Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (29 page)

More searching on the university and its archaeology faculty. It appears that the department chair—who would presumably be the one to approve such digs and perhaps help secure grant money—is still in the States, teaching classes for the fall semester. I remember the name: Michelle Liu. She’s an old friend of
Dad’s who preferred the lecture hall and the cozy office to the heat and dust of digs. They often published findings together. I think they kind of had a deal: She’d minimize his teaching responsibilities and the agony of academic bureaucracy, and he’d brave the mud and the icky bugs to dig for treasure. Each thought the other one was doing all the dirty work. I’d drop her name if I had to; I figured I had enough to proceed now and a safe place to keep my stuff.

“Ready to head back out?” I ask my hound. Orlaith is curled up on top of the bed, hogging all of it.

“You’ve been napping already. Come on, let’s go, unless you want me to leave you here.”

she says, and climbs down off the bed, her tail up and wagging. I leave my bag in the room and put a D
O
N
OT
D
ISTURB
sign on the door. I take my weapons, though. I’ll need Scáthmhaide to snoop around.

It’s after midnight when we return to the dig, and I approach the trailer sitting off to the side with the hope that it contains an office instead of sleeping archaeologists. I camouflage both of us, to be safe, and gently try the door. Locked.

I’ve not done it before, but Atticus told me that you can bind tumblers into the unlocked position with very little trouble. Despite his assurance, it’s quite troublesome for me; I’m not so accustomed to free-form binding as he is, and I can’t actually see the tumblers. I don’t know how to target them without visual aid, and we haven’t had time since my binding to the earth to go over Breaking and Entering for Druids. After ten frustrating minutes, I give up and unbind the entire metal doorknob and lock, letting it melt away out of the hole. Problem solved.

“Stay here and let me know if anyone comes?” I whisper to Orlaith.

The trailer contains three desks, a mini-fridge, and a garbage can stuffed full of empty soda bottles and sandwich wrappers. No slumbering archaeologists.

I turn on a light and dispel my night vision, figuring that Orlaith will let me know in time if anyone comes to investigate. I can’t imagine that anyone would, besides the archaeologists themselves, and they’re surely sacked out in a hotel somewhere.

It takes little time to discern which desk is Dad’s. Two are messes and one is neat. And the papers on the neat one are covered with my dad’s tight, crabbed script.

They’re not interesting to me—catalogs of artifacts found and reports on soil composition and radiocarbon dating and so on. I try the drawers of the desk, only to discover that they’re locked too. I don’t waste time but unbind the lock right away. I find what I’m looking for in the bottom drawer: Dad’s personal diary. I skip forward to the last couple of entries, beginning with one dated October 3:

I skim through the rest of that paragraph, because I know how it ends. But I do wonder who the mysterious former student is and what happened to him, because this indicates that my father didn’t find the vase himself—as Laksha told me—but rather had it given to him. I would dearly love to speak to whoever was responsible for that. In the entry of October 4 I get a clue:

No entries after that. I have two names to inquire about now—Logan and Ray—and a search to run about those arrows. I take the diary with me and leave everything else untouched, though I do scan the tops of the messy desks to see if I can determine to whom they belong. Hard copies of memos and emails reveal that one belongs to Chirayu Parekh—who might be Ray—and another to Miriam Vargas. I’d come back to the dig at dawn and try to catch one or both of them before they got to the trailer and realized it had been burgled.

Okay, my favorite hound
, I say as I exit the trailer.
Nap time. Let’s go back and get you snuggled into bed
.

Maybe later. I need to work on a problem for a little while
. Durga’s suggestion that I might have occasion to wonder at the weapons she brought two nights ago comes back to me. I think this might be the proper occasion. The mention of the arrows makes me realize that she hadn’t brought a bow with her.

When I get back to the hotel and run a quick image search of Durga, I discover that she is often depicted as having a bow, and the stories that delve into the gifts given her by the gods of the Hindu pantheon do include mention of Vayu’s arrows. However, I cannot find any specific mention of the bow in the stories,
beyond a symbolic religious meaning. Vayu’s arrows, then, must be the important weapons, and she had come without them. Perhaps because they truly were buried somewhere north of Thanjavur? If so, why? And why did she not simply explain?

When I review the last entry, Dad’s journal makes another connection for me. The idea that Vedic culture influenced the Norse somehow is certainly true in my own experience: The
asuras
I’d seen surrounding my father were blue-skinned and four-armed, like the shape Loki had taken when he confronted us in Poland. I remember thinking at the time, what the fuck, why is he blue, but it never would have occurred to me to think it was anything but the product of his own derangement. We had the Olympians to worry about, and Loki had to be put on the back burner. And now all I can think is, what if that was my big clue—my one chance to walk the path to which Durga alluded, where none of this happened?

I hide my face in my hands and mutter, “Oh, shut
up
.” Orlaith hears me and raises her head from the bed.

I was talking to myself. And watch out for double negatives
.

I know it is pointless to speculate and torture myself with what might have been, but I expect I’ll take a good long while doing it. Later. To prevent a spiral of second-guessing and self-recrimination, I’d try to grab a few hours of sleep to get myself adjusted to Indian time, so I could begin again at dawn. I’d search for this Logan guy, and when I found him, I’d ask where he got that urn.

It’s an excellent plan, and the flaw doesn’t become clear until I stop Ray in the morning, before he makes it to the trailer and sees that the doorknob is gone. I am so very smooth: I tell him my name is Beverly Childress, drop Dr. Liu’s name, and say I’ve been hired by the university to investigate the disappearance of Donal MacTiernan. My American accent in this place gives me instant credibility with him.

Indian-born but educated in America, Chirayu Parekh is an
adorable if slightly doughy man with glasses and a mustache imported from the seventies. Like many people from overseas who spend any time in the United States, he had grown tired of repeating his name over and over again and had hacked it down to Ray to simplify it for the ’Mericans. He carries a leather messenger bag in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and he’s very eager to help once he checks me out and decides that he wants me to like him.

“Mr. Parekh, in my preliminary investigation we came across a student of Dr. MacTiernan’s named Logan, who was working here on site,” I say. “Can you tell me anything about him?”

“Oh, sure, that guy. Kind of tall, blond, sort of kept to himself. Or at least kept away from Miriam and me. He hung around with Dr. MacTiernan a lot.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”

“All right, what was his last name?”

“I don’t know that either. He was always just called Logan.”

I try to hide my irritation, but I’m uncertain that I manage it. “Will he be joining you here at the dig today?”

“No, I don’t think so. He disappeared at the same time Dr. MacTiernan did. But we couldn’t report it, you know, because we didn’t know his name.”

I frown at him. “We? You mean Miriam Vargas doesn’t know either? How do you let someone work on a university-sponsored project like this without knowing his name?”

Ray begins to panic at the implication that he screwed up somehow. “Well, Dr. MacTiernan vouched for him and he knew his stuff, so who was I to question? I mean—”

“This man may be responsible for Dr. MacTiernan’s disappearance. Can’t you think of any way to find out his name?”

I fear that the opposite might be true—that my father, once he was possessed by the raksoyuj, caused Logan to disappear—but I can’t share that with Ray.

“Well, no, I mean, I hardly even think about living people; it’s not in the job description of an archaeologist, you know—”

“Walk me through how you first met Logan, please, Mr.

Parekh.”

“Oh, well, when Miriam and I arrived, he was already here with Dr. MacTiernan, who introduced the guy as Logan, a former student of his. Hey, should we maybe talk more in the office?”

“No, I’m almost finished. You flew in from the States?”

“Yes. Dr. MacTiernan flew in from a dig he had going in the UK, so he got here first.”

“And this was on October third?”

“Right.”

“You were called in by Dr. MacTiernan?”

“Indirectly, yes. He called Dr. Liu at the university and asked her to send someone who could help with Sanskrit. She tapped us and we packed our bags. We were going to publish together.”

“There was a vessel here, wasn’t there, with Sanskrit markings on it? That’s why he needed you?”

Ray is taken aback by this. “Yes. How did you know?”

“Dr. Liu informed me,” I say. “Where is that vessel now?”

“It disappeared with Logan and Dr. MacTiernan. We think one of them took it.”

“That’s my suspicion also. Was the vessel unearthed here?”

“That’s what Logan claimed. He said he dug it up here and showed us a depression in the earth where he’d excavated it. But we just got lab results back on the soil and material samples Dr. MacTiernan sent off, and it looks like it didn’t come from here at all. The lab says it was buried originally somewhere in the west, probably in Gujarat.”

“Interesting. Thank you for your time, Ray. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“What? That’s it? Hey, you want some coffee?”

I wave goodbye at him without answering. With Orlaith at my side, I put some distance between us, before he can discover that the office has been invaded and remember that he really isn’t that good with people and probably should have questioned me a bit more. No doubt he’ll get some grief later from Miriam for being so trusting. Poor Ray.

As soon as I’m out of sight, I cast camouflage on the two of us and we jog down to the house south of Thanjavur in which my father—or, rather, the raksoyuj—had been staying. I’d never gone inside to check it out, and if Logan had disappeared with Dad, then maybe he had been there too. Maybe he’s still there—and dead. Or maybe I’ll find a clue to his whereabouts. It seems as good a place as any to begin.

Except it’s no longer a place. When I get down there, I can’t find it anywhere, though I’m sure I recognize the field in which it stood and where everything happened. And then I realize that Durga had probably wiped it from the earth as part of her cleansing ritual. The earth had been scoured clean. No evidence of rakshasas or
asuras
for humans—or even me—to find.

I don’t know what to do next. If Logan’s body had been in that house, it wasn’t there anymore. There might be an immigration officer who could tell me all the Logans that had entered India in early September or early October, but I couldn’t just smile and lie my way into accessing that information. I might be able to try approaching Dr. Liu back at Dad’s university, posing as an investigator hired by his family, but she’d be far more skeptical than Ray. Besides, even if she could access Dad’s class rosters for the past twenty years or so, privacy laws would prevent her from handing out names of former students without serious legal paperwork signed by a judge.

One thing I do know is that the “Sorcerer’s Urn” didn’t disappear with Dad or Logan. It was somehow found by Laksha, and she was still someone to whom, in theory, I could talk. She’d need a mouth for that, however, since she’s clearly not interested in jumping into my head anymore.

I return to the hotel to consult my laptop again, because it’s easier to mask than cell phones or other wireless gadgets. I grab us some lunch, and Google tells me about the Raja Mirasdar Hospital in Thanjavur and provides me with a map. After I retrieve Laksha’s necklace and stuff it into my pocket, we set out to find Laksha a new body.

We circle the hospital campus a couple of times and pick out
a nice tree under which Orlaith can stretch out and take a nap. I camouflage her and then ask Kaveri if she would continue to keep Orlaith hidden while I am inside and cut off from the earth.