The Silence of the King
The moon was a sliver of bone, sharp and white against the bruised purple of the twilight sky. It offered little comfort to Bhanwar Singh as he began his final patrol. Below him, the lights of Jaipur glittered, a sprawling galaxy of amber and gold pinned to the dark earth, but up here, on the ramparts of Nahargarh Fort, another world existed. It was a world of stone and silence, of wind that whispered through ancient corridors like a sigh.
Nahargarh. The Tiger Fort. For three centuries it had stood sentinel on the Aravalli hills, its formidable walls a testament to the power of the Maharajas. But the locals knew it by another name: the abode of the ghost. They spoke of Nahar Singh Bhomia, a Rathore prince whose spirit was said to haunt these very stones, a restless guardian who tolerated no trespassers in his domain.
Bhanwar, a man whose bloodline had served Jaipur's royalty for generations, didn't claim to believe the stories, but he didn't disbelieve them either. He had heard the unexplained noises—the faint clink of anklets from an empty courtyard, the mournful strains of a sarangi with no player—and he had learned to respect the fort's deep and unnerving silence.
Tonight, however, the silence was different. It was heavier, more profound. The usual chorus of nocturnal insects was mute, and the wind itself seemed to be holding its breath. He adjusted the strap of the heavy rifle on his shoulder, its familiar weight the only thing grounding him. His route took him towards the Madhavendra Bhawan, the grand pleasure palace built for the king and his twelve queens. Its symmetrical wings and interconnected suites were a marvel of design, but at night, they formed a labyrinth of shadows.
That's when he saw it. A faint, flickering light.
It came from a window on the upper floor of the king's personal suite, a section of the palace that had been sealed for restoration work for the past month. Bhanwar froze, his heart a cold stone in his chest. No one was supposed to be in there. Dr. Sharma, the archaeologist in charge, had been adamant. All work ceased at sundown. The archaeologist was a man of strict rules and volatile temperament, and he had a particular fixation on keeping this section of the fort clear after dark.
Perhaps one of the workers had left a lamp burning. Cursing under his breath at the thought of the lecture he'd receive from the doctor in the morning, Bhanwar made his way to the entrance of the wing. The main door was secured with a heavy, modern padlock, just as he had locked it himself hours earlier. Frowning, he used his key to open it, the click of the lock echoing unnaturally loud in the stillness.
Inside, the air was frigid, colder than the night outside. A fine layer of dust covered the floors, undisturbed. He followed the long corridor, his torch beam dancing nervously over frescoes of royal hunts and divine lovers. As he ascended the stone staircase to the king's private chambers, a smell reached him. It was faint, but sharp and coppery, layered over the musty scent of old stone and lime plaster. The smell of blood.
The light he had seen from outside was gone. The upper floor was plunged in darkness. He was now standing before the king's bedchamber, a massive, ornate door of carved teakwood. It was closed. He pushed. It didn't budge. He pushed harder, his shoulder straining against the wood. Nothing.
"Is anyone in there?" he called out, his voice sounding thin and reedy.
Only silence answered.
He shone his torch at the base of the door. There was no gap, no sign of a key. This door had no modern lock, only an ancient, heavy iron bolt on the inside. A bolt that could only be slid shut by someone within the room. A chill, entirely separate from the cold air, traced a path down his spine. He remembered the stories then, of how the prince's spirit would trap those who displeased him.
Panic began to fray the edges of his composure. He radioed his supervisor, his voice cracking as he explained the situation.
It took nearly an hour for the first police jeep to navigate the winding road up to the fort. By then, two other guards had joined Bhanwar, their faces pale in the moonlight. The senior officer, Inspector Rathod, was a stout man with a thick moustache and a thicker air of impatience. He listened to Bhanwar's story with a skeptical grunt and ordered two of his constables to break down the door.
The old wood groaned and splintered under the force of their shoulders. With a final, sickening crack, the door swung inward. Inspector Rathod stepped across the threshold, and the beam of his torch cut a clean path through the darkness, landing on the scene within.
The room was just as the restoration records described it: sparsely furnished with a low, cushioned divan, a few chests, and intricate mirror work on the walls that shattered the torchlight into a thousand glittering shards. In the center of the room, lying on his back, was a man. His eyes were wide open, staring at the high, vaulted ceiling with an expression of profound shock. A dark, sticky pool was spreading from a neat, precise wound in his chest, staining the white of his kurta a deep crimson.
Inspector Rathod recognized him immediately. It was Dr. Alok Sharma, the renowned and notoriously difficult archaeologist.
But it wasn't the body that made the constables gasp and take a step back. It wasn't the fact that the heavy iron bolt on the inside of the door was firmly slid into its socket, sealing the room.
It was the symbol.
Painted on the wall directly above the doctor's head, in what looked like the same drying blood, was a large, cryptic sigil. It was a complex spiral, interwoven with sharp, angular lines and unfamiliar characters. It looked ancient, malevolent, and utterly alien to the Rajput artistry that decorated the rest of the palace.
Rathod swept his torch across the room. The single window was barred, the ironwork thick and rusted into the stone frame. There were no other doors, no hidden panels he could see. A man was dead inside a room that had been sealed from within.
"Nahar Singh…" one of the guards whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and terror.
The Inspector ignored him, but he could feel the legend settling over the crime scene like a shroud. A perfectly impossible crime. In the heart of Jaipur's most haunted fort, it felt less like a murder and more like a sacrifice. And in that cold, silent room, under the gaze of the dead archaeologist and the bloody symbol on the wall, the ghost of Nahargarh felt terrifyingly real.
Chapter 7: The Victim's Last Move
Neel's quiet declaration fell into the room like a stone into a deep well, the ripples of its meaning expanding in the oppressive silence. "It was painted here. Less than forty-eight hours ago."
Maya Sharma drew in a sharp breath. For the first time since she had arrived at the fort, a flicker of something other than grief crossed her face—a spark of fierce, vindicated anger. Her father had not been killed by a phantom. He had been killed by a man.
But it was Inspector Riya Singh's reaction that held Neel's attention. He watched as the Inspector stared at the symbol, her mind working furiously behind her sharp, intelligent eyes. She was re-evaluating everything she had been told, every assumption her team had made. The entire foundation of the case—the impossible, supernatural crime—had just been demolished by the chemical smell of acrylic polymer. She had been trained to look for fingerprints, for fibres, for footprints. She had never been trained to smell a lie painted on a wall.
She turned her gaze from the symbol to Neel, and for the first time, her professional skepticism was gone, replaced by an intense, almost unnerving curiosity. She saw him not as an eccentric consultant, but as a lens that could bring the truth into focus.
"A lie," Riya breathed, her voice low. "The locked bolt, the symbol, the ghost story… it's all a performance. A stage set." She took a step closer, her torch beam sweeping across the room, seeing it now with new eyes—not as a haunted chamber, but as a meticulously crafted illusion. "But why? If the ghost is a distraction, what is it distracting us from? Where do we even begin?"
It was the perfect question. The question of a true investigator.
"We begin where the killer did," Neel said, his voice calm and even. He turned away from the wall, his focus shifting from the crime to the man at its center. "The murder of Dr. Sharma was not the first move in this game. It was a response. The killer's actions were a reaction to the victim's actions. To understand why he was killed, we must first understand him."
He looked directly at Maya, his gaze softening almost imperceptibly. "Your father was not killed for who he was. He was killed for what he was doing. For what he had found. Or what he was about to find."
He then turned back to Riya. "The ghost story is the killer's narrative. I am not interested in it. I am interested in Dr. Sharma's. I need to see everything. His office at the city museum. His study at home. I need every research paper, every grant proposal, every note, every email, every book with a turned-down page. We are not hunting a ghost, Inspector. We are following the intellectual trail of a dead archaeologist."
Riya nodded, her mind already running through the logistics of securing the warrants and access he would need. This was a tangible course of action, a world away from chasing local myths. "I can arrange that first thing in the morning."
"We can start now," Neel corrected her. "What was found on his person? Here, in this room?"
Riya gestured to a small, sealed evidence bag lying on a makeshift table in the corner. "The usual. Wallet, keys, his mobile phone—which is password-protected, we're working on it. And this." She picked up another, smaller bag containing a worn, leather-bound notebook. "His field journal. Forensics went through it. It's filled with technical notes about plaster composition, carbon dating figures, chemical analysis of pigments. Nothing that looked relevant to his murder."
Neel held out his hand. Riya hesitated for a second, then passed him the bag. He carefully slid the notebook out, his movements precise. He didn't open it immediately. He held it, feeling its weight, observing the worn leather, the spine softened from use. It was the tool of a man who worked with his hands as much as his mind.
He began to page through it, his eyes scanning the dense, spidery script. Just as Riya had said, the pages were filled with academic jargon, complex chemical formulas, and precise measurements. It was the meticulous record of a man obsessed with the past. He moved past diagrams of wall strata and notes on Rajput-era brickwork. He kept turning, his thumb brushing against the edge of the final page.
Then he stopped.
The last entry was different. It was not a neat column of data or a technical observation. It was a sketch. Drawn with a hurried, excited energy, it depicted a cluster of seven stars, arranged in a familiar pattern—the Saptarishi, the Indian name for the Big Dipper. Below the sketch was a line of Sanskrit, written in a hand far more elegant than the scientific scrawl that filled the rest of the book. And beneath that, a simple, four-digit number.
Maya and Riya moved closer, peering over his shoulder.
"The Saptarishi," Maya murmured. "He was fascinated by archaeoastronomy. He believed ancient Indian architects used star alignments in their constructions."
"What does the Sanskrit say?" Riya asked, her torchlight steady on the page.
Neel ran his finger gently under the script. "It is a line from the Rigveda," he said, his voice a low hum. "Yatra suparna amritasya bhagam animesham vidathabhiswaranti. 'Where the sun birds with their unending song praise their share of immortal life.'"
He fell silent, his gaze fixed on the combination of star chart, ancient verse, and modern number. It was a lock, and the key was the mind of the man who had written it.
"This wasn't his logbook," Neel stated, looking up at Riya, a new intensity in his eyes. "This was his map. Your team was right, Inspector. His work on the frescoes was his official project." He tapped the notebook. "This was his real one. And it has nothing to do with authenticating paint."
He looked around the cold, silent room, at the modern paint hiding a deeper secret, and at the cryptic page in his hand.
"It has to do with something buried."