Mae said, ‘That arm represents this avenue and those tiny gaps along it indicate the safe arches: the first safe archway was the right-hand one, then the left, and so on. It matches perfectly.’
‘You’re absolutely right . . .’ Nobody said, looking from the printout to the archways around them.
Mae grabbed her radio. ‘Pooh, Jack. The tablet tells us everything we need to know about the cities. It shows you the safe path through your boulevards.’
She relayed to them what she had just explained to Nobody and Iolanthe.
In the flooded tunnel at Atlas, Jack clicked off his radio and brought up the image of the triangular tablet on his smartphone. He was glad Nobody had given him the waterproof casing for it.
He scanned the tablet, focusing on the vertical arm to the left of the Mace:
According to it, the right-hand arch in front of him was the safe one.
Aloysius gave him a look. ‘She’s your mother. You first.’
‘Talk about a trust exercise,’ Jack said as he swam in front of that archway.
He keyed his radio. ‘Folks, I’m going to swim through my first arch. Stand by.’
Then, more quietly to himself: ‘I hope you’re right, Mum.’
With those words, he kicked his fins and entered the right-hand arch.
Nothing happened. No trap was triggered.
Jack emerged safely on the other side of the arch.
He exhaled in relief and said, ‘Nice work, Mum. I’m through.’
Aloysius joined him a few seconds later. ‘Damn, I wish I trusted my mom as much as you trust yours.’
Using the path shown on the left arm of the tablet, Pooh Bear and Stretch did the same at Thule.
And thus at the Three Secret Cities, Jack’s teams penetrated the Grand Avenues simultaneously, wending their way through the triple-archways, advancing down the deadly tunnels.
THE CITY OF ATLAS
Atlas
Guided by the tablet, Jack and Aloysius swam down their flooded tunnel, choosing the correct arch each time.
Lighting the way with their flashlights, after a while they saw the end of the avenue up ahead.
Dim blue light framed by a square doorway.
But there was also something else.
Man-shaped figures—dozens of them, eerie shadows in the underwater haze—stood on the seafloor just beyond the doorway, partially blocking the light.
Jack and Aloysius came to the end of the tunnel and shone their flashlights out into the gloom.
Three hundred faceless, beaked bronze figures stood between them and the City of Atlas, erect and silent, in perfect ranks and rows, like soldiers standing to attention.
They filled the whole area between Jack and Aloysius and the city, plus the last few metres of the tunnel—stopping them from exiting it.
They looked like the renowned army of terracotta warriors at Xian, China: silent man-sized bronze statues, each one six feet tall and standing deathly still in their ordered lines.
Behind them, soaring into the watery blue void, was an hourglass-shaped rock formation covered in towers and domes, bridges and battlements. On the upper half of the hourglass, the towers hung suspended from the rock, dangling spectacularly.
It was a colossal thing, several hundred feet high. A path ran up its lower half, pausing at one point at a bridge with an open-sided square cupola on it.
‘The City of Atlas . . .’ Jack breathed.
It was truly magnificent.
In its time, it must have been extraordinary: a towering city on this singular rock formation. Until the day of the flood, the greatest flood in history.
Off to his left, Jack saw something that did not belong to the City of Atlas.
A wreck lying awkwardly up against the base of the ancient city.
The wreck of a plane.
It was an old plane from the 1960s, a DC-3 or maybe a Boeing 707. It looked like a cargo plane and it was covered in coral and barnacles: the accumulation of years of undersea growth. It must have crashed long ago and been washed here on the current.
Jack turned to face the incredible sunken city in front of him. His gaze found the tiny bridge halfway up the lower slope.
‘At its bridge you must overcome its silver guardians . . .’ he said.
Aloysius, however, only had eyes for the army of bronze figures blocking their way.
‘Statues?’ he said. ‘That’s all there is guarding this place? I was kind of expecting something more . . . elaborate.’
And then the statues moved.
Aloysius’s jaw dropped.
‘Oh, fuck me . . .’ he gasped as he raised his harpoon gun and fired it.
THE CITY OF THULE
Thule
In Iceland, Pooh and Stretch heard the gunfire before they reached the end of their frigid avenue.
Their tunnel had its own singular feature: its ceiling and floors had been comprised of stone coffins . . . which had evidently opened sometime before their arrival. This had meant they’d had to walk along the narrow flagstones between the opened coffins.
‘There’s an awful lot of these things . . .’ Pooh Bear said worriedly.
At the sound of gunfire, they started running, eventually emerging from their avenue at the top of a vast funnel-shaped city that plunged into the Earth.
It was an awesome sight.
The Icelandic chill had caused a layer of frost to cover everything, so the entire city gleamed white.
Clusters of frost-laden buildings hung off a wide spiralling path that swept in a descending curve around the cavern’s walls. Then the path reappeared from the structures to spring across the cavern’s central abyss via a narrow bridge that had a square open-sided cupola in its middle.
The shouts and gunfire had come from Cardinal Mendoza and three Swiss Guards who were standing before the cupola on the bridge.
Behind Mendoza and his men, blocking their escape, filling the curving main roadway of the underground city, was a veritable army of faceless bronze automatons that were identical to the one Pooh and Stretch had seen at the Underworld.
The bronzemen stood like silent statues on the curving road, in perfect ranks.
Every few minutes, in unison, the entire army would take a single collective step forward, the echo of their move resounding in the space.
One of the Swiss soldiers fired back at them, but his bullets pinged harmlessly off the bronzemen’s metal bodies and a minute later the army just took another inexorable step forward.
‘There’ve got to be hundreds of them,’ Stretch breathed.
Pooh, however, was looking at the bridge. ‘I don’t think they’re the real problem.’
THE CITY OF RA (X-RAY THROUGH JUNGLE)
CLOSER VIEW (X-RAY THROUGH JUNGLE)
Ra
Mae, Nobody and Iolanthe stood at the end of their tunnel at the edge of the Venezuelan jungle, also frozen in shock.
Their golden-floored avenue had ended at the base of a colossal tepui mountain that covered them in deep shade.
The lost city of Ra rose before them.
El Dorado.
The city appeared to be made up of three wide step-like levels that had been cut into the slanting lower face of the tepui.
Rising up through those levels was a single partially-enclosed street that switched back and forth. Widely-spaced Y-shaped uprights held up a ceiling of long slats that covered the roadway. Through gaps in the uprights, one could see doorways on the inner walls of the street.
The whole city, however, had been consumed by the encroaching jungle: it was shrouded in a foul tangle of trees, moss, mud and vines.
Architecturally, it wasn’t particularly remarkable. It was squat and low, and mainly square in shape. It had no soaring spires or dominating ramparts. In fact, the three winding swit
chbacks seemed to have only a hundred or so doorways. As a ‘city’, it was kind of unimpressive.
Except for one thing.
Every surface was made of gold.
Not just the floorstones. Every wall, every upright, every step, everything.
Nobody gasped. ‘If it weren’t for the jungle and all the grime strangling it, in daylight this place would shine like the sun.’
Mae nodded. ‘It is the Great City of Ra, and he was the Sun-god.’
They could now see that the slat-like roof of each level was composed of thick gold beams.
They had not survived the ages well. There were wide gaps between the golden slats and, over the centuries, some of them had fallen in on the street.
This had allowed even more jungle weeds to invade the city. Now the porous roofs of the levels were shot through with unchecked vegetation.
To anyone in an aeroplane flying overhead or looking down via satellite, it would’ve looked like just another jungle-covered slope at the base of a tepui. Only someone who came here specifically looking for it and who got close enough would spot the city amid the dense jungle that had swallowed it.
Through gaps in the gold uprights of the three lower levels, spaced between the doorways on the internal walls, Mae and the others could see dozens of horizontal coffin-shaped recesses carved into those same walls.
The coffins were open.
Their former occupants—three hundred bronze automatons—now filled the rising golden street of the city of Ra.
At the top of the enormous mountainside city was a section that was almost open to the sky.
Here a stepped gold bridge leapt across a wide ravine in the cliffside. At its near end, the bridge had a square opened-sided cupola and it was at this cupola that their rivals—a young woman and a squad of six Brazilian special forces troops—had stalled in their quest to reach the city’s innermost vault.
‘Chloe,’ Iolanthe said, recognising the woman.
‘Who?’ Nobody said.
‘Chloe Carnarvon,’ Iolanthe said. ‘My former assistant. She sold me out to my brother and left me in the hands of his torturer.’
Standing in the midst of the Brazilian troops, Chloe held the Helmet of Hades.
The reason for her team’s delay wasn’t immediately apparent: as Chloe and her men waited on the near side of the bridge, one of the Brazilian soldiers stepped tentatively into the cupola and began fighting with several glistening man-shaped silver figures inside it.
The soldier fired his gun at the figures from point-blank range but it didn’t seem to have any effect on them. Then one of the silver figures stabbed him with its right hand and hurled the Brazilian trooper off the bridge.
Making matters worse for Chloe and her men was the three-hundred-strong army of bronze automatons packed into the main street of Ra below them.
They were stuck between a rock and a hard place: they either fought the four silver figures on the bridge and got past them . . . or they faced the army of bronze ones behind them.
Abruptly, with a loud boom, the entire bronze army took a single step in unison, closing in on Chloe and her team.
Mae pulled up an image of the Plato scroll on her phone: ‘At its bridge you must overcome its silver guardians,’ she read.
She turned to Iolanthe. ‘Your protégé evidently doesn’t know how to get past the guardians on that bridge.’
Iolanthe said, ‘True. But as of right now, neither do we.’
Atlas
Aloysius Knight’s harpoon bounced harmlessly off the chest of the first bronzeman striding slowly across the seabed toward him and Jack.
‘Kushma alla?’ the assembled army intoned, muffled by the water.
Jack recalled Lily’s translation of the phrase from before: Are you my master?
He figured the answer to that question was one of the Mysteries that would have been revealed to Orlando had he stepped inside the obelisk after the Great Games.
The army of bronzemen closed in on Jack and Aloysius.
Their collective footfalls boomed through the watery silence.
Boom . . .
They were shaped like humans: with arms and legs, chests and shoulders.
Boom . . .
But it was their faceless beaked heads that made them fearsome. It gave them a pitiless, inhuman aspect: no emotion, no sympathy, no remorse.
Boom . . .
And they clearly did not need oxygen or air to operate. The three hundred feet of water pressing down on their heads had no effect on them whatsoever.
They were automatons built for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there.
Jack and Aloysius swam a short way back into the tunnel.
‘Jack!’ Stretch’s voice came in through Jack’s earpiece. ‘We’ve penetrated Thule. We can see Mendoza, but he’s stuck at a bridge, held up by some silver robots of some sort. We might be able to reach the bridge, but unless we know how to beat those silver things, we’ll be dead, too.’
Mae’s voice came in next: ‘Jack, we’ve got the same problem here at Ra! They seem to be the silver guardians mentioned in the Plato scroll: we have to get past them but we don’t know how!’
The army of bronzemen in front of Jack kept slowly advancing.
He tried to think.
There has to be a way . . . he thought.
‘The tablet tells us everything we need to know about getting into the cities . . .’ he said aloud. ‘The tablet tells us . . .’
As the bronzemen kept coming forward, one inexorable step at a time, he glanced at his image of the tablet one more time.
Jack scanned the image desperately. ‘It’s got to be here. The cities . . . the weapons . . . The First Kills . . . the Second Blinds . . . the Third Rules . . .’
As Jack peered at the image on his phone, Aloysius pushed him further into the entry tunnel. ‘Back up. Back up—’
Then Aloysius stopped his shoving and Jack looked up.
Four bronze automatons had emerged from coffins set into the walls of the flooded tunnel behind them, blocking their escape.
‘Kushma alla?’ they intoned.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Aloysius said.
There was nowhere to go.
They had three hundred bronzemen coming at them from in front and four coming from behind. It was like being in a slowly closing vice.
Jack and Aloysius hovered in the flooded tunnel looking this way and that, trapped.
The two leading bronzemen raised their claws, revealing their fearsome pointed tips.
At the sight of them, Aloysius’s eyes went wide. ‘Oh, mother of mercy.’
‘There has to be a way . . .’ Jack said softly. ‘Think, damn it.’
The bronzemen continued to advance, their claws gleaming in the underwater haze.
Aloysius Knight swore. ‘Of all the ways I thought I’d die, I never thought I’d go out like this. It’s been a pleasure to know you, Captain West. See you on the other side.’
And then the lead two bronzemen raised their deadly claws, and as Aloysius Knight squeezed his eyes shut, they swung them violently at him and Jack.
‘Stop!’
His eyes shut, Aloysius heard Jack’s voice through his scuba helmet’s speaker.
Aloysius opened his eyes . . .
. . . to see a gleaming bronze claw stopped exactly three inches from his heart. Another claw had halted right in front of Jack’s chest.
And then he saw Jack, hovering beside him in the flooded tunnel, holding the Mace of Poseidon high above his head.
In that final moment, as the realisation struck him, Jack had snatched the Mace from his weight-belt, held it aloft in front of the advancing bronzemen and yelled, ‘Stop!’
‘What just happened?’ Aloysius asked.
&nbs
p; ‘The third rules,’ Jack said simply.
‘Come again?’ Aloysius eyed the unmoving bronzemen warily.
They now stood like frozen statues, erect and to attention, their bladed claws now held stiffly by their sides.
Jack said, ‘The tablet tells us everything we need to know. The first kills. The second blinds. The third rules. The Mace is the third weapon. I think the makers of the tablet neglected to include a couple of words: the guardians. The Sword kills the guardians. The Helmet blinds them in some way. And this Mace, well, it rules the guardians of this city. They must obey whoever holds it.’
Aloysius looked again at the crowd of bronze automatons, standing dead still in the presence of the upraised Mace.
‘Well, thank fuck you figured that out when you did,’ he said. ‘These things speak English?’
‘No, I think they just obey the Mace,’ Jack said. ‘I just kinda said that because I was afraid. Still, I’m not going to lower this Mace anytime soon.’
He keyed his sat-radio with his spare hand: ‘Mum, Stretch. The weapons get you past the guardians. I repeat: the weapons get you past the guardians. The Sword kills them and the Helmet blinds them.’
Thule
After receiving Jack’s call about the Sword, Pooh Bear and Stretch faced their own significant problem: getting past the three hundred bronze automatons between them and their bridge.
‘It’s at times like this I wish I had one of those Maghook things,’ Pooh Bear said.
‘In the absence of a Maghook, I have an idea,’ Stretch said. ‘Follow me.’
They hurried down the curving road, in amongst the buildings of the frost-covered city hanging off it.
‘What are you thinking?’ Pooh Bear said as he hurried to keep up.
‘We take the high road and then we take the low road,’ Stretch said.
His plan soon became clear.
After running a short way down the curving road, Stretch led Pooh into one of the ancient buildings overhanging the central abyss of the city.
The Three Secret Cities Page 28