G8

They were two hours east of Bhelpur, walking in the loose formation of people who are not quite travelling together, when the demon hunters came out of the forest. There were seven of them. They wore no colours, carried no banners, displayed no sect insignia. What they carried were weapons — short, heavy blades designed for close work, and in one case a chain-flail that moved through the pre-dusk air with the practiced ease of long use. Their faces were covered with wrapped cloth from the nose down. Their eyes, above the wrapping, were flat and professional. They had not come from the road. They had come from the trees — specifically from both sides of the road simultaneously, which indicated planning. Arjun assessed this in the time it took to drop his pack from his shoulder and get his hands free. Four on the left. Three on the right. The spacing suggested they knew their targets' approximate fighting capability — wide enough to allow for some resistance, not so wide as to indicate they expected significant difficulty. They were underestimating, Arjun decided. Or perhaps they were not. He didn't know yet what the others were capable of. 'The marks,' said the leader — identifiable by position and by the slight deference the others showed in the half-second before they moved. 'All four of you. Lower your weapons, step away from each other, and this ends without additional injury.' 'Additional?' Kiran said. 'Meaning us, presumably,' Rahu said from just behind Arjun's right shoulder. His voice was almost conversational. 'They've already injured some other bearers. This is a collection operation.' The leader tilted his head. 'You're perceptive.' 'Occasionally.' Rahu paused. 'What happens to the marks once you collect them? Do they transfer? Or do you need the whole person?' The very brief silence before the answer told Arjun everything. 'They need the whole person,' Arjun said. 'Or they need us dead.' The leader moved. What followed was not what Arjun's limited experience of formal duels had prepared him for — it was fast, close, messy, and loud. The four attackers on the left came in two pairs, staggered, clearly trained to work together. The three on the right split — two toward Vikram, one toward Rahu. Arjun went toward the nearest attacker with the flat simplicity of a man who had decided that thinking was for afterwards. He was not formally trained. What he had was natural reach, the strength of years of physical labour, and the Kalaripayattu forms his father had taught him in the dark — which were not the polished Guild forms, but older, rougher, designed for actual rather than ceremonial effectiveness. He caught the first man's blade-wrist on a downswing, turned it with both hands, and drove his elbow into the man's face. The man went back two steps. The second came in while he was doing this — Arjun felt the blade rake across his upper arm, not deep, and twisted away rather than back, which was instinctive and also happened to bring him inside the third man's reach. He headbutted the third man. He was, evidently, developing a pattern. To his left, he caught a glimpse of Kiran — moving with a precise, flowing quality that was unlike anything Arjun had seen, redirecting the attacker's force rather than meeting it, using the attacker's own momentum to put him in positions where he was off-balance. It was graceful. It was also, Arjun noted with one part of his mind, extremely effective. To his right, Vikram had one of his two attackers disarmed and on the ground and was engaging the second with a short stick he had produced from somewhere on his person. The stick moved like it was an extension of his arm. Rahu was — Arjun could not track Rahu during the fight. There was movement, and then the attacker who had gone toward Rahu was on the ground, and Rahu was standing over him looking faintly puzzled, as though the fight had concluded slightly before he'd expected it to. The leader — who had not engaged — was watching all of this from the edge of the road. Arjun had enough of a handle on his three attackers now — one down, one retreating, one hesitating — to look at the leader directly. 'You're better than expected,' the leader said. He did not seem especially troubled by this. 'Who sent you?' Arjun asked. 'Someone who wants the marks contained. Someone who believes that four untrained children walking into Suryapura with active Agni Marga designations is catastrophically dangerous.' The leader tilted his head. 'They might be right.' 'Contained meaning dead,' Vikram said. He was very calm. He had a bleeding cut on his forearm that he appeared to be ignoring. 'Contained meaning controlled.' The leader looked at each of them in turn. 'You don't know what you're carrying. You don't know what activating those marks fully will do to the political structure of this empire. You don't know who is already positioning to use you, and who is positioning to destroy you, and the difference between those two groups is smaller than you think.' Silence on the road. The forest around them was very quiet — the birds had gone silent during the fight and hadn't come back yet. 'Tell us who sent you,' Kiran said. His voice was even. 'We'll listen.' The leader looked at him for a moment. Then he made a hand signal — Arjun didn't recognise it — and the remaining attackers melted back into the treeline. The injured ones were helped, silently, by the others. The leader stayed. 'My employer,' he said carefully, 'is not yet willing to be named. What I can tell you is this: Agni Marga requires four marks fully awakened. The marks awaken through cultivation — specifically, through the chakra-cultivation system. Each of you has a natural affinity. Each of you has a corresponding realm. If you reach Suryapura and enter that tournament before your marks are mature, you will be captured, dissected, or used in ways that won't be pleasant.' 'And if we don't go to Suryapura?' Rahu asked. 'The people who killed the wandering ascetics will find you. They're better funded than my employer, and less interested in keeping you alive.' He looked at them for a long moment. 'There is a Kalaripayattu master,' he said. 'In the Sahyadri forests, south of here. Old. Inconvenient. Refuses to acknowledge the empire. His name is Chitragupta. He trained the last generation of Agni Marga practitioners, one hundred years ago.' 'What happened to them?' Arjun asked. The leader was already stepping back toward the treeline. 'They almost won,' he said. 'Almost.' He was gone before any of them could ask what they'd almost won, or against whom. The four of them stood on the empty road in the growing dusk. Kiran looked at his hands — specifically at a bruise forming on his right forearm from a block. Then he looked at the others. 'Anyone badly hurt?' Arjun held up his arm. The cut was shallow, already drying. 'This.' Vikram showed his forearm. 'This.' Rahu had a split lip from something — a stray elbow, probably. He touched it with two fingers, assessed, and appeared to conclude it was beneath comment. 'We need to find this master,' Kiran said. He opened his Roga-Shastra, made a small notation. 'Before we do anything else.' 'The Sahyadri forests are south,' Rahu said. 'Suryapura is east.' 'South first,' Arjun said. No one argued. Which was, perhaps, the first real indication that something between them was forming — not friendship, not yet, but something like a shared direction. A temporary alignment of purposes. They walked south as the stars came out, and none of them looked at the spot where the leader had been, and none of them said what they were all thinking: That the man had known about the marks, and the path, and the master, and the tournament — and had still tried to stop them. Whatever Agni Marga was, it made people afraid. That, Arjun thought, cutting south off the main road and into the trees, was either very bad or very interesting. Possibly both.