Six Sacred Stones
Page 35
When he was done flipping pages in the novels, he was left with:
MISSION TO JUNGLE A DISASTER.
WOLF CAUGHT UP WITH US AND NOW HAS BOTH PILLARS, PHILOSOPHER’S
STONE AND FIRESTONE. RON TAKEN PRISONER. KINGSLEY SHACKLEBOLT
DEAD.
REST OF US SAFE ON THE HIPPOGRIFF NOW, BUT SOUTH AFRICA CLOSED
TO ALL AIR TRAFFIC.
OUT OF OPTIONS AND JUST HOPING YOU’RE ALIVE.
PLEASE REPLY.
Jack reeled at the message.
His worst fears had come true.
Wolf had the Second Pillar. That Wolf might lay the Pillar at the Vertex was disturbing but not disastrous: Jack only wanted to save the world from destruction, and so long assomeone set the Second Pillar in place today, the world would be OK for another three months until the next set of four vertices required attending.
But as Jack now knew, Wolf had the suicidal Switchblade in his team.
“Oh, this is bad,” Jack said aloud. “This is very, very bad.”
He stared at the line KINGSLEY SHACKLEBOLT DEAD and sighed. Kingsley Shacklebolt was a tall black wizard from the fifth Harry Potter book and hence their code name for Solomon Kol.
So Solomon had been killed.Damn.
But worse still was the previous line: RON TAKEN PRISONER. Of course “Ron” was code for Alby—for just as Ron was Harry Potter’s best friend, so Alby was Lily’s.
Wolf had Alby.
Jack rarely swore wholeheartedly but he did so now. “Fuck.”
Consulting hisHarry Potter books, he quickly typed out a reply, then clicked “POST.”
His message was:
STILL IN THE GAME.
ON WAY TO CAPE TOWN WITH FRED AND GEORGE AND SIRIUS BLACK.
CAN’T RISK CALLING YOU YET. WILL CALL WHEN I CAN.
SO GLAD YOU’RE SAFE. WILL GET RON BACK OR DIE TRYING.
Hidden beneath its false shell, theIndian Raider powered toward Cape Town.
As it happened, it would be the very last boat in a line of about a dozen South African fishing trawlers to be allowed back into South African waters that afternoon.
Then the sealanes were closed.
And as the sun set and Cape Town found itself shut off from the world, the night of the second deadline began.
AT LENGTH, the Indian Raider came to the eastern coast of the Cape of Good Hope, a rugged peninsula of densely forested mountains and valleys.
Blasted all year round by biting winds from the Antarctic, and featuring many impassable gorges, it was an inhospitable place and even in the present day, uninhabited.
Nestled up against the immense bulk of Table Mountain on the other side of the peninsula was the modern city of Cape Town. Right now, two dozen South African Navy warships formed a semicircular perimeter around the city, covering the seaward approach.
Anchored in close to the rocky coastline about a mile south of the city’s last seaside residence were a few unmarked American vessels and one private cruiser with Saudi Arabian markings that had arrived several days ago.
In a diving bell beneath those vessels, CIEF troops in scuba gear were busily at work, pulling a veil of seaweed from an ancient stone doorway cut into the rock wall of the coast.
It was the main entrance to the Second Vertex.
But as Jack knew, since the Second Vertex was modeled on the layout of the ancient city of Ur—or more correctly, Ur had been based on the mucholder Vertex—there was asecond entrance, one that arrived at it from the east before bending down to meet the vertex from the north.
“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Lachlan said, eyeing the sub’s GPS readout.
“I’m pinging the shore for voids and recesses,” the Sea Ranger said. “But we have to be careful with the active sonar. If someone hears it, they’ll know we’re here.”
He was firing sonar signals at the underwater shoreline; those signals then bounced back to theIndian Raider …unless they disappeared inside an aperture in the rock wall.
“Sir!” a sonar operator called. “Sonar anomaly in the coastline, bearing 351. Depth 170
feet.”
The Sea Ranger came over. So did Jack and the twins.
“Makes sense,” Julius said. “Sea levels are a lot higher now than they would have been back then. An ancient entrance would be underwater now, like at the Cosquer Cave in southern France.”
“Let’s take a look,” the Sea Ranger said. “Fire up the outside forward camera.”
A monitor was switched on, showing the underwater world outside in ghostly nightvision green, thanks to a camera mounted on the sub’s bow.
On the monitor, fish glided by, even a shark or two. Seaweed waved lazily in the current, and beyond it all, the rock wall of the coast cruised by—
“There!” the Sea Ranger said abruptly, pointing at a blurry dark spot on the screen.
Jack leaned close, and his eyes widened.
“Sharpen focus,” the Sea Ranger ordered.
The image was refined, came into clearer focus.
As it did, Jack knew they’d found it.
On the screen in front of him, partially covered by strings of twisting seaweed, was an ornate ancient doorway, huge in size, perfectly square in shape, and beautifully cut out of the solid rock around it.
“Holy shit…we’re here.”
THE EASTERN ENTRANCE TO THE 2ND VERTEX
TheIndian Raider jettisoned its trawler shell and dived.
Moving slowly, the sub pushed through the veil of waving seaweed that hung down over the ancient doorway and entered the darkness beyond it.
Twin beams of light lanced through the haze from the two floodlights mounted on its bow.
On the monitor inside the conning tower, Jack saw a square tunnel stretching away into darkness, boring into the very foundations of the Cape itself.
The Sea Ranger kept his men alert, kept them driving the sub slowly and carefully, now using his active sonar without restraint.
After about fifty minutes of this slow travel Jack saw something on the monitor that he’d seen before: columns.
Great, high stone pillars holding up a flat rockcut ceiling. And yet still the space was wide enough for the 240 foot long submarine to fit between them.
“This place must be enormous…” the Sea Ranger whispered.
“You should have seen the last one,” Jack said.
A wall of steps appeared in front of them. Just like at the First Vertex at Abu Simbel, it was an enormous mountain of steps,hundreds of them, all as wide as the pillared hall through which they were cruising. Only at this vertex, they went upward not downward, rising up and out of the water.
“Sir, I’ve spotted the surface,” the sonarman said. “There’s an opening up there, at the top of the steps.”
“Let’s see what’s up there,” the Sea Ranger said, swapping a look with Jack.
The Indian Raider rose gracefully through the spectacular underwater hall, gliding silently up past the hall’s massive pillars, following the incline of the submerged superstaircase.
Then it left the hall, breaking the surface.
TheIndian Raider ’s conning tower rose silently out of a still body of water, seawater sliding off its sides.
It found itself hovering in a walled pool easily a hundred yards wide. It looked like a miniature harbor, foursided, with walls on two sides and the ultrawide stairs rising up out of the water on the third. On the fourth side, there were some stone buildings, half
submerged.
Darkness filled the air above this miniharbor. But a sickly yellow light peeked over the horizon at the top of the steps, illuminating the space.
It was a gargantuan cavern, the ceiling easily six hundred feet high.
The hatch on the conning tower swung open and the Sea Ranger and Jack emerged, gazing in wonder at the immense dark space around their little sub.
Wickham drew a flare gun, but Jack stopped him.
“No! Wolf’s already here.”<
br />
He nodded up at the sickly yellow glow above them—the result of flares already fired elsewhere in the supercavern.
Within a few minutes, they’d rowed ashore and, with the Sea Ranger and the twins beside him and Horus perched on his shoulder, Jack stepped up the wide hill of stairs, climbing them.
When they reached the top and beheld what lay beyond them, Jack let out a gasp of astonishment.
“God save us all,” he whispered.
THE SECOND VERTEX
AN UNDERGROUND city lay before him.
An entire city.
A collection of stone buildings, all of them tall and thin like towers, stretched away from him for at least five hundred yards. Bridges connected all of them—some dizzyingly high, others very low, others still were constructed of steeply angled stone stairways.
Canals of water filled the “streets” between all these buildings, seawater that over the millennia had seeped in through the cave’s two entrances and flooded the city’s floor.
Dominating the forest of towers before him was a massive ziggurat, a great stepped pyramid that rose up in the very center of the ghost city.
Exactly as it did in ancient Ur,Jack thought.
At the summit of this ziggurat was a very peculiar structure: an ultrahigh and very thin laddertype object that shot up vertically from the ziggurat’s peak until it hit the rocky ceiling of the cavern two hundred feet above.
At the point where the ladder hit the cavern’s ceiling, a series of runglike handholds led to the spectacular centerpiece of the cavern, a centerpiece that took Jack’s breath away.
Looming off to the side of the underground city was another inverted pyramid—bronze and immense, exactly like the one Jack had seen at Abu Simbel.
It hung from the ceiling of this cavern, hovering like some kind of spaceship above the vast indoor city, easily twice the size of the ziggurat below.
From where he stood, Jack couldn’t see any buildings directly beneath the pyramid—he guessed that it hung suspended above a bottomless abyss like the one at Abu Simbel had done.
But unlike the one at Abu Simbel, this pyramid was surrounded by its supplicant city, an exact twin of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.
Jack wondered if all six of the vertices were somehow subtly different, unique shrines built to complement a central upsidedown pyramid—Abu Simbel had a massive viewing hall looking out at its pyramid; this one had a city of spectacular bridges kneeling before it.
Suddenly, shouts and mechanical noises made Jack look up. They’d come from the other side of the cavern.
A flight of steep stone steps rose up the side of the nearest tower. Jack climbed them.
Arriving at the summit of the tower, he was rewarded with a full view of the immense cavern and a glimpse of exactly where he stood in this lifeordeath race.
Things didn’t look good.
There, standing on a rooftop halfway across the vast cavern, having obviously got here some time ago, surrounded by the men of his quasiprivate army, was Wolf.
Jack swore.
His enemies were far more advanced across the labyrinth than he was. Once again he was starting from behind.
And then, among the group of soldiers standing immediately behind Wolf, Jack glimpsed a diminutive figure, and his heart sank.
He only saw the figure for a moment, but the image lodged in his brain instantly: head bowed, left arm in a sling, right hand gripping Jack’s fireman’s helmet, terrified and alone, it was a small black boy with glasses.
It was Alby.
COMPARATIVE POSITIONS OF JACK’S AND WOLF’S TEAMS
THE CITY AND THE PYRAMID
THE SECOND VERTEX
BENEATH THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE
SOUTH AFRICA
DECEMBER 17, 2007, 0255 HOURS
JACK TOOK IN the monumental task ahead of him.
First he assessed Wolf’s position, over on the other side of the cavern.
They must have entered via the main western harbor some time ago, because they were standing on a tower roughly halfway between their harbor and the ziggurat.
A big head start.
But as he looked more closely at them, Jack frowned. Wolf’s troops seemed to be laying longbridging planks over the rooftop in front of them and then running across each plank to the next tower.
Jack then looked at his own situation and instantly he saw the reason behind their unusual method of travel.
The tower on which he stood hadno roof. In fact,all of the tower tops he saw from up here were roofless.
They were all completely hollow, like smokestacks.
And yet, curiously, nearly every rooftop was connected to two or three more rooftops by the dizzying network of bridges.
“Oh, man,” Jack said, realizing. “It’s a huge trap system.”
Every roof that Jack could see from here was the same.
On each one there was a tonguelike platform stretching out from the leading edge of the roof to its middle, out over that tower’s black hollow core.
Ringing this tonguelike platform were three smaller steppingstonelike platforms, each situated exactly halfway between the central platform and the roof’s three other edges, and each requiring a substantial jump of about five feet to land on them.
Jack examined the rooftop on which he was standing.
Carved into the stone tongue on which he stood was some text written in the Word of Thoth. On each steppingstone was a similar carving.
“How does it work?” the Sea Ranger asked.
“Question and answer,” Jack said. “This carving here, on the tongue, is the question. You jump on the steppingstone carved with the correct answer. If you’re right, the stepping stone holds your weight.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Lachlan asked.
“If you’re wrong, I imagine it doesn’t hold your weight and you fall down the hollow of the tower.”
The Sea Ranger looked down into the black void inside the tower before them. Its walls were sheer and slick. You’d never be able to climb out, if you hadn’t already landed in something deadly.
Jack said, “I imagine the struts holding up the false steppingstones are made of a brittle material. They look strong, but they’re not.”
“But you have to getevery riddle right all the way across,” Julius said. “Would you stake your life on your ability to answer all those riddles correctly?”
But Jack wasn’t listening anymore.
He was staring into space.
“Riddles,” he said aloud. “Aristotle’s Riddles…”
He turned sharply to the Sea Ranger. “Have you got any sat phones on theRaider, video
capable? We need to call in some expert help.”
Of course, the Sea Ranger had several satellite phones on board theRaider. He even had some small helmetmounted cameras that could be connected to them. He had them brought out.
Handing one to West, he said, “Jack, if you put out a call on that thing, anyone in the area with even a basic scanner is going to know we’re here.”
“Believe me, they’ll know we’re here soon enough. And if we’re going to survive this, we need help.”
With that, Jack called theHalicarnassus on the videophone.
WHEN THE SATELLITE PHONE console on theHalicarnassus suddenly started ringing, everyone on board exchanged worried glances.
Zoe picked up the phone and cautiously said, “Hello?”
“Zoe! It’s me.”
“Jack!”
Quick greetings were exchanged and an overjoyed Lily blurted out a brief summary of their quest through Africa before finishing with the explosive arrival of Wolf’s forces at the kingdom of the Neetha and the loss of Alby and the Pillar to him.
Wizard leaned in to the mike. “Jack. It was great to get your message. We didn’t know if you were alive. But now we’re in dire straits. We can’t get into South Africa. We’re sitting on an airstrip in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, just north of South Africa, wh
ile Wolf has gone to the Second Vertex. Where are you?”
“I’m at the Second Vertex,”Jack said.
Wizard’s jaw dropped.
“And I need all of your help.”
Moments later, Wizard, Zoe, and Lily were gathered around the videophone monitor peering at the feed coming from Jack’s helmetmounted camera.
Wizard saw the underground city and breathed, “The city of bridges…” but Jack directed their attention to the carved words of Thoth on the first rooftop’s tonguelike platform:
“Lily?”Jack asked.
Lily read the text quickly.
“It says, ‘What is the best number of lies?’” she said.
Standing to Lily’s left, Wizard frowned. “The best number of—wait a minute…”
But then, from her right, Zoe said, “Hey! I’ve seen that carving!”
“Where?” Wizard asked.
It was Jack who answered over the radio: “Somewhere in the Neetha realm, I imagine.
Along with a list of other carvings, carvings that looked like numbers maybe.”
“Yes,” Zoe said. “Yes. They were in the very center of the maze there. Carved onto a beautiful whitemarble podium. But how could you know that, Jack?”
“Because this is one of Aristotle’s Riddles,”he said.
“Of course,” Wizard said. “Of course…”
“I don’t get it,” Zoe said.
Jack explained, “At the Academy in Greece, Aristotle was Hieronymus’s favorite student, the same Hieronymus who found the Neetha. It makes sense that Hieronymus told his favorite student about the Neetha and what he’d discovered there. Aristotle’s Riddles aren’t Aristotle’s at all. They’re Hieronymus’s. Riddles that Hieronymus found during his time with the Neetha, riddles that I imagine he got someone among the Neetha to translate for him.”
“So what is the best number of lies?” Lily asked.