The Two Lost Mountains Read online

  ‘You lost our wager,’ he said softly.

  The way he said it made Lily’s stomach tighten.

  ‘I am no tyrant,’ he added. ‘Far from it. I am a merciful man. To demonstrate, I will spare your nuns the price of the wager and give them quick deaths. But not you. You made the bet so you shall pay the full price.’

  Without warning, Sphinx shoved Sister Beatrice into another adjoining side-chapel, then he had the eight fearsome-looking Vandals released into it after her, with their mouth-gags removed.

  ‘She is all yours, my hungry friends.’

  The eight Vandals scurried into the chapel like slavering dogs. Sphinx slammed the gate shut behind them.

  A second later, Sister Beatrice’s screams—inhuman, and agonised—pierced the air as the Vandals tore into her flesh with their hideous teeth, eating her alive.

  Lily squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to hear it, but she couldn’t.

  After a minute, the abbess’s screams stopped and the only noises that came from the chapel were the sounds of crunching bones and sloppy chewing.

  Sphinx was true to his word regarding the other nuns. Within a few minutes, they were all dead, each ruthlessly shot in the head.

  The giant bells were removed from the crypt with forklifts.

  Lily scowled at Sphinx. ‘You’re a monster.’

  ‘Young lady,’ Sphinx said, ‘I haven’t even started. Come, let us test one of the bells.’

  A few hours later, Lily was flying inside one of Sphinx’s Chinook helicopters high above the outskirts of Moscow, sitting beside Sphinx in the cockpit.

  The vast Russian capital lay spread out before her, stretching toward the horizon, a colossal metropolitan basin that was home to twelve million people.

  Moscow was an incongruous mix of the old and the new, the beautiful and the ugly: sleek glass skyscrapers towered over brutish Soviet-era apartment blocks; charcoal-black factories flanked the limestone aristocratic neighbourhoods of the 19th century; high-walled kremlins and beautiful churches nestled beside huge public parks, many of them containing frozen ponds for ice-skating.

  All of it was covered in ice and snow, blanketing the city in grim greyness.

  Clouds of steam rose from chimneys both residential and industrial: evidence of the heating systems required to withstand the Russian winter.

  Carving a broad swathe through the entire cityscape was the Moskva River, snaking along in wide bending curves, its surface white and hard-frozen.

  It was just before dawn and the Russian capital was stirring.

  A thin stream of cars cruised around the ring roads. Buses rumbled down the boulevards. The icebreakers that would cut canals in the frozen Moskva River were not yet out, but they would be soon.

  A few ice-skaters were on the river doing graceful spins and crossovers. A couple of early-morning dog walkers strolled down the paths by the shore.

  Garbage trucks roamed the streets of the residential districts and alleyways of the city.

  And then suddenly something rose up from within the walls of Novodevichy Convent, flying quickly and vertically into the sky, as if pulled upward by a string.

  It was a huge double-rotored Chinook heavy-lift helicopter, only this Chinook had blacked-out windows.

  Lily felt her chest constrict.

  She had seen a helicopter like this one before. In London, a few weeks ago, when the Knights of the Golden Eight had drawn Jack out into the open by suspending a red London bus from a similar chopper above the Thames.

  It was a drone, operated by the Knights of the Golden Eight.

  Suspended beneath the drone Chinook in some rope netting was one of the mighty spherical bells that Lily had seen at the convent.

  Looking out at the sleeping city with the drone chopper now high above it, Sphinx handed Lily a pair of military-grade protective earphones, the kind worn by special forces operators.

  ‘Here, you will want to wear these.’

  Lily knew this type of headset: it was a 3M Peltor ComTac ear-protection headset with air-sealed gel cushions that covered the ears.

  While they looked like regular commercial over-the-ear headphones, these units were much more than that.

  They had external noise-cancelling microphones, but ones that operated several levels above those available commercially. These Peltor headsets were worn by special forces units around the world and for good reason: they digitised all noise around their wearers, giving the wearer almost superhuman hearing, while at the same time protecting them from deafening sounds like gunshots and explosions, preventing their eardrums from rupturing.

  Lily noticed that all of Sphinx’s people now wore similar protective earphones. She hurriedly put hers on.

  ‘Ring it,’ Sphinx said.

  Suddenly the drone chopper rocked, causing the great bell hanging from it to swing . . .

  . . . making something inside it clang.

  A long, high-pitched note rang out from the ancient metal bell, reverberating mightily, blaring out over the city like an unearthly chime.

  Lily heard it as a digitised sound through her earphones.

  What the people of Moscow heard without any aural protection was difficult to describe.

  It was at the same time both beautiful and terrible, joyous and painful. A moment of pure yet fleeting ecstasy.

  But more than anything, the ringing sound was authoritative, penetrating, irresistible.

  It rippled out from the mysterious ancient sphere, expanding in invisible waves over the entire city.

  Lily saw the reactions immediately.

  A garbage truck beneath her veered off the road and slammed into a building.

  Cars collided on the ring road. The buses on the boulevards crashed into light poles, traffic lights and shopfronts.

  Lily watched in helpless horror.

  Her searching eyes found the skaters on the Moskva River below her.

  Lily watched as they all—all of them, at the exact same time—collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut.

  Lily zeroed in on one woman in particular.

  After she fell to the ice, the woman seemed to pause, confused, looking around herself in an effort to understand what had just happened.

  She struggled to her hands and knees, trying to get back onto her skates, but for some reason she couldn’t, so instead she crawled desperately on her belly, straining to reach the shore.

  After about fifteen seconds of this, the woman slumped to the ground and lay motionless.

  A few of the other skaters had done the same and they, too, now lay on their bellies, still.

  Whether they had lost consciousness or died, Lily couldn’t tell.

  She also noticed the dog walkers beside the river.

  They’d also dropped in mid-stride while their dogs howled, yelping in pain as the stinging sound of the sphere hit their differently configured hearing. The dogs, Lily saw, hadn’t collapsed.

  ‘Are they dead?’ she said flatly to Sphinx.

  ‘No,’ Sphinx said. ‘Not yet. It is a kind of sleep or coma. Nor are they in pain. According to the ancient texts, as they enter the Siren sleep, they experience a moment of incredible rapture.’

  ‘Everyone in the city?’ Lily asked.

  Sphinx nodded. ‘To a radius of about thirty miles, we estimate.’

  The city below Lily was now still.

  The whole city.

  Every car, every bus, every garbage truck, every person: all still.

  Horns blared from drivers who had collapsed against their steering wheels. Car alarms wailed from the many collisions.

  The only movement was the constantly rising steam from the chimneys.

  ‘Some of them will die soon,’ Sphinx added. ‘That cannot be helped. The skaters on the ice and the drivers of those cars will a
lmost certainly die. Not from the sleep but from exposure or thirst.

  ‘Those in their beds should be okay for a few days, perhaps a week, but they too will die of thirst or starvation if the sleep lasts too long. That is why I wanted to do this now—at this time of day, early—while most of the population are in their beds. They will just continue sleeping, only now they will be sleeping in the coma created by the bell. When they wake, they will find themselves in a new world.’

  Lily shivered.

  She didn’t quite know what to make of that statement. This day had already held too many horrors.

  ‘What kind of world?’

  Sphinx gazed out over the subdued city of Moscow. ‘One ruled by me.’

  He turned to face Lily and smiled brightly.

  ‘Come now, my dear. Do not dwell on such grim topics. It’s time for you to play your part and do what I brought you here for.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Somehow, your adoptive father, Captain West, escaped from the City of Atlas. It was caught on my security cameras. He is a determined one, I must admit. He will, I have no doubt, come looking for you, so we must give him what he seeks.’

  And with those curious words, Sphinx struck Lily in the face with the butt of his pistol and her world went black.

  She would wake later that morning on the steps on St Basil’s Cathedral in the middle of Red Square, bound to a chair with a sore head and flanked by two headless nuns.

  ST BASIL’S CATHEDRAL

  RED SQUARE, THE KREMLIN and ST BASIL’S CATHEDRAL

  Airspace above Russia

  23 December, 0845 hours

  Jack West’s plane sped toward Moscow.

  Unusually, however, Jack West was not in it.

  Rather, inside the plane were his friends, Pooh Bear and Stretch, plus their pilot, Sky Monster, all racing toward the Russian capital as fast as the sleek Tupolev Tu-144 could carry them.

  Jack was also on his way, but he had been further out when the news had come in: that Lily had been found in Moscow, in Red Square, on the steps of St Basil’s Cathedral. He had been returning from Australia with Aloysius Knight and Alby in Knight’s Sukhoi Su-37 fighter-bomber.

  Stretch and Pooh Bear had been much closer, in eastern France, so they had come straight here in the Tupolev.

  The two soldiers—one a tall and lean Israeli sniper whose actual name was Benjamin Cohen, the other a short and chubby Arabian prince named Zahir al Anzar al Abbas—could not have been more different in appearance or temperament. Indeed, when they had first encountered each other in the early years of Lily’s life at a remote farm in Kenya, they had barely been able to tolerate each other.

  But one moment had changed all that.

  During a firefight at the farm—when their enemies had ambushed them—Stretch and Pooh Bear had done an extraordinary thing: seeing Lily in danger, they had both, at the exact same time, leapt from cover, guns blazing, to rescue her.

  In that moment, all of their differences had vanished and in the ensuing years, they had become the closest of friends, sharing homes and holidays, missions and milestones.

  And when Lily was spotted—captured by facial-recognition software on a CCTV security camera in Red Square—there was no way on Earth that they were not going to dash to her rescue.

  Sky Monster felt the same. The gentle big-bearded pilot from New Zealand had doted on Lily since she’d been a baby—although it had to be said that no-one in their little extended family, except maybe Jack, had any clue what his actual name was.

  The three of them had weaponed up, boarded the Sky Warrior and taken off for Moscow immediately.

  In the weeks after Stretch, Pooh and Alby had made the shocking—and thrilling—discovery at the Rock of Gibraltar that Lily had not been sacrificed during the ceremony there, Jack’s team had regrouped.

  At first, they had been scattered around the world, variously at the Rock and at the three secret cities of Thule, Atlas and Ra.

  They had two main goals in the following weeks.

  One: find Lily.

  And two: figure out what Sphinx—having completed the Trial of the Cities—would do next in his quest to rule the world during the coming Omega Event.

  But before they could do either of those things, they all had to get to safety.

  Hades’s apartment in Rome was deemed both too small and too vulnerable. If they were discovered there, escape would be difficult. It also couldn’t accommodate the whole team.

  They needed a place that could hold them all and allow them to do their ancient research, yet which also offered quick access to a runway or other means of rapid getaway.

  Of course, as a former king in the shadow royal world, Hades owned just such a property, albeit one that he kept off the books.

  It was a horse farm in Alsace-Lorraine, nestled in a classically Germanic forest just outside the medieval town of Lembach. Vast and rambling, he had once kept his many polo ponies here. When they’d been younger, he had brought his two sons to the estate for family vacations.

  Then, a few years ago, Hades had sold it. But the sale had been a front; he had basically sold it to himself: it was now a hideaway in plain sight.

  The estate met all their key requirements.

  It had plenty of space; in fact, inside the main house, some of them got their own wings.

  More interestingly, the enormous property contained within its boundaries a massive old concrete entry blockhouse—or ouvrage—to the Maginot Line, France’s enormous complex of concrete forts, gun emplacements and connecting tunnels, built in the 1930s, which had spectacularly failed to stop the Nazi invasion of May 1940. The Germans had just swept around the Maginot Line, bypassing it by going through Belgium and the Netherlands.

  In addition to the huge grey ouvrage, Hades’s estate included a lake and lake house, a concealed runway and an old World War II military hangar which Hades used to garage his private jet.

  One final group of team members also arrived: Jack’s beloved animals—his falcon Horus and his dogs Roxy and Ash—brought by their earnest minder, the sweet Neanderthal known as E-147. They had taken a private plane from Australia, paid for by Hades, that had landed at nearby Strasbourg. Jack’s mother, Mae, who had taken a shine to the short Neanderthal, had driven there to pick them up.

  When they arrived at Hades’s estate, the former minotaur from the Underworld emerged from the car carrying Horus and flanked by the two delighted bounding dogs.

  ‘Hello, Captain Jack,’ he said. ‘All animals be well. I good dog minder. I feed dogs and walk dogs. I not eat dogs.’

  Despite everything that was going on, Jack couldn’t help but smile at that.

  ‘I’m glad to hear you didn’t eat my dogs, buddy. Nice work.’

  The Neanderthal nodded enthusiastically.

  Jack, of course, was consumed with their first objective.

  ‘We find Lily,’ he said. ‘There’s no point saving the world if she’s out there, alone, with that bastard, Sphinx.’

  To find her, they tapped into the U.S. government’s top-secret facial recognition system known as TITAN, a system that used a worldwide network of closed-circuit security cameras, airport face scanners, social media apps, and even cell-phone facial locks, to geolocate individuals and pinpoint their locations.

  If Lily stepped in front of a camera somewhere, they would know.

  Police and military frequencies were tapped, as well as satellite feeds of aeroplane movements, but it would take time to get a hit.

  On the ancient side of things, they began researching the next trial, the Trial of the Mountains.

  Hades, Mae and Iolanthe took the lead on that, pulling up its description from the Zeus Papyrus. This was the papyrus that had been written at the command of Zeus himself after his champion had won the Great Games and he had received th
e Mysteries that showed one how to overcome the two trials that preceded the Omega Event. It was this that had introduced them to the Trial of the Cities. Now they focused on the second trial it mentioned:

  THE TRIAL OF THE MOUNTAINS

  Five iron mountains. Five bladed keys. Five doors forever locked.

  But mark you, only those who survive the Fall,

  May enter the Supreme Labyrinth

  And look upon the face of the Omega.

  While all this was happening, Jack went to two places.

  First, he went with Zoe and Hades to a nearby but potentially very dangerous place: the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the home of the Fraternal Order of St Paul, or as they were known in the secret royal world, the monks of the Order of the Omega.

  It was only after all the chaotic events surrounding the finding of the Three Secret Cities that Jack had learned what had become of the Omega monks.

  They had vanished.

  It had even been reported on the TV news: the secretive order had abandoned their lodgings adjoining the Gallerie dell’Accademia, taking with them all of their possessions, including many priceless works of art and sketches.

  To the TV news anchors, they were just a group of quirky monks.

  But to Jack they were something far more deadly.

  They were experts in all the astronomical events connected to the Omega Event.

  ‘They also showed themselves to be singular haters of women,’ Jack said to Zoe and Hades as they broke into the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice a couple of days later. ‘They think of women as baby-makers who were put on Earth to serve men.’

  ‘So we’re talking about very modern thinkers,’ Zoe said drolly.

  ‘The worst thing is these guys really believe it.’

  Jack recalled when the leader of the monks, High Brother Ezekiel, had winced in almost physical pain when Lily had spoken to him.

  ‘Do not speak!’ he’d squealed. ‘“Do not permit a woman to speak or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.”’

  Jack said to Zoe, ‘Their leader, Brother Ezekiel, said that the female voice is a foul and disgusting thing.’