The Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  And so, at the very moment the slab had slid across the top of his pit, he had clenched his teeth and yanked with all his strength on his naileddown artificial left hand.

  It shook the nail slightly, but on the first pull, he did not pull it loose.

  The slab fell into his pit—

  —just as he yanked on the nail again, and this time, his metal hand came free, nail and all, and as the huge stone slab fell down into the pit, Jack planted his false arm perpendicular to his body, made a fist and tucked his legs up against his side as—clang!—the full weight of the slab hit his metal fist, crushing two of its fingers, but the arm held and the irresistible force of the slab met the immovable object of Jack’s upraised titanium forearm.

  The leading face of the slab came to a stunning halt less than an inch from Jack’s nose, and to anyone looking down at it, it would have appeared that he had been completely crushed by the great stone slab.

  Jack, however, had his legs squeezed to the left of his body while his head was facing right, his right hand still nailed to the floor, itself only inches away from the face of the slab above it.

  From there, all he needed was courage, strength, and time—courage to grab, with his real right hand, the nail sticking through it; strength to form a fist around the head of the nail and jimmy it from the block beneath it; and time to do so without tearing his own hand apart or dying from shock.

  Three times he passed out from the strain, blacking out for he didn’t know how long.

  But after a couple of hours of this agonizing sequence of jimmying and yanking, he finally dislodged the masonry nail and got his right hand free.

  Deep hyperventilating gasps followed as he then used his teeth to extract the nail from his bloody right palm.

  Clenched in his jaws, the nail came free and blood issued from the hole in his palm. Jack quickly unlooped his belt from his trousers and with his teeth created a tourniquet.

  At which point, he promptly blacked out again, passing out for an entire hour this time.

  He woke to the sounds of chanting, dancing, and drums.

  “Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

  Now he had to deal with the issue of the slab on top of him.

  All he needed was one crack in it, and he found it near where his right hand had been nailed down.

  Into this crack he jammed a chewinggumsized wad of C2 plastic explosive—the high

  impact lowradius explosive he kept in a compartment in his artificial arm for use in enemy door locks in case of capture.

  The C2 went off—the distant bang Pooh would hear—and a long fatal crack snaked up the length of the slab, breaking it perfectly in two. The partial slab to Jack’s right fell flush to the floor of the pit, providing a narrow aperture through which he could squeeze.

  After some careful wriggling, he was all but out, save for his artificial left arm, which still held the other side of the slab off the ground.

  A tough predicament—there was no way he could lift the half slab off his titanium arm.

  So he did the only thing he could.

  He simply unlatched the forearm section of his false arm from the bicep section and rolled out.

  And so Jack stood at the base of the pit, with one full arm and one half arm, to the sounds of chants and drumbeats—only now he was free.

  Another wad of C2 cracked the section of slab above his artificial forearm, releasing it, and Jack quickly reattached it and tied a rag tightly around his wounded right palm.

  Then he climbed the ladder in the wall of the pit and commenced his own oneman war against the guards of his father’s mine.

  JACK STOOD before the crowd of guards looking like Death incarnate.

  His eyes were bloodshot and a ring of his own blood was caked around his mouth, blood from the masonry nail that he had wrenched from his own hand with his teeth.

  But he was still just one man against thirty.

  It was then that he brought his spare hand into view. In it was a fire extinguisher, grabbed from over by the gantry elevator.

  With a sudden blast of white carbon dioxide, he fired the extinguisher into the burning cross, and it went out, plunging the mine into darkness.

  Absolute black.

  The guards panicked, started shouting. Then there came the sound of many feet shuffling, moving, and—

  —Bam!—

  —the mine’s dim emergency lights came on, revealing Jack standing in exactly the same position as before, beside the cross…

  …only now an army stood behind him.

  An army of several hundred slave miners that he had released from their underground quarters before confronting the guards.

  The looks on the faces of the slaves said it all: hatred, anger,vengeance. This would be a battle without mercy to avenge their horrific treatment, to even the score for months, years of slavery.

  With a piercing cry, the crowd of slave miners rushed forward, attacking the guards.

  It was a slaughter.

  Some of the guards tried to get their guns from a nearby rack, but they were intercepted on the way, crashtackled to the ground, and stomped to death. Others were grabbed by many hands and hurled into the arsenic pool.

  A few tried to flee for the gantry elevator—the only exit from the mine—but they were set upon by several dozen slave miners waiting there with nailstudded planks. They were clubbed to death.

  Within minutes, all the guards were dead and the mine was eerily silent in the dim emergency lighting.

  Jack quickly set about releasing Pooh Bear from his cage. Once he was free and standing on solid ground, Pooh gazed at Jack in horror.

  “By Allah, Jack, you look like shit.”

  Bloody and filthy and weary beyond all human endurance, Jack smiled a crooked smile.

  “Yeah—”

  Then he fainted into Pooh Bear’s arms.

  JACK AWOKE to the wonderful sensation of warm sunlight on his face.

  He opened his eyes, to find himself lying on a cot in a guardhouse just inside the upper entrance to the mine, sunshine slanting in through the window.

  A fresh bandage was on his right hand and his face had been washed. He also wore crisp new clothes: some traditional Ethiopian robes.

  Squinting, he stood and padded out of the guardhouse.

  Pooh Bear met him in the doorway.

  “Ah, the warrior wakes,” Pooh Bear said. “You’ll be happy to know we now own this mine. We took out the upper guards with the help of the miners—who, it should be said, were most enthusiastic in assailing their captors.”

  “I’ll bet,” Jack said. “So where are we in Ethiopia?”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  They stepped out of the office and emerged in bright sunshine.

  Jack took in the surrounding landscape.

  Dry, barren brushland, with rustcolored soil and treeless hills.

  And dotting the hollows of some of those hills were structures—stonebuildings —exquisitely carved buildings, each easily five stories tall, that had been hewn from solid rock and were sunk inside massive stonewalled pits. It was as if they had been cut out of the living rock.

  One of the buildings, Jack saw, was carved in the shape of an equalarmed cross, a Templar cross.

  “You know where we are?” Pooh Bear asked.

  “Yes,” Jack said. “We’re in Lalibela. These are the famous churches of Lalibela.”

  “Our mission is in tatters, Huntsman,” Pooh Bear said sadly.

  It was a short time later and the two of them were sitting in the sunshine, with Jack nursing his injured right hand. Around them, the freed slave miners variously left, ate, or plundered the upper offices for clothes and booty.

  “We’ve been scattered to the winds,” Pooh went on. “Your father sent Stretch back to the Mossad, intent on collecting the bounty on his head.”

  “Aw, shit…” Jack said. “And did I see Astro go off with Wolf?”

 
; “Yes.”

  “Timeo Americanos et dona ferentes,”Jack muttered.

  “I don’t know, Jack,” Pooh said, “from what I could see, Astro didn’t seem, well, himself.

  And during our mission, he struck me as a fine young man, not a villain. I wouldn’t rush to judgment on him.”

  “I’ve always valued your opinion, Zahir. Consider judgment suspended, for the moment.

  What about Wolf?”

  “He set off after Wizard, Zoe, and Lily, to find the ancient tribe and get the Second Pillar.”

  “The Neetha…” Jack said, thinking.

  He stared out into space for a moment.

  Then he said, “We have to catch up with Lily and the others. Make sure they get that Pillar and get it to the next vertex in time.”

  “You need rest,” Pooh Bear said, “and a doctor.”

  “And a panel beater,” Jack said, touching the two halfcrushed metal fingers on his mechanical left hand.

  Pooh Bear said, “I say we head for our old base in Kenya, the farm. There you can get some medical attention and rearm yourself. Then you can set out from the farm for the central regions of the continent.”

  “Ican?” West said. “What aboutwe can?”

  Pooh Bear looked at him closely. Then he looked away into the distance. “I will be leaving you at the farm in Kenya, Huntsman.”

  Jack remained silent.

  “I cannot leave my friend to suffer in the cells of the Mossad,” Pooh Bear said. “The Mossad do not forget a slight. Nor do they forgive those agents who disobey their orders.

  Even if the world is to end, I will not leave Stretch to die a cruel death in a dungeon. He would not let such a fate befall me.”

  Jack just returned Pooh Bear’s gaze. “I understand.”

  “Thank you, Jack. I shall get you to Kenya and there we shall part.”

  Jack nodded again. “Sounds like a plan—”

  Just then, however, a delegation of about dozen Ethiopian Jews approached them. The leader of the delegation, a dignifiedlooking man, held a bundle in his hands, wrapped in dirty hessian cloth.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Jack,” he said humbly. “As a gesture of thanks, the men wanted to give you this.”

  “What is it?” Jack leaned forward.

  “Oh, it is the stones your father had us digging for,” the man said matteroffactly. “We found them three weeks ago, we just didn’t tell him or his evil guards that we had. So we hid them and kept digging as if the stones had never been found, awaiting salvation, awaiting you.”

  Despite himself, Jack shook his head and grinned. He couldn’t believe this.

  “And since you set us free,” the leader said, “we would like to present the holy stones to you, as a token of our thanks. We think you a good man, Mr. Jack.”

  The leader of the Jewish slave miners handed Jack the hessian bundle.

  Jack maintained eye contact with the leader as he took it. “I sincerely thank you for this. I also apologize to your people for the cruelty of my father.”

  “His acts are not yours. Be well, Mr. Jack, and should you ever need aid in Africa, send for us. We will come.”

  And with that, the delegation left.

  “Well I’ll be,” Pooh Bear said. “No good deed really does go unrewarded…”

  Beside him, Jack gently unwrapped the hessian cloth, to reveal two stone tablets, each the size of a manila folder, and clearly ancient, and both inscribed with half a dozen lines of text, written in the Word of Thoth.

  “The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis,” Jack breathed. “God damn.”

  THE SEPARATION OF THE TEAM

  KENYAN SAVANNAH

  DECEMBER 12, 2007

  FIVE DAYS TO SECOND DEADLINE

  JACK AND POOH BEAR sped across the vast Kenyan savannah in an old truck they’d taken from the mine at Lalibela.

  Pooh Bear drove while Jack sat in the passenger seat, gazing at the two ancient tablets.

  “Huntsman. What are those things?”

  Staring at the tablets, Jack said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Pooh gave him a look. “Try me.”

  “Okay. The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis are a pair of stone tablets once owned by Rameses the Great around the year 1250B.C. They stood on a holy altar at his favorite temple in Thebes, the most valuable treasure of his reign. But they were taken from Rameses late in his life, stolen from the temple by a renegade priest.”

  “I confess I have not heard of these tablets before,” Pooh Bear said as he drove. “Should I have?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard of them. Only you’ve heard them called by their other name. You see, the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis are more commonly known as the Ten Commandments.”

  “The Ten Commandments!” Pooh Bear exclaimed. “You can’t be serious. The two carved stone tablets containing God’s laws handed to Moses at Mount Sinai?”

  Jack countered, “Or how about two carved stone tablets containing crucial ancient knowledge stolen byan Egyptian priest named Moses from the Ramesesseum at Thebes and spirited to Mount Sinai after making his escape from Egypt.

  “And, while we’re being precise about it, originally there was only one tablet,” Jack added. “According to the Book of Exodus, Moses broke the single tablet in two. And it only contained five commands, not ten—the tablets are identical, containing the same text. Whether God sent the tablets to Moses on Mount Sinai or whether Moses just revealed them to his followers for the first time on Mount Sinai, is open to question.”

  “It is?”

  “Well, let me ask you: who was Moses?”

  Pooh Bear shrugged. “A Hebrew peasant, abandoned by his mother to the rushes, who was found by the queen and raised as the brother of…”

  “…Rameses II,” Jack finished. “We all know the story. That Moses lived during the time of Rameses the Great is likely. That he was a Hebrew isunlikely, since ‘Moses’ is an Egyptian name.”

  “The name ‘Moses’ is Egyptian?”

  “Yes, in fact, strictly speaking it’s onlyhalf a name. ‘Moses’ means ‘born of’ or ‘son of.’

  It is normally combined with a theoriphic prefix pertaining to a god. So Rameses—or spelled another way, ‘Ramoses’—means ‘Son of Ra.’

  “As such, it is highly unlikely that ‘Moses’ was actually the name of the man we call Moses. It’d be like calling a ScotsmanMc or an IrishmanO’ without adding the family name—McPherson, O’Reilly.”

  “So what was his name then?”

  “Most modern scholars believe that Moses’ full name wasThuth moses: the son of Thoth.”

  “As in the Word of Thoth?”

  “The very same. And as you and I know very well, Thoth was the Egyptian god of knowledge. Sacred knowledge. This has led many scholars to deduce that the man we call Moses was in fact a member of an Egyptian priesthood. More than that, he was a very influential priest: a gifted orator, a charismatic leader of people. Only there was a big problem. He preached a heretical religion.”

  “Which was?”

  “Monotheism,” Jack said. “The idea that there is only one god. In the century before Rameses ascended the throne of ancient Egypt, Egypt had been ruled by a peculiar pharaoh named Akenaten. Akenaten has gone down in history as the one and only Egyptian pharaoh to preach monotheism. Naturally, he didn’t last long. He was assassinated by a group of holy men, aggrieved priests who had been telling Egyptians for centuries that there were many gods to worship.

  “But. If you look at the Biblical Moses, you’ll see that he preached a very similar idea: one almighty God. It’s very probable that Moses was a priest of Akenaten’s who survived his downfall. Now, think about it, if this charismatic priest were to come upon a pair of stone tablets carved by an advanced prior civilization, don’t you think he might use them to augment his preaching, to say to his followers, ‘Look at what God in his wisdom sent you! His immutable laws!’”

  “You realize that if you’re right, Christian Sunday schools
will never be the same again,”

  Pooh Bear said. “So what has all this to do with some remote stone churches in Ethiopia?”

  “Good question. According to biblical history, the Ten Commandments were kept in the Ark of the Covenant, thearca foedera, inside a special vault deep within the Temple of Solomon. Now, in the movies, Indiana Jones found the Ark in the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis, but according to the people of Ethiopia, Indy was wrong.

  “The people of Ethiopia have claimed for over seven hundred years that thearca foedera has resided in their lands, brought there direct from the Temple of Solomon by European knights in the yearA.D. 1280, the same European knights who built the churches of Lalibela. Seems the Ethiopians were right.”

  “So if the tabletsdon’t contain the ten ultimate laws of God, what’s written on them?”

  Pooh Bear asked.

  Jack gazed at the engraved writing on the two tablets in his lap. “What the tablets contain is just as important: they contain the words of a ritual that must be performed at the sixth and last vertex of the Machine, when the Dark Star is almost upon the Earth. The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis contain a sacred text that will save us all.”

  They drove south through Kenya, zooming along its highways until at last they crested a final hill and their old base came into view—a large farmhouse not far from the Tanzanian border. On the distant southern horizon, the cone of Kilimanjaro rose majestically into the sky.

  And standing on the porch of the farmhouse waiting for them, were two white men.

  One wore a black Tshirt, the other a white one.

  The shirts read:“I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!” and “THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!”

  The twins.

  Horus was perched on Lachlan’s forearm. She squawked with delight when she saw Jack and flew directly to his shoulder.

  “When we got here this morning,” Julius said, “your little friend was waiting.”