The truck was driven by a Knight of the Golden Eight—Jaeger Zwei again, Jack’s nemesis from Moscow and Jerusalem—and it was loaded with twenty more silvermen who quickly leapt down from it!
‘You have got to be kidding me . . .’ Jack breathed.
‘We were so close!’ Lily shouted.
Jack couldn’t believe it.
His eyes darted from the twenty newly arrived silvermen to the furious scowl on the face of Jaeger Zwei in the truck to the lowering stone slab in the doorway of the gate—almost fully closed now—and the original force of toppled silvermen behind him who were now getting to their feet and staggering toward him.
And then it got worse.
From out of nowhere, another troop truck speared across Jack’s path and at the sight of it, all of Jack’s hopes fell.
It skidded to a halt in between Jack’s bike and Zwei’s truck, throwing up a huge cloud of dust and sand as it ground to a halt near the gate.
As the dust cloud settled, Jack saw the shadows of more automatons emerge from the newly arrived truck and his heart sank.
More reinforcements for the bad guys.
But then the cloud of dust parted and he saw one of the bronzemen more clearly: it had pale blue Air Force paint on its head and shoulders.
They were Easton’s palemen!
And, directed by little Easton—leaping down from the truck which Jack now saw was driven by Aloysius Knight—they threw themselves at the silvermen: automaton versus automaton.
Aloysius shouted, ‘Go, Jack, go!’
And in that moment of respite that Easton and Aloysius had given him, Jack saw the way to do this.
‘Thanks!’ he shouted. Then to Lily and Zoe: ‘Follow me!’
They were only forty metres from the gate now, but still blocked from reaching it by silvermen, many of them now fighting Easton’s palemen.
They raced on foot across the dusty ground, not toward the gate but off to one side of it, toward . . .
. . . the crashed Sukhoi.
They scrambled up onto the wing of the crumpled fighter-bomber.
‘Alby! Rufus!’ Jack called as he ran past them. ‘You use the second one to get out of here!’
Rufus frowned. ‘The second what?’
Alby threw something to Jack as he ran by him: his backpack.
‘Jack! Something to help you in there!’ he yelled.
‘Thanks, kid!’ Jack caught the backpack and plonked himself in the pilot’s seat of the Sukhoi.
‘Lily!’ he said as she joined him. ‘On my lap. Zoe, wrap yourself around Lily!’
As the two women jumped on top of Jack on the pilot’s seat, Jack reached out with his shotgun and—very strangely—fired it at the right wing of the Sukhoi.
After three booming shots, the already cracked wing broke and the whole plane lurched wildly, rocking over onto its side . . .
. . . so that the top of its cockpit now faced the ancient closing gate.
Zoe saw the future. ‘You are not thinking of . . . ?’
‘Oh, yes, I am,’ Jack said grimly. ‘Hang on.’
Then he yanked on the ejection lever of the pilot’s seat and did the impossible.
The pilot’s seat came shooting out of the side-turned Sukhoi like a champagne cork out of a bottle, rocketing laterally across the dusty desert, flying horizontally two feet off the ground, heading straight for the closing gate.
Zoe yelled.
Lily screamed.
Jack just clenched his teeth as the ejection seat bounced across the sand like a stone skimming across a pond, whipping between all the silvermen.
The gate rushed up to meet them before, with a loud clang!, the reinforced back of the ejection seat slammed against the stone slab lowering into the outer doorway of the gate and stopped with a bone-jarring lurch.
Jack quickly unfastened his seatbelt and pushed Lily and Zoe under the lowering slab and into the darkness beyond.
‘Go! Go! Go!’ he urged.
He turned and caught a final glimpse of Alby, Aloysius and Rufus on the Sukhoi, jumping back into its cockpit while firing their guns at the plane’s other wing, righting the plane again. A moment later, the Sukhoi’s second ejection seat, the rear gunner’s seat, shot skyward out of the plane, hopefully to land safely some distance away.
But then Jack’s view of them was cut off by a silverman appearing right beside him, looming over him.
Quick as a snake, the silverman grabbed Jack by the head and began to squeeze and twist—
—it was going to rip his head off—
—when suddenly the silverman was bowled aside by two palemen, crash-tackling it, and the silverman released Jack from its grip and suddenly Easton was at Jack’s side, lifting him to his feet and shoving him toward the lowering slab in the doorway.
The slab was only a foot off the ground now.
With a final look at the sky and the mountains and the desert behind him, Jack rolled through the gap at the base of the ancient doorway, followed by Easton and four of his palemen.
There was so little room now, that as the last paleman successfully rolled under the lowering slab, the slab scratched some deep lines across its blank metal face.
A moment later, with a reverberating boom, the slab hit the ground, closing off the maze to the outside world.
Jack, Lily and Zoe stood in pitch darkness, flanked by Easton and the four palemen.
Jack flicked on the small flashlight mounted on his fireman’s helmet.
Zoe lit up the penlight on the barrel of her MP-7.
Jack, Zoe and Lily all wore light packs on their backs, variously filled with canteens, protein bars, night-vision goggles and, in Jack and Zoe’s cases, spare clips loaded with specially-tipped ammunition, ropes, climbing gear and a mini-Maghook each.
Jack checked the backpack Alby had thrown to him outside.
A severed mummified head stared up out of it.
‘Not what I was expecting,’ Lily said.
The mummified head wore a burnished silver skullcap and suddenly Jack realised who it was.
‘Imhotep,’ he said.
A Post-it note was stuck to the silver cap, with a message in Alby’s handwriting:
Jack, meet Imhotep.
Take off his skullcap.
The tattoos help with the maze.
Assume Mendoza has this, too.
Alby
Jack took the silver cap off the desiccated skull and looking closely at the mummified skin of its crown, saw the tattoos: a complex array of shapes and Thoth text marked on the black skin in a paler grey.
‘Lily, what do those Thoth markings say?’ he asked.
Lily scanned them. ‘Hmm. Stuff like: Move forward or die, for the Labyrinth closes itself: each maze remains open for but one rotation—Once you pass the shining stair, there is no going back—To find the endless tunnel, take the doorway below the image of Ningizzida—In the tunnel, always take the sinister fork—Speak not in the presence of the gold ones: only in silence may you pass—Look not in their faces, or thine eyes will not see again—Beware the liquid fire. And lastly, Life is rule, death is life. But there is no escaping the ultimate choice. In the face of Omega, you cannot conceal your true desires.’
‘They’re instructions for the maze . . .’ Zoe said. ‘Oh, Alby, nice work. Nice work.’ She turned to Lily. ‘If we get out of here alive, honey, marry that boy.’
‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ Lily replied.
Jack put the skull back in the pack and looked at the space around them.
They were inside a small chapel, dusty and silent.
Guided by their flashlight beams, and followed by Easton and his palemen, they stepped over to the inner wall. It was carved to look like an arched doorway.
On the floor before it they saw
a raised marking: the five-pointed mark.
Jack, Zoe and Lily each bore the same mark on their palms, acquired during the Fall.
Jack pressed his hand against the raised mark on the floor and with a deep ominous rumbling, the ancient inner door above it opened.
On the other side of the door, descending into darkness, was a wide set of stairs.
‘The Supreme Labyrinth,’ Lily said solemnly. ‘The ultimate maze. The final trial to overcome before the Omega Event, the end of all things.’
‘And we’re the last to get here,’ Zoe added. ‘Our enemies are already inside, way ahead of us.’
Jack nodded at them and Easton.
‘True. But, then, you know what I always say: we didn’t come this far just to come this far. Zoe, Lily, Easton, I’m so pleased to have you all with me on this final mission. Let’s do this.’
With those words, followed by the four palemen, the four of them stepped through the ancient doorway and ventured down the dark stairs beyond it into the Supreme Labyrinth.
THE END
OF
THE TWO LOST MOUNTAINS
JACK WEST JR WILL RETURN . . .
. . . ONE FINAL TIME
AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY
SPOILER WARNING!
The following interview contains SPOILERS from The Two Lost Mountains. Readers who have not yet read the novel are advised to avoid reading this interview as it does give away major plot moments in the book.
You scared us when you almost killed Lily off at the end of The Three Secret Cities—but early in this book, we find out what really happened and about poor Alexander’s fate!
Yes, I wanted to take readers to the very edge with Lily and the sacrificial ritual. In fact, in the very first draft of The Three Secret Cities I did not include the epilogue where it is suggested that Lily is okay. A few of the people who read that draft really believed I’d killed her off and were quite upset with me.
I am a reader. I love reading. In this way, I am just like my fans. And as a reader, when I finish a novel and close that book for the final time, I firmly believe I should smile, nod and mentally say to myself, ‘Mmmm, that was satisfying. I enjoyed that.’
I apply that standard to my own novels. When a reader finishes one of my books, I hope they smile, nod and mentally say, ‘Mmmm, that was satisfying. I enjoyed that.’
So.
I didn’t want readers to finish 3SC and say, ‘What the hell! The bad guys won and they killed Lily!’ Finishing a book with a cliffhanger is one thing (and that can be fun, like with The Six Sacred Stones), but it’s all about that feeling of satisfaction.
And so I decided to add the epilogue. I think this made The Three Secret Cities better, since it ended the novel on an uptick and not a downer, giving readers a hopeful ending, not a hopeless one . . . and thus they closed the book feeling satisfied in the knowledge that Lily may still be alive and there’s more to be revealed.
This is why The Two Lost Mountains addresses Lily’s fate immediately. I felt I owed readers that. I really enjoyed starting the book with Lily on the steps on St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, in the cold, flanked by two beheaded nuns. It’s a jarring way to start a novel, which I love (a bit like the way I started The Four Legendary Kingdoms with Jack waking with a startled gasp and finding himself inside an ancient cell with his head shaved—it instantly makes readers curious and invites them to lean in).
With every Jack West book, we wonder what kind of new piece of mythology or shocking ancient technology we’ll discover. How did you come up with the Siren bells? When Jack falls ‘asleep’ and gets to fully experience it, it sounds terrifying!
As I think the Jack West books clearly show, I’m a huge fan of mythology. More than that, I’m an even bigger fan of explaining ancient myths in modern, realistic terms.
It goes all the way back to Seven Ancient Wonders, where I imagined the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Or in The Four Legendary Kingdoms, where I tried to formulate what the Labours of Hercules might have actually been. My answer: a set of competitive deadly challenges!
When it comes to the Siren bells and the sleep they cause, I was directly inspired by the Greek myth of the ‘Sirens’: beautiful maidens who, with their entrancing song, caused sailors to crash their boats on the shore. I first read about the Sirens in The Voyage of the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes and I thought they were just terrific (it’s a super book, too, by the way). Just as good was Odysseus’s typically inquisitive desire to hear their song and be able to describe it afterward. His method of achieving that was great: he had himself bound to the mast of the ship while the rest of the crew rowed with wax in their ears.
So, instead of the hypnotising song of some sweet-voiced maidens, I chose advanced bells which, when rung, would put people into a sleep-like state. (I particularly like how Jack can actually hear the world around him while he is sleeping, which makes that scene in Jerusalem even more dramatic.)
On a narrative level, with the series racing toward its conclusion, I wanted to raise the stakes and put the population of the whole world in jeopardy. Rather than have Jack ‘save the world’ in an overall way, he now has to rouse everyone from this terrible sleep or else they will freeze or starve to death. And if Sphinx wins, he just won’t wake millions of people. The stage is thus set for the final book.
Will we see some more myths realised like this in the final book?
Oh, yes! Absolutely. I’ve kept a few awesome ones up my sleeve. In the final book of the series, I’ll address a couple of the ancient world’s greatest myths.
The fate of the world (or galaxy, or universe) is always at stake, but it’s usually Jack West and his team who are the ones on the front line of the action. There have been some exceptions—like the incident in London in The Three Secret Cities—but you really put the people of the world in immediate danger in The Two Lost Mountains: Moscow being trashed, scared sites in Jerusalem being destroyed, whole cities being put to sleep . . .
Go big or go home, I say. But seriously, in many of the earlier books, Jack worked away at the extreme corners of the world, far from its major cities and population centres. I found, though, as the stakes rose, his adventures necessarily brought him closer to civilisation: like with the scene on the Thames in London and the action at Hades’s penthouse in New York in The Three Secret Cities.
On some level, I suppose I felt it was time for the people of the world to know about Jack’s efforts on their behalf. The poor guy is constantly saving the world and no-one knows about it! While this is fine with Jack—indeed, an integral part of his character is not wanting to be celebrated; more than anything, Jack wants to go home to his farm and remain far from the world—it’s not fine with me.
Also, we’re getting near the end of what has become a gigantic seven-book series, so I have to make sure we finish with a bang, which means everything has to be at stake.
You first teased the importance of the Apollo 15 mission in The Three Secret Cities. What inspired you to use the moon as a key component in the Trial of the Mountains?
I just wanted to give Jack a completely impossible task: having to do something on the surface of the moon!
First of all, I just love anything to do with the moon landings. I think they were the pinnacle of human achievement, exploration and daring. One of my all-time favourite books is Moondust by Andrew Smith. The author interviewed every living astronaut who had set foot on the surface of the moon. All had been changed by the experience and the descriptions of the landings—including Armstrong’s, which is as thrilling a piece of writing as you’ll ever read—are simply awesome.
I loved the idea of linking one of the moon landings—Apollo 15, which really was the first mission to use a rover—to a specific requirement of the four kings. I had the idea of doing this a while back, which is why I slipped the clue into The Three Secret Cit
ies.
Since I jumped back into the Jack West Jr series with The Four Legendary Kingdoms, I’ve been doing this sort of thing more: inserting clues in an earlier book and revealing the twist or twists in later ones. (I always loved the image of five warriors standing behind four kings that I put in The Six Sacred Stones way back in 2006 only to reveal who the four kings were ten years later in The Four Legendary Kingdoms—that was a very long-term clue!)
I think this is because, in my mind, I view the last three books in this series as one big story.
Once I committed to writing The Four Legendary Kingdoms, I knew I was committing to counting all the way down to The One Something Something. In my mind, The Four Legendary Kingdoms sets up the chessboard for the final stages of this story and in the last three books, I just go hell-for-leather for the finish line.
Oh, and just FYI, and there are still things lurking in the early books that I will refer to in The One Something Something.
And we head back to Egypt in this book! It feels very nostalgic for long-time Jack West fans. Could you possibly have imagined when first writing Seven Ancient Wonders that you’d ever bring Jack back here, or use the Great Sphinx somehow?
I have been waiting for so long to put the Great Sphinx in one of these novels. It’s taken all my restraint to wait this long.
In the Jack West books, I’ve tried to link all the strange ancient sites dotted around our planet into one big story and the Great Sphinx is one of the strangest. I just think it’s the best one! When I visited Egypt years ago, I sat down and just gazed at the Great Sphinx for ages. It is truly mysterious.
Oh, and the two images of it in this book are real.
Let’s talk about the other Sphinx—the villainous Hardin Lancaster XII, Watchman of the City of Atlas. As a member of the Trismagi, he’s first teased as a character in The Four Legendary Kingdoms and proves a tough opponent for Jack in The Three Secret Cities. Jack hasn’t faced such a clever adversary since defeating his father, Wolf. It must be fun to turn yet another myth on its head—that one of the three wise men uses his knowledge not for noble purposes, but to greedily seek power.
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