The Four Legendary Kingdoms

by Matthew Reilly

  After a year in a filthy São Paulo prison, his local bishop appeared one day and offered him and his five comrades their freedom in exchange for participating in a holy mission: the Great Games.

  Having scaled the right-hand side of the maze, Corazon arrived at the fifteenth level, at the dead end containing one of the Golden Spheres.

  Standing in front of the glimmering sphere was the black lion-helmeted figure of Chaos. He gripped a sinister-looking scimitar in one hand.

  Corazon’s eyes narrowed. He knew how to fight. Like all special forces operators from his country, he was an expert in capoeira, the deadly Brazilian martial art. He could take this guy in his stupid helmet.

  Corazon drew his knife.

  Up on the royal balcony, standing beside Lily, Iolanthe watched the confrontation intently.

  Beside her, Cardinal Ricardo Mendoza did the same.

  Iolanthe said, ‘Now we find out if your Brazilian psychopaths are worthy.’

  Mendoza nodded. ‘They are more than worthy.’

  Corazon attacked Chaos with a flurry of flashing knife moves.

  Chaos parried his every blow—easily—before ducking and slashing Corazon’s throat with his sword, almost decapitating him.

  The black lion-headed warrior then hurled the dead Brazilian off the ledge and the limp body sailed fifteen levels down the face of the maze before it landed with a splash in the lake far below.

  Iolanthe turned to Cardinal Mendoza and raised her eyebrows.

  Mendoza swallowed. ‘Oh.’

  In the left-hand dead end containing the other Golden Sphere, a different kind of confrontation took place.

  The young man wearing the crimson colours of Lord Hades arrived there to find the white lion, Fear, guarding the Golden Sphere with his own curving sword, waiting for him.

  Again, the royal spectators watched keenly.

  Lily heard a few of them whisper, ‘It’s Zaitan. Hades’s second son . . .’

  Lily saw Hades himself watching the encounter closely.

  She also saw Dion—Hades’s first son and heir—watching with extreme interest.

  Zaitan drew his own short sword and stared levelly at Fear.

  They engaged.

  This fight was far more evenly matched.

  While Fear was taller, Zaitan moved faster, and rather than try to match the lion-helmed warrior for strength, he moved quickly, parrying blows and then diving away, making Fear chase him.

  Lily frowned as she watched the fight.

  There was something wrong about it. Something odd. She had the distinct impression that Fear wasn’t fighting as hard as he should; definitely not as hard as Chaos had fought the Brazilian commando.

  And then, as Fear lunged at him with a lusty swing, Zaitan slipped under the swipe, scooped up the sphere and slid out and over the front edge of the ledge, quickly dropping to the level below, with the sphere.

  The royals gasped, then cheered.

  Bearing the precious Golden Sphere, Zaitan now moved with greater speed and confidence. He raced away from the dead end, lest Fear come after him, and slithered up the last three levels before popping out through the exit at the top of the maze.

  Safely out of the deadly labyrinth, he looked over at the royal balcony and with a broad grin on his face, thrust the sphere above his head triumphantly.

  The royal spectators roared with delight.

  Hades clapped approvingly.

  Dion clapped vigorously, cheering loudly at his brother’s achievement.

  Further down on the left-hand side of the maze, Jack and Alby both spun at the roar from the royal balcony.

  Alby turned to Jack. ‘Someone’s got a sphere already.’

  ‘Keep going,’ Jack said. ‘We can’t stop moving.’

  There was one other dangerous element lurking in the maze.

  Mephisto the jester, wearing his gaudy antlers.

  He danced jauntily around the middle levels of the labyrinth, Charlie Chaplin–style, twirling his deadly double-balled flail as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  And then he stopped, hearing something, and with frightening speed, he suddenly descended two levels, moving with incredible lightness and nimbleness out over the forward edges of the ledges before he landed without a sound right behind a lone champion.

  It was the Indian MARCOS commando: the one who had thrown his partners at Scarecrow and fled.

  After leaving his men to fight Scarecrow, the MARCOS commando was now hopelessly lost.

  He had stumbled across the centre of the maze and into a dead end and had had to backtrack out of it. Alone, afraid and desperate, he had completely lost his bearings and now all he wanted to do was find a way upward.

  He held in his hand a long serrated knife with a steel knuckleduster grip.

  Mephisto crept up behind him, gripping his wicked flail.

  The Indian commando didn’t know he was there.

  The royal spectators saw it all, but Mephisto turned to them and put a finger to his grinning lips: Shhhh!

  Then, still stalking the hapless Indian commando, he began theatrically raising and lowering his feet, as if walking on tiptoes.

  Lily watched the scene in total horror. These Games were a foul awful thing, but she found the jester’s jokey treatment of the violence he was about to inflict somehow even more frightening.

  The little red jester crept closer to the oblivious Indian.

  The crowd held their breath.

  Then Mephisto tapped the Indian on the shoulder.

  The Indian spun around, raising his knife.

  But as the Indian turned, quick as a whip, Mephisto ducked around him, so that the little man again stood behind the commando’s back.

  Mephisto shrugged comically toward the royal balcony.

  The royal spectators laughed.

  The Indian commando whirled again and this time, Mephisto raised his double-balled flail until it was spinning like helicopter rotors and he flung it . . . and the two heavy brass balls, joined by their connecting chain, wrapped around the poor Indian commando’s head.

  The result was fast and devastating.

  As the chain hit the Indian in the forehead, the two brass balls whipped around his head and came back: they slammed into his eyes with phenomenal force, crashing into the sockets with twin explosions of blood before driving into the poor man’s brain.

  The Indian stood for a few seconds, but he was already dead.

  Mephisto stepped forward and unwrapped his flail from the dead man’s face—revealing the hideously smashed-in eye sockets—before he let the body collapse in a heap to the ledge.

  The Indian commando, a member of the MARCOS, one of the finest commando units in the world, had been defeated in seconds by the jester.

  Mephisto bowed for the royal crowd.

  The crowd applauded appreciatively.

  Then Mephisto placed his boot on the Indian’s body like a victorious hunter and flexed his arms in a muscleman’s pose.

  The royals laughed.

  Lily didn’t. She just swallowed in fear.

  Then suddenly Mephisto’s head jerked up—he had sensed someone else nearby—and looking down below the jester, Lily saw another champion and his partners unwittingly approaching Mephisto’s position from below.

  Jack, Alby and Roxy.

  Mephisto scurried away.

  Jack vs Mephisto

  Jack hauled himself up onto a new level and immediately saw a body lying on the flat stone ledge in front of him.

  It was the corpse of the Indian commando.

  He froze, instantly cautious.

  The killer might still be nearby.

  Jack turned to Alby, waiting on the level below, holding Roxy. ‘Alby, hang back a second. Don’t come up yet.’

 
Jack drew his knife as he slowly approached the slumped body. It was lying face-down.

  Reaching forward with his bare right foot, Jack rolled it over.

  The face of the dead MARCOS commando stared back at him with its crushed eye sockets.

  ‘Christ,’ Jack said, wincing.

  He bent over the corpse, examining it.

  The Indian commando had died so suddenly, he was still clutching his knuckleduster-gripped knife.

  Jack checked the body for more weapons.

  ‘Now that’s useful,’ he said aloud, unclipping a gun-like device from the dead man’s belt.

  Like many special forces units around the world, the Indian Marine Commandos often do exercises with American units to learn from them. One weapon that the Indians have copied from the US Marines Corps is one of the most unique weapons of the world: the Armalite MH-12 Maghook.

  A variety of grapple gun, the Maghook fires a gas-propelled grappling hook that, thanks to a high-powered magnet, can adhere to sheer metallic surfaces. Because of its complex propulsion and cable-reeling systems, the Maghook has proven to be difficult to replicate, but India has tried.

  The Indian copy of the Maghook is made by its special weapons division, the ARDE, so they call it the ARDE-7 grapple gun. It is a crude copy, to be sure, but it’s compact and it works.

  And this poor asshole won’t be needing his anymore, Jack thought as he took the dead man’s ARDE-7.

  Bent over the commando’s body, Jack never saw the small red-clad figure slowly and silently lowering himself out and around the ledge above him.

  Mephisto moved like a calculating monkey, dangling from one arm high above the lake, his double-balled weapon held in his spare hand.

  On the royal balcony, all the royal spectators held their collective breaths as they watched Mephisto lower himself behind the unsuspecting Jack.

  Lily leaned forward, opening her mouth to shout a warning—

  ‘Ah-ah-ah,’ Hades said from beside her. ‘Don’t say a word. We must not give our champions any assistance.’

  Lily bit her lip, feeling totally powerless, as over on the maze, Mephisto’s feet landed silently on the ledge immediately behind Jack.

  Beside her on the balcony, other royals—including an old lady in pearls—sipped champagne from crystal glasses as they keenly watched the scene.

  Lily glanced from the old lady to Jack to Hades before she ever so casually bumped the old lady’s arm, knocking the champagne glass from her hand, sending it sailing over the balcony’s railing.

  ‘Oh dear, I’m terribly sorry,’ Lily apologised.

  A second later, the crystal glass smashed against the mountainside twenty feet below the balcony, exploding into a thousand pieces, the noise ringing out like a gunshot.

  Jack had just clipped the dead Indian’s grapple gun to his own belt and was rising to stand when, from across the lake, he heard the champagne glass smash and he spun at the sound—only to see the bizarre figure of Mephisto, short, red and deadly, standing there right behind him.

  ‘What the hell—?’ he gasped as Mephisto swung his flail, cracking it like a whip.

  Jack ducked and the two brass balls clanged loudly as they slammed together at the exact spot where his head had been.

  Then Mephisto was leaping at Jack and it was all Jack could do to fend off the demonic little jester’s blows.

  Mephisto swung his flail, Jack rolled and the heavy brass balls made deep dents in the stone ledge.

  Mephisto lashed out with his claw-like fingernails and one fingernail drew a slashing line of blood across Jack’s left cheek.

  Jack raised his knife, only to see Mephisto crack his flail again. One of the heavy balls hit Jack’s knife-hand and the knife went flying from his grasp, tumbling into the lake below.

  Jack actually managed to land a good punch on Mephisto then, knocking the jester toward a nearby chute . . . only for the little man to jam some kind of handheld pneumatic mountain-climbing device into the stone wall and use it as a handhold to stop his fall.

  Then Mephisto was back in Jack’s face and he swung his flail again and this time one of the brass balls hit Jack a glancing blow on the side of the head and he saw stars and dropped to his knees.

  Jack’s vision clouded. He was about to lose consciousness. He wanted to roll off the ledge and swing down to the one below, but his muscles wouldn’t obey.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the demonic little red man standing over him, raising his flail to finish him off.

  Whack.

  Alby hit Mephisto in the back of the head with the dead Indian’s knife, leading with its knuckleduster grip.

  Mephisto dropped instantly, out cold.

  Alby slid to Jack’s side, started slapping his face. ‘Come on, Jack! Stay awake! Stay awake!’

  Jack shook his head, regaining some clarity, and raised himself up on one elbow.

  He looked from Alby—with Roxy snuggled inside his zipped jacket—to the unconscious jester and back to Alby again.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Jack stared at Mephisto, at his red tattooed face, his subdermal horns, his sharpened teeth. ‘What is that?’

  Suddenly, Mephisto groaned.

  Alby said, ‘I don’t know, but I sure don’t want to be here when he wakes up. Let’s get moving up this maze.’

  They hurdled the slumped body of the jester and sprinted away into the maze.

  On the royal balcony, after glancing down at the smashed champagne glass, Hades gave Lily a meaningful look.

  Lily simply returned his gaze and shrugged. ‘Alcohol makes people so clumsy. Your guests really should be mindful of their drinking.’

  The Second Golden Sphere—Vargas vs Chaos

  While Jack was doing battle with Mephisto on the left-hand side of the maze, high up on the right-hand side, another champion was making a run at the second Golden Sphere, the one defended by the black lion, Chaos.

  It was the second Brazilian champion. His name was Sergeant Victor Vargas and he hailed from the same disgraced special forces unit as Sergeant Mauricio Corazon.

  Unlike Corazon, Vargas had not raced headlong up the maze alone. Rather, he had done it with his two partners and now they closed in on the dead end containing Chaos and the second sphere.

  Having seen Corazon’s body go sailing down the face of the maze, Vargas had conceived a different plan to get the sphere.

  He sent his two partners into the dead end ahead of him while he remained on the level below.

  His two partners stormed the dead end, attacking Chaos with knives.

  Chaos responded with terrible blows from his massive sword, but the two Brazilians were quick and agile and they managed to evade his swings and swipes, at least for a short while . . .

  . . . long enough for Vargas to sneak up from the level below, climbing up and around the edge of the ledge into the dead end, and snatch the Golden Sphere. He then leapt back down just as Chaos, still fighting the other two, saw him out of the corner of his eye.

  Vargas bolted, not caring for the fate of his two partners.

  He hadn’t told them that it was actually part of his plan that they would probably die, and die they did: seeing Vargas race off with the sphere sent Chaos into a frenzy and in his rage, he dispatched both of the Brazilians in the dead end with him. He cut off the head of one and ran his sword through the belly of the other then tossed both of them off the maze and took off after Vargas.

  But the Brazilian champion had got too much of a head start and he nimbly ascended the last couple of levels of the maze, and just as Chaos rose onto the topmost level behind him, Vargas slithered through the exit with the all-important Golden Sphere in his possession.

  The spectators on the royal balcony cheered.

  Chief among them was Cardinal Mendoza. He gave Iolanthe a smug
knowing smile as he clapped heartily.

  On the left-hand side of the maze, Jack once again heard cheers coming from the royal balcony.

  ‘Damn it,’ he said. ‘Someone must have got the second sphere. Now we gotta be one of the seven to get out through the exit. Can you remember the way up?’

  Alby gulped. ‘I don’t know but I can try.’

  ‘Alby, there’s no other person in the world I’d rather follow through a maze,’ Jack said. ‘Lead the way.’

  Jack wasn’t the only champion to hear the cheers from the royal balcony. All the other champions had heard them and they also knew what they meant.

  The other champions had begun to converge on the uppermost level of the maze—some with their companions, some without—and one after the other, they climbed out through the exit hatch.

  Two levels below the escape level were Scarecrow and his team.

  ‘Pick it up, Marines,’ he said to Astro and Tomahawk. ‘Let’s get out of this deathtrap.’

  The three of them came to a void leading to the second-to-top level of the maze. Astro led the way, followed by Tomahawk, with Scarecrow bringing up the rear.

  ‘This level is clear,’ Astro said, peering forward, as Tomahawk reached back down to lift Scarecrow—

  —just as a huge fist seized Scarecrow’s left ankle and yanked him back down to the level below.

  Scarecrow landed on his back, hitting the ground hard, and looked up to see the flashing blades of one of the Hydra’s scourges rushing at his face.

  Scarecrow rolled. The blades slashed the stone beside his head, creating sparks. The other scourge came down. He rolled again and it missed again.

  From his position on the ground, Scarecrow unleashed a powerful upward kick at the Hydra’s groin.

  Whack!

  But the Hydra just stood there staring at him, unharmed. The codpiece on his armour was too strong.

  ‘Right . . .’ Scarecrow said.