“I do believe.”
Thala turned to me sharply. “Since when?”
I thought about the storm again. “Since this journey taught me how little I know about everything,” I said to her.
¤
We got back on the trail, and as we climbed, my mind drifted to Arjun. I thought about how he had kissed me that first time, out in the mango grove. I thought of us lying in the hammock together, laughing. My heart longed to hear his voice again. Then I thought about Varun’s hands on my waist, the way he looked at me, the intensity in his eyes as he told me about Mount Moutza and Maya.
“Don’t get distracted,” Thala said, picking up on my mental state. “We’re close. Right now, your only focus should be on the next ten feet ahead of you.”
We were hiking up a pebbly path that laced the edge of a mountain. I was grateful for my healed feet, for the comfortable sandals Thala had selected for me. Every hairpin turn, every time we had to lean into the rock face in order to progress up the trail, my heart raced.
“How much longer till we get there?” Thala asked. She was ahead of me, and before her, I saw nothing but a drop as the trail turned, twisting around the mountain. I pulled the map from my satchel, opened it, and looked at the X that marked the Janaka Caves.
“They should be right here,” I said as I came up behind her.
I followed her to the edge of the mountain and turned my head to see the path curving around the bend. But there it stopped.
I gasped.
Before us was a wall that stretched so high, I couldn’t even see the top of it.
“What now?” Thala asked. “Did we go the wrong way?”
I shook my head. “This is where we’re supposed to be. The Janaka Caves are right here, according to the map. They must be on the other side of this wall,” I said, running my fingers over the smooth rock surface before us. The top of the wall seemed to disappear into the clouds.
“We can’t scale that. It’s too high.”
I looked around. Beside us was a terrifying drop. Behind us, the path we had come on.
“Do we have any more water?” Thala asked.
I nodded, reaching into my satchel, and my hand instinctively grabbed the dagger. Suddenly, I realized it.
“The dagger! It was the key to the safe at Meena Amba’s. It must be the key to this wall too.”
I turned to look at the wall, inspecting it for a keyhole. But the surface of the wall was too clean. Almost glistening. There was no keyhole, at least not one I could see. I held the blade toward it, hoping it would tell me something. I poked the wall with the blade. Nothing. I pointed it up toward the sky. Still no evidence that it was the key that would open some sort of doorway to the Sybillines.
“There must be another way.” Thala shook her head.
“I don’t understand. Meena Amba said it was the key to many things. It has to be the key to the Janaka Caves!”
After a few more tries, I sighed, letting my arm drop. Then, a jolt. I looked down at the dagger. The rubies had lit up, shining bright crimson in the light of the setting sun.
“It’s saying ‘not up, but down.’” Thala pointed to the ground below our feet.
Slowly, I crouched, bringing the dagger to the ground with me. Gently, I stuck it into the ground. All of a sudden, the mountain appeared to tremble.
The ground gave way, and we were both falling.
Twenty-Six
WE LANDED WITH A LOUD THUD, and dust filled the air, causing a violent sneeze to escape my nose.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I can’t see anything,” Thala responded.
I palmed the floor, feeling the ground beneath me. My fingers grasped long fibrous stalks knotted into the ground. Roots. I looked up to see where we had fallen from, but the opening was gone. We were shrouded in darkness.
“Hold on a minute,” Thala said. I heard a whoosh, and then a flame lit up her face. She had found a sulfur stick.
The walls instantly illuminated, and I noticed that the interior of the cave was made of bundles of fibers. I had initially thought that they were roots, but they were different shades of blue—cobalt and aquamarine and sapphire and indigo—and they appeared to be breathing.
“It’s alive,” Thala said as she stood up. It was a tunnel, the ceiling just barely touching the tops of our heads when we stood up. She was right. Only something alive could move in this way.
“This is incredible,” I said as I ran my hand over the glowing cords, which undulated like sea hydra. “This must be the way.
“What do you think this is?” I asked Thala.
“No idea.”
“You’ve never seen anything like this before?”
“Just because I’m a seer doesn’t mean I’ve seen everything,” she quipped.
I looked at the dagger in my hand. It was pulsing, the rubies lighting up as if in rhythm with the breathing walls.
We began to walk, carefully negotiating our every step. The tunnel moved and shifted with us, like a rope bridge, twisting and turning in concentric circles.
“I feel like we’re going down, but I can’t tell,” Thala said.
It was disorienting walking through this thing—whatever it was—but we were descending deeper and deeper into it. We kept walking till I noticed tiny bulbous knots growing on the fibers. I stopped before them, carefully touching one with my fingers.
“Mushrooms,” I said, glancing at the polka-dotted lavender toadstools before us.
Even farther on, snails with lapidary shells the color of jewels: peridot and ruby and emerald and sapphire. They moved slowly, crisscrossing the tendons of light and leaving behind dewy, iridescent trails.
“Look out!” Thala yelled. I looked up and saw something approaching: a cloud of glitter, chirping as it made its way toward us. As it flew by us, I realized that the cloud was made up of winged insects.
“Butterflies,” I whispered. They landed in the crevices of the roots, resting their sparkled wings for a moment before they flew off again.
From the spots where they had landed, tiny flowers grew before our eyes. Crimson and ochre and magenta pom-poms, shivering in the cool air.
I shook my head. “I can’t believe this.”
And then I heard it: from a distance, a purring sound.
“Do you hear that?” I whispered.
Thala stopped for a moment. She placed a hand on my shoulder. “Careful,” she said.
“What?”
“This thing . . . whatever it is . . . it’s not entirely benign.”
We turned a corner and were suddenly standing before a dark blue wall.
I moved closer to it, almost pressing my face against it, trying to figure out what it was, when a yellow eye the size of a window blinked open.
It took everything in me not to scream as I recoiled violently, my mind racing to put it all together. When I stepped back, another eye opened. And then I saw it: a face as large as a wall. It moved closer to me. I realized that those roots that lined this entire cave were tentacles of some sort attached to the face. They moved with this creature.
“It’s a spider,” Thala said, her voice shaking.
“I’ve never seen a spider this size,” I said.
I was too afraid to move, too afraid to speak. Thala’s hands shook.
And then it hit me. “It’s Makara. He who creates, sustains, destroys . . . ,” I whispered.
Just then, Makara smiled, baring hundreds of glittering fangs.
I jumped back, the dagger in my hands, my heart racing at such a pitch, I was certain that the spider could hear it. He looked right at me, adjusting his head, inspecting me with curiosity.
As he did, I noticed something behind him: a silver door. On the side of the door, a crack the same size as the blade of my dagger. And just beside
the crack, three rubies. The terrifying arachnid moved toward me again, blocking the only exit from this place.
I knew that on the other side of the door were the Sybillines. And this creature guarded the entrance.
“What do I do?” I whispered.
“Are you supposed to . . . kill it?” Thala asked, glancing at the dagger in my hand. I looked down at the blade, trying to decide what to do next.
The creature appeared to sense what I was thinking, because in a flash, a tentacle wrapped itself around my waist. I screamed, the sound of my terror echoing through the cavernous space. Another tentacle emerged from the wall like a rope lasso and grabbed Thala.
“Kill it, Amrita!” Thala yelled. My wrist free, I reached for the tentacle that held me, pressing a blade against it. But something stopped me.
“I can’t,” I said.
“What do you mean, you can’t? This thing is going to eat us alive!”
I turned my head and looked at the face of the creature. He was inspecting us, rotating us in his strong, cord-like limbs, but something told me he didn’t want to hurt us.
Slowly, tentatively, I reached for the spider’s face, placing a hand just above his eye. He closed it for a minute, and as he did, I heard something, a voice.
I just want to play, it said.
“Did you . . . did you hear that?” I asked.
Thala raised an eyebrow. “Hear what?”
“I can . . . hear him. He’s not going to hurt us,” I said.
“Really? Because those teeth look as though they were made expressly for that purpose,” Thala said.
“He’s . . . curious,” I said, watching as the creature flipped us right side up and back upside down in delight. “He probably hasn’t had visitors in a long time.”
The creature tugged at Thala’s feet and let out a sound that was a mixture of a purr and a hiss. He was chuckling.
“See? He’s friendly,” I said. “His body houses so many living creatures. He’s an entire ecosystem. If we hurt him, we hurt everything that depends on him. And if he really is Makara the Spider, if we destroy him . . .”
“I get it,” Thala said, “but we have to convince this thing to let us pass.” He swept her up and swung her toward him, pressing her toward his eye.
I placed a hand back above his other eye. Please let us go, I thought.
No, it replied.
I felt disappointment, urgency, frustration.
All right, I thought. How much longer do you want to play?
The creature smiled again, his fangs so huge that we both gasped.
To me, a short time. To you, forever.
Panic filled my lungs. I looked at Thala, and she could sense my terror.
“What?” she asked. “What is he saying?”
I didn’t answer her. I remembered the story. He sustains the world while he’s awake. He creates while he dreams.
I needed to get him to fall asleep. I had an idea, but I wasn’t sure whether it would work.
Makara, I called after the creature. I’ll play with you. I thought the words instead of saying them, and he grinned that terrifying grin again.
Do you know how to play catch? I’ll throw you something, and you catch it in your mouth.
Play! Play! I heard in response.
I reached into my satchel, pulling out the diamond shoe, throwing it into the air. Makara lunged for it, catching it between his fangs, swallowing it whole.
How about this? I threw him the skin of water, and once again, Makara darted toward it.
I reached back into my satchel for the thing I was looking for, holding it in my fingers. It was the leftover bark from the silver tree. I had saved it. Varun had told me it was a potent drug, that it would help Thala sleep. I didn’t know if it was potent enough to work on Makara the Spider. But I had no other option.
How about this? Can you get this?
I aimed the piece of bark the best I could, throwing it at Makara’s head. It struck him right between the eyes before he caught it in his mouth.
I watched as his eyelids got heavy, then closed. The tentacles loosened around my waist, and we both fell to the floor.
I let out a slow breath of relief before I turned to Thala’s stunned face.
“Quick, before he wakes up!” I whispered.
We stepped over his body and squeezed together before the silver door. I placed the dagger in the crevice, turning it on its side.
The rubies lit up and the door flew open, and I breathed a sigh of relief as we crossed the threshold.
On the other side at last, the door closed behind us with a click, and hundreds of eyes turned to look at us.
Twenty-Seven
THE JANAKA CAVES were an ancient city built into the interior of a mountain. Cave dwellings embedded in the rock swirled up in an interminable spiral that touched the clouds. On every surface were reliefs that bore a striking resemblance to those in the Temple of Rain, except this was no abandoned site. It was alive with color. Murals stretched from the ground far beyond where my eyes could see. Paintings of multiarmed gods, creatures that were half-man, half-tiger, white birds with wingspans the size of elephants against bold blue backdrops.
And directly before us, a crumbling, ancient-looking mural of a young woman: Maya. I looked down at my tunic. It was the very same one Maya was wearing in the mural. And in her hand, a dagger with three rubies.
A trail of goose bumps climbed up my arm.
The mural was not only of Maya—it was of me.
The Sybillines halted their activities. A man carving a bowl out of wood put down his tools. An elderly woman in a white sari trimming and collecting flowers set down her basket and the shears in her hand. Men and women playing games on wooden boards glanced in our direction.
“They’re here,” some of them whispered.
“She’s returned!”
Finally, the woman in the white sari approached. Her face was creased with lines, but her smile was youthful. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she said.
I couldn’t bring myself to respond right away. My eyes scanned the magnificent caves, trying to take it all in.
Trees grew like webs, climbing up the rock face, creeping over the entrances to homes. On the far edge of the mountain, a waterfall pooled into an aquamarine lagoon where people washed their clothes or bathed. On various levels of the caves, stone balconies housed gardens with exotic-looking plants in hues of lavender, pink, turquoise, and yellow, and on every surface of the mountain, a silver dust: chamak. It glistened in the sun, making the entire city sparkle.
I saw Thala taking it in too, her mouth agape, a mixture of curiosity and fear in her eyes. I reached for her hand.
“It’s all right. We’ll be fine,” I assured her, but the very idea of Thala being surrounded by so much chamak made me anxious.
At the base of the vertical city was a bowl, a vast arena where all civic activity appeared to take place. A man watered a garden filled with varieties of fruit and vegetables I had never before seen. A woman wove white scarves from skeins of cotton thread. Children sat on swings made from the boughs of trees and linen-colored rope.
Finally, it was Thala who spoke. “It’s a . . . volcano. We’re inside a massive volcano.”
She was right. The Janaka Caves were built inside a dormant volcano, and within that volcano was an entire civilization that maybe no one from the outside world had ever seen. No one except us.
I turned to the woman. “You’ve been waiting for me?”
A youthful laugh escaped her lips. “We knew that one day you’d return, Goddess Maya,” she said as I glanced again at the mural behind her. “I’m Kalyani. You’re the first visitor we’ve had in years. Welcome,” she said, bowing before me.
“This place is . . .”
“Uncontaminated, exactly as it was
when my people first came here hundreds of years ago,” she said, gesturing behind her. “Of course, anyone is allowed to leave, and many do,” she said to us. “But visitors are not very common. Oh, I forgot to mention—we received a dispatch for you yesterday. That’s the other reason we knew you’d be here soon,” she said, pointing to the edge of the lagoon where a flock of birds had congregated.
“Saaras!” I exclaimed, running over to him. I noticed a note tied to his foot. I hurriedly untied it and unfolded it open. I recognized the handwriting right away, and my heart skipped a beat.
Amrita,
I received a note from your friend Varun. He tells me (to my relief) that you are safe and on your way to the Janaka Caves. For your sake, I hope you trust him, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to trust anyone here.
I suppose by now, you’ve been to the temple and learned of your true identity. I wish I could explain to you why I never told you the things I knew. But your father wanted you to find out on your own, when you were ready.
Looking back, I was delusional to think that you and I might have had any kind of future together. Sooner or later, you would have learned who you are and found me unsuitable, unworthy of you. Our little plot to run away together, it was a mistake, all of it. I’ve forgotten it, and you should too.
My surprise at Arjun’s coldness must have registered on my face.
“What is it?” Thala asked.
I simply shook my head and continued to read.
You should know that Shalingar is now a colony of Macedon, and search parties have spread out across the kingdom, looking for you. Army units patrol Ananta, and people are being imprisoned for reading books, speaking Shalingarsh in public. Women have been told to stay indoors at all times. Shalingar will never be the same again.
“No, no, no!” I whispered.
“What is it?” Thala pressed, squatting next to me, reading over my shoulder.
You’re temporarily safe with the Sybillines, but eventually Sikander’s men will find the caves.
My parents are safe too, but we haven’t recovered from this series of tragedies that we never envisioned. I’m ashamed that I have no option but to do as Sikander instructs or he’ll hurt my family.
The Library of Fates Page 17