"You have returned at last."
Eshaan stared at the woman kneeling before him, her fist still pressed against her chest, and for a long moment he couldn't find a single word to answer her with.
"Returned from where?" he finally managed. "Devi, I have never met you in my life. I don't know what you're talking about."
Vidhya rose slowly to her feet, and the strange reverence that had been on her face a moment ago started to fade into a much more calmer look.
"You truly don't remember," she said, and it wasn't quite a question.
"Remember what?" Eshaan's voice came out sharper than he intended, irritation finally cutting through the shock. "I was born in Pataliputra. My father is Mahesh Shrivastava, head clerk to the Samanta there. I was trained under Acharya Kripa, and now I study under Bhaskaracharya. That is the whole of what I know about myself, Devi. I have never returned from anywhere, because I have never left."
Something in Vidhya's expression shifted as she heard Eshaan's side of story, and she found herself rearranging on what to say next.
"I see," she said quietly.
"You said you were looking for me," Eshaan pressed, "because something vanished from your protectorate. What vanished? And why does it have anything to do with me?"
Vidhya studied him a moment longer before gesturing toward the low table between them, the same one she'd been standing beside when he'd entered.
"Sit," she told him. "This will take longer to explain than we have been standing here."
Eshaan sat, though every part of him preferred to keep standing, to maintain his distance from this woman, and to find a way to escape if his life was threatened.
"My name is Vidhya," she began again, more formally this time. "I belong to an order that has existed since the reign of Emperor Ashoka himself. We are called the Navagranthika."
The name shook Eshaan, and brought back the memories from that secret sanctum, in which, he took his last breath before he was transmigrated into this body. Eshaan couldn't decide whether to hide this fact that he knew the name, or tell it to Vidhya. He decided the latter.
"I have heard that name," Eshaan said slowly. "It is an old story that goes like after the Kalinga War, King Ashoka was devastated by a vision that he saw in the flames that burned Kalinga. He wanted to protect the future, and so he called out his nine most trusted men, and entrusted them with dangerous knowledge, and instructed them to build a secret sanctum beneath the University of Nalanda."
Eshaan was clearly talking about the first secret society of the World, 'The Nine Unknowns' and he noticed that Vidhya's eyebrows rose, genuine surprise crossing her face for the first time she had knelt before him. "Who told you this?"
"I heard it," Eshaan answered, careful not to explain further, because explaining it was complex and dangerous to his secret. "Does it matter where?"
"It does matter because these were the exact words inscribed in our oldest grimoires that we have, plus you know the location of main sanctum," Vidhya admitted. "Perhaps, we shouldn't talk about it tonight."
Eshaan let out a sigh of relief that Vidhya decided to drop the topic for good, and that he was somewhere saved from telling and explaining how he got to know about the origins of their society.
"The Navgranthika are real, Eshaan. We are not an army, and we do not rule any kingdom, whatever the stories may have told you. We do help maintain order time to time, but we are just custodians. Nothing more. Each of the Nine guards a single book, a single key to a collective knowledge that King Ashoka believed could either preserve our civilization or unmake it entirely, depending on whose hands it fell into."
"Books of what?" Eshaan asked as he remembered the inscriptions from the wall of the sanctum's inner chamber.
"The first concerns propaganda," Vidhya explained, counting each book off properly and in sequence. "How a population's beliefs can be shaped, how a whole people can be turned against itself, or united behind a single idea, without a sword ever being drawn. The second concerns the human body — its vulnerabilities, the places where a single touch can end a man twice your size. The third concerns disease, plague, and the terrible uses it can be put to. The fourth concerns alchemy, the transmutation of one substance into another. The fifth concerns communication across great distance, by light and by sound. The sixth concerns the movements of the heavens. The seventh concerns the very origin of the universe. The eighth concerns light itself — how it bends, how it deceives an eye too quick to trust it."
Eshaan's eyes widened as the list of the books got crossed off one by one, he was completely shocked, but he knew it was possible at the same time because Nalanda University held great knowledge but, in some years it will be burned by an invader, out of anger. And he had a duty to prevent this from happening, for the sake of knowledge, for the sake of future.
"And the ninth," Vidhya said, "is called the Quill."
Vidhya suddenly fell silent, and Eshaan waited until his patience wore off, "What does it concern?"
"Civilisation itself." Her eyes stayed on Eshaan's face. "The other eight deal in pieces of the world, Eshaan. The body. The sky. The light. The plague. The Ninth deals with how a civilization is built, and governed, and made to last. Law. Trade. Institutions. The mechanisms that decide whether an empire survives three generations or thirty. Ashoka feared this Book more than all the others combined, because a man who knows how to destroy a city is dangerous for a season. A man who understands how to build an empire that outlives him is dangerous for centuries."
Something cold settled in Eshaan's chest as she spoke. Nalanda. Administration. The engineering he wanted from Bhaskaracharya. The governance, the preservation of knowledge, the entire quiet shape of what he'd been building towards since he first opened his eyes in this life. He hadn't thought of any of it as belonging to a single idea before tonight. Hearing her describe the Ninth Book felt, uncomfortably, like listening to a stranger describe the exact outline of his own ambition.
"Why are you telling me this," Eshaan asked, though some part of him had already begun to guess.
"Because the Ninth Book is missing," Vidhya replied. "It has been missing for some time, it isn't lost exactly. The books aren't like your ordinary books, and the ninth is a special one among the others. It disappears the moment the Peacock Bearer appears, as it always has, in every age we have record of. And above all, this ninth book is alive. It preserves the older knowledge attain by the bearer."
Eshaan's arm went cold beneath his sleeve, the mark hidden there felt, suddenly, less like a secret and more like a living thing holding onto his body.
"What does this mean?"
"Eshaan, have you heard these lines before?" Vidhya continued.
"Vāsāṃsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya
Navāni gṛhṇāti naro 'parāṇi
Tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāny
Anyāni saṃyāti navāni dehī"
"This… it means, As a person casts off worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so does the embodied self cast off worn-out bodies and enter into new ones."
"That is correct, Eshaan. But there is one more thing you must understand. The soul—the Atman—is immortal. It does not perish when the body dies, it casts one body aside and takes another, continuing its journey towards knowledge. And among all forms of life, it is only in human birth that the Atman possesses the means to seek that knowledge and rise beyond what it was before."
She paused, her eyes fixed upon him.
"You may not remember your previous births, Eshaan, but your Atman does. The Ninth Book preserves the knowledge gathered by the Atman across those births and rebirths. That is why you can access what you have forgotten. The knowledge was never truly lost. It was merely waiting for you to remember."
"What if Eshaan Shrivastava is one of my previous births? Could that be why I was able to inherit this body? And this… was it the past, or an entirely different timeline?" Several thoughts raced through Eshaan's mind at once, but he dared not say a single one of them.
His thoughts were again interrupted by Vidhya. "Now, coming back to the point. The rule I was talking about was also observed since Ashoka's own time."
"And that rule is?"
"When the Peacock Bearer appears, the Ninth Book disappears. We don't know why. We only know it happens, without exception, and that the appearance of the mark begins a search that doesn't end until the Book is found again."
"And when you saw the mark on me," Eshaan started
"I knew," she finished the sentence for him.
Eshaan began to put the pieces together to form a picture, before he finally said, "Then you weren't searching for the Book at all, you were searching for whoever the book would lead you towards."
"We were searching for the Peacock Bearer," Vidhya said. "That is the closest thing to the truth I can give you."
"Then that's what you meant. When you said I had returned."
"It is the closest word we have for it," she admitted. "The Bearer has appeared before, Eshaan. More than once, across the centuries the Nine have kept record of. We don't know whether it is truly the same soul returning each time, or something else entirely wearing the same mark. We only know the shape of the pattern."
"How many times has it happened?" Eshaan asked.
"That, I cannot tell you."
"Cannot, or will not?"
"Both," Vidhya said, without flinching, "depending on how you choose to hear it."
Eshaan remembered this exact conversation with Acharya Kripa, he already knew that he was the peacock-bearer but he didn't know it was because of the ninth book, nor did he know that 'The Navagranthika - The Nine Unknowns' did exist in this time period.
"What am I meant to do with any of this?" he asked instead. "If the Book disappeared because of me, why would any of you expect me to be the one to find it again?"
"Because that is what has always happened," Vidhya replied simply. "The Nine don't fully understand the bond between the Bearer and the Ninth Book. We only know history has never once produced a Peacock Bearer who did not, eventually, cross paths with it again."
"So I'm meant to save Bharat, then," Eshaan guessed, and an edge of disbelief crept into it that he didn't try particularly hard to hide.
"We don't know what you will become," Vidhya told him, "We only know what your arrival has always meant."
Eshaan had no clue what to ask next as Vidhya's word just confused him more and more. He knew that she had been hiding many things and telling him whatever little she could give, and honestly, who gives everything in their first meeting. So Eshaan thought of changing the topic to something else.
"His majesty mentioned something, about you, helping him gain independence from the Solankis?"
"I don't remember him saying anything." She lied plainly.
"Is it true?"
"That's not a story we want to discuss for tonight."
"You keep saying that," Eshaan said, frustration finally slipping past the calmness that he tried to maintain throughout the conversation.
"I cannot tell you about the internal and private matters of the Paramara Kingdom."
"You can't tell me anything, how am I going to trust your words or anything you say?"
Vidhya kept quiet for a long time, before she decided to tell Eshaan, "Very well. I cannot tell you much but…"
"When the Solanki hold over Malwa grew stronger under the reign of the previous king, Jayavarman, the region faced constant problems and so, the dying king Jayavarman requested his son, Vindhyavarman to free Malwa from the Solanki clutches as his dying wish. The nine then provided him with information like troop movements, precise weaknessees within the region and spying over the administration. That was our doing, nothing more."
"Why would your order care who rules Malwa?"
"We don't. Not in a way you mean. We care about the preservation of civilisation and culture built upon this land, and we strive for their survival. A kingdom that is strangled under foreign suzerainty rarely meets its end. That was the reason for our inclusion."
Eshaan was now somewhat understanding what did this group do, and most probably, they weren't just nine, they could be nine groups that work together.
"what do you want from me?" He finally asked.
"Nothing. Not yet."
Eshaan blinked at her. "Nothing?"
"I did not come to Ujjayini to recruit you, Eshaan. I cannot tell if you are ready to be trained by me, and I clearly don't want to bind you to the Nine."
She continued. "I came only to confirm that the mark I'd hear about from an old friend was genuine, and the boy was the same that he mentioned. That confirmation was my whole purpose tonight. What comes after it, isn't mine to decide alone."
"So you will simply leave."
"I'll report what I have seen," she corrected. "The Nine will decide together what happens next, as we always have."
Vidhya stood up and walked to the door, Eshaan simply watched her without a word, "Before I go," Vidhya added, "there is one more thing you should know, because I don't believe it would be right to leave you without it."
"what is it?"
"The Ninth Book has a Keeper, and it didn't simply vanish into nothing, the book might have gone somewhere to someone else, but the keeper is still there."
Eshaan's pulse quickened, "Who is the keeper?"
Vidhya met Eshaan's eyes before answering, "We don't know the current keeper but, we know where the book was last seen."
"Where?"
Vidhya sighed heavily, "Pragjyotishpur, in Kamarupa, far to the east, beyond even our reach."
"Kamarupa" Eshaan repeated slowly but, the word didn't ring a bell. A soft knock sounded at the door before Vidhya could say anything further, she immediately straightened.
"That will be His Majesty." She opened the door, and Vindhyavarman was standing there, his expression unreadable, his eyes moving quickly between Vidhya and Eshaan as if trying to understand what was going on in his absence.
"Well?" The king asked.
Vidhya didn't answer him directly. She only inclined her head, once, toward Eshaan, and stepped past the king into the corridor beyond, her travelling robes catching the lamplight one last time before she disappeared from view entirely, leaving Eshaan alone with King Vindhyavarman.