The Sacred Vault

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.’

‘Glad my mum wasn’t that strict,’ Eddie said.

‘So, the word representing Kali is “death”,’ said Nina. ‘Okay, we have to get the segment with the word “death” on it around to the wheel next to Kali, and then line it up with her. Let’s see . . .’

She turned the appropriate large wheel, bringing the smaller disc to the position where it was shared with an adjoining wheel. A half-turn of the little disc switched the eye section on to the new carrier; two turns anticlockwise brought it to a third large wheel, and a final anticlockwise move placed it next to the key. Nina rotated the small wheel to align the word with the goddess. There was a moment of almost comical silence as the onlookers all held their breath, but nothing happened.

‘I suppose it was too much to hope that we’d hear a big click,’ she said. ‘What are the other words?’

Several minutes of debate produced - more or less - a consensus. Parvati was represented by the word ‘love’. While Uma prompted some argument over whether she, Parvati or Shakti best fit the term, she was eventually agreed to embody ‘motherhood’. Shakti herself was attributed with ‘femininity’ - though as Girilal pointed out with a smile, the word could also be interpreted as ‘sexuality’. Finally, Durga, the fearless warrior, was ‘invincible’.

With Kali’s part of the combination already in place, the task now was to bring the other pieces to where they belonged. Nina took a step back, puzzling out the sequence of turns needed to bring everything into the right place. There was a certain Rubik’s Cube quality to the task, as without careful planning, moving one word into position at the centre could carry another away.

But she was sure she could do it.

Snow was rubbed into the chosen words to mark them, so all Nina had to do was switch them from wheel to wheel to bring them into the correct positions, then rotate the smaller discs to line up the precise word with each goddess. In an odd way, she realised as she worked, she was almost enjoying herself. Shankarpa and the other guardians didn’t seem any better disposed to her, and there was the looming threat that helicopters laden with armed men could thunder overhead at any moment, but the immediate challenge was a purely intellectual