The Sacred Vault_ A Novel - Andy McDermott [131]
Nina’s mental arithmetic skills were considerably better. ‘Six hundred times five hundred and ninety-nine is three hundred and fifty-nine thousand four hundred. Multiply that by five hundred and ninety-eight and you get, uh . . .’ She frowned herself as the numbers very rapidly grew beyond even her ability to handle them in her head. ‘Hold on, let me write this down.’
She took a notebook and pen from her pack. But it didn’t take long for her to admit defeat. ‘O-kay. Let me put it this way. If you said a trillion—’
‘There’s a trillion combinations?’ Eddie interrupted. ‘Bloody hell!’
‘I’m not finished. If you said a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, and kept on saying trillion over a hundred times more, that’s how many variations there are. If you tried one combination every second for the five billion years before the sun explodes and destroys the planet, you couldn’t even do one per cent of them.’
‘That’s a bit of an overkill way to open the doors.’
She smiled a little. ‘If something’s too much overkill even for you, it must be bad.’
‘We don’t have five billion years to spare, though. There must be a quicker way.’
‘You’re right. Whoever built it wouldn’t have made a lock so complex that even the people protecting it wouldn’t be able to figure it out.’ She looked at Shankarpa. ‘Have you ever tried to open it?’
‘A few have tried,’ he said, ‘but without the key, the secret has been lost.’
Her gaze slowly circled the pattern of interlocking wheels, then went to the centre. She examined the keyhole. ‘So the key is the key.’
‘Duh,’ said Eddie.
‘If you’ll pardon the pun. But it can’t be a coincidence that the faces of the goddesses on the key line up with the wheels. They’re a clue. Maybe you don’t need to have the entire thing in an exact configuration - just match each goddess to one particular word. What do the words say?’
Girilal ran his finger around one of the small wheels, reading the ancient text. ‘Many different things. “Moon, waterfall, sadness, dog, travelling, invincible, stranger, yellow . . .” ’
‘They’re completely random,’ said Kit. ‘Maybe they have to be arranged into a sentence?’
‘I don’t think Shiva would have designed his vault’s lock around a game of Mad Libs. It’s something simpler than that, to do with the goddesses . . .’ It struck Nina that she had yet to ask the obvious question. ‘Who are the goddesses?’
Shankarpa pointed them out. ‘Parvati; Uma; Durga; Kali; Shakti.’
‘Shiva’s wives. And if you had to describe each of them in a single word,’ Nina went on, excitement rising as the solution came to her, ‘are those words on any of the wheels?’
‘Durga is the invincible warrior-mother,’ said Girilal. Shankarpa almost shoved his father aside as he darted closer to examine the wheels. ‘The words! We have to find the right words!’
‘Talonor didn’t get it quite right,’ Nina realised. ‘What he wrote in the Codex was a misinterpretation, a mistranslation - it’s not the “love of Shiva” you need to know to open the Vault. It’s the “loves”, or “lovers” - the wives of Shiva! If you don’t know their stories, you’ll never find the right combination.’ She hurriedly turned her notebook to a new page. ‘We need to know the words - all of them.’
‘Six hundred words?’ Eddie said. ‘That’ll take a while.’
‘You got an appointment?’ She took her pen and started writing as Girilal began to recite the words.
‘Rat.’
‘Rat,’ Nina repeated, writing it down.
‘Hmm . . . dust.’
‘Dust.’ After thirty minutes, her list was a little over half complete. The tedium of the task had overcome the initial thrill, most of the guardians sitting contemplatively at the statue’s feet waiting for her and Girilal to finish. Kit was hunched up in his thick coat, half asleep, while Eddie paced impatiently around the ledge. Even Shankarpa, watching his father work, showed signs of boredom.
‘Smiling.’
‘Smiling.’
‘Ah . . . now, let me think,’ said Girilal,