The Six Sacred Stones

489 Pages·2012·3.01 MB·English

by  Reilly Matthew

ALSO BY MATTHEW REILLY

7 Deadly Wonders

Contest
Scarecrow

Ice Station
Temple

Area 7

SIMON & SCHUSTER
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

Copyright r 2008 by Karanadon Entertainment Pty Ltd.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary
Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon &
Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reilly, Matthew.
*** The 6 sacred stones: a novel / Matthew Reilly.
****** p. cm.

*** 1. End of the world....Fiction. 2. Armageddon....Fiction. 3. Curiosities and
wonders....Fiction. 4. Antiquities....Fiction. I. Title.

PR9619.3.R445S59 2007
823'.914....dc22************************ 2007016989

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5375-5
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5375-4

Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com

For John Schrooten
A great and true friend

*

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

FIRST ORDEAL

A MEETING OF NATIONS

SECOND ORDEAL

AN ANCIENT MYSTERY

THIRD ORDEAL

A GIRL NAMED LILY

THE SECOND MEETING

FOURTH ORDEAL

FIFTH ORDEAL

SIXTH ORDEAL

SEVENTH ORDEAL

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE SIX RAMESEAN STONES

THE MYSTERY OF THE CIRCLES

A mortal battle,
Between father and son,

One fights for all,
And the other for one. ....ANONYMOUS (FROM AN INSCRIPTION FOUND
IN A 3,000-YEAR-OLD CHINESE SHRINE IN THE WUGORGE, CENTRAL
CHINA)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
....ARTHUR C. CLARKE

The end of all things is near. ....1 PETER4:7

INTRODUCTION

THE DARK CEREMONY

12:00 MIDNIGHT
AUGUST 20, 2007
LOCATION: UNKNOWN

IN A DARK chamber beneath a great island in the most distant corner of the
world, an ancient ceremony was under way.

A priceless gold stone....pyramidal in shape, with a crystal at its peak....was set
in place.

Then an ancient incantation, unheard for thousands of years, was uttered.

No sooner had the words been spoken than a great purple beam blasted down
from the star-filled sky and lit up the pyramidal capstone.

The only witnesses to this ceremony were five angry men.

*

When it was over, the leader of the group spoke into a satellite radio: "The ritual
has been performed. In theory, the power of Tartarus has been broken. This must
be tested. Kill one of them tomorrow in Iraq."

*

The next day, on the other side of the world, in war-torn Iraq, an Australian
special forces soldier named Stephen Oakes was shot dead by insurgents.
Ambushed in his jeep at a security checkpoint, he was torn apart by an

overwhelming wave of gunfire from six masked attackers. His body was riddled
with over two hundred bullet holes. His attackers were never found.

That an allied soldier should die during the occupation of Iraq was nothing new.
Already over thirty-two hundred American servicemen had been killed there.

What was unusual about this death was that it had been an Australian who had
been killed.

For curiously, since March 2006, there had not been a single Australian death in
combat in any conflict around the world.

In fact, it was well-known among the allied troops in Iraq that Australian
servicemen had an uncanny luck. Over the past five months, they had survived
all manner of attacks and ambushes....in some cases almost miraculously.

Indeed, this capacity to survive practically any kind of attack was so well-known
to their American colleagues that it was considered wise to stand next to an
Aussie in a firefight.

But with the death of Specialist Steve Oakes on August 21, 2007, that uncanny
luck came to a bloody and conclusive end.

*

The day after that, an encrypted message was handed to one of the most
powerful men in the world.

It read:

SECURE TRANSCRIPT 061-7332/1A
CLASS LEVEL: ALPHA-SUPER
FOR A-1'S EYES ONLY
22-AUG-07

BEGIN SECURE MESSAGE:

Note death of Australian specialist Oakes in Iraq. The power of Tartarus has
been nullified. Someone has the other Capstone.

The game is back on.

Now we must find the Stones.

END SECURE MESSAGE.

THE ENTRY CHAMBER

PROLOGUE

WITCH MOUNTAIN

WITCH MOUNTAIN

OFF THE WU GORGE, THREE GORGES REGION

SICHUAN PROVINCE, CENTRAL CHINA
DECEMBER 1, 2007

SITTING in a sling harness suspended from a long rope and hanging in near-
total darkness, Professor Max Epper cracked the top off his flare, illuminating
the subterranean chamber around him.

"Oh my - " he breathed. "Ooooh, my - "

The chamber was simply breathtaking.

It was a perfect cube, wide and high, cut out of the living rock, perhaps fifty feet
to a side. And every square inch of its walls was covered in carved inscriptions:
characters, symbols, images, and figures.

He had to be careful.

The amber light of his flare revealed that the floor directly beneath him
contained a well shaft that perfectly matched his opening in the ceiling. It
yawned wide, a dark hole of indeterminate depth.

In some circles, Max Epper was known by the call sign "Wizard," a nickname
that was entirely appropriate.

With a flowing white beard and watery blue eyes that glistened with warmth and
intelligence, at sixty-seven, he looked like a modern-day Merlin. A professor of

archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin, it was said that, among other feats, he
had once been part of a secret international team that had located....and re-
erected....the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Swinging to the floor of the chamber, Wizard unclipped himself and gazed in
awe at the text-covered walls.

Some of the symbols he recognized....Chinese characters and even a few
Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was not unexpected: long ago, the owner and
designer of this tunnel system had been the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi. In
addition to being a venerated thinker, Laozi had been a great traveler and was
known to have ventured as far as Egypt in the fourth century B.C.

In pride of place in the exact center of the feature wall was a large raised relief
that Wizard had seen before:

Known as the Mystery of the Circles, it had not yet been decoded. Casual
observers guessed it to be a representation of our solar system, but there was a
problem with this analysis: there was one too many planets circling the central
Sun.

Wizard had seen the Mystery of the Circles perhaps a dozen times around the
world....in Mexico and Egypt, even in Wales and Ireland....and in various forms:
from crude scratchings on bare rock walls to artistic carvings over ancient
doorways, but none of those renderings was anywhere near as beautifully and
elaborately carved as this one.

This specimen was dazzling.

Inlaid with rubies, sapphires, and jade, each of its concentric circles was rimmed
with gold. It glittered in the glare of Wizard's high-powered flashlight.

Directly beneath the Mystery of the Circles was a narrow doorway of sorts:
perhaps two feet wide and six feet high, but shallow, recessed a couple of feet
into the solid stone wall. It reminded Wizard of a coffin standing vertically,

embedded in the wall. Strangely its rear wall was curved.

Carved above it was a small symbol that made Wizard's eyes widen with delight:

"The symbol for Laozi's Stone - " he breathed. "The Philosopher's Stone. My
God. We've found it."

Surrounded by this repository of ancient knowledge and priceless treasure,
Wizard pulled out a high-tech Motorola UHF radio and spoke into it: "Tank.
You aren't going to believe this. I've found the antechamber, and it's positively
stunning. It also contains a sealed doorway, which I assume gives access to the
trap system. We're close. Very close. I need you to come down here and...."

"Wizard,"came the reply."We just got a call from our lookout at the docks down
on the Yangtze. The Chinese Army is snooping around. Gunboat patrol, nine
boats, heading into our gorge. They're coming this way."

"It's Mao. How could he have found us?" Wizard said.

"It may not be him. Could just be a regular patrol,"the voice of Yobu "Tank"
Tanaka said.

"Which could actually be worse." Chinese military patrols were notorious for
roughing up archaeological expeditions in these parts in search of petty bribes.

"How long have we got till they get here?" Wizard asked.

"An hour, maybe less. I think it would be wise for us to be gone by the time they
arrive."

"I agree, my old friend," Wizard said. "We'd better hurry. Get down here and
bring some more lights. Tell Chow to fire up his computer: I'm going to get
started recording images and transmitting them up to him."

*

THE UNDERGROUND chamber in which Wizard found himself was situated
in the Three Gorges region of China, in an area that very much suited him.

This was because the Chinese character wu means "wizard" or "witch"
depending on the context....and it was used often in the names of the area's
features: Wu Gorge, the second of the famous Three Gorges; Wushan, the
ancient walled fortress-town that once sat on the banks of the Yangtze; and of
course Mount Wushan, the colossal two-mile-high peak that towered above
Wizard's chamber.

Translation: Witch Mountain.

The Wu Gorge area was renowned for its history....shrines, temples, carvings
like the Kong Ming Tablet, and rock-cut caves like the Green Stone
Cavern....nearly all of which had now been submerged beneath the waters of the
350-mile-long lake that had formed behind the gargantuan walls of the Three
Gorges Dam.

The area was also known, however, for certain unusual events.

The Roswell of China, for hundreds of years it had been the site of numerous
strange sightings: unexplained celestial phenomena, swarms of shooting stars,
and aurora-like apparitions. It was even claimed that on one gruesome day in the
seventeenth century the clouds over Wushan had rained blood.

The Wu Gorge area certainly had a history.

*

But now in the twenty-first century, that history had been drowned in the name
of progress, swallowed by the waters of the Yangtze as the great river backed up
against the largest structure ever built by mankind. The Old Town of Wushan
now lay three hundred feet beneath the waves.

Fast-flowing tributaries that had once gushed into the Yangtze via spectacular
side gorges had also been humbled by the expanding Dam Lake....what had once
been dramatic four-hundred-foot-high white water ravines were now just regular
hundred-foot-high gorges with placid water at their bases.

Small stone villages that had once sat on the banks of these little rivers, already
far removed from the outside world, had now disappeared completely from
history.

But not from Wizard.

In one partially flooded gorge, deep within the mountains to the north of the
Yangtze, he had found an isolated mountain hamlet built on higher ground and
in it, the entrance to this cave system.

The hamlet was primitive and ancient, a few huts constructed of irregular stones
and tilting thatch roofs. It had been abandoned three hundred years ago and the
locals thought it haunted.

Now, thanks to the ultramodern dam a hundred miles away, the deserted hamlet
was flooded to knee-height.

The entrance to the cave system had been neither guarded by booby traps nor
heralded by elaborate gates. It was, rather, its very ordinariness that had kept it
secret for over two millennia.

Wizard had found the entrance inside a small stone hut that backed onto the base
of the mountain. Once inhabited by the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi....the
inventor of Taoism and the teacher of Confucius....this unassuming little hut
possessed within it a stone well with a raised brick rim.

And at the bottom of that well, concealed beneath a layer of foul black water,
was a false floor....and underneath that false floor, had been this magnificent
chamber.

*

Wizard got to work.

He pulled a powerful Asus laptop from his backpack and connected it to a high-
res digital camera and started clicking away, taking shots of the chamber's walls.

As the camera gathered its images, a rapid-fire series of computations took place
on Wizard's computer screen.

At work was a translation program....a complex database that had taken Wizard
years to compile. It featured thousands of ancient symbols, from many countries
and cultures, and their accepted translations. It could also perform "fuzzy"
translations, a kind of best guess when a symbol's meaning was ambiguous.

Every time a symbol was captured on the digital camera, it was scanned by the
computer and a translation found. For example:

ELEMENT TRANSLATIONS: shi tou(stone)si (temple)
FULL SEQUENCE TRANS:"The Temple of Stone"
FUZZ TRANS POSSIBILITIES:
"Stone shrine," "Stone Temple of the Dark Sun," "Stonehenge (Match Ref.
ER:46-2B)"

Among the other glyphs and reliefs on the walls, the computer found Laozi's
most famous philosophical invention, the Taijitu: