The Two Lost Mountains Read online

  ‘Planes have been requisitioned for the purpose, sire,’ Jaeger Eins said. ‘Ten U.S. Air Force C-5M Super Galaxy cargo planes equipped with ADS containers. They’re the only ones large enough and powerful enough to carry the weight of the bronzemen. It will be done within the next week.’

  Cardinal Mendoza read aloud from his computer’s screen. His translation, Lily noted, was identical to hers. His program was good.

  Sphinx said, ‘Cardinal. The first iron mountain . . . ?’

  ‘. . . awaits your arrival,’ Mendoza said. ‘The High Astronomer, Father Rasmussen, is there right now, preparing everything for you. He is the Church’s foremost expert on the iron mountains, the lunar alignments and the Fall.’

  Sphinx nodded. ‘I also want the bells.’

  A hush fell over the group when he said this.

  ‘Sire,’ Mendoza said. ‘You do understand that they are not necessary to complete the trial.’

  Chloe added, ‘And are notoriously dangerous—’

  ‘I want them,’ Sphinx said firmly, ‘because they are key to my ruling plans. This means paying a visit to the lovely ladies of Novodevichy Convent in Moscow.’

  ‘Whores,’ Mendoza spat. ‘Women who are too clever for their own good.’

  ‘I like them,’ Sphinx said. ‘They’re committed. To their code and their cause. They have been for five thousand years. They outwitted your Church for all that time, Cardinal. When is the next series of alignments?’

  ‘Sometime around the solstice, according to Father Rasmussen. Christmas Eve or thereabouts. I will get the exact times and dates from him promptly. We have about three weeks.’

  ‘You have all the data on the Apennine Mountains and the Sea of Rains?’

  ‘Yes, sire,’ Mendoza said.

  ‘And the observatory is ready?’

  ‘All prepared, sire.’

  ‘Then let us go to Moscow,’ Sphinx said. ‘Except we shall make one stop on the way.’

  ‘Where might that be, sire?’

  ‘The Royal Prison at Erebus,’ Sphinx said.

  Then he turned on his heel and casually tossed a pill of greystone into the sacrificial pool containing Alexander’s dead body.

  The moment the pill hit the water, the surface clouded over, going dark and opaque. There followed a series of foul cracks as the black-grey water solidified into a concrete-like substance that wholly encased Alexander’s corpse, hiding it from view.

  And then they were moving.

  Lily was shoved toward the exit stairs.

  She managed to grab a final, sad glance back at the sacrificial pool containing the brother she’d hardly known, now entombed in solid stone.

  His last act, he had said, had been on behalf of ‘the only people who had ever loved him’.

  Lily knew who that referred to.

  Sky Monster’s sweet and loving parents, who had taken Alexander into their home as a boy and raised him as their own.

  Sphinx’s men—the Knights of the Golden Eight—had killed both of them horrifically.

  Then Lily was pushed out of the chamber as Sphinx and his people whisked her away from the Rock and onto a plane headed for Erebus.

  The Royal Prison at Erebus

  Mediterranean Coast, Algeria

  5 December

  Roland Rubles was singing happily in the pitch darkness of the abandoned royal prison.

  ‘When Irish eyes are smiling, sure, ’tis like a morn in spring . . . !’

  Rubles was, of course, clinically insane.

  Once upon a time, he had been the refined butler of a minor royal household in Luxembourg. But then, when his master had gone away one weekend, Rubles had killed and then eaten his master’s wife, two children and dog.

  Sentenced to spend the rest of his life half encased in a stone slab on Erebus’s infamous Wall of Misery, Rubles had been terribly disappointed when Jack West Jr—his next-door neighbour on the Wall—had escaped from the prison and not taken Rubles with him.

  That Jack had been the first person ever to escape from the notorious prison had not impressed Rubles, even though he was aware that it was a prison whose location was known to perhaps three individuals in the whole world.

  ‘In the lilt of Irish laughter, you can hear the angels sing . . . !’

  A small consolation for Rubles, however, had been a new neighbour: no less a figure than the Governor of the Royal Prison himself, Count Yago DeSaxe, the younger brother of Hades, the King of the Underworld.

  After being rescued by the bounty hunter, Aloysius Knight, Jack had unceremoniously imprisoned Yago in a liquid-stone slab of his own and mounted him on the Wall of Misery: imprisoning the jailer in his own jail.

  ‘When Irish hearts are happy, all the world seems bright and gay . . .’

  But now, a few days later as the prisoners around him sagged with hunger and thirst and Rubles sang, flashlights suddenly appeared, sabring through the gloom, and a dozen armed figures appeared in front of Rubles.

  At the sight of them, Rubles increased his gusto.

  ‘And when Irish eyes are smiling, sure, they—’

  Bang!

  Rubles’s head exploded, shot, his forehead blasting apart in a spray of blood and brains. His head, still embedded in its vertical stone slab, could not even loll to one side. Rubles just hung there, still, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open, blood oozing out of a hole in his skull and down his face.

  Sphinx stepped out of the darkness and lowered his gun.

  He stood in front of the slab containing his friend, Yago.

  ‘Get him out,’ Sphinx commanded.

  It took thirty minutes to free Yago from his slab.

  While everyone was gathered around Yago, one of Cardinal Mendoza’s assistants, a young Serbian priest named Father Miroslav Cilic slipped away from the larger group.

  Moving quickly by the light of a small flashlight, he wended his way down several dark passageways, moving ever deeper into the ancient prison until at last he came to the innermost dungeon of the whole ghastly place: a square-sided stone-walled chamber with a broad pit in its middle.

  It was hard to tell how deep the pit was.

  It could have been bottomless for all anyone knew.

  A thick iron cage hung out in the centre of the pit, twenty feet from the cavern’s walls, suspended above the drop by a single sturdy chain.

  An inescapable cell.

  A huge hulking figure stood inside the cage, cloaked in shadow.

  He did not move.

  The young priest gazed at him with eyes that were wide with fear and . . .

  . . . adoration.

  Although the prisoner’s face was bathed in shadow, it was clear that he was looking directly at the young priest.

  Father Cilic said softly, ‘General Rastor. My name is Cilic. I am a loyal disciple. You commanded my brother during the troubles in my homeland. Here.’

  He threw a key across the chasm to the figure in the hanging cell.

  Whip-quick, the figure’s hand reached out through the bars and caught the key.

  When he spoke, his voice was a low rasp that sent a chill up the spine of the young Serbian priest.

  ‘You will be rewarded in the next life, my son,’ the prisoner said.

  ‘Thank you, General,’ Father Cilic said. ‘Forgive me, but I must get back before I am missed.’

  ‘You have done well,’ the prisoner said. ‘Go. I will follow later.’

  The young priest hastened away from the innermost dungeon of the royal prison, leaving the prisoner in it hanging in darkness, in his cage, but now with the key to unlock it.

  Thirty minutes later, Sphinx and his people left Erebus, with Yago in their midst.

  Sphinx had also ordered the release of eight other rather unusual prisoners. They were taken, too,
although they were transported in cuffs and chains, and with leather gags covering their mouths.

  Father Cilic walked quietly behind Cardinal Mendoza, glancing furtively about.

  ‘Let us regather our people and bring all our forces together,’ Sphinx said. ‘Then we will go to Moscow. To the convent.’

  Novodevichy Convent

  Moscow, Russia

  23 December, 0000 hours

  Novodevichy Convent lay silent in the cold Moscow night.

  It had begun life as a fortress—or to use the Russian term, a kremlin—and it still retained the colossal walls and defensive towers of the citadel it had once been.

  But in the 1500s, under the reign of Vasili III and his psychotic son, Ivan the Terrible, it had been converted into a convent to imprison royal women forced to take the veil.

  Today, it is famous for three of its features: first, its stupendous belltower; second, its cemetery containing the graves of many famous Russians; and third, the glorious white Smolensky Cathedral that stands in its centre with its five gold-and-grey onion domes, domes that resemble those of its cousin, the larger and more famous St Basil’s Cathedral, a few miles away.

  For five hundred years, the convent has been a symbol of stoic endurance, surviving wars with Napoleon and Hitler, and even making a cameo appearance in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

  It is also a symbol of decidedly feminine endurance.

  For since its conversion from fortress to cloister, Novodevichy Convent has been the exclusive domain of women, an order of nuns known to most as the Order of Serene Maidens, or the Sereneans for short, and by a much older name to a select few.

  That would change on the night of 23 December, for at the stroke of midnight, Sphinx’s forces attacked it.

  It was not a silent attack. It wasn’t even a stealthy attack. And it was not small.

  It was big, bold and loud.

  Four long dark boxes that looked like armoured black shipping containers came roaring out of the sky and slammed into the snow-covered grounds of the convent.

  BAM!

  BAM!

  BAM!

  BAM!

  As they hit the ground, the earth shook and snow was thrown into the air.

  In military circles, these dark containers were known as ADS-IRM—Aerial Delivery System for Impact Resistant Material.

  In regular English, this meant they were precision-guided containers that, because of their non-human or non-mechanically sensitive contents, didn’t need to land softly. And with the advent of GPS and high-tech guidance features on the containers themselves, ADS containers had become very adept at landing on small targets very quickly.

  They were mainly used to drop food, weapons or ammunition into remote war zones or cities suffering humanitarian crises.

  These four ADS containers came down hard inside the fortified walls of Novodevichy Convent, landing at the four points of the compass, so that they blocked each of the four exits from the complex.

  A moment later, the walls of the containers dropped open with loud slams and out of each container ran thirty bronzemen, racing for the central living quarters.

  Sphinx and his human companions arrived minutes later in two low-flying Chinook helicopters loaned to them by the Russian Army.

  Sphinx emerged from the first chopper, guiding Lily behind him, her hands bound with flex cuffs.

  They were followed by Cardinal Mendoza and Chloe Carnarvon; Jaeger Eins and four of his Knights; twelve bronzemen and the eight unknown men they had sprung from Erebus prison.

  As a prominent figure in the shadow world of the four kingdoms, Sphinx had forewarned the appropriate people at the top of the Russian military of his arrival, so there was no local intervention, not from the police or the army.

  Sphinx did not want to be disturbed as he stormed the convent.

  Because he had important things to do.

  Minutes later, inside a dark crypt deep beneath the five-domed cathedral, backed by his two advisers, the five Knights, the twelve bronzemen and the eight other men, Sphinx stood in front of the twenty female residents of Novodevichy Convent.

  All the nuns knelt on the floor except for their leader, the abbess of the convent, Sister Beatrice, who stood defiantly in front of Sphinx.

  Some of the nuns sobbed quietly.

  Most of them cast wary glances not at Sphinx or even at the exotic bronzemen, but at the eight other men Sphinx had brought along.

  For those eight men were the stuff of nightmares.

  They were short and skinny, with wiry muscles and hunched shoulders. But it was their faces that were truly terrifying: these men had teeth filed to sharp points and the skin on their foreheads, tattooed red, was stretched over surgically inserted subdermal horns.

  Upon seeing them enter, one of the younger nuns had gasped involuntarily, ‘Vandals . . .’

  The cathedral’s crypt was bitingly cold.

  It was essentially one long underground corridor with vaults and caged side-chapels lining its walls; monuments to great Russian women over the centuries. Some of these little chapels had altars, others had waist-high stone sarcophagi.

  The abbess eyed Lily, standing behind Sphinx with her hands bound.

  ‘You are the Oracle . . .’ the old nun breathed with realisation, before she snapped to look in horror at Sphinx.

  ‘High Priestess,’ Sphinx said formally.

  ‘Watchman,’ the abbess replied evenly.

  Sphinx smiled brightly. ‘It’s good to see you, Beatrice. You’ve aged well.’

  ‘And you, Hardin, are still clearly a prick of the highest order.’ The old nun glared at him. ‘You were a shit when you were a child and I was your babysitter, and you’re obviously still a shit now. So, you’ve finally made your move?’

  ‘I’ve waited a very long time for this,’ Sphinx said.

  ‘You always were patient, I’ll give you that,’ Sister Beatrice said. ‘Patient, watchful . . .’

  ‘Why, thank—’

  ‘. . . and cruel,’ the nun finished. ‘I never forgot what you did to the Ludovico boy.’

  ‘He stole my new sunglasses.’

  ‘You blinded him.’

  ‘Thou shalt not steal.’

  ‘You were thirteen years old, Hardin,’ the old nun said. ‘Normal psychopaths, when they are children, torture small animals and pets. You tortured a boy.’

  Sphinx gave her a wan, indulgent smile.

  ‘I want the bells,’ he said flatly.

  ‘They are not here,’ Sister Beatrice replied. ‘They haven’t been here for a hundred years—’

  ‘They are in the crypt of Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna right behind you,’ Sphinx said curtly, nodding at the enormous stone vault behind her, the largest one in the entire subterranean complex.

  The vault was a great square thing, made entirely of grey stone, and it was the size of a double garage. On its door was carved the severe frowning face of a heavy-browed, matronly woman wearing a crown.

  Sphinx stroked the grey stone face of the statue.

  ‘Tsarevna Sophia,’ he said. ‘Daughter of Tsar Alexis and once all-powerful regent of Russia. But it ended badly for her, didn’t it, Beatrice?’

  The abbess said nothing.

  Sphinx said, ‘During the height of her power, the tsarevna rebuilt this convent and supported its nuns, but when her grasp on power collapsed, she was herself imprisoned here for the final years of her life. Do you recall what the new tsar, Peter, did with her supporters, Beatrice?’

  The abbess said softly, ‘He hanged them by the neck right outside the windows of her room, so if she looked outside her prison, she saw them.’

  ‘Got to hand it to Peter,’ Sphinx said, ‘he was an inventive sadist.’

  His eyes narrowed.

  ‘Tell you what, Beatrice,
let’s have a wager. Let’s open this crypt right now. If, as you say, the Siren bells are not inside it, I will kill you and your sisters here quickly and painlessly, with bullets to your heads.’

  He held up a finger.

  ‘But, if the bells are in there—and you’re lying to me—I will leave you to my ghastly friends.’

  He waved at the eight Vandals, with their horrific teeth and ‘horned’ heads.

  Sister Beatrice swallowed.

  Lily froze.

  ‘Open it,’ Sphinx said to Jaeger Eins.

  Minutes later, the door to the great crypt was blasted open with controlled explosives and Sphinx beheld its interior.

  Sphinx was not a man who was easily impressed, but his breath caught in his throat.

  A giant, nine-foot-tall, gold-and-silver sphere stood before him.

  It was a glorious piece of metalwork, polished to a brilliant sheen, its gleaming sides perfectly curved. It was astonishing in its flawlessness: far too precise for people of previous centuries to have built; perhaps too precise even for people of today.

  It stood there, heavy, ancient and ominous, reflecting the light dully. It was mounted on a slab, which allowed one to see the wide round hole at its bottom. This great sphere was hollow, a huge bell of some kind.

  Behind it stood thirteen more spherical bells, lined up in two long rows, all of similar gigantic size, all made of silver and gold.

  ‘The Siren bells . . .’ Chloe said.

  Sister Beatrice’s face fell.

  Sphinx just shook his head sadly.

  ‘Oh, Beatrice. You lied to me.’

  ‘Don’t toy with me, Hardin. I’m too old for games,’ the abbess snapped. ‘You’ve got what you came for. You have your emperor’s ring on your finger and now you have the Siren bells. You did it. You won. As a boy you were a petty tyrant, and now, as a man, you can be a full-blown one. Leave us. Go to one of the five mountains and perform your Fall. Then go and claim your throne at the Labyrinth and make us and everyone else in the world your servants, just like you’ve always wanted. Only spare me the fucking speeches.’

  Sphinx was silent.

  He stared at the defiant old nun.