Those, and Lsel encryption.
Before she unrolled the paper all the way, she repeated the motion, just her nail sliding against the metal of Yskandr’s imago-machine, touching what had touched him. Had been nestled inside him. The central rectangular chip, dull now as if the metal had been pickled, and all the long filament-legs stretching from the corners, fractal branches which had infiltrated his brain stem. The base of her skull ached where her own machine rested, sympathetic pain.
Lsel encryption here, too: no one could get to the Yskandr encoded in the machine’s memory, with all of his knowledge. Those missing fifteen years that she’d never had access to, not even when the Yskandr in her mind had been functioning correctly. She missed him so much.
(Would she like him, the man who had sold Lsel’s secrets to Six Direction? She was worried that she would. That what he’d done wouldn’t matter in the slightest, if only she could have an ally again in truth.)
Mahit cracked the rest of the wax on the communiqué and pressed the roll of paper flat on the table with both of her hands.
What she saw written there was not what she expected. Oh, the message looked right—for the first moment she stared at it. Paragraphs, written in an alphabet, the Lsel alphabet with all of its thirty-seven letters, shockingly familiar and unfamiliar at once. And the opening salutation signaled clearly that the following paragraph was using her own substitution cipher, the one which depended on a Teixcalaanli grammar. It was the paragraph below that began to worry her—that one was in a cipher she not only didn’t know, but one she’d never seen.
Well, she had been hoping for good encryption …
“Twelve Azalea?” she called, toward the kitchen.
“Yes?”
“Do you have a dictionary? Specifically, do you have Imperial Glyphbook Standard?”
“Everyone has Imperial Glyphbook Standard,” Three Seagrass called back. She only sounded mostly like she’d been crying.
“I know!” Mahit said. “That’s why I chose it—so do you?”
Twelve Azalea came back in and peered inquisitively at the unfolded paper. “Is that your language? It’s got so many letters.”
“You say this, and Imperial Glyphbook Standard has forty thousand different glyphs.”
“But alphabets are supposed to be simple. That’s what they tell us in Information Ministry training sessions, anyhow. Hang on, I’ll get the dictionary.”
At least he had one. She could probably have bought one in any shop, but it was a relief to not have to find a shop. Not with the City in its current unsettled state.
Twelve Azalea dropped the book at her elbow with a thud. In codex form it was over four hundred pages long, grammar and glyphs arrayed in tables. “What do you want with it?”
“Sit down,” said Mahit. “Watch me reveal some Lsel state secrets.”
He sat. After a moment, Three Seagrass emerged—her eyes red—and sat next to him.
It was strange, doing decryption for an audience—but Mahit was, she had realized, committed to these two. They’d stayed with her, they’d protected her, they’d put themselves in political and physical danger for her. And besides, she wasn’t telling them how to decrypt the cipher, just which book to use. It didn’t take her long—she’d written this cipher, she knew how to read in it.
The first paragraph of the communiqué identified its sender—Darj Tarats. Mahit was almost surprised: that the Councilor for the Miners would send a message to her, not Aknel Amnardbat from Heritage. But if Amnardbat was responsible, as Dekakel Onchu’s secret communiqués implied, for sabotaging her imago-machine, rendering her as damaged as she currently was, perhaps Tarats had … intervened? Intercepted the message and made sure he was the one to answer it?
If she believed that, she was taking Dekakel Onchu’s suspicions—suspicions she was never meant to have seen—as truth. And Tarats wouldn’t have known about Onchu’s warning to Yskandr. Tarats would be thinking about talking to a Mahit Dzmare who—might or might not have access to Yskandr Aghavn, her imago, but who certainly didn’t know why she didn’t. If she didn’t. Perhaps the sabotage was something else entirely, some personal failure of her own, and had nothing to do with a feud between distant Councilors being played out at a remove.
Start from the idea that Darj Tarats wanted to speak to her, whether or not he’d known about Amnardbat’s sabotage, if Amnardbat’s sabotage was even real. The Councilor for the Miners was almost always concerned with issues of defense and self-rule; it won him votes. If this message came from Tarats, the threat a Teixcalaanli expansion war posed to Lsel sovereignty was being taken seriously, at least.
Start with what she could absolutely be sure of, and entertain fantasies of sabotage (wouldn’t it be nice to have the cascading neurological failure not be her fault?—an unworthwhile thought if she’d ever had one) later.
Mahit pieced together the rest of the decipherable paragraph, glyph by glyph. It acknowledged her message (that was one glyph), thanked her for it (another), and instructed her that the book cipher was not an appropriate level of encryption for the remainder of the message, which contained specific guidelines for action based upon an important point of information to which Mahit had heretofore not been privy. (That took six glyphs, and the last one was damn obscure; she’d never seen it written before. It was a Teixcalaanli word for “secret previously unrevealed to the uninitiated.” Of course they had a word for that.)
“Yes, yes,” she muttered, “so how do I decrypt the rest…”
Three Seagrass snickered, and when Mahit looked up at her to glare, she held up her hands, apologetic. “I like watching you work,” she said. “You’re very fast, even when you’re confused. You could learn a real cipher, one of ours, if you memorized the season’s fashionable poems—”
“Easily,” Mahit said, not mollified. “But they’re not real ciphers either, Three Seagrass. I mean—they’re not real encryption. Substitution ciphers are trivial to break with a decent AI and knowing what the key is. Glyphbook or poem.”
“I know,” she said. “They’re not encryption, they’re art, and you’d be good at them.”
That was a strange kind of sting. Mahit shrugged, and looked again at the last sentence of the only paragraph she could understand.
Cipher || kept safe/imprisoned/locked away || (personal/hereditary) knowledge (location within) || (belonging-to)
And then in perfectly clear Stationer letters, Yskandr-imago.
The code to decrypt the rest of the message, with its secret-previously-unrevealed-to-the-uninitiated, was located in Yskandr’s knowledge-base, not Mahit’s. And Darj Tarats had expected her to be able to access it. (He must not know about the sabotage. Or he’d expected that the sabotage would fail, that she and Yskandr would have already integrated enough that any damage to the machinery that had brought them together would nevertheless be sufficient to decode this.)