The Lord of Misrule

Chapter 13

"Alis grave nil " - Nothing is heavy to those who have wings

Mikael hunched over the cipher, his chin resting on his hand and his eyes dancing back and forth over the garbled text. He made a clucking sound, then pulled out a goose-feather quill and a vial of ink from a small pouch affixed to his leather belt. He started scratching notes on the margins of the letter.

Ami leaned over the table, tired of watching the street traffic and letting curiosity get the better of her ego. Mikael had vertically arranged all the alphabets of the language and had already tagged a number to a few of the letters. He was now rapidly doling out numbers to the letters still remaining.

"What are you doing? Are you giving each alphabet a random number value?" Ami asked, looking at the letter more closely. It was made of high quality parchment instead of the more commonly used paper made from linen pulp. It was also an abnormally long length, made more daunting by the wall of text scribbled in ink from top to bottom. There was barely any space left to make notes, forcing Mikael to write using tiny letters on the margins.

"No," Mikael said, still jotting down numbers. "I'm merely counting how many times the alphabet appears in the entire document."

Ami balked, her eyes widening impossibly. "Are you kidding me? You're only spending a few seconds on each letter!"

Mikael snorted in response. His eyes were fluttering rapidly over the text, his fingers pausing for the briefest of moments before he wrote another number down. 

Ami blinked, utterly at a loss for words. She could hardly count how many times the letter 'P' appeared in the first sentence before Mikael was moving on to the next letter. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck prickled, and she shuddered uncomfortably.

The top portion of the cipher-text read:

"PPZDEMNVAEIHPRJSSFLQVPOQVPGPPZSYEFYCHTJYMYR.

DNZTLLBJHJIRLLXRUVPPFHROCCQWTWTRVXZLGLWJUVPWTLT.

KPZDSVPJBRFZWZRGDTVGCDTJIICEUVGPXMAXSWWPSPCARHYZRNHLYERVQPCOPPNMARPNRVSYD

CZIWTLRSQNJRZPDMAISFLQVPOQVPGPPZSYEFYCNZCEGPOYJMOZUASELBNRRPP.

WECTLQIXZLGJZCRGAZSSAHCPBFMWGCEQZYRUPJHGYPTYE

UEOCGNRNSYHGPCRJSSFLQVPOQVPGPPZSYEFYCNZCEGPOBNRRPPFXCZLTGZYLRGETMAWESPREEZDSEXTJLIXAJBCPO"

The text continued like that throughout the document. Ami rubbed her eyes in irritation, then looked back at Mikael's scrawl. "How in Hades will counting letters help? If this is random substitution, isn't it like finding a needle in a haystack -- or a man with sense?"

Mikael pursed his lips, his eyes still glued to the note. "It's highly unlikely that this is a random substitution," he replied.

"Did you not say that earlier?" she asked in an accusing tone.

"I said 'seemingly random' – a term that denotes it appearing random to low-level plebeians." It was Mikael's turn to hold back a smile.

"Have you ever wondered what would happen if I flooded your earholes with ink? I have...."

He scoffed, then explained further. "A truly random substitution would be extremely cumbersome. Very few men will be able to memorize a random substitution key easily, which would mean you'd have to write it down. You'd have to keep the key AND the encoded message stored somewhere safely, and separately, at all times.

"Every time you receive a message and want to decrypt it, you'll have to pull out the key from storage. The more people involved in the message chain, the more 'keys' you'll have to write down, and the larger the chance that the key falls into the wrong hands. Imagine the turmoil when you actually need to change the key!" Mikael continued to scribble notes down feverishly on Mawbsy's letter as he was talking.