G9

They made camp that night in a dry nullahand — a seasonal streambed, empty in this weather — where the cut banks gave them shelter from the wind and the trees were dense enough to discourage casual observers. Kiran dressed Arjun's arm cut and Vikram's forearm laceration with the methodical efficiency of someone who had done this many times, cleaning both wounds with powdered haridra from his pack and wrapping them with strips of clean cloth, explaining what he was doing and why in a quiet running commentary that was clearly habit. Rahu watched the tree line. No one asked him to. He did it anyway. They ate cold food — Arjun had flatbread and dried fruit from Bhelpur, Kiran had dried berries and the remnants of a herb-rice preparation he'd cooked two days prior, Vikram had purchased provisions at the Bhelpur market with an efficiency that suggested he had done this often. Rahu produced, from various places on his person, enough food to constitute a modest meal and did not explain where any of it had come from. After eating, the silence stretched. Then Vikram produced the archivist's notes — carefully folded, tucked inside his inner jacket — and spread them on the ground in the space between them. In the small fire's light, they leaned in: four young men reading about themselves. 'Bhaskar's translation is partial,' Vikram said. 'The original scroll was damaged, and some sections were deliberately removed. But what he was able to recover:' He read, his voice low and level: 'In the age before the systematised cultivation arts, there existed a path known to its practitioners only as the Agni Marga — the Fire Road, or more correctly, the Road Through Fire. It was not a school. It was not a sect. It was a natural phenomenon: the periodic appearance, once every thousand years or more, of four individuals whose internal energy affinities correspond to the four fundamental states of matter and their corresponding forces. These four, when their marks are fully awakened and their cultivation has reached the required depth, become capable of accessing the original cultivation technique — a technique that existed before the chakra systems were codified, before the sects divided the knowledge, before the empire unified the practice under imperial sanction.' Silence. 'The original technique,' Arjun said. 'Before the sects codified it,' Kiran said thoughtfully. He was sitting cross-legged, hands on his knees. 'Our current cultivation systems are all derived from older practices that were standardised about two hundred years ago, when the Parakrama Rajya unified the subcontinent. Before that, different regions had different approaches — some very different.' 'The empire standardised cultivation,' Vikram said. 'And in doing so, according to Bhaskar, simplified it considerably. The manuals we train from today are — his word — shadows of the originals.' 'Shadows,' Rahu said from his position at the tree line. He had not moved. 'Meaning weaker.' 'Meaning controllable,' Vikram said. 'The empire doesn't want individuals with access to pre-standardisation cultivation techniques. Those techniques are, apparently, significantly less compatible with imperial oversight.' 'That's why they're hunting the scroll fragments,' Kiran said. 'And why they're hunting us.' Arjun looked at his palm. The flame-knot pulsed amber in the firelight, almost indistinguishable from the fire's own glow. 'What does the scroll say we're supposed to do?' he asked. Vikram turned the page. 'This is where it becomes incomplete. There are references to a training period — the marks must be nurtured through deliberate cultivation practice, each practitioner developing their primary affinity to what the text calls the Third Awakening. That's the third chakra realm in current cultivation terminology.' 'Manipura,' Kiran said. 'The third chakra. Fire and power, in the traditional correspondence.' 'After that,' Vikram continued, 'the text becomes fragmentary. There are mentions of a confluence — a point where all four marks reach their primary awakening simultaneously. And a warning.' He smoothed the page. 'I'll read it exactly: Do not bring the four to confluence before each is complete. An incomplete confluence is worse than no confluence. The road unmade is better than the road broken.' The fire crackled. 'So we can't just go to Suryapura, grab a scroll, and activate whatever this is,' Arjun said. 'Apparently not.' Vikram folded the notes back carefully. 'We need the master. We need to train. And we need the complete scroll — which is presumably in the Imperial Library — to know what we're actually training for.' 'Three problems,' Rahu said. 'The master, the training, and the scroll. In that order, presumably.' 'The master first,' Kiran agreed. 'He trained the last generation. He'll know what we need to know.' Another silence. An owl called, somewhere in the dark forest. The fire shifted and settled. Then Arjun said, because someone had to: 'What are we doing here?' The others looked at him. 'I mean — before any of this. I was a potter's son. I was going to stay in my village and take care of my mother and throw clay until my back gave out.' He looked around at the three of them — the nobleman's son, the monk's disciple, the street survivor. 'You. You were a Guild swordsman. You were a hermitage healer. You were—' He looked at Rahu. 'Moving,' Rahu said simply. 'Moving.' Arjun looked at his marked palm. 'And now we're sitting in a nullahand in the middle of a forest following something on our hands because apparently we're part of a thousand-year phenomenon and the empire is trying to kill us.' He paused. 'I'm not complaining. I'm just — naming it. In case anyone else was thinking it and not saying it.' Vikram looked at him for a moment. Then something in his usually closed expression shifted — not softening exactly, but a small crack in the careful blankness, through which something like dry amusement showed. 'When you put it like that,' he said, 'it does seem improbable.' 'I spent seven years in a hermitage learning to be very calm about things,' Kiran said. 'This is testing the limits of that somewhat.' Rahu made a sound. It took Arjun a moment to recognise it as a laugh — very quiet, entirely without performance. Just a real, brief, reluctant laugh. 'Go to sleep,' Rahu said. 'I'll watch first. Wake me when you're ready to switch.' No one argued about this either. Arjun lay on his back and looked at the sky through the trees — the stars were still there, slightly dimmer after the alignment night, as though they'd spent something and were recovering. The mark on his palm was warm and steady. Go toward it, his mother had said. Don't fight it. He wasn't fighting it. He wasn't sure if that was courage or simply the absence of alternatives. He thought: tomorrow, south, toward the master. He was asleep before he could think anything else.