The Sacred Vault

Shankarpa didn’t seem convinced. ‘And what else?’

‘If you’ll let us, we can try to open the Vault.’ She indicated the replica key.

He laughed in disbelief. ‘You want the guardians of the Vault of Shiva to help you open its door?’

‘All the Khoils want are the Shiva-Vedas. We can take them someplace secure. If they’re not here - and they know that - they’ll have no reason to come. Whatever other treasures are in the Vault will be safe.’

‘And why should you be trusted with the sacred words of Lord Shiva over this man Khoil?’

‘Because the Khoils want to use them to gain power. But I want to show them to the entire world,’ she said defiantly. ‘Everyone will be able to read the teachings of Shiva. Isn’t that what he would want?’

‘She is telling the truth,’ Girilal added. ‘She is very famous for this. Even in Kedarnath!’

‘I can help you,’ Nina insisted. ‘If you let me.’

Shankarpa remained deep in thought for a long moment. ‘I will . . . let you try to open the Vault,’ he finally said. ‘Tomorrow, when it is light.’ ‘And what if we can’t get in?’ Eddie asked.

A thin smile. ‘Then you will die.’

He nudged Nina. ‘No pressure on you then, love.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘If others come, we will protect the Vault, as we always have,’ said Shankarpa. ‘And we will have more than just our swords.’ Eddie’s Wildey was amongst the group’s belongings, the guardians knowing enough about firearms to have removed the magazine and ejected the chambered round.

‘You’ll need more than just one gun,’ Nina said.

‘Perhaps we have more. But if you open the Vault, we may not need them.’ He issued an order. Several men stood and surrounded the prisoners. ‘They will take you to a room where you can sleep.’ He smiled coldly. ‘Enjoy your stay.’

In contrast to the previous day, the slash of morning sky above the valley walls was a deep, empty blue. Sunlight turned the snow above almost to gold. But the warm glow didn’t reach into the depths of the narrow canyon; even the giant statue of Shiva, standing beneath the overhang, was shrouded in eternal shadow.

Accompanied by Shankarpa and Girilal, and escorted by about half of the guardians, Nina, Eddie and Kit made the laborious ascent to the broad ledge at Shiva’s feet. Nina had the replica key with her, as well as some of her archaeology tools, but she had no idea how much use the latter would be. She suspected the lock was not one that could be picked.

Even in the shade, enough diffuse light came down from above for her to get a good look at the door. The lock was far more complex than she had realised. A circular hole at its centre for the key, five large wheels arranged around it in a pattern resembling a flower - and round their circumferences were smaller ones, twenty in all, the ‘parent’ wheels sharing one with each of their neighbours where they touched.

But the complexity didn’t end there. Each small wheel was divided into three pieces: two eye-shaped sections aligned with the rim of the bigger disc, and a third like the central pinch of an hourglass between them to fill in the rest of the circle. The edge of each ‘eye’ had ten words in Vedic Sanskrit carved into it, the ends of the hourglass another five. Thirty words per disc, twenty discs . . . six hundred words in all.

Somehow, they had to be arranged in the right combination. What that combination might be, Nina had absolutely no idea.

She reached up to one of the large discs, and, after getting a silent nod from Shankarpa, turned it. Metal and stone grated behind the surface, some kind of undulating runner system lifting it - and the smaller discs it carried - outwards as it rotated, just enough to clear the neighbouring wheels before dropping back down into the next position. By turning the smaller discs through a hundred and eighty degrees and then rotating the big wheels, each eye section could be swapped between them and moved to any part of the lock. It was an extremely complicated, but also incredibly clever, piece of ancient engineering.

‘I think I see what you have to do,’ she announced.

‘Glad you do,’ said Eddie, bewildered. ‘I haven’t got a clue. All this Professor Layton crap does my head in.’

‘It’s not that complicated, really.’ She inserted the key into the central hole with the carvings of the Hindu gods facing outwards. ‘See? Five goddesses, five small wheels and five big ones. Presumably, you have to position all the wheels correctly to open the lock. It’s just a matter of figuring out the right combination of these words.’

‘Oh, that all? Doddle.’

‘How many combinations are there?’ Kit asked.

‘Let’s see. Six hundred words, so the factorial of six hundred.’

Shankarpa stepped closer, examining the mechanism in a new light. ‘What does that mean?’

‘The factorial? It’s the number of possible combinations of a number of items. If you had four, the factorial would be four times three times two times one - twenty-four. Five would be five times four times three, and so on - one hundred and twenty.’

Eddie’s brow crinkled as he tried - and immediately failed - to extend the sequence to the puzzle. ‘So six hundred times five nine nine times five nine eight . . . Christ, I can’t even do the first one without my head hurting.’

Nina’s mental arithmetic skills were considerably better. ‘Six hundred times five hundred and ninety-nine is three hundred and fifty-nine thousand four hundred. Multiply that by five hundred and ninety-eight and you get, uh . . .’ She frowned herself as the numbers very rapidly grew beyond even her ability to handle them in her head. ‘Hold on, let me write this down.’

She took a notebook and pen from her pack. But it didn’t take long for her to admit defeat. ‘O-kay. Let me put it this way. If you said a trillion—’

‘There’s a trillion combinations?’ Eddie interrupted. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘I’m not finished. If you said a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, and kept on saying trillion over a hundred times more, that’s how many variations there are. If you tried one combination every second for the five billion years before the sun explodes and destroys the planet, you couldn’t even do one per cent of them.’

‘That’s a bit of an overkill way to open the doors.’

She smiled a little. ‘If something’s too much overkill even for you, it must be bad.’

‘We don’t have five billion years to spare, though. There must be a quicker way.’

‘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