Jhajjar woke to smoke that morning.
Bhairav Malik — the man whose name the streets of the fort used as shorthand for precision — arrived at the scene before the sun had climbed fully. He moved like a hunting shadow, boots soft on churned earth, eyes taking in angles and ash. Around him, soldiers and villagers circled the wreck: carts splintered, canvas blackened into ragged flags; sacks of millet — some burned to cinders, some slashed open and emptied — lay scattered like fallen bodies. The air tasted of metal and singed grain.
The ambush had not been neat. It had been deliberate.
A cart boss lay face down in a shallow ditch, his throat cut cleanly. Two escort infantry had been slain and left where they fell; one trader, a man who had always preferred cash to complaint, sat with his shoulders rocked by sobs. Silver—the kind carried specially for paying recruiters and men on the road—was missing from locked chests. Someone had removed coin and then set the grain to a slow, hot burn that ate sacks and smell and market confidence.
Bhairav crouched by an overturned crate, picked up a shard of wax stuck to a scorched label, and turned it toward the growing daylight. The impression was small, crude at first glance. Under his thumb, something about the bite of the wax felt familiar. He did not take to sentiment. He took notes on the pad of his palm.
"These were picked," he told the captain at his elbow. "The fire was set after the sacks were opened. Someone wanted these burned, not just taken."
The captain nodded, answering with the shorthand of men trained to move on orders. "Tracks go west. Two directions; one west by the old ford, the other north by the ridge. Men saw riders split after the strike."
Bhairav's jaw tightened. He sent a runner back for a wagon and for Haridas — the trader-subordinate who knew routes and faces the way other men knew prayers. Haridas arrived with soil on his knees and an annoyance in his set mouth; the market's gossip had woken him quicker than any official notice.
He knelt, examined wheel marks, noted a triangular nick on a wheel beam, then another on a cart axle—a maker's stamp, repeated. "Same craftsman," Haridas said. "Different drivers. They knew which loads to take and which to torch."
That observation—different drivers, same maker—mattered. It meant intent and organization. It meant someone upstream had arranged for supply to be choked.
Bhairav moved to the nearest intact sack and brushed away ash. The cloth was torn but the tax stamp was still visible: a seal, shallow where heat had licked the edges, but there. He leaned closer and felt the cheat in the wax again; the impression differed from the official presses he'd seen when Antaji's men first posted supervisors at customs. He palmed a fragment and kept it.
Evidence, then. A message, shaped into loss.
Half an hour later, the news had threaded itself back to the fort and to the careful desk of Zafar Khan. Zafar met Bhairav's men at the outer gate, ledger rolled under his arm like an old friend. He set figures down on a scrap of paper as he spoke: the number of sacks lost, the estimated coin taken, the immediate shortage's likely effect on local prices. His voice was the soft clack of summing stone.
"If we lose this much now, merchants will reroute," Zafar said. "Prices will spike. If merchants stop coming, we starve our own market—and we starve the tax base. This is not a harvest's accident; it's a strategic cut. Whoever did this wants instability."
"Kill them all," Bhairav said without ceremony. The suggestion had the blunt mercy of a man who believed fear quickened obedience.
"Public executions will close mouths," said a captain near Bhairav, "but they will also close roads. Merchants hate spectacle and they will hide."
Bhairav's face was an argument—swift justice versus measured statecraft. He looked toward the fort, toward the high steps where Kalyan Singh Rathod would weigh the options, and then down to the wreck again. The grief and the charred grain made the choice cruel.
When Kalyan arrived—calm, eyes small with calculation—Bhairav met him head-on. "Find their heads and hang them," Bhairav said. "Make an example."
Kalyan's reply was patient, the kind of voice that had stopped more men than a blade. "Find them," he repeated. "But do not make this a spectacle that kills our trade."
Bhairav's throat worked. His impulse remained: a public punishment would be immediate and terrifying. Kalyan's mind worked in different metric: markets, loyalty, and the slow arithmetic of supply.
Raghuveer, standing a little behind, did not come to the wreck and clang of soldiers first; he came to the quiet corners where traders whispered. He moved with the ease of a man who'd watched many tempests and had learned which small gestures steadied a shaking hand.
"This is economic signaling," he said later, when Kalyan asked for him in the inner tent. He spoke softly, head still fresh with the road's smell. "They burn to show they can make us fear the granary more than the blade. They take silver so they can buy loyalties elsewhere. They do not only strike; they instruct."
Kalyan's eyes narrowed. He liked slogans when they revealed strategy. "They want the city to look fragile," he said. "For whom?"
"For those beyond our borders," Raghuveer said. "They are not trying to starve one village only—they are trying to make every market doubt the next sack."
Zafar had produced his calculations while the conversation continued. He laid them out—short term commodity shock, medium term panic among merchants, longer-term weakening of Rohtak's leverage. Bhairav glared at the numbers like a man tasting betrayal.
"We need action," Bhairav said. "Road sweeps. Checkpoints. Hang a dozen to prove the law is strong."
Kalyan considered the site report in his hand and then the men before him. "All three," he said finally—"but in order. First: secure routes. Second: bait and watch. Third: punishment if we catch the organizers. We will not punish blindly."
Bhairav's shoulders hunched in anticipation; he accepted the order like a wound. He wanted the law to ring immediately like a bell. Instead he would have to be patient.
They dispatched a mixed team to the scene—Bhairav leading the security detail, Haridas acting as local guide, a junior clerk to note manifests. The combination was deliberate: muscle, market memory, and paper. Haridas's role was critical. He would speak to merchants and learn which caravans had changed schedule recently; he knew who paid in coin and who paid in favor.
At the wreck, the team found small hints that deepened worry. Aside from the crude Maratha-like seal on a half-burned sack, they found scuff marks that matched an uncommon shoe type used by a band of riders known in rumors just beyond the district boundary. A scrap of fabric with a red thread—similar to a marking seen in the neighboring district's traders—fluttered in a breeze. The more they picked over the scene, the more the pattern emerged: not random banditry but a careful lesson in pressure.
Haridas reported back that merchants were already considering alternative routes that added days and cost. A trader in the market had openly said he would avoid the ford near Jhajjar and instead cross via a mountain pass more expensive and dangerous. The worry spread like mold: one man's choice became several, then a chain. Each re-route meant delay and higher prices.
"Silver gone," Haridas said quietly. "That funds the next test."
Raghuveer's mouth formed a thin line. They had found two important things: the network used forgeries (old seals and new wax mixtures), and they understood the logic—take coin, burn grain, make trade costly. The attack had a message: Rohtak's supply lines could be disrupted at will.
Word came that Antaji's administration had noticed similar disturbances in other districts and had quietly sent an inspector to observe patterns. The Marathas were not blind; they were worried. That meant two things: Rohtak must show control quickly, and Rohtak must not show panic.
Under Kalyan's order, they set immediate measures in motion: randomized convoy times, decoy loads that would be watched silently, and rolling checkpoints manned by local guides who knew the cart marks. Haridas arranged for alternate routes for urgent cargo; Zafar prepared an emergency ledger that logged redirections and the costs borne by villages.
They also recovered a small, folded scrap among the charred remains: a note, singed at the edges but legible. Someone had tucked it into a split sack pocket as if hiding a prayer. It carried a single word in hurried ink: "prepare."
Raghuveer held the scrap a long time and then put it carefully into his robe. The word was not bravado. It was instruction.
Bhairav tasted anger and something more—respect for an enemy who could speak a language of pressure instead of pure violence. He wanted heads; the enemy had given them a challenge.
That evening, as the sun fell and the wagons that remained tightened their ropes and moved with added caution, the fort made its public response. Kalyan posted a proclamation at the market: justice would be served, safe conduct would be increased, and merchants would be protected. He promised swift action. The proclamation was both shield and signal.
But in private the men at the table did other work: they cataloged the missing silver, they set watch-pairs for the decoy convoys, and they marked suspects in the clerk book. They would not yet hang men in the square; they would not yet show a public head so that merchants might still load their carts without fear of the spectacle itself.
Outside, the market's whispers coalesced into a cooler fear. Caravans crept in like mice. Men counted coin twice when it passed their fingers. The ambush near Jhajjar had been loud enough to be heard as a warning across villages. The enemy had taught a lesson in the essences of war: make them fear not the immediate blade but the slow, grinding absence of food and money.
Bhairav did not sleep well that night. He tested every patrol plan twice and then a third time. Rage simmered, but he trusted Kalyan's calculus for now: punish when you can name the king, not when you appease the crowd.
They had a lead: the forged seal fragment and the note that read "prepare." They had a burden: a merchant class already calculating cost and taking new routes. They had an enemy who preferred messages to massacre.
As the fort lamps burned low and the last carts rattled past the gate under watchful eyes, Raghuveer pinned the scrap to a map and drew a thin line toward the north. The ink trembled because the wind had already changed.
The ambush was not the beginning of full war.
It was its first clean, loud lesson.
And it left Rohtak with a single stubborn command: respond quickly, but respond cleverly—because the next message might ask them not only to contain, but to pay attention to who was teaching them how to fear.