Chapter 20
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Twenty
Adam stalked across the ruddy hills northwest of Ranyapali, his thoughts locked worriedly on the skinny twelve-year-old girl he needed to rescue.
He liked Vanika. He had liked her from the moment she had bounded down the steps of the palace to greet them when they arrived in Nandapur.
He liked that she read cowboy books, traded insults with princes, and eyed his machete like she wanted to try it on for size.
She was a great kid, and Adam had let her walk into the worst kind of trouble while he sat around drinking flower booze with her grandma.
He knew that Vanika had put herself in that dangerous position—hell, she’d been ordered by a damned maharaja not to go any further than the village—but she was a kid. It should have been Adam’s job to make sure she actually listened, and he had screwed that up.
He hadn’t been lying about the advantage he and Ellie had when it came to dealing with Jacobs—but the truth was, Adam would’ve gone after Vanika regardless.
As Adam followed the route Subhas had given him, red earth and scrub gave way to stands of tall, graceful trees clustered around streams that carried the waters of the monsoon into the valley.
Here and there, gaps between the hills revealed glimpses of the deeper forest, thickly green and dancing with shadows.
Ellie hiked at Adam’s heels. Kalb trotted ahead of them, frequently glancing back as though urging them to move faster.
Adam could almost imagine that the dog had some idea of who they were trying to find and wanted to help.
Maybe he even could. Adam hadn’t had much time to try training Kalb, but he was a hunting breed, and hunting breeds usually had great noses.
Certainly, he’d proved himself more than capable of finding things like hidden cats or an abandoned plate of cookies.
“But why didn’t he tell us?” Ellie burst out behind him.
Adam cocked an eyebrow at her in an unspoken reminder that whatever conversation she had been having in her head, she was only just now letting him in on it.
“Neil,” Ellie grumblingly elaborated.
“Your brother was never going to be comfortable with having magical past-seeing abilities,” Adam pointed out.
He had been thinking about Neil’s revelation as well.
After the initial shock, Adam had found himself less surprised than he might have been about the whole business.
In a mad sort of way, it fit. It had always been a bit uncanny how Neil knew stuff about the past. He couldn’t always say where he’d picked up a particular piece of information.
He’d just dismiss it as ‘obvious’ or say that he must have read it in a book.
But some of the stuff Neil came out with had been things even their professors hadn’t known—and they were the guys who wrote the books.
If Neil had some kind of supernatural gift for sensing what was true about history, it would certainly explain a few things. Adam could hardly dismiss the notion out of hand. He’d seen far too much weird stuff over the last few months for that.
“I know he wouldn’t be comfortable with it.” Words spilled out of Ellie now as she hiked in Adam’s wake. “But he still might have told me.”
“Have you told him you’re carrying Tulan around in your head?”
“No,” Ellie admitted tightly, and then rushed to explain. “It isn’t that I don’t trust him. I just hardly understand what’s happening myself. How can I strike up a conversation—one where he’s sure to have a hundred questions—about a subject that’s still an infuriating mystery to me?”
“You and your brother have a lot in common,” Adam commented softly and significantly.
Ellie let out a frustrated sigh. “You’re right. It’s wrong of me to take it personally. But… we might’ve helped each other.”
“You still can. You will, once we get through all this.”
“But that’s three of us now who can do things that ought to be impossible. Does that mean the whole world is full of… of…” Ellie pressed a hand to her temple. “I don’t even know what word to use for it! I don’t know if there is a word.”
Adam frowned thoughtfully. “Someone’s gotta know.”
Ellie’s focus sharpened. “What do you mean?”
“All this stuff isn’t coming out of nowhere. These magic trinkets we’ve been stumbling across are all talked about in the old myths and stories. It just turns out they weren’t as made up as we thought they were.”
He took a step closer to her, reading the frustration, worry, and hope roiling behind her hazel eyes.
“Those old stories were full of people who could do crazy stuff as well. Maybe that part wasn’t all made up, either.
And if that’s true—if this has been going on the whole time—you can’t be the first person to have figured that out. ”
Ellie looked dizzy. “You mean… someone might’ve written a book about it?”
Adam laughed. “Hell, I don’t know, Princess. Maybe? Or maybe they’re still out there working on it. I just can’t think how you’d be the only one.”
Ellie paced along the path. Adam could practically see her mind whirling.
“But why do some people have these abilities and not others? Are they always there, or do they pop up somewhere along the way during one’s lifetime?
Of course, there must be a difference between how someone like Jacobs or Neil came to do what they do, and me, with it all starting from touching the Smoking Mirror…
and what about the mirror? How does a power like that come to exist?
How on earth does one manufacture a flaming sword? Where did all these arcana come from?”
“I can’t even begin to tell you.” Adam repressed the urge to smile.
“But you think somebody can.”
Adam shrugged. “Feels like a reasonable assumption.”
“But how would we ever find them?”
Adam could see how much the question meant to her. He pushed a loose curl of hair back from her cheek—and waited, because he knew there was more she still needed to say.
She drew in a deep, unsteady breath. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this… this place that’s living inside me.”
“Then we’ll find out,” Adam vowed to her. “You and me. Together. Whatever that means. Got that?”
Her eyes were wide with feeling as she nodded.
Adam couldn’t help himself. He leaned down for a kiss, soft and gentle like the seal of a promise.
“Now let’s go get that damned kid,” he declared.
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Adam smelled the river before he saw it, the distinct aroma of wet stone and mud carrying through the thick heat of the afternoon. Sound came next in a soft rush of moving water.
Kalb stiffened, quivering. Adam quickly snatched hold of his collar as a new noise emerged from the low susurration of the water—a number of men calling back and forth to each other from a short distance away.
Adam crouched down in the thick ferns that grew between the slender trees. He gave Kalb’s ears a scratch. “Good boy. Now stay here.”
“That dog has absolutely no idea how to stay,” Ellie warned him.
Kalb sat, panting at them with a blankly waiting expression.
“See?” Adam murmured back.
He crept forward through the underbrush, keeping low. A few yards further, the land dropped steeply away in a muddy cliff. Adam lowered himself to his belly and snaked forward until he could see over the edge of it—which thankfully wasn’t terribly high off the ground.
The river lay before him, a softly curving band of gray water roughly twenty yards across. The surface was smooth, but Adam could tell that the water was running fast, fueled by the rains. In places, it already flooded over the banks.
There would have been no swimming it safely even if there hadn’t been an Indian Army platoon working just below.
The detachment numbered around thirty, which was more than enough to mean trouble. They all wore turbans, which were standard issue for Indian Army sepoys. The beards on all their faces weren’t, signaling to Adam that he was probably looking at a Sikh company.
The men were building a pontoon bridge using lumber from the riverbank. Two sections already extended out into the water. A third would get them the rest of the way across.
With a hissing rush, a tree collapsed below Adam’s perch. A handful of the soldiers efficiently attacked it with axes and saws.
Ellie wriggled into place beside him, a streak of mud marring the freckles on her nose. “Do you see Borthwick?”
“Not yet.”
“What about Jacobs? Or Vanika?”
Adam made another scan of the band of men—and suppressed a sigh. “Found her… with another old friend.”
Vanika stood near the back of the operation, her arms crossed over her chest with an air of forceful confidence. Beside her, Professor Dawson fanned himself with his pith helmet, his skin ruddy with heat over his ginger beard.
Adam could hear his distinctive whining complaints from all the way up on the hill.
He made a quick assessment of the rest of the uniformed bodies working below. “We can’t get to the kid in the middle of all this. We’ll need to follow them until they set up camp for the night.”
“That means getting over the river. Any chance we could sneak across their bridge?”
Adam thought of what he knew of Colonel Charles Borthwick—and of Jacobs. “Doubt it.”
“Subhas mentioned that the Adrija had a crossing.”
“Then let’s go see what we’re dealing with.”
Adam guided Ellie back from the drop. Kalb still waited, quivering with the effort it took to remain sitting. At the sight of them, the dog let out a groaning, eloquent whine.
“Good boy,” Adam said, rubbing his ears.
Kalb leaped up to trot after them.
Adam studied the landscape, his mind automatically mapping the way they’d come against the directions Subhas had given him back in the village. Game trail… level ridge… dry streambed…
He led Ellie and the dog up the river, then picked their way down another slope, pushing past a stand of wild sugarcane to bring the water back into view.