Honor among thieves

Chapter Seventy-Two

“Be of good cheer, lad,” Slag said as he led Malden down toward the Meadlock Stair. “Think of the fucking bright side already.” Ahead of them the river Skrait was at its narrowest, and it ran cold and fast, swollen with melted snow from the north. That morning white flakes had settled for a moment on the courtyard of the Lemon Garden, melting before Malden could be sure they were real. Winter was almost upon them.

Malden could barely imagine a bright side, much less see one. He strained for optimism, and came up with only the barest rationalization. “The pilgrims will die on the road, long before they would have had need of those foodstuffs,” he said, mostly for his own benefit. “In this weather-they’ll freeze before they starve.”

“That’s not precisely what I meant. Here, let me show you something I think will please you,” Slag said. He headed down the steps toward the river, where his latest creation was spinning freely on a massive steel axle. It looked like the Bloodgod’s own wagon wheel, twenty feet across and made of massive beams of wood. All along its circumference paddles stuck out like the oars of a war galley. The paddles dipped into the water, where the current pushed against them and sent them speeding upward again, water spilling from them in a constant torrent. “The force of the river, you see, is transmitted to the axle as angular moment, and from there to a reducing gear which-”

“I don’t speak dwarven, and you know it,” Malden said. He followed Slag up a rickety scaffolding to look down on what had once been a yard for the storage of tar barrels. Now it had been turned into a grain mill. The steel axle of the waterwheel was connected by some ingenious bit of clockwork to a wooden shaft as big as a tree trunk. This rotated constantly, turning as it did so a millstone busily churned out crushed wheat. The human millers down there looked afraid to touch the mechanism, but they worked spryly enough at gathering up the grain and scooping it into sacks.

“This rod turns that rod, which turns the arsing stone,” Slag explained, a bit testily. “It works, that’s the important thing.”

Yes. Yes, it was. As little grain as Ness still possessed, it was worthless if it couldn’t be ground into flour. Now, at least, that part of the problem was solved. Malden felt hope blossom in his chest for the first time in days. “Slag,” Malden said, “you’ve done it again. Is there no end to your invention?”

“Now, I can’t rightly claim to have thought this one up,” the dwarf admitted. “There’s wheels like this in Redweir, turned by the Strow. Or at least, there used to be. Who can say what’s come of that town?”

Malden nodded solemnly. News from the eastern half of Skrae was rare as hen’s teeth, but all of it was bad. Those few travelers who actually came as far as Ness now reported a countryside ravaged by barbarians, full of bandits and starving peasants too terrified to leave their homes in search of food.

“For the nonce, at least, we’ll have flour,” Malden said, because that was what Slag wanted to hear. “You’ve done a wonderful job here. The city will give you a medal, or some commendation. I’ll see to it.”

“Lad, bollocks on that. You know I don’t care for honors. I’m trying to help you, that’s all. And maybe I can offer you something else today, if you’ll step into my office.” The dwarf’s eyes burned with excitement as he led Malden into a shack at one corner of the millyard. It was cold inside, and cramped-the ceiling was far too low for Malden’s comfort-but once he saw what the dwarf had in mind, he could not look away.

A piece of parchment lay weighted on a table. On it was a message written in dwarven runes, with beneath each rune a character from the alphabet of Skrae. This second set of characters was grouped into individual words.

“You’ve deciphered it?” Malden asked, breathless. Cutbill’s message had become a touchstone for him, a hope he could cling to no matter how dark things got. He had convinced himself, with no evidence whatsoever, that if he could only read it, all his problems would be solved. In his more lucid moments he knew that was folly, but with so many people believing in him, he needed something he could believe in. “But no,” he said, glancing at the alphabetical marks. “No, it’s still gibberish.”

“Trust a guildmaster of thieves to be paranoid,” Slag said. “He used not one cipher, but three. First the symbols on the original ledger page, which were then revealed to be substitutes for dwarven runes. I had to convert the runes to your tongue, by comparing the sounds they stand for. That wasn’t simple! And even then the wrong man wouldn’t be able to read it, because he ciphered the runes as well.” Slag shook his head. “Crafty bastard.”

“One step closer,” Malden said. He had not expected it to be easy.

“More than that. Look here. This last word in the message-ASRZGJJ. Does it look familiar at all?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Slag groaned. “Think, lad! Use the damned skills Coruth gave you. It’s a substitution cipher. A rotation cipher, I warrant, or blind me with a stick. Seven letters. The last two the same. Think!”

Malden wished the dwarf would just tell him the answer. He hadn’t slept more than an hour or two in days. Every time he closed his eyes he saw only the fear in the priest’s eye as his food was taken away. He could use something easy, for once. But-all right, he thought. Work it through.

Seven letters. Two the same, at the tail. Think of words that end with a double letter, most of them end in TT, SS, or-ah-LL…

“It’s a signature,” Malden exhaled. “It’s-”

“Cutbill’s name, ciphered!” Slag agreed. “And more than that, it’s a partial key to the whole fucking thing! Now I know every time the letter J appears in the message, it’s actually an L. Every A stands in place of a C. Fill in the rest, and we have it.”

“We… have it,” Malden said.

“Together we can solve this in an hour,” Slag said, nodding happily.

A strange fear gripped Malden. So close. He desperately wanted to read the message. And yet-if he did-his one hope would be gone. There couldn’t possibly be anything in the message to solve his problems. It just wasn’t long enough.

Yet he had to know. He must know what Cutbill had deemed so important it had to be kept so carefully secret.

“I’m supposed to go address a meeting of the wool carders’ guild right now,” Malden said. “After that I’m supposed to sit in judgment at the hall of justice. Velmont has my whole day sewn up with meetings and audiences.”

“So-you don’t want to work on this right now?”

“Blast you, no, that’s not what I meant at all. I meant bar the door, so when Velmont comes looking for me, he can’t get in. And hand me that quill!”