Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  Moments later, three of Astro’s yellowstriped grenades came bouncing down the hallway and entered the midst of Mao’s Chinese force gathered at its base, at the edge of the abrupt vertical drop there.

  Flash—bang!

  Hissing gas and dense smoke engulfed the dozen or so Chinese troops. They instantly began coughing and gagging, their eyes watering uncontrollably.

  Through this hazy gasfilled environment, three figures moved like ghosts.

  Wearing fullface oxygen masks and moving quickly, Jack, Astro, and Wizard slipped between the screaming Chinese as they fell to the floor, losing consciousness—although Jack did take the opportunity to give Colonel Mao a sharp blow with the butt of his Desert Eagle on the way past, breaking the Chinese commander’s nose and dropping him.

  Then he came to the spot where the hallway’s floor just fell away into nothingness.

  “Mother of God…” he breathed.

  Mao and his men had set up a diesel generator and some arc lights to illuminate the area, and now, in the haze of the gas, the vast space that opened up before Jack took on a mystical, almost otherworldly appearance.

  A vast chasm dropped away in front of him—perhaps thirty yards across and of unknown depth. On its far side was a sheer polished stone wall. This wall was literally covered in round holes, hundreds of them laid out in a grid, each about the size of a human hand.

  And in the exact center of the wall was a small square tunnel, heading deeper into the mountain

  .

  Standing on the edge of the chasm, Jack kicked a dropped Chinese gun over the edge.

  It sailed down into the darkness.

  Silence as it fell.

  Long silence.

  Then, finally, a distantclunksplonk.

  “Whoa…” West whispered.

  “Jack!”a voice called both in his earpiece and from somewhere nearby.“Down here!”

  West looked down, and saw Stretch and Scimitar poking their heads out from an identical ledge sixty feetbelow his.

  The only walkways connecting their tunnels to the magnificent dotted wall were a pair of narrow ledges—one for each hallway: West’s higher one ran along the shortleft hand connecting wall; Stretch’s lower one ran along theright side one.

  Along each narrow ledge were more of the handsized holes—handholds, Jack guessed, but lethal ones. Each hole, he noticed, every single one, had a small carved Chinese symbol above it.

  “Classic Chinese tomb trap,” Wizard said. “The easy way to spot a grave robber in ancient China was to spot the guy with the missing hand. Those are handchopping holes.

  Some have grips inside them, to help you climb. All the others have springloaded scissor blades. If you know which ones are safe, you get across. If you don’t, you lose a hand and in all likelihood fall to your death.”

  “What’s the clue?” West said.

  “It’s here.” Wizard went to a panel on the wall, on which was written:

  “‘The greatest treasure,’” Wizard translated. “What, according to Laozi, was the greatest treasure?” he asked aloud. “Ah…”

  He recalled the old philosopher’s axiom in his mind:

  Health is the greatest possession,

  Contentment the greatest treasure,

  Confidence the greatest friend,

  Nonbeing the greatest joy.

  “It’s contentment,” he said to Jack.

  Sure enough, one of the handholes on the lefthand ledge bore the symbol for contentment——above it. So did the third one, and the fifth, and several more.

  “Go!” Wizard said. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Wasting no time and trusting his friend, Jack plunged his hand into the first hole…

  …and found a handgrip.

  Then he was off, out along the ledge, above the bottomless black of the subterranean chasm.

  Stretch called in: “We got an inscription, too:‘The noblest path to wisdom.’”

  Following close behind Jack, Wizard said, “That’s an easy one. Look for the Chinese symbol for ‘reflection.’ It’s a Confucian saying: ‘There are three paths to wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.’”

  After Wizard described it, Stretch said,“Got it. It’s above every second or third handhole.”

  “Use only those holes, Stretch,” Jack said. “If you use any of the others, you’ll lose a hand. See you on the other side.”

  At length, Jack came to the great pockmarked wall itself, and saw that again every single hole had a symbol carved above it.

  It made for a bamboozling sight, and to the uninitiated, it would have seemed totally incomprehensible.

  But following the holes that bore the symbol for “contentment,” he found a continuing path that ended at the square hole in the center of the polished wall.

  Freeclimbing across the sheer slippery wall, high above the deep black chasm below it, he traced a winding path from the left, while Stretch and Scimitar followed a similar trail from their ledge on the lower right:

  And all the while, Mao and his crew lay on the floor of the hallway, a few of them groaning weakly on the edge of consciousness.

  Jack, Wizard, and Astro came to the square hole, where they were soon joined by Stretch and Scimitar.

  “Looks like we go together from here,” Jack said.

  He cracked a glowstick and tossed it into the dark hole, revealing another ultralong tunnel, squareshaped this time, big enough to crawl through and stretching away into distant darkness.

  “What choice do we have?” he said to no one.

  And so he hoisted himself up and climbed into the square hole and guided by his helmet flashlight and another glowstick, disappeared into the passage.

  THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER

  THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER

  AFTER CRAWLING for about 600 feet, Jack emerged in a dark chamber of some kind, where he could stand easily. He removed his breathing mask.

  For some reason, however, his flashlight couldn’t penetrate the darkness around him. He could see a lake of some kind immediately in front of him, but no walls. Only black, infinite black. It must have been a large space.

  He cracked a glowstick, but it revealed little more.

  So he fired his flare gun…

  …and beheld the space in which he stood.

  “Hooah…” he breathed.

  In his time, Jack West Jr. had seen some big caverns, including one in the southeastern mountains of Iraq that had housed the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  But even that cavern paled in comparison to this one.

  It took seven more flares to light it fully.

  The cavern that West saw wasimmense —utterly immense; roughly circular in shape and at least five hundred yards in diameter.

  It was also a masterpiece of structural engineering: it was a natural cave, sure, but one that had been shaped by the work of men—tens of thousands of men, Jack guessed—to be even more impressive than Nature had originally made it.

  Eight towering pillars of stone held up the cavern’s soaring ceiling. They had clearly once been limestone stalactites that, over thousands of years, had eventually met their matching stalagmites on the floor of the cavern, forming into thick roofsupporting columns. But somewhere in history, a Chinese workarmy had shaped them into beautifully decorated columns, complete with faux guard balconies.

  But it was the column in the very center of the cavern that dominated the scene.

  Thicker than the others and entirely manmade, it looked like a glorious tower, a great twentystory fortified tower, reaching all the way to the cavern’s superhigh ceiling, where it joined with it.

  It was easily the most intricately decorated of all the columns: it bore many balconies, doorways, archer slits, and at its base, four sets of rising stone stairs leading to four separate stone doorways.

  Surrounding the tower and each of the other columns was a wide perfectly stil
l lake of a dark oillike liquid that was certainly not water. It glinted dully in the light of West’s flares. Stretching across it from West’s position all the way to the tower in the middle of the cavern was a long series of sevenfoothigh steppingstones—a bridge of sorts, but one that no doubt possessed its own nasty surprises.

  “Liquid mercury,” Astro said, raising his gas mask to briefly sniff the lake’s fumes. “You can tell by the odor. Highly toxic. Clogs your pores, poisons you right through the skin.

  Don’t fall in.”

  As he rejoined West and the others, Wizard recited:

  “In the highest room of the highest tower,

  In the lowest part of the lowest cave,

  There you will find me.

  “From Confucius,” he said. “Third book of eternal maxims. I never really understood it till now.”

  Near their position, a redandblack castiron archway spanned the first steppingstone.

  Carved into it was a message in ancient Chinese script:

  A journey of a thousand miles

  Begins with a single step.

  So too this final challenge

  Begins, and ends, with a single step.

  Wizard nodded. “Appropriate. ‘Every journey begins with a single step’ is a quote attributed to both Laoziand Confucius. Historians are unsure which of them came up with it. So here, where their two paths join to become one, there is just one quote.”

  “So what’s the catch?” Scimitar asked.

  West eyed the steppingstones, the tower, and the great cavern, the intent of it all becoming clear.

  “It’s a timeandspeed trap,” he said softly.

  “Oh, God, you’re right,” Wizard said.

  Astro frowned. “A what? What’s a timeandspeed trap?”

  “A big one,” Wizard said.

  “That usually begins with a single step,” West added. “Your first step sets off the trap.

  Then you have to get in and out before the trap completes its sequence. You need accuracyand speed to get through it. I imagine that as soon as one of us steps on the first steppingstone, the sequence is set off.” He turned to Wizard. “Max?”

  Wizard thought for a moment. “‘In the highest room of the highest tower in the lowest part of the lowest cave.’ I imagine it’s up there, in the highest room of that tower. I think we need your skill and speed from here, Jack.”

  “That’s what I figured,” West said wryly.

  He removed his heavy garments, until all he wore was his Tshirt, cargo pants, boots, and the lower half of his gas mask, leaving his eyes clear. His metal left arm glinted in the dull light. He put his fireman’s helmet back on his head and gripped a climbing rope in one hand. He also kept his gun belt with its twin holsters on.

  “He’s going alone?” Scimitar asked, surprised, and perhaps a little suspiciously.

  “For this test, the most important thing is speed,” Wizard said, “and in places like this, there’s no man in the world faster than Jack. From here, he must go alone. He’s the only one who can.”

  “Yeah, right,” West said. “Stretch, if it looks like I’m in trouble, backup would be appreciated.”

  “You got it, Huntsman.”

  Then Jack turned to face the long line of steppingstones stretching out toward the colossal tower.

  He took a deep breath.

  Then he ran, out onto the first steppingstone.

  THE RUN

  NO SOONER had his foot hit the first steppingstone than things began moving all around the immense cavern.

  First, a line of stalactites in the ceiling of the cavern—each the size of a man—began dropping from their places, raining down on the steppingstones, inches behind the running figure of Jack West.

  Jack bolted, arms and legs pumping, moving rapidly across the high stones, seven feet above the mercury lake asboom!boom!boom! the pointed missiles rained down behind him, some hitting the raised steppingstones, others splashing into the lake around him.

  But he outran the rain of sharpened stones.

  The flurry of stalactites was also highly distracting, designed to force an error from the intruder, but Jack kept concentrating as he ran, holding his nerve for the two hundred yard dash.

  He hit the stairs at the base of the tower at a sprint, clambered up them two at a time, came to a high arched doorway…just as a miniwaterfall of ambercolored acid came splashing down across its threshold.

  Jack dived under it, somersaulting into the tower a split second ahead of the skinsearing acid.

  He turned to look behind him—and saw the long line of high stepping stones all slowly begin to lower into the lake!

  “Oh that’s just nasty…”

  At their rate of descent, he reckoned he had about four minutes till they were completely submerged under the mercury lake, cutting off his only means of escape.

  “Jack…!” Wizard called urgently.

  “I see them!”

  He looked upward and, by the light of his helmet flashlight, saw that the tower was completely hollow: a soaring cylindrical well shaft rising ominously into darkness above him, with ladderlike hand—and footholds cut into one side.

  Breathing hard, he climbed the ladderholds, noticing some small mansized recesses along the way. Curiously, carved above each recess was the Chinese symbol for “sanctuary.”

  A groaning noise made him look up.

  The distinctive grinding sound of rolling rock, then a faintwhistling…

  Jack swung into the nearest recess just as—whoosh—a twoton boulder came plummeting down the hollow shaft, filling it completely from wall to wall, whipping by Jack in his tiny recess, missing his nose by inches.

  Once it was past him, Jack resumed climbing, and on two more occasions he dived into other “sanctuary” recesses just before more boulders rained past him, preceded only by the telltale groaning.

  “Why do these guys have to be so protective of their treasures…” he muttered.

  But then, after a minute of climbing, he came to the top of the tower, to the point where it merged with the ceiling of the supercavern, and found himself entering a space just above the cavern’s roof.

  He rose up into a beautiful square chamber, not unlike the entry chamber back near the surface.

  Intricately carved reliefs lined the walls: carvings of the Mystery of the Circles and the symbol that represented the Machine, and against one wall, above a low darkened alcove: an image of the Philosopher’s Stone.

  There were other carvings, including one of four throned kings sitting shoulder to shoulder and flanked by five standing warriors, but Jack ignored them.

  He crossed to the alcove and beheld within it a small stone altar on which stood one of the most beautiful, most exquisite, most magnificent artifacts he had ever seen in his life.

  The Philosopher’s Stone.

  It wasn’t very big, but the simple purity of its design commanded respect.

  Its sides were perfectly lacquered in the ancient Chinese way—the shiny black flanks were of a deep, deep black and were lined with red. Flecks of gold peppered the red lining.

  Made of two pieces, the Stone’s body section was trapezoidal in shape, with a rectangular void cut into the top surface. Its second piece, the lid, was smaller, a perfectly smooth square block, and—Jack noticed—exactly the same size as the base of the Firestone.

  Peering into the alcove, Jack saw that its roof was hollow, like a chimney above a fireplace, so with a quick lunge, he reached in and snatched Laozi’s Stone and dived out of the alcove—

  —a bare second before the alcove—but not the Stone’s altar—was drenched in a waterfall of pouring sulfuric acid that drained away through a grate in its floor.

  Jack hurried away from the alcove, stuffing the venerable Stone into his rucksack, and began his breakneck return journey.

  Down the hollow core of the tower, ducking into its recesses as more boulders rained down—more now than before; it was as if the trap system knew the Stone
had been taken and was doing everything it could to stop the fleeing thief.

  Jack clambered down the handholds in the wall, came to the bottom just as another boulder came shooting down the shaft.

  He jumped into the main doorway, whose acid curtain had stopped by now, where he briefly glimpsed the lowering steppingstones leading back across the lake, when suddenly the boulder came whistling past, clipping his shoulder, causing him to lose his balance and to his horror, he fell, snatching desperately for a handhold but finding none, and so Jack dropped, into the darkness of the well shaft at the base of the tower—

  ONLY FOR a hand to snatch his wrist and clamp tightly around it.

  Hanging from the hand, West looked up to see Stretch’s sweatstreaked face.

  “Your backup has arrived, Captain West,” Stretch said grimly. “Come on. One more sprint to go.”

  They emerged from the tower to see the steppingstones now only one foot above the surface of the mercury lake and lowering fast.

  “Go!” Stretch yelled.

  They raced out across the mercury lake, moving step for step, almost perfectly in time, springing from stone to stone, all while the stones kept lowering.

  With ten yards to go, the stones hit the waterline and Stretch called, “Keep going! Suck it in, Jack! Suck it in!”

  Jack was almost out on his feet, exhausted, his heart pounding loudly inside his head, lactic bile rising in his throat, breathing through his half mask in deep rasping heaves.

  Then his feet splashed in mercury and, with a terrible sense of helplessness, he felt himself begin to stumble and knew there was nothing he could do about it—he was going to fall facefirst into this mercury lake, three steps short of safety!