Twenty minutes in, Kabir stopped. "There," he said.
On the right wall of the ravine, at about shoulder height: a series of marks cut into the rock. Not decorative — functional, the cuts too deliberate and too regular to be erosion. A horizontal line, then three diagonal cuts below it, then a circle.
"Signal mark," Kabir said. "The dacoits used these. A whole system. This one—" he checked his notes "—based on the 1974 police report on Man Singh's gang's territory, this pattern means something like 'known route, proceed.' The marks were made by a specific blade — a type of curved knife called a katar that they carried."
Aryan moved in close, getting the mark on camera. "They're everywhere in here?"
"The known routes have them. A gang would mark their territory's paths so any member could navigate even in the dark."
"In the dark," Aryan said, for the camera. "They moved through these ravines in the dark."
"They were born here," Vikram said. He was looking at the mark with an expression Aryan couldn't fully read. "Their fathers were born here. Their fathers' fathers. The land was in them."
"Beautiful," Tanya said, taking a photograph of the mark.
They kept walking. Kabir found two more signal marks in the next twenty minutes — a different pattern, which he said meant "water nearby" — and then the path opened into a wider section where the ravine walls stepped back and the floor levelled into something almost like a small plain. And there, in the far wall: a series of dark openings. Caves, or the rough equivalent — spaces hollowed into the rock by a combination of natural erosion and deliberate human modification.
"The first hideout," Kabir said.
They stood at the edge of the open area and looked at the caves. The light did not reach into them. They were dark in the specific way that enclosed spaces in old terrain are dark — not the darkness of night, which you know is temporary, but the darkness of something that has not been light for a long time.
Priya lowered the camera. She was looking at the cave openings. "Kabir," she said. "Those signal marks we passed — how old are they?"
"The survey team noted them in 2003. So at least twenty years old. Possibly much older — the katar cuts on this rock type don't weather fast."
"But they could be newer."
"Technically. Why?"
She pointed to the third cave opening, the one at the far left. "The dust on the ledge in front of that one. Look at it."
They looked. The ledges in front of the other openings had the undisturbed grey dust of decades. The ledge in front of the third cave had a different quality — disturbed, the dust pattern broken in a way that had the shape of a footstep that had been there and been partially swept away but not completely.
Vikram was already looking at it. He had been looking at it since before Priya had pointed it out.
"Animal?" Aryan said.
"No animal in this region makes that shape," Vikram said. He was very still. "We explore the outer two caves. We do not go near the third one. We go back to the vehicle in one hour."
