Jack found himself hurdling rusted chestplates, fallen swords and blackened shields as he hurried down the tight, rough-walled tunnel.
The water rising around his shins was a foul milky sludge, a mix of mud and silt. The idea of drowning in it was sickening.
The tunnel was about two kilometres long and by the time they reached its end, the sludge—fed by the incoming tide above them seeping through the walls—had risen to their thighs.
At last they came to a medieval wall with a ragged hole punched in it, where an old man with a wild shock of white hair, a Roman collar and a kind face stood waiting for them.
It was Brother Dagobert de Montreuil.
And he was waving anxiously at them to stop.
‘Stop, stop, stop! Hold it right there!’ Brother Dagobert said in a hushed whisper. ‘There’s a laser trip-wire just in front of you!’
Jack stopped instantly, looked down and saw it through the murky water.
A faint red beam spanned the tunnel at knee height.
He and Iolanthe stepped carefully over it, joining the old priest.
At first, Brother Dagobert smiled when he saw Iolanthe, but then his grin vanished.
‘Goodness me . . .’ he said as he scanned her partially-shaved head and bruised face.
When he had last seen her, Jack guessed, she had probably had her lush auburn hair and flawless complexion. She looked very different now.
Bertie leapt forward and hugged her warmly. ‘Oh, Io! It’s so good to see you.’
‘You, too, Bertie.’ She indicated Jack. ‘Brother Dagobert de Montreuil, meet Captain Jack West Jr.’
Bertie nodded at Jack, impressed. ‘You, young man, have disturbed the universe. Big fan. Love your work. Those entitled royal families have been ruling this world for far too long. Welcome to the first iron mountain.’
‘Nice to meet you, too,’ Jack said.
‘Quickly now, we cannot linger,’ Bertie said, turning suddenly and striding into the dark bowels of Mont Saint-Michel. ‘Sphinx’s advance team arrived here not long ago. I don’t know where Sphinx is, but I overheard someone say he is on his way. The advance team is led by Cardinal Mendoza, who now sports the papal ring and a Ring of Command, and Dionysius DeSaxe. And my snivelling snake of a boss, young Father Rasmussen—ever alert to the possibility of impressing a senior member of the Church—has his lips permanently attached to Mendoza’s ass.’
Iolanthe and Jack hurried after the old Jesuit.
He moved quickly, like a power-walker.
They wound left and right, through a maze of old passageways, before they came to some narrow stairs going steeply upward.
Bertie didn’t stop as he started up them. ‘This is the priests’ entrance to the ancient temple within the mountain. Lots of these old shrines and temples have back doors for caretaker-priests to enter them without using the main entrances.’
He turned to Iolanthe as he walked.
‘Oh, Io, whatever happened to your lovely hair?’
‘My brother had me tortured, Bertie,’ Iolanthe said.
‘Orlando, hmm. He was a nasty boy and no doubt a nastier man. Resentful lad. Spoilt. And not very bright. That’s never a good combination in a king.’
Jack said, ‘You knew Orlando and Iolanthe when they were children. Did you know Sphinx, too?’
‘Ooh, yes,’ Bertie said, never stopping. ‘Yes, I did. Back then, Sphinx was just Hardin. Hardin Lancaster. Even when he was young, he was old. Shrewd beyond his years. Cunning. Patient, too. And he could hold a grudge against a teacher or another child like you wouldn’t believe. As I recall, there was an incident with a boy from the Ludovico family. I’m not surprised Hardin has made his move now.’
For the first time, Bertie paused on the stairs, nodding at Iolanthe.
‘But Io, here’—Bertie gave her a genuinely affectionate smile—‘she was my best student. Wilful, yes. Headstrong, yes. Naughty, oh my, yes. But gifted and brilliant like no other student I ever taught.’
He spun and started climbing the steep stairs again.
‘Thanks,’ Iolanthe said wryly.
Bertie was disappearing into the darkness. ‘Hurry now. I can’t be away for too long before I am missed by Father Rasmussen. They are preparing to perform the Fall.’
Back on Tombelaine Island, Nobody sat huddled in his seaplane—parked inside the old fishing shack—watching and listening to the video feed from Jack’s helmet-mounted camera.
Hades stood on a hill a short distance from the dock, gazing out at Mont Saint-Michel a couple of miles to the south.
The great island monastery was gloriously lit by the full moon and the artificial lights.
Through an earpiece, he listened to the audio from Jack’s helmet-camera, noticing the second reference to his son: ‘Sphinx’s advance team arrived here not long ago . . . led by Cardinal Mendoza, who now sports the papal ring and a Ring of Command, and Dionysius DeSaxe—’
Hades gazed in silence at the island, thinking.
Dion . . .
He glanced at a small stone shack built into the hillside near him. Ostensibly, it was a shepherd’s hut, designed to shield the herders of old during the sudden storms that were common here, but in reality it housed the hidden entrance to the English tunnel to Mont Saint-Michel.
A few minutes later, Nobody came out from the plane.
‘Yo, Hades,’ he called. ‘Can you tell me about—’
He cut himself off.
Hades was gone.
Huffing and puffing as he struggled to keep up with Bertie, Jack hustled up flight after flight of ultra-narrow stone stairs.
It was so tight, his shoulders brushed against the walls.
He got the impression that the many steep flights they were climbing were built inside the medieval walls of Mont Saint-Michel’s colossal abbey.
Brother Bertie climbed the stairs with the energy of a younger man. He spoke with equal sprightliness.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t write it all out in that message, Iolanthe. My superiors could have happened upon me at any moment. So I’ll tell you now: the Vatican Globe that originally sat atop the obelisk outside St Peter’s is incomplete.’
‘What do you mean, incomplete?’ Iolanthe said.
‘What I mean,’ Bertie said, ‘is that the globe that Caligula had transported to Rome from Egypt in 37 A.D. was defaced and thus rendered incomplete.’
‘How so?’ Jack asked.
‘It’s always been believed that that obelisk came from Heliopolis,’ Bertie said. ‘But it doesn’t. It comes from Siwa, the famed oasis way out in the Egyptian desert, the birthplace of the Oracles. When the priests of the Cult of Amon-Ra at Siwa were informed that the mad Roman emperor, Caligula, was planning to move their sacred obelisk to Rome, they were horrified.
‘They knew that the globe on that obelisk showed the locations of the three secret cities and the five iron mountains. They were aghast at the idea that a man as insane as Caligula might possess such knowledge. Don’t forget, Caligula was so mad, he declared his horse to be a god. His horse!’
Jack watched the old monk as he marched up the stairs, speaking quickly. He clearly loved all this history. Jack liked him.
Bertie continued: ‘So the priests of Amon-Ra at Siwa immediately began defacing the globe, filing down the mountains on it, so that Caligula wouldn’t obtain its sacred knowledge. It was difficult work—that globe is made of a metal not found on Earth—but they managed to scrape off two of the mountains before Caligula’s men arrived and took the globe and killed all the priests. Thus the globe is incomplete.’
Jack said, ‘Leaving two unknown mountains . . .’
‘Yes. The two lost mountains. Even then, because the Vatican Globe is so small and lacking in detail, deducing the locations of the three mountains actually depicted on it is not that easy. Mon
t Saint-Michel’s location is clear enough: it’s right there on the coast of modern France. But the other two mountains, which we call the second and third mountains, well . . .’
He shrugged.
‘The second mountain is definitely in the French Alps—we know that—but it could be any one of several mountains: Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, or even the Jungfrau. The third mountain is somewhere in central Asia in the Himalayas: it could be Everest or Annapurna, it could be in Bhutan, it could even be underneath Potala Palace, as some believe.
‘And then there are the last two mountains that were erased from the globe completely. Over the centuries, the Church and the royal families have sent many men to find them: Columbus, Magellan, Drake, Cook and, of course, Javier, whose journal is reputed to mention them, as I said in my text to Iolanthe. Ah, here we are.’
They came to an old wooden door cut into the wall of their rough-hewn stairwell. They pushed through it—
—and suddenly Jack found himself in a curving stone-walled corridor that swept out of view in both directions. Unlike the stairwell, its walls were beautifully carved, clean and smooth.
Bertie hurried down the curving hallway.
Jack said, ‘We’ve sent some people to find Javier’s journal in the Vatican Archives.’
‘Nice to know someone takes my advice,’ Bertie said. ‘Unlike the stupid Church. I might have told them the same thing if they hadn’t made my former student, Rasmussen, my boss.’
And there it was, Jack thought. The older man passed over by his protégé. He felt for poor Bertie.
‘As you would be aware, Captain, over the course of sixty years of study, one acquires a considerable amount of arcana. I’m an old man. I own nothing. I am nothing. I have nothing but the knowledge in my head. When Rasmussen was my student, I didn’t tell him everything I know. But that is not our immediate concern. This is.’
They came to a small stone balcony branching off the inner side of the curving passageway.
‘Careful, now. Stay back a little, so they don’t see you,’ Bertie said.
Staying in the shadows, Jack peered out from the balcony.
‘Oh, wow,’ he gasped.
THE HALL OF THE FALLING TEMPLE
A vast cavern lay below Jack, lit by two huge floodlights that Sphinx’s advance team must have erected.
It was an immense space, at least two hundred metres wide, and it had no floor.
Its sheer stone walls—cut from the heart of the island mountain—just fell away into darkness.
Five levels of balconies ran in a wide circle around the space, the highest of which was Jack’s. They looked like VIP boxes at an opera house.
In the middle of the chamber’s soaring ceiling was a round hole through which a thin shaft of moonlight lanced downward, almost perfectly vertical.
But it was the enormous structure in the exact centre of the cavern that seized Jack’s attention.
A superancient temple.
It was the shape of a gigantic spinning top: it had a wide round waist while it tapered to sharp points at the top and bottom.
And it was absolutely immense, perhaps sixteen storeys from tip to tip, with eight storeys above the waist and eight below.
The temple was suspended from the ceiling by four mighty chains, hanging in such a way that its wide middle was perfectly level with four leaping half-bridges that reached out to it from ceremonial doorways in the walls of the cavern.
Looking down on the gigantic temple from his balcony, Jack saw immediately that it comprised two distinct parts: an upper half and a lower half.
The upper half appeared to be made of solid stone and was visibly heavy. Five gorgeous obelisks surmounted it: four smaller ones ringing a larger central obelisk that stood proudly at the very peak of the hanging temple. That obelisk alone must have been sixty feet tall.
Markings in the distinctive symbols of the Word of Thoth covered the obelisk. Jack wished he had Lily with him to read them.
The lower half of the hanging structure was very different from the upper half.
Whereas the upper half was all weight and mass, this half was skeletal.
It had eight open-air levels, each one smaller than the one above it, so that its bottommost level—the lowest tip of the immense temple—was basically a small open-sided cupola.
And in the centre of that bottommost level, Jack spied a waist-high altar.
All of the lower levels were made of brilliant white stone. They were connected by glistening golden pillars, each of which was inset with ladder-like rungs.
Jack peered down into the vast shaft below the hanging temple.
In the shadowy darkness down there, he saw that it narrowed to a circular shaft barely wider than the temple itself.
‘What is this place?’ Jack whispered.
‘This,’ Bertie said reverently, ‘is the Hall of the Falling Temple at the First Iron Mountain.’
There were some figures down on one of the bridges, looking positively tiny against the scale of the gigantic temple.
Jack recognised one of them as Cardinal Ricardo Mendoza, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or as it was once known, the Holy Inquisition.
The man beside him was younger and he wore a plastic half-facemask to cover his hideously disfigured jaw.
Dion DeSaxe, Jack thought. Hades’s psycho son.
Wearing his cardinal’s skullcap, Mendoza was gazing up studiously at the temple while a blond-haired priest beside him pointed out various things on it.
‘That’s Father Rasmussen,’ Bertie growled. ‘Little German snake. The other Church man is Cardinal Mendoza, Sphinx’s expert and the leader of his advance party. He’s a clever one, well versed in ancient matters. He is the one who perfected their Thoth translator.’
‘We know Mendoza,’ Jack said. ‘And that guy in the mask with him is Hades’s son, Dion. Unfortunately, we know him, too.’
‘What happened to his face?’
‘My friend shot him through it,’ Jack said simply.
He scanned the ceiling of the cavern.
‘Are we below the church at the summit of the Mont?’
‘Yes, directly beneath the nave. Mendoza’s men moved the tip of the spire that sits atop the church. They also pushed aside the altar, revealing a moon hole in the floor. The moonlight comes directly down through the spire and then through the hole and into this cavern.’
Jack looked down at the shaft beneath the suspended temple.
‘Bertie,’ he said. ‘How deep is that shaft?’
‘It is exactly 3.8 kilometres deep,’ Bertie said, ‘with sheer stone walls.’
‘And at the bottom?’
‘Solid rock.’
‘And the temple falls into the shaft?’
‘Yes. With the claimant on it,’ Bertie said.
‘The claimant?’ Jack asked.
‘The person who lays claim to the ultimate throne.’
Jack was silent as that sank in.
The ultimate throne . . .
Bertie added, ‘The temple is a remarkable piece of engineering. It is perfectly balanced. Perfectly. It will fall straight and true, directly into the lower shaft. For this is the test of the claimant.’
‘How so?’
Bertie nodded again at the dark round shaft beneath them, plummeting into the Earth.
‘There are two giant ancient metal rings embedded in the round wall of the shaft: one annulus at the top, another a further three kilometres down.
‘The claimant stands atop the temple and releases it from its chains, causing the whole structure to fall . . . with the claimant on it. As the temple drops into the shaft and passes through the first metal ring, the claimant must have his palm pressed against one of four hand-shaped marks on the base of the upper obelisk.
‘Then the claimant must move quickly. For by the time the temple passes through the second giant annulus—exactly 52 seconds later—the claimant must have dashed down to the lowest level of the Falling Temple and placed his hand on a second altar down there. His hand must be pressed against a hand-mark on the surface of the lower altar at the moment the Falling Temple passes through the second ring. Only that will stop the temple’s fall.’
‘And what if the claimant doesn’t make it to the lower altar in time?’ Jack asked.
Bertie said, ‘Then the entire structure—falling at incredible speed—will crash into the solid stone base at the bottom of the shaft and the heavy upper half will crush the spindly lower half in an instant, killing anyone on it.’
Bertie gave Jack a look. ‘Do you see those Thoth markings on the main obelisk?’
‘Yes.’
‘According to our records, it translates as: “He cannot be emperor who does not risk his own blood.” Not just anyone can rule the world. This is a test of courage. And it is demanded as part of the Trial of the Mountains. “Only those who survive the Fall may enter the Supreme Labyrinth and look upon the face of the Omega.” This, my good Captain West, is the Fall.’
Bertie stood.
‘I must leave you now. I told Father Rasmussen I had to fetch something from the library and I must get back before I am missed.’
He handed Iolanthe an envelope. ‘For you, my dear Io. As a nineteen-year-old, you were a horrible little strumpet: wilful, insolent and entitled. All of your other teachers thought you would become a truly nasty princess, but—well—I always thought you had some good in you.’
Iolanthe smiled.
Bertie nodded at Jack. ‘He’s a fine man, this one. If you’re traipsing around with him, then maybe you’ve turned out all right. I’m glad to see it. You might have proved this silly old man correct.’
He gave her an affectionate peck on the forehead and a final hug and dashed off.
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 11
