The Four Legendary Kingdoms

by Matthew Reilly

  The red jester began to poke and prod the minotaur with his little red trident.

  He would playfully stab the minotaur and then somersault quickly through its legs as it turned and then stab it again.

  The whole act was like a comical version of a bullfight. At one point, the minotaur lunged at the jester, only for the jester to step lightly out of the way, sweeping aside an imaginary bullfighter’s cape.

  The audience of royals laughed and clapped.

  And then the jester pulled a curious weapon from his belt: it had a wooden handle from which hung a pair of weighted brass balls on two short lengths of chain.

  ‘It is a flail,’ Iolanthe whispered to Lily. ‘An ancient weapon and a most difficult one to master.’

  With a deft swirl of his wrist, Mephisto twirled the flail, causing the two heavy balls to spin so rapidly they blurred with motion.

  Then with a flick of his arm, the flail lashed out and the two brass balls were suddenly wrapped around the minotaur’s head and they came crashing together at the poor beast’s temples, crushing his helmet horrifically inward.

  The half-man in the bull mask froze instantly. Blood dribbled out from under his cracked mask yet he remained standing.

  Lily was thunderstruck.

  Beside her, Iolanthe continued to eat her appetiser. She picked a stray piece of lettuce from between her teeth.

  The audience gasped, then clapped in admiration.

  As she watched, Lily’s eyes met those of the little red jester and she saw delighted malevolence in them.

  As the jester eyed Lily, he kicked the still-standing minotaur behind him.

  The minotaur fell to the stage with a dull thud. It lay motionless, dead, as the jester broke eye contact with Lily and bowed theatrically for the crowd.

  They cheered enthusiastically.

  ‘I am truly in Hell,’ Lily whispered to herself.

  While Lily was dining in luxury and splendour, Jack, Alby and Sky Monster sat together on the cold steel floor of their hostage carriage eating out of tin bowls.

  While the bowls weren’t exactly of the finest quality, the food was actually pretty good: pasta, rice, chicken. Energy food for men who needed lots of energy.

  Nestled beside Jack were his two dogs, the big labrador Ash and the small poodle Roxy.

  In front of all of them—its bull helmet removed and its injured foot now bandaged—was the minotaur Jack had saved at the end of the Third Challenge.

  Looking at the hairy half-man with his broad forehead, flat nose and monobrow, Jack thought about what Iolanthe had said earlier about the minotaurs being purebred Neanderthals.

  Archaeologists and anthropologists had once believed that homo sapiens—modern man—had killed off the smaller-statured Neanderthals.

  More recent theories, however, postulated that the world’s Neanderthal population, rather than being exterminated, had just been thinned and, in some regions, had interbred with homo sapiens. It was entirely possible that the slightly hairier, shorter, hunched-over person in your office had some Neanderthal blood in them. That a society of purebred Neanderthals might have survived in a remote and contained ancient citadel was not out of the question at all.

  With his hunched stance and protruding lower jaw, Neanderthal man had also got a bit of a raw deal when it came to estimations of his intelligence. Neanderthals, it was thought, could build weapons and structures, count and speak.

  Jack’s dogs had their own responses to the hairy half-man.

  Ash, imperturbable as usual, just ignored him. Roxy, also as usual, adopted a guard-dog role: she stared daggers at the minotaur, growling suspiciously at him.

  ‘Here.’ Jack handed his bowl of pasta to the half-man. ‘Eat something.’

  The hairy half-man took the bowl tentatively.

  ‘Can you speak?’ Jack asked.

  The half-man nodded. ‘Little.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  The half-man pointed to a tattoo on his left shoulder that read E-147. Jack recalled that the minotaur that had attacked him in his cell at the very start of all this had had a similar tattoo on its shoulder.

  ‘I . . . Minotaur E-147,’ the Neanderthal said.

  ‘Okay. I’m Jack.’

  ‘Jack?’ the half-man said, trying to wrap his mouth around the word. ‘Jack.’

  Roxy barked at the half-man, making him jump.

  Jack patted the little poodle. ‘Never mind her. She’s kinda protective.’

  The hairy man said, ‘Jack help E-147 when other minotaurs run. Why?’

  ‘I don’t like watching anyone get left to die,’ Jack said.

  E-147 looked directly into Jack’s eyes. ‘E-147 surely die without Jack’s help. E-147 thank Jack. E-147 consider Jack friend.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Jack said. ‘This is Sky Monster and this is Alby—’

  ‘Why Jack keep dogs?’ E-147 interrupted. ‘For eat later?’

  ‘What? Oh, no.’ Jack shook his head. ‘We don’t eat dogs. The dogs are my friends. Good friends.’

  ‘Oh.’ E-147 looked a little saddened by that.

  ‘Tell me,’ Jack said. ‘How many minotaurs are there?’

  ‘There many minotaurs,’ E-147 said. ‘N minotaurs, S minotaurs, E minotaurs and W minotaurs.’

  Jack saw the pattern: north, south, east and west. Wherever these minotaurs lived, they were divided into geographic areas.

  ‘Where do all you minotaurs live?’ he asked.

  ‘In minotaur city. Known as Dis. Is great underground city. It protect only land entrance to Underworld.’

  Alby said, ‘An underground city?’

  Jack said to him, ‘Iolanthe said Hades has thousands of these guys. E-147, how many E minotaurs are there?’

  E-147 said, ‘Most high number is E-900.’

  Jack said, ‘Four groups of minotaurs, with almost a thousand to each group. We’re talking several thousand minotaurs all up.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Sky Monster said.

  Jack turned back to E-147. ‘If you don’t mind, I just have to ask, what are you?’

  E-147 cocked his head to the side, frowning. ‘I . . . E-147. I . . . me.’

  Jack smiled to himself. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. That’s right. You’re you.’

  At that moment, another voice spoke—a man’s voice, a young man’s voice.

  ‘Jack? Jack West Jr? It is you . . .’

  Jack turned.

  Through the bars of the hostage carriage, two cells away, he saw a young male US Marine dressed in combat trousers and an olive t-shirt.

  It was a Marine he knew well but had not seen in a long time.

  It was Lieutenant Sean Miller, call sign Astro.

  Jack and Astro’s relationship went way back, back to the mission involving the Six Ramesean Stones.

  It had not started out well: when the mission began, Astro had been inserted into Jack’s international team as a representative of the United States. What neither Astro nor Jack knew at the time was that Astro’s shadowy superior back home had been Jack’s father—a villainous colonel known as Wolf—whose plans were not as noble as Astro had thought they were.

  During a vicious battle at a gigantic underground temple-shrine in Japan, Astro had betrayed Jack and, thinking he was doing the right thing, sided with Wolf. But a short time later, Astro was shot and the duplicitous Wolf left him for dead.

  The person who’d saved Astro was Jack. They had been friends ever since.

  ‘Astro?’ Jack said. ‘How’d you get roped into all this?’

  ‘Same as you, I’m thinking,’ the young Marine replied. ‘They found my file, saw that I’d had some history with all this ancient stuff, and called me in. But I feel terrible—because of me, these guys got pulled into it, too.’

  J
ack noticed that Astro was sharing his cell with three other United States Marines, two men and one woman. At that moment, the woman stood up to look at Jack.

  She was a very distinctive female Marine. She was absolutely gigantic, at least six foot two, with a shaven head and a grim dark-humoured smile.

  It was the big burly woman Jack had seen during the Third Challenge, the one accompanying the other US Marine, the one with the reflective glasses. The hostage chamber between theirs was now empty, half-filled with liquid stone, its occupants sacrificed after the Third Challenge. Until now, Jack hadn’t realised that he and the Marines were quartered so close to each other.

  He recognised her, but he hadn’t seen her in a very long time, not since some very secret joint US–Australian special forces operations in the 1990s.

  ‘Do my eyes deceive me or is that Jack West Jr?’ the big woman said. ‘The famous Huntsman, the biggest pussy in the crack Australian SAS?’

  ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, Gena?’ Jack said.

  The woman grinned back at him. After all these years, she hadn’t changed a bit.

  She was Gena Newman of the United States Marine Corps, call sign Motherfucker, or just Mother for short.

  ‘What happened to you, Jack?’ Mother said. ‘Back in the 90s, you were hot shit. Ranked in the top ten in the world. Geez, your escape from Iraq in Desert Storm in Saddam Hussein’s own fucking plane went down in military legend, man. And then you just vanished. Disappeared. Where the hell did you go?’

  ‘A mission that turned into my life,’ Jack said. ‘In ’96, I was assigned to protect a little girl and that mission didn’t end till 2008. I adopted her. Got married. Found out I was part of an ancient prophecy.’

  ‘Prophecy?’ Mother said.

  ‘You kinda get used to the epic historical side of it all,’ Jack said.

  Mother snorted. ‘Yeah, well I haven’t seen something this freaky since I saw Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. Creepy French circus shit. Got any ideas on how to get out of this clusterfuck?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m still playing catch-up myself,’ Jack said.

  ‘Hey, you still got that plane you stole from Saddam?’

  ‘The Halicarnassus? Sadly, no. I destroyed it when I had to smash my way into a big underground shrine. Real shame. Got a new plane, now. Stole it from one of these royal assholes after I killed him. It’s a Russian knock-off of the Concorde. Fast.’

  Jack jerked his chin at their grim surroundings. ‘So how’d you get involved in all this? This ain’t your regular Marine Corps op.’

  ‘As I said, it’s my fault,’ Astro said. ‘I was on tour in Afghanistan, based at Leatherneck in Kandahar, when I got called into a tent and found the Commandant of the Marine Corps sitting there waiting for me. He was surrounded by some powerful dudes in suits. They knew a lot: asked me about our mission back in ’08, the Six Sacred Stones, the Vertexes, the prophecy of the Five Greatest Warriors and all that. Then they asked me about Mother and our CO, the captain here. Asked if I knew anything about them and a group called “Majestic-12”. I didn’t. I just said they were two of the best Marines I’d ever seen. Put Tomahawk with ’em and you’ve got one hell of a team.’

  He turned to the two other male Marines sitting below the waist-high wall of their cell, out of Jack’s sight. ‘Excuse me, sir, but I got someone here I think you should meet.’

  The most senior Marine stood and Jack got a good look at him for the first time. He was lean and fit, his muscles hard and wiry. He had dark hair that had been shaved short to accommodate the explosive chip and gemstone in his neck and a weathered handsome face. He wasn’t wearing his reflective anti-flash glasses now, so Jack could see his eyes.

  They seized his attention.

  Two hideous scars—one for each eye—slashed vertically down across them.

  Astro said, ‘Captain Jack West Jr, formerly of the Australian SAS, call sign Huntsman, meet Captain Shane Schofield of the United States Marine Corps, call sign Scarecrow.’

  The Marine with the slashed eyes stared at Jack for a long moment, before nodding.

  ‘Captain,’ he said cautiously. ‘What’s with the arm?’

  Jack glanced down at his titanium left arm. One of the reasons he wore a glove on that hand and a long-sleeved t-shirt was to cover it up, to not draw attention to it. But this Scarecrow guy had spotted it instantly.

  Jack could have said it was a state-of-the-art, fully articulated, motor-controlled arm built for him by his late mentor, Wizard, after his real arm had been seared off by a curtain of falling lava in a volcano in Uganda, but instead he just said, ‘Lost the old one in a tight spot. This one’s better.’

  ‘So what do you know about this place and these Games?’ the Marine named Scarecrow said.

  ‘Not much more than you,’ Jack said. ‘I was drugged and kidnapped. Woke up in a cell to find a minotaur charging at me with a knife. How about you?’

  Scarecrow said, ‘We were brought here under false pretences. Along with Astro, Mother and Tomahawk’—he nodded at the fourth and last Marine in the cell, a younger blond-haired man—‘I was informed that we would be performing a joint op with four Delta operators in southern Afghanistan. Boarded a plane with the D-boys, short flight, maybe an hour, but when we landed, it was at a remote desert airstrip near a coast. Afghanistan has no coast. It’s landlocked. We weren’t in Afghanistan anymore.

  ‘The airstrip we’d arrived at was little more than a runway of hard-packed sand. No buildings, no civilisation in sight. Only a single man, that guy Vacheron, and a pick-up truck with a cage on the tray. Our Delta companions seemed entirely unsurprised. They just got in the cage.’

  He nodded at the four men in the next barred hostage chamber.

  ‘That’s Major Jeff Edwards, call sign Ricochet, and his three douchebag buddies from Delta Force. Typical Delta assholes. They’re better than you and they know it. I suspect they’ve been training for this. But we had no idea.

  ‘Anyway, we got in the pick-up’s cage and black bags were put over our heads. When my bag was removed, I found myself alone in a cell and a few minutes later, one of those minotaurs came charging at me, just like you.’

  ‘Do you know any of the other champions?’ Jack asked.

  Again, Scarecrow paused, eyeing Jack warily, assessing him. He struck Jack as a careful man who didn’t like surprises.

  At last, Scarecrow said, ‘That big African-American dude over there with the tattoos on his arms is Warrant Officer DeShawn Monroe. Navy SEAL. Trained killer, tough son of a bitch. Known as The Finisher, ’cause that’s what he does, finishes things. He’s the only other one I know.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Well, if Astro vouches for you, you’re good with me. I’d trust him with my life and with my little girl’s, too.’

  ‘Forgive me if I withhold judgement on you for a while,’ Scarecrow said. ‘Right here, right now, I don’t trust anyone.’

  ‘I get that,’ Jack said. ‘In the meantime, a question: what did the coast look like? The coast near the airstrip you landed at?’

  Scarecrow shrugged. ‘Just a barren desert coast. No trees, no life. Tropical blue water, but with a tinge of reddish-orange at the edges. Given the short flight time from Kandahar, I figured we were somewhere on the edge of the Arabian Sea, but honestly we could be anywhere in the region: Yemen, Oman, Iran, Pakistan, even India.’

  ‘We’re in India,’ Jack said. ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘India,’ Mother spat. ‘I hate fuckin’ India.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Because India gave the world yoga, and now when I go to Starbucks to get my morning coffee, I have to deal with all these fucking yoga-loving yuppies dressed in tight pants who think they’re living on some higher celestial plane when they’re really just asshole followers-of-fashion.’

  Jack allowed himse
lf a smile.

  Scarecrow looked at Jack seriously. ‘Captain West—’

  ‘Please, call me Jack.’

  ‘Captain West. I’ve seen some strange shit in my time. For instance, Astro, Mother and I once survived a very unusual mission together at a secret base called Hell Island. But I’ve never found myself in a place calling itself the Underworld, ruled by a guy calling himself Hades, fighting for my life against guys in bull and lion helmets. My question for you is: what are we going to do to get out of here alive?’

  Jack looked at Scarecrow for a long moment.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know.’

  Shortly after, in the eerie darkness that surrounded the hostage carriages, all the champions drifted off to sleep.

  After the exertions of the first three challenges—the minotaurs in the cells, the water pit and the tower—they all slept soundly.

  All except Jack.

  He couldn’t sleep.

  Leaning against the bars of his cell, he peered out at the darkened Underworld, at the tower and the abyss of the Third Challenge.

  This whole place baffled him. The Underworld. Was it a cave? It looked like a cavern, but it didn’t feel like one. The air was too fresh. But he couldn’t see the sky either; above him there was nothing but inky black. No stars, no moonlight.

  Jack was awake when, late in the night, Major Brigham returned from the banquet and re-entered his cell. He was greeted by his companions but soon they were all sleeping.

  Jack remained awake, sitting up against the waist-high fence of his cell, head resting against the bars, thinking. Then fatigue overcame him and his eyes began to droop and he nodded off—

  A shuffling sound woke him.

  A figure in a hooded robe crept past Jack’s cell, moving quickly and lightly.

  Jack didn’t move. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep for, or what time it was, but it was still dark, the dead of night.

  He followed the robed figure with only his eyes, feigning sleep.