Chap. 351 The Engraver’s Mistake

Chap. 351 The Engraver’s Mistake

With many misgivings, K’ndar launched. Lizard waved at them as they rose into the sky and then turned to return to his caravan.

The raptor that’d killed the green fire lizard was circling overhead, keeping an eye on its prey.

The moment they’d cleared the meadow, the raptor dropped, picked up the dead fire lizard, and flew to an outcrop to eat.

Raptors have to eat, he thought, and at least the green didn’t suffer. At least I hope she didn’t.

She didn’t. They do like we do, bite behind the neck to cut the spine. Then the prey doesn’t move anymore.

Strange, he thought, that I feel almost selfishly happy that she wasn’t one of my friends.

Let’s return to where we found Lizard. I want to pick up those bolo stones.

You want the stones? Why? You can’t eat them.

K’ndar laughed. You’re right. It’s a human thing.

Both Siskin and the brown huddled on Raventh’s neck, trusting the dragon to protect them. Once they’d cleared the meadow, they sat up.

He is liking this very much Raventh said, referring to the brown. He’s surprised at how he can fly without using his wings

The flattened grass told Raventh where to land. Within minutes, K’ndar found the bolo stones.

He balanced them in his hands, marveling at their perfection in weight and shape. “These are perfect,” he said, marveling at the perfect match of the two main stones. If they’re a gram apart in weight, I’ll be amazed. Even the smaller third stone is perfectly shaped.

Trodden in the grass was the sea cap. He picked it up, flicking bits of grass off it. The blood will have to be washed out, he thought. I’ll find a way to get it to the sea cook.

He was about to leave when he noted a shiny thing in the flattened grass.

A dagger.

It has to be Lizard’s. None of us noticed his was missing.

Siskin had left Raventh’s neck to quarter the meadow, more out of habit than hunger. The brown seemed happy to stay aboard Raventh.

Raventh, please call Batu and ask him to take this dagger to Lizard.

Batu appeared. He hovered in front of K’ndar, then landed on a nearby rock.

“Batu. Send my image to your master. “

He saw the light change in the lizard’s eye. I have no words to describe that look, he thought, but it is the very same as that in a dragon’s eye when he’s transmitting images.

“Lizard, I found your dagger.” He held the dagger out for Batu to grasp.

The bronze jumped into the air, hovering, and took the dagger by the lanyard.

“Good Batu. Take this to your master. You were a smart lizard to call us.”

Batu chipped as if to say, ‘of course,’ lifted higher into the air, and vanished.

Siskin had gone a ways when he chittered and landed next to the road.

He’s found something.

At the blue’s feet lay another dagger, dried blood on the blade.

It has to be the one the raider stabbed Lizard with, he thought, until Lizard turned it on him.

“Good lad,” he said, expecting the fire lizard to jump to his shoulder.

But Siskin continued to chitter, sounding exasperated.

“What?” he asked, looking down at the little blue. Siskin began to dig in the flattened grass. There was a lot of blood, black now from exposure to the air.

Siskin exposed a leather strap.

“Oh, smart Siskin!” he said, and tugged on the strap. It was attached to a pouch.

“A pouch!” He picked it up, noting that the strap on it had been recently cut by a knife. It was heavy. It was bloody.

Siskin whickered, happily, and jumped to his shoulder.

“Clever blue!” he said. Siskin looked smug.

He opened it to find several papers and three heavy bronze cylinders.

Of the ten pages, six were in code. Four were not. One said in plain words ‘New key sent by messenger lizard.’

The other three were drawings. One showed a bollard at a seaport, at the very end of a wharf. Below it was the number 270°.

The second showed a man with a brown fire lizard on his shoulder. The fire lizard had a zigzag scar on his chest.

The third was of a girl with two long plaits down her back. It was Vixen.

_______________________________________________________________

“Where’ve you been?” Jansen said.

“Francie and I were called out to the Stony Wastes to help a friend of mine. He was ambushed and stabbed by raiders.”

“Oh no! Is he okay?”

“He says he is, but he’s the kind of person who doesn’t want to admit that he’s hurting.”

She shook her head. “Typical pigheaded male behavior.”

“Hey!” K’ndar said, aggrieved.

“Oh, I’m sorry, K’ndar, I didn’t mean YOU, it’s just, well, you men have this thing about not wanting to admit you’re in pain. My mother used to say it was because, hehehehe, men were afraid that if they admitted to hurting their bollocks would fall off. My father was that type. I swear, if he had a bone sticking out, he’d say, ahh, it’ll heal up in no time.”

“Well, uh, yeah…”

“Yes. You’re not like that, though.”

Hmm. Suddenly her words made him feel oddly two dimensional, as if his masculinity was being both acknowledged and then dismissed.

“They won’t see a healer until it’s far too late, and then wonder why they die sooner than women,” Jansen finished.

K’ndar was able to retort, “It’s because we want to!” They laughed.

“I love you, K’ndar, because whenever you walk into my workspace, you’re bringing me another puzzle to solve.”

“Um, well, yes. I don’t mean to be a pain, though. I do it because you’ve never failed me yet.”

She smiled. “Thanks! And no, you’re not being a pain! Trust me, you always make my job a lot more fun. Most folks just come in with problems with their computers. Or want to argue about a policy that I have absolutely no control over how it’s applied. So what’s the treasure this time?”

He laid the lightwood strip out carefully, then the pages, the drawings, and finally the bronze cylinders.

She picked up the lightwood strip.

“Ooh, it’s a cipher!” she said, delighted. She carefully flattened it out to allow her computer to scan it.

The computer beeped.

“What’s it say? Can the computer read it?”

“Oh, no, K’ndar, it doesn’t work like that. The computer is going to have to play with it for a while, trying to see what it says.”

Then she scanned the pages. The computer beeped again. It then showed a bar with a number beneath it. The number started at 1 and began to count up.

Within seconds it had reached a hundred and was increasing speed.

“What is it doing?”

Jansen chuckled. “Trying to decode the pages. I think the strip is what is called a ‘key’. It tells the computer what letters and numbers to use to figure out the cipher.”

“How long will that take?”

She shrugged. “There’s millions of combinations. Deciphering it might take minutes, it might take days. It definitely takes up a lot of computer memory.”

She then scanned the drawings.

“This drawing of a dock. Do you know where it is?”

He shook his head.

“Okay, I’ll let the computer look at it, with the information of two hundred seventy degrees. Now these two, do you know who these people are? How did you get this stuff?

“The strip came by green fire lizard wearing a message pouch. She was attacked by a raptor, but before she died, she managed to send an image of the man who my friend later identified as his attacker.

He touched the drawing of the girl. It was very well drawn, he thought.

“This girl is Vixen. She’s a courier from Lemos Hold. She was attacked near Fort SeaHold on Northern for her cargo. She took a ship from Fort SeaHold and more raiders were waiting for her on our continent, at a new seaport on the coastline of the Stony Wastes. My friend, Lizard, the one who was stabbed? He managed to get them off her trail and onto his, they switched the cargo, he was attacked while she managed to deliver the real cargo to Lord Toric’s men.”

“WOW. What a story!”

“There’s a lot more to it, but as Lizard’s fairly badly beat up, I didn’t want to pressure him. I had to leave him when Raylan called me to return to Landing, so I don’t know the whole story. His attackers stabbed him and then hit him with a bolo. He was able to stab the attacker before he was knocked out. They left him for dead because they had what they thought was the real cargo. And they possibly knew that Lord Toric’s men were coming for them.”

“Was the attacker dead?”

“No, the only one at the fight site when Francie and I landed there was Lizard. I imagine that the attacker left with his fellow raiders after knocking him out. I stopped at the site after flying Lizard to his caravan and Siskin found the pouch. It’s not Lizard’s, so I’m assuming it was cut during the knife fight and fell off the attacker.”

“And the man with the fire lizard? He was the one who stabbed your friend?”

“No, I think he was someone sent from Northern, for what purpose, I don’t know. Vixen said he was waiting at the port with three raiders when she disembarked, he’d taken a faster ship from Northern. I have to remind you, I didn’t get the whole story so I’m a bit fuzzy on the details. I do know the man in the drawing is dead. His fire lizard showed this man,” he tapped the drawing, “as being dead.”

“Where is the fire lizard now?”

“Poor thing. He is devastated at losing his master. He came back to Landing, with me. He’s with Raventh and Siskin at the moment.”

“K’ndar, you live the most amazing life,” she said, admiringly.

“Well, I suppose you’re right. It’s not at all what I expected when I came to Landing! So what are the cylinders?”

She scanned them.

Bronze cylinder

“Yes, yes, you sarcastic problem child,” she told her computer. She looked over her shoulder at K’ndar. “He can be such a pain at times,” she whispered.

She took the cylinder off the scanner and examined it. “Oh, it’s capped! See?” She twisted one end. It unscrewed easily. She examined the exposed end.

“Oh. My. Stars.”

“What is it?”

She turned it to him. A logo had been carved into the end. Above and below the centered standard were letters and the current year, all reversed: dloH nrohtuoS skraM eviF. Below it was the current year date,also reversed

“Do you know what this is?”

“Uh, no.”

“It’s a minting stamp. You use it to stamp brand new marks.”

It took him a moment to understand the concept. “Whoa.”

“With this stamp and unstamped marks, anyone can make money from Southern Hold, issued by Lord Toric.”

She opened the other two-and whistled.

“This one says twenty marks. That one says one mark. The one I scanned says five marks. You get the new blank marks, stamp them and make yourself wealthy.”

She pondered the immense significance of the stamps.

“I don’t know what the ciphers will tell us, but I’m betting that the courier was carrying new, unstamped marks from Lemos Hold, and somehow the raiders knew it, and another somehow, got the minting stamps. I am betting they were all set up to start counterfeiting Southern Hold marks. It’s not been publicized, but we’ve learned that in the last six months, two couriers from Lemos Hold were killed en route to Southern Hold, and their cargo stolen.”

“Lizard mentioned that Vixen suspected spies in both Holds.”

“I think they’re right. What were they thinking, sending a girl out with a cargo like this?”

Her computer beeped.

“Ah, Turing, you’ve done well.”

“It decoded it?”

“It broke the ciphers, now it’s reading the messages. Let me see what it says.”

Script ran past her eyes at a pace faster than K’ndar could read it.

“You can read that fast?”

“No, of course not, I’m looking for markers. Remember our class on program codes? Remember the seven and ten berry markers?”

“Um-barely.”

“No matter. Turing’s got it figured out. I often wonder how people ever managed to create anything without a quantum computer.”

“Okay, let me read this,” she said. “Wow! Amazing!”

“What!”

“Wonderful! Turing broke the ciphers without needing a key!”

“Is that good?”

“If you want to break a cipher, a key really, really helps.”

She picked up one of the messages for emphasis.

“It’s hard to write ciphers by hand. It’s like writing computer code without a computer. Even though I’ve been writing computer code for a couple years, I make mistakes, and I’m using my computer here. When I hit enter, I know almost immediately if I’ve made an error.

If you’re trying to write and create a cipher by hand, you don’t get that instant feedback. It takes a lot of focus and attention to detail. It gets tiring. You make mistakes.”

She paused for a moment, then continued.

“These ciphers lead me to believe that there’s a spymaster in Lemos Hold. Whoever she is, it’s not her official job, of course not. You don’t stay a spy for long when people know what you’re up to. So she had to hide writing them. Maybe the only time she could write these messages was after a long day’s work and everyone else had gone to bed.”

“The ciphers say it’s a woman?”

“My gut says it’s a female, one who has a certain amount of power. These messages are orders, not chatty little things discussing the upcoming Gather. She’s managing people on two continents, in secret. She’s highly placed at Lemos. So high that she is one of the few people who knows when a barrel of unstamped marks is going to Southern Hold. She knows that Toric’s the only Holder who insists on human transfer instead of using dragon transport. You can see that she was targeting Southern Hold. See, here, here, and here?”

She pointed at a screen full of script.

“No. All I see is gibberish.”

“Sorry. It’s plain to me, but, I know. First of all, we are lucky. Having six messages was a big help in deciphering the lot. The raider kept them, instead of destroying them after reading. That would have been the smart thing to do, I imagine she’d even told him to destroy them after reading them. But, raiders aren’t always smart, just cunning. I’m thinking this is about six months worth of correspondence from the spymaster in Lemos Hold to the Southern raiders.

Each time she sent a message, she also changed the key, like this one on the lightwood strip. Those, the raider destroyed, or they just deteriorated. Lightwood strips don’t take kindly to rough handling. The raider had to have the new key before he could read the new message. You said the green fire lizard showed up AFTER your friend was attacked?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

“Hmm,” she said, tapping her chin while thinking, “Maybe the lizard was delayed. Or got lost. Either way, this new key code is of no help in deciphering these messages. I’m guessing, from this one note saying that the new key has been sent by lizard, that there are more messages on the way.”

She scanned the script, then looked at him, grinning.

“Lucky for us, the spymaster doesn’t have a computer like I do. She has to laboriously create a new key for each message, by hand. Then she must write the message and translate it into cipher. Her next step is to send out the key first, then the message, in two separate shipments.

Writing ciphers gets very tiresome. To be effective, each key has to be different from the last one. Let’s say I create a key. I change the letter A to W. Just this one time, for this specific key. I write a message substituting W for A. So, for instance, if I want to write “K’ndar” I have to spell it “K’ndwr”. Each letter has to be changed.

I want to keep the message short because after awhile, I begin to make translation mistakes. I might forget to change an A, leaving it in, and if I don’t proofread the message, it goes out with a bunch of W’s and one or two A’s. Someone who knows how to write ciphers, especially if they have the key, would pick that up right away, because mistakes like that makes the message come out wonky.

When I want to send a new message, I have to repeat the whole process: create a new key by changing all the letters, and I can’t use the same changes. I can’t use W for A, this time, I have to change A to K, for instance.”

“That sounds like hard brain work.”

“It is. Which is why it’s great to have a computer that can think a million times faster than me and, even without a key, doesn’t get tired doing so.”

She picked up the six coded papers and shuffled them. “We’re lucky that we have six messages, all in cipher, all using a different key. It would take a human a lifetime to work them all out, but my electronic friend Turing has talents, he does. When he gives me grief, he’s computer. When he’s good, he’s Turing.”

So that’s who Turing is. Her computer, he thought, smiling inwardly, she named her computer like I name a horse. Or a fire lizard.

“Turing compared all the messages to each other, using the key I scanned in. It’s not usable for these messages, but the spymaster unconsciously worked with two things in her mind: cultural indoctrination, meaning protocol, and a tendency to keep at least a few letters the same. In this case, she forgot that she’d used R for S at least twice, in two different keys.”

“So some of the keys have the same letter for S?”

“Yes.”

“And protocol?”

“Yes. We grew up using honorifics for our superiors; our Holders, our Weyrleaders, even our cooks. We even use them for dragonriders. “K’ndar, Rider of brown Raventh.” “Lord Councilman Cecilia, formerly of Harper Hall.” That’s just civil protocol.

In each of these messages, the spymaster used the same sequence for one very specific title, that of Lord Holder Toric. Not the same letters, but each time she used the same sequence for ‘Lord Toric.’ Four and five, four and five letters. See, here, here, here, and here. Lord Toric Lord Toric Lord Toric. If she’d used ‘Big Southern Lout’ or ‘Lord Holder’ or ‘The Southern Holder’, even if she’d misspelled it Touric, it would have still meant the same person, but it wouldn’t have popped out so clearly. But, again, I bet she got tired or just never thought to change it. She grew up using those words, just like we did. The same sequence, Lord Toric, is used in all six messages and it was like a red flag to Turing. Once he got that, the rest of the messages were easily deciphered.”

K’ndar was gobsmacked.

“You know, you’re a genius,” he finally said.

She giggled. “Not really. I just, well, I’m good at my job. Despite Turing being a real pain in the arse at times, he’s taught me a lot. He’s AIVAS, I guess, without the voice or the personality behind it.”

“Can you tell who the spymaster is?”

“No. But I will take this to Raylan, have him look it over, and then present it to the Council of Six. They may want to hear testimony from your friend, and the courier, Vixen, before they try to nail the spymaster. If she is indeed running a spy organization, we’ll want to catch them all in one big net. That will take time and coordination between Weyrs and Holders, even Crafters, like the one that made the cylinders. In the meantime, I suggest we keep this to ourselves. Do you know what happened to the raiders?”

“Well, first off, all my information is second hand. I didn’t witness any of the attacks, just the aftermath of the attack on Lizard, and finding the pouch.

I know that at least one, the one in the drawing, is dead. His fire lizard told us with images. He came off a ship from Northern to link up with the Southern raiders.

The man who attacked Lizard is probably dead or dying. Lizard did manage to get in a good stab, and I’m sure this pouch was cut during the fight.”

“You’re sure of that?”

He shook his head in a brief bit of irritation. “I didn’t see the body, no. But I know Fire Lizard Man. That’s his official name, by the way, if you drop it at the Council.

He’s a trader. He doesn’t look dangerous, and he’s not one to go looking for trouble. But he won’t back down from a fight, and there’s no one on Pern deadlier with a dagger. IF his attacker is alive he’s in awfully bad shape.”

“I see.”

“There were two others, they got away on horseback with the cargo. The last I heard, Lord Toric was headed west from his Hold, and his troopers were headed east to try and catch the raiders in the middle. But there’s thousands of miles of badlands to the south in which to hide.”

“Well, they may be luckier than they thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“This last message was to the man who was leader of the Southern raiders. It orders him to ‘kill the others’.

“Huh. Well, he picked the wrong man to attack.”

He idly picked up one of the stamps and hefted it. “Such power in such a small, insignificant thing,” he said. “I wonder why they used bronze instead of steel. I would think that after a few stamps the cutting edges of the letters would start to dull.”

Jansen tilted her head in thought. “I’m not a metallurgist, but, yeah, I think you’re right.”

He looked at the cutting end of the stamp. Something about it piqued his interest.

“There’s something odd about this stamp,” he said.

? her expression said.

“Hand me a piece of paper, please? and your pencil?”

She did.

He scraped the pencil lead over the cutting end of the stamp, then stamped the paper with it.

Southorn Hold Five Marks

Both of their jaws dropped. Without a word, she handed him another.

Southern Hold Twonty Marks

And the third

Southern Held One Mark

She turned to her computer and began typing furiously.

Minting stamp: n: a solid cylinder of steel, with one end carved in such a way as to engrave a substrate with letters or symbols. It is used by placing the engraving end upon a substrate, such as wood or leather, and striking the top end in order to press the engraving into the substrate.

Minting stamps are used primarily to prevent forgeries or theft of the engraved item; to certify that the item which has been engraved is legal tender, as in money; or to serve as a signature on a legal document.

Currently, minting stamps are created by highly skilled craftsmen under continuous observation at Lemos Hold’s Smithcrafthall. Strict chains of custody are maintained at all times. At the beginning of the year, a new minting stamp is created and issued only when the former year’s minting stamp has been returned to the Crafthall and melted down.

They both reached for the coins in their pockets.

“I have two marks from Southern Hold and a mark from Telgar,” Jansen said, “and they’re all legitimate.”

He pulled out four marks. “I have one from Tillek Hold, one from Ruatha, and two from Singing Waters. All legitimate.”

“Something is definitely wrong,” Jansen said. “Highly skilled craftsmen take pride in their work. They don’t make spelling errors on something as valuable as a minting stamp.”

“Not purposefully. Or with a different metal than steel.”

“This is someone sending a message right under the spymaster’s nose.”

“Like a cry for help?”

The look in her eye was dark.

“Yes.”

She stood and gathered up the stamps, the papers, the drawings and K’ndar’s pencil stamped paper.

“Don’t leave. I’m taking this in to the Council right now. They’ll probably want to talk to you.”