The Five Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  “Or someone else did,” Stretch said. “So let me get our mission straight: before the last three Pillars are placed at their Vertices, they must be cleansed twice, in the Philosopher’s Stone and in the Basin ‘in the pure waters of the Spring of the Black Poplar’?”

  “Correct,” Lachlan said.

  “And we have the Basin,” Julius said, still scowling at his brother.

  “So all we need to do now is find this mysterious spring.” Stretch looked at the Twins. “And you think it’s up here?”

  “Not us,” Julius said, “Wizard. It was on his summary sheet all along. We just verified it through some of Isaac Newton’s writings.”

  At that moment, right on cue, the train burst out of the tunnel, revealing a dramatic landscape ahead of it: a long almost eerily flat lake, veiled in fog and flanked on both sides by mountains that plunged directly into it.

  It was perhaps the most famous lake in the world.

  Loch Ness.

  AFTER JACK had tasked the twins with finding the Spring of the Black Poplar, it had been Julius who had provided the breakthrough.

  His starting point had been the initial reference to the Spring, the inscription at Saggara:

  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 his bounties.

  While the others had been looking up references to black poplars in the historic and scientific literature, Julius had glanced at Wizard’s summary sheet for the millionth time and noticed something new:

  There it was, at the very bottom of the sheet.

  “The Ness Spring . . . ?” written in Wizard’s own hand, right under “Fabergé Egg—Newton’s alchemical work” and “Easter and the equinox??”

  Those references hadn’t meant anything till now—till they had been searching for a special spring.

  Cross-references were made.

  First the Twins deduced that black poplars grew only in northern latitude countries like Scotland. They also searched for any links between the only warrior of “The Five” who could realistically have had contact with Loch Ness—Napoleon—and found none.

  But they also looked up links to Isaac Newton and his alchemical work, since it appeared so close to “The Ness spring” on Wizard’s sheet, and it was Julius who found a reference to the Loch in one of Isaac Newton’s handwritten letters to Christopher Wren, helpfully scanned and archived on the Internet:

  “Dear Edmund has found an old well in those dreadful ruins of his at Loch Ness, with a strange black poplar growing through the stones—”

  Julius explained: “ ‘Dear Edmund’ is Sir Edmund Halley, Newton’s close friend and the famous astronomer after whom the comet is named. Halley was very wealthy and owned large estates across the UK, including one on the eastern shore of Loch Ness. It’s now public land.”

  And so they had jumped on the first train north, heading for the highlands of Scotland and the famous monster-infested lake.

  Located in the rugged north of Scotland, Loch Ness is a deep freshwater lake, superlong yet extremely thin. It is roughly 23 miles in length but barely a mile wide.

  Its western shore is serviced by the A82 road and so it is on that side, up near the north of the lake, that one finds the guesthouses and hotels for the tourists who come to see the monster.

  The eastern shore, however, is a different story.

  In an area already thinly populated, it is not serviced by any major road. And in the southern stretches, it is still in many ways an untouched highland wilderness—with forests that run all the way down to the Loch, the odd isolated farm, and rugged cliffs and hills. It is a harsh land and not many people go there.

  * * *

  Using records that dated from the 1680s, the team located the land that was once Edmund Halley’s Scottish estate and ventured there in a rented four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser.

  A thick fog lay over the Loch. Drizzle fell. A chill wind had everyone dressed in boots and high-collared parkas.

  For four days, the Twins, Pooh Bear, and Stretch searched on foot and in a motorized dinghy for signs of ruins or an ancient spring within the thick forest near the Loch’s edge.

  Julius sulked, still aggrieved by his brother’s revelation about scoring with Stacy Baker at Easter Island six years previously.

  Ignoring him, Lachlan said, “Most ruins in this area are actually built on older ruins—strategic locations didn’t really change much in the Middle Ages. What was a strategic spot for some ancient tribe was also strategic for Robert the Bruce. We’re looking for something older within an existing ruin.”

  He also explained that there were springs and holy wells all over the British Isles. Primitive tribes like the Celts had marveled at the mineral-rich water that rose from within the Earth and the curative properties they sometimes possessed. The Romans used them as baths, while monks in the Middle Ages built churches on top of them, like at St. Oswald’s in Cumbria.

  Pooh Bear said, “There are several revered springs in the deserts of Arabia, where we call them eins. My father once told me that aside from simply quenching one’s thirst in a desert, the mystique of a spring is related to the energy in the water that comes from under the ground: people die, they are buried, then their souls rise again within the waters of springs.”

  For four days they searched. In the evenings, seated in the boot of the Land Cruiser, the Twins would work away on their computers, trying to figure out their other task: the location of the Fourth Vertex. Working from their original photos of Stonehenge during the light show, it was somewhere in the British Isles.

  Then, late on the fourth day, as he sat in the dinghy with Lachlan, Pooh Bear saw something.

  “Hey!”

  They’d been cruising up a narrow inlet shrouded by moss-covered crags and thick overhanging trees when a small cave at its farthest extremity, veiled by vines, had caught his eye.

  Just inside the cave’s mouth, behind the veil of vines, Pooh Bear saw a low ankle-high wall constructed of square stone bricks. It was worn down by centuries of moisture, to the point where it was almost perfectly camouflaged against the natural walls of the cave.

  Barely a foot high, it was the remains of a very old man-made structure—a barrier, Pooh Bear thought as he stepped over it—but in a land of magnificent castle ruins and mythical monsters, this little cave had clearly been dismissed as small-time and ignored.

  A trickle of water ran out through a cleft in the little wall, coming from inside the cave itself, before dropping in a weak dribble into the black waters of the Loch.

  Venturing inside the cave, climbing steadily into darkness, Pooh Bear found the source of the trickle.

  A circular stone well, barely twelve inches in diameter, ringed by a man-made rim of ancient bricks, all covered in slimy green moss.

  Shining his flashlight onto the rim, Pooh Bear brushed away the moss—

  —and immediately saw a pattern carved into the stones.

  It was an image of a tree, with many flowing branches, branches that continued from brick to brick—or, as Newton had put it, “growing” through them.

  It was an image of a black tree.

  A poplar.

  POOH BEAR, Stretch, and the Twins gathered in the cave and stared at the little ancient well. The only sound was that of the soft trickle of springwater issuing from it.

  “From the humblest of origins come the mightiest of things,” Pooh Bear said softly.

  “That little trickle is going to save the planet?” Julius said.

  “It’s certainly not much to look at,” Lachlan said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, traitor—”

  “There’s writing cut into the brickwork, alongside the branches of the tree,” Stretch said, peering closely at the well with his flashlight. “Looks like it’s written in Thoth.”

  “We have to show this to Lily,�
�� Pooh Bear said. “Lachlan, can you get a shot of that?”

  Lachlan had been taking digital photos of the cave for their records. He took several close-ups of the well’s circular rim.

  Pooh Bear asked, “Can you see any symbols that refer to the Vertices, especially the Fourth one?”

  “I don’t see any,” Lachlan said as he took his shots.

  “Like you didn’t see my love for Stacy Baker,” Julius muttered.

  “So what do we do now?” Stretch asked.

  Pooh Bear shrugged. “We collect as much of the springwater as we can carry.”

  An hour later, they’d filled ten two-liter plastic bottles with springwater from the well, enough to fill the Basin many times over.

  “That should be enough,” Pooh Bear said.

  As they made to leave the cave, Julius ducked back to the well and filled his empty Gatorade bottle with the sacred water of the spring.

  “Julius!” Lachlan said, aghast.

  “Hey, it’s still water and I’m thirsty. Might also give me superhuman powers. And given your recent revelations, brother dearest, I’ll not be lectured by you on what is or is not decent!”

  “Come on, you two. Let’s go,” Stretch said.

  THAT NIGHT, they were once again on an express train, only this time they were heading south, back toward England, their ten bottles of the precious water stowed in large hikers’ backpacks.

  “Oh my God, I think I’ve got it . . .” Julius said from the fold-down desk of his first-class cabin.

  Stretch leaned in from the adjoining cabin. “Got what?”

  Julius looked up at him. “The location of the Fourth Vertex.”

  As the others gathered around him, Julius explained.

  “Here is our starting point, the light show at Stonehenge and the fourth pinprick of light up near the top of the stone, marked ‘4’:

  “As we know, the dots marked ‘1’ and ‘2’ represent the Vertices at Abu Simbel and Cape Town. ‘4’ is clearly somewhere in the British Isles, but the detail is poor. Using high magnification and digital image intensifiers, Lachlan and I were able to narrow it down to the west coast of England.

  “Now, the golden plaque from the First Vertex said that the Fourth Vertex was ‘The City of Waterfalls.’ At first I thought this could mean one of the many waterfalls in Wales. But then I thought: what if they’re ocean waterfalls. What if this Vertex is built underneath a small island somewhere off the west coast of England or Wales and water pours into it?”

  “But there must be hundreds of—” Stretch began.

  Julius smiled. “Yes, but sometimes what you’re looking for is not only right under your nose, you’ve actually seen it before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  With a flourish, Julius pulled out a sheet of paper: it was a map of the UK, over which someone had drawn a right-angled triangle.

  “This is a picture Lachlan drew for Lily last year, back when we went to Stonehenge to perform the light show. We were showing her the link between the Preseli Hills in Wales—where the bluestones for Stonehenge were mined—and Stonehenge itself and that if you extend the line connecting the Preseli Hills to Stonehenge, you end up at the Great Pyramid in Giza.

  “The thing is, we were so caught up in the link between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, we never noticed the third corner of the triangle, the right-angled corner. Look at its location: in an area full of water, it lands precisely on an island in the Bristol Channel. I looked it up. It’s Lundy Island. Although the ancient Welsh knew it by another name, Ynys Elen, ‘the Island of the Goddess of the Dying Sun.’ ”

  “The Dying Sun,” Stretch said. “How appropriate.”

  Julius said, “These days only thirty-odd people live there, but Lundy has a colorful history: it was once owned by the Knights Templar; 13th-century pirates used it as a base because it has very dangerous hidden shoals. And since it’s in the Bristol Channel, it’s subject to the Channel’s huge ten-meter tides, the second largest in the world.

  “According to local fishermen, when the tide is low, some reefs and rocks on the western coast of Lundy Island are revealed. One such rock formation is known as ‘The Well’ because the weathered rocks resemble the shape of a brick well.”

  “So?” Stretch frowned.

  Julius smiled, and turned his laptop around: on it was the jpeg of Genghis Khan’s shield:

  “Look at the picture at the top right-hand corner,” Julius said. “It shows the entrance to the Fourth Vertex, and it looks to me a lot like a well. Gentlemen, I propose to you that Lundy Island is the location of the Fourth Vertex.”

  As Julius spoke, Pooh Bear stared out the window of the speeding train, only half paying attention.

  He was on edge. Something didn’t feel right. It was as if things were going too well lately.

  His eyes followed two pairs of blinking red lights hovering in the nighttime sky to the east, moving parallel to their train and moving fast.

  They looked like aircraft lights, but they were flying too low to be planes.

  The train had emerged from the northern highlands and was now racing through the rolling fields of the lowlands. It was nearing midnight when it zoomed out onto a long high bridge over a particularly wide valley gorge.

  The cluster of blinking red lights kept following.

  “Pooh Bear, relax.” Lachlan grinned, sitting beside him. “For the first time in our lives we’ve found something first and made a clean getaway. Quite a rarity, really. And much more pleasant than the usual running, shooting and screaming.”

  “Don’t speak too—” Pooh Bear said.

  At that moment, a soft droning alarm began to sound and the train’s brakes started squealing.

  They were slowing down, out in the middle of the long high bridge.

  Pooh Bear gazed out at the blinking red lights, and as they came closer, he swore.

  They were helicopters, military helicopters, four of them: AW-101 Merlins capable of holding thirty Royal Marines each.

  Two of the massive choppers fell into identical hovers on either side of the stopped train. They switched on their spotlights, illuminating the stationary train in blinding white light.

  The other two hovered just out of Pooh’s sight directly over the train—but from the muffled thumps coming from above him, Pooh knew they were unloading Royal Marines onto the roof of the train.

  Pooh Bear shook his head. “Our getaway wasn’t clean at all. They’ve been following us all along.”

  AS A pleasant Scottish voice asked all passengers on the train to evacuate to the rear in a calm and orderly manner, black-clad Royal Marines brandishing MP-5SNs secured the first-class carriage, zeroing in on the team’s two cabins.

  Pooh Bear turned to Julius: “Do you have anything in writing that mentions the location of the Fourth Vertex on Lundy Island?”

  Julius said, “No, it’s just a conclusion I drew from various stuff, pictures, research. It’s not written down anywhere—”

  “Good, because in about fifteen seconds we’re going to have a bunch of men with guns in here and the only thing that will keep us alive is the location of that Vertex—”

  “Freeze! Hands where we can see them!”

  Six Royal Marines appeared in the doorway, guns up. As one, the team all raised their hands.

  A moment later, gliding casually into the cabin, sliding past the armed Royal Marines, came a smiling female figure.

  Iolanthe Compton-Jones.

  “Hello, boys,” she said lightly. “From the British Museum to the wilds of Loch Ness. My, you have been busy.”

  “We have the Basin, the springwater, and we know the location of the Fourth Vertex,” Pooh Bear said.

  Iolanthe’s eyes narrowed. “How clever of you, Sergeant Abbas. I can take the Basin from you, and I might even already have my own supply of the sacred springwater, but I imagine getting the location of the Vertex out of you won’t be quite as easy.” She shrugged. “All in good time. In any c
ase, I’m not here to take anything from you just yet, or even kill you for that matter.”

  With a loud thunk, she placed a reinforced military-spec communications laptop onto the cabin’s foldout desk. The markings on it, curiously, were in Cyrillic text.

  It was Russian-made . . .

  “No,” Iolanthe said, “I’m here tonight as a messenger, because someone wants to talk to you.”

  SOMEWHERE IN FAR EASTERN RUSSIA

  MARCH 16, 2008

  2 DAYS BEFORE THE 4TH AND 5TH DEADLINES

  A BUCKETLOAD OF icy water splashed onto Jack’s face, waking him with a start.

  He sat up. He was in a dank cell with sickly white ceramic walls and a drainage grate in the floor.

  Not a good sign: the Soviets had built cells this way because it made cleaning them easier. You just hosed the blood off the ceramic walls and it drained away through the grate.

  “Get up!” the Spetsnaz soldier holding the bucket barked. “The commander desires a word with you.”

  “Where are my friends?”

  “Move!”

  His hands cuffed, Jack was escorted from the cell up through a labyrinth of concrete stairways and tunnels. Their common feature: pipes, dozens of them, lined the ceiling of every passageway.

  At one point, he crossed an enormous concrete hall via an elevated steel catwalk. The wide gray hall was lined with sixteen huge turbines fed by pipes as big as buses. It looked like the inside of a—

  Another windowless concrete stairwell led up for many stories until Jack came to a door, which the Spetsnaz guard flung open.

  Blinding winter sunshine assaulted Jack’s eyes as he emerged to find himself standing atop a colossal mountain dam, nestled between two snow-covered peaks. On one side, the dam held back a modest lake; on the other it plummeted for five hundred feet all the way down to a rocky gorge. The landscape around it was bleak and bare. Wind whistled. He was in the middle of the middle of nowhere.

  The guard shoved Jack along the top of the dam, around its long sweeping curve. They were heading, Jack saw, for a dome-shaped building that overlooked the dam, sitting proudly on one of the mountain peaks that bookended the immense concrete barrier.