Encrypted (4 page)

Tikaya, rigid back to him, walked out.
Corporal Agarik and Sergeant Ottotark waited outside. Agarik
spotted the blood running down her chin and gave her a sympathetic
frown. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it seemed that guilt
lurked in his eyes.

“
Pampered librarian,” the
captain muttered before his door slammed shut.

Unsurprisingly, the sergeant eyed Tikaya
with lasciviousness and went out of his way to rub against her on
the way back. She clenched her jaw, determined not to react. When
they locked her into her cell, she willed them to go away. Alone,
she would not have to maintain the stalwart facade.

Before they left, the corporal pressed a
kerchief into her hand. After the hatch clanged shut, she staunched
the blood trickling from her lip.

She threw the notes on the floor and paced
circles around the confining cell. That bastard wanted the
impossible. And he was going to kill everyone she loved if he
didn’t get it. How was she supposed to translate a dead language
with nothing more than a couple rubbings of runes?

Tikaya slammed her hands against the hard
metal wall. Her short, fast breaths rasped in her ears. She forced
herself to take deeper ones. Panicking would not help. She needed
to escape and get her family to safety. Yes, that was the best
plan.

She eyed the cell across the way. An ally
would make escape easier.

“
Five?” she said. “Thanks
for the help earlier.”

She waited several moments, but no answer
came. Maybe he had been taken from his cell. Maybe he was sleeping.
Or—she grimaced at the idea—maybe he would not talk to her because
he hated her as much as everyone else on the ship. Just because he
had not wanted to see a woman manhandled did not make him a
devotee. Though it did suggest he was decent, maybe worth the
effort of bringing around.

“
I now know why I’m here,”
Tikaya said. “Sort of. I’ll tell you about it if you tell me why
you’re here. And why you have a number instead of a
name.”

She stepped close to the gate, propping her
elbows on the cold metal bars, and peered into his cell. Her eyes
had adjusted to the gloom, and she made out his form in the deep
shadows of the back corner. He sat, slumped against the walls, and,
though she could only guess at his height, she had the impression
of a big man.

“
Are you a crew member
being punished for something? Or are you a prisoner
too?”

He had only voiced the
single sentence, but that rich baritone had sounded native
Turgonian. Of course,
she
spoke the language like a native and was not one.
Maybe he was another linguist brought in to help. And they had
chained him because... Why? He was more dangerous than she? She
snorted. Who wasn’t?

Neither her questions nor
mental musings stirred him to answer, and only silence came from
his cell. For now, she would have to plot an escape on her own. She
ticked the bars with a fingernail. As long as she remained in the
cell, she would not have a chance. Reluctantly, she allowed that
cooperating with the captain, or at least
appearing
to cooperate, might be the
only way to get herself moved to less secure lodgings.

Tikaya slid the rubbings through the gate
and laid them on the floor. The single lantern burning in the
corridor provided wan illumination, and she had to squint to
read.

“
I wish I knew where these
rubbings had been taken. I can’t even assume it’s the Turgonian
continent, because the empire’s ships troll the world. This is a
short sample, but some of the symbols do repeat.” She spoke out
loud and in Turgonian for the benefit of her neighbor, just in case
hearing her voice might bestir him to comment on something, but she
soon lost herself in contemplation and forgot him, the poor
lighting, and even that she was on a ship full of
marines.

“
If it’s alphabetic, it’s
a large alphabet,” she murmured. “I’m more inclined to believe
we’re dealing with a logographic or logophonetic script. In that
case, there could be thousands of symbols in the lexicon.” She
sighed, daunted at the prospect, but she tingled a bit too. It had
been over a year since anything challenged her like this. “As far
as I can tell, the symbols are abstract, not like Jutgu Hieroglyphs
where so many are ideograms that represent ideas or physical
things. That would have been useful.” She tapped a page. “That
glyph reminds me of the Aracha vowels, but I suspect it’s just a
coincidence. This is far more complex. The way the symbols are
clustered and linked is unique. I’d guess the groupings represent
words, or maybe sentences or concepts. Some are quite large.
Seventeen in that series. Eleven, two, seven, seventeen
again.”

“
Prime
numbers.”

Tikaya had forgotten her silent neighbor, so
she cracked her forehead on the gate in surprise when he spoke. She
grunted and rubbed the nascent bump. “What?”

“
Are all the groupings
prime?” It was the same deep, mellow voice he had used to speak to
the guards, though a note of curiosity had entered it.

Tikaya recovered and bent over the rubbings
again. She almost asked him to come forward and have a look, but
remembered the clink of chains. He was probably shackled in the
back specifically so he could not reach the gate and any passing
guards.

“
Huh,” she said after a
moment. “They are. The highest grouping, which appears only once in
these samples, is twenty-nine.”

She gazed thoughtfully into her neighbor’s
dark cell. She would have noticed the prime number commonality
eventually, especially if she had been scribbling notes, but that
his mind went right to that gave her an inkling that she was
sharing the brig with someone more than an average thug.

“
You’re sure you’re
working on a language?” His chains rattled, and his dark form
changed position. She could make out little, but guessed he had
shifted to face her.

“
I’m not, no. That’s what
the captain told me. An ancient language that he wants me to
decipher. Though I don’t think he knows much or he’d understand
there’s no hope of translating a text by looking at a sheet of
symbols. I’m guessing he was just parroting what someone higher up
told him.”

“
Likely.” Was that an
amused note in his voice?

“
I’m not sure how much
stock to put in his claim of ‘ancient’ either. The Turgonians don’t
use the mental sciences and can only rely on the relative dating
method for judging age. Even that’s questionable, since they’ve
only been on their continent seven hundred years, and I’m not sure
how much, if any, documentation they did of the existing cultures
before they assimilated them. Or killed them off.
Brutes.”

Her neighbor—Five, she reminded herself—said
nothing at that, and she winced, recalling he might be Turgonian
himself. She rubbed her lips, annoyed at her mouth’s proclivity for
blurting things out without lacing in any tact.

“
Erm, anyway,” she said,
“all primes between two and twenty-nine are represented in these
samples.” Casually, hoping she could draw him out, she added,
“Supposing this is a language, do you have any thoughts as to what
might be the significance of incorporating primes in the core
structure?” The first thing her mind flashed to was that each
number might signify a different part of speech, but using
seventeen symbols to represent a verb seemed like
overkill.

His chains rattled. A shrug? “I’m sure you
already know prime numbers are the building blocks of natural
numbers. They can only be divided evenly by one and themselves, and
anything that’s not a prime number is made up of prime
numbers.”

“
Building blocks,” she
mused. “Like letters are the building blocks of my language,
perhaps. Though in this case the numbers are the wrappers, not the
content.” She stood and stretched, wishing the cell afforded her
more room to pace.

“
You are Kyattese, is that
correct?”

Tikaya stilled, realizing
he did not know who she was to the marines. If he
was
a Turgonian, her
chances of turning him into an ally might plummet if he found out
she was their cryptomancer.

“
Yes,” she said
carefully.

“
Did your president
survive the war?”

Surprise and then suspicion flooded her, and
she regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Yes, why wouldn’t he
have?”

“
Is he...a good man? Good
for your people?”

Tikaya did not know what to make of this
line of questioning and responded only with another clipped,
“Yes.”

She folded her arms across her chest and
decided not to answer anything further about her people or her
nation, especially not anything the Turgonians might use against
them. Fortunately, Five asked no more.

“
Why don’t you answer a
question for me since I’m answering yours?” she
suggested.

He did not respond.

“
I’ll settle for one,” she
said. “Will you answer me one question?”

His soft snort hinted at amusement. Tikaya
decided to take it for consideration.

“
What’s your name?” she
asked.

A sigh mingled with the hum of the engines.
“Not that question. Ask another.”

“
Why not that?”

“
You’re replacing your one
allotted question with that one?” A hint of dryness infused his
tone.

“
Yes.”

Another sigh. “They took my rank and my name
as punishment. Five was my number on the penal boat going to
Krychek Island, and, as far as the empire cares, it’s the only
identification I have now.”

“
Krychek Island,” Tikaya
breathed. “Isn’t that where they send criminals so vile they’re
afraid to execute them outright? Out of fear their spirits will
linger in the area and afflict the living? So they send you to the
island with no food, no weapons, no resources, the assumption being
you’ll kill each other off far from anyone worth haunting? They say
those few who do survive turn into animals, bestial and deranged
and cannibalistic and...” She caught her lip between her teeth.
There she went again, probably offending the only person on this
ship who had stood up for her.

“
Glad our penal island is
renowned even amongst foreigners.” Five’s dryness held a bitter
edge this time.

She sighed. She
had
offended him. And
she had a new concern. If he was that much of a criminal, dare she
side with him? What could he have done to merit such a harsh
punishment? Brutality seemed bred into the Turgonian culture, so
she struggled to imagine someone who fit their definition of vile.
Five sounded normal—pleasant—but perhaps it was a facade. He had to
be shackled for a reason, though Captain Bocrest’s current problems
must trump that reason, or why else would Five be here?

“
But the captain came to
pick you up? Isn’t Krychek Island usually a permanent residence?”
she asked, wanting to be sure. “Its location is even secret, isn’t
it? So families can’t make rescue attempts?”

“
Correct.” Tension riddled
that one clipped word, and she hesitated before asking the next
question, but she had to know if he was likely to be a threat to
her.

“
What was your
crime?”

Clothing rustled and the chains rattled. “No
more questions.” His voice was muffled, as if he had covered his
face. “Please,” he added so softly she thought she might have
imagined it.

“
Of course. Sorry.” She
meant it. If the place was half as bad as the stories said, she
could understand not wanting to discuss it. He was probably lost in
his painful memories, and only the puzzle of the language had
distracted him. “Uhm, I’ll be over here, enjoying the lovely
ambiance and pondering these slanted circles, dots, and sideways
trees. If you want to talk later, let me know.”

She did not expect anything else from him,
but he surprised her by asking, “Sideways trees?”

“
Well, if trees were
symmetrical maybe. Want to see?”

“
I can’t reach the
corridor.”

She grabbed one of the rubbings, folded it
into a compact stack, and tossed it through his gate. His dark form
shifted, so she assumed it fell within his reach, but he said
nothing.

“
Can you see it?” she
asked after a moment. “Is there enough light?”

“
Yes. I should have
known.” He sounded grimmer than a funeral pyre. “I’ve seen them
before.”

“
Where?”

“
Somewhere I never want to
go again.”

“
Where?” she repeated,
leaning forward.

He did not answer.

“
Five?”

Silence.

CHAPTER 3

Tikaya dozed until the hatch creaked open
hours later. The perennial darkness of the cell stole her sense of
time, but she guessed it was evening. Her hollow stomach whined for
a meal.

Footfalls rang on the metal deck. She eyed
the gate warily and let out a sigh of relief when Corporal Agarik
came into view—alone. He carried two metal canteens and wooden
trenchers narrow enough to slide between the bars. Dried fish,
dried fruit, and a couple of hard biscuits soon rested on the floor
before Tikaya. Though the meal did not exactly fill the brig with
scintillating scents, her mouth watered anyway.