The Sacred Vault

by Andy McDermott

  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 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 one.

  After five minutes, one more turn brought the last wheel into alignment. ‘Okay, almost done!’ she said. Now that all five were in position, she could turn them to line up the individual words. Kali was already paired with the word ‘death’, and one by one she turned the others. Shakti, Uma, Durga . . . and finally Parvati.

  Another breathless silence . . .

  And again, nothing happened.

  ‘Buggeration and fuckery,’
she muttered.

  Eddie gave her a surprised look, then drew back to check the rest of the door, aware that the guardians were now watching him more mistrustfully than ever. ‘There’s not a handle we’re supposed to turn?’

  ‘This is all there is,’ said Shankarpa.

  ‘Try another combination,’ Kit suggested, urgency entering his voice as he nervously regarded the men surrounding them. ‘Shakti might be “motherhood”, not Uma.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll make any difference,’ said Nina. They had overlooked something. But what?

  Shankarpa interrupted her thoughts, pushing her back from the door. ‘You have failed.’

  ‘Wait a minute, mate,’ Eddie said, moving towards him - only to have several sharp blades raised to his neck. ‘She’s good at this stuff, but even she doesn’t always get it first time. I once nearly fell into a pit full of spikes ’cause she couldn’t tell her left from her right.’

  ‘Way to make me look competent to the impatient guys with swords, Eddie,’ Nina muttered.

  Other guardians threatened Kit with their weapons. At Shankarpa’s command, they forced the three visitors towards the edge of the ledge. Girilal protested, but his son angrily dismissed him.

  ‘If you kill us, you’ll be fucked when Khoil’s people turn up,’ growled Eddie.

  ‘We will deal with them as we will deal with you,’ Shankarpa promised. ‘Shiva will protect us.’

  ‘Shiva,’ Nina whispered. That was the clue! Something about Shiva had been literally staring her in the face the whole time she worked on the lock. ‘It’s Shiva! I know how to open the door!’

  Shankarpa’s condescension was clear. ‘And perhaps you also know how to fly off this ledge. It is the only thing that will save you now.’

  ‘No, no, look!’ She pointed at the statue towering over them. ‘Look at Shiva! Look at his head!’

  The certainty in her voice made him hesitate. Holding up a hand to signal the others to stop, he glanced at the colossal stone figure. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Nina said desperately. ‘It’s tilted to one side!’