Eshaan wasn't able to sleep properly even after several days of finding Ujjayini's name.
He was completely blank and many questions occupied his mind but the most prominent was - "Is that Sixth Book still in Ujjayini?"
The other eight cities weren't also random, he noticed a pattern starting from the first city to be ever built - Kashi. Takshashila was a centre of knowledge that had trained kings and generals for centuries before its fall. Nalanda was the current golden gate for knowledge. Kanchipuram, Tamralipti and Madurai were each a centre of trade, of scholarship, of gateway to the sea. And Pataliputra, his own city, the ancient seat of Magadha itself.
Every single one of the cities had been, at some point in time among the most important cities in the land. Which only meant that the nine volumes had never been scattered carelessly, and drafted at places that aren't hidden in obscurity but, in plain sight. It might serve two purposes -
These cities are too significant to ever entirely vanish from the record.
Whoever planned this, they knew that people don't look for something in populated places, where it is the easiest to miss.
And Ujjayini where the sixth book was drafted, was a centre of cosmology and according to Vidhya, the sixth book was concerned with cosmology. This cannot be a coincidence and Eshaan did acknowledge that but, he didn't know whom to ask for help. For one moment, a thought crossed his mind, "What if Bhaskaracharya himself is connected to it somehow?"
Eshaan immediately dismissed the thought, Bhaskaracharya didn't know the first thing about the Nine Unknowns, hadn't even blinked at the mention of Vidhya's name. Whatever Ujjayini's connection to the sixth book was, it wasn't related to Vedha Shala and, the city's astronomical tradition had grown here on its own merit, long before the Vedha Shala was built. And if the book was here once, then there must be a trace of it left somewhere within the entire city.
Eshaan returned to the Granthabhandara one of the following evenings with a question for Keshav.
"What are the oldest astronomical manuscripts in this collection?"
Keshav scratched his jaw, his milky eyes narrowed as he searched for an answer. "There are a handful," He replied finally. "Most are fragments of the original ones, copied so many times over the centuries that I doubt much of the original written ones survive in them at all. Why the sudden interest in ancient relics of sky?"
"I am just looking for something that my mentor, Bhaskaracharya told me to look for."
Keshav nodded and led Eshaan through tha maze of old dusted books before they reach another section of the reservoir that wrote, 'Astronomy.' He bowed and left Eshaan alone.
He spent that evening, and several days after it, working though the pile of dusted books and records, looking for something that hinted toward the sixth book and its location. All the hard work felt wasted until nearly a week in, Eshaan found something.
The manuscript described the relationship between the movement of bodies in the sky and movements of things upon the earth and it was written in considerably older language than the most. But, Eshaan's curiosity and certainty faded the moment he somehow realised that this work was unique but it wasn't in any way connected to the sixth book.
It cited its own sources, using names of older astronomers, older observations, generations of men adding their own finds in the work. Whatever the sixth book was, it wasn't the only reason Ujjayini became a centre of Mathematics and Astronomy. Eshaan set the manuscript aside without much disappointment.
He reached for the next bundle when the door of the Granthabhandara burst open harder than it ever had, the hinges let out a sigh under the force of it. A runner stood there, chest heaving, dust still clinging to his sandals from wherever he had sprinted from.
"Keshav ji" the runner gasped, not noticing Eshaan at first in the low lamplight, "the palace has ordered the Granthabhandara closed. All records, all scholars, everyone is to return to their homes tonight. Ujjayini's gates are being shut."
Keshav appeared from the far end of the maze, his usual unhurried pace abandoned entirely. "Closed? On whose order?"
"His Majesty's own." The runner finally caught his breath enough to speak plainly. "Word came an hour ago from the northern outposts. The Paramara army is on the move again, and this time it isn't a border skirmish. Vindhyavarman marches west, towards Gujarat."
Eshaan felt something cold settle low in his stomach.
Keshav turned toward him, his milky eyes suddenly very sharp. "Go, Eshaan. Now. Your Acharya will want you at the Vedha Shala before the streets fill."
Eshaan gathered nothing, left the bundle he'd been holding exactly where it sat, and ran.
Anahilapataka, Gujarat
Anahilapataka, the Chaulukya capital, sat far to the west along the banks of the Saraswati, its walls catching the last colour of evening across water drawn in from the river through the great stone channels of the Sahasralinga tank. A thousand small shrines lined its embankments, their lamps lit each night without fail regardless of what news travelled through the palace above them.
Tonight, very few of those lamps had been tended on time.
Inside the inner palace, in a chamber set apart from the public halls where petitioners were usually heard, a war council had gathered that no herald had announced and no scribe would be permitted to record in full.
At its head sat a boy no older than nine, small on a seat built for a much larger man, his feet not yet reaching the floor beneath the raised platform. King Bhima, second son of Ajayapala, had worn the crown for less than a year, inherited from a brother who had died before either of them had been given the chance to grow into the burden properly.
He said nothing. He had learned already, in the short months since his brother's death, that a king too young to command respected men on his own authority did far better to sit quietly and let the men who had earned that respect speak first.
It was General Arnoraja who spoke.
"Vindhyavarman has crossed the Mahi," Arnoraja announced, laying a map across the low table at the chamber's centre, its edges weighed down with brass. "Faster than any of our scouts predicted. He is not raiding border villages this time. He means to take Malwa back whole, and by the pace of his march, he intends to do it before the season turns against him."
A minister seated near the king's platform, older, robed in the plain dark cloth the treasury favoured, leaned forward with a frown already carved deep into his face. "The kingdom Kumarapala built does not simply hand back what it took. Malwa has paid tribute to Anahilapataka for a generation. If we let one province walk free because a boy sits our throne and a dead man's son thinks himself owed a crown, every feudal lords from here to the Vindhyas will believe the same is possible for them."
"With respect, minister," Arnoraja started, but by the time he finished the sentence, the respect left his voice, "the boy on our own throne is precisely why half our lords already believe exactly that, whatever Vindhyavarman does or doesn't accomplish in Malwa. We do not have the luxury of pretending otherwise in this room."
The minister's jaw tightened, but he didn't argue the point further.
King Bhima shifted slightly on his seat, and for one moment every man in the chamber's attention turned toward him, waiting to see whether the child would speak. He didn't. He only watched Arnoraja with stillness. He understood, even this young that the men arguing in front of him held the real weight of the decision between them, and that his own voice, however loudly it might be listened to out of formality, carried nothing behind it yet worth spending.
"What forces does he march with?" the treasury minister asked instead, turning back to Arnoraja.
"More than we expected, and better disciplined than the reports from three years ago suggested he could manage."Arnoraja traced a line across the map with one calloused finger. "He has spent the years since his father's death rebuilding what was lost during the interregnum, and it seems he spent them well. Our garrisons along the eastern border will not hold him for long without reinforcement."
"Then send it."
"Send what, exactly, and from where?" Arnoraja's voice sharpened. "We are still recovering from the Ghurid incursion at Kasahrada. Half our standing strength sits scattered across garrisons we cannot yet afford to thin further, not with rebellion already simmering in three provinces the moment my back is turned toward the east."
Silence settled over the chamber, heavy and unwelcome.
It was the king, finally, who broke it, his voice smaller than the room deserved but steady enough that every man present turned fully towards him this time.
"My father held Malwa," Bhima said. "My brother held Malwa. Are you telling me I am the one who loses it?"
Arnoraja's expression didn't soften, but something in it shifted, weighing the boy's question with more seriousness than court formality alone would have required.
"I am telling Your Majesty," he said slowly, "that Malwa was never truly ours to hold in the way Gujarat is ours. It was a province taken during weakness, and it is a province a strong enough king can always eventually take back. What I cannot yet tell you is whether Vindhyavarman is strong enough, or simply desperate enough to look that way for one more season."
"Find out," the boy ordered, and for a moment, his voice carried the aura of a great ruler.
"Whatever it costs. I will not be remembered as the king who sat still while a province my father bled for slipped away because I was too young to say otherwise."
Arnoraja studied him a long moment, then bowed his head, the closest thing to genuine respect he had offered anyone in the chamber all evening.
"As you command, Your Majesty," he said. "I will ride east myself within the week."
Outside, along the Sahasralinga's dark water, the unlit shrines waited for lamps no one in the palace above them had found the time to send.
Two hundred miles east, on the far bank of the Mahi, King Vindhyavarman's camp had already gone quiet for the night, the fires burned down to embers and most of the men asleep against whatever ground they'd claimed for themselves that evening.
Vindhyavarman himself hadn't slept.
He sat inside his command tent with a map spread across a low camp table, the same worn quality to it as the one Arnoraja had unrolled two hundred miles to the west that same hour, though neither man knew it. A single oil lamp burned beside him, throwing long shadows across the faces of the two men seated across from him.
"The eastern garrisons fell without much resistance," informed Senapati Udayaraj, the older of the two, a man who had served under Vindhyavarman's father before the interregnum had scattered half the kingdom's standing army to the wind. "Faster than I expected them to, Your Majesty. Either the Chaulukyas grew complacent holding a province they never truly earned, or they simply weren't ready for us."
"Both, most likely," Vindhyavarman stated, tracing a line across the map. "A boy sits on their throne. His brother died of illness, followed his father through the heavens before the kingdom had properly grieved the last death. Kingdoms don't defend themselves well in that condition, whatever generals they still have standing behind the child."
The younger man beside Udayaraj, a commander named Ranadeva who had earned his place at this table through three border skirmishes wins rather than through birthright, leaned forward with cautious in his expression. "Their generals aren't nothing, Your Majesty.Arnoraja *alone has put down two rebellions in as many years, and there are whispers his own lieutenant, a man named *Kumara, fights with a temper that's cost more than one overconfident commander his life already."
"I have heard the name," Vindhyavarman admitted, "Kumara concerns me considerably more than the boy on their throne does. A weak king can still field a dangerous general, Ranadeva, and it would serve none of us to walk into this campaign believing otherwise simply because the crown wearing it happens to be small."
"Then we proceed carefully."
"We proceed quickly," Vindhyavarman corrected, "and carefully, both at once, because a slow campaign gives Anahilapataka time to remember how to defend itself properly, and a careless one hands Kumara exactly the kind of overextended flank his temper would enjoy punishing."
He sat back, weighing the map a moment longer in silence. "Malwa belonged to my father before it was taken away from him. On his deathbed, I promised to him to win it back. And now when I have the strength, I do not intend to lose it a second time to anyone's carelessness, least of all my own."
Udayaraj inclined his head. "The men are ready to march again at first light, Your Majesty."
"Good." Vindhyavarman rolled the map closed, with the decision already settled, he let out a sigh, "We push towards the border fortresses next. I want them secured before word of tonight's advance reaches Anahilapataka in any shape they can properly organize around."
The two commanders bowed and left Vindhyavarman alone while the camp settled further into its uneasy sleep around him.
In this moment of war, Vindhyavarman's thoughts fleeted back to Ujjayini, towards a boy who might be sleeping soundly, entirely unaware that a war is brewing in full swing, far away from his reach.