The Three Secret Cities

by Matthew Reilly

  ‘You are so like your father,’ he said evenly. ‘Your adopted father, I mean. Captain West. You both have such grit, such defiance. It is nice to meet you at last, young Oracle. I have followed your progress for many years. I am Sir Hardin Lancaster, Lord and Keeper of the City of Atlas, but you may call me Sphinx.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Lily demanded.

  ‘For a long time, I have been something of a mentor to young Dion,’ Sphinx said. ‘I am also—how to put this?—obscenely rich, and before his formal coronation, Dion needed someone to put up the downpayment for the Knights’ services. They do not come cheap, the Knights of the Golden Eight, but they do guarantee results.’

  ‘What was the price?’ Lily found herself asking, looking from Sphinx and Dion to Jaeger Eins.

  ‘The downpayment was a Greek island that I own,’ Sphinx said. ‘When Dion is formally named King of the Underworld tomorrow, he will hand to the Knights ownership of the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala as well.’

  Dion. A king, Lily thought fearfully. In the royal world, clearly it didn’t matter if a new king was murderously insane.

  ‘I thought my father was supposed to be killed as well,’ Lily said. ‘Wasn’t that part of the commission?’

  Sphinx said, ‘Your father, it turns out, was also being pursued by the royal jailer. It’s quite unseemly for the Knights to be acting in competition with a royal official, although this does sometimes happen. Thus we came to an arrangement with Yago in London and handed your father over to him. The Knights and the royal jailer have cooperated in this manner several times over the centuries. With West at Erebus and with your delivery here, the Knights have fulfilled their contract.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ Lily asked, trying to stop her lips from quivering. ‘Why did we have to be captured alive?’

  It was Dion who answered her.

  ‘My life is now beset by constant pain, Lily. Pain that you and Albert caused. You both had to be taken alive so that I can return the favour and inflict upon the two of you similar pain. Physical pain for Albert. The torment of watching for you. Oh, Lily. What I’m going to do will probably make you physically ill. I’m going to torture Albert till he begs me—begs me—to die, and then I’m going to kill him right in front of your eyes.’

  Lily shot a look at Alby up in the cage.

  Only then, suddenly and to everyone’s surprise, all throughout the castle, alarms began to sound.

  Jaeger Acht came over to Jaeger Eins: ‘Sir. A small helicopter just crash-landed in the woods on the eastern side of the island. According to its registration number, it’s a rental chopper from Naples. Looks like a tourist pleasure flight.’

  Jaeger Acht held up a small handheld security monitor for his boss to see.

  On the screen, Jaeger Eins saw a crashed helicopter on the lower eastern slope of the island, half-buried in some stone fortifications, its landing struts twisted but its fuselage largely intact.

  A lone figure lay slumped in the pilot’s seat, head bent.

  Jaeger Eins stared at the screen with hard eyes.

  He threw a look at Sphinx. ‘West is at Erebus?’

  ‘I saw him there with my own eyes last night, sealed in stone,’ Sphinx said.

  Eins nodded to Acht. ‘Send a couple of squires.’

  The two squires approached the crashed helicopter cautiously, guns gripped and ready.

  The chopper lay nose-down in some crumpled brickwork on the edge of the castle’s eastern forest.

  The two squires eyed the slumped figure in the pilot’s seat. He did not move. He was still strapped in by his seatbelt and still wore his radio headset—

  —and then he sprang, suddenly alive, whipping up two pistols, firing quickly, and both squires dropped where they stood, shot in their chests.

  The pilot unclipped his seatbelt and stepped out of the downed helicopter. He grabbed the guns of the two dead squires and strode in through the nearest gate leading to the multi-levelled castle.

  ‘Who is it?’ Eins said.

  ‘It’s an associate of West’s,’ Acht said.

  Jaeger Eins raised an eyebrow at that.

  Standing nearby, Lily heard Acht’s words and her hopes lifted.

  On Eins’s monitor was a freeze-frame of the lone figure entering the castle, pistols gripped in his hands, glaring directly up into a security camera as he did so.

  A matrix of facial recognition vector-lines had locked into place around the frozen image of the man.

  Jaeger Acht said, ‘Facial recognition confirms his name is Mr Julius Adamson.’

  Julius Adamson walked quickly through the gardens and courtyards of Aragon Castle, his face locked in a dead-eyed stare.

  It hadn’t taken him long to reach the home of the Knights of the Golden Eight.

  He had been in the room when Iolanthe had said that the Knights were based at Aragon Castle off the coast of Italy. A few extra searches on the flight there had confirmed some other relevant pieces of information.

  The history of Aragon Castle, for one thing.

  It had once been owned by the Catholic Church. A handwritten record from the Vatican—dated 26 May 1296, seven days after the mysterious death of Pope Celestine V—showed a transfer of ownership of Aragon Castle from the Church to the Militum Sanguine Ischium: ‘the Blood Knights of Ischia’.

  Ischia was an island off the coast of Italy, not far from Naples, and, indeed, was where one found Aragon Castle.

  The term ‘Blood Knights of Ischia’ brought up matches with ‘Knights of the Golden Eight’, ‘Merlin’ and ‘Knights of the Round Table’.

  After that, the journey had been pretty straightforward. It was just the preparations—scoping out the island, buying weapons on the streets of Rome and finding a helicopter—that had required a little extra time.

  Then he had rented the chopper in Naples, flown it directly to the island, and intentionally crashed it to get the Knights’ attention.

  Julius didn’t care for the crumpled chopper.

  He was beyond caring.

  He had come for revenge. To avenge his dead brother and his family, murdered in their car above the Thames two days earlier.

  Jaeger Eins stared in disbelief at the security monitor showing Julius Adamson striding through the outer courtyards of his castle.

  Looking closely, he saw that Julius was gripping something between his right fist and the pistol it held: a scrunched-up piece of paper.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Jaeger Eins snorted. ‘He’s attacking us. How extraordinary. Jaeger Drei and Jaeger Fünf. Please kill that man.’

  Two of the Knights standing nearby grabbed their guns and dashed away.

  Julius came to a domed chapel on the third of Aragon Castle’s six cascading levels, shot its padlocks and kicked in its door. The low afternoon sunlight lanced into the dusty space.

  On the innermost wall of the chapel was an ornate arched doorway, sealed by an iron grille.

  This was the entrance to the old castle, he had learned in his research, the original one that lay beneath the many newer ones.

  Julius scanned the gorgeous chapel, saw a security camera up near the ceiling and calmly shot it to pieces.

  Moments later, the two armed Knights sent by Jaeger Eins arrived in the chapel via a secret panel behind the altar.

  They leapt out, their MP-9 submachine guns blazing, strafing every wall of the little church.

  Julius wasn’t there.

  They frowned.

  ‘Hello.’ Julius emerged from a thick velvet curtain behind them and—blam-blam!—shot them both in the head.

  He took one of the Knights’ MP-9s and disappeared through the secret panel they had used to enter the chapel, forging relentlessly onward.

  Behind the chapel, Julius entered a tight, long hallway that was lit by decaying y
ellow electric lights.

  This hallway had a name—the Petitioner’s Passage—since it was the one and only tunnel that led to the Petitioner’s Ledge. All who came to employ the Knights had to pass through it.

  The Petitioner’s Passage was dead straight and about a hundred metres long.

  Stone statues of Knights long gone were spaced along its length, eerie in the sickly light.

  Julius—his face cold, his eyes dead, still gripping the sheet of paper between his right hand and the pistol in it—strode down it.

  He saw the end of the tunnel and the wider, well-lit space beyond it.

  That was his goal: the inner sanctum of the Knights of the Golden Eight. The men he was going to kill.

  He was striding down the tunnel, glaring at the rectangle of light at its end, when—

  Clang!

  An iron-barred gate dropped into place in front of him.

  Clang!

  A second gate dropped into place behind him.

  And suddenly he was trapped.

  ‘Drop your guns, Mr Adamson,’ a voice said over an unseen speaker in the ceiling.

  ‘Screw you!’ Julius shouted. ‘Come and get them!’

  ‘As you wish.’

  There came a puff of yellow gas from a hole in the wall next to Julius’s face and the next instant, he collapsed to the hard stone floor.

  Julius fought the darkness engulfing him, but it was no use. The world around him shrank.

  The last thing he saw was a shadowy blurred figure walking slowly down the length of the tunnel, growing larger as he neared, until he crouched in front of one of the barred gates trapping Julius and shook his head sadly.

  ‘Mr Adamson,’ Jaeger Eins said, ‘your loyalty to your brother is commendable, but you, my friend, have just entered a world of pain.’

  Night had fallen by the time Julius awoke . . . inside a barred medieval cage only slightly larger than his body.

  He was upright, thanks to an iron neck-ring clamped around his throat, and his hands poked out the front of the cage through two manacle-like holes.

  His cage hung suspended above an awfully high drop.

  Blinking to his senses, Julius saw Alby imprisoned in an identical cage beside him: same neck-ring, same hands-through-the-manacle-holes, suspended from the same T-shaped wooden frame.

  Julius closed his eyes. His mission was over.

  ‘Fuck,’ he whispered.

  Lily stared in horror at Julius and Alby, strung up in their cages.

  They were all inside the Hall of the Round Table, the heart of the old castle, deep within the island.

  Julius’s cage hung a foot out over the drop. Alby’s hung over the platform, over solid ground, at least for now.

  The remaining Knights stood arrayed around the two cages, their eyes deadly.

  Dion and Sphinx stood a few steps behind them.

  Ominously, Lily saw a squire step out onto the platform carrying a purple velvet box with gold buckles. It was about the size of a thick hardback book and he carried it with great reverence.

  ‘Mr Adamson.’ Jaeger Eins stood in front of Julius’s cage. ‘We know why you’re here. You suffered a terrible loss, the death of your brother, and you came here to avenge him.’

  Julius said, ‘Yup.’

  Jaeger Eins smiled wanly, and raised a rumpled sheet of paper.

  ‘You were holding this when we gassed you in the tunnel,’ he said. ‘It’s a printout of an email.’

  Jaeger looked down at the sheet and, standing close to Julius’s cage, read it in a calm, even voice:

  ‘Dear Jack, dear everyone.

  If you’re reading this, then I guess I’m dead. To be completely honest with you, I’m not sure what to write right now. Sending a message from beyond the grave is not something you ever really think about.

  First, I hope you’re all okay. Second, I hope I went out fighting. A good death, as the Vikings said. And if some evil shithead killed me, avenge me!

  But seriously.

  I guess, more than anything, I just want to say this to my brother, Julius: Jules, you were never just my brother. You were my best friend. I love you, man, with a love so strong it can cross time and space and the wall between the living and the dead. Brothers forever. I’ll see you again.

  Lachie.’

  Trapped inside the tight cage, Julius clenched his teeth. His eyes welled with tears.

  ‘Oh, Julius . . .’ Lily sobbed, her heart going out to him.

  Jaeger Eins crushed the sheet of paper into a ball and tossed it into the chasm.

  ‘You will be seeing your brother again much sooner than you think,’ he said.

  Jaeger Eins turned to face Lily. ‘Having said that, Mr Adamson has inadvertently given us the means to provide a demonstration of what will happen to Mr Calvin shortly.’

  He held out a hand and the squire handed him the purple velvet box.

  Jaeger Eins opened it and took from it a curious ancient weapon.

  It looked like a harp, but a very small one, handheld, and with only a single string.

  Its lone ultra-narrow thread glistened in the light, a filament no wider than a fishing line. What exotic metal it was made of, no-one alive now knew, but it looked sharper than any human blade.

  Jaeger Eins gripped its curved handle in his fist, so that the filament-string lay outside his knuckles.

  Then, so quickly it was shocking, he casually waved the string-weapon in front of Julius’s cage and, just like that, one of Julius’s hands, sticking out the front of his cage, went tumbling into the abyss.

  Julius roared in pain, staring in horror at the stump that was now his left wrist.

  He started hyperventilating.

  Blood gushed from the stump, still in its iron manacle.

  Lily gasped in horror.

  ‘What the . . .’ Alby whispered.

  Jaeger Eins had hardly applied any pressure at all, she thought. That filament in the harp must have been—

  ‘This is a weapon from another time,’ Jaeger Eins said. ‘Elegant yet severe. A razor-sharp filament that will cut through just about any organic thing: wood, bone, human flesh. You killed two of my Knights, motherfucker. Such an outrage cannot go unpunished!’

  He slashed again with the string-weapon and Julius’s other hand was severed, and suddenly poor Julius was standing there, in the cage, held upright by the iron neck-ring, with both of his hands cut off.

  He wailed. The veins on his forehead bulged.

  Jaeger Eins stepped in front of Julius so that they were only inches apart.

  Julius’s face was covered in sweat.

  Jaeger Eins was impassive and cold.

  ‘You did your best, Mr Adamson, but your best was not good enough.’ He began to turn away.

  ‘Hey,’ Julius gasped abruptly, making Eins stop.

  ‘Yes?’

  Julius heaved for breath.

  Through the sweat and spittle on his lips, he said, ‘His wife’s name was Eriko . . .’

  Jaeger Eins frowned.

  ‘She was an astrophysicist. Their kids were named Caleb and Willow. The boy liked Lego and Minecraft. The girl liked soccer and dressing up as Wonder Woman . . .’

  Lily began sobbing.

  Alby clenched his teeth. ‘You tell ’em, Jules!’ he shouted, trying to send some defiant strength to Julius.

  ‘They were ordinary decent people,’ Julius said, glaring at Jaeger Eins. ‘And you’re just a sick fuck.’

  Eins said nothing.

  He just turned and nodded to a squire by the wall and the squire released a lever and suddenly Julius’s cage dropped from the timber frame and fell, soaring through the air, three hundred feet straight down the side of the rock tower before it plunged with a splash into the water at the bottom of the cav
ern, beside the Akula submarine parked there.

  Julius—handless and in agony—shot underwater amid a mass of bubbles.

  The water wasn’t actually that deep and within moments, he hit the bottom, where he saw at least six other cages just like his, each with a figure in it, all of them without hands, all of them long dead.

  It would be the last thing Julius Adamson saw.

  He closed his eyes and inhaled the water into his lungs, and in that very last instant before everything went black, Julius found peace because he knew that he would soon be reunited with the brother he loved.

  Lily screamed at Jaeger Eins. ‘You bastard! You’re all bastards!’

  ‘No!’ Eins turned, his eyes flaring. ‘You did this! Your father did this! You have entered a world you do not understand and you are paying the consequences for your ignorance! You think I am just a mercenary? My Knights and I are well aware that the fate of the world hangs in the balance. We have made our alliances for the times to come; we have prepared. Have you? No, because you do not understand. But you will.’

  He handed Dion the filament-blade weapon. ‘My prince . . .?’

  Eins nodded to the squire by the wall. The squire swung Alby’s cage into place above the drop, putting it in the same spot where Julius’s cage had been moments before.

  ‘Oh, God, no . . .’ Lily said. ‘Dion, please, I’ll do anything. Please don’t hurt him—’

  ‘Hurt him?’ Dion snarled through his half-mask.

  He came over to Lily and removed the mask, revealing his face.

  It was hideous. Horribly disfigured. The skin of Dion’s right cheek was twisted in an impossible way. His cheekbone sagged like melted wax and his mouth drooped in one corner, revealing teeth that are not usually visible.

  Dion grinned through his gnarled face. ‘Oh, I’m gonna hurt him. Repay him for doing this to me.’

  Dion strode over to Alby’s cage, lazily twirling the string-weapon.

  Lily struggled against the two Knights holding her. ‘No . . . !’

  Dion stood before Alby, helpless in the cage.

  ‘Hello again, Albert,’ he said. ‘I am giving away a sizeable portion of my kingdom for this, so I plan to enjoy every second of it.’