Chapter 23 #2
Singh Rao led him across the camp to another tent, smaller than the structures being used as barracks for the men but bigger than the two-man canvas that had been loaned to Adam and Ellie. The interior was simply furnished with a bedroll, lantern, and folding camp desk.
Borthwick waved Adam over to the desk as they arrived. “You said you’re handy with a map, Mr. Bates. Where would you say we are at the moment?”
Adam studied the inked lines on the unrolled paper. Much of the territory had been only loosely surveyed, perhaps by way of a ridge expedition mapping the various peaks. Everything between would be a guess.
With the ease of years of experience, Adam fitted the undulating lines of the hills into his brain. Even before he’d gone to British Honduras, he’d been good at matching a landscape to paper.
He instinctively picked out the Adrija village by the distinct curves in the topography and was relieved to find the location unmarked. His study moved to the river, and beyond that through the loosely mapped region of the forest.
He set down a finger. “Here.”
Borthwick exchanged a significant look with Singh Rao. “Quite on the nose of what we’d calculated,” he said with a note of approval. “And the subedar was actively tracking our progress. You weren’t bragging about your surveying skills.”
Adam wanted to shrug off the compliment. His father would’ve scolded him for that.
He kept his shoulders stiff.
“Now, why don’t we see where we’re going next?” Borthwick mused.
He gestured to one of the two sepoys at the door of the tent. Adam heard a quick order in Punjabi, and a moment later, another soldier stepped inside, marching Vanika with him.
Vanika’s eyes flicked to Adam and narrowed to a glare.
At least he wouldn’t have to worry about Borthwick thinking that he and the kid were on the same side.
Borthwick paced around the table as he regarded the girl. “Tell me, then—where is the next leg of our route?”
Vanika raised her chin confidently as she answered him. “We follow the base of the ridge for half a day’s walk. Then turn to the west, between the two streams.”
As lies went, it wasn’t bad. Vanika’s gaze never wavered. Adam might’ve even have bought the bluff himself—if he hadn’t caught the subtle hint of gloating behind her expression.
“What do you think, Mr. Bates?” Borthwick asked without looking away from the kid. “Will the girl’s directions take us where we need to go?”
Singh Rao studied the map. The subedar’s expression was unreadable, sheathed in the unimpeachable professionalism the man wore like another part of his uniform.
The ground seemed to shift under Adam’s boots, turning treacherous. “I don’t know what you’re looking for.”
“Join the Lord of the Dance on the ridge that points to the dawn of the longest day,” Borthwick recited.
“Uh-huh.” Adam kept his tone neutral.
“You won’t find it marked on the map,” Borthwick continued, “but I would still be interested in your general impressions.”
Vanika didn’t so much as glance at Adam. She didn’t need to. She was perfectly confident that Adam would confirm her route.
Why wouldn’t he? She had led him out from Nandapur expressly to help stop Borthwick.
She had no reason to suspect that Adam would do anything else.
Singh Rao stepped back from the map, making more room for Adam at the desk.
Adam’s guts twisted. Hell.
Without wanting to, his brain instinctively mapped Vanika’s directions against the contours of the landscape. They led to a real place… but not one that matched anything in the clue from Tulsidas’s manuscript.
The kid was deliberately guiding the colonel and his soldiers astray.
Borthwick and Singh Rao might not have put it together. If Adam confirmed Vanika’s route, they could follow it, putting them miles out of the way—and clearing a path for Subhas and his team to get to the Brahmastra first.
But there was also a damned good possibility that Singh Rao had seen the same thing Adam had in the map—and that all of this was just another test.
Adam had gambled for some high stakes before. Hell, he’d even sought them out—but not like this.
His heart clenched as he made the call.
“She’s taking you the wrong way.”
He could see the moment Vanika’s confidence shattered, along with her trust. Stark betrayal twisted across her face, followed by a wrench of fear.
She might’ve been punching above her weight, but she was still a child—a twelve-year-old kid who stood in a room full of people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.
And her bluff had just been called by the one person she’d thought was on her side.
I’m going to get you out of here. Adam willed the thought at her, but how could she possibly understand it? He couldn’t let any of it show on his face.
As far as Vanika was concerned, Adam was no better than the man he was pretending to be. The line between that awful fiction and reality grayed inside of him, and Adam felt sick.
“He’s lying!” Vanika protested.
“Why don’t we see who’s lying?” Borthwick casually replied.
With a flick of his thumb, he loosened the whip at his belt.
Adam’s throat closed.
He knew what a stock whip could do. When he was seventeen, he had spent some time at a ranch in Marin—one of his father’s many investments.
He had never been happier in his life than when he was riding with the herders across the hills.
The men had all carried whips in case of a stampede because the crack of the poppers could help direct fear-mad cattle away from danger.
Adam had once seen an overzealous rider use his whip to strike an angry bull. The flail had ripped open the beast’s hide like a surgeon’s blade.
The man had been let go, but Adam had never forgotten what that injury had looked like.
And a bull had a damned thick hide.
Borthwick unfurled the leather coil.
Singh Rao’s eyes dropped to where the braided length slapped the ground, and for just a moment, a flash of disapproval cracked through the man’s cool facade.
The subedar pulled the feeling back behind his mask, directing his gaze forward.
Singh Rao wore a sidearm on his belt next to a sheathed dagger. The two soldiers at the door both held rifles.
Borthwick had the whip.
Four men, all armed, stood against Adam and one skinny twelve-year-old girl. Even with his machete, he would be shot as soon as he moved, and it still wouldn’t save the kid—but he couldn’t stand there and watch Vanika get flayed. He couldn’t.
Borthwick used the handle of the whip to push up Vanika’s chin, forcing her to look at him. “Do you know what this is?”
Angry, frightened tears streaked down Vanika’s cheeks. She nodded.
“Answer me,” Borthwick ordered.
“Yes,” Vanika replied, her voice shaking.
Adam’s hands clenched on the frame of the desk.
“You’re going to tell us where we need to go.” Borthwick continued smoothly. “Because I’m going to show you what happens when you try to get the better of me.”
Fear and anger knotted tighter as Adam’s sense of desperation rose.
Paper crinkled under his grip.
The map.
There was one way Adam could stop Borthwick’s sadistic lesson—besides throwing his body into the path of it, which would only delay the inevitable.
He could make it unnecessary.
Subhas Kōnja had known where the clue from the manuscript pointed, but Adam hadn’t bothered to press him for directions, focusing on his own mission. He inwardly cursed himself for that now as he traced the blue curves of the topography, urgency pounding through his skull.
The ridge that points to the dawn of the longest day.
Sunrise on the summer solstice… here in the Northern Hemisphere, that meant the sun’s furthest northern point of rise before shifting back east with the shortening of the days.
Odisha and Chhattisgarh sat at a similar latitude to British Honduras, so Adam knew pretty damned well where the sun would rise on a sultry late June morning.
The change in the topography of the mountains was subtle, just a slight variation in the contour at the top of one of the low, rambling peaks. A little jut of land pointed like an arrow ten degrees north of due east… right where Adam needed it to.
Borthwick ran his hand along the length of the whip, his eyes on the girl. “Shall we, then?”
He made it sound like an invitation to dance.
Adam couldn’t worry about all the problems he was causing for himself. He would deal with that later.
Right now, all he could do was act.
“It’s here,” Adam announced loudly, setting his finger on the paper. “The ridge that points to the dawn of the longest day.”
Borthwick glanced back at Adam with mild surprise.
Singh Rao stepped forward to study the map.
Shock widened Vanika’s eyes. With an uncomfortable lurch, Adam realized that she stood in exactly the same spot.
She hadn’t tried to run or hide from Borthwick’s threatened violence.
It would have been futile to try—but thinking of the courage it must have taken to face Borthwick with defiance and dignity instead made Adam’s chest hurt.
Singh Rao gave Borthwick a nod.
The colonel’s steel gaze shifted to Adam. “Useful skills indeed, Mr. Bates.”
Adam forced himself to bury his rage, fear, and guilt behind a facade of bored indifference. “You might still need the girl after you get there. And she’ll be easier to transport if she’s uninjured.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Borthwick mildly agreed. “So long as we’ve made our point clear.”
With a flick of his wrist, the whip snapped out.
Adam took an instinctive, desperate step forward—even as he realized it would be futile. He could never reach her in time.
The flail snapped a breath away from Vanika’s face, cracking like a gunshot through the claustrophobic space of the tent.
Vanika flinched at the sound—and choked out a brief, heart-wrenching sob.
Borthwick assessed her reaction coldly. “It would seem that we have.”
Singh Rao’s gaze fell to Adam’s right foot—which lay one betraying pace ahead of the other.
Adam’s pulse ratcheted up. It had to be patently obvious that he’d been on the verge of intervening.
He waited for Singh Rao to call it out. Whatever personal dislike the subedar might have for the notion of whipping a child, he was still an officer—someone who’d been trained and sworn to strict notions of duty.
With an unreadable expression, Singh Rao looked away. “We can be on the ridge Mr. Bates indicated by early tomorrow afternoon.”
Borthwick’s icy gray stare still pinned Vanika in place. “Make it noon.”
“Yes, sir,” Singh Rao acknowledged briskly.
With an easy twist of his wrist, Borthwick coiled back up the whip. He gestured dismissively to the sepoys at the door. “Take her out of here. See that she’s watched.”
Singh Rao repeated the order in Punjabi. The men dragged Vanika from the tent. The girl didn’t resist—except to throw one last terrible look back at Adam, tears tracking down her cheeks.
Adam barely realized that he had started to follow, drawn after Vanika as his heart ached with the need to try to fix what he’d just broken.
Borthwick’s voice stopped him.
“Mr. Bates.”
Adam tore his eyes from the slight figure dwarfed by the soldiers at her sides. He forced himself to turn to where the colonel waited within the tent.
“Join me for dinner,” Borthwick invited.
Every cell in Adam’s body rebelled against the idea. A thousand responses flooded his brain, from thin excuses to shouts of outrage.
He couldn’t say any of them.
Because he was George Bates’s son.
“Sounds great,” Adam replied instead.
Something shriveled up inside of him like a dying leaf, and Adam walked back inside.