Chapter 29
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Twenty-Nine
Wild fascination mingled with an aching sense of regret as Neil moved through the ruined city.
He ought to have been surveying all of it one square foot at a time, studying old road beds and looking for signs of agricultural manipulation of the landscape.
Could he pick out remnants of civic infrastructure?
Maybe a hint of a municipal water system?
A municipal water system would be deeply enticing.
The mossy structures were rich with the promise of all they could teach him about the people who had lived in this place centuries before. He picked out the distinctive foundation imprint of a granary. Another cluster of buildings likely indicated a family compound.
Those were normal, rational leaps of intuition for someone who had trained for over a decade in how to recognize the patterns of previous habitation.
Other leaps of intuition weren’t quite so rational—like how Neil knew that lotus blossoms used to grow in the ruined artificial pond that stood beside an overgrown orchard.
He smelled sandalwood. Heard a woman’s laugh carry to him on the breeze.
Neil told himself that it could all be his imagination, even as a chill danced up the skin of his arms.
He rubbed at the goosebumps—then whirled at a sound from behind him like the bark of a hoarse, angry duck.
A monkey perched on one of the nearby branches. It coughed at him again, glaring with irritation from a small black face surrounded by soft gray fur.
Constance’s eyes widened with delight. “He’s adorable!”
She and Neil were alone on an overgrown road. Subhas’s men had spread out to cover the rest of the ruins.
“I believe he’s trying to threaten us,” Neil theorized uncomfortably.
“Do you have any snacks in your pockets?” Constance pressed, ignoring his concern. “I want to make friends.”
The langur snorted, then swung away through the leaves.
Neil glimpsed a flash of mossy gray stone through the shifting branches. He pushed through the brush and found himself in front of a simple one-story structure roughly the size of a carriage house, flat-roofed and fronted by a low portico.
Rich vegetation sprawled up the sides of the building, obscuring much of the carvings that decorated the stone facade. Sal trees grew thickly to either side, the air scented with their blooms.
The monkey sat on top of the entrance, flicking its tail with disapproval.
“Stuffy, there are more monkeys here.”
Neil hurriedly searched the trees around him with a jolt of nerves at the notion of running into an entire troop of irritable simians.
“Not there—on the building!” Constance corrected.
Neil peered past the foliage and realized that the small structure was decorated much like the torana, with loads of langurs gamboling and leaping across the surface of the stone.
Constance looked from the weathered bas-reliefs to the live animal glaring at them from above the portico. “I think he wants us to go in.”
Neil assessed the entrance to the building with a twinge of unease. The interior was shadowed with gloom, obscuring whatever lay within—which couldn’t be much.
“Aren’t we supposed to be hunting for the Waters of the Son of the Wind?” he pushed back weakly, recalling the clues from the manuscript that had led them to the ruins.
The langur barked impatiently and sprang away.
Constance strolled inside.
Neil hurried after her with a dart of alarm. “Connie, you shouldn’t enter these structures until they’ve been properly assessed for stability…”
His words trailed off as he pushed through the gloom—and realized what lay on the other side.
Where the back wall should have been lay the opening to a stone-walled staircase that descended into a steep channel in the earth. Arched arcades braced the walls in cake-like layers. Green vines spilled down over the lip of the ground. Cool air wafted up strangely from the obscure depths ahead.
“It’s so lovely!” Constance’s voice was softly breathless as she gazed at the narrow, haunted descent.
Neil’s mind spun with scholarly fascination.
“But all of this is deliberate! Think of the pressure that must be pushing in on all of this at the soil levels—that’s why they built all those arches.
They’re systematically designed to hold everything in place.
Have you any idea the complexity of that sort of engineering?
And all of this must have been designed nearly a thousand years ago!
“The engineering is very nice,” Constance conceded. “But now let’s see where it all goes.”
She tugged him onto the stairs. Soft light alternated with deeper shadow as they passed under the stacked arches.
Moss clung to the walls. Small flowers and ferns grew tenaciously from the cracks in the mortar.
The heat of the day faded, replaced by a cool stillness that whispered of damp and smelled of ancient stone.
They passed under another tower of arcades, and Neil craned his neck back to see the layers climb four stories to the distant ground above.
“The calculations that must have been involved…” he wondering wistfully, itching for a theodolite and a measuring tape.
The stairwell fell into a tunnel carved through solid bedrock. Neil tore his attention from the marvels overhead to follow Constance inside. Gloom fell over him and then receded as the tunnel ended—and they reached their destination.
Neil found himself at the base of a shaft cut into the earth. It soared up to a distant square of light dimmed by the far green leaves of the trees. Galleries lined the space at each level, ornately carved pillars framing shadowy recesses carved into the stone.
At his feet, a few short steps led down to a landing that ringed a deep pool of still, green-tinted water.
Old readings burst back to life in Neil’s brain, filling him with both recognition and a wild sense of wonder.
“Municipal water systems!” he burst out, his voice choked with excitement.
“What’s that?” Constance frowned at him from where she was making her way around the lower gallery, examining the structure.
Neil waved his hand at the towering shaft. “It’s a stepwell! We’re standing in a stepwell!”
Constance’s eyes flashed with amusement. “You’re going to have to elaborate on that, Stuffy.”
Neil quickly circled the pool as he craned his neck at the distant opening overhead. “They’re meant to provide access to water during times of drought. Indians have been building them since ancient times, but I’ve never actually seen one before, only read about them.”
A quick flapping sounded from behind him.
Neil whirled toward it, nearly losing his footing and tumbling into the water.
He managed to right himself as a sparrow darted out of the shadows of the gallery.
The bird made a frantic circle of the well before disappearing between the pillars of the upper level.
Something about the shadows where the bird had emerged tugged at Neil’s attention. He moved closer, and a figure emerged from the gloom.
Neil startled, his hand automatically flailing for his sword until he realized that he wasn’t looking at an intruder but rather a shape carved from pale gray stone.
The statue was straight and still, its hands pressed together over its chest in a gesture of prayer.
The stone form was decorated with carved beaded bracelets, armbands, and necklaces, but it was the distinctive features of its face that made Neil’s eyes go wide with surprise.
They reminded him of the irritable langur that had guided them to this place—with the wise gaze and rounded jaw of a monkey.
“Oh, it’s Hanuman!” Constance darted over for a better look. “He must be here to mind the well. He’s meant to be very devoted and courageous because of how loyal he was to Lord Rama.”
Neil pulled up what he could recall about the god. He had been Rama’s companion, as close as a brother to him, standing by his side and lending aid throughout Rama’s quest to free his wife from the demon Ravana.
But Hanuman had also turned out to possess supernatural powers of his own, thanks to his unknown history as the…
“Son of the Wind!” Neil blurted out.
“Are you cursing?” Constance prodded.
“No…” Neil stammered. “I’m talking about Hanuman—in the Ramayana. It’s some sort of divine conception, which is most likely a metaphor for—”
“Stuffy,” Constance warned.
“Vayu, the wind god. That’s Hanuman’s father. He’s the Son of the Wind.”
“This is it, then!” Constance bounced with excitement. “The Waters of the Son of the Wind! This is where we’ll find the next clue!”
“But what are we looking for?” Neil asked as he studied the softly gloomy hollow of the well. His voice sounded loud against the deep silence that surrounded the still green water.
“Someplace where nobility of spirit is never untouchable.”
“How on earth are we supposed to know what that means?” Neil grumbled.
Constance didn’t answer. Instead, her gaze fell to Neil’s shoulders—then drifted down his chest.
Neil glanced down at his shirt and waistcoat. They didn’t appear any filthier than they had that morning. The shirt just clung to him more closely, slightly damp with the humidity.
“Is there something on my…” he began.
Constance’s eyes jerked back up. She blinked at him innocently. “Hmm?”
A bizarre theory burst into Neil’s mind. Had she just been distracted by him?
The idea was frankly ludicrous. Why would the fiercely gorgeous, blazingly confident Constance Tyrrell have been distracted by the sight of Neil Fairfax in a slightly sweaty shirt?
“I’ll just look around,” he hurriedly suggested.
“Good idea,” Constance agreed. “Keep your eye out for any secret passages.”
“Secret passages? What on earth would those even look like?”
“You’ll know one when you see it,” Constance assured him.
Neil slowly circled the gallery. The pillars were silent sentinels keeping watch over the still water. They framed a deeply shadowed recess cut out from the stone, likely intended as a place where visitors to the well could rest and cool off on hot summer days.