Decrypted

by Lindsay Buroker

  He talked her through the systematic picking process, and after a few minutes pushed the door open. Before he stood, Tikaya rested her hands on his shoulders and bent over to kiss him on the cheek. “I might just promote you before I’ve tasted your coffee.”

  “That’s good because cider and tea are the primary drinks in the empire. I wouldn’t know what to do with a coffee bean.”

  “Oh? Maybe Grandpa is right and Turgonians are barbarians.” Tikaya stepped inside.

  Rias snorted and followed her. Tikaya closed the shutters on the windows before lighting a few lamps and candles. Bookshelves lined the walls of the spacious chamber, with rolling ladders allowing access to tomes near the carved obsidian molding under the arched ceiling.

  “This is all related to oceanography?” Rias eyed the towering stacks.

  “Yes. Though I think we’re going to be interested chiefly in the seas around the Kyatt Islands. That’ll narrow things down.”

  “How much?”

  Tikaya checked a directory. “Uh, that wall.”

  Rias considered the twenty-five-meter-long wall with its floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with books. “You may need more than one research assistant. Why didn’t you invite your cousin to join you?”

  “A lot of the historical tomes will be in Old Kyattese. Ell wouldn’t be able to read that.”

  “Tikaya, I can’t read it either. I can barely read new Kyattese.”

  “You’ve proven numerous times that you don’t need to be able to understand a language to make useful insights.” Tikaya swatted him on the backside as she headed for the shelves.

  “Demanding woman,” he murmured, but strode to the shelves as well. Instead of examining the book titles, he stopped before a tall case holding rolled scrolls. Maps most likely. That jangled a bell in Tikaya’s memory.

  “A colleague mentioned that all the topography and bathymetry maps for the islands and surrounding waters are in here. I think she was worried about them getting into Turgonian hands, especially since you’re building a submarine and could find little nooks from which to spy, but maybe there’s another reason she didn’t want me handing them to you.” Tikaya tried not to feel guilty about the fact that she was not only handing them to him but encouraging him to study them.

  Rias slanted her a sidelong look. “Turgonia has your bathymetrical maps.”

  “It does?”

  “There were old ones in the archives that I dug out, and then I sent a scout ship early on in the conflict to take depth readings at night and verify the accuracy. We had plans to occupy your island and knew there’d be less opposition if we didn’t use the harbor. We were concerned with the underwater lava flows and how they may have changed the terrain, so my men were quite thorough.”

  “Oh.” Tikaya shouldn’t have been surprised, but she experienced a moment of numbness at the reminder that he, despite his cute stories of boyhood intellectual pursuits, was still the enemy admiral who’d caused her people so much pain during the war. Her exasperation at her family’s unwillingness to welcome him was perhaps unfounded. “Well, take a look. I can’t imagine yours are terribly accurate if your men were out there with knotted ropes. I’m sure our practitioners worked with the sailors making the recordings.” After she spoke, she wondered if he’d find the comment... snotty. She’d implied, after all, that his people had primitive methods that weren’t equal to the ones used by those who practiced the mental sciences. Offending one’s only research assistant probably wasn’t a good idea.

  Rias nudged a few candles aside and spread the first of the maps out on the table. After a brief look, he said, “Actually, I think ours are more accurate.” He scratched his jaw. “I don’t suppose there’s anyway I could get copies now.”

  “How can that be?” Tikaya had selected an armload of books and she brought them over, setting them down with a thump on the table. Dust flew up and tickled her nostrils as she peered over the map.

  “About twenty years ago, a young captain was assigned the dangerous mission of creating an accurate bathymetry map of Nuria’s east coast. Though dodging Nurian scout ships kept him busy, he found the rope method tediously slow and inaccurate and invented a primitive echo ranging device that used sound waves to determine the depth and shape of the undersea environment.”

  “And was this young captain someone with whom I’m familiar?”

  “He was.” Rias tapped the map. “A copy of this would be useful for navigating in and out of the harbor on our first voyage, especially if there’s something out there—” he waved toward the ocean, “—we should investigate.”

  “I’m told there isn’t, nothing of archaeological significance anyway. Our people have documented everything that’s happened in the last seven hundred years, and before that the islands were uninhabited.”

  Rias lifted his gaze from the map. “Nobody had ever been here before?”

  “According to the history texts, when my ancestors landed here, there wasn’t any evidence that other humans had ever settled or even set foot upon these islands.”

  “After my ancestors chose to depart from the Nurian continent, they roamed the oceans and explored widely, looking for an uninhabited land before choosing what they eventually turned into Turgonia. I haven’t studied that period of history extensively, but I’m surprised they didn’t find your islands at any point in their travels.”

  “It’s interesting that you said your people ‘chose to depart’ Nuria,” Tikaya said, wondering if he’d be offended if she shared an alternate view of the history with which he’d been raised. “The Kyattese global chronicles tell us that the peoples who banded together to become the early Turgonians were those who were persecuted and shunned and even enslaved in Nuria because of their poor affinity for learning the then burgeoning mental sciences. They fled the continent in search of a land where they could live without worrying about Nurians.”

  Rias lifted a hand, palm up. “History has always been written to favor the viewpoints of those penning the texts. Were not your people also fleeing something when they left the Southern Hemisphere?”

  “A plague, yes. It broke out after opposing factions started a war that decimated the continent. My ancestors were those who left after governments collapsed and chaos reigned. They vowed to find a new land where they could adopt a peaceful way of life and stay neutral in other nations’ disputes. They found their way here seven hundred years ago, and we’ve always prided ourselves on starting over so successfully.” Realizing she sounded a tad supercilious again, Tikaya mumbled, “Not that any of that matters now,” and returned her attention the table. While comparing historical accounts was interesting, they had limited time in the library. She opened one of the books.

  “What are your people hiding, I wonder?”

  Perusing a map, Rias sounded like he was talking to himself, but Tikaya felt compelled to ask, “You just have a hunch, right? No proof of anything?”

  “They’re upset by my submarine construction plans.”

  “Because they fear you’re still holding hands with the emperor and he’ll want to use your submarine for purposes that’ll be detrimental to our people.”

  “Yosis’s comments aside, I don’t believe for a moment that your high minister thinks I’d build my craft in front of them if that were my intent. I also suspect that the Kyattese diplomats stationed in Turgonia have ferreted out the truth about my alienation from the emperor—they must know I’m no longer his man. Your government is making up false concerns to camouflage something else. There’s something down there that they don’t want me to see.”

  “I’m not aware of any underwater secrets that my people are hiding from foreigners.”

  “Maybe they don’t want you to know about it either.”

  Tikaya propped her fist on her hip in exasperation. So far, she had nothing more than his hunches to go on, and they seemed to be straying farther and farther from the likely. The only thing that supported the idea that something fishy was going o
n was the odd closing of the library wing. For all she knew, there was a burst pipe waiting to be fixed or some other innocent piece of maintenance requiring attention. “Maybe you’re a paranoid Turgonian who’s ascribing entirely too much intelligence to my government.”

  “I’ll admit that there are a number of popular sage quotes involving paranoia and survival in my culture, but your government isn’t full of fools. Regardless, if we do operate under the assumption that there’s something down there, something that’s not visible from the surface but would be visible with the help of an underwater craft, it’ll narrow down our search a great deal.” Rias tilted his head toward the overflowing shelves. “We’ll only need to look up the history of water exploration around the islands.”

  “It’s as good of a starting point as any, I suppose. Those books will be in Old Kyattese.”

  “I’ll stick to the maps.” Rias waved to the shelves, then paused and took a longer look. He rolled the ladder over and climbed up to a row of maps drawn on parchment, their edges yellowed and tattered with age.

  “I’ll grab some of the old chronicles from the other room,” Tikaya said. “It’s always possible the ones I grew up reading contain revisionist history.”

  Rias, perched on the ladder and already engrossed in a map he’d withdrawn, did not answer.

  • • •

  Tikaya yawned and glanced toward the shuttered windows. She didn’t think dawn lurked on the horizon, but she and Rias had been buried in their research for at least two hours. Perhaps because she’d found so little of interest, she’d been spending a lot of the time worrying that Yosis would wake up, notice Rias gone, and hasten in this direction with some draconian punishment in mind.

  “I may have something,” Rias said. No fewer than twenty maps sprawled about him, some recent, some so old that the edges had crumbled when he opened them. “Your main island here has gained square footage over the decades, I assume due to the volcano’s continuing leakage of lava onto the sea floor. Following these maps—there was a new one done about every hundred years or so—you can see the gradually increasing footprint on the east side.”

  “Yes, that’s a fairly well-known fact here.”

  “What’s interesting is that these first three maps all have a basin delineated just north of the underwater lava flows. Here, next to this inlet.” Rias pointed to the same spot on different pages. “Then, four hundred years ago, the basin disappears from the maps. Not just one but all the subsequent ones.”

  Tikaya removed her spectacles, rubbed gunk out of her eyes, and leaned close to examine the tiny underwater terrain lines. “It’s possible it was filled in. Every couple of generations the volcano gets frisky and spits out larger amounts of lava.”

  “Frisky? Is that the geological term?”

  “I’ve never had occasion to learn the Turgonian words related to volcanology. If you’d like to switch to Kyattese, I can be more precise.”

  “Not necessary. It’s just that the word frisky brought other thoughts to my mind.” Rias wriggled his eyebrows.

  Tikaya blushed, forgetting her weariness. “If we finish here, maybe there’ll be time for exploring those thoughts more thoroughly before you have to get back.”

  “In that case, let us be most efficient in the study of these maps.”

  Tikaya traced the basin on one of the older versions and eyed the legend. “That would be a big area for lava to have filled in without a major seismic event.”

  “Deep too. Turgonian diving suits wouldn’t allow one to descend even halfway down to the bottom, if the basin still exists, that is.”

  Tikaya scribbled the dates AC 374-469 on a scrap of paper, the years between the last map drawn with the basin and the first map drawn without it. “I’ll dig out a geology text and see if anything significant happened during that gap. Are there any other discrepancies?”

  “Not that I found.”

  “I don’t suppose you memorized the bathymetry maps your people took and could verify or disprove the accuracy of this one?” Tikaya tapped the 469 version.

  “Sorry, my ancestors gave me a reasonably good memory, but not an eidetic one.”

  “Ah, apologies. I sometimes expect too much of you.” Had she the energy, Tikaya would have laughed at his chagrinned shoulder slump. He always seemed so disappointed when his education failed her in some way. She patted his arm to let him know she was teasing him. “We should leave before Yosis realizes you’re gone. I’ll head to the geology wing and grab a couple of books to take home. If that section isn’t closed for repairs too, that is.” In her wanderings around the Oceanography Wing, she hadn’t seen any problems that would have justified the locked door and sign. “Do you want to put those maps away and meet me at the door?”

  “Cleaning up, is that one of the roles of assistants?”

  “I don’t care what Grandpa says; Turgonians are faster learners.”

  Rias snorted. “Take your time with the books. I want to copy this side of the island.”

  “Planning your first trip already?” Tikaya asked lightly, though her colleague’s words came to mind. How many of her people would consider it treasonous of her to facilitate Rias’s acquisition of the bathymetry maps? But, assuming his story was true, the Turgonians already had this information—better information—so it shouldn’t matter.

  “The craft will need a maiden voyage, and this isn’t that far from your harbor.”

  Maiden voyage, sure. He wanted to know what was down there.

  Tikaya had to admit that the strings of her curiosity were being plucked as well. Though they’d found nothing major, the small discrepancies were making her believe there was something to Rias’s hunches. She put away the books she’d looked at, and headed for the geology department, hoping to find a historical accounting of seismic activity on and near the Kyattese Islands. On a whim, she veered into the civil history room first. There hadn’t been newspapers back then, but the government had maintained annual journals, recording significant events. They were more political than geological, she was sure, but an earthquake or volcanic anomaly would have affected the populace and therefore been mentioned. When she located the appropriate date range on the shelves, she found herself staring at a gap in the middle. It was only a one-book gap, and she might have missed it if she hadn’t been perusing the years with intent, but 397 was gone. As a historical reference book, it shouldn’t have been checked out.

  Tikaya lifted her lantern and gazed at nearby tables, thinking someone might have left it out, but they were all empty.

  “All right, 397,” she murmured, “what happened to you?” Or, more specifically, what happened in that year that someone wanted forgotten?

  Her mind filled with research ideas, histories of other fields that she could cross-check, but she’d been in the library too long already. Rias needed to get back, and he was probably waiting for her to finish before leaving. Besides, none of the other rooms was locked, so she could come back and investigate during the day.

  Nodding to herself, Tikaya strode back to the bottom-floor door through which she’d entered. Rias wasn’t there.

  “Still tracing?” She thought she’d been gone long enough for him to finish, and then some.

  She returned to the stairs. A thump came from somewhere on the second floor. Worry knotted Tikaya’s gut and she broke into a run. Taking the stairs three at a time, she sprinted toward the Oceanography Wing. Rias had closed the door on his way out but not made it farther than that. He was curled on the floor, clenching his temples.

  “Akahe curse that man,” Tikaya growled, knowing Yosis had to be responsible. She dropped her knapsack and raced to Rias’s side. “Rias?” she whispered. “Are you...?”

  He gasped and shook his head so hard he almost clunked it on the floor. “Heard... cousin’s warning... too late. I can’t... block... it.” He clawed at his wrist.

  Though her first instinct was to stay and help him somehow, the only way to stop his pain was to stop Yo
sis.

  “Stay here,” she barked, though it was unnecessary. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Tikaya lunged to her feet and sprinted down the stairs. Rage fueled her, and she flew out the library door like a champion sprinter. Right away, she spotted the white-robed figure on the dark path nearby. Her vision narrowed to a black tunnel until she saw nothing but Yosis. His gaze was toward the second-story windows of the Oceanography Wing, and he didn’t see her coming. Good, Tikaya thought, the word a snarl in her mind, and she ran at him like an arrow loosed from a bow.

  She smashed into him so hard, they both hit the ground and rolled several meters. Her battles at Rias’s side must have taught her something, for she came out on top, straddling Yosis. She smashed the heel of her palm into his face before he got his arms up in a semblance of a block. With anger and frustration still coursing through her veins, she simply aimed for a different target. She punched him in the gut numerous times before an indignant yell of, “Ms. Komitopis!” pierced her fury-clouded mind.

  A moment later, someone grabbed her shoulders and hauled her off Yosis. Blood charged through her body, and she almost took a swing at this newcomer as well, but cold awareness cut through her rage. Striking one’s fellow citizens was illegal on the islands, and she had witnesses who had seen her beating up on Yosis. Lots of witnesses, she realized, as she peered about at policemen carrying lanterns along with a couple of government officials that she recognized from the war room. Their hair was tousled and clothes rumpled. One woman wore a bathrobe. Yosis must have sent out some sort of alarm when he woke to find Rias missing.

  Several sets of eyes stared at Tikaya, some stern, some shocked, some outraged. Yosis staggered to his feet, one hand pressed against his abdomen, the other clutching his nose. Blood ran from one nostril and dripped down his arm. The lantern light shown brightly enough to reveal several droplets spattered on his white robes. Tikaya couldn’t bring herself to apologize.

  “Ma’am?” the ranking policeman asked one of the officials. “Do we take her to—”