The question came from the third row, as it always did.
"Sir, are we actually going to talk about the Nine Unknown Men today?"
Eshaan didn't look up from the board immediately. He finished writing the date - 21 December 2025 and put the chalk down before turning around. Twenty-one faces looked back at him with varying degrees of interest. During the three years of Eshaan's PhD under Professor Chandrashekhar and teaching Ancient Indian History at the newly rebuilt Nalanda University, he has learned a few things,
This subject attracts two kinds of students: The ones who are genuinely obsessed with history, and the ones who had heard there were secret societies involved and were interested in Conspiracy theories.
Both types were useful; you just had to handle them differently.
"We are at the end of Kalinga War, and this is the point when the rumoured secret society was formed by Emperor Ashoka." Eshaan said, settling against the edge of his desk.
"But I want to be precise about what that means, we will discuss them but only from a fictional point of view. What do you already know about them?"
Several hands went up. He pointed at a girl near the window.
"Emperor Ashoka formed a secret society after the Kalinga War, and they were Nine scholars with each guardian of a book of forbidden knowledge."
"You are absolutely correct in outlining the event but, where does that account come from?"
The whole lecture hall fell silent, then from the back, a boy breaming with confidence stood up to answer as if he had already looked this up. "It's from a novel by Talbot Mundy"
"Exactly." Eshaan picked up the chalk again. "Talbot Mundy was a British adventure writer. _The Nine Unknown_ was published in 1923 and it was fiction. Entertaining fiction, but fiction. The problem" he paused,
"...is that Mundy's invention was so compelling that it got absorbed into popular history. People cite it as fact. You will find it on websites, in documentaries, even in some embarrassingly credulous academic papers."
Eshaan wrote a phrase on the board: "WHAT WE KNOW. WHAT WE BELIEVE. WHAT WE WISH TO BE TRUE."
"These," he said, tapping each phrase, "are three completely different categories. An archaeologist who cannot tell them apart is not an archaeologist. He is a storyteller."
He meant it as a warning to his students. He was also, though he wouldn't have admitted it that morning, talking to himself.
The class ran long, it always did when secret societies came up, and by the time the last student left the hall, the afternoon sky had turned into a shade of orange outside the window. Eshaan sat at his desk for a moment, looking at the board. WHAT WE KNOW. WHAT WE BELIEVE. WHAT WE WISH TO BE TRUE.
He erased the contents of the blackboard and packed his briefcase.
The drive to Nalanda Mahavihara took twenty minutes on the motorcycle, the evening air cut through Eshaan's shirt as he left the new campus behind and headed south towards the ruins. He knew every turn of this road by now. He had driven it almost every evening for the past month, always arriving just before the last rays of sun hit the earth and always left after midnight with his eyes burning and his mind too full for sleep.
Eshaan told himself it was research. Technically, it was.
The security guard at the entrance was new, he looked young, still carrying the stiffness of someone performing his first real job. He stepped out of the booth with his hand raised before Eshaan even reached the steel gate.
"Premises are closed after six, sir—"
Eshaan held up the Researcher Personnel Permission Card without speaking. The guard squinted at it, then straightened with a sharp salute that was slightly too enthusiastic.
"Apologies, sir. I'm new here."
"I understand." Eshaan pocketed the card. He'd already been through this with the previous guard. "You'll see me most evenings."
"Sir!" the guard addressed as he pointed at the premises, welcoming Eshaan inside.
Eshaan parked his motorcycle and walked in without looking back.
The ruins of Nalanda Mahavihara in the early evening were one of the most quietly devastating things Eshaan knew. Not because of what was there: the careful brick outlines, the excavated monastery foundations, the interpretive signs in three languages explaining what scholars believed each structure had once been. But because of what wasn't there. Ten thousand students. The largest library in the ancient world. Eight centuries of accumulated human thought which was gone in a few weeks of fire, around 1193 CE.
He had a complicated relationship with that date. As a historian he understood it, could contextualize it within the broader movements of the twelfth century, could explain without flinching the military and political logic that had brought Bakhtiyar Khilji's forces to these walls. Understanding was his job.
But sometimes, standing in the long shadows of the monastery ruins with the smell of Bihar dust in the air, he didn't feel like a historian. He felt like someone standing in the ruins of his own house. A house he had never lived in but somehow recognized.
Eshaan checked his watch, it was an old mechanical one that his father had left him, its second hand still ticked with stubborn accuracy even after two decades of wear and tear.
A month ago, Eshaan found the hidden entrance by accident, while following a brick alignment that the survey maps didn't account for, he had ended up in the narrow lane between Monastery 1 and Monastery 4 at exactly the wrong time to leave and exactly the right time to see the wall move. He'd stood there for a full minute convinced he was hallucinating from too much caffeine and too little sleep, before the doorway had sealed itself again and he'd spent the next four hours trying to figure out the trigger mechanism.
It was, of all things, a specific time. 6:15:15 PM. Precise enough to the second.
He had not told anyone. He had thought about it, gone as far as drafting an email to Professor Chandrashekhar twice and both times he had deleted it before sending. He wasn't sure why. Partly caution. Partly the particular possessiveness that comes over a person when they find something extraordinary and aren't yet ready to share it with the world and its grant committees and its jurisdictional disputes.
Partly because of what was inside.
The stone door sealed behind him with its familiar thud. He lifted the torch from its iron bracket — it burned with a steadiness that had baffled him from the first night, no wax visible, no oil, just flame that simply was — and walked the corridor he now knew by heart.
The Secret Sanctum opened before him.
Even now, a month in, it hit him every time. The scale of it. The sheer impossible preserved scale - pillars rising to a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow, shelves lining every wall from floor to vanishing point, filled with manuscripts, scrolls, bound volumes, clay tablets, texts in Sanskrit and Pali and scripts he hadn't been able to identify yet. The air smelled of old parchment and something faintly metallic, a smell he associated now with the feeling of standing at the edge of something much larger than himself.
He had spent every available night for a month working through the open sections. The word open was relative, roughly two thirds of the Sanctum was accessible to him. The remaining third was sealed behind doors that had not moved for anything he tried. He had examined the hinges, searched for trigger mechanisms, spent one entire night just pressing his palms against the wood and listening but nothing happened.
Whatever was behind those doors was not for him. Not yet possibly not ever.
Tonight, he didn't head for the shelves. Tonight, he carried with him something he had found the previous evening - a brittle manuscript, its edges crumbling, that he had been working through slowly. It mentioned a ritual gathering. It said, "The Keepers of the Sanctum met twice in a year. Once at the Summer solstice and other at the Winter."
Eshaan had checked the date three times on his phone before driving here. 21 December. The date of Winter Solstice. It was today that the day will be the shortest and the night will be the longest. He dragged a heavy wooden table to the edge of the sealed wing, settled himself behind it on the cold stone floor, and turned off his torch. The Sanctum went dark around him, deep and complete, the way darkness can only be underground with no light source in any direction.
He waited.
The waiting nearly beat him. The floor was cold and hard, his legs cramped after twenty minutes, and at some point, the exhaustion of the day - the lecture, the drive, the accumulated weight of too many late nights - pulled him under for a few minutes. He surfaced groggily to silence and for a moment thought he had imagined the whole plan.
Then he heard the door.
Not his door but another one, on the far side of the Sanctum, one of the sealed doors that had never opened for him. The sound was unmistakable: iron grinding against stone, slow and deliberate, as if the door was very heavy or very old or both.
He pressed himself flat against the back of the table and involuntarily stopped breathing entirely.
They came in one at a time. Nine of them, black-robed, hoods drawn low, moving with the unhurried precision of people who had done this, many times. They carried no torches and the Sanctum seemed to know they were coming, the walls brightening almost imperceptibly around them, the bioluminescent growth that ran along the upper stone pulsing gently to life.
They arranged themselves in a loose formation near the centre of the hall and began to speak.
The language was Sanskrit. Eshaan had spent eleven years with Sanskrit, he could read it, speak it, think in it when required and he caught perhaps seventy percent of what was being said. The rest slipped between the words, formal and technical and strange, as if the dialect had been frozen at a point centuries before the versions he knew.
But enough came through.
The fracture point approaches...
...the old models fail at this scale...
...intervention was never our purpose...
...and yet here we are having this conversation again...
One voice, older than the others, cut through the debate with the tone of someone who has been patient for a very long time and is nearly finished being patient:
"The Ninth has been restless for two years. You have all felt it. The Book does not move without reason."
There was a stillness after and then a softer voice followed, from someone on the far side of the circle: "Then perhaps it is no longer our decision."
Eshaan's back was flat against the wood. His left hand was pressed over his mouth, his heart making more noise than he thought hearts were supposed to make. He had spent his career being precise about the line between what we know, what we believe, and what we wish to be true.
He was having difficulty locating that line right now.
The nine figures stood in the half-light of the ancient hall, and one of them - the oldest, the one who had spoken last - turned their hooded head slowly, scanning the darkness, scanning the shelves, scanning the length of the sealed wing.
Scanning, with slow inexorable certainty, toward the table where Eshaan was hiding.
The figure took one step forward. Then another. The footsteps were soft, but they filled the entire hall.
Eshaan shut his eyes, pressed his hand harder against his mouth, and thought with perfect absurd clarity: I should have sent that email.