Casket of Souls

recognized the writing at once as some sort of cipher. The messages were too long and complex to chance copying all of them, and it would be a bit too obvious to steal them, especially since the night watchman had caught him wandering the corridors. Laying the three of them out side by side on the floor in front of him, he studied them in the glow of the lightstone, trying one system after another to get them to make sense. It took only a few minutes to recognize it as nothing more than an offset code. With his host’s pen and ink, he copied the shortest, then interpreted the other two and wrote them down. He frowned down at the revealed messages, then tucked them inside his shirt and hurried back up to his room.
    Alec was fast asleep on his side, snoring softly the way he did when he’d had too much to drink. Rather than chance disturbing him, Seregil settled in an armchair and took out the copies he’d made, puzzling over them for some time.
    Alec woke the next morning with a throbbing head and queasy stomach, but managed a humble apology to their hosts. He suffered their well-meant reassurances and managed not to throw up in the carriage on the way home.
    “Next time,
you
get drunk!” he groaned as the carriage jounced over a rough patch of paving. “You never feel this ill afterward.”
    “I’m sorry, talí, but your sacrifice was not in vain,” Seregil said. “I found a report on us, and these.” He showed Alec the letters he’d copied. “Thero will certainly want to see these.”
    Alec cradled his head in his hands. “Then you can damn well go on your own!”

 
    “Y OU’VE certainly kept yourself busy,” Thero said approvingly as Seregil followed him into the workroom. “Tea?”
    Seregil accepted a cup and pulled out the copied documents. “I found another copy of a letter from Elani to the queen, a report on Alec and me that mentions you as one of our friends, a letter from Malthus to Laneus, and these.” Seregil handed him the copy of the enciphered document first. “I found three written in this code. I didn’t have time to copy them all, but I did this one as an example.”
    Thero frowned as he scanned it. “I don’t know this system. Can you read it?”
    “Yes. It’s just an offset encryption. Let me show you.”
    He went to Thero’s desk across the room and took out a sheet of scraped parchment and a quill.
    The wizard joined him, looking over his shoulder. The first line on the page read
SORITO ALA TIRLYK SMIEXT YWBIMTUH YHSAWWEKRI
. The second was longer:
BIUB UI KJNA ERTOARXMEN BMOPIU YNERSBQUIUS ESPYTEBV CWATP OSMRYIUP TRADFTVIH OUY
.
    “It’s not a hard code, but whoever wrote this knew a trick or two. The beginning of it is pure gibberish, designed to throw off anyone trying to make it out.” He struck out the first two groupings of letters of the first line, except for the last one in the second grouping: A. “Taking every second letter from there, you get AILK.”
    “Klia, backward.”
    “Exactly. But from here, taking every second letter, youget them in proper order left to right: METWITHHAWKI.” He drew a series of slashes between the letters, dividing them into MET WITH HAWKI.
    “Hawki?” asked Thero.
    “It’s probably meant to be ‘hawk.’ And we don’t know who that is. Perhaps someone from the Red Hawk or White Hawk regiments?”
    “But that cipher doesn’t work on the next line,” Thero pointed out.
    “No, because you start with the third grouping and read every third letter. It’s a common system, although whoever wrote this may not have known that. An amateur intriguer, probably. So using that …” Seregil slashed through the letters of the second line, leaving: ATREMINSUSPECTSYMPATHY. “ ‘At Remin suspect sympathy.’ The second word nearly threw me off, but Remin is a small town on the Folcwine, probably the site of a battle.”
    The wizard shook his head. “The first part sounds like something that could be common knowledge. But the ‘sympathy’ suggests some sort of collusion.”
    “I think you may be right. Here are the two I translated.”
    The first read:
ailk recalled to queens camp given more riders appears in favor rumor she is to be made general wolves with her
. The second read:
no general ailk shows no ill will openly but ire among ranks hawk seen three times spent several hours alone in tent unable to get close wolves too loyal forgive slow progress difficult
.
    “This ‘hawk’ again,” Thero noted. “And