The 6 sacred stones.

a novel.

Matthew Reilly.

For John Schrooten.

A great and true friend.

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 WU GORGE, CENTRAL CHINA).

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-ARTHURC. 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 starfilled 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 wartorn 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 thirtytwo hundred American servicemen had been killed there.

What was unusual about this death was that it had been anAustralian 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 wellknown 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 wellknown 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 0617332/1A CLa.s.s LEVEL: ALPHASUPER.

FOR A1'S EYES ONLY 22AUG07.

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 neartotal 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 sixtyseven, he looked like a modernday 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 reerected-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 textcovered 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 centuryB.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 a.n.a.lysis: 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 highpowered 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 wascurved.

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 G.o.d.

We've found it."

Surrounded by this repository of ancient knowledge and priceless treasure, Wizard pulled out a hightech 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 a.s.sume 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 characterwu 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 fortresstown that once sat on the banks of the Yangtze and of course Mount Wushan, the colossal twomilehigh 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 rockcut caves like the Green Stone Cavern-nearly all of which had now been submerged beneath the waters of the 350milelong lake that had formed behind the gargantuan walls of the Three Gorges Dam.

The area was also known, however, for certainunusual 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 auroralike apparitions. It was even claimed that on one gruesome day in the seventeenth century the clouds over Wushan had rainedblood.

The Wu Gorge area certainly had a history.

But now in the twentyfirst 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.

Fastflowing 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 hundredfoothigh whitewater ravines were now just regular hundredfoothigh 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 kneeheight.

The entrance to the cave system had been neither guarded by b.o.o.by 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 una.s.suming 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.