. . . until only Sphinx and his people, protected by their military-grade headphones, remained standing.
Sphinx drew his gun, walked over to the immobile Pope lying on the ground and calmly shot the defenceless pontiff in the head.
The Pope’s head blew apart, splattering the cobblestones of St Peter’s Square with blood.
Sphinx holstered his pistol and shook his head. ‘Honestly, “a den of wickedness”. “The world’s moral leader”. This from a man whose organisation protects child molesters. I could never stand him.’
He took the papal ring off the Pope’s dead finger and threw it to Mendoza.
Mendoza caught it and put it on. ‘Thank you, sire. Thank you so much. I appreciate this more than you know.’
Sphinx nodded. ‘This is what I promised you: to be Pope in my new world. Later, you can wake whichever cardinals and priests you choose and rebuild the Church in whatever image you desire. Congratulations, Your Holiness.’
Jack’s Farm/Hades’s Estate
3–23 December
In the three-week period between the chaotic ending of the global race to find the Three Secret Cities and Jack’s dash to Moscow to save Lily, one individual came to observe and experience the unique world of Jack West Jr.
That was E-147, the Neanderthal minotaur whom—to the shock of the assembled royal spectators—Jack had saved during the Great Games at the Underworld.
In the days immediately after the Great Games, E-147 had lived and recuperated with Jack and his team at their remote farm in the Australian desert.
It was a culture shock for him in many ways.
First of all, E-147 got a new name.
‘Young man,’ Mae declared, ‘we are not going to call you by a number.’
Suggestions were made, most of them starting with the letter E—Eric, Eldrick, Edward—but in the end, it was the origin of E-147’s alpha-numeric name that became the source of his new one.
The E in ‘E-147’ indicated that he hailed from the eastern sector of the minotaur city in the Underworld. The other clans were similarly designated N, S or W, for the north, south and western sectors.
‘How about Easton, then,’ Alby had suggested. ‘It’s a nice name and it’s kinda close to eastern.’
That was the one he chose.
Easton loved his new name.
In addition to his new name came a new look.
As a Neanderthal in the Underworld, Easton hadn’t had to subscribe to any kind of grooming regimen, so his black hair was unkempt, his whiskers were wild and his monobrow pronounced.
So Mae gave him a haircut, and Pooh Bear and Stretch taught him how to shave. (Of course, they disagreed on whether or not he should have a beard; Pooh was naturally pro-beard, while Stretch voted for a clean-shaven look.)
When he emerged from the bathroom, Easton looked like a new man.
He had two neatly trimmed eyebrows, a shorter hairstyle parted on the side, longish sideburns and a clean-shaven chin.
Some new clothes completed the makeover.
Now, he looked like a regular short stocky guy with dark hair, olive skin and a large rock-hard jaw that by three in the afternoon had a five o’clock shadow.
He was no longer E-147.
He was Easton.
Another thing that E-147 noticed—no, Easton, he corrected himself—was the unusual concept of family that was prevalent in Jack’s group.
Of course, minotaurs knew the idea of family: they had clans; they had marriages; they even had a ruling bloodline that produced the minotaur king.
But Jack’s concept of family included people who were not related to him by blood or marriage.
Alby, Easton saw, was not Jack’s relative, but Jack treated him as if he were his son.
Pooh Bear and Stretch were like his brothers, as was the big hairy guy with the funny accent who flew Jack’s plane.
One day during that three-week hiatus, Easton asked Jack about it.
‘Because I care about them, Easton,’ Jack answered. ‘I’ve never understood why people limit the idea of family to blood relatives. It seems unnecessary to me, unnecessarily self-limiting. Look at these people.’ Jack waved his hand at the team around them, working away at their various tasks. ‘I’d do anything for them. That’s how much I love them.’
‘Even though they are not of your blood?’
Jack smiled. ‘There’s an old saying, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.” I don’t subscribe to that notion at all. You can choose your family. Because “family” are those people who lift you up, who help you reach the heights you can’t reach by yourself. Why should that group be arbitrarily limited to blood relatives? Life is short, Easton, so it’s best spent with those you love.’
The final illumination in Easton’s life had been his experiences with Jack’s animals.
For when Jack and the others had gone off in search of the secret cities, Easton—himself nursing a partially broken foot from an incident during the Great Games—had remained at the farm to watch over Jack’s beloved falcon, Horus, and his two dogs, Ash and Roxy.
Or as Easton called them: ‘the smart bird and the doggies’.
After being shot in the wing at Pine Gap, Horus had spent most of the time recovering. She cooed weakly but appreciatively when Easton fed her and rebandaged her wound.
As for the dogs, well, Easton had never known pet dogs before.
In the Underworld, the only times minotaurs encountered dogs were when they ate them. To care for dogs and enjoy their company was nothing short of a revelation to him.
He loved it.
He adored Roxy’s irrepressible nature, especially given that she had one gammy leg—kind of like he did. He delighted in the way her tail wagged with unbridled joy at the sight of him and how the little black poodle bounced up and down with anticipation when he prepared to throw the tennis ball for her to fetch.
Ash, the labrador, was older than Roxy and more docile. She only ever wanted Easton to rub her stomach. She ignored the ball when he threw it for her.
Jack had commented about that: ‘Yeah, Ash used to fetch the ball, and then one day, she just decided she didn’t want to anymore. Don’t take it personally, she won’t fetch it for me either, no matter how much I try to coax her.’
And so Easton maintained Jack’s farm for that time, sweeping the floors, tending to Horus and playing with the doggies.
For anyone else, it might have seemed like a lonely life, but Easton didn’t mind it at all. He was a simple soul and having lived his whole life in the crowded confines of the minotaur city in the Underworld, he quite liked the combination of open space and solitude.
And then, on the third morning of his time there, he woke to find that, during the night, both doggies had climbed into his bed, nestled beside his legs and fallen asleep there.
They had been inseparable after that.
When Easton had rejoined Jack and the others after all the secret cities stuff, even though Jack was bloodied and bruised, Jack had said, ‘Thank you for looking after my furry friends. They look very happy.’ Easton had beamed with pride.
And when Easton had proudly reported that he hadn’t eaten the dogs, he had actually meant: I adore these dogs.
Jack understood.
He loved them, too.
Even if Ash wouldn’t fetch the ball for him anymore.
When Easton relocated from the farm in Australia to Hades’s estate in France, he watched the goings-on there with curious interest.
He had arrived just as Pooh Bear, Stretch and Alby had returned from the Rock of Gibraltar with the news that it was not Lily who had been sacrificed on the Altar of the Cosmos.
He had also seen them return with the three fabled weapons—the sword Excalibur, the Mace of Poseidon and the Helmet of Hades—all three of which had been
left at the Rock.
One day Easton had watched, intrigued, as Jack, Aloysius and Stretch worked on the sword with a grinder while Alby analysed the helmet with a spectrometer.
‘What Alby doing?’ he asked.
‘We want to know how this helmet makes its wearer invisible to the bronzemen,’ Alby said.
‘Magic?’ Easton asked.
‘No.’ Alby smiled. ‘It’s not magic. Usually, there’s a reason. We just have to find it. In this case, I’m detecting that this helmet emits faint pulses of low-level gamma particle resonance.’
‘Why is this helpful to know?’ Easton asked.
‘By our count, Sphinx could have as many as five thousand bronzemen at his command,’ Alby replied. ‘This helmet’s resonance confuses them, blinds them. If we can replicate it, then maybe we can make ourselves invisible to the bronzemen and beat them in a fight.’
‘Alby very clever,’ Easton said.
He looked over at Jack and the others working on the sword with the grinder.
Sparks flew from the fabled sword’s blade as Stretch worked away at it with the fast-spinning grinder.
‘And the sword?’ he asked.
‘The sword kills the bronzemen,’ Alby said. ‘Stretch has an idea how to use that ability to our advantage. For that he needs some slivers of its blade, but it turns out, Excalibur’s blade is pretty tough. Eventually, he’ll get some slivers, but there’ll only be one way to test his theory and that’ll be hairy.’
Easton didn’t know what that meant.
‘What about the Mace?’ he asked.
Alby pursed his lips. ‘It looks like the Mace is now inert, dead. According to our scanners, it gives off no detectable particle emissions or resonance at all. Its power seems to have, well, gone out of it.’
Stretch worked on his project with Excalibur right up until the day they had got word that Lily had been spotted in Moscow and he had dashed off with Pooh Bear and Sky Monster to save her.
Before Stretch left, however, he gave Easton a task on that project. It wasn’t a very exciting task—in fact, to anyone else, it would have been exceedingly tedious—but Easton, once again happy to contribute to his new family and with the dogs curled up beside him, took to it with gusto.
Hades’s Estate
Alsace-Lorraine, France
23 December, 1600 hours
In was mid-afternoon on the 23rd of December when the Sukhoi arrived at the private airstrip of Hades’s horse farm in eastern France.
It landed in front of a small group of people: Jack’s wife, Zoe; Hades, the former King of the Underworld; Iolanthe Compton-Jones, former Keeper of the Royal Records for the Kingdom of Land; the famed oceanographer Professor David ‘Nobody’ Black; Jack’s mother, the noted historian Mabel Merriweather; and last of all, Easton.
Jack, Alby and Rufus emerged from the plane carrying the sleeping bodies of Lily, Stretch and Aloysius. The two nuns came out cautiously after them, lingering near the plane.
At the sight of the three limp bodies, Nobody said, ‘Are they—?’
‘They’re alive,’ Jack said, not stopping. ‘But unconscious. Some kind of ancient sleep.’
‘The Siren bells . . .’ Iolanthe said.
‘Yeah, them,’ Jack said. ‘Folks, we can’t linger. We’ve got an army of bronzemen in cargo planes on the move from Russia. Sphinx’s people knocked out Sky Monster and Pooh Bear in the Sky Warrior and then shot them down while they were defenceless.’
Mae said, ‘Oh, God, no.’
‘They didn’t deserve to go out that way,’ Jack said. ‘Killed in their sleep. They at least deserved a stand-up fight. We only got out of there alive because of some fancy flying by Rufus.’
There was a short silence as the group digested this loss.
They all knew that death was a possibility, but that didn’t lessen the blow when it occurred, and this blow hit them all hard.
‘Jack,’ Zoe said seriously. ‘Moscow has been all over the news and social media, but it just happened again, literally a few minutes ago.’
‘Where?’
‘Rome. The whole city just went silent: people collapsing in the streets; hundreds of car accidents; planes falling out of the sky. Just like Moscow. Twitter’s gone crazy with hashtags about “SleepingCities” and people are scared out of their minds, looking for a pattern, wondering which city will be next. Sphinx must have gone to Rome and rung another of his bells.’
Sisters Lynda and Agnes were still standing beside the Sukhoi.
They took in their surroundings: the chateau, the lake, the grim concrete fort of the Maginot Line and the forest-covered hills ringing it all.
Sister Lynda’s gaze landed on Jack’s mother.
‘Mae Merriweather . . .’ the old nun said.
‘Lynda Fadel . . .’ Mae said.
A tense pause followed . . .
. . . and then the two women embraced each other warmly.
‘It’s good to see you, Lynny,’ Mae said. ‘Gosh, it must have been thirty years.’
They followed Jack and the others into the main house.
‘Closer to forty,’ Sister Lynda said. ‘You look good, Mae. I must say I was so pleased when I heard you divorced that shithead of a husband.’
‘How do you know each other?’ Jack asked as he lay Lily down on a couch and threw a blanket over her.
Sister Lynda said, ‘When your mother was a young woman making a name for herself in archaeological circles, I tried very hard to get her to join our order. But she was in love. In love with some big tough smart military guy named Jonathan West—Wolf was his nickname—and she went off and married him instead. I never liked him. He just looked like a wife-beater and it turned out, he was. Mind you, I suppose it was a good thing, since their union brought you into existence.’
She turned to Mae. ‘What ever happened to Wolf? He just disappeared off the face of the Earth.’
‘Jack killed him,’ Mae said simply. ‘It was kind of a showdown.’
‘Oh,’ Lynda said. ‘A father versus son thing?’
‘Something like that,’ Jack said. ‘But that’s in the past. Folks, I hope you’ve been doing some research because what I need right now is information. If he’s put Rome to sleep, then Sphinx is on the move and getting further ahead of us. I need information and I need it fast.’
‘What should we look at first?’ Zoe asked.
Jack turned to Sister Lynda.
‘The Omega Event. When is it going to happen?’
‘In six days,’ Lynda said simply. ‘On December 29.’
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Captain, the Church has known about this date for a very long time. Its astronomical observatory in Arizona is solely devoted to tracking the expansion of the visible universe down to the micrometre. So, yes, I’m sure.
‘In six days time, at precisely 3:06 a.m. GMT on the 29th of December, the expansion of the universe will cease and then, in a single crushing instant, it will collapse inward in an all-consuming rush, withdrawing into a singularity, destroying every planet, every star, every single thing in existence. The end of all things is less than a week away.’
Everyone assembled in the lounge of the main house. Computers and projector screens were set up.
When they were settled, Jack said, ‘All right, then. Six days till doomsday. Tell me about the Trial of the Mountains, the five iron mountains, these sphere-bells and how they are connected to the Omega Event?’
Hades said, ‘This is all connected to the Omega Event, Jack. The best place to start is here, with the Zeus Papyrus. We’ve been looking into it.’
Hades projected the image of the Zeus Papyrus and its translation of the second trial onto the screen:
THE TRIAL OF THE MOUNTAINS
Five iron mountains. Five bladed keys. Five doors
forever locked.
But mark you, only those who survive the Fall,
May enter the Supreme Labyrinth
And look upon the face of the Omega.
Hades said, ‘After Zeus’s champion, Hercules, won the Great Games of their time, Zeus won the title “King of Kings”. It was thus his honour and responsibility to complete the two trials and prevent the Omega Event of that age.
‘When he stood inside the obelisk atop the Underworld, Zeus received the solutions to the two trials—the Mysteries—and performed the trials without any complications. He also, thankfully, wrote down what he did, which has proven to be enormously helpful to us.
‘For after Jack won the Games, Jack prevented his sponsor, Orlando, the King of Land, from standing inside the obelisk and receiving those secrets to the trials. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: Orlando was an evil and foolish man. But it did complicate matters. It meant we had to figure out how to complete the trials.’
Jack said, ‘I didn’t mean to complicate things, I just—’
‘Jack,’ Iolanthe said firmly. ‘Don’t beat yourself up. Trust me, this is much better than having Orlando enjoying unlimited power.’
She indicated her face: the result of the unspeakable torture inflicted on her on the orders of Orlando, her own brother. The bruises to her eyes had healed and her hair had grown back slightly. But her nose was still damaged by the bull-ring that had been thrust through it.
‘At least the world now has a chance to live free,’ she said.
Hades went on: ‘As it happened, we successfully completed the first trial at the Three Secret Cities of Thule, Ra and Atlas.’
Mae said, ‘But it was Sphinx who reaped the reward for our efforts, since it was he who performed the hideous sacrifice at the end of it all.’
‘Correct,’ Hades said. ‘One reward for performing that ritual sacrifice, clearly, is being able to command the bronzeman armies, although I’m not sure how Sphinx does this.’
‘Rings,’ Sister Lynda said. ‘Some call them the Rings of Dominion or the Rings of Command. There are five. One all-powerful ring and four lesser rings that allow their wearers to command the automatons that reside at the three cities and the Underworld. Whoever wears them directs the actions of the bronzemen, the silvermen and the goldmen from each city.’
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 8