Day 4, Night

“Seyt,” Vaozey swore under her breath. It was the middle of the night, so we were trying to be quiet, but she had been muttering to herself for the last half hour while I ate some cold jerky. While it was entirely possible for us to be unconscious for nearly the whole day, doing so on the third day led to horrible migraines and general mental fatigue, so we both opted to have some wakeful time when the caravan was stopped during the night. “What?” Vaozey snapped, glaring at me.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“I don’t know how you seytoydh do this shit,” Vaozey growled, looking down at her hands. I waited for her to continue speaking, but I was pretty sure I knew what she was upset about. “Trying to move this away from my hand is just impossible.”

“Did you start with-” I began.

“Yes I started with making it weaker, it wasn’t that hard,” Vaozey hissed, cutting me off. “Sorry.”

“Then I don’t know what else you need to do,” I admitted. “Your case is relatively unique, you’ll need to figure most of it out yourself. For me, all I need to do is move my mental image into the right location.” Vaozey sighed, then narrowed her eyebrows, straining with effort for a moment as she tried to heat one hand with the other. “Be careful that you don’t end up just heating the target area,” I advised.

“I know,” Vaozey replied, gritting her teeth. “Seyt.” With a huff, she winced and relaxed, leaning back and putting her hands down. “If I didn’t have these seytoydh pains in my gut, maybe I could focus.” The swelling from the implanted packages had been getting worse, to the point where even I found it difficult to move sometimes without actively fighting my body’s instincts.

“In combat, you’ll need to be able to do magic under pressure,” I said. “This will be beneficial, in the long run.”

“If I can do it at all,” Vaozey added. With a groan, she leaned over and grabbed some of the jerky, then began slowly eating it. “How long did it take you to learn heat magic?” she asked.

“That information won’t help you,” I replied.

“Just tell me,” Vaozey prompted.

“A few hours,” I said. In truth, I probably hadn’t spent more than an hour at Pae’eyl’s home, but I did spend some time after that figuring out the specifics and limitations.

“Seyt,” Vaozey swore again. “I knew already, but hearing it makes it worse.”

“For most people, this process is supposed to take longer,” I advised.

“But not you,” Vaozey grumbled.

Day 5, Night

“Move that one there, jump two pieces,” Vaozey said, pointing to a spot on the light magic projection above my hand. Straining, I slowly jumped her piece over two of mine, then removed them from the board. Sweat was beading on my forehead, but I smiled as I returned the favor, jumping four of her pieces and promoting one of mine.

“Your move,” I strained, the edge of the grid flickering for a second.

“This isn’t fair,” Vaozey growled, staring at the board. “It’s impressive, but it’s not fair. How do I know you’re not changing around the pieces when I’m not looking?”

“Checkers is an extremely simple game,” I explained, “I don’t need to cheat at it to beat you.”

“I don’t even have any moves I can make that won’t lead to me losing pieces,” Vaozey said, gesturing to the board. “If I move this one, you jump me here, if I move that one, you do it there. Can’t I skip a turn?”

“No,” I said. “You have to play.”

“This game is stupid,” Vaozey grumbled. “Just move one on your own and take your turn. I’m pretty sure I’ve already lost.”

“You lost two moves ago, actually,” I said, then I slowly acted out the remaining moves on the board, clearing it of Vaozey’s pieces, then exhaling with relief as I let it flicker out of existence. My heart was thumping in my ears, and my eyes felt like they were struggling to stay in one place, but I had maintained the most complex magical structure I ever attempted to create for more than ten minutes as we played.

“Why couldn’t you just teach me something interesting like this?” Vaozey asked.

“Do you really think you could do it, even if you knew light magic?” I asked. “Even that simple projection was almost more than I can handle. At your current level, I doubt you’d be able to do more than this.” I manifested a loop of softly-glowing light, then a ball, and made the ball pass through the loop.

“Still better than just trying to warm my hands up,” Vaozey sighed.

“Did you manage it yet?” I asked.

“I’ll get to it,” Vaozey replied. “Did you get the repellent?”

“Over there,” I gestured, pointing to the far end of the wagon. Vaozey, holding her breath, slowly pushed herself into a crouched position on her feet and waddled over to the bottle, then brought it back over.

“Gods,” she exhaled as she sat down. “I thought I was going to hurl just from that.”

“Just be glad this doesn’t give you as much of a headache as it gives me,” I said, uncorking the bottle and pouring out some of the contents onto my hands. As I spread the strange-smelling liquid over my body, I felt the familiar tightness I had come to associate with it forming behind my eyes.

“You never mentioned that this gives you a headache,” Vaozey replied as she did the same. “Of all the things to be weak to, you’re weak to this?”

“Okay, new game,” I announced, making a right angle by putting my hands together with the fingers touching, then manifesting a seven-by-seven grid vertically. “In this game, you select one column from this grid to ‘drop’ a piece into, and try to create an uninterrupted line of a given length as we alternate turns. In this case, the length is half of the grid size rounded upward, so four. Since you lost the last game, you can make the first move.”

“Oh seyt off,” Vaozey scoffed, suppressing a smile.

Day 6, Night

“You need to eat,” I said.

“Can’t,” Vaozey grunted. “Hurts.” The swelling around the implanted packages in our abdomens had become so painful that even staying unconscious for more than a few hours at a time was impossible, and every bump of the wagon was like being stabbed. Vaozey had even removed her armor because keeping it on was making the pain worse.

“You need nutrients to replenish the magic your body is losing by trying to heal,” I said, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in my own gut. My heads-up display told me that I was hovering around eighty percent on my magic reserves, which dwindled during the day but replenished at night after I ate a meal.

“I’m going to kill that seytoydh ngoyth if I ever see her again,” Vaozey swore, baring her teeth and shutting her eyes as she curled into a ball. A few seconds later she finally reached out and grabbed the meat I was holding out for her, putting it in her mouth reluctantly.

“Just a day and a half more, according to the driver,” I reminded her. Vaozey ate in silence, and I sat as still as possible, breathing slowly to limit the damage to my organs.

“Hey,” Vaozey called out quietly when she was done with her meal. “Were you serious when you said they’d have killed you for not following an order?”

“What?” I asked, momentarily confused by the sudden change of conversation topic.

“After the bandit attack,” Vaozey grunted. “You said you’d have been executed for refusing an order.”

“Oh, that,” I sighed. “Yes, of course.”

“Seytoydh aoreyv,” Vaozey swore. “What kind of zaeternaaf did you serve?”

“Is that not normal here?” I asked. “Insubordination was typically punished with execution on- rather, in my homeland.” Maybe this pain is affecting me more than I thought, I considered, I nearly just said “on Earth”.

“You might be arrested, fined, and jailed, but not executed. At least not intentionally,” Vaozey replied. “Especially for conscripts. They’re not even soldiers, they can’t be expected to be perfect. Professional soldiers risk their rank for insubordination, but conscripts have no rank.”

“How do your people maintain order in the miltary then?” I asked. “Without the threat of death, wouldn’t desertion rates be extremely high? From what I know of your people, rank alone would not be enough to inspire their loyalty, there needs to be something more.”

“I don’t know,” Vaozey admitted. “Seyt, I thought you were just being a npoyt, I didn’t think you were serious.”

“When am I ever not serious?” I asked.

“Good point,” Vaozey grunted. “Anyway, I thought about it, and you were right. I should have just gone back in.”

“Next time, listen faster,” I advised. “You are not a professional soldier, so I’ve granted you some leeway, but it is not infinite.”

“Next time…” Vaozey muttered.

Day 7, Night

“I can’t stand this anymore,” Vaozey howled, grabbing her stomach. I moved to cover her mouth and keep her quiet, but my body locked up from a sudden explosion of pain, and I fell flat onto the floor of the wagon. My vision went white for a moment, and I almost lost consciousness.

“One more day,” I grunted, pushing myself back to my feet. “I’ll put you under again, just-” As I approached, Vaozey’s arm flailed out for the left side of my pants, and she fumbled one of the throwing knives from my pocket.

“I’m cutting it out,” she gasped, pulling up her shirt and moving to stab the knife into her right side. I caught her hand before she could cut herself, and she glared at me, expression halfway between rage and pleading. There’s no way we’ll be able to get into the city like this anyway, I thought, it’s too suspicious.

“Let me do it,” I said. “You’re going to rupture the bag if you do it like that.” After a pause, Vaozey let go of the knife, then stretched out a bit to allow me to cut open her side. She didn’t even flinch when I made the incision, probably because of the pain she was in, and with a bit of force magic I popped the first bag out. It was covered in yellow fluid, probably from the body having an immune reaction to it, and smelled vaguely of rot. Flipping her over, I quickly excised Voazey’s second bag, and she sighed in relief immediately.

“Gods,” Vaozey gasped. “I can finally breathe again.” As she flipped into her back, her whole body seemed to relax, then she frowned. “You have to put them back in again, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I replied. We were both silent for about a minute, and then Vaozey sat back up, grabbing one of the bags and squeezing it with her hand. Only then did she notice the smell and turn up her nose, wiping her hand on the floor. “We should probably rinse them,” I suggested.

“I’ll get some water,” Vaozey said, and she exited the wagon to go fetch a canteen from storage. While she was gone, I examined the stitching on the leather and realized I could probably untie it with magic. As a test of my new dexterity, I undid the knot and then reversed the two threads through some of the needle holes. The practice is paying off, I thought, I don’t think I would have been able to do that a week ago. This changes things a bit. As I tested out tying a few different knots with the thread, Vaozey stepped back into the wagon carrying a large metal bottle.

“Got it,” she said. “Now we can- wait, what are you doing?”

“Just testing some magic,” I said, pausing what I was doing.

“Can you put that back together?” she asked, looking at the threads as I held them in midair.

“Of course,” I replied, thinking the exact same thing I suspected she was.

“Then… can you unwrap the package?” Vaozey asked, and I smiled.

“Maybe not the inner layer,” I said. “The outer ones, yes. You want to see what’s inside, right?”

“Obviously,” Vaozey snorted. “I want to know what’s so valuable that it was worth shoving in my guts like that. Seem you had the same thought.”

“I’d rather not be surprised by the contents,” I said, and the threads began pulling themselves out of the leather again. In a minute, the first layer of leather was gone, and in three, the second came off too. Though the squirrel skin was wrapped in a way that I wasn’t confident I could unwrap without damaging, the contents were partially visible because the skin itself was stretched to the point of translucency. I recognized the substance inside from its granularity and color, so there was no need to unwrap it anyway.

“What is it?” Vaozey asked, looking at the package as she rinsed off the leather.

“Black powder,” I said, using English. “It’s explosive, but not particularly reactive to pressure or rupture. I don’t even think it would be toxic, not to us.” This isn’t something they should have had, I thought, I’ve only seen Rehvites use this, and it doesn’t seem known to the regular Luwahriy.

“What’s black powder?” Vaozey asked. “That doesn’t sound very descriptive.” Only after her question did I realize I had literally called the substance ngvaat nuwjhay, the Uwrish words for “black” and “powder”.

“Explosive, the kind used in those grenades that blew up my room in Kahvahrniydah,” I said, and Vaozey’s face darkened.

“Seyt,” she swore, and I had to admit I shared the sentiment.

“Give me those, let’s check the other one,” I said, and Vaozey made no complaint as she handed me the leather and thread to I could re-assemble the first package. Once that was done, I took apart the second package, finding that it was filled with a nondescript white powder.

“Drug?” Vaozey asked.

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “A finely ground white powder could be anything, but a drug would make the most sense. Probably would have killed you if ruptured, just so you know.”

“Check yours,” Vaozey said, handing me the leather so I could put everything back together. Once the second package was back in order, I withdrew my throwing knife and cut out both packages from my abdomen. The relief I felt once they were out was palpable. After a slight wave of the stinging sensation of healing magic, it felt as though I had pushed something heavy off my chest and could breathe again. Bending left and right, I cracked my spine and exercised some ranges of motion I hadn’t used in days.

My first package was tied in a slightly different way than the others, so it took me an extra minute of careful tugging to get the knot to come apart so I could undo it. Once I got the squirrel-skin orb out of the leather, I could hardly believe my eyes at what I saw. This must be worth thousands, this far out, I thought as I looked at the faint traces of blue inside the semi-transparent membrane. That’s at least a hundred grams of extract, enough to kill a dozen people or knock out well over a hundred.

“Blue leaf,” I said, holding it up for Vaozey to examine.

“Gods and spirits,” Vaozey huffed. “Where did they manage to get that?” I should steal this right now, I thought for a moment, but then a list of reasons not to do so popped into my head. “You want to take it?” Vaozey asked.

“Not here,” I said. “We need to actually deliver it. However, nothing is stopping us from taking it back after.” Reluctantly, I re-packaged the blue leaf, then turned to the second package. Unlike the others, It felt hard inside, and when I removed the leather I found that there wasn’t a ball of squirrel skin inside, but a small metal cylinder with a cap on one end. Curious, I looked it over for markings, finding nothing.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked. I was hesitant to open it, just in case it destroyed whatever was inside.

“That almost looks like the kind of message container that ships dump in the water when they sink,” Vaozey said, furrowing her brow as she inspected the cylinder. “It’s just too small, and those are usually made of wood so they float more easily.” Checking the end of the cylinder, I noticed that the cap was screwed on, which was extremely unusual since the Uwrish didn’t typically use screws of any kind. Holding it away from me in case it was trapped, I unscrewed the cap, then carefully looked inside.

“Sheets of paper,” I said, pulling out the tightly-packed contents. There were three sheets in total, folded over each other many times and then curled to fit into the cylinder. All three had writing on them in Uwrish script, but it was unintelligible, apparently just random letters. On the third sheet, near the bottom, there was also a small pictogram of an ant.

“Yeyhhayseytayb,” Vaozey swore. “A message from the Rehvites in Towrkah.”

“Actually, I think it might be to the Rehvites in Muhryehv from a non-Rehvite,” I said, looking over the papers again. “Wouldn’t Rehvites send a message in Holy Inscription? This is in regular Uwrish writing. It doesn’t make sense.” Vaozey thought about it for a moment, then took one of the papers from me. For a moment I thought she might burn it, but instead, she appeared to be studying it.

“I think you might be right,” she muttered.

“Do you know what kind of code this is?” I asked.

“No,” Vaozey said. “They’re not actually very big on codes, usually. References to their holy book, sure, but this sort of thing isn’t normal for Rehvites. They used to do stuff like this back during the unification war, but-” she tilted the sheet ninety degrees sideways, then sighed. “I don’t know what this is.”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Obviously,” Vaozey replied, rolling her eyes. “What I mean is that usually when you see this sort of thing it’s gang members sending orders to their subordinates. We had a few of those years ago in Owsahlk. They’re not very smart, so they just change the letters around, but I don’t think that’s what this is.” I turned my attention back to the sheet I was holding and came to the same conclusion as Vaozey. It’s probably not monoalphabetic, I thought, If I had a proper body with a basic CPU I could crack this in a few seconds, I doubt it’s as secure as a digital algorithm.

“This would be easier if it was in English, or even Português,” I muttered, trying to do a character frequency analysis. Every word is long, too, I thought, there isn’t even a single, wait a minute. “Vaozey,” I said, grabbing her attention. “What is the shortest word used in common Uwrish speech?”

“Uh, probably awp,” Vaozey replied. The word was the Uwrish equivalent of various verbs for being, such as “is”, “are”, “am”, and so on.

“Two letters then,” I said. “Aw and p. How hard would it be to write this much without ever using the word awp?” I looked up to see Vaozey giving me a strange look, but then she glanced down at her sheet and raised her eyebrows.

“Hard,” she said. “Even in formal speech, you can’t avoid it. But…” She seemed to notice the same thing I was hinting at.

“The shortest word is four letters,” I said. “That means this cipher is probably substituting one letter for two.”

“How the seyt did you realize that?” Vaozey asked, sounding astonished.

“I’ve seen enough of these sorts of things,” I replied. “Trust me when I say this is probably an easy one. We have a few hours until the rest of the caravan wakes up. If you help me, we can probably figure out the basics of what this says before we have to re-package it.”

“We don’t have any other paper,” Vaozey said. “It would be easier if we has something to write on and with.”

“We have wooden boxes over there,” I said, gesturing to the crates that we shared the wagon with.

“And to write with?” Vaozey prompted. As a reply, I carefully burned the word “magic” onto the floorboard beside me.

“I’ll take care of it,” I replied.

Progress was slow at first, but sped up after the first hour. Whoever made the cipher was fairly clever by Uwrish standards, but not very smart by Earth standards, because the ciphertext output for a given plaintext word was always the same. Once we had identified “awp” in the text, and realized that the letter pair assigned to each plaintext letter was determined by the ordering of the letters in each word, it was easy enough to work out a few other words. Many of the longer words weren’t fully translatable, but they weren’t needed to understand the general content.

The first page was a ledger of some kind telling the recipient what was being sent inside Vaozey and me. The white powder was still unidentified as I couldn’t work out the translation of the words being used for it, but it wasn’t znahdeyvtih, that I was certain about. The second page looked like an update on the general situation in Towrkah, and had a lot of words that I suspected were names of Roytmay’s employees in it. The third page was the hardest to translate, as it had a number of things that appeared to be scriptural quotes from the book of Rehv at the beginning. However, it cleared up near the end and became a series of orders.

“Seven pairs,” I said, looking at a word that had come up near the end of the text, “then awp, five after that, then nine.” Vaozey looked at the words, trying to make sense of them at the same time I was.

“This could be something like naazeylzhay,” she said, pointing to the fourteen-letter ciphertext and using the word for “passenger”. “It would be consistent with other words starting with ‘naa’, and I think something on the second page had an ‘ay’ in that position.” She looked at the notes I had scrawled with magic into the inside of the crate lid, frowning.

“What about this one?” I asked, pointing to the five-pair word. “Looks like it ends in ‘eyl’ or ‘pao’, if you move your head I can check and be sure.” Vaozey looked down from the notes, then tapped another word.

“This one here starts the same,” Vaozey said, her finger on the word “jhaojh”. A shiver ran down my spine, and I instantly knew what the text meant.

“Naazeylzhay awp jhaoyeyl, yaenpahbeylm,” I said aloud. ‘This passenger is the jhaoyeyl, my gift to you’, I translated in my head, grimacing.