Chapter Thirty-Four
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Thirty-Four
Adam hiked up the pass under a sky turned to heavy gray lace by the soaring branches of old-growth teaks. Two rambling peaks framed his way while clusters of wildflowers and ferns whispered around his boots.
He was under armed guard. He had lost his dog. Two of his best friends were buried alive in a thousand-year-old stepwell.
All in all, he felt like hell.
His fear for Neil and Constance was only moderated by the strength of his determination to go back and dig them out.
He wasn’t bound, and he still had his knife.
Both of those things helped his odds, but he also stood in the middle of a platoon of capable soldiers.
If he tried to make a run for it now, he’d be shot down or tackled before he could take two steps.
He didn’t doubt that he could find a way to get loose later. He just wasn’t sure what he would have to leave behind when he did—or what staying alive in the meantime would cost him.
Ellie stayed close, clearly shaken by her encounter with Jacobs. Adam was shaken by it, too. He had always known the man was dangerous, but his attack on Ellie had felt like a different kind of violence—one that wasn’t remotely purposeful or controlled like all the rest of his actions.
Ellie had said that she had been poking at the truth behind Jacobs’ mysterious quest for justice. That she thought she had started to get close to it when he attacked her.
Adam guessed she was probably right.
Bruises darkened the skin of her throat. The sight of them made Adam want to hurt someone—not that he was in any position to do it. Instead, he was pretty sure he owed it to Dawson of all bloody people that Ellie hadn’t actually been throttled to death.
Adam wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Dawson trudged along ahead of him. Every now and then, the professor cast a huffy glare over his shoulder. He obviously felt betrayed to discover that Adam hadn’t really been his friend.
Adam didn’t feel too bad about that.
Jacobs trailed behind. Adam tried not to look at him. If he did, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to resist going back there to pummel the man—and then his situation would get even more damned complicated.
They neared the top of the pass, and Adam pulled his compass from his pocket.
It had been elegant once, a gentleman’s accessory sheathed in gold and beautifully engraved. The gold was scratched and battered now. Rust showed at the hinges. Adam should have sold it off to a jeweler and bought himself something more practical a long time ago.
He still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t.
He flipped it open and stared at the inscription inside the lid.
To A. May you always know your path—GB
Adam pushed the words from his mind and focused on calculating their distance from the stepwell where Neil and Constance were waiting for a rescue.
Three miles. Thirty degrees southwest.
He snapped the compass shut.
An odd hiss rose through the whispering of the trees. The sound was familiar, though Adam failed to place it.
He scrambled up the last stretch of the climb and stared down into another world.
A deep, ragged gorge lay below him, framed by soaring cliffs of ocher stone. A massive silver curtain raced down the face of the steep bluff at the far end, feeding the turquoise waters of a quick-moving stream that curved through the base of the ravine.
The waterfall was alive with the flood of the monsoon. Flowering vines hung around the cascade, clinging to irregularities in the cliffs.
It was achingly beautiful… and decidedly strange.
Dark openings peppered the walls of the gorge like the hives of some insect—except that they were Adam’s size and clearly made by men.
While some of the holes were simple ovals that almost looked natural, others were carved in rectangular lines, framed by false door jambs or shadowy colonnades.
“Rock-cut chambers,” Ellie breathed with an air of numb wonder as she stopped beside him. “It’s like the ruins at Udayagiri or Barabar. Probably a monastery or ashram. These should all lead to residential cells carved from the rock, interspersed with temple structures.”
Her brain hauled up more details from her reading.
“There’s an ashram in the Ramayana—Valmiki’s ashram.
Sita is sent there after Rama exiles her from his court…
but that was supposed to sit on the banks of the Ganges.
” She straightened, grasping Adam’s arm.
“Only Sita didn’t stay there. Valmiki sent her to live with a group of female ascetics, somewhere secret and safe.
That’s what this must be. It’s Sita’s ashram.
That’s where Tulsidas has been taking us! ”
At her words, a gust of wind ripe with the scent of a coming storm stirred the trees that crowned the ridge. The whisper of the leaves mingled with the sibilant rush of the waterfall.
“Great,” Adam replied queasily.
Ellie looked disappointed by his response—until her eyes widened knowingly. “Oh. We are quite high up, aren’t we?”
“Sss’fine,” Adam assured her.
Ellie kept hold of his arm, her concern for his state warring with virulent curiosity. “But what’s that all over the ground?”
“Bones,” Adam replied.
Across the floor of the ravine, enormous skulls and massive ribs lay in tumbled piles, draped with moss and verdigris. A great tusk, thick as Adam’s chest, pierced through the growth to point up at the roiling gray sky.
Adam had recognized the distinct shape and unique scale of the remains the moment he had spotted them. “They’re elephants.”
The animals must have been coming to this place for ages, drawn by the presence of water during times of drought or the gorge’s relative insulation from predators. Ill, injured, or aged to exhaustion, they had lain down by the stream and died.
Adam thought of the stories he had heard about this forest—a place haunted by gods and monsters.
He recalled the word with an uncanny chill. Rakshasas.
The bones started to spin. Ellie firmed her grip on his arm as he swayed.
“We should probably get you off the ridge,” she suggested pointedly.
“I’d rather go down on my boots than my face,” Adam agreed.
She kept her hold on him as they descended the pass, trailed by his guards.
Singh Rao directed his men to a broad, sandy bank at the edge of the stream.
The space was relatively flat and free of the undergrowth that sprawled through the rest of the floor of the gorge, tangling with the massive elephant bones.
A red-hued cliff rose up behind the site, pockmarked with several of the man-made caverns.
Ellie studied the openings worriedly. “The Brahmastra must be here. We need to get back to Constance and Neil—but we can’t just leave the arcanum for Borthwick to find.”
Adam felt a bit steadier now that he was on the ground. He surveyed the irregular walls of ruddy stone. “There’s gotta be nearly fifty of those caves. It’ll take him a while to search them all, assuming whoever put the thing here didn’t just leave it lying out in the open.”
“But it could turn out to be in the first place he looks,” Ellie countered, her voice aching with worry.
The weight of all Adam’s responsibilities pressed down on him.
Armed guards stood at his back. A platoon of soldiers surrounded him.
He was starting to lose track of how many people were depending on him—Ellie, Vanika, Constance, and Neil.
Subhas and the rest of his men, who had been left bound and under guard by the ruins.
The whole damned Adrija village that Borthwick intended to go after as soon as he’d gotten what he’d come for.
Adam needed to do something about all of it, and yet he remained shackled by the need to keep meeting Borthwick’s expectations.
“I don’t have a plan, Princess,” Adam confessed, his voice rough.
“Since when has that ever stopped you?” Ellie challenged.
Adam was thrown. When had it stopped him?
He’d been doing stupid things against overwhelming odds for most of his life. It came as naturally to him as swinging a machete or forgetting to change his socks. Hell, his father had spent years trying to batter the trait out of him.
Maybe for once in your life, you might actually stop and think before you do something stupid.
Ellie put her hand on his arm. The touch was gentle but firm, just like the look she gave him. “You told me when we got here that you’d have to be someone else in order to keep us both alive. And it worked, Adam… but maybe now it’s time for you to be the man you really are again.”
Her words made him feel like he was back on the ridge again. The world went into a slow, dizzy spin.
“Reckless and irresponsible?” he quipped back awkwardly.
Ellie didn’t flinch. “Exactly. That’s the Adam we need right now. My Adam.”
Something inside Adam quietly shivered open. He felt it like a drop of rain on his skin or a lit window against the night.
Like hope.
Worry still lingered. “Ellie, we’re outnumbered and under guard. The wrong move here could get us both killed. ”
“We’ve been under guard before.”
“Yeah—but this time, we don’t have a couple of friends on hand to steal you my knife.”
Ellie’s eyes glinted with mischief. “You still have your knife.”
“That’s one knife against a whole lot of rifles.”
“Is that really your biggest obstacle?” Ellie pressed knowingly.
Adam ran a hand over his face with an air of resigned exasperation. “No.”
“Then what is?” Ellie’s question was implacable.
Adam didn’t search for the answer in his brain. He found it in his gut—where it had been waiting for him all along.
He looked across the camp to where a small, skinny figure sat on a boulder with a rifleman at her back.
“Vanika,” Adam replied bluntly. “I’m not leaving here without her. And I broke any trust she might’ve had in me.”
Ellie lifted her hand to his face. “Then go fix it.”
The simplicity of her answer cut through the morass of uncertainty clogging up Adam’s brain.
Go fix it.