The Three Secret Cities

by Matthew Reilly

  For when you open the first, you open the second and the third.

  THE MINE & THE PRISON

  The Royal Prison at Erebus

  Location: Unknown

  27 November, Time: Unknown

  When he finally awoke, Jack found himself, oddly, standing upright.

  Well, not quite upright. He was tilted backwards at an angle.

  Then he realised that he was on a wheeled hand-truck, his arms and legs bound to its struts with thick buckled belts. His head was also tied back, fastened to the hand-truck by a leather strap that covered his mouth.

  He was inside the hold of a military plane of some kind and it was in flight, engines whining.

  Two guards in black uniforms saw him wake and they alerted Yago, sitting nearby, wearing a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

  Yago looked idly over at Jack and nodded to one of the guards.

  The guard promptly smashed Jack in the face with the butt of his rifle and Jack’s world plunged into blackness again.

  Jack was jerked awake by sudden and intense bright light.

  He was being rolled out of the rear ramp of the cargo plane into brilliant sunshine.

  Searing heat engulfed him. Desert heat.

  Jack squinted in the blazing sunlight.

  He glimpsed a vast sea of sand dunes stretching away before him and the ocean behind him. He was on a tiny airstrip between them.

  A gargantuan skeletal structure towered over him: a conveyor belt mounted on high iron pylons. It was the kind of industrial-sized conveyor belt one saw at iron ore mines. It stretched for a full five hundred metres from somewhere inland to a concrete dock beside the airstrip, where it poured grey ore into the hold of a cargo ship parked at the dock.

  A desert on a coast, Jack thought.

  North Africa, maybe?

  Suddenly, Yago appeared in front of him.

  ‘You are fifty miles from anywhere, Captain,’ he said. ‘There is only desert on three sides and on the fourth is the sea. And it is all my property. Even if you could escape, you wouldn’t survive a day out there.’

  Jack was wheeled up a ramp into the back of a canvas-covered truck.

  After a short drive inland, the truck came to a colossal hole in the ground: an open-cut mine.

  A single narrow road was cut into the perimeter of the deep circular crater. It spiralled downward from the crater’s rim, sheer cliffs dropping away from its inner edge all the way down.

  Tiny cement trucks worked their way up and down the gently-sloping road.

  To Jack, they looked like toys.

  It was only when his vehicle passed one of the cement trucks—it was going up while his was going down—that he realised the monumental scale of the place.

  First, the spiralling cliff-side road wasn’t narrow at all; it was wide enough for two trucks to pass one another side-by-side.

  And second, the cement truck that had rumbled past him was enormous. Its tyres alone were twenty feet high: huge rubber things that turned slowly. The constantly-rotating cement mixer on its back was at least the size of a shipping container.

  Jack also noticed another thing about the cement truck: it had no driver.

  It was automated. This was common in mining nowadays and it was very easy to do: you just programmed the trucks to know the roadway’s GPS coordinates and up and down they went, all day, every day, perfectly safely.

  Jack’s truck arrived at a huge shed at the base of the crater.

  It was an old rusty structure, circular in shape, with flimsy corrugated-iron walls and a flat sheet-metal roof. In the already relentless desert sun, it looked like a heat-box.

  Jack sighed. Shit.

  Still bound to the hand-truck, he was wheeled into it.

  Inside the shed, filling the entire space, was a huge round turntable, perhaps ninety feet in diameter.

  A cement truck rolled off the turntable and headed outside while a waiting empty truck rolled forward onto the turntable.

  With Yago walking beside him, Jack was wheeled onto the turntable beside the big cement-mixing truck . . .

  . . . and suddenly with a mighty mechanical groan, the steel turntable began to go down.

  It wasn’t a turntable.

  It was an elevator.

  An open-sided roofless elevator.

  The stone walls of the cylindrical shaft whooshed steadily upward as the huge industrial elevator descended into the Earth.

  This elevator, Jack saw, had no cable.

  Given the size and weight of the trucks it carried, it needed a more robust motor than that. To that end, the shaft had two huge ladder-like structures on either side of it made of sturdy iron. Jack guessed that on the underside of his platform was a pair of motorised cog-wheels that locked into the ladders, driving the elevator up and down the shaft.

  The elevator descended steadily for a full five minutes.

  Yago said, ‘This elevator travels for exactly one mile, straight down. One thousand six hundred metres, all of it vertical.’

  At length, the wide steel platform emerged in a large cavern deep within the bowels of the Earth and as it did, Jack felt his blood curdle.

  The elevator platform had come out of a round hole in the ceiling of the cavern, three hundred feet above its floor.

  To reach the floor of the cavern—to cover those last three hundred feet—the iron ladders set into the walls of the shaft extended downward like a pair of telescoping rails.

  When the platform touched the ground, those extendable rails immediately withdrew back up into the ceiling, making escape impossible.

  What Jack saw around him was like nothing he had ever seen: an incredible space that held a grey castle-like structure, a giant wall filled with what looked like rectangular bas-reliefs or frescoes, and a wide pool of bubbling grey-black liquid.

  But it wasn’t the sight that had made Jack recoil.

  It was the sound and the smell.

  Wails and screams: cries of desperate agony that echoed across the cavernous space.

  And the stench of human urine.

  ‘Captain West,’ Yago said. ‘Welcome to Erebus, the Royal Prison. It is a place of much pain and no pity, and it will be your home for the rest of your miserable life.’

  Jack was rolled on his hand-truck across the gigantic subterranean cavern.

  The short journey gave him a brief chance to take in the space.

  To his left, looking out over the cavern was the castle. Made of black-grey stone, it appeared to be embedded in the northern wall, kind of like the carved buildings of Petra, Jordan.

  Its design was magnificent.

  It bore pointed towers, twisting pillars, curved balconies and a broad staircase at its front. The truly incredible thing was, the whole structure appeared to be cut from a single piece of stone.

  There was not a single seam to be seen on the entire edifice.

  Jack wondered how anyone could have carved such a complex structure out of stone.

  The floor of the cavern also caught Jack’s attention, because it was not solid.

  It was composed almost entirely of a bubbling grey-black liquid that appeared to have the texture of quicksand. The shifting ooze gave off steam, warming the otherwise cool cavern.

  A low cement bridge spanned the pool, crossing the cavern and passing in front of the castle. Smaller side-bridges branched off it, disappearing into tunnels from which a constant stream of cement trucks came and went, loaded with dark-grey dust of some sort.

  Looking down at the bubbling grey-black pool, Jack suddenly realised that he had seen this curious substance before.

  In the Underworld.

  It was the same steaming conglomerate that had been dropped on the hostages when their champion had died in a challenge, drowning them.

  He had also
seen it in Venice, in the lair of the Order of the Omega: where they had used it to turn a captured man into a statue.

  Yago saw the realisation dawn on him.

  ‘It is called liquid stone,’ he said, ‘and it is a most remarkable substance. It acts rather like cement and, in the hands of a master craftsman, it can be moulded into all manner of complex shapes: bridges, pillars, castles, towers, temples. When heated to the right temperature, it exists in semi-liquid/semi-solid form, enabling it to be shaped and moulded. When it cools, it becomes fully solid.’

  Yago grinned. ‘Which allows me to use it in one especially handy way.’

  It was then that Jack came close enough to see the high wall at the end of the cavern, and now he saw that the rectangular bas-reliefs in it were not bas-reliefs or frescoes at all.

  They were slabs of stone, and embedded in each slab was a person, with the back half of his or her body set into solidified liquid stone.

  Jack counted six rows of the slabs rising up the high wall, five or six prisoners to each row.

  This was the source of the screams and wails: for the people set into the stone slabs were still alive. They didn’t all scream and wail. Some groaned in pain, others just hung their heads, while one poor fellow babbled incoherently, clearly insane.

  They were also the source of the rank smell of the place. Since they couldn’t move from their individual stone prisons, they were left to urinate on themselves.

  ‘It is known as the Wall of Misery,’ Yago said. ‘An apt name.’

  And then as his eyes roamed over the wall, Jack saw him, in the bottom row, his body encased in the liquid stone, his chest bare, his face twisted in pain.

  Hades.

  ‘It’s so nice to reunite you with my dear brother,’ Yago said, glancing at Hades. ‘In the royal world, punishment is clear and severe. It is the only way to ensure respect for the existing order.’

  He removed the leather strap that covered Jack’s mouth.

  Jack stared helplessly at Hades.

  Yago said, ‘I believe you once also met my dear friend, Vladimir Karnov, the former King of Land, known to some as Carnivore.’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘I heard you killed him,’ Yago said. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He didn’t say that he’d shot Carnivore to death with a wave of heavy-bore anti-aircraft rounds from almost point-blank range.

  ‘To be fair, you didn’t know he was a king at the time,’ Yago said. ‘He was a fine man, Carnivore. Firm. Strong. A man of deep conviction. I miss him. You know, he used to keep those who wronged him in formaldehyde tanks. Few know it, but Carnivore was actually inspired to do that by a visit to this place. But formaldehyde, well, it doesn’t act in the same way liquid stone does.’

  Jack’s hand-truck was stopped in front of a rectangular stone tray about the size of a large bathtub.

  Inside it was water.

  The two guards pulled Jack from the hand-truck, tore off his shirt and lay him horizontally on his back in the water inside the stone tub.

  Jack lay face-up in the water, his arms still tied behind his back, the water rising to just below his ears.

  Then Yago stepped up into his field of vision.

  He held between two fingers a pinch of grey-black powder. It looked like gunpowder, only finer, much finer.

  ‘This is what we mine here,’ Yago said. ‘It is an old and rare substance, found only in six places in the world, the core ingredient of liquid stone. In dry form, both visually and in chemical structure, it is easily mistaken for fine volcanic soils like picrite basalt and pitchstone, but it is capable of so much more than they are.

  ‘It has been called stone dust, grey matter, greystone and, my favourite, Gorgon Stone. It is how the ancients built their colossal structures, from Hades’s mountain-palace to my castle here to the six temple-shrines of the Great Machine that you rebuilt. Allow me to show you how it works.’

  He sprinkled a few grains of the grey-black powder into the water of Jack’s tub.

  Jack felt the reaction instantly.

  The water around his body began to press against his sides and somehow thicken.

  It was a terrifying sensation and Jack began to breathe faster.

  He turned his head slightly and saw that the clear water around his body had become an opaque black and as it changed colour, it also changed form: from liquid to solid.

  It was becoming denser, heavier.

  ‘I would advise you not to turn your head too far, Captain,’ Yago said. ‘Whatever position your head is in will, very shortly, be its final position. I’d hate for you to spend the rest of your life with a crick in your neck.’

  Panting now, Jack quickly returned his face to an upward position and felt the grey-black ooze pinch around his head, legs and ribcage.

  It was getting noticeably thicker, more gluggy.

  ‘The reaction of the grey matter to water is quite remarkable,’ Yago said. ‘My scientists tell me that on a molecular level, it is forming what is called an exponential lattice. It is like a nuclear chain reaction. For every bond the grey matter makes with the water molecule, one hundred more are made, which is how such a small amount of powder can solidify the entire tub around you. It also has to do with the special properties of water, like its ability to form ice.’

  Abruptly, Jack heard a series of ominous cracks and to his horror the inward press of the substance suddenly took on a different quality: the grey-black ooze around him had started to harden.

  Jack clenched his teeth at the pain.

  ‘The prisoners in this place are here for various crimes,’ Yago said. ‘Some stole from their royal masters. Some were caught plotting. Some, like my brother, failed in their royal duties. Some are killers and rapists. And then there is you: a man who dared to defy all four kings.’

  The dark ooze around Jack was now entirely solid.

  Yago gazed down at him, lying face-up in what was now a dark-grey slab, the entire back half of his body, including his arms, embedded in the stuff. His front half, including his bare chest, protruded from it.

  Yago said, ‘It feels like the liquid stone around you has set, but it is not done yet. It will cool further. And like everything that cools, it will contract and slowly squeeze you. First, it will squeeze your skin, causing it to burst in places. Then—very slowly, over the course of months and years—it will crack your bones. Your skull will feel it first—a steady, firm pressure—then your shoulders and your legs.

  ‘You will be drip-fed water and just enough nutrients to keep you alive, if this state can be called living. If you excrete anything, you will do it over yourself. Don’t worry, you will get used to the smell.

  ‘For a sentence at the Prison at Erebus is a sentence to a lifetime of pain and agony. Listen to the screams of those around you. I adore that sound. It soothes me. Sends me to sleep at night. Soon, your screams will join theirs, Captain. Yours will be another voice in this choir of the damned.

  ‘Sleep if you can. Dream of rescue, if you choose. But know that such a thing will only ever be a dream. No-one knows the location of this place but me, and my guards cannot reveal it for they were born here.

  ‘No, it is here that you will die, Jack West Jr. For in over five thousand years of recorded history, no prisoner has ever escaped from this place.’

  Once the liquid stone had set, Jack’s stone tub was raised into a vertical position and mounted on the Wall of Misery beside Hades.

  From his own identical position on the wall—embedded in a slab, hands behind his back—Hades had watched the whole grim procedure. Once Jack was on the wall beside him and Yago was gone, he spoke.

  ‘We meet again, Captain.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘Got a clever plan to get out of here?’ Hades asked.

  ‘No. Hoping my friends mig
ht, though.’

  ‘You shouldn’t hope,’ Hades said. ‘Any attempt to rescue you is foolhardy. Anyone who tries to bust you out of this prison will only earn themselves a place on this wall. You overcame the Underworld, Captain. But this place is different. This isn’t the Underworld. This is Hell.’

  The prisoner on Jack’s other side was the insane babbler.

  And he never stopped. He muttered about his innocence and about ‘the voices that made him do it’. Some of the other prisoners on the Wall called out, ‘Quit it, Rubles!’ ‘Shut your fucking mouth, you mad bastard!’

  The insane fellow—Rubles—merely replied, ‘Come and fucking shut it, you miserable bastards.’

  Then he started singing.

  ‘Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer . . . !’

  Jack just closed his eyes and tried to tune it out.

  Down in the depths of the ancient prison, one could not tell the difference between night and day.

  Yago’s silent guards, however, turned the cavern’s lights on and off in a twelve-hour cycle, effectively creating a day-night rhythm.

  In the last hours of his first ‘day’—while Rubles sang—Jack gazed out at the cavern.

  There was only one entrance: the wide circular hole in the ceiling from which the elevator descended into the cavern.

  It was three hundred feet above the floor.

  There was no ladder to it. No way to access it.

  He could see why no-one had ever escaped.

  Then, abruptly, the lights went out.

  On that first night in the prison, Jack slept fitfully. The solidified liquid stone binding his body in place was hard and unforgiving. He could feel it contracting. The first couple of times he awoke, Rubles was still singing. Mercifully, by the third time, the insane man had himself fallen asleep.

  Thank God, Jack thought.

  He continued to doze unevenly until finally exhaustion overtook him and he fell into a deep sleep.

  But then, at some point during that first night, while all around him slept, a blinding flashlight to his eyes woke him and, for a moment, Jack dared to hope someone had come to rescue him.