‘You’re right. Whoever built it wouldn’t have made a lock so complex that even the people protecting it wouldn’t be able to figure it out.’ She looked at Shankarpa. ‘Have you ever tried to open it?’
‘A few have tried,’ he said, ‘but without the key, the secret has been lost.’
Her gaze slowly circled the pattern of interlocking wheels, then went to the centre. She examined the keyhole. ‘So the key is the key.’
‘Duh,’ said Eddie.
‘If you’ll pardon the pun. But it can’t be a coincidence that the faces of the goddesses on the key line up with the wheels. They’re a clue. Maybe you don’t need to have the entire thing in an exact configuration - just match each goddess to one particular word. What do the words say?’
Girilal ran his finger around one of the small wheels, reading the ancient text. ‘Many different things. “Moon, waterfall, sadness, dog, travelling, invincible, stranger, yellow . . .” ’
‘They’re completely random,’ said Kit. ‘Maybe they have to be arranged into a sentence?’
‘I don’t think Shiva would have designed his vault’s lock around a game of Mad Libs. It’s something simpler than that, to do with the goddesses . . .’ It struck Nina that she had yet to ask the obvious question. ‘Who are the goddesses?’
Shankarpa pointed them out. ‘Parvati; Uma; Durga; Kali; Shakti.’
‘Shiva’s wives. And if you had to describe each of them in a single word,’ Nina went on, excitement rising as the solution came to her, ‘are those words on any of the wheels?’
‘Durga is the invincible warrior-mother,’ said Girilal. Shankarpa almost shoved his father aside as he darted closer to examine the wheels. ‘The words! We have to find the right words!’
‘Talonor didn’t get it quite right,’ Nina realised. ‘What he wrote in the Codex was a misinterpretation, a mistranslation - it’s not the “love of Shiva” you need to know to open the Vault. It’s the “loves”, or “lovers” - the wives of Shiva! If you don’t know their stories, you’ll never find the right combination.’ She hurriedly turned her notebook to a new page. ‘We need to know the words - all of them.’
‘Six hundred words?’ Eddie said. ‘That’ll take a while.’
‘You got an appointment?’ She took her pen and started writing as Girilal began to recite the words.
‘Rat.’
‘Rat,’ Nina repeated, writing it down.
‘Hmm . . . dust.’
‘Dust.’ After thirty minutes, her list was a little over half complete. The tedium of the task had overcome the initial thrill, most of the guardians sitting contemplatively at the statue’s feet waiting for her and Girilal to finish. Kit was hunched up in his thick coat, half asleep, while Eddie paced impatiently around the ledge. Even Shankarpa, watching his father work, showed signs of boredom.
‘Smiling.’
‘Smiling.’
‘Ah . . . now, let me think,’ said Girilal, finger pausing over one particular word. ‘Some sort of bird. It could be “buzzard”, or it could be . . .’
‘Helicopter,’ said Eddie.
Nina glanced at him. ‘I don’t think that’s quite right, Eddie.’ ‘No, I mean I can hear a helicopter. Listen.’
She strained to hear as Shankarpa called for silence. A faint thudding became audible, the unmistakable chop of rotor blades. ‘And I thought you were worried about your hearing,’ she whispered to Eddie.
‘It’s high frequencies that’re knackered. Low ones aren’t a problem. Yet. And choppers aren’t exactly quiet.’
‘Is it Khoil?’ asked Kit, standing.
Nina anxiously stared at the ragged banner of blue above the canyon. There was an outside chance that the helicopter’s arrival at the hidden valley was just a coincidence . . . but she wouldn’t have wasted even a single dollar betting on it.
The noise drew closer, echoing from the valley walls. The whine of engines rose beneath the pounding blades. A shadow flicked across the sunlit summit of one of the cliffs as the helicopter passed overhead, and was gone. The engine shrill faded.
Nina exchanged a look of relief with Eddie . . .
The sound’s pitch changed. The helicopter was coming back.
‘Get into cover!’ said Eddie, waving the guardians into the shadows. The approaching rotor noise was louder, the aircraft descending.
The shadow reappeared on the cliff, moving more slowly. The helicopter was above them. A fine spray of snow whipped down from the overhanging rock, caught in the downwash.
Eddie watched as the crystalline fall moved from one side of the ledge to the other. ‘It’s circling,’ he said. ‘They’re trying to get a better look into the valley.’ He advanced a few steps, looking up past the overhang. ‘I can see it - they’re coming round! Everyone get back!’
He retreated as the helicopter’s lazy orbit brought it over the far end of the valley. It was civilian, painted red and white with a rather bulbous fuselage that reminded him of a fat, short-billed bird in flight. He didn’t know the type, which meant it had entered service after he left the SAS; aircraft recognition was a standard part of military training.
One thing was clear, though. It belonged to the Khoils. The Qexia logo was emblazoned on its side.
The chopper drifted across the canyon. Eddie glimpsed a face behind the side window, sunlight glinting off a camera lens. It disappeared from view behind the cliff above, blowing down another swirling sheet of snow, then the engines increased power and it flew off to the south.
Nina ran to the top of the stairway, but it was already out of sight. ‘Did they see the statue?’
‘Even if they didn’t, they still got pictures,’ Eddie said grimly. ‘Couple of minutes in Photoshop and they’ll be able to brighten things up enough to spot it. And soon as they do . . .’
‘They’ll be back. In force.’ Nina hurried to the door. ‘We don’t have much time,’ she told Shankarpa. ‘We’ve got to figure this out, fast.’
Girilal resumed his work with more urgency, Nina hurriedly scribbling down each new word. The remainder took only twenty minutes to translate. ‘Okay,’ she said, flicking back through the pages, ‘we’ve got five goddesses, and six hundred possible words to describe them. Let’s narrow it down.’
It was a tortuous process. Shankarpa told the other men what they needed to do, but everybody had slightly different views of the goddesses. There were multiple words that could apply to each of them; Kali, for instance, fitted the descriptions of ‘black’, ‘death’, ‘terrifying’, ‘salvation’, ‘rage’ and ‘uncontrollable’, and the other four Hindu figures had similarly varied lists.
Nina wrote each set on a separate page, tearing them from the notebook and lining them up in front of the door. ‘Well, it’s a start,’ she said. ‘Eddie, how long do you think we have before that helicopter comes back?’
‘Depends where it’s going, and if Khoil’s all set up to go or if he needs to put a team together.’
‘If he’s flying from Delhi,’ Kit said, ‘it would take about an hour. And that would be the logical place for him to assemble his men.’
‘Then we need to start trying the lock,’ said Nina. ‘Okay, so each goddess has got several words that could be used to describe them. But what are the best words? When you think of Kali, say, what’s the first word that comes to mind?’
‘Death,’ said Eddie immediately.
‘You’re just saying that because of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.’
‘No, he is right,’ Shankarpa said. ‘Kali is the goddess of death, the destroyer of evil.’
‘The destroyer of ego,’ Girilal corrected. ‘She is like the mother who sees when her children have bad in them - and drives it out. If you face Kali and you are not pure, if you fear her because you know you have done something that deserves punishment . . . she will destroy you.’