Chapter 29 #2
Constance poked her head into an opening cut into the wall on the far side. “I think I found the stairs to the upper level.”
She ducked inside.
Neil started to follow her—and realized another doorway stood in the stone behind the Hanuman statue. He slipped around the god to peer inside, where he could barely make out a narrow alcove carved into the stone
“There’s something here too, but I can’t see it very well,” he called up.
Constance stepped onto the gallery above him. “Stuffy, you have a flaming sword.”
“Oh! Right.”
Fighting back a now-habitual sense of unease, Neil drew Dyrnwyn from the scabbard on his back.
Cool, silent flames bloomed up its length.
Neil stood in a space a little bigger than a dressing room. A stone bench along the far wall suggested it might have been a more private retiring room, perhaps for members of the local nobility.
The walls were richly decorated with bas-relief carvings. Dyrnwyn’s flames danced over a warrior fighting a pack of wolves, a crowned goddess riding a dolphin… and a couple tangled in a frankly erotic embrace.
Constance poked her head around Hanuman’s form to peer inside. “See anything interesting?”
Neil dropped the sword, plunging them into gloom.
“You were upstairs,” he blurted out desperately.
“Yes,” Constance returned with exaggerated patience. “And then you told me you’d found a secret room.”
“It’s nothing,” Neil asserted quickly. “Everything’s fine.”
He could just make out Constance’s skeptically arched eyebrow in the gloom and felt himself start to sweat. “Not that it wouldn’t be fine. It’s just a closet. And then I dropped my sword. Because you surprised me.”
“Are you going to pick it up again?” Constance asked with careful patience, shadow cloaking the details of her expression.
The bas-relief from the wall blazed through Neil’s brain—of a woman’s head turned back for a kiss while the fellow behind her lifted her leg and…
“Please no,” he pleaded, and then winced. “I mean—I will. In a minute. After I… cool off.”
“Uh-huh,” Constance returned skeptically.
To Neil’s infinite relief, she moved away.
He waited for her to step back out into the well, then yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and used it to safely retrieve Dyrnwyn, shoving it back into the scabbard.
Darting past Hanuman, he leaned against the wall and gave a shaking sigh of relief.
Constance studied the carvings on a pillar nearby. “Aren’t some of these scenes from the Ramayana?”
Neil joined her as she moved between the columns, pointing out scenes from the famous story.
“The stringing of Shiva’s bow,” she listed. “The betrayal of Kaikeyi. Exile into the forest.”
Her fingers brushed against the stone garments of a woman who lingered behind Rama at the edge of the trees, her body partially obscured by his own.
Constance named her. “Sita.”
The uncertain note in her voice finally wrenched Neil’s attention from his own mortification. “Why do you say it like that?”
Constance threw him a slightly rueful look. “Oh, it’s nothing. Only that I’ve always thought Sita was a bit useless. Letting her husband be exiled. Getting herself kidnapped. Sitting around waiting for him to come and rescue her. But…”
Her expression was uncharacteristically solemn in the soft, deep light of the well as she traced the lines of the thousand-year-old carvings. “Aai reminded me that there’s always more to the story for women. Things we have to hide because the world isn’t ready for everything that we really are.”
Something tightened inside Neil’s chest at her words.
He thought of all the things that Constance had to hide from the world. Her dreams of a life of adventure and purpose. Her courage and audacity. The part of her heritage that was woven into the marvel of engineering that surrounded him.
How much more might there be that he hadn’t even discovered yet?
The degree to which she lived as her true self in the face of relentless opposition frankly awed him—and a new feeling unfurled inside of him in response.
It was bigger than awe, and Neil recognized that it was far more dangerous, even as he struggled to put a name to it. The feeling bloomed until he felt as though he would crack open if he didn’t find a way to let it out. But what could he possibly say?
That he wanted to know everything—all the dreams and hopes and fears she kept hidden inside herself. That she was magnificent. That if the world was too small for her, it should get out of her bloody way.
And like that, the careful stories Neil had been telling himself for the last several weeks splintered, shivering away like the walls of Jericho falling to the cry of the trumpets. Destruction stripped him bare, leaving only a raw and undeniable truth in the place where his defenses had been.
One that he knew very well how to name.
She was an endless night in a labyrinthine library. A pyramid complex rife with secrets. A world that Neil wanted to explore in all its stunning depth until he lost himself inside of it.
This wasn’t just lust. This was something else—something that electrified him with terror.
He was her fake fiancé. At some point in the not-so distant future, they would have to find a way to break that off—and where would that leave them? Could they possibly find some way to save their friendship in the face of that?
Two months ago, the notion of being Constance’s friend would have sent him running for the hills in fear of having his site reports set on fire.
That friendship had become desperately important to him. It was still important—even if it had also grown dangerously complicated.
He knew Constance cared about him, but he was just Stuffy to her—Ellie’s stick-in-the-mud brother with his nose stuck in books and his head full of dead languages.
And if he gave voice to this reeling, dizzying epiphany welling up inside of him, who would he be then?
Just another person demanding more from Constance than she wanted to give.
I can’t, he thought desperately. I won’t.
Constance had moved to one of the pillars beside Hanuman, oblivious to the tumult silently raging through Neil’s heart. Her brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Hold on. Isn’t this Shabari?”
“Shabari?” The word came out in a croak.
“Here—look.”
She tugged him over by his sleeve. In the carvings on the column, Neil identified the figure of Rama by the noble lines of his face and the mala necklace draped over his bare chest. He could feel the hero’s stoic endurance across the thousand years since the artist had set his chisel to the stone.
A woman knelt beside him, her face weathered with her advanced years. She held an offering out to Rama in humble hands, her head bowed with reverence.
Constance brushed her finger over the aged figure.
“This one happened while he was on his quest to save Sita after she was kidnapped by Ravana. You can see Shabari here giving Rama berries, but Lakshmana tells Rama not to take them. He says the berries are tainted because Shabari had tasted them—she’d done that to make sure that she only gave him the ones that were sweetest. Only Rama accepts them anyway because they’ve been offered with love.
” She shook Neil’s arm with excitement. “Neil, Shabari was a low-caste woman. She would have been considered…”
“Untouchable,” Neil filled in. “Where nobility of spirit is never untouchable. You’re right, Connie. You found it.”
Constance frowned irritably. “Only I have poked all over this carving, and not one bit of it serves as a trigger to open a secret tunnel.”
Subhas’s voice sounded from behind them. “Secret tunnel?”
Neil turned to see the Adrija leader watching them wryly from the other side of the well.
“There aren’t any secret tunnels,” Constance complained. “But we did find the next clue.”
Subhas circled the gallery to join them. He studied the carving thoughtfully. “It’s damaged.”
He was right. A fragment of the pillar had sheared off, lost to an ancient fault in the material. A pair of carved mountains framed whatever piece of the story had fallen away.
“Maybe the carving itself is the clue, telling us where to go next,” Constance mused. “But does that mean the path to the astra isn’t here anymore?”
“That might be for the best.” Subhas met Neil’s astonished look. “If the clue is gone, Borthwick can’t find it. This artifact of yours could just stay hidden forever.”
Subhas was probably right. Maybe it was for the best if the secret of the Brahmastra remained hidden forever… even if Neil’s heart ached at the sense of a mystery only half unfolded.
A subtle sound broke through his thoughts, soft as a whisper.
Tap.
Neil looked up. The sparrow he had startled earlier was perched on the upper gallery. It blinked down at him, head cocked, and returned to pecking at the stone.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound changed in Neil’s awareness, shifting in tone and location.
He thought of tiny chips of stone dusting the ground at the base of the pillar. The notion was whimsical, entirely out of context with what was going on around him, but it struck him with a particular itching intensity… one that Neil was starting to recognize.
His gaze swung back to the carving of Rama and the Untouchable woman, snagging on the blank space above their heads where the pillar had been damaged.
The itch turned into a buzz like a hundred boxed-up bees.
“Something changed,” Neil blurted.
The sparrow pecked at the upper gallery again. Neil heard the sound like the snap of a chisel against stone.
“What do you mean, Stuffy?” Constance prodded gently.
Neil stared helplessly at the pillar as the feeling grew stronger. “Something changed about the carving.”
“Part of it fell off,” Subhas reminded him with a hint of mischief.
“No,” Neil bit back sharply. “Not that. Before.”
Subhas arched a surprised brow.
Constance’s eyes widened. “You’re doing it right now, aren’t you? Using your magic.”
“I’m not… It isn’t...” Neil twisted between his complete discomfort with the word and the undeniable truth that rang through him like a struck tuning fork.
The tapping echoed in his ears, hollow and relentless.
Neil gritted his teeth.
A warm hand closed over his own. He looked down, startled to see Constance’s fingers entwined with his.
“It’s all right, Neil,” she softly assured him. “No one here is going to judge you for it.”
He met her steady gaze and knew that at least part of that was true. Constance would never judge him for what he was. She’d soak it all up with curiosity, wonder, and a childlike excitement.
Subhas’s expression was less reassuring, but his skepticism fell into a tired look of chagrin. “Just… do your thing.”
Neil faced the missing piece of the carving. “I still don’t know what that is, exactly.”
“Try saying whatever comes into your head,” Constance suggested.
How could that possibly be enough? It felt mad… but so was all of this.
Neil closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and let the words spill out.
“Bas-relief works in ancient India weren’t painted the way they were in the Mediterranean regions. Sculptures like these were intended as devotional and teaching aids more than decor.”
Blurting out the ephemera of years of random books and journal articles probably hadn’t been what Constance had in mind—but she’d told him to say whatever popped into his brain.
Helpless and slightly desperate, Neil kept going.
“The Ramayana was a religious tale meant to instill a sense of wonder at the power of the gods while also teaching the principles of dharma, or one’s proper path in the universe, with Rama’s actions serving as a model for righteous living.
And there was something else between those mountains. ”
He stopped, thrown by his own words.
“What do you mean? What was between the mountains?” Constance prompted.
Subhas watched them thoughtfully.
Neil studied the two peaks that framed the missing piece of the carving. They were roughly but not precisely even in height, lower in profile like the rambling slopes of the ridge that framed the valley.
He shook his head, feeling dizzy.
Something between the mountains…
An image popped to life in his mind like a jack-in-the-box.
“Horns?” Neil burst out.
He felt like a lunatic… even as his instincts sang with recognition.
“Horns,” he forced himself to say again as he followed the thread, the image burning more brightly inside his brain. “They’re poking up out of the ground. Enormous, curving horns. Wait…” He caught himself, frowning. “It’s not just horns. It’s…”
The word that floated to his lips sent a chill over his skin.
“Bones,” he finished awkwardly. “It’s a valley of giant bones.”
Subhas’s face blanked with shock. He looked from the sheared piece of stone to Neil. “None of that is here.”
Neil rubbed a tired hand over his face. “I know how it must sound.”
“But you recognize it,” Constance filled in cannily. “What Neil described—it’s a real place, isn’t it?”
Subhas’s expression was tight as he nodded.
Neil reeled. Nothing on the pillar would have prompted him to intuit what once filled that broken space—and yet he had done it, drawing the truth from the blank stone.
“Where?” he rasped.
“It’s not a place my people go,” Subhas warned. “I haven’t been to it myself, but those mountains in the carving—they’re three miles to the southwest. There’s a stream that runs between them. You can follow it to the pass that will take you there.”
“Three miles?” Constance pressed eagerly. “We could be there by this afternoon!”
A response sounded from across the hollow air.
“How very convenient,” Colonel Charles Borthwick commented as he stepped into the light.