Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  Or so we presumed. More than ever I regretted a dozen years of no one talking about magic except in terms of what used to be done in the golden days of Astandalas.

  I turned to the other letter.

  Dear Lady Greenwing:

  It was extreme regret that I must announce to you the death of your husband, Major Jakory Greenwing, as the traitor of Loe. He was shot in the back fleeing from the summons to a court martial. Under the circumstances his body will not be returned; it will be interred with the several hundred dead soldiers his action caused to be slain.

  As the poet says, ‘The soil of history has as many weeds as flowers.’

  Lady Norcell of Westmoor

  Second-in-Command of the Sixth Division of the Seventh Army of Astandalas

  Despite my best efforts the pages trembled. I set them down on the table and rested my weight on my hands. Read it over again, as if it were a poem whose genre I needed to determine before I could begin the work of analysis.

  “It is addressed to Lady Greenwing,” I said.

  “And the line of poetry? That is one of the Gainsgooding poems, isn’t it?” Mr. Dart asked insistently. “I remember it because of how trite the line sounded.”

  “Most of their poems did,” I murmured, staring at the line. “It’s not quite ... right ... there’s a word missing, or something.” I ran over the poems in my mind, trying to recall which this came from. Dominus Lukel’s blurt of ‘Not Violet!’ when I’d mentioned highwaywomen made my mind slide towards those many evenings she and I had spent researching ciphers and cracking them, when both of us should have been studying for something else. That had been my extracurricular focus before Mr. Dart had written about the Gainsgooding conspirators.

  “It’s odd that there would be a reference to one of those poems in here, isn’t it?” Hal said. “They’re not exactly learned by rote by every schoolchild.”

  “This is a matter of treason,” I said absently, reaching for what was amiss with the line. “Perhaps they liked evoking the one successful assassination of an Emperor.”

  Ben snorted. “Losing an entire battalion wasn’t enough for them?”

  I looked up. “No. Evidently not, for they felt the need to frame my father to take the blame, as if they didn’t want to soil themselves. Soil! That’s it!”

  “What is?”

  “It should be ‘The garden of history has as many weeds as flowers.’ Not ‘the soil of history’.”

  “Garden does make more sense.”

  “Except that the ideograph for soil is almost identical to that for the number fourteen—” I looked around for paper and pen. Sir Hamish passed me the ones I’d been using earlier. I thanked him and drew the two ideographs below the last one. “This is from a poem called ‘The Fall of Rain and Civilizations’.”

  “Subtle,” muttered Mr. Dart.

  “It has nineteen verses. The fourteenth is in the form of a vocative ode addressed to the goddess of Fame—”

  “Just like Lark’s philippic,” Hal said.

  I waved that aside. “Don’t introduce digressions. I’m trying to work out what cipher this is encoded in. It’s not a proper game of Two Sticks and a Stone—”

  “Don’t ask,” advised Mr. Dart. “He’ll explain.”

  “It doesn’t involve any of the cues for a prose rendering of the esoteric language, either. No, it must be a more straightforward cipher. I don’t imagine it’s too complicated, either, as why would anyone be expecting a code to be in it? My mother was the recipient of the letter, and she wouldn’t have been receiving secret messages like this.”

  I frowned at the page in front of me. Violet had been better at divining the existence of codes than me. Once I knew they were there I was better at deciphering them, but she was always the one to realize there was a significant anagram or the first letter of each sentence or paragraph formed a clue, or—

  The first letter of each paragraph spelled DIALS.

  Include the two extra sentences, and you had DIHUALS.

  That was not a word in any language I knew, but it was an anagram of HASDUIL, which meant ‘fire’ in Ancient Shaian and meant that if the author had been using any of the established ciphers, it was almost certainly either ‘Artkey’ or ‘Thunderstrike’.

  I read it over again. DIALS suggested Artkey, with its rotating sequence of substitutions. I frowned at the paper. Did I recall enough of ‘The Fall of Rain and Civilizations’ for this to work?

  How likely was it, really, that someone would have all of the Gainsgooding conspirators’ poetry, or an anthology of the Late Perpendicular Style of poetry made before the realization of how many of the poets were compromised? I wrote down the title across the length of the paper. This was Alinor: one never knew what book one might find in someone’s library.

  “What is Lady Flora’s chief interest?” I asked as I translated the title into ideographs.

  “The antiquity and descent of her family,” my uncle said gloomily. “She’s descended from the Bloody Queen, you know, from back before this was Fiellan.”

  “The Bloody Queen! She’s the one buried at the Hanging Hill in the forest, isn’t she?” Mr. Dart said.

  The pattern shifted another step. Almost, almost ... In the corner of the page I drew the ideograph for ebraöni, as if all the ramifications of meaning from cloud to having the wool pulled over your eyes would help.

  “What word is that?” my father asked. “It looks almost like kitaibë from this angle.”

  Sir Vorel seemed to notice him for the first time. “Who are you, sir? You seem ... have we met before, sir?”

  “Ebraöni,” I said, ignoring him. Then my father's word penetrated. Kitaibë meant ‘thunderbolt’ and, by extension, ‘revelation’.

  Invert the cloud and you saw the lightning.

  The cipher opened up.

  I scribbled words across the page, lists of how the letters shifted in their encoded patterns, matched sign to significance to the deeper layer of sense, until the words turned, and turned, and turned again, and meant—

  “I’ve got it,” I said, cutting right across whatever Ben and Sir Vorel and Sir Hamish were all saying at once.

  The jumble of sounds cut out. “I beg your pardon?” Sir Hamish said carefully.

  “I’ve deciphered it.”

  My uncle frowned mightily. “Just like that? Are you sure you’re correct, young man?”

  Not my dear nephew? I smiled thinly at him. “Why not? I studied puzzle poems at Morrowlea, sir. You cannot expect a cipher to be entirely alien. This one is a quite simple variation on the Artkey Code commonly used by spies from the Imperial College of Wizardry.”

  Hal said, “There were spies from the Imperial College of Wizardry?”

  “Everywhere the Empire was brushing up against outsider magics, certainly,” Ben said. “Now, lad, what does it say? I am even more agog.”

  I took a breath, glanced down at my final words, and read it out.

  Flower of Hope:

  You have done well establishing your first position. This letter supplies what you need to move to the next. Soon it will be time for our people to return to glory. The stones of the forest are older than the trees, and the water redder than the blood of empires. When the restoration comes, we will need you. Be ready at all times. You know what the red water and the white stone can do.

  We who speak for the shadows

  They were all very quiet. My father whispered something to himself in a language I did not understand; when I looked at him he repeated it in Shaian. “Stone speaks to stone, and water to water.”

  “The rallying cry of the Stone Speakers,” Ben supplied.

  “The red water,” I said, and turned to Sir Hamish on the thought that this might be an opportune moment to ask the Honourable Roald Ragnor’s question. “Sir Hamish, what is crimson lake?”

  He appeared only briefly startled; then his eyes narrowed thoughtfully and he shifted from the sardonic gentleman-farmer to the intense, incisive,
much-lauded painter of portraits. “Crimson lake is, first of all, a paint colour derived from cochineal. ‘Lake’ comes from the word ‘lac’, ‘an extrusion’, related obviously to the word ‘lacquer’. Crimson lake is also called carmine ... it makes a superb clear colour. I’d use it to paint pale-skinned folk and sumptuous red clothing, because it works brilliantly as a transparent wash. Vermilion is sometimes too opaque; it’s an ocherous pigment.”

  My thought flashed to the red staining the bones that had been buried in my father’s place.

  “And the second point?”

  He smiled slightly. “It is also, as I understand it, the name of a secret society whose mission appears the re-establishment of magic.”

  Hence a magic ring as a token ... although that really did not explain anything, such as why I’d been sort-of-recruited to join it. Possibly it explained why the Honourable Rag had access to werelights. I nodded as if this was all entirely irrelevant to me.

  The Honourable Rag had suggested the answer was more than it seemed, and I had decided I’d rather comport myself as if he were not a drunkard of a young man bent on self-destruction—or at least not only that. He had graduated from Tara, at least.

  “And third?”

  “Third,” said Master Dart, “it’s the name of a lake up along the top of the Magarran Strid, which at this time of year often experiences an algal bloom that colours all the water red.”

  “The tippermongeramy and the Tufa.”

  “The what?” said several people.

  I ignored the discussion of the word and its meaning. My father had said that Tufa was also the word for a kind of rock. (“Isn’t tufa a kind of rock?” Hal asked on cue; “I’m sure it’s what we use to make stone troughs at home. For alpine plants, you know.”)

  My thoughts were moving almost too fast for me to think them. I waited while the others talked, as they sizzled in my mind, images jostling with each other, lines from poetry and letters and history and the game of Poacher my father and I had played what seemed an age of the world ago.

  My final Net had contained Two Fat Carp, a Stranger, a Mysterious Letter, and a Thunderstorm.

  Poacher did not predict anything; that was silly. Prognostication very rarely worked (I had gotten that far in my History of Magic classes), at least not on Alinor. It was said some of the other magic systems of the Empire supported it. What did a set of cards know?

  Nothing, of course. It was all in the players and the history of meanings built up around the cards and their conjunctions. You revealed your soul as you played.

  And you might, perhaps, end up showing something of the truth of the real conjunctions in the world-at-large as your unconscious mind saw them.

  Two Fat Carp: my uncle and my aunt. Or, dropping down a layer of significance, the two seeming villains (for the carp meant, first, a feast, and secondly, from a famously disastrous feast once held on Colhélhé, betrayal): Dominus-not-Gleason and Lady Flora.

  A Stranger: a piratical highwayman, who was my father. My uncle, whose blustering surface seemed so obviously what he was. Dominus Gleason, who was not who he seemed. Lady Flora, who was not what she seemed. The Honourable Rag, who annoyed me with all his misdirections. All the unfolding ramifications of the Stranger were there in its surface meaning: the potential god or demon, the potential friend or enemy, the Unknown that could open itself to trickery or salvation.

  A Mysterious Letter: how many there were! From my mother; from the army; from the blackmailers.

  (We should not, I reflected fleetingly, forget that small point of blackmail.)

  Why had I needed to be kept out of the way?

  Why had my father needed to be kept out of the way?

  What happened that we had seen, or might have seen, or might have interfered with? Why us?

  Why had that letter been what was needed for the establishment of a second position?

  Flower of Hope ... Lady Flora. Who had married my uncle the year before my father went to Loe.

  Who, my uncle had just said, was a descendant of the Bloody Queen, that legendary pre-Fiellanese chieftain who just might (according to Mr. Dart) be buried in that grassy hill with the king oak and the hollow and the highwaymen.

  Who had, as a result of this letter, become established not so much as a Personage in the barony (though there was that, too), but as the lady of Arguty Manor, with all its secret passageways, its proximity to the Forest and the town, and its cellar full of barrels that might, or might not, contain contraband whiskey.

  I almost had it—

  One more card. There was one more card before the Emperor Card was played. My last one had been A Thunderstorm.

  A Thunderstorm ...

  The letter had been coded in Artkey, not Thunderstrike. The whole situation seemed to be threatening some form of storm, from the absurd accusations heaped on me to what was going to happen to my uncle when he finally discovered my father was alive to—

  My tutor’s voice suddenly spoke in my mind’s ear: Do not forget the letter of the text.

  Do not forget the source of all this speculation, that was. In the game of Two Sticks and a Stone, it also meant: don’t forget the literal meaning, what the words in their simplest form actually said. ‘The garden (or soil) of history has as many weeds as flowers.’ You could not fail to take the surface meaning into account when presenting your interpretation.

  On Being Incarcerated in Orio Prison was, first and foremost, a poem about being incarcerated for life in a prison on the top of a cliff, with the endless ocean on one side and the city the poet could no longer enter on the other, and facing her always across the crescent of that city, on the opposing bluff the first and oldest and perhaps the greatest of all the universities of Alinor.

  That was what it was about.

  And that card was about the weather. Thunderstorms ... and what was thunder, exactly?

  The noise of lightning. That was the basis of half of its ramifying significances, the idea that it was the sound made by light, the sound of illumination, the sound of the air being torn in two by a bolt of pure energy.

  One of the things I liked best about the Two Stick and a Stone poets was how they used ordinary everyday things as natural symbols. They did not just arbitrarily assign meaning, like encoding a cipher; instead they looked at things around them and tried to see what they really were, if you looked hard enough.

  I took a step back from the table so I could take a harder look at all the people gathered round.

  My glance lit on the coolly elegant and coolly amused figure of the Chancellor of Morrowlea, who was the world’s foremost Scholar of Lightning.

  “Chancellor,” I said through all the babble, “why precisely did you come to Ragnor Bella?”

  Only my uncle kept muttering after that.

  The Chancellor regarded me with her usual gravity and unshakeable dignity, and then she inclined her head and smiled. “I was invited to witness the Turning of the Waters tomorrow by Red Myrta.”

  Chapter Thirty: Ebraöni

  “You can’t trust him,” said Mr. Dart.

  I glanced across the room. We were leaning against the wall by the window; my uncle sat staring dumbly into the fire. Everyone else stood or sat in clusters around the room. Ben, Jack, Dominus Lukel, Sir Hamish; Master Dart, the Chancellor, Hal. The other two Scholars were still outside looking at the bones.

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, then. You know what Roald said about his tells. Why did you believe what he said?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Mr. Greenwing!”

  “Ssh.”

  “Oh, very well, explain in your own way.”

  “Either he is complicit or he is a blind fool. I am inclined to the latter opinion, but I haven’t ruled out the former. There’s still one mystery left to crack.”

  Mr. Dart shook his head. “Only one? Why were you taken away for two days?”

  “Clearly it was to keep me out of the way. Otherwise they could have
just made up a story about how I slipped on something and hit my head.”

  He looked dissatisfied. “That’s hardly a good answer.”

  I laughed at that. He looked even more disgruntled. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sober myself. “Everything is going round and round in my head. It keeps almost making sense, but none of my theories account for all the facts.”

  “What’s sticking out? That your father is not actually dead?”

  “That’s one,” I agreed, then looked around hastily to see if anyone else had heard us. No one appeared to have. “Let’s go outside, Mr. Dart, and see if the Scholars have discovered anything interesting.”

  “It might shake something loose,” he agreed, and so we repaired to the courtyard.

  The Chief Constable and his underlings had disappeared. Domina Enory and Dominus Vitor were standing next to the bones, both in attitudes of the most extreme puzzlement. They swung round when we arrived to frown at us.

  “Is something the matter?” Mr. Dart asked. “Is there anything we can do?”

  Domina Enory pointed accusingly at the bones. “These are fake.”

  We looked down. They certainly looked like real bones. I cleared my throat. “In what respect? Are they made of—something else?”

  “They are real bones,” Dominus Vitor said. He was back to looking disgusted. “Bull, boar, stag.”

  I felt very confused. “Then what is the problem?”

  Domina Enory folded her arms across her chest. Her mouth was tight, as if she had discovered that someone had tricked her. “These are made to appear as if they were used for the semblancing spell,” she said finally.

  Mr. Dart understood first. “They weren’t? The semblance was a fake?”

  “It’s not the result of cultic magic. It’s all silver-gilt, red paint, and soot. It was never informed by magic.”

  I grabbed Mr. Dart by the shoulder to catch myself. I felt dizzy with the speed of my thoughts. “When? When would that have been done?”

  The two Scholars looked at each other. “We’d have to do some other tests,” Dominus Vitor said.