Six Sacred Stones Part 49

"Switchblade! No!" Wolf yelled.

Switchblade snarled, "Covetous man! You want earthly power. There is no greater power on this planet than the ability to destroy it. Now witness that power, and know that, in the end, we won the war!"

He then thrust the Pillar out from his body, his arm fully outstretched, preparing to drop it into the abyss.

"See you in h.e.l.l!" he roared.

And with those final hateful words, Switchblade dropped the cleansed Second Pillar into the abyss.

SWITCHBLADE let go of the Pillar-at the exact moment that someone came thudding into him, swinging on a rope of some kind.

It was Jack, hanging on to the end of Astro's Maghook,having swung across from his tower, two hundred feet away!

With nothing else to call on, he'd fired the Maghook's magnetic head into the side of the pyramid and hoped to G.o.d that the structure had magnetic properties.

It did, and the bulbous magnetic head stuck fast against the pyramid, and Jack swung-a long, swooping arc over the bottomless abyss, an absolutely astonis.h.i.+ng twohundredfoot swing-arriving at the peakjust as Switchblade yelled his final insult to Wolf and released the Pillar...

...which Jack caught......a nanosecond before heslammed into Switchblade himself and stopped abruptly, becoming entangled in the insane Marine's harness! Clutching desperately for a handhold, he was forced to release the Maghook and it swung back toward the city, leaving him clinging to Switchblade at the peak of the pyramid.

Switchblade was furious. His eyes blazed with rage at this intrusion on his triumph.

He punched Jack hard in the face, a withering blow, and Jack recoiled sharply, his helmet camera dislodging from his head. It plummeted down into the abyss, cartwheeling wildly.

As he was flung backward by the blow, Jack only just managed to keep hold of the Pillar with his right hand while clinging to Switchblade's chest harness with his left.

Hanging on desperately, he looked up into Switchblade's eyes......and saw that the j.a.panese madman wasn't finished.

Switchblade glared at Jack as he began to unclip the central buckle of his harness.

"Oh, you're not..." Jack said.

He was.

He was going to drop them both into the abyss!

"We're both going to die anyway!" Switchblade yelled. "Might as well die now!"

And with those words, he managed to unclip the buckle-just as Jack made a final lunge, yanking himself up Switchblade's body, reaching with his outstretched arm for the peak of the pyramid-and in the very instant that the buckle unclasped and they both dropped together,he jammed the Pillar into its slot in the summit of the pyramid and then fell, with Switchblade but no longer holding the Pillar, dropping away from the pyramid's peak, watching it get smaller and smaller as the sheer walls of the abyss closed in around him.

And thus Jack West Jr. and the fanatic named Switchblade fell down into the abyss beneath the inverted pyramid of the Second Vertex of the Machine, an abyss that for all anyone knew went all the way to the center of the Earth.

AS THE TWO tiny figures disappeared into the dark abyss beneath the pyramid, the great structure's mysterious mechanism came loudly and spectacularly to life.

First there was heard an ominous thrumming, then a deafening thunderboom that shook the entire supercavern. Then a dazzling laserlike beam of light lanced out from the pyramid's apex, shooting down into the abyss, before a moment later it sucked back up into the pyramid's peak.

Silence.

The combination of the ancient spectacle and the fall of Switchblade and Jack hit the various spectators in different ways.

Wolf.

At first, he'd been shocked by the reappearance of Jack, but he regathered quickly and after the light show he dispatched Rapier to go and grab the nowcharged Pillar from the pyramid and thus garner the reward, the secret of perpetual motion.

Once the Pillar was retrieved and in his hands, Wolf swept out of the underground city.

Someone asked him what they should do with the boy, Alby, and he cast a dismissive wave.

"Leave him here," he said before striding out with his men, leaving Alby alone, on top of the ziggurat in the middle of the city.

The Sea Ranger and the twins.

They just stood motionless on the roof of the tower from which Jack had swung only moments before.

The Sea Ranger stared at the scene, digesting what had just happened.

The twins stood with their mouths agape. Horus, who had been sitting on Lachlan's shoulder, flew off toward the abyss.

"He did it..." Lachlan breathed. "He f.u.c.kingA did it. He set the Pillar in place."

Julius shook his head. "The guy is frigging SuperJack."

"You can say that again," the Sea Ranger said, glancing around them.

None of them had seen Alby through the labyrinth of buildings.

"Come on, gentlemen," Wickham said. "We can't stay here. We have to get back out that entry tunnel before Wolf's buddies send a destroyer to seal it off. Come on."

They hustled back to theIndian Raider.

"What about Horus?" Lachlan said as they moved.

"That bird's destiny is with Jack," Wickham said grimly. "Always has been."

Alby.

Standing alone on the summit of the ziggurat in the middle of this vast underground s.p.a.ce, abandoned by his captors and with darkness descending all around him as their flares began to fade, he felt the most profound sense of aloneness.

The sight of Jack West plummeting from view had shocked him to his very core-till now Jack had seemed indestructible, incapable of dying, but now he was gone, swallowed by the great abyss, dead.

And with that thought, a cold horror swept through Alby's body as he realised that he was going to die here, in this huge dark cave, alone.

Standing there on the ancient ziggurat in the encroaching darkness, clutching Jack's helmet, he softly began to cry.

Wizard, Zoe, Sky Monster, and Lily.

They saw it happen on their videophone monitor.

Watching it all first from Jack's helmet camera and then from the camera that Lachlan had been wearing, they watched in horror as the ultratiny figures of Jack and Switchblade fell away from the tip of the immense pyramid, dropping down into the abyss, before they both disappeared from sight.

"Daddy...!"Lily cried, leaping at the screen. "No!No, no, no...!"

"Jack..." Zoe's eyes filled with tears.

"Huntsman..." Wizard whispered.

Sky Monster pointed at the screen. "Look, he laid the Pillar before he fell! He did it! The crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d did it...!"

But then an alarm siren blared out in the c.o.c.kpit and Sky Monster went to check on it and he called, "Zoe! Wiz! We have incoming South African aircraft! F15s! We have to get out of here!"

Despite their tears, Zoe and Wizard hurried off to man the wing guns, leaving Lily staring at the monitor-alone, frozen, stunned-sobbing deep wrenching sobs and searching for some sign, any sign, that her father was alive but knowing in her heart that he could not possibly be.

"Oh, Daddy..." she said again. "Daddy..."

Then theHalicarna.s.sus powered up and they took to the air, flying north this time, away from southern Africa, fleeing yet again, uncertain and unnerved by the knowledge that now without any shadow of a doubt, they faced the remaining challenges of their quest- the placing of the last four Pillars in March of 2008-alone, without Jack West Jr.

THE END OF THE 6 SACRED STONES.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

WRITING A NOVELcan be a somewhat solitary experience: you spend months alone at the keyboard, lost in the world you have created. I happen to find this enormously fun, which is why writing novels is the best job in the world for me.

But when you decide to write a book with ancient Chinese characters and j.a.panese military language in it, you have to call for help, and this is where I get to thank those many people who helped me along the way.

As always, my wife, Natalie, is the first to read my stuff and her comments still manage to be both insightful and gentle. Having read all my books in draft stage plus all my screenplays, she's now really quite an experienced ma.n.u.script reader!

To my good friend John Schrooten, who (again) read this one while sitting in the M.A.

n.o.ble Stand at the SCG while waiting for the cricket to start. The cricket commenced and he just kept on reading, so that was a good sign! Great friend, great guy.

For technical support, I am indebted to Patrick Pow for getting the ancient Chinese scripts from China, and to Irene Kay for putting me in touch with Patrick.

For the Chinese language tips, my thanks go to Stephanie Pow. Likewise, since I know no j.a.panese, I have to thank Troy McMullen (and his wife and sisterinlaw!) for their help!

I read many books while researchingThe 6 Sacred Stones -from works about s.p.a.ce and zeropoint fields to more esoteric books about Stonehenge and other ancient places. I'd like to make special mention, first, of the works of Graham Hanc.o.c.k, which I just love and would recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to view global history from an unconventional pointofview, and second, of a little gem of a book calledStonehenge by Robin Heath. It was in this book that I first saw the theory that connects Stonehenge to the Great Pyramid through a series of rightangle triangles.

I must also send out my heartfelt thanks to Peter and Lorna Grzonkowski for their very generous donations to the Bullant Charity Challenge. The twins in the novel, Lachlan and Julius Adamson, are named after their nephews.

Likewise, Paul and Lenore Robertson, two longtime supporters of my work and another couple who do an enormous amount for charity, for their donations at not one but two ASXReuters Charity Dinners! Paul, I hope you don't mind that I made you a smooth talking doublecrossing badguy CIA agent!

And last of all, I thank The WAGS, a great group of guys with whom I play golf on Wednesday afternoons, for their generous donation on behalf of Steve Oakes, the leader of this motley crew. In return for their kind donation to charity, I named a character at the start of this book after Oaksey, and promptly riddled him with bullets. As the boys say, no one likes to see that, but such are the dangers of having a character named after you in a Matthew Reilly book!

To everyone else, family and friends, as always, thank you for your continued encouragement.

-Matthew Reilly Sydney, Australia September 2007 AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY.

THE WRITING OFTHE 6 SACRED STONES.

SPOILER WARNING!.

The following interview contains Spoilers fromThe 6 Sacred Stones.Readers who have not read the novel are advised to avoid reading this interview as itdoesgive away major plot moments from the book.

Q:Let's get straight to the biggest question of all: how could you endThe 6 Sacred Stoneswith Jack West Jr. falling into a bottomless abyss?

MR:Okay, okay! Yes, I figured this might be an issue, and this is certainly the best place to talk about it. (Hey, I think the interview at the end ofScarecrow saved me from countless emails about what I did in that book!) When I sat down to writeThe 6 Sacred Stones, I asked myself, "How can I make this book totallydifferent from the others? What can I do that will be completely unexpected?"

My answer: come up with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous novel yet with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous cliffhanger ending imaginable, one in which the fate of the hero literally hangs in the balance at the end of the book (and as those who have read my other books will know, I love a good cliffhanger). This worked out very well when it became apparent to me that the story I had come up with (involving six pillars being placed at six vertices) was going to be too big to achieve in one book. So the ending is merely the midway point of a larger adventure. I've often ended chapters with dire cliffhangers, just think of this as a huge chapter ending!

Jack may well get out of his terrible predicament-indeed one method for his survival has been inserted into the book (and no, it's not Horus) the fun is in waiting to find out how.

The way I see it, it's a bit like waiting for the next season of a TV show that has ended on a cliffhanger. So in the end, I apologize to everyone for making you wait in such an awful way, but I promise it will be worth it!

Q:7 Deadly Wondersand The 6 Sacred Stoneshave seen an increase in the scale of your books (solar rays, dark stars, vast ancient structures). What exactly are you trying to achieve with this series?

MR:What I am trying to achieve is really quite simple: I want to create aLord of the Rings style epic set in our world, in the present day.

I want it to be a story that is part adventure and part myth in which a small group of seemingly powerless characters struggle against the mighty and allpowerful.

There is another reason for it, too, one that is purely for me as an author. In his Introduction toThe Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of his reason for writing that tale: "The prime motive was the desire of a taleteller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them."

Same here.

I just wanted to try my hand at a really big epic story: a grand sweeping adventure that spans the globe, that looks out at the Sun and s.p.a.ce itself, that examines the mysterious ancient places scattered around our planet, and in which-most important of all-the protagonists, in the course of carrying out thrilling feats of heroism, endure profound tests of their character. I also just wanted to try to write a long story.

So in contrast to the Shane Schofield/Scarecrow books, which bring back the same hero in separate adventures, the story begun in7 Deadly Wonders and continued inThe 6 Sacred Stones is actually one big story (indeed, this is why the sections t.i.tled "A Girl Named Lily" begin with Part III in this book, Parts I and II having appeared in the earlier novel).

Q:Tell us about some of the "mysterious ancient places" that appear in this book and why you chose them?

MR:I love ancient places and ancient things-from the pyramids to the Rosetta Stone. I can just gaze at them all day long-especially when they defy explanation.

Having explored the Great Pyramid and its fellow "Wonders" in7 Deadly Wonders, I decided to focus on some of my other favorite ancient places in this book, among them Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, and the Three Gorges region of the Yangtze River in China.

(There are, of course, many others that I love just as much, but I'm keeping them for the next book!) I have visited all three of these places.

First, Stonehenge. Seriously, pictures don't do it justice. Those stones arehuge! And the stuff about coastal lichens being on their surfaces is true-it is weird and unexplained!

Abu Simbel is simply colossal, bigger than you can possibly imagine, and built for the same reason the men of Gondor built the Argonath in Tolkien'sThe Fellows.h.i.+p of the Ring: to tell encroaching neighbors, "Look at how powerful we are in Egypt! Don't even think of crossing these borders unless you can deal with the people who built this monument!" And it's all the better that the UN rebuilt it brickbybrick to save it from the waters of the Aswan Dam.

Finally, the Three Gorges of China. These are simply beautiful. Natalie and I visited them in 2006, solely to research this book. A side trip into the gorges of the Shennong River system (lush, green, misty, and narrow) really crystallised my mental image of the flooded rural hamlet where Wizard finds the entrance to Laozi's trap system.

Q:What else have you been working on? How is theContestmovie coming along?

MR:Earlier this year, I sold a TV script calledLiterary Superstars to Sony, who successfully licensed it to the US TV network ABC.