The Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  I must also send out my heartfelt thanks to Peter and Lorna Grzonkowski for their very generous donations to the Bullant Charity Challenge. The twins in the novel, Lachlan and Julius Adamson, are named after their nephews.

  Likewise, Paul and Lenore Robertson, two longtime supporters of my work and another couple who do an enormous amount for charity, for their donations at not one but two ASXReuters Charity Dinners! Paul, I hope you don’t mind that I made you a smooth

  talking doublecrossing badguy CIA agent!

  And last of all, I thank The WAGS, a great group of guys with whom I play golf on Wednesday afternoons, for their generous donation on behalf of Steve Oakes, the leader of this motley crew. In return for their kind donation to charity, I named a character at the start of this book after Oaksey, and promptly riddled him with bullets. As the boys say, no one likes to see that, but such are the dangers of having a character named after you in a Matthew Reilly book!

  To everyone else, family and friends, as always, thank you for your continued encouragement.

  —Matthew Reilly

  Sydney, Australia

  September 2007

  AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY

  THE WRITING OFTHE 6 SACRED STONES

  SPOILER WARNING!

  The following interview contains Spoilers fromThe 6 Sacred Stones.Readers who have not read the novel are advised to avoid reading this interview as itdoesgive away major plot moments from the book.

  Q:Let’s get straight to the biggest question of all: how could you endThe 6 Sacred Stoneswith Jack West Jr. falling into a bottomless abyss?

  MR:Okay, okay! Yes, I figured this might be an issue, and this is certainly the best place to talk about it. (Hey, I think the interview at the end ofScarecrow saved me from countless emails about what I did in that book!)

  When I sat down to writeThe 6 Sacred Stones, I asked myself, “How can I make this book totallydifferent from the others? What can I do that will be completely unexpected?”

  My answer: come up with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous novel yet with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous cliffhanger ending imaginable, one in which the fate of the hero literally hangs in the balance at the end of the book (and as those who have read my other books will know, I love a good cliffhanger). This worked out very well when it became apparent to me that the story I had come up with (involving six pillars being placed at six vertices) was going to be too big to achieve in one book. So the ending is merely the midway point of a larger adventure. I’ve often ended chapters with dire cliffhangers, just think of this as a huge chapter ending!

  Jack may well get out of his terrible predicament—indeed one method for his survival has been inserted into the book (and no, it’s not Horus); the fun is in waiting to find out how.

  The way I see it, it’s a bit like waiting for the next season of a TV show that has ended on a cliffhanger. So in the end, I apologize to everyone for making you wait in such an awful way, but I promise it will be worth it!

  Q:7 Deadly Wondersand The 6 Sacred Stoneshave seen an increase in the scale of your books (solar rays, dark stars, vast ancient structures). What exactly are you trying to achieve with this series?

  MR:What I am trying to achieve is really quite simple: I want to create aLord of the Rings

  –style epic set in our world, in the present day.

  I want it to be a story that is part adventure and part myth in which a small group of seemingly powerless characters struggle against the mighty and allpowerful.

  There is another reason for it, too, one that is purely for me as an author. In his Introduction toThe Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of his reason for writing that tale: “The prime motive was the desire of a taleteller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.”

  Same here.

  I just wanted to try my hand at a really big epic story: a grand sweeping adventure that spans the globe, that looks out at the Sun and space itself, that examines the mysterious ancient places scattered around our planet, and in which—most important of all—the protagonists, in the course of carrying out thrilling feats of heroism, endure profound tests of their character. I also just wanted to try to write a long story.

  So in contrast to the Shane Schofield/Scarecrow books, which bring back the same hero in separate adventures, the story begun in7 Deadly Wonders and continued inThe 6 Sacred Stones is actually one big story (indeed, this is why the sections titled “A Girl Named Lily” begin with Part III in this book, Parts I and II having appeared in the earlier novel).

  Q:Tell us about some of the “mysterious ancient places” that appear in this book and why you chose them?

  MR:I love ancient places and ancient things—from the pyramids to the Rosetta Stone. I can just gaze at them all day long—especially when they defy explanation.

  Having explored the Great Pyramid and its fellow “Wonders” in7 Deadly Wonders, I decided to focus on some of my other favorite ancient places in this book, among them Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, and the Three Gorges region of the Yangtze River in China.

  (There are, of course, many others that I love just as much, but I’m keeping them for the next book!) I have visited all three of these places.

  First, Stonehenge. Seriously, pictures don’t do it justice. Those stones arehuge! And the stuff about coastal lichens being on their surfaces is true—it is weird and unexplained!

  Abu Simbel is simply colossal, bigger than you can possibly imagine, and built for the same reason the men of Gondor built the Argonath in Tolkien’sThe Fellowship of the Ring: to tell encroaching neighbors, “Look at how powerful we are in Egypt! Don’t even think of crossing these borders unless you can deal with the people who built this monument!” And it’s all the better that the UN rebuilt it brickbybrick to save it from the waters of the Aswan Dam.

  Finally, the Three Gorges of China. These are simply beautiful. Natalie and I visited them in 2006, solely to research this book. A side trip into the gorges of the Shennong River system (lush, green, misty, and narrow) really crystallised my mental image of the flooded rural hamlet where Wizard finds the entrance to Laozi’s trap system.

  Q:What else have you been working on? How is theContestmovie coming along?

  MR:Earlier this year, I sold a TV script calledLiterary Superstars to Sony, who successfully licensed it to the US TV network ABC.

  It’s a halfhour comedy set in, of all places, the publishing industry. I figured that after ten years in the book world, I’d acquired many funny tales, so I decided to put them into a TV

  show. The heroine is not an author, though, but a publicist who promotes authors for a publishing house.

  The script led a charmed life through Hollywood, going from my agents to Darren Star (producercreator ofSex and the City) , to Sony, to the lovely actress Jenna Elfman, and then to ABC. For a while there, I was flying back and forth from Sydney to Los Angeles to do meetings with studio and network executives, which was all pretty exciting. We shoot the pilot later this year, so my fingers are crossed that it gets picked up.

  This has meant that I’ve put my ambitions for aContest movie on hold for a while; after all, you have to run with the show that’s actually getting made. ButContest isn’t going anywhere.

  Q:One question that many fans are asking is, will we be seeing Shane Schofield again in the near future?

  MR:Yes, Scarecrow is a character that my fans really do love—especially after what I put him through inScarecrow. And, in all seriousness, I thank my readers for allowing me to venture into other stories and write about other heroes (believe me, as an author, it is possible to get pushed into writing about the same character over and over again). When, one day, I look back on my career as a novelist, I’d like to see an array of standalone books and different series, from the Schofield and Jack West series, to the (current) stand alones of William Race and Stephen Swain and who knows wh
o else.

  That said, having taken a break from Scarecrow, Iam rather keen to write about him again, and a new idea featuring him has started to form in my mind. So as I write the sequel toThe 6 Sacred Stones (after all, I can’t leave Jack West falling down that abyss forever!), I’ll be fleshing out this idea that I have for a new Scarecrow novel with the hope that it will be the next book I write after that. I should add that I also have lots of kids demandingHover Car Racer II!

  (Oh, and for those who missed it in 2005,Hell Island —the short novel that I wrote for the Books Alive initiative—features Scarecrow and is now available again in stores across Australia and New Zealand.)

  Q:Any final words?

  MR:As always, I just hope you enjoyed the book; that it took you away from your world for a few hours or a few days and entertained you in the way a good rollercoaster should.

  And rest assured, I’m already typing feverishly away on the next one.

  Best wishes and see you next time!

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I’VE NEVER actually included a bibliography in one of my books before, but with this novel I thought I might since it delves into so many different fields of study (from ancient Egypt and China to the African slave trade, to space and zeropoint fields, to the intricacies and history of diamonds). As an author of fiction, I have to be the proverbial jackofalltrades and master of none, and while I readily admit that I am no expert in astronomy or astrophysics, I do my best to read as widely as I can so that my characters can be.

  I have not divided this bibliography into principal or lesser sources—some might only have provided me with information on a single point in my novel, but that makes them no less valid to my mind (after all, it might have been a big point)—nor is it in any particular order of importance. It is simply here so that readers who have an interest in certain aspects of the book might like to read further.

  Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,The Elixir and the Stone (London: Random House, 1997).

  Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln,The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982; London: Century, 2005).

  Ian Balfour,Famous Diamonds (London: William Collins & Sons, 1987).

  Robert Bauval,Secret Chamber (London: Century, 1999).

  Bill Bryson,A Short History of Nearly Everything (London: Doubleday, 2003).

  Deidre Cheetham,Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

  Robert Guest,The Shackled Continent (London: Macmillan, 2004).

  Manly P. Hall,The Secret Teachings of the Ages (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003; original text, 1928).

  Graham Hancock,Fingerprints of the Gods (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1995;

  London: Century, 2001).

  Graham Hancock,The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1992).

  Graham Hancock,Underworld (London: Michael Joseph/Penguin, 2002).

  Stephen W. Hawking,A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press/Transworld, 1988).

  Robin Heath,Stonehenge (Glastonbury: Wooden Books, 2000).

  Peter Hessler,River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

  Adam Hochschild,King Leopold’s Ghost (London: Macmillan, 1999).

  Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas,Uriel’s Machine (London: Century, 1999).

  Peter Marshall,The Philosopher’s Stone (London: Macmillan, 2001).

  Giles Milton,White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004).

  John North,Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric Man and the Cosmos (New York: The Free Press, 1996).

  Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince,The Stargate Conspiracy (London: Little, Brown & Co, 1999).

  Reader’s Digest,The World’s Last Mysteries (Sydney: Reader’s Digest Services, 1978).

  Chris Scarre, ed.,The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).

  Dava Sobel,The Planets (London: Fourth Estate, 2005).

  Duncan Steel,Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).

  Gordon Thomas,Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (New York: St.

  Martin’s Press, 1999).

  Hugh Thomas,The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870

  (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

  Craig Unger,House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties (London: Gibson Square Books, 2004).

  Peter Watson,A Terrible Beauty (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MATTHEW REILLYis the international bestselling author of seven other novels:7

  Deadly Wonders, Ice Station, Temple, Contest, Area 7, Scarecrow, and the children’s bookHover Car Racer, and one novella,Hell Island. His books are published in more than twenty languages, and he has sold more than 3 million books worldwide. In addition to his novels, he has recently written a television show for the ABC network, set in the world of international publishing.