The court hall held its breath as if the very stones had learned to listen.
Light poured in through the high shutters and lay in cold bands across the floor. The official chairs were full: merchants who had washed their hands twice before arriving, clerks with ink still under their nails, ministers folded in stately impatience. Kalyan sat at the head of the dais as if he were the spine of the room; his face gave away nothing. Zafar bent once over the open ledger, his pen poised like a surgeon's scalpel. Bhairav occupied the doorway like a pillar of shadow. Raghuveer stood near the back, Viren at his elbow, young and very still.
Jamuna Das came forward first, the portrait of a respectable trader. He unfolded his paper packet and placed it on the table with hands that trembled only a little. His voice was low but steady.
"Faujdar sahib," he said. "I brought twenty thousand suspected coins at your exchange. You paid me eighty thousand as promised. Among those eighty thousand I later found ten thousand false. I ask for correction—an exchange for the ten thousand."
He spoke simply, like a man reporting a loss he could not afford. The court listened. The ledger showed his seal. The receipts were in place. Zafar's clerk confirmed the entry aloud.
Then Chandi Mal stepped forward. He glided with the oily confidence of a man used to gilded rooms. His clothes were fine; his jewelry was measured. The small pin in the upper part of his right ear winked in the light and held the court's attention like a secret at the throat.
"Faujdar," he said smoothly, voice raised so the gallery could hear. "I brought twenty thousand coins for exchange, and I demand replacement for twenty thousand counterfeits. The treasury owes me."
Murmurs rose. Two men—two claims. Both had exchanged, both claimed deceit. On paper the claims were symmetrical. In life they were not.
Zafar read the records aloud: dates, seals, clerk names, times stamped. The ledger was clean; the stamps matched the clerks' hands. It was a document meant to keep men honest. Yet men stood before it and asked for more.
Raghuveer watched Chandi Mal's face the way a man studies a blade edge. He had noticed things earlier: sudden improvements in Chandi Mal's houses, payments to unknown hands, a taste for tools that cost more than a jeweler's craft required. He had seen patterns. Now the moment had arrived.
Raghuveer spoke low, deliberately. "Jamuna Das came in good faith and followed the law," he said. "We paid him according to proclamation. As part of our test — a controlled mix — ten thousand doubtful pieces were placed so that honest hands would come forward first."
A swallow in the gallery. Jamuna's face slackened with relief mixed with embarrassment. He had been the first to obey. That was the point.
"And you, Chandi Mal," Raghuveer continued, turning his quiet attention like a lens. "You ask the treasury to replace counterfeit coins you claim to have received. We must ask: did the treasury give you false coin or true coin?"
Zafar produced the seals, the chest manifests, witnesses. "The chests delivered to Chandi Mal were verified by three separate clerks," he said. "They were weighed, stamped, and marked. There is a record."
Chandi Mal's composure hardened. He spoke fast, then loud. "You cannot treat merchants as thieves on suspicion and expect business to continue. I demand my coins be replaced."
Raghuveer let the room feel the statement for a beat. Then he said the thing that made the air thin.
"Examine the portrait," he told the Faujdar. "Notice the ear."
Kalyan tilted the coin. The small notch above the right ear caught the light—an odded-in mark as if from a pin or an engraving slip. Raghuveer watched the pin in Chandi Mal's ear glint like a guilty punctuation.
"You will forgive me," Raghuveer said. "But counterfeit dies are not carved from nothing. The craftsman copies what he knows. The die-maker used a small, idiosyncratic mark—the upper-ear pin—because that was the face he had before him."
Gasps threaded the room. Faces went toward Chandi Mal, and there, among the tangle of silk and beard, the glint of a pin answered the coin's notch.
"You would accuse me," Chandi Mal barked, voice rising into anger. "Accuse a man of business on a whim?"
Zafar's tone shifted from ledger to accusation. He laid down the corroborating facts: transactions into Chandi Mal's accounts, payments to a small workshop in the outskirts, the purchase of copper and alloy in quantities larger than his need. He produced sketches—rough dies and copper plates taken in prior raids and secret inquiries. Bhairav's men had done the field work; Bhairav himself stepped into the light then and produced a folio from his folds, the dossier he had kept.
Bhairav let the evidence speak in the way he preferred—stern, simple. He pushed the folio forward. There were notes, names, small hand-drawn dies with the same eccentric ear notch. The room smelled of ink and fear.
Chandi Mal's face drained. He tried a last theatrical note: "You have no proof!" he cried, and in that moment reached for a cup of water at the clerk's side—a polite gesture to staunch his rage. He tipped it back, the liquid sliding and catching in the light.
Bhairav's eyes tightened. He saw the movement nobody else did: the way Chandi Mal drank too quickly, the tiny tremor in his fingers. The guard nearest the dais made a step forward; Bhairav's hand flicked a motion—watch, not touch.
Moments later Chandi Mal's words cut because they were strangled. He clawed at his throat, eyes rolling. He lurched forward, then back, as if invisible ropes pulled. The court rose in a wave of noise: cries, shouts, a clerk overturning. Bhairav moved first—swift, a shadow into shape. He seized Chandi Mal gently but firmly even as the man began to keel. Two men caught him; they supported him upright, iron hands under silk.
Chandi Mal's voice came, thin and urgent. He tried to speak—he gasped words into the air. Bhairav leaned low to his ear; his jaw moved in a single hard set. Then Chandi Mal's eyes found Raghuveer's. He stretched a shaking finger, and with a breath like wind through dry grass, he murmured a partial name—two syllables, broken off: "—ad…—" His lips formed more, then closed. The sound was almost nothing. Only Raghuveer heard it clearly; only Raghuveer's face changed at the whisper.
Bhairav's hand tightened at the man's shoulder. He barked a quick order. "Take him. Quietly. Into custody."
There was a brief confusion—some clapped that order, some cried. Kalyan rose, voice like a blade laid flat. "Bhairav," he said, low and steady, "escort him. No spectacle."
Bhairav did not wait for flourish. He stepped forward, and with a composed force that made even the ministers still, he had Chandi Mal bound and led him through the heavy doorway. The hall's murmur did not turn to cheers. Instead a silence with the shape of an unasked question hung in the space.
Outside, Bhairav turned to the guard captain. "Lock him in the lower chambers," he said. "No visitors. I want a surgeon. I want a watch. And send two men to Chandi Mal's house tonight. Inventory everything."
Kalyan's face was a mask of displeased calculation. He lowered his voice to Zafar and Raghuveer. "We do not make accusations in public," he said. "This is not for rumor. Keep the accusation quiet—only the necessary men will know."
Zafar's mouth pressed into a thin line. "If this is true," he said, "we are larger than a single shop. And if it is false—"
"If it is false," Kalyan interrupted, "we will be destroyed by rumor. Quiet for now."
Bhairav led Chandi Mal away with a look that said he both wished for steel and for paper. Raghuveer felt the weight of the moment settle. He had expected cleverness to catch greed. He had not expected a hand to move so quickly beside the cup.
In the lower chamber the surgeons fussed and found no obvious wound. They gave morphine and leeches gestures of comfort but little cure. Chandi Mal's face went pale as moonlight and his breath came ragged. He clutched at a servant's sleeve and, as the room filled with the soft noises of men trying to fix what had broken, he spoke one more time, his whisper raw: "—ad… the letter… he promised gold… the faujdar…" Then his eyes closed and his chest stilled.
Silence became something heavier. A man who had demanded replacement coins had died or was dying while in custody. The court would later call it a fainting or an untimely collapse; the closer men who watched knew the truth: someone had slipped poison into a cup during a charged, public moment.
Bhairav's face was granite. He looked at Raghuveer, and for the first time in public the Kotwal's gaze was not merely professional. "He named half a name," Bhairav said quietly. "I want that found. Now."
Raghuveer remembered the two syllables. He did not voice them; the syllables were sour and incomplete—like a map with its corner torn off. He also remembered the letter that, if true, would tie a man of power to this trade of lies. He saw then what the counterfeit was for: the slow poisoning of trust before the thunder of war, a market collapsed so soldiers went unpaid or angry and cities grew brittle.
Kalyan chose to keep the matter quiet. He ordered searches discreet. He told Zafar to inventory the treasury and freeze outward payments. His voice, small but decisive, shaped policy: "Not a whisper beyond these walls. We mend, not shout."
Men moved. Bhairav's men went to Chandi Mal's house at dusk and worked like surgeons of evidence. They found ledgers, dies, and a sealed satchel. Among the satchel's contents was a folded paper—an envelope with a faint smear of foreign ink and an address in a hand that suggested a distant hand. The paper's seal bore an emblem the men could not read with certainty. They unfastened it and found a letter—careful, guarded, written in a hurry. It named ambition and advantage, spoke of making a city weak and of coin that 'might sweeten men for the south'—but the salutation was torn.
Bhairav held the letter back from Kalyan's sight for a moment and then, because the Faujdar had ordered quiet, he slid it into Raghuveer's hands. Raghuveer read in the pale light. The letter implicated a rival faujdar—regional, ambitious, not yet named fully in the line. The signature had been half-scorched; only two letters remained clear before the scorch: "Ad—".
Raghuveer folded the note into the palm of his hand like a small stone. The half-name matched the syllable Chandi Mal had breathed before his collapse—"Ad—." It fit like a bolt in a lock too easily.
That night, Rohtak slept less easily. Zafar stayed at his table and scratched his name lists with a nervous pen. Bhairav watched rooftops and roads, the net of his men tightened. Kalyan wrote a short, careful set of orders that would be delivered by runners in the morning: keep the markets open but watched; delay payments that could be exploited; stamp more coins with the treasury punch for trusted circulation.
Raghuveer stood alone for a long while in the warm dark of his small room. He felt the shape of the day settle like iron dust: greed had been caught; a man had been poisoned; a letter hinted at a faujdar with ambition enough to weaken a neighbor through counterfeit. He had won an immediate victory. He had also felt the edges of a larger game.
Viren's voice in the doorway was small. "Was it right?" he asked.
Raghuveer looked at him. The boy's face was bright with lessons and fear.
"For now," Raghuveer said carefully. "But watch this: clever men can buy the world in pieces. We have only found one hand. There are others."
And in the quiet, beneath the hum of a city that had not yet decided whether to trade in coin or bread, the question settled like ash: who wore the name that began with "Ad—", and how many hands did he have hidden in the city's chest?
They would not hurry to answer. This was a slow war—paper against tool, ledger against blade—and intelligence must move like a tide, not a fury.
The letter, folded and secret, waited in Raghuveer's hands like a map with its corner torn.
Outside, in the market, a child counted gold beads by lamplight and did not yet know the price that men of power would pay to remake a city. The sound that closed the chapter, long after the clink of chains and the court's low talk, was a different, smaller noise: the soft footfall of men sent to listen, to ask, to string together names.
The investigation would be slow. The consequences, the deeper ones, would not wait.