IT TOOK THEM ALMOST TWO hours to track down Enoch and Surendranath, who had wandered quite beyond the frontier of Jack’s kingdom and into a sort of lawless zone between it and a Maratha stronghold. Through the center of that no-man’s-land ran a small river in a large gulley—a steep-sided channel that the water had cut down through black earth every bit as slowly and patiently as the kolis whittling their beams.