The Four Legendary Kingdoms

by Matthew Reilly

  The two friends hovered there, perched a short way out from the pinnacle, where the crowd of angry minotaurs had gathered.

  ‘Thanks, buddy,’ Jack said. ‘I’m sure glad I didn’t bring a lightweight companion with me. He couldn’t have done that. Come on, we gotta climb round this thing and get through this.’

  And so Jack and Sky Monster edged their way around the watchtower.

  As they did so, far above and ahead of them, Major Gregory Brigham of the SAS, running free of any companion, powered up the series of narrow criss-crossing paths that circled the tower on the main pinnacle.

  Close behind Brigham were the golden minotaur and the Gorkha. The Gorkha pounded up one of the paths, his mountain-born lungs aiding his climb.

  On the royal balcony, Vacheron pointed them out.

  ‘My lords and ladies, the leaders are approaching the summit of the tower. They should be wary, however, for the tower has its own defences.’

  As he ascended the mighty tower, Greg Brigham heaved and panted. It was a brutal uphill run.

  He heard grunting behind him, looked back and saw both the gold minotaur and the Gorkha clambering up the path a short distance below him.

  Gaining.

  The path Major Brigham was dashing up was not for the faint-hearted. It clung to the outer wall of the huge cylindrical tower and was wide enough only for one person.

  On the inner side of the path, some shallow alcoves were cut into the wall at regular intervals, while a one-foot-high stone gutter rimmed the vertiginous outer edge of the path—

  Suddenly Brigham heard great booms from somewhere above him.

  He dove into the nearest alcove—a bare second before a huge spiked iron ball the size of a man came rolling around the corner, taking up the entire width of his path.

  The ball was a vicious-looking thing: with many protruding red-hot iron spikes, blurring with motion. And it was built so that its rolling spikes fitted perfectly within the outer gutter of the path, stopping it from going over the edge. It rolled mercilessly down the pathway.

  Brigham pressed himself into the shallow alcove, his back against the wall, and sucked in his stomach as the iron ball thundered past, its red-hot spikes so close they sizzled as they went by his nose.

  The Gorkha leapt off the path, gripping its gutter with his fingertips, hanging from it to get out of the way.

  The gold-painted minotaur and its companion, however, had no alcove into which they could dive and they saw the boulder too late to do what the Gorkha had done.

  The iron boulder ploughed into them.

  Two of its cruel spikes stabbed the lead minotaur before the artificial boulder rolled over him and speared his companion as well and both the boulder and the screaming minotaurs toppled off the structure.

  Jack looked up at the sudden screams.

  Having climbed around the outer wall of the watchtower, he and Sky Monster were now hurrying across the bridge that gave access to the main pinnacle.

  Behind them, the horde of minotaurs were massing around the gate. They were either trying to raise the portcullis or climb around the watchtower as Jack and Sky Monster had done.

  Either way, the angry horde would be coming across the bridge soon.

  At the sound of the screams, Jack snapped up and saw the two cuffed minotaurs and the iron boulder falling off the tower.

  They fell a full two hundred feet before they hit the rocky slope of the pinnacle at the base of the tower, after which they tumbled down the slope and off the pinnacle, dropping into the abyss beneath it, falling who-knew-how-far.

  Looking higher, Jack saw a couple of champions ascending the criss-crossing paths on the tower.

  He could see the SAS guy, Brigham, leading the way, up near the summit, closely followed by the Gorkha, both of them dodging the iron boulders that tumbled down the tower’s paths.

  A few more champions were on the lower reaches of the tower, well behind. Others still, Jack saw, hadn’t even bothered ascending the tower. Figuring that Brigham and the Gorkha were too far ahead, they were cutting their losses and already making for the Coward’s Route exit.

  A curving path led from Jack’s bridge up the rocky slope to the tower. This curving path then became one of the paths on the tower itself, which meant that the iron boulders coming down the structure continued all the way down to where Jack was.

  As they arrived at the start of this rising path, Jack and Sky Monster beheld an iron boulder that had stopped there at the end of its long downward roll.

  Jack gazed at the deadly ball.

  It was a savage thing: a six-foot-tall iron ball fitted with many red-hot spikes and several pairs of curving blades.

  Now that it had stopped, Jack could also see that it was strikingly beautiful; the iron had been wrought into a vivid image: the heads of several ferocious snarling boars.

  Indeed, the deadly spikes had been crafted to represent the tusks of each boar’s head.

  ‘Wow . . .’ Jack breathed.

  Sky Monster also stared at it in awe. ‘This is why I usually stay on the plane.’

  A roar made them both spin.

  The minotaurs on the first pinnacle had got the portcullis open and were now running en masse through it, racing across the bridge after them.

  ‘Move,’ Jack said. ‘We gotta get off this rock. We can’t be one of the last two pairs left here.’

  They took off up the path.

  While Jack and Sky Monster were beginning their ascent of the pinnacle, high above them, Major Gregory Brigham was reaching the summit of the tower atop it.

  After dodging a few more iron boulders—and passing one of the four holes from which they had emerged—Brigham reached the summit of the tower only a few metres ahead of the Gorkha.

  To the rapt approval of the watching royal spectators, Brigham clambered up some broad stone steps with wide vents in them, reaching the absolute peak of the enormous structure . . .

  . . . where he found the Golden Sphere mounted on an altar.

  Extending out from that altar-platform was a bridge suspended from cables which led to the royal balcony.

  Brigham didn’t waste a second. He grabbed the sphere and, gripping it like a football, raced across the bridge.

  After a short vertigo-inspiring run, he stepped off the bridge with the sphere, panting and sweating, to the cheers of the royal spectators.

  In stepping off the bridge, however, Brigham’s boot landed on a trigger stone, and immediately the high bridge began to retract behind him, its extendable segments telescoping into each other, leaving the Gorkha stranded out on the tower.

  Vacheron turned to the assembled royals. ‘My lords and ladies, we have a winner! But as I said, only he gets to escape the arena via this special bridge. All our other champions must be reminded how unworthy they are. They must escape via the Coward’s Route.’

  At that moment, set off by the same trigger stone, a second terrible mechanism came to life on the tower.

  Superheated liquid stone spewed out from the wide vents embedded in the steps supporting the altar on the summit. Thick, grey and goopy, it glowed with red-hot embers and flowed like slow-moving lava.

  The Gorkha turned and fled back down the nearest spiralling path.

  The grey mixture oozed slowly out from the summit and, like lava pouring over the rim of a volcano, it began to creep down all four of the guttered paths that led down from the summit, toward all the champions still on the tower and the pinnacle.

  The Coward’s Route

  Jack and Sky Monster were halfway up their curving path—with the small army of minotaurs charging up it behind them—when they saw the liquid stone come pouring over the rim of the tower’s summit and start oozing down the curving paths on its flanks.

  Jack saw all the champions on the tower reverse direction and start r
unning desperately downward.

  Having come halfway round the lower reaches of the main pinnacle, he now beheld the other exit from the vast cavern: three stupendous bridges spanning the abyss, all arriving at a mount where their three individual staircases converged at a single exit.

  The Coward’s Route.

  The situation became clear to Jack.

  What had until then been an upward race for the summit now became a downward sprint for the three bridges and the exit.

  ‘Pick it up, Sky Monster!’ he called. ‘We gotta get to that exit!’

  And so they ran, ran as hard as they could, pounding up the steep curving pathway, pursued by the horde of angry minotaurs.

  Sky Monster wasn’t doing well. Panting and breathless, he was dragging Jack down.

  They reached the spot where the rocky slope of the pinnacle met the base of the tower and as Jack looked up at an oncoming boulder, Sky Monster dropped to his knees.

  ‘Keep running,’ Jack said, yanking him forward.

  But Sky Monster didn’t move.

  ‘Sky Monster, buddy, we gotta—’

  ‘Jack,’ Sky Monster said. ‘We both know it. I can’t do this. I’m too fat, too slow. I’m weighing you down.’

  Jack glanced back at the ascending horde of minotaurs, then up at a descending iron boulder. Things were happening too fast. They didn’t have time for this.

  ‘Monster, please, we don’t have time for—’

  ‘No, but we do have time for this,’ Sky Monster said, suddenly shoving Jack roughly away from him, off the path, before he himself lay down and stretched his arm—his handcuffed arm—across the path.

  Jack now dangled off the path, hanging from the handcuff, lying on the steeply-sloping pinnacle.

  A moment later, the iron boulder came rolling into view from the path above them and it thundered over Sky Monster’s outstretched arm and—

  Snap!

  One of its blazing-hot spikes crunched down on the chain of their cuffs and snapped it in two. Another superheated spike lanced into Sky Monster’s right forearm as it rolled past him and he roared in pain.

  The deadly iron boulder tumbled away, rolling directly into the mass of minotaurs charging up the lower path. It took out the first five minotaurs before it stopped, wedged on top of one poor minotaur, pinning its foot under one of its spikes. The creature issued an agonised wail.

  As for Jack, he stood up in surprise, suddenly untethered to Sky Monster.

  ‘Go!’ Sky Monster yelled at him. ‘You have to live, Jack! I don’t! You were always special. I’m not. I’m just a pilot. Make my life worth something by getting out of this mess and kicking these assholes’ assholes! Go!’

  Jack didn’t have time to argue so he just nodded to his friend and started running down the nearest path, heading for one of the three escape bridges.

  Jack ran as fast as he could.

  He flew down one of the sloping paths on the pinnacle and raced out onto one of the dizzyingly high bridges leading to the exit.

  As he ran, he saw the other champions fleeing ahead of him.

  They scampered up the three high stairways, reaching the point where the three stairways converged and then they leapt over a narrow chasm to safety.

  Jack noted that this final leap was a downward one—a drop of about eight feet. Once you made the leap across, you couldn’t jump back and re-enter the arena. It was a mechanism, he guessed, to stop a champion going back into the arena, perhaps to save his partner.

  He scanned the way before him. All the other champions were well ahead of him.

  All but one.

  The Gorkha.

  He had gambled on reaching the summit of the tower first and winning the challenge. But that gamble had been a double-edged sword: after Brigham had got there first, the Gorkha had been left with the greatest distance to run to reach the Coward’s Route exit.

  Which meant the Gorkha was the only other champion left in the arena with Jack. Right now he was running along the middle bridge only a short distance ahead of Jack.

  One champion is already dead, so I can’t be the last one left here! Jack’s mind screamed.

  Jack sucked it up and increased his speed.

  Up on the royal balcony, Lord Hades and his guests watched Jack’s desperate sprint with keen interest.

  ‘Why,’ Vacheron commentated, ‘look at the fifth warrior run. He knows the score. One champion has been killed, so now the last champion left in the arena will be the second-last one and that means death. He is literally running for his life.’

  The Gorkha was halfway up the middle set of stairs when Jack hit the base of his stairway.

  Jack pounded up the stairs.

  His rival—still gripping his short sword—was nearing the summit, running hard.

  The Gorkha reached the summit first and leapt—

  —just as Jack dived at him and grabbed his ankles with both arms, rugby-style, bringing him down with an ungainly thump.

  Jack and the Gorkha untangled themselves and faced off on the small platform atop the triple staircase.

  The Gorkha raised his short sword menacingly.

  This was no longer a race to the exit.

  It was now a fight to the death.

  The Gorkha rushed at Jack, the blade of his sword flashing.

  ‘Goddamn,’ Jack said.

  Too exhausted to fight and too tired to care about doing it like a gentleman, he fought dirty.

  One kick to the kneecap made a foul cracking noise and abruptly the Gorkha’s left leg was folded back the wrong way and he screamed.

  Jack’s next kick to the unbalanced man’s chest sent him toppling off the platform into the abyss. He screamed all the way down.

  And suddenly Jack was alone on the platform.

  The vast space around him was oddly silent.

  The iron boulders had stopped tumbling down the tower’s spiralling paths.

  The horde of minotaurs—blocked by the iron boulder that had cracked Jack’s handcuffs and facing the prospect of outrunning the liquefied stone still oozing down the tower—had returned to the first pinnacle.

  Hades, Vacheron and the royal spectators all watched Jack in expectant silence, ready it seemed to break out into applause when he made the final leap.

  The other surviving champions stood barely ten feet from him, across the narrow chasm, also watching. He had only to make the short jump to join them and exit the arena.

  But then Jack did something that no-one expected.

  He didn’t jump.

  All the royal spectators watched, aghast, as to their complete and utter surprise, Jack West Jr turned and jogged—jogged!—back down the high staircase, heading back toward the main pinnacle.

  ‘What on Earth is he doing?’ someone said.

  Iolanthe watched Jack with narrowing eyes. ‘He’s doing what he does.’

  Jack hastened back across the bridge, eyeing the oozing rivers of liquid stone still creeping down the criss-crossing paths of the tower.

  They had almost reached the base of the tower.

  He hurried up one of the curving sloping paths that led to the tower and arrived at the base of the tower just as the oncoming river of sludge crept into view ten yards away from him.

  He found Sky Monster where he’d left him. The big Kiwi was just sitting there holding his bloody right forearm and staring at the ground.

  He looked up in shock when Jack said, ‘Monster. Come on, it’s time to go.’

  ‘Jack? You . . . came back? Don’t you have to . . . get out?’

  Jack smiled. ‘So long as we can outrun that ooze, we’ve got as much time as we need, my old friend. Leave no man behind, no matter how out-of-shape. Come on.’

  Jack led Sky Monster away toward the exit.

  They had barely gone a
few steps when Jack heard it.

  A whimper.

  A pained animal whimper.

  Squinting, Jack peered down the sloping path that led back to the first pinnacle.

  There, pinned underneath the iron boulder that had rumbled through here earlier, lying half-off the path—evidently as part of an attempt to dive clear of the boulder—was a minotaur.

  One of its boots had been caught underneath the stationary boulder and now the half-man was hopelessly pinned underneath the heavy iron thing.

  But it wasn’t whimpering at Jack.

  Rather, it was appealing for help from two other minotaurs standing further down the pathway. They shifted anxiously where they stood, unsure, uncertain. To attempt to rescue their comrade was to risk being caught by the oncoming sludge.

  Then they made their decision . . . and bolted the other way.

  The pinned minotaur yanked off his bull mask and wailed plaintively at their backs as they hurried away.

  As Jack watched, the minotaur tugged desperately at his pinned foot, but it was no use. The boulder was too heavy for the half-man to move on his own.

  Without his battle helmet on, the half-man looked far less fearsome: he had a mop of black hair, a low forehead and a protruding jaw.

  He looked more human.

  And something inside Jack clicked.

  This man, this thing, this half-man—whatever he was—was going to die horribly as he was slowly swallowed by the oncoming liquefied stone.

  And so leaving Sky Monster at the base of the tower, Jack stepped down the path.

  On the royal balcony, a handsome young prince came up beside Hades and whispered, ‘Is this legal, Father? Can he do this?’

  Hades just kept watching Jack.

  Then he said, ‘The champion is breaking no rules, as far as I can see.’

  The pinned minotaur still hadn’t seen Jack.

  Then Jack’s bare feet crunched on the gravel of the path and the minotaur spun in surprise, eyes wide with fear.