The Alchemist's Code aa-2

by Dave Duncan

  “Minor deviations,” Sciara said. “Probably just happenstance. The same with single letter frequency. It is not truly random, but certainly neither a Caesar nor a transliteration of Arabic letters into Roman.”

  “Nor a transposition, then. Curious.”

  It is a rare treat to watch the Maestro fencing wits on equal terms with someone. I had a fair idea of what they were gabbling about because I have to encipher and decipher much of his correspondence, but a glance at the vizio told me that he was utterly at sea. Bruno had gone to smile at the pictures.

  “I put a summary of our experts’ work notes in here,” Sciara said, tapping the satchel, “to save you from wasting time attempting to decipher the code. I know it is the sort of puzzle that distracts you. Their Excellencies accept that it is unbreakable.” The skull sneered. “They hope your occult methods will identify Algol where our cryptography has failed, and this is the only lead they can offer.”

  Nostradamus snorted. “But if I break the cipher, the plaintext would lead you back to Algol, almost certainly, and would also be admissible evidence. I shall do both. What else can you tell me? How long has this Algol been operating? What departments of government has he penetrated? How does he communicate with the Porte that you are able to intercept his mail?”

  “Their Excellencies have not authorized me to release such information.”

  “Have they asked for a zonta?”

  The secretary twitched as if jabbed by a needle. “I do not discuss Their Excellencies’ deliberations!”

  The Maestro smiled foxily. “And to whom do I report my findings?”

  Sciara actually hesitated before replying. “If you have evidence pertaining to the safety of the Republic, report it to the chiefs of the Ten- messere Tegaliano Trevisan, Tommaso Soranzo, and Marino Venier. If you find nothing of interest, just return these papers to me. Me personally.”

  “Why bother, if they contain nothing of interest? Have they been debated in the Council, lustrissimo?”

  Even Vasco had caught the drift of the Maestro’s questions now and looked horrified.

  Circospetto said, “I told you, Doctor, I do not discuss Their Excellencies’ discussions.”

  The Maestro chuckled and handed the papers back to Sciara. “On what terms may I take these?”

  “They stay in the possession of Vizio Vasco. He will watch while you study them, collect them when you are finished, also any copies or extracts you have made of them and all your work notes. When you are done, he will bring the material back to me.” The old man handed the satchel to Vasco.

  “Then I shall see what I can do,” the Maestro said.

  “You really expect to succeed?” Sciara said scornfully.

  Nostradamus stared at him with an expression of bemused innocence. “Why not? I have already narrowed the field, haven’t I?”

  I rose and went across to tap Bruno’s arm and gain his attention.

  As we trooped down the great dim staircase-the link boys first, then Bruno and the Maestro, with Vasco and me in the rear-Vasco caught my arm to hold me back.

  “What did Nostradamus mean by narrowing the field?” he whispered.

  “It’s not too difficult to guess, Vizio. Even you-”

  His nose twitched. “He thinks there’s a traitor in the Council of Ten? That’s outrageous!”

  “Sciara damn near confirmed it,” I said cheerfully. “He made sure we knew the names of the chiefs! They haven’t told the whole council what evidence they have, because that would betray the Republic’s agents in Constantinople. And why not? Remember 1355?” No Venetian forgets that date, the year the doge himself, Doge Marino Falier, was beheaded for conspiring against the state. If a doge could be a traitor, anyone could. “You need me to spell it out for you?”

  “Oh, please do, sier Alfeo. In large type. Very large!”

  Vasco attempts wit only when he thinks he is on top and ahead, so that sarcasm should have alerted me, but I missed it.

  “Well, the procedure was wrong to start with. Normally the chiefs would have summoned the Maestro and questioned him themselves, then either just authorized him to proceed on their own authority, or asked the Ten’s approval at the evening meeting. They would not drag him out before the whole council.

  “This elliptical procedure suggests,” I continued, amused to hear echoes of the Maestro’s lecturing manner in my own voice, “that the chiefs are very scared indeed, and whoever else is in the know is scared also.” I meant the doge, most likely, and probably Zuanbattista Sanudo, because it must have been he who suggested bringing in Maestro Nostradamus. “The fox is so well disguised as a hound that they don’t know which one he is. The Ten’s normal reaction to a sticky problem is to ask for a zonta, right?” A zonta is an addition, usually of fifteen men, elected by the Great Council. The advantage of the Ten being thirty-two instead of just seventeen is that all the great clans can be represented. This spreads the guilt and dilutes grudges.

  “Sciara did not deny that they were thinking about it,” I concluded. “No, ‘no’ means ‘yes’ in that world. Would you like the lecture on cryptography now?”

  “Later,” Vasco said. “Much later. Tell me again why the Maestro was paraded before the entire Ten, if the spy may be a member?”

  I used a phrase I would have to remember for my next confession. Why had I not seen that for myself?

  “Blasphemy!” the vizio said smugly. “But I think you’ve got it this time.”

  “And are you being sent along to guard-what?” I asked furiously.

  “Maestro Nostradamus, of course.” Vasco smiled beatifically at having caught me out.

  “Bait?”

  “Exactly. There’s a remote chance that Algol will be superstitious enough to believe in the old fraud’s posturing. In that case he must seem to be a danger, so Algol may try to dispose of him-and then he will run into me. Missier Grande mentioned that I should keep a protective eye on you at the same time, but I’m sure he was just joking there.”

  9

  V asco took his absurd mission seriously and proceeded to demonstrate how efficient he was, requisitioning a couple of night guards to escort us out to the Molo and see us safely aboard the gondola. He was the last to board and the first off at Ca’ Barbolano, where he would not let the rest of us disembark until Luigi had opened the door and confirmed that all was well within. Nor would he let Bruno carry the Maestro upstairs before Giorgio and I had finished bringing in the oar and cushions for overnight storage in the androne and the door had been locked and bolted. Then he shepherded us up the stairs, made sure the apartment was properly secured after we entered, and ordered Giorgio to inspect his family’s quarters in the attic and report any intruders. I smirked and he sneered.

  The Maestro had endured this exhibition with astonishing self-control. Now back on his own feet, he wanted to get to work. “The bag, please.”

  “Not until I am finished securing the house, Doctor.”

  “If you are looking for ghouls, Filiberto,” I said, “then you should begin over here. This is our only guest room, so you must either share the bed with the resident ghoul or sleep out here on a couch.”

  The vizio bared his teeth like a dog. “Who’s in there?”

  “ Sier Danese Dolfin, about to become son-in-law to messer Counselor Sanudo. Evict him if you wish. We have had very little success.”

  Vasco faced a tricky decision, whether or not to intrude on a nobleman and near relation to a ducal counselor in a nobleman’s house, but he rose to the challenge. After a brief glance at the Maestro, who remained studiously blank, he took up a lamp and marched into the spare room. Unfortunately I did not witness the expression on our guest’s face when the dreaded Missier Grande ’s deputy appeared like an apocalyptic nightmare and demanded to know who he was and what he was doing there. Vasco was smirking a little when he came out. He locked the door behind him and I would really have enjoyed seeing Danese’s reaction to that, too.

  The vizio inspe
cted the bedrooms with special care-mine, the Maestro’s, Bruno’s-peering in wardrobes and under beds. He went over the kitchen, the dining room, and started in on the salone, confirming that no assassins or demons crouched behind the statues. By then the Maestro and I were in the atelier, I lighting lamps for an all-night session, and he at his desk with a great leather-bound manuscript of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia.

  He looked up angrily as Vasco entered and began snooping around, peering at everything: terrestrial globe, celestial globe, armillary sphere, alchemy bench, reagent shelves, wall of books. The alcove in the center of the books contains a huge oval mirror framed by overweight cherubs. Vasco studied it for a moment, took another moment to locate the hidden catch, then slid the bolt and pushed on the frame. The whole back of the alcove turned on its pivot. There was enough light on the far side for him to recognize the dining room he had seen earlier. He nodded as if satisfied, closed the door again, and bolted it.

  Only then did he deign to deliver the precious satchel to the Maestro, who opened it without a word and began going through its contents like a child at Christmas. Vasco settled himself in one of the green chairs, where he could watch. I took the red one facing him, confident I would not be left in peace for long.

  “You really think those papers are of any true value?” I inquired. I knew that the entire Turkish army could march through the room without distracting the Maestro from whatever he was doing.

  Vasco glanced at him, came to the same conclusion, and answered, “Worth killing for, easily.”

  I shook my head. “ Circospetto would never have parted with them without keeping a copy. What he would love to do, of course, is catch Algol and then use his cipher to send false information to Constantinople.”

  “How do you know that Algol is spying for the Porte?”

  “I don’t,” I admitted. “He could be working for the Vatican, the Louvre, the Escorial, or even Whitehall. All states play the same sort of game. I just happen to have a grudge against the Turks. Perhaps the reason Venice can’t break the cipher is that its man in the Porte has been taken or turned and the writing on those papers is pure canal mud, meant to tantalize the Ten into insanity.”

  Vasco shrugged. “You’ll go mad thinking that way.”

  “Or Circospetto made it all up by himself to bait his trap for Algol.”

  “I wouldn’t put that past him. You’re an expert in code breaking as well as everything else, I suppose?”

  “Not everything else.”

  He scowled at the fireplace for a moment, then asked in a bored tone, “So what’s a Caesar, that you mentioned earlier?”

  “The cipher Julius used. You shift every letter a known number of places along the alphabet. Instead of A you write, say, C, and instead of D you write F. It’s easy to break, because in any language some letters are used much more often than others. In Veneziano, for instance, E and A are about the busiest and they’re close together in the alphabet, so if your ciphertext shows a lot of, say, M ’s and Q ’s, you assume those are A and E. Also R, S, and T are used a lot and fall next to each other, so they’ll stand out as a group. It would be easier if everybody spelled words the same way, and it depends a little on whether your spy has ignored accents or not, but that’s the principle. Once you have pinned down a few letters, the rest follow automatically, as was shown by Leon Battista Alberti of Florence in-”

  “But shown much earlier,” said the Maestro, “by Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Is-haq ibn as-Sabbah ibn ’omran ibn Ismail al-Kindi. Ninth century, in fact. Come over here and make yourself useful. You, too, Vizio.”

  We rose and went like good little schoolboys.

  “Every one of the sheets,” the Maestro said, “has ten five-letter words in a row, and no more than thirty-two rows on a page. This may be steganography, where the text is hidden in full view. You may have to take the first letter of the fourth word and the third of the one below and so on, or it may even require a Cardan grille to identify the meaningful letters. Let us hope that the original was copied exactly. But it wouldn’t be, of course. The spacing between lines varies, see? And we can’t tell whether it did in the original or not. I want you each to take a pen and a sheet of paper and invent a page just like these, 320 nonsense words in 10 columns. Go to it.”

  Vasco was frowning, but I suppose it seemed a better alternative than total boredom, so he accepted a pen and an inkwell, and went over to work on the slate-topped table with the crystal ball. I sat at my side of the desk and rapidly discovered that the job was not as easy as it seemed. When we turned in our assignments, the Maestro studied them while we peered over his shoulders.

  Then he chuckled. “You have disproved your own hypothesis, Alfeo! You see where you both went wrong?”

  Fortunately I did. “We weren’t repeating ourselves,” I said. “I never wrote a double letter, but the originals have lots of them. There’s even three K ’s in a row there. I never began a word with the same letter I’d used to start the one before. And we never wrote a real word. Algol has a MOLO and even PASTA if you ignore the space in the middle.”

  “And so on,” the Maestro said sourly, annoyed that I had spoiled his revelation. “You were too random! Your lack of order is a sort of order in itself. That means that these originals were not made by someone just writing random letters. There is meaning in them. Now all we have to do is pull it out.”

  “How can you do that if you don’t know what language it is?” Vasco demanded.

  “Not many languages are likely-Tuscan, Latin, Spanish, Veneziano, Arabic, Turkish, French. They use Old Persian in the Porte sometimes. I can read most of those and recognize the rest. But perhaps I can find another way. Take this trash away, Vizio.” The old man heaved himself to his feet, I handed him his staff, and he hobbled over to the crystal. “You can both get some sleep. I’ll lock up, Alfeo.”

  I doused the other lamps and shooed Vasco out of the atelier ahead of me.

  I did not offer to share my bed with him, but I did find him a blanket and a pillow. He stretched out on a couch in the salone.

  The last thing I did before going to bed was to consult my tarot. It gave me an assortment of the minor arcana, all low numbers without a single court card or trump. I had not seen such a disgusting heap since before I was toilet trained. Deciding I must be overtired, I fell into bed.

  10

  I awoke at dawn as always. Remembering the work I had to do, I growled myself upright, groaned myself into my clothes, and grouched out into the salone in my stocking soles. The vizio ’s blanket lay unoccupied beside the couch, so he had presumably gone to recharge the canal, and I had a chance to reach the atelier without attracting his unwelcome attention.

  The atelier door is both locked and warded at night. The Maestro might have omitted setting the wards if he was exhausted after his clairvoyance, but I played safe and cast the counter-spell before using my key. As soon as I had let daylight in, I went to inspect the slate-topped table.

  What I found was ominous. It began in the usual barely legible scrawl:

  When the cat is in the trap, the mouse…

  But that was followed by mere chalk scribbles, snail tracks bearing no resemblance to writing at all. I have known the Maestro to prophecy in such appalling cacography that neither of us could read half of it, but I could recall no occasion when he had failed to produce a reasonable attempt at a quatrain.

  And my tarot had failed me.

  The door closed behind me and I spun around angrily. It was not, as I had expected, Filiberto Vasco snooping. It was Danese Dolfin, obviously released from his kennel and apparently not snooping, because he came striding straight over to me, his manner all but shooting lightning bolts. He had given up wearing his sling.

  “Why is the vizio here?” he demanded.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I know, but I can’t tell you.”

  That stopped him. I was tempted to suggest he a
sk around his new family, but even that hint would violate my oath.

  “Does sier Alvise Barbolano know he’s here?”

  “No,” I said, “and I strongly advise you not to tell him.” Then I remembered old Luigi, whose mouth is larger than the Adriatic. The news would be out the moment Luigi could find a listener.

  More wary now, Danese said, “Is he going to stay long?”

  There were witty retorts I could have made to that, but I wasn’t feeling witty. “Several days.”

  “It’s intolerable!” Danese shouted, turning on his heel.

  “Yes,” I said softly as he disappeared. Life holds many trials we can do nothing about, but with luck Vasco would rid us of one of them.

  I followed Danese out, locked the atelier, and went in search of shaving water. Halfway along my trek to the kitchen stood Vasco, folding his blanket with the satchel strap over his shoulder like a tippet, as if he had worn it all night. We greeted each other with cold nods, acknowledging that our enforced cooperation was only temporary and battle would resume at the first opportunity.

  The kitchen was redolent with ambrosial scents of fresh bread and the khave Mama Angeli was just preparing. Giorgio and four sons sat gobbling at the big table-the older girls would still be dressing small fry. We exchanged blessings and they waited hopefully for me to explain the additional houseguest. I just asked them to keep down the noise outside the Maestro’s room.

  In stalked the vizio wearing sword and satchel, closely followed by Danese wearing his lute. They both looked rumpled and unshaven-Danese less so, because he was blond and had not had to sleep in his clothes-and their joint arrival seemed so staged that I half expected them to burst into song.

  Vasco asked me, “When will Nostradamus want to see these papers again?”

  “Probably not for a couple of hours.”

  “May I ask your gondolier to take me home to fetch some clothes? I won’t be long.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Just promise me you’ll keep the door locked while I’m gone.”