Jack held up his hands.
‘I don’t want to hurt you. I want to help.’
Without waiting for an answer—he didn’t have much time; the river of liquid stone was almost at the base of the tower now—Jack just leaned forward and, to the pinned half-man’s absolute amazement, grabbed one of the boulder’s hot spikes with his titanium left hand and heaved on the boulder.
Up on the royal viewing balcony, the assembled guests now watched in open shock and disbelief.
‘How ghastly,’ one of the women said.
‘Preposterous,’ one of the men said.
Lily gazed down proudly at her father.
Near her, Hades just kept watching Jack with a cool gaze.
The heavy iron boulder rolled a short way down the sloping path, freeing the minotaur’s left foot.
The half-man leapt to a standing position, hopping comically on his good leg, as if to defend himself.
Jack still held out his hands.
‘Like I said, I want to help you.’
He then quickly slipped himself under the half-man’s left shoulder, took his weight and helped him up the path.
To the thunderstruck silence of the royal balcony, Jack and the minotaur rejoined Sky Monster at the top of the path and the three of them headed, together, down the opposite side of the pinnacle toward the bridges and the exit.
At the exit—the same spot where Jack had killed the Gorkha—Jack helped Sky Monster make the final leap across the chasm by tossing him across it.
Then, hefting the minotaur onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry—an image enhanced by the fireman’s helmet he was wearing—Jack looked over at the royal balcony, at Hades and Vacheron.
‘I can keep anything I can carry out of this arena, right?’ he called.
Vacheron glanced questioningly toward Hades.
Hades nodded.
‘You may,’ Vacheron said.
‘Okay then,’ Jack said.
And with the injured minotaur draped across his shoulders, he leapt across the chasm to safety.
The royal balcony was abuzz.
Many famous things had happened at the Great Games over the millennia but never this: a champion saving a minotaur!
On the balcony at the end of the Coward’s Route exit, the other champions stared at Jack in bewilderment.
Their baffled expressions said it all: who helped a minotaur?
Hades held up his hand and the entire cavernous space fell silent. When he spoke, Jack could hear him even from this far away.
‘Lords, ladies, champions! What a spectacle we are witnessing! Victorious champion. Step forward.’
The SAS man, Major Brigham, stood before Hades. Reverently, he handed the Golden Sphere he had acquired during the challenge to the Dark Lord.
Hades said, ‘Champion. I am most impressed. You have won both of the last two challenges. Once again, for winning this challenge, your reward is yours to name. Anything that it is in my power to give. So speak.’
Brigham nodded.
The royal audience waited in tense anticipation.
So did the champions on the other balcony.
After he had won the Second Challenge, Brigham had ordered the execution of his nearest rival. Would he do that again?
A few of the champions watched Brigham nervously, aware that the two lion-masked hunters, Chaos and Fear, had silently appeared behind them. Similarly, up on the royal balcony, Vacheron had appeared beside Hades with his deadly remote control unit.
Finally, Major Gregory Brigham spoke.
He bowed to Hades. ‘My Lord, I would like the Tibetan prince, Tenzin Depon, to be killed, please.’
The royal spectators murmured in approval.
The Tibetan prince was ranked third to win the Games. After his first win, Brigham had ordered the execution of the second-ranked champion. Now he was eliminating the next best challenger. This was a tried and tested strategy in the Games: win the early challenges and eliminate your key rivals.
Jack saw a muscly Tibetan warrior-monk standing near him. The young man closed his eyes, resigning himself to his fate a moment before his head blew apart and his body collapsed.
His companions in their hostage carriage were killed next: liquid stone gushed into their iron cage, drowning them.
Watching it all happen, Jack felt ill.
When it was over, Vacheron called formally: ‘My lords and ladies! That is all for today! All champions will retire to their hostage carriages! The Fourth Challenge shall commence tomorrow at dawn!’ He bowed toward the royal guests. ‘I bid good evening to you all.’
Broome, Australia
It was going on three in the afternoon when Pooh Bear and Stretch drove their rental car out of Broome regional airport in the remote northwestern corner of Australia.
It was blisteringly hot.
Perched on the coast at the edge of a mighty desert, in the winter months Broome was a popular holiday destination. But in summer it was just hot. For four months of the year, daily temperatures exceeded 44 degrees Celsius, or 110 Fahrenheit.
Pooh Bear and Stretch passed a cheerful sign that read:
welcome to broome population 14,052
‘If you want to live at the ends of the Earth,’ Pooh Bear said, ‘this is it.’
Stretch smiled wryly. ‘Mae certainly likes her solitude. And the world likes her to have it.’
‘What’s her beef with you?’ Pooh Bear asked.
‘I’m too skinny. You?’
‘My lack of a girlfriend,’ Pooh Bear said. ‘This is the woman who married Wolf and who raised Jack. She was always going to be formidable. What does she do up here?’
‘She’s a high school teacher. Teaches history.’
‘Jack’s mother is a high school history teacher?’
Stretch turned to face Pooh Bear. ‘My friend, Dr Mabel Merriweather is perhaps the most overqualified high school history teacher in the world.’
Their car swung through the gates of Broome High School.
They’d timed their arrival well. School had just finished for the day and the students of Broome High were streaming out the gates, heading home for the weekend.
Pooh Bear and Stretch waited in the reception area, having asked to see Ms Merriweather.
After about five minutes, a short woman in her late sixties with a pixie face, bob haircut and big glasses walked briskly into the reception area chased by a towering eighteen-year-old lad wearing a Broome High football jersey.
The boy pleaded, ‘But Ms Merriweather, if I don’t pass, I don’t get to play in tomorrow’s game!’
‘Arthur—’
‘Everybody calls me Bubba, ma’am.’
She stopped walking.
Pooh Bear felt a chill descend on the room. The look she gave the boy could have frozen water.
‘Arthur,’ she said. ‘Let me be very clear about this. I do not care for games. When you leave this school, it is not the number of football games you played that will garner you a job. My sole concern is your education. If you had studied for the test, you would have passed it. And if you had passed it, you would have been able to play your match. This is a good lesson for you: life comes first, games come second. You get to play when you earn it.’
The giant boy bowed his head. Crestfallen, he turned and walked away.
Pooh Bear and Stretch—battle-hardened soldiers who had killed men in hand-to-hand combat—both just sat there, stunned.
‘Now, then . . .’ The little woman turned and her laser-like gaze landed on them.
‘Benjamin Cohen,’ she said to Stretch. ‘Good Lord, lad, when are going to eat something? You’re as skinny as a rake. And Zahir . . .’
Pooh Bear stood. Not many people used his real name these days.
‘Found yourself a girl yet?’
> ‘No, ma’am. Not yet.’
‘Any dates?’
‘A couple, ma’am.’
‘Please, enough of this “ma’am” business. Call me Mae.’ She gave them both a winning smile. ‘But if you ever call me Mae West, I’ll cut your balls off with a butter knife.’
‘Yes, ma’am. I mean, yes, Mae,’ Pooh Bear stammered.
‘Now,’ Mae said. ‘What’s going on? Only one thing could bring the two of you all the way out here at no notice. What’s happened to my son?’
They adjourned to Mae’s office, a modest room overlooking a desert garden.
As he entered, Pooh Bear saw that all the bookshelves were filled with history books.
They ranged from the classic to the alternative: from Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken and The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall. All were arranged, Pooh Bear saw, in strict alphabetical order by author, their spines lined up with military precision.
‘Jack’s disappeared,’ Stretch said as he and Pooh Bear sat down in a pair of armchairs across from Mae’s desk. ‘He was kidnapped.’
‘How do you know for sure?’ Mae Merriweather may have had a cute pixie-like face, but her eyes—behind her big glasses—bored into Pooh Bear’s. She looked to Pooh Bear like a killer librarian.
He pulled out his iPhone, played a video on it.
The video showed Pine Gap as seen from the air: a gliding, soaring view of the desert installation.
‘This is footage from the GoPro camera that Horus was wearing around her neck when Jack disappeared early this morning.’
On the screen, a gang of armed men—and one woman—walked into the base. They emerged soon after carrying the unconscious figures of Jack, Sky Monster, Lily, Alby and the two dogs.
As they conveyed Jack across the sandy ground, the woman pointed up at the camera and one of the soldiers raised his pistol and fired and the camera-view spiralled out of control before slamming into the ground and cutting to hash.
Pooh Bear grimaced. ‘They shot Horus and everyone at the base had been killed.’
‘Rewind it please,’ Mae said, firmly. ‘I want to see the woman’s face.’
Pooh Bear did so, freezing the image on the walking woman. As soon as he’d seen this footage, he’d recognised her. Like Jack, he knew the woman well.
‘Her name is Iolanthe Compton-Jones,’ he said. ‘She’s from a group we know as the Deus—’
‘The Deus Rex,’ Mae said. ‘The god-kings.’
Pooh was surprised that she would know this. ‘How do you know—?’
Mae said, ‘History teacher.’
‘Before he was taken, Jack managed to leave this for you.’
He handed her the silver teaspoon from Pine Gap, with the message written on it in black marker:
‘We can’t decipher the symbol. Hopefully you can.’
Mae turned the teaspoon over in her little hands, peering at it closely.
‘A tetra-gammadion,’ she said absently.
Pooh Bear and Stretch said nothing, not wanting to interrupt her thoughts.
She looked up. ‘The base Jack was visiting, does it contain some kind of observatory? An astronomical observatory with a telescope?’
‘Yes,’ Pooh Bear said quickly, hopefully. ‘The data site of a very powerful new telescope.’
‘Hmmm . . .’ Mae frowned darkly and Pooh Bear suddenly felt like he’d done something wrong.
She stood abruptly and went to one of her bookshelves. She pulled from it a thick and very old leather-bound volume with no title on its spine.
She brought the book back to her desk and flipped through its pages.
When she found the page she was looking for, she read from the book aloud:
‘I cannot see it. The optics of my time are not good enough. But the mathematics are inescapable. It is coming. It will be up to the wise and noble men of future generations with optics of a more advanced nature than mine to find it in the night sky and initiate the return call. Or else all is lost.’
Mae turned the book around for Pooh Bear and Stretch to see.
In the middle of the page, above the paragraph she had just read, was the symbol:
‘Look familiar?’ Mae asked them.
‘Sure does,’ Pooh Bear said.
The text below the symbol, he saw, was handwritten in a very old style. The pages of the book were dry and brittle, brown with age.
‘What is this book? And who wrote it?’
‘This book,’ Mae said, ‘is nearly three hundred years old and it is one of only five existing copies. It is called The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms and it was written by Sir Isaac Newton.’
‘This was why I asked if Jack was at an observatory when he was kidnapped,’ Mae said.
‘There are many tetra-gammadions in the world—in Buddhism and Hinduism and also sadly in the Nazi swastika—but few refer to it in an astronomical sense. This picture, drawn by Newton himself, represents a distant galaxy known as the Hydra Galaxy.’
‘A galaxy he couldn’t see?’ Stretch said.
‘Isaac Newton was a remarkable and brilliant man,’ Mae said, ‘perhaps the most brilliant man in all of human history. His work on the movement of planets was 250 years ahead of its time and the Principia Mathematica remains the most influential book ever written. Ever.
‘Newton famously delved into some more exotic research that critics have dismissed as “alchemy” or “occult science”. His notes on these subjects—and Newton always kept very detailed notes—were notoriously obtuse, difficult to decipher. His work on the Hydra Galaxy is similar.
‘Among other things, Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Master of the Royal Mint, and most importantly for our purposes, President of the Royal Society. This last post made him the head of a most powerful group, the Royal Society’s inner elite: the Invisible College.’
‘The Invisible College?’ Pooh Bear said.
‘Wisest of the wise, solemn advisors to the kings of old,’ Mae said. ‘That’s their actual official motto.’
‘The members of the Invisible College were advisors to the British Crown?’ Stretch asked.
Mae gave Stretch a look.
‘No. I said they were advisors to the kings of old. To the kings of the four legendary kingdoms.’
She saw the looks of incomprehension on Stretch’s and Pooh Bear’s faces.
‘Four legendary kingdoms?’ Pooh Bear repeated.
Mae paused for a moment. She seemed unsure if she should go on.
‘It was a topic I researched a long time ago, back when I had the energy and zeal of youth,’ she said. ‘My colleagues thought I was crazy. They said I was chasing legends, conspiracy theories, not real history. Only Jack’s father encouraged me. I haven’t thought about the four kingdoms in a very long time.’
‘Tell us about them,’ Stretch said.
‘Gentlemen’—Mae’s eyes were suddenly hard, focused—‘if we are to proceed in this matter together, you are going to have to dispel some of your preconceived notions of kings and queens and nation-states, even of history itself. Can you do this?’
‘Given what I’ve seen travelling around this world with your son, ma’am, I’m the most open-minded guy on the planet,’ Pooh Bear said. ‘I’m in.’
‘Mae,’ Stretch said. ‘Forgive me, but Jack West Sr—Wolf—would never have married a plain old high school history teacher. What’s your real area of expertise?’
Mae smiled. ‘While I genuinely love opening young minds, I like to think I am something more than your average high school teacher. All my life I have inquired into a single question. My search for the answer to that question has made me something of an expert in subjects as varied as mythical kingdoms, advanced astron
omy and famed individuals like Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton.’
‘So what’s the question?’ Stretch asked.
‘The question,’ Mae said, ‘is the greatest question of all: who or what is God?’
‘Who is God?’ Stretch said doubtfully. ‘Are you talking about the Muslim god, Allah? Egyptian gods? Greek gods? Or the Christian God who supposedly sent his only son to Earth to be crucified and then rise from the dead? You do realise that Jack once found the tomb of Jesus Christ in a Roman salt mine with the body still in it.’
Mae nodded. ‘I’m talking about all of them. And, yes, I am also very aware that Jesus the Nazarene was very much a man even if a sizeable portion of mankind has made him into a god. Why do you think this has happened?’
Stretch shrugged. ‘He preached a popular philosophy. Peace, equality, be nice to others. He fed his followers with loaves and fishes. Healed the sick. And from what we learned back in 2008, he was also a member of a very ancient royal line—’
‘That’s right,’ Mae said quickly. ‘He healed the sick and he was a member of an ancient royal line. Imagine you’re living in the Roman province of Judea and a guy comes out of nowhere with advanced medical knowledge and starts healing the sick? It’d cause a sensation. Christ’s royal lineage made him an even greater sensation and his fame spread.
‘It is my contention that a handful of royal lines have been privy to advanced superancient learning handed down to them by a mysterious civilisation from the distant past. This wisdom has given them a knowledge-advantage over the general population and allowed them to appear, so to speak, god-like.
‘Did you know that every single great ancient civilisation mentions being visited by a white-skinned bearded man—it’s always a man, he is always white and he always has a beard—who bestows on them advanced wisdom and who often heals the sick?
‘The Egyptians, the Maya, the Cambodians, all of them were visited by such an individual. The Egyptians called him Viratia. The Mayans called him Viracocha. The Cambodians: Viacaya. Sound consistent?
‘I mean, if you’re a simple society and someone comes to you and shows you how to build giant pyramids, predict solar eclipses, plant sustainable agriculture, and miraculously heals your ill, you’d think he was a god, wouldn’t you?’
The Four Legendary Kingdoms Page 9