The Five Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  “And?”

  “It’s very dense and complicated, and a lot of the time it just doesn’t make sense at all. Call me crazy, but sometimes I felt Newton was using the term ‘alchemy’ as a code word for something else.”

  Wizard said, “Isaac Newton was notoriously secretive, and even in his time, alchemy was a debunked notion. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Newton’s ‘alchemy’ was actually a cipher for some other kind of transformation.”

  “Does any of his work refer to the Dark Sun?” Jack asked.

  “Not that I’ve found,” Stretch said. “No direct references, anyway.”

  Jack said, “So is he relevant?”

  Wizard answered for Stretch: “Oh, most assuredly. Even today, Sir Isaac Newton remains one of the world’s greatest experts on planetary motion. He was, after all, the first person to accurately predict the Titanic Rising. Given Newton’s proclivities toward the esoteric and the vast amount of work that he didn’t publish, it’s possible he discovered the Dark Sun and kept it to himself. We ignore Newton at our peril.”

  It went on the whiteboard.

  One quiet afternoon, Jack took Wizard into an office to chat privately. He wanted to discuss something that had been troubling him.

  “Max, the reward for laying the First Pillar, knowledge, was highly advanced knowledge. The second reward, heat, was the secret of perpetual motion. Do you have any idea what the last four rewards are?”

  Wizard shrugged. “Guesses mostly. Information on the nature of the rewards is fragmentary at best. Take the third reward: sight. Is it seeing the future? The past? Or the ability to see into the hearts of men? I once read about an Egyptian blood ritual in which a priest slashed his own palm and gripped a sacred gem in his bloody hand—it was said that he would then see visions.

  “Why, our Chinese philosopher friend, Laozi, once postulated that the greatest thing of all to see would be the time of one’s own death, so one could be prepared for it. Considering Laozi’s connection with our quest, this might be an allusion to the reward known as sight.”

  “What about the others?” Jack read from Wizard’s summary sheet: “Life, death, and power?”

  Wizard said, “Remember what Stretch said about Isaac Newton the other day? That he might have used the word ‘alchemy’ as a code for something other than the transformation of lead into gold? I’ve often wondered if Newton’s alchemical quest was actually an attempt to transform the ordinary human life span into a longer one.”

  “You think the reward, life, is long life . . .”

  “I like Newton’s metaphor,” Wizard said. “That our ordinary life span is lead, while an extended one would be golden.”

  “What about the fifth reward then, death?”

  “Piecing together some Egyptian references—the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead—my guess is this reward is a weapon of some kind. The ability to deal out death to one’s enemies.”

  Jack thought for a moment. “Is it possible that the two rewards life and death are somehow connected? Death might be some kind of power to kill, but life might be an antidote to death? After all, those two Pillars are the only two that have to be laid at the same time.”

  “Mmmm, I hadn’t thought of that,” Wizard mused. “There could definitely be something in that.”

  “And what about the last reward?” Jack asked. “Power?”

  Wizard spread his hands wide. “It’s the reward of rewards: absolute Earthly power to the one who repels the Dark Star. But what form that power takes, no one knows—”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Zoe poked her head in. “Hey. Lily just called from Australia. She says she’s got something big to report.”

  THE GROUP gathered in the meeting room, facing a projector screen and the whiteboard.

  Wizard stood at the front of the room. Lily’s face was on a computer monitor, coming in via videolink from Perth.

  Wizard projected a digital photo onto the screen. It depicted the golden plaque he and Zoe had photographed at the First Vertex at Abu Simbel, the one containing the descriptions of all six of the Vertices:

  “So what’s up?” Zoe asked.

  Lily said, “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Look closely at the left-hand side of this plaque and you will see the Thoth numerals for each Vertex listed as horizontal lines. Underneath each Thoth numeral, however, you will see a V-shaped marking. This is the Thoth symbol for cleansing.”

  Zoe shrugged. “Sure. The cleansing of each Pillar by the Philosopher’s Stone.”

  “Partly,” Lily said. “Look more closely. The numerals for the last three Vertices have two Vs underneath them.”

  “Oh yeah . . .” Lachlan said.

  “Huh . . .” Julius said, seeing it for the first time.

  Jack frowned. “What does that mean? Some sort of double cleansing?”

  “Yes,” Lily said.

  Wizard said, “I’ve just been checking my database for references to a second form of cleansing. It seems that because it’ll be a lot closer to Earth in late March and thus emitting more power, the Machine requires an extra form of cleansing for the last three Pillars. The key source I’ve found is this.”

  He projected another image onto the screen, one of an ancient Egyptian wall, filled with hieroglyphs.

  “This is from a chamber at Saqqara south of Giza,” Wizard said. “The hieroglyphs read:

  Cleanse the last three also in my basin,

  In the pure waters of the Spring of the Black Poplar.

  Do this and Ra’s Twin will be satisfied and

  Upon you he will confer their bounties.

  “Their bounties?” Stretch said. “The last three rewards?”

  “That’s right,” Wizard said.

  “So to stop the Dark Sun at the last three Vertices,” Jack said, “we need to cleanse the last three Pillars not only in the Philosopher’s Stone, but also in the waters of this ‘Spring of the Black Poplar’ . . .”

  “. . . and this must be done ‘in my basin,’ in Rameses II’s basin, the last of the Six Sacred Stones,” Wizard said.

  “And the only one we’ve been completely unable to locate,” Jack said. “This is going to be a problem. Lily, Alby, Wizard: I want you guys to stick solely with this from now on. Find out what happened to that basin and figure out where this poplar spring is.”

  THE RESEARCH continued.

  In between group meetings and reading sessions, Jack and the other soldiers in the team would go outside to exercise or maintain their weapons skills.

  Jack and Zoe would go for morning runs along the remote coast. Pooh Bear created a man-sized mannequin out of sandbags into which he threw knives and Stretch, now almost back to full fitness, fired long-distance sniper rounds.

  One day, at Lily’s urging on the videophone, he drew a smiling, bespectacled face on it. Lily then christened the mannequin “George.” After that, when anyone went out to train, they’d leave with the words: “I’m just going outside to kill George a few times.” When the battered mannequin was brought back in—leaking sand, sometimes decapitated, usually missing a limb—someone would invariably say, “Poor George.”

  The research went on.

  More links between the great warriors were discovered and the whiteboard filled up. But it soon became apparent that some of the most startling—and most important—connections revolved around one particular warrior.

  Jesus the Nazarene.

  “No single individual has had a greater impact on the world than Jesus Christ.” Lachlan was giving the group a presentation with his brother, Julius. (As they often did, today the twins were wearing competing T-shirts—Lachlan’s read STEWIE GRIFFIN FOR PRESIDENT while Julius’s countered STEWIE GRIFFIN IS AN EVIL GENIUS.)

  “We’ll leave for another time the question as to whether Jesus was the son of a divine being,” Lachan said. “What all agree on, believers and atheists alike, is that Jesus was a man who lived in the Judea region about two thousand
years ago.

  “His teachings are promulgated by the organization we know as the Catholic Church, but questions remain as to whether this organization is really just a revived version of an Egyptian sun cult—”

  “We’ve had dealings with them on this issue,” Jack said.

  “—yes, but are you aware of the critical importance to the Church of Easter this year, in 2008? Wizard even mentions this at the bottom of his summary sheet.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Well, as you’re probably aware, the date for Easter changes every year, but do you know how the date for Easter is calculated?”

  “How?” Pooh Bear asked.

  Julius said, “It was originally calculated this way: Easter Sunday shall fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the northern vernal equinox.”

  “The Sunday after the first full moon of spring,” Lachlan simplified.

  “Sun cult,” Stretch said.

  Lachlan said, “But this year, in 2008, something very special happens. This year, Easter falls right on the equinox. Our day of reckoning is March 20, and this year, March 20 is Holy Thursday, the beginning of the Easter celebration that commemorates Jesus’ death.”

  “The sun at equinox and the return of the Dark Star,” Jack said. “It’s a religious perfect storm.”

  “Too right. For the Catholic Church, March 20, 2008, is the ultimate holy date,” Lachlan said, “when everything they believe in comes together.”

  “You think they’re still in this game?”

  “The Church might have gone silent since your battle with its agents at the Great Pyramid, but it would be dangerous to mistake silence for inactivity. I’d proceed on the assumption they will be observing our mission very closely come the 20th of March.”

  “Getting back to Jesus himself,” Julius went on. “As most of you will know, he was called the ‘Messiah,’ a moniker that has acquired religious meaning over the years but which actually is a term connected with lineage.

  “Much has been made of Jesus’ paternal ancestry, his father, Joseph, being from the royal line of David. On his father’s side, Jesus was from very wealthy stock. He wasn’t a poor carpenter. Indeed, nowhere in the Bible is it said that Jesus ever actually worked at all.”

  Lachlan took over: “But on his mother’s side, the story becomes even more interesting. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was from the line of Aaron, another royal line. Who was Aaron, you ask?”

  Lachlan grinned. “Aaron was Moses’s brother. Jesus, our Second Warrior, was a very, very distant descendant of the family of Moses, our First Warrior.”

  Julius said, “Jesus was thus monumentally important even before he said a word. He was the living breathing union of two powerful royal lines: the lines of David and Aaron. The linking of these two great lines had even been prophesied and the one who joined them would be known as the Messiah.”

  “It makes sense, then, that sacred family heirlooms—such as the ‘treasure’ that Moses spirited out of Egypt—would have been passed down through the generations until it came to Jesus. What Jesus did with that treasure is then the big question.”

  “According to one of Dr. Cassidy’s poems,” Julius went on, “the Second Great Warrior—Jesus—would ‘break the treasure in two and leave his mark on the world forever.’

  “Well, we know Jesus left his mark on the world. ‘To break the treasure in two,’ we take that to mean dividing the Six Pillars into two sets of three.”

  “Now, after a lot of research and a little bit of gap-filling, Lachie and I have come up with the following diagram which summarizes our best guesses as the whereabouts of the Six Pillars:

  Julius said, “It looks complicated, so allow us to explain. First, we need to work backward from what we know now: that the Saudis had the First Pillar, the Neetha had the Second, and the Brits have the Fourth. They’re marked I, II, and IV on the diagram.”

  “So knowing those end points, let’s go back to Jesus,” Lachlan said. “How does he split the six Pillars in two? Well, they are valuable heirlooms, so he probably wanted to keep them within his family. So again, working with what we know now, we think that Jesus kept three Pillars within his own immediate family, the now-famous family born of himself and Mary Magdalene that popped up in France soon after Jesus’ crucifixion. It is this holy-royal lineage, the Deus Rex, that certain European royal families claim as their birthright.

  “And the British Royal Family, as we know, has one such Pillar in their possession, the Fourth. We believe that another Pillar, thanks to centuries of royal intermarriage and warfare, has been held equally between the Danish Royal Family and the Romanov descendants of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II.”

  Jack said, “You said Jesus kept three Pillars? That’s only two. What do you think happened to the third one?”

  Lachlan glanced at Julius.

  Julius glanced at Lachlan.

  Then they both shrugged.

  Lachlan said, “We have no reason to believe the third Pillar traveled out of Judea after Jesus’ crucifixion. While historians are sure that Mary Magdalene went to France, no one is certain that Jesus left Judea at all. We think he stayed and he kept his Pillar with him.”

  “What?” Wizard exclaimed.

  “So what happened to it, then?” Zoe asked ominously, considering the implications.

  “Well”—Lachlan hesitated—“we think Jesus had it buried with him.”

  “You’re saying that we have to find the tomb of Jesus Christ . . . !” Zoe said in disbelief.

  “More or less,” Julius said apologetically.

  Lachlan said, “Whether or not he rose from the dead, no one’s ever actually found the tomb where he was laid to rest, either in Jerusalem or elsewhere.”

  “So how do we go about finding it?” Zoe asked.

  Lachlan said, “We’ve only found one ancient document concerning Jesus that mentions both a resting place and his ‘wisdom’: a letter in Aramaic discovered in a church in southern France, purported to be from Jesus’ brother James to Mary Magdalene. It’s pretty vague but it translates as follows:

  “He lies in peace,

  In a place where even the mighty Romans fear to tread.

  In a kingdom of white

  He does not grow old.

  His wisdom lies with him still,

  Protected by a twin who meets all thieves first.”

  “No names, no locations,” Zoe said. “Typical.”

  “But a clear reference to ‘his wisdom,’ ” Diane observed.

  Zoe sighed. “That letter could have been written by anybody—”

  “What about the other three Pillars Jesus possessed?” Jack said gently, moving on. “Where did they go?”

  Lachlan nodded. “Right, right. In the Gospel of Peter, there is mention of Jesus giving ‘three pieces of wisdom’ to James shortly before he himself was detained in the Garden of Gethsemane. We’ve interpreted this as a reference to three remaining Pillars. Remember, family heirlooms, and James was an heir as well. Jesus also trusted James greatly.”

  “Again, working backward from what we know—that the Knights Templar ransacked the Temple and stole a Pillar which ended up with the Neetha—we can postulate that it was probably James who hid that Pillar in the Temple,” Julius said. “As a member of the Line of David, he had privileged access to the inner sanctum of the Temple.”

  Lachlan said, “As for the other two Pillars, James ended his days at the Fortress of Van, a great hilltop city in modern-day Turkey, situated between the Black and Caspian Seas. The route he took to get there is given in great detail, town by town, in the same Gospel of Peter.”

  Lachlan opened a nearby book to a photo of an ancient parchment, on which was a long, handwritten list:

  Jerusalem

  Dibon

  Ephraim

  Medeba

  Jericho

  Rabbath

  Gilgal

  Ammon

  Masada

  Damasc
us

  Ein Gedi

  Aleppo

  Ein Bokek

  Diyar Bakir

  Mountain of

  Ezurum

  Sodom

  Mountain of

  Ein Aradhim

  Ararat

  Kir Moab

  Yerevan

  Aroer

  Van

  Julius said, “James went to Van and a thousand years later, guess who sacked Van with his armies? Genghis Khan. Another link between the Five Warriors.”

  “Interesting,” Jack said. “Did Genghis attack Van just to get the Pillars?”

  “That’s not known, but it is possible. Either way, Genghis got his hands on the two Pillars kept at Van and one of those Pillars—the First—ended up with the Saudi Royal Family.

  “How it got to them is unknown, but we do know that, as thanks for helping his army approach the Kwarezmi Empire in secret from the west, it’s recorded that Genghis gave a Bedouin chief a ‘bricklike stone of tremendous beauty the likes of which none had ever seen.’ Hundreds of years later, that Bedouin tribe became the House of Saud.”

  “And the last Pillar?” Jack asked. “Genghis’s other Pillar?”

  Julius flashed a thirteenth-century portrait of Genghis Khan onto the projector screen.

  A stern-looking Mongolian with a long gray beard glared out from the screen. He was dressed in leather-and-bronze armor, a sturdy helmet, and he held in one hand a pentagonal shield, covered in studs and raised images. Even in painted form, the man’s eyes cast a spell. They blazed with authority.

  “ ‘Attack with aggression, but always have a plan of retreat,’ ” Julius said. “Genghis Khan’s famous military axiom, and also the central thesis of countless business self-help books in the 1980s.”

  Lachlan said, “Did you know that Genghis conquered all of China and half of Europe?”

  “More or less,” Jack said.

  “But he never conquered Japan,” Lachlan said, “and it was a lot closer than Europe. Ever wondered why?”