Mr. Naismith—Todd—if her little friend, Alby Calvin, doesn’t want to play soccer, don’t make him. You’re making his mother nervous. That’ll be all.”

  With that, Jack left, leaving Todd Naismith sitting there with his mouth open.

  AND SO LILY lived for holidays and weekends, when she could return to the farm and meet up with her old friends.

  Wizard’s visits were a highlight, although as the months went by, they became less frequent. He was at work, he said, on a very important project, one that he had been working on his whole life.

  Lily was thrilled to read his notes, filled as they were with ancient mysteries and symbols, and on a few occasions, she even helped Wizard translate some carvings that were written in the Word of Thoth, an ancient language that only she and one other person in the world could decode.

  Twice Wizard brought his research partner Tank Tanaka to the farm.

  Lily liked Tank. Clever, cuddly, and fun, on his second visit he brought Lily a toy from his native Japan, a little robot dog built by the Sony Corporation, called Aibo. Lily quickly renamed the dog Sir Barksalot and equally quickly set about using him to terrorize Horus. A quick tweak from Wizard enhanced Sir Barksalot’s infrared motion sensors—making him bark if he detected movement, even in the dark. It made for great games of “spotlight” with Alby, with the goal being to bellycrawl past the hyperalert robot dog.

  Tank also had a tattoo on his right forearm that intrigued Lily: it depicted a Japanese character hidden behind the flag of Japan. Ever curious about languages, she tried to look it up one day on the Net, but she couldn’t find it anywhere.

  But there was something else that struck Lily about Tank: there was a tremendoussadness to him, a blankness in his eyes that Lily detected on their very first meeting.

  When she asked him what was wrong, he answered by telling her about his childhood:

  “I was a small boy, about your age, when my country went to war against America. I lived in Nagasaki, a beautiful city. But when the war turned for my country and the American Air Force started bombing our cities at will, my parents sent me away, to live with my grandparents in the countryside.

  “My parents were in Nagasaki the day the Americans dropped their terrible bomb on that city. My parents were never found. They’d been obliterated, reduced to dust.”

  Lily knew exactly what it meant to lose your parents—she had never known either of hers—and so a special bond had developed between her and Tank.

  “I’m not very old,” she said solemnly, “but one of the biggest things I’ve learned in life is this: while it can never replace the real one, you can make a new family with your friends.”

  Tank had looked at her kindly, his eyes moist. “You are most wise for one so young, little Lily. I wish I saw the world as you do.”

  Lily didn’t quite understand Tank’s final comment, but she just smiled anyway. He seemed to like that.

  AFTER EACH of Wizard’s visits the whiteboard in West’s study would be overflowing with notes.

  After one such visit, it had this on it:

  THUTHMOSIS V

  Renegade priest of Akenaten regime; monotheist;

  Rival of Rameses II; exiled by him under threat of execution.

  Note Egyptian nameelement “mosis” meaning “son of” or “born of”; this element is usually followed by atheorific, or divine, element.

  So: “mosis” or “moses” or “meses” = “son of”;

  Rameses = Ramoses = son of Ra.

  Thuthmosis = Thothmoses = son ofThoth!

  WHEREABOUTS OF TWIN TABLETS OF THUTHMOSIS

  Who knows!! Temple of Solomonarca foederis Menelik Ethiopia

  Templar quest to Ethiopia inA.D . 1280 Churches of Lalibela? Templar symbols all over them. Are the Tablets in Ethiopia?

  NEETHA TRIBE*

  ·Remote tribe from Democratic Republic of the Congo /Zaire region; warlike;much feared by other tribes; cannibals;

  ·Congenital deformities in all members, variety of Proteus Syndrome (bony growth on skull, similar to Elephant Man);

  ·Found by accident byHENRY MORTON STANLEY in 1876; Neetha warriors killed seventeen of his party; Stanley barely escaped alive; years later, he tried to find them again, but strangely he could not locate them.

  ·Possibly the same tribe encountered by the Greek explorerHIERONYMUS during his expedition into central Africa in 205B.C . (Hieronymus mentioned a tribe with terrible facial deformities in the jungles south of Nubia. It was from the Neetha that he stole the clear sphericalorb that was later used by the Oracle at Delphi.)

  ·BEST KNOWN EXPERT:DR
. DIANE CASSIDY,Anthropologist from USC. But her whole 20man expedition went missing in 2002 while searching for the Neetha in the Congo.

  ·Cassidy found this cave painting in northern Zambia and attributed it to ancestors of the Neetha:

  ·Seems to depict a hollowed out volcano with the Delphic Orb at the summit but its meaning is unknown.

  And finally, the entries that intrigued Lily the most:

  EASTER ISLAND

  (a.k.a. “RAPA NUI”: “THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD”)

  COORDS: 27°09'S, 109°27'W

  BIRDMAN CULT ( “TANGATA MANU”)

  ·Annual competition, held near Rano Kau, the southernmost volcano of Easter Is, whereby a young champion would compete on behalf of his chieftain;

  ·Each champion had to swim to islet of Motu Nui, grab the first tern egg of the season and then return across the sharkinfested waters. The winner’s sponsor became BirdMan, or Chief of Chiefs, for the next year.

  ARISTOTLE’S RIDDLES

  Series of strange axioms left by Aristotle as “lifeguidance” for his students.

  Aristotle’s authorship of them is disputed, since they find no correlation elsewhere in his works. They begin with:

  What is the best number of lies?

  (One, since to support one lie means telling more)

  What is the best number of eyes?

  (Again, one, after the AllSeeing Eye of Egypt)

  What is the best life to live?(The afterlife—key source of Christian theology) What is the direction of Death?