“ I now know why I’m here,” Tikaya said. “Sort of. I’ll tell you about it if you tell me why you’re here. And why you have a number instead of a name.”
She stepped close to the gate, propping her elbows on the cold metal bars, and peered into his cell. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and she made out his form in the deep shadows of the back corner. He sat, slumped against the walls, and, though she could only guess at his height, she had the impression of a big man.
“ Are you a crew member being punished for something? Or are you a prisoner too?”
He had only voiced the single sentence, but that rich baritone had sounded native Turgonian. Of course, she spoke the language like a native and was not one. Maybe he was another linguist brought in to help. And they had chained him because… Why? He was more dangerous than she? She snorted. Who wasn’t?
Neither her questions nor mental musings stirred him to answer, and only silence came from his cell. For now, she would have to plot an escape on her own. She ticked the bars with a fingernail. As long as she remained in the cell, she would not have a chance. Reluctantly, she allowed that cooperating with the captain, or at least appearing to cooperate, might be the only way to get herself moved to less secure lodgings.
Tikaya slid the rubbings through the gate and laid them on the floor. The single lantern burning in the corridor provided wan illumination, and she had to squint to read.
“ I wish I knew where these rubbings had been taken. I can’t even assume it’s the Turgonian continent, because the empire’s ships troll the world. This is a short sample, but some of the symbols do repeat.” She spoke out loud and in Turgonian for the benefit of her neighbor, just in case hearing her voice might bestir him to comment on something, but she soon lost herself in contemplation and forgot him, the poor lighting, and even that she was on a ship full of marines.
“ If it’s alphabetic, it’s a large alphabet,” she murmured. “I’m more inclined to believe we’re dealing with a logographic or logophonetic script. In that case, there could be thousands of symbols in the lexicon.” She sighed, daunted at the prospect, but she tingled a bit too. It had been over a year since anything challenged her like this. “As far as I can tell, the symbols are abstract, not like Jutgu Hieroglyphs where so many are ideograms that represent ideas or physical things. That would have been useful.” She tapped a page. “That glyph reminds me of the Aracha vowels, but I suspect it’s just a coincidence. This is far more complex. The way the symbols are clustered and linked is unique. I’d guess the groupings represent words, or maybe sentences or concepts. Some are quite large. Seventeen in that series. Eleven, two, seven, seventeen again.”
“ Prime numbers.”
Tikaya had forgotten her silent neighbor, so she cracked her forehead on the gate in surprise when he spoke. She grunted and rubbed the nascent bump. “What?”
“ Are all the groupings prime?” It was the same deep, mellow voice he had used to speak to the guards, though a note of curiosity had entered it.
Tikaya recovered and bent over the rubbings again. She almost asked him to come forward and have a look, but remembered the clink of chains. He was probably shackled in the back specifically so he could not reach the gate and any passing guards.
“ Huh,” she said after a moment. “They are. The highest grouping, which appears only once in these samples, is twenty-nine.”
She gazed thoughtfully into her neighbor’s dark cell. She would have noticed the prime number commonality eventually, especially if she had been scribbling notes, but that his mind went right to that gave her an inkling that she was sharing the brig with someone more than an average thug.
“ You’re sure you’re working on a language?” His chains rattled, and his dark form changed position. She could make out little, but guessed he had shifted to face her.
“ I’m not, no. That’s what the captain told me. An ancient language that he wants me to decipher. Though I don’t think he knows much or he’d understand there’s no hope of translating a text by looking at a sheet of symbols. I’m guessing he was just parroting what someone higher up told him.”
“ Likely.” Was that an amused note in his voice?
“ I’m not sure how much stock to put in his claim of ‘ancient’ either. The Turgonians don’t use the mental sciences and can only rely on the relative dating method for judging age. Even that’s questionable, since they’ve only been on their continent seven hundred years, and I’m not sure how much, if any, documentation they did of the existing cultures before they assimilated them. Or killed them off. Brutes.”
Her neighbor-Five, she reminded herself-said nothing at that, and she winced, recalling he might be Turgonian himself. She rubbed her lips, annoyed at her mouth’s proclivity for blurting things out without lacing in any tact.
“ Erm, anyway,” she said, “all primes between two and twenty-nine are represented in these samples.” Casually, hoping she could draw him out, she added, “Supposing this is a language, do you have any thoughts as to what might be the significance of incorporating primes in the core structure?” The first thing her mind flashed to was that each number might signify a different part of speech, but using seventeen symbols to represent a verb seemed like overkill.
His chains rattled. A shrug? “I’m sure you already know prime numbers are the building blocks of natural numbers. They can only be divided evenly by one and themselves, and anything that’s not a prime number is made up of prime numbers.”
“ Building blocks,” she mused. “Like letters are the building blocks of my language, perhaps. Though in this case the numbers are the wrappers, not the content.” She stood and stretched, wishing the cell afforded her more room to pace.
“ You are Kyattese, is that correct?”
Tikaya stilled, realizing he did not know who she was to the marines. If he was a Turgonian, her chances of turning him into an ally might plummet if he found out she was their cryptomancer.
“ Yes,” she said carefully.
“ Did your president survive the war?”
Surprise and then suspicion flooded her, and she regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Yes, why wouldn’t he have?”
“ Is he…a good man? Good for your people?”
Tikaya did not know what to make of this line of questioning and responded only with another clipped, “Yes.”
She folded her arms across her chest and decided not to answer anything further about her people or her nation, especially not anything the Turgonians might use against them. Fortunately, Five asked no more.
“ Why don’t you answer a question for me since I’m answering yours?” she suggested.
He did not respond.
“ I’ll settle for one,” she said. “Will you answer me one question?”
His soft snort hinted at amusement. Tikaya decided to take it for consideration.
“ What’s your name?” she asked.
A sigh mingled with the hum of the engines. “Not that question. Ask another.”
“ Why not that?”
“ You’re replacing your one allotted question with that one?” A hint of dryness infused his tone.
“ Yes.”
Another sigh. “They took my rank and my name as punishment. Five was my number on the penal boat going to Krychek Island, and, as far as the empire cares, it’s the only identification I have now.”
“ Krychek Island,” Tikaya breathed. “Isn’t that where they send criminals so vile they’re afraid to execute them outright? Out of fear their spirits will linger in the area and afflict the living? So they send you to the island with no food, no weapons, no resources, the assumption being you’ll kill each other off far from anyone worth haunting? They say those few who do survive turn into animals, bestial and deranged and cannibalistic and…” She caught her lip between her teeth. There she went again, probably offending the only person on this ship who had stood up for her.