“They’re always hostile,” Borthwick pushed back easily as Adam stared down at the oblivious figure of his best friend.“Prepare the men for an engagement.”
?
Twenty-Nine
Wild fascination mingledwith an aching sense of regret as Neil moved through the ruined city.He ought to have been surveying all of it one square foot at a time, studying old road beds and looking for signs of agricultural manipulation of the landscape.Could he pick out remnants of civic infrastructure?Maybe a hint of a municipal water system?
A municipal water system would be deeply enticing.
The mossy structures were rich with the promise of all they could teach him about the people who had lived in this place centuries before.He picked out the distinctive foundation imprint of a granary.Another cluster of buildings likely indicated a family compound.
Those were normal, rational leaps of intuition for someone who had trained for over a decade in how to recognize the patterns of previous habitation.
Other leaps of intuition weren’t quite so rational—like how Neil knew that lotus blossoms used to grow in the ruined artificial pond that stood beside an overgrown orchard.
He smelled sandalwood.Heard a woman’s laugh carry to him on the breeze.
Neil told himself that it could all be his imagination, even as a chill danced up the skin of his arms.
He rubbed at the goosebumps—then whirled at a sound from behind him like the bark of a hoarse, angry duck.
A monkey perched on one of the nearby branches.It coughed at him again, glaring with irritation from a small black face surrounded by soft gray fur.
Constance’s eyes widened with delight.“He’s adorable!”
She and Neil were alone on an overgrown road.Subhas’s men had spread out to cover the rest of the ruins.
“I believe he’s trying to threaten us,” Neil theorized uncomfortably.
“Do you have any snacks in your pockets?”Constance pressed, ignoring his concern.“I want to make friends.”
The langur snorted, then swung away through the leaves.
Neil glimpsed a flash of mossy gray stone through the shifting branches.He pushed through the brush and found himself in front of a simple one-story structure roughly the size of a carriage house, flat-roofed and fronted by a low portico.
Rich vegetation sprawled up the sides of the building, obscuring much of the carvings that decorated the stone facade.Sal trees grew thickly to either side, the air scented with their blooms.
The monkey sat on top of the entrance, flicking its tail with disapproval.
“Stuffy, there are more monkeys here.”
Neil hurriedly searched the trees around him with a jolt of nerves at the notion of running into an entire troop of irritable simians.
“Not there—on the building!”Constance corrected.
Neil peered past the foliage and realized that the small structure was decorated much like the torana, with loads of langurs gamboling and leaping across the surface of the stone.
Constance looked from the weathered bas-reliefs to the live animal glaring at them from above the portico.“I think he wants us to go in.”
Neil assessed the entrance to the building with a twinge of unease.The interior was shadowed with gloom, obscuring whatever lay within—which couldn’t be much.
“Aren’t we supposed to be hunting for the Waters of the Son of the Wind?”he pushed back weakly, recalling the clues from the manuscript that had led them to the ruins.
The langur barked impatiently and sprang away.
Constance strolled inside.
Neil hurried after her with a dart of alarm.“Connie, you shouldn’t enter these structures until they’ve been properly assessed for stability…”
