Seat of Mars

Chapter 6: hath made a shameful conquest of itself...

Roger

I spot the tails on my way into London. Four of them. And I've lost count the number of times I've had to lose a tail. And frankly I'm not in the mood.
I double back into an alley and wait for the first one to approach. They're inexperienced and in fact rather dull. I take the first man out with a punch to the throat, and wait for the second to come. I ram a shoulder into his chest, he draws a knife and I break his arm, twisting it to use the knife to cut the third. The first, jumps on my back and I throw him off, rolling to the ground. One dives at me and I kick him the face before hopping back to my feet in time to catch another one's fist.
The fight is over before it began, they're limping, howling in pain with broken bones, out of breath.
"Who sent you?" I ask, raising one, the leader I think, by his throat.
"No one," he gasps.
"Liar. Who had you follow me?" I growl.
"I am a servant of King Richard," the man says.
I drop him to the ground, punching him one more time so he stays down.
Done. So my own brother doesn't trust me now? I'll deal with that when I get back. I have my mysterious contact to meet.

Harry

"My spies still haven't returned from following Clarendon. I assume the worst. Since he can't kill you subtly, you're going to be next to follow him," I tell Tom as we sit in my office organizing my papers. I have an office now. King Richard said I could and so I do and I don't think I've ever been so happy. My beautiful files.
"Father still hasn't said anything?" Tom asks, quietly.
"No. It doesn't matter, Tommy. He doesn't really love us or he'd have surrendered himself and rescued us by now," I say, eating a honey tart.
"I told you not to send that letter," Tom asks.
"Why? It was a sound political strategy," I frown.
"Because now we know he loves power more than us. I didn't need to know that," Tom says, face on his fist.
"It was always true. Pretending it wasn't doesn't do any good," I say, stiffly.
"Aren't you coming to bed soon?"
"Oh lord no I have far too much to do. Did you feed Devon yet today?" I ask.
"Yeah earlier, he didn't eat his breakfast," Tom says.
"He knows it's there that's the main thing," I say, unconcerned.
"King Richard said I could practice jousting if the men had time, tomorrow, d'you want to come?" Tom asks.
"I'll likely still be doing this," I say, shaking my head, "You enjoy yourself though. Don't die."
"Thanks I think."
There's a knock on the door.
"Devon? Come in you relocating in here?" I ask. I left him in my room since we got him. Now I have an office he can live in if he likes.
"I've decoded it," the boy says, walking in, carrying a stack of papers. His hair is completely mussed and his eyes are bloodshot.
"Brilliant—have you slept since you got here?" I ask. It's been three days.
"No?" He says, frowning, like it's a stupid question.
I reach out and pat the top of his messed up hair, gently, "What was the cypher?"
"Complicated, starts in the third line. The first two lines of code, were gibberish meant to prevent you from deciphering it, that cost me, about seven hours, when I thought to work from the middle and started getting a pattern," he says, holding up a piece of scrap paper nearly incomprehensibly covered in his writing.
"That's why I couldn't see anything," I say.
"Quite, only a few lines, specifically the middle word in each line, is actually meant to be decoded, the rest is pure and simple gibberish, to throw you off," Devon says, "It's in English, not French, and the cypher is revealed in the use of the numbers throughout, which are spaced through the gibberish, run them backward, then multiply by the last number on the page—you get the cypher for decoding these few words." He has them circled.
"Clearly sender and recipient know the code, there's no key telling you it's the middle words, that's the trick you have to know, verbally or an anecdotally, but once you know that those words are what you're decoding then standard rules apply. It took me trial and error to decode it, by going through each and every word, it was only once I started getting 'hits' on the one line down the center I realized that could be the trick. But I couldn't be sure the rest was a waste of time till I'd done it every language. So if you don't know what to ignore—,"
"You're at it for hours," I say, well aware this would have taken anyone but him over a week. My friend has a near perfect memory and a command of numbers rivaling my own, he could run through the options much faster than anyone else alive and this still took him days.
"The numbers are mixed up, every six and nine are inverted, and it's to be read backwards, that's just the cypher for how the middle words are to be read, there's no key to going to the numbers," Devon says.
"So the people writing this know each other and the code implicitly, and have plenty of time on their hands."
"On the contrary, once you're doing it would be relatively quick and simple to write a whole bloody page of absolute gibberish just to throw off anyone reading it, but whoever did write this—,"
"Expected it to be under scrutiny," I say, grinning, "Didn't expect you though."
"No," not even smiling.
"I love this for both of you—what does it say?" Tom asks.
"Yes, but tell me more later—what is the message?" I ask.
"It's not good," he says, holding up a paper. It has a several sets of scribbling on it, where he was clearly working through decoding it.
In the center is written, in English, then circled: