As Willoughby was about to leave Lomas Rishi’s cave, his eyes fell on a few pieces of paper scattered at the corner of the cave.
He took notice of them and moved to pick them up.
His eyes widened in surprise, and he couldn’t comprehend what they saw next.
His fingers weren’t just gripping a paper; they were gripping the throat of my strategy.
What was written in the paper was not just words, they were his key to face off against the very storm he was facing.
His heart stopped, sweat rolled down his face, as a wide grin appeared across his lips.
What he held in his hands were no ordinary papers, but a full-planned smuggling of materials and ores from Calcutta.
“So, this was his plan all along.
I was starting to wonder how he keeps those mammoth machines of his in top shape.
Now I see!!!!!
He gets the ores and shipments directly from CALCUTTA!!!!??????
Damn it, he has already infiltrated the heart of the British Empire before anyone knew it.
There is no time to waste, if I could pinpoint and strangle his supply areas in Calcutta, he would run off supplies; it would be only a matter of time before “The Mighty Guardian” falls.
I should move before it is too late.
God knows how he plans to “Snatch the Meat From the Tiger’s jaws!!
I won’t let my prey be stolen by anyone.” He told his regiment and troops to pull back.
“Everyone Pull back!!!
Relay a message to the headquaters in Bengal that the Guardian is directly coming for them.
”
Willoughby stood in the center of the obsidian black cave, his silhouette cast long and jagged by the dying flare.
The papers in his hand were not just tactical drafts; they were a confession of ambition so grand it bordered on insanity.
He smoothed the edges of the blueprint, his fingers trembling; not with fear, but with the electric surge of a hunter who has finally seen the true size of his prey.
“Calcutta,” he whispered, the name a prayer and a curse.
“You weren’t stalling me in these hills, Guardian.
You were buying time to travel.
You’ve outpaced me again, haven’t you?”
He looked at the scribbled annotations in the margins of the blueprint.
They were written in that same clean, alien script; detailing the timing of the guards’ shifts at British ports, the unfinished blind spots of warehouses and silos, and the exact caloric needs of a single operative hiding in the city’s underground for ten days.
It was a masterpiece of infiltration.
His mind raced, “could he really be thinking of such a big strike?
that too at the heart of British!!!!”
The logic took root in his mind like a fever.
A river blockade at Rajmahal would be a messy, slow strangulation.
But cutting off supplies in Calcutta?
That was a tactical strike that would completely cripple and collapse the British administration.
It was exactly the kind of “recalculation” the Guardian lived for.
“Major!” Willoughby roared, his voice snapping the eerie silence of the Lomas Rishi.
A startled officer stepped forward.
“Sir?”
“Forget the jungle sweep!
Stop every man, every horse, and every lantern from moving into these woods.
We are leaving.
Now!”
“But sir,” the Major stammered, “the Guardian just jumped into the ravine!
He’s broken, unpowered we could find him by dawn!”
Willoughby turned, his eyes wide and burning with a manic, crystalline clarity.
He shoved the blueprint into the Major’s chest.
“You think he jumped because he failed?
No!
He jumped to lead us into a circle!
Look at this!
While you are hunting for a man in the mud, the real strike is already at the gates of Bengal.
He didn’t drop this because he was careless; he dropped it because he was distracted by the pressure I put on him.
He slipped, Major.
For the first time, he slipped.”
He gripped his saber, the leather creaking under his palm.
“I will not let my prey be stolen by a common sentry in the capital.
If the Guardian is going to kill the heart of the Empire, I will be the one waiting in the dark to catch his blade.”
Within the hour, the Barabar Hills were a ghost of activity.
The British regiments pulled back with a frantic, desperate energy.
Messengers were dispatched on the fastest stallions, riding until the horses’ hearts burst, carrying a single, terrifying warning to the East: THE GHOST IS COMING FOR CALCUTTA.
While he was marching out of the forest, some thoughts clicked his mind, “I knew he was daring, but could he really strangle the supplies of entire Calcutta.
Although we have enough storage, if the crisis lasts long, it could cause serious problems.
That shouldn’t be, “The Guardian” is “a man of honour” and I know it.
He must have something else planned as well.
I should work quickly.” He frantically pulled out maps of Kolkata and started marking the areas and docks, where my ships could land.
“Soon, pretty soon, I will have my hands on the precious treasure of alliance,” , he spoke to himself.
He repeatedly skimmed through every map and every logistics center in Kolkata, unable to hide his maniacal smile.
He couldn’t stop shaking from the sheer excitement of coming face to face with “the greatest brain of the alliance.”
While in the north, the air in Lahore didn’t smell of gunpowder; it smelled of stagnant dust and fear.
Begum Hazrat Mahal sat atop her white charger, positioned on a low ridge overlooking the Hazuri Bagh.
Beside her stood the Pashtun Maliks, their long rifles slung across their backs, their eyes fixed on the massive, silent walls of the Lahore Fort.
They had expected a siege of fire and blood, but the Begum had commanded a different kind of war.
“The British believe that power is held in the lead of a bullet,” she said, her voice carrying clearly in the crisp morning air.
“They forget that a city is a living thing.
It needs to breathe.
It needs to eat.
It needs to hope.”
She looked at her command staff.
“Close the Bari Doab headworks.
If the British want to hold the fort, let them learn to survive on the dry dust of the plains.”
On her command, many Pashtun tribals, as well as her soldiers, started digging many deep passages from the main river.
Many small canals were made to divert the water flow away from Lahore.
By noon, the transformation was complete.
The great Bari Doab Canal, the lifeblood of the city’s British cantonments, had been diverted.
In the Mian Mir barracks, the taps sputtered and died.
The thousand horses of the British cavalry began to stomp restlessly in their stalls, their throats parched, their strength fading with every passing hour.
The Begum didn’t stop there.
Under her orders, a thousand printed broadsides were smuggled into the disarmed sepoy camps.
They weren’t calls to arms; they were poems of home and dignity.
She used the small, high frequency radio repeaters to broadcast her voice; not as a general, but as a sister; directly into the hearts of the four thousand men sitting idle under British guns.
“They took your muskets because they fear your hands,” her voice echoed through the camp’s makeshift receivers.
“But a man without a gun is still a man.
When the sun hits the meridian, stand up.
Do not fight.
Do not shout.
Simply walk toward the Ravi River.
Let the British decide if they wish to be remembered as soldiers or as butchers of the unarmed.”
By the afternoon, the sun climbed to its peak.
In the Lahore Fort, Sir John Lawrence stood on the ramparts, his telescope trembling.
He looked toward the Khyber Pass, praying for the dust clouds of a rescue column.
There was nothing.
He looked towards his soldiers.
In the hot weather and scorching heat of the sun, almost all of them were half dead.
Most of their water was finished in the morning itself.
It had never been a problem for them, as they could fetch water from the rivers coming from the Pashtun areas.
But now, soldiers stood up trying desperately to look for water; some saw a mirage and were directly headbutted into the wall of the fort.
Only on the plea rang in the whole fort, “Paani!!!
Paani!!!!!”.
He was torn between the psychological image the Begum had drawn, and the absence of reinforcements from Pashtun tribes just added more to his toll.
The North had fallen silent.
The telegraph lines to Calcutta had been cut by my “Hydraulic Checkmate” in the East.
He stood there as if he were an island, and the “Begum” tide was coming in.
Finally, the gates of the Mian Mir cantonment swung open.
Not by force, but by the sheer weight of four thousand unarmed men walking in a silent, disciplined wave toward the city.
Lawrence looked at his artillerymen.
Their fuses were lit.
Their cannons were aimed at the mass of men.
“Fire,” a junior officer whispered.
Lawrence looked at the Begum, standing motionless on the ridge, her white banner catching the light.
He saw the Sikh aristocracy watching from their balconies, their hands on their swords, waiting to see if the British would spill the blood of their own brothers in the streets of Lahore.
“No,” Lawrence rasped, his face pale.
“If we fire, we don’t just lose Lahore.
We lose India’s soul.
We can’t kill them all.”
The parley took place at the Roshnai Gate.
She entered with a small, brass key, a duplicate of the Fort’s lock she had commissioned from the city’s finest smiths.
“General Lawrence,” she said as the British commander descended the steps of the fort, his head bowed.
“You are a man of logic.
You know that Willoughby is chasing phantoms in the salt mists of Calcutta.
You know the river is closed.
You know the mountains belong to my brothers.”
She extended her hand, not for his sword, but for the ledger of the city’s grain stores.
“I offer you the ‘Golden Bridge.’ Leave your heavy guns.
Leave your stolen treasures.
March your men toward the south.
I will provide the water and the grain for your journey.
But Lahore returns to its people today.”
Lawrence looked at her, a woman who had defeated an Empire without firing a single cannonball.
His eyes scorned over his thirsty underlings.
He slapped the heavy iron keys of the Lahore Fort into her palm.
Begum remained calm.
“You have recalculated the cost of our stay, Begum Sahiba,” Lawrence said, his voice hollow.
“It is a price we can no longer afford to pay.”
As the British column began its long, humiliated march out of the city, the Begum turned to her people.
She didn’t shout.
She didn’t celebrate.
She simply walked toward the Badshahi Mosque, her head held high.
The North was hers.
The “Great Thirst” had claimed its most prestigious victim.
As the night began to fall, Mammu Khan stood on the prow of the lead barge, his eyes fixed on the horizon where the Ganges narrowed into the Rajmahal Corridor.
Behind him, a fleet of hundreds, not of warships, but laden with heavy stones and flat bottomed transport vessels stretched back into the morning mist.
“The telegraph lines are silent, Khan Sahab,” a young signalman reported, holding a small, flickering device the Guardian had dubbed a ‘Frequency Sniffer.’ “The North is dead air.
Calcutta is screaming about a ghost.
Willoughby has taken the bait.”
Mammu Khan twisted into a small grin, a gesture of satisfaction he rarely had.
The Guardian had played his part in the mud of the Barabar Hill.
Now, it was his time to finish the work.
“Drop the anchors,” Mammu Khan commanded.
“Bring the ‘Iron Box’ to the deck.”
The Rajmahal hills pressed in from the south, forcing the massive river into a treacherous, deep water vein.
In the nineteenth century, this was the only passage for the deep draft British steamers.
Using the hydrology maps the Guardian had ‘liberated’ from Willoughby, Mammu Khan didn’t need to block the whole river, but only blocked the three meter channel.
The Throat of Bengal.
“Commence the scuttling,” he ordered.
One by one, the heavy barges, filled to the brim with basalt rock and river silt, were positioned slowly with surgical precision.
At a signal, British hulls were breached.
With a series of muffled thuds and the churning of white water, they began to sink.
They didn’t just sink randomly.
They formed a jagged, submerged reef, an artificial sandbar that wouldn’t be visible from the surface until a British ship’s hull was already being ripped open by it.
As the night grew darker, the Ganges began to back up.
The flow didn’t stop, but the speed changed.
The silt began to settle where Mammu Khan had directed it.
“Willoughby thinks the Guardian is coming to snatch the ‘Meat’ in Calcutta,” Mammu Khan whispered, looking down at the swirling brown water.
“He doesn’t realize the ‘Meat’ is already rotting because the ‘Blood’ has stopped flowing.”
By dawn, the Rajmahal Corridor was no longer a river; it was a trap.
Any ship heading north with reinforcements for Lahore or Delhi would be grounded within minutes.
Any ship heading south with grain for the starving capital would find itself staring at a wall of mud and stone, guarded by Mammu Khan’s cannons on the heights.
Soon, all the progress was informed to Rani.
She let out a sigh of relief, “All is going according to plan.
Everyone, please be safe..”
In the ancient ruins of Rajgir, I leaned my head against the cold Cyclopean stone.
My suit was a dead weight, my HUD a dark void, and my body a map of bruises.
But as I watched the first light of dawn touch the horizon, I didn’t need sensors to tell me the world had changed.
I could feel it in the air, the sudden, heavy silence of an Empire that had just realized it was holding its breath.
The trap was closed.
Now, we wait.