The Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

There were removable entry holes in each of the cube’s six sides, and at the moment one of these—on the upper side of the docking unit—was connected to the tube that snaked back up to the Zodiacs.

  Once the unit was in place, its corner points bolted to the lake floor and to the pyramid island itself, Jack started an air pump, filling the tube and the docking unit with air.

  The docking door inflated quickly and suddenly the way was clear to climb down its tube—perfectly dry—and access the wall of the ancient pyramid island.

  Jack climbed down the rubber tube, gripping its inbuilt ladder holds, slowly descending into Lake Nasser.

  He carried a fullface scuba mask but did not wear it. It was a precaution, just in case the docking door collapsed or otherwise unexpectedly filled with water. He also held the cleansed First Pillar in a chest pack. On his head he wore his trademark fireman’s helmet.

  He came to the bottom of the entry tube and stood—thanks to the airfilled docking unit—

  on the floor of Lake Nasser. His boots stepped down into an inch of water, water that formed a suction layer against the bottom of the tentlike docking unit.

  The exposed flank of the pyramid island stood before him, rocky and uneven and glistening wet.

  Carved symbols covered it, a kaleidoscope of images in which the carving of the Machine was easily lost.

  But there was no discernible door in the wall. Nothing but carving after carving after carving.

  Jack gazed at the symbol for the Machine.

  It was a fairly large carving, about the size of a manhole. And the six rectangles in it depicting the six Pillars seemed to be lifesized, the same size as the Pillar in Jack’s chest pack.

  Unlike all the others, however, the uppermost rectangle in the carving wasindented, recessed into the image.

  “A keyhole,” Jack said aloud.

  He removed the Pillar from his chest pack, held it against the recessed rectangle.

  It was an exact match for size.

  “You’ll never know if you don’t try…”

  And so he reached forward with the Pillar and pressed it into the rectangle—

  —and immediatelythe entire circular carving turned on its axis, rotating like a wheel, and retreated into the wall, revealing a dark round tunnel beyond it.

  Jack stepped back in surprise, still gripping the Pillar.

  “Jack? You OK down there?”Zoe’s voice asked in his ear.

  “Am I ever,” he said. “Come on down. We’re in.”

  THE TUNNEL OF SOBEK

  THE TIGHT TUNNEL beyond the round entry hole was slick with wetness. A dripping noise echoed from somewhere within it.

  Gripping an amber glowstick in his teeth and guided by the light on his fireman’s helmet, Jack bellycrawled for about five yards down the claustrophobic tunnel before he came to its first obstacle: a huge Nile crocodile, easily an eighteenfooter, blocking the way and grinning at him from a distance of three feet.

  Jack froze.

  The thing was enormous. A great fat prehistoric beast. Its fearsome teeth protruded from the edges of its snout. It snorted loudly.

  Jack shone his helmet flashlight down the tunnel past the big croc, and saw others beyond it, maybe four more lined up in single file down the length of the tight little tunnel.

  There must be some other entrance,Jack thought.A crevice somewhere above the waterline that the crocodiles have slithered in through.

  “Hey, Jack?” Zoe said, arriving in the tunnel behind him. “What’s the holdup?”

  “A large animal with a whole lot of teeth.”

  “Oh.”

  Jack pursed his lips, thinking.

  As he did so, Zoe came up behind him and shone her flashlight past him. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

  Then abruptly Jack said, “It’s too cold.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too early in the day for them, their blood’s still too cold to be a threat.”

  “What are you talking about?” Zoe asked.

  “Crocodiles are coldblooded. For a croc, especially a big one, to perform any kind of athletic act, it needs its blood to be warmed up, usually by the Sun. These guys are scary, sure, but it’s too early in the morning for them, too cold, so they’re not gonna be capable of big aggressive movements. We can crawl past them.”

  “Now you really are kidding.”

  At that moment, Pooh Bear and Wizard arrived behind them.

  “What’s the problem?” Pooh Bear asked.

  “Them.” Zoe jerked her chin at the line of large crocodiles before them. “But don’t worry, Captain Courageous here thinks we can crawl by them.”

  Pooh Bear’s face went instantly white. “Crcrawl by them…?”

  Wizard gazed at the crocs, nodding. “At this time of day, their blood will still be very cold. The only thing they could really do right now is bite.”

  “Biting is what worries me,” Zoe said.

  Jack checked his watch. It was 5:47A.M.

  “We’ve got no choice,” he said. “We’ve got twentyfive minutes to get to the Vertex, and that means getting past these guys. I’m going in.”

  “Er, Huntsman,” Pooh Bear said. “You know…well…you know I’d follow you anywhere. But I’m…not good with crocs at the best of times and this is—”

  Jack nodded. “It’s okay, Zahir. No one’s completely fearless, not even you. You sit this one out. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Thank you, Huntsman.”

  “Zoe? Wizard?”

  He could see that they were thinking similar thoughts.

  Zoe eyed the tunnel determinedly. “You can’t do this alone. I’ll be right behind you.”

  And Wizard said, “I’ve worked my whole life to see what lies beyond those crocs. I’ll be damned if they’ll stop me.”

  “Then let’s do it,” Jack said.

  Crawling through the darkness, he came to the first croc.

  The great reptile made him look tiny, puny.

  As Jack’s face came level with it, the croc opened its massive jaws, revealing every single one of its teeth, and emitted a harsh belching grunt in warning.

  Jack paused, drew in a deep breath, and took the plunge, crawling past the thing’s jaws and shimmying around the side of the animal, sliding up against the curved wall of the tunnel.

  His eyes came level with the croc’s—and Jack saw that those eyes, cold and hard, were watching him every inch of the way.

  But the creature did not attack. It did nothing but shuffle on its claws.

  Jack wriggled past it, his cargo pants brushing up against the bulging belly of the beast, and he could feel the flabby give of its abdomen, and then suddenly he was alongside its spiky tail, past it.

  Jack let out the breath he’d been holding.

  “I’m past the first one,” he said into his headset mike. “Zoe, Wizard. Come on through.”

  THE STAIRS OF ATUM

  IN THIS MANNER, Jack, Zoe, and Wizard slithered down the long tight tunnel, squeezing on their bellies past the five gigantic Nile crocodiles.

  At the end of the tunnel, they emerged at the top of a square stone well equipped with a staircase that delved down into darkness.

  The stairs bent back and forth as they dived down the well shaft. On the walls of each landing were thousands of hieroglyphs, including more large carvings of the Machine’s wheellike symbol.

  Jack descended the first flight of steps and came to the first landing……where the Machine symbol in the wall retreated inward by some unseen mechanism and revealed a wide gaping hole behind it, a hole that could contain any kind of deadly liquid…

  …but then the Pillar in Jack’s hands glowed slightly and the hole instantly resealed itself.

  Jack exchanged a look with Wizard.

  “Doesn’t look like you get past these traps without the Pillar in your possession.”

  “Not without great difficulty,” Wizard agreed.

  Down the stairs they climbed, winding b
ack and forth.

  At every landing, the wheellike symbol for the Machine opened but then closed again when it sensed the Pillar in West’s hand.

  Down and down.

  Wizard counted the stairs as they went, until at last they came to the bottom, where the stairs stopped at a great stone archway—tall and imposing, twenty feet high. It opened onto dense blackness.

  Wizard finished his count—“267.”

  Jack stepped into the archway, staring out into the blackness beyond it. A light breeze struck his face, cool and crisp.

  He sensed a large space before him, so he pulled out his flare gun and fired it into the black.

  Fifteen flares later, he just stood there in the archway, his mouth open in wonderment.

  “Now that’s a sight you’ll remember for a long time,” he breathed.

  THE HALL OF THE MACHINE

  The twenty foot high archway in which Jack stood looked microscopic compared to the space that opened up below it.

  The archway stood at the summit of an immense mountain of stone steps—five hundred of them, maybe more—steps that descended to a flatfloored hall that was easily four hundred feet tall and five hundred wide. The colossal collection of stairs stretched for the entire width of the hall, from wall to wall, an enormous mountainside of perfectly square

  cut steps.

  The ceiling of this mighty subterranean hall was upheld by a forest of glorious columns, all of which were carved in the colorful Egyptian fashion, with brilliant redblueand

  green lotus leaves at their tops. There must have been forty such pillars, all in regular rows.

  “Just like the temple of Rameses II at Karnak…” Wizard breathed.

  “Maybe the temple of Rameses was a replica built in honor of this,” Zoe said.

  Standing at the top of the great flight of stairs, Jack felt like he was standing in the topmost row of a modern football stadium, gazing down upon the field far below.

  And there was one other thing.

  Down in the hall,there was no fourth wall opposite the stairmountain.

  Indeed directly opposite the huge staircase, past the forest of ornate columns, was nothing at all: the polished floor of the hall simply ended abruptly at a sharp edge, a railless balcony five hundred feet wide, essentially a great viewing platform that looked out over an even larger space of more darkness.

  But from their vantage point at the top of the staircase, Jack and the others couldn’t see what lay inside this larger space, so they descended the stairs, looking like ants against the gargantuan hall.

  They were halfway down the stairs when Jack saw what lay in the larger space.

  He stopped dead.

  “We’re gonna need more flares,” he breathed.

  THE VERTEX AT ABU SIMBEL

  THE FIRST VERTEX OF THE MACHINE

  JACK, WIZARD, AND ZOE crossed the vast floor of the Hall, passing through the forest of superhigh columns, before they came to the edge of the hall, the point where it looked out over a larger underground void.

  A gargantuan abyss dropped away before them. Deep and black and at least a thousand feet wide, it plummeted to unfathomable depths, into the densest darkness Jack had ever seen.

  And mounted over it, suspended from the flat stone ceiling above the abyss, was a colossal pyramid—hanging inverted, upside down—perfectly cut and, by the look of it, of exactly the same dimensions as the Great Pyramid at Giza. It looked beyond ancient, beyond anything mankind could hope to build. Its flanks blazed with a lustrous bronze sheen.

  Jack was reminded of the Pyramid Inversé at the Louvre in Paris—the beautiful upside down glass pyramid that hung over a smaller one. Made famous in the blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, its construction was shrouded in both Masonic and neopagan myth.

  He also thought of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built as they were into a giant natural stalactite in a great cavern in southern Iraq, and it struck him that perhaps the Gardens were built in homage to this.

  Either way, the incredible size of the pyramid dwarfed the hall in which Jack, Wizard, and Zoe stood, the hall that until now had seemed so gigantic.

  “Jack. Zoe. Meet the Machine,” Wizard said.

  Jack checked his watch.

  It was 6:02A.M. The Jovian equinox would be at 6:12.

  They’d made good time.

  His radio squawked.

  “Huntsman, you still alive down there?”Pooh Bear asked anxiously.

  “We’re in. We’ve found the Machine.”

  “Sky Monster just called. He’s picked up a large force of land vehicles heading this way from Aswan. Over a hundred vehicles coming in behind the tourist coaches.”

  “ETA?” Jack asked.

  “An hour, maybe less.”

  Jack did some calculations in his head. “We can be gone by then. Just.”

  As Jack spoke into the radio, Zoe and Wizard examined the walls of the hall.

  They were literally covered in images—thousands and thousands of beautiful and intricate carvings.

  Some they recognized, like the Mystery of the Circles, the circular symbol for the Machine, and even the layout of Stonehenge was there. But others were completely new:

  Zoe quickly pulled out a highres Canon digital camera and started clicking away, trying to capture as many of the images as she could.

  “That’s Ur,” Wizard exclaimed, pointing at the second to last image.

  “It is?” Zoe said.

  “It’s the layout of the ancient city of Ur, in Mesopotamia. Ur famously had two walled harbors, one to the west, the other to the north—you can see both of them clearly in the carving. Until the Great Pyramid was built, the Ziggurat at Ur was the tallest building in the world. And do you know what the word ‘Ur’ means?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Light. The City of Light.”

  Taking pride of place in the center of the wall was a huge polished obsidian plaque. Every carving in it was edged with gold and its ornate frame also appeared to be cut from a single square piece of gold:

  “Oh my God, the six vertices…” Wizard breathed. “That symbol repeated on the left, an inverted triangle surmounting a rectangle, is Thoth for ‘vertex.’ This carving is a description ofall six vertices. I’ll have to get Lily to decipher it.”

  Zoe snapped several photos of the plaque, then stared at the incredible hall around them and the gravitydefying pyramid suspended above the abyss.

  “Wizard, who could build a place like this?” she asked. “Not ancient man. Not even modern man could do something like this.”

  “This is true,” Wizard said. “So who could? Extraterrestrial visitors? Some think so—

  over 70 percent of people believe that the Earth has been visited by aliens at some point in history. And if they exist, perhaps aliens did visit our planet and build these structures.

  But I don’t subscribe to that view.”

  “What do you think?”

  “He thinks men built them,” Jack said, joining them, scanning the walls as he did so.

  “Hey, it’s Ur.”

  “Men?” Zoe frowned. “But I thought you agreed that neither modern nor ancient man could have—”

  “I did agree. But I didn’t rule out a race ofsuper ancient men,” Wizard said.

  “The past civilization theory,” Jack said.

  “Yes,” Wizard said. “The theory that ours is not the first advanced civilization to flourish on this planet. That over the eons, in between asteroid impacts, comet strikes, and deadly Dark Stars, humantype beings have on numerous occasions risen above their animal neighbors, thrived, and then died out, only to rise again millions of years later.”

  “You think a previous civilization ofpeople built all this?” Zoe asked.

  “Yes. A highly advanced human civilization, far more advanced than we are today. Why, did you notice how all the doors and steps we have passed through to get here haveall been suited to our size and stature? This is not coincidence. That analie
n culture would buildhuman sized steps would be an astronomical coincidence. No, this structure—this wonderful structure—was built by human hands a long,long time ago.”

  “Humans who despite their advancements couldn’t save themselves from extinction,” Zoe pointed out.

  “Maybe something else killed them,” Jack said. “While they were building this, a rogue asteroid might have wiped them out.”

  Wizard nodded. “A lot can happen in a hundred million years. Entire species can emerge, evolve, thrive, and become extinct in that time. By contrast, modernHomo sapiens is only a hundred thousand years old. And hey, at least the people who built this Machine were trying to save themselves from the future return of the Dark Star.”

  “Wizard, sorry to interrupt, but would you mind taking a look at this.” Jack had moved to the edge of the balcony and was gazing at the colossal inverted pyramid through a pair of binoculars.

  The peak of the upsidedown pyramid hovered level with their balcony, but it was still three hundred feet—about ninety yards—away.

  “The peak isn’t pointed,” he said, handing the binoculars to Wizard. “It’s flat at the summit.”

  “Like the Great Pyramid was?” Zoe said.

  “Sort of, but smaller. Much smaller,” Wizard said. “About the size of”—he looked at the Pillar in Jack’s hands “—that.”

  “So how do we get over there to place it?” Zoe asked.

  “I’m guessing the same way we got in here,” Jack said, pointing to the floor at his feet.

  Zoe looked down—and saw the symbol for the Machine engraved into the marble floor beneath Jack’s boots. Again, the rectangles in it were lifesized.

  Jack placed the cleansed Pillar into the rectangular slot nearest to the abyss.

  No sooner had it slotted into place than a deep rumbling could be heard.