The Sacred Vault_ A Novel - Andy McDermott [130]
A thin smile. ‘Then you will die.’
He nudged Nina. ‘No pressure on you then, love.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘If others come, we will protect the Vault, as we always have,’ said Shankarpa. ‘And we will have more than just our swords.’ Eddie’s Wildey was amongst the group’s belongings, the guardians knowing enough about firearms to have removed the magazine and ejected the chambered round.
‘You’ll need more than just one gun,’ Nina said.
‘Perhaps we have more. But if you open the Vault, we may not need them.’ He issued an order. Several men stood and surrounded the prisoners. ‘They will take you to a room where you can sleep.’ He smiled coldly. ‘Enjoy your stay.’
In contrast to the previous day, the slash of morning sky above the valley walls was a deep, empty blue. Sunlight turned the snow above almost to gold. But the warm glow didn’t reach into the depths of the narrow canyon; even the giant statue of Shiva, standing beneath the overhang, was shrouded in eternal shadow.
Accompanied by Shankarpa and Girilal, and escorted by about half of the guardians, Nina, Eddie and Kit made the laborious ascent to the broad ledge at Shiva’s feet. Nina had the replica key with her, as well as some of her archaeology tools, but she had no idea how much use the latter would be. She suspected the lock was not one that could be picked.
Even in the shade, enough diffuse light came down from above for her to get a good look at the door. The lock was far more complex than she had realised. A circular hole at its centre for the key, five large wheels arranged around it in a pattern resembling a flower - and round their circumferences were smaller ones, twenty in all, the ‘parent’ wheels sharing one with each of their neighbours where they touched.
But the complexity didn’t end there. Each small wheel was divided into three pieces: two eye-shaped sections aligned with the rim of the bigger disc, and a third like the central pinch of an hourglass between them to fill in the rest of the circle. The edge of each ‘eye’ had ten words in Vedic Sanskrit carved into it, the ends of the hourglass another five. Thirty words per disc, twenty discs . . . six hundred words in all.
Somehow, they had to be arranged in the right combination. What that combination might be, Nina had absolutely no idea.
She reached up to one of the large discs, and, after getting a silent nod from Shankarpa, turned it. Metal and stone grated behind the surface, some kind of undulating runner system lifting it - and the smaller discs it carried - outwards as it rotated, just enough to clear the neighbouring wheels before dropping back down into the next position. By turning the smaller discs through a hundred and eighty degrees and then rotating the big wheels, each eye section could be swapped between them and moved to any part of the lock. It was an extremely complicated, but also incredibly clever, piece of ancient engineering.
‘I think I see what you have to do,’ she announced.
‘Glad you do,’ said Eddie, bewildered. ‘I haven’t got a clue. All this Professor Layton crap does my head in.’
‘It’s not that complicated, really.’ She inserted the key into the central hole with the carvings of the Hindu gods facing outwards. ‘See? Five goddesses, five small wheels and five big ones. Presumably, you have to position all the wheels correctly to open the lock. It’s just a matter of figuring out the right combination of these words.’
‘Oh, that all? Doddle.’
‘How many combinations are there?’ Kit asked.
‘Let’s see. Six hundred words, so the factorial of six hundred.’
Shankarpa stepped closer, examining the mechanism in a new light. ‘What does that mean?’
‘The factorial? It’s the number of possible combinations of a number of items. If you had four, the factorial would be four times three times two times one - twenty-four. Five would be five times four times three, and so on - one hundred and twenty.’
Eddie’s brow crinkled as he tried - and immediately