The Alchemist's Code

by Dave Duncan

  “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 ask 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.”

  “Should I wear my sword?”

  “You’re probably safer without it.”

  “Very true,” I said, “I hate inquests.” I glanced inquiringly at Giorgio and he nodded, of course. “He will be happy to oblige you, lustrissimo.” I was sorely tempted to add, “But don’t tip him too generously; he isn’t used to it.” I didn’t say that, though, and the self-restraint required must have made all the angels in Heaven cheer.

  Danese said nothing, but when gondolier and vizio departed, he went with them. I looked across the table at the amused stare of a descending line of dark eyes—Christoforo, Corrado, Archangelo, and little Piero.

  “It’s a good job I like your father,” I said. “Or I’d be praying for sharks to sink his gondola. Chris, go and bolt the front door behind them.”

  Eight eyes widened. “Why?” chorused one bass, one baritone, one tenor, and one alto.

  “You know the doge is a great book collector and the Maestro is an expert on old books? He’s examining some very rare documents for the doge, so valuable that the doge sent the vizio along to guard them.” That was as close to the truth as I could come and it satisfied the youngsters, although probably not Mama, who never missed a word of any conversation, spoken or unspoken. Hating myself for even that much deception, I beat a fast retreat with a mug of hot water and another of khave.

 
I checked that both doors were bolted as well as locked.

  As soon as I had shaved, I took my tarot deck from under my pillow and tried another reading. It was no more informative than the last one and I tucked the deck away again, fearing that any more attempts to force it might desensitize it. My tarot skill had apparently become as useless as the Maestro’s clairvoyance, which confirmed what I already suspected—that whatever we were up against would not be deterred by bolted doors or Filiberto Vasco’s sword.

  When Vasco returned, he found me at my side of the big desk behind a pile of every book on cryptography in the Maestro’s library—Roger Bacon, Johannes Trithemius, Girolamo Cardano, Leon Battista Alberti, Giovani Porta, Blaise de Vigenère. Al-Kindi was there, too, but I can’t read Arabic. Needless to say, I had made small progress with those I could read.

  “No sign of the Maestro,” I said. “May I have a look at the evidence?” You cannot conceive how much it hurt me to sound humble.

  The vizio could, though, and smirked. “What for?”

  “Not the ciphertext, just Circospetto’s notes.”

  He had the effrontery to make himself comfortable in the Maestro’s chair and beam across at me. “Why?”

  “I have an idea and I wanted to see if the Ten’s gnomes thought to check for it.”

  “What sort of idea?”

  “About nomenclators.”

  “What’s a nomenclator?”

  “This frantic impulse to exercise your brain after so many years of disuse may do serious damage.”

  He just smiled.

  “I taught you last night,” I said with saintly patience, while silently vowing epochal revenge, “that a simple Caesar alphabet cipher is too easy to break. The most popular way to improve it is to add more symbols, usually numbers. So you have, say, 32 standing for D, 14 for N, and a dozen or so different codes for a very common letter like E—and so on. Then you start adding symbols for common words, perhaps 42 for the and 51 for and. That sort of list is called a nomenclator. It makes the cipher harder to break, but not much. Carry it too far and you’re writing a whole codebook, with numbers for King of Denmark, Venice, Janissary regiment, and Lord knows what. That’s more secure, but then your spy can’t carry the cipher in his head anymore and has to lug a book around with him. If the enemy captures it, a codebook is enough evidence to hang him and reveal all your coded correspondence, past, present, and future. If a Caesar alphabet is compromised, you only have to change the key, which is a single number, whereas replacing a codebook is a huge task. But codebooks are how most states encipher their dispatches.”

  Vasco nodded as if he understood. He does have a certain low animal cunning. “Algol doesn’t use numbers.”

  “No, he uses twenty-three letters, and if he is pairing them up he has hundreds of couplets available. So the first thing the Maestro asked was if Sciara’s gnomes had checked for couplet frequency. Perhaps GX stands for A, NT for B, EO for King of France, understand? Now you pass me the notes and I’ll tell you what to look for in the ciphertext and if we’re quick about it we may have this thing broken before the Maestro comes.”

  “And if we’re really lucky, angels may appear to transport you to Paradise.”

  I thought that was the end and the pleasure of refusing me had overridden his duty, but then he shrugged and opened the satchel. He held out the work notes, making me stand up to reach them.

  “So what do I look for?” he asked.

  “My initials. LAZ, for Luca Alfeo Zeno. How many times can you see those letters together? I know they appear more often than they should.” I set to work reading what Sciara’s team had tried, ignoring more scoffing from Vasco.

  Sciara’s notes were thorough and detailed. I learned that the ciphertext comprised four Algol dispatches, varying in length from three pages to nine, twenty-four pages in all. The Ten’s cryptologists had tested for letter frequency and couplet frequency and even “word” frequency, although the five-letter groups could not be real words. Their conclusion was that the distribution of letters was not truly random, but not skewed enough for a substitution cipher, such as a Caesar, or a transposition cipher, which is a gigantic anagram. They suspected that all four dispatches had been written using the same code, so very likely it was a nomenclator.

  They had not tested for triplets, though. Of course my own initials in a page of meaningless text will always jump out at me, and the previous evening I had seen them twice on one page when I was looking over the Maestro’s shoulder. After a few minutes of angry muttering, Vasco announced that he had found my initials seven times, and at least once in each of the four dispatches. We had grasped a thread in the labyrinth! That ought to lead somewhere.

  But where? There were thousands of other three-letter combinations to look for, and the only sensible next move I could think of was to hand the problem back to Sciara and tell him to put his legions to work on triplet frequencies. I suggested we each try to find another repeating triplet.

  Eventually the thump of the Maestro’s staff on the terrazzo outside announced his approach and Vasco hastily vacated his chair. The old man came hobbling in, looking murderous.

  “Make any sense of it?” he growled at me, with a wave at the slate table.

  “Nine words,” I said. “That’s all.”

  He grunted, meaning that he had reached the same conclusion.

  “And my tarot doesn’t work either.”

  He seemed unsurprised. “Why do you think he’s called Algol? Vizio, who named the unknown that and why?”

  “I have no idea, Doctor.”

  More grunt.

  I doubted that Algol would turn out to be a true ghoul, a monster that haunts graveyards and eats corpses, but he might well be a demonologist, and the laws of demonology dictate that anyone who employs demons will soon find that the shoe is on the other hoof and the demons are employing him.

  Vasco was looking puzzled. I thought it kinder to leave him that way.

  “Can you break a nomenclator in an unknown language?” I asked.

  The Maestro’s scowl darkened. “Given time and enough text to work on, yes. But there are far more good ciphers than good people using them. When a cipher is broken, it is almost always because the operator was careless. Human error damns us all! If we look hard enough and long enough, we will find that he has made a mistake somewhere.”

  That was my cue. “He likes my initials. He used them seven times.”

  The effect on the Maestro was dramatic. He sat up straight and his eyes blazed with excitement. “Where? Show me!”

  Two minutes later he snapped, “Bring me the pastels!”

  I fetched our box of pastels.

  We marked every LAZ in red. After another ten minutes or so we had located and highlighted four more triplets that were repeated at least once. Nostradamus told me to round up the three oldest Angeli children currently available. Reading and writing are uncommon skills among the citizen class, but I taught Mama and she teaches all her children.

  Archangelo was on a ladder, dusting the tops of high pictures in the salone, and so was happy to be recruited. Corrado and Christoforo happened to come running up the stairs as I emerged from the atelier and were not, but they brightened when I chivied them into the dining room and they saw the pile of shiny soldi in front of the Maestro. Most of the time he is as tight as a coffin lid where money is concerned, but he has little idea of how much it means to adolescents and often tips them extravagantly.

  He handed out a pastel crayon and four or five pages of ciphertext to each of us. He explained the rules. The boys received a soldo for each new repetition they found. Vasco and I did not. The vizio was clearly torn between the excitement of the chase and regarding this labor as far beneath the dignity of a major officer of the Republic—which he is not, but likes to think he is.

  The pile of coins shrank rapidly. We found ten different triplets that were repeated. None of the others repeated as often as my initials did, and most only once. My initials
were always in the middle of the five-letter groupings, and the others usually had their own places also, with a couple of exceptions that could easily be due to chance. Archangelo found a four-letter repeat and was rewarded with two soldi.

  Whatever we were discovering was a clue to analyzing the cipher and might even lead us to breaking it, so I grew quite excited. The Maestro became crabbier and crabbier until he slapped his hand on the table and said, “Stop!”

  Surprised, we all stopped.

  “This is a waste of time. Off you go, boys, thank you. Vizio, please gather up the papers. Alfeo, has that freeloading friend of yours removed his belongings yet?”

  “He was never a friend of mine,” I protested. “He had no baggage with him when he left this morning.”

  “Then pack up his things and take them to Ca’ Sanudo and tell him to find someone else to sponge off!”

  It was almost noon. I had hoped to call on Violetta, but I was lacking several hours’ sleep and might well have settled for a siesta instead.

  “After dinner?”

  “No, now! The vizio is our guest and that simpering pretty boy is not. I want him out of here.”

  “I don’t mind sleeping on the couch,” Vasco said, with the martyrdom of a triptych saint. “I can guard the house better there.”

  The Maestro ignored him. “You heard me,” he snapped.

  I sighed. “Your wish is my command, Oh Most Illustrious Master!”

  Although Nostradamus has uncommonly small hands, they have always packed a lot of sleight, and when Vasco tucked his papers back in his satchel, he didn’t think to count them.