The Code-Breaker
( A follow-up to @rookmenagerie‘s “Communion.” Read that, it’s good! )
It wasn’t that hard a cipher, not really. Rosella had dealt with worse in her Whispers training back when she was a girl. Gods, she needed to find those people, the Whispers she’d known back when she was sixteen and seventeen, when they told her she was brilliant and she’d have a future of utility, of service. Of fun, for certain values of fun.
But Torres had reclaimed her after the others had rejected her, and the bolt-holes and secret passwords she’d known so long ago were nothing now. Nothing. She was a woman adrift with one last job to do -- and cipher-breaking, that was better. That she’d do while the contract waited. She always did have a talent for ciphers.
And a substitution cipher didn’t require men to be smart or canny, or to keep notes or to remember more than a word or a phrase. Just one word, and the whole coded mess might unlock. Joko hadn’t worked, or Mordant or Crescent or a hundred other words she’d tried up in her little attic room. Two days passed, three.
And then she thought of ego. This wasn’t Joko’s project, this was that prosecutor’s project, and he had his own name. What would satisfy an ambitious man under a tyrant more than using his own name as the key to everything? She rifled through her notes until she found it, tested it against the cipher, and laughed aloud.
“You egotistical freak bastard,” she murmured. Akif. Not even a family name to follow. Just a four-letter key, and from there, two levels of classical Elonian shifts, and there. Akif’s lists, Rabiah’s targets.
She jotted down names and locations as quickly as she could. A long-standing Priory dig near Lornar’s pass. A ship called The Queen’s Mercy, sailing north from Orr to Lion’s Arch. A fisherman and his family in Triskell Quay. Another group of separatists, this one near Ebonhawke itself. One of the Seraph who guarded the passage into Lake Doric, gods.
Some of the information made little sense, but she wrote it down all the same. Rabiah was an honest woman with an honest cause, and Rosella hadn’t known many of either. Perhaps, when the contract was done, and Rabiah had returned...
She shook her head. One issue at a time. “Miss Bahar?” she called as she headed out of her room and stepped lightly down the stairs. “Miss Bahar, I have some of that information for you.”