I blinked, adjusting to the abrupt alteration in his demeanor. He beckoned me to follow him to a shelf in the far corner of the room. Between two ancient tomes was a small black box containing a bronze, discoidal object. Gingerly, Casimir lifted the object, which I now realized was actually made up of two overlapping bronze discs, each adorned with black and gold letters. His face was full of anticipation.
“What is it?” I breathed.
“It’s a cipher,” he said. “An old one, by the looks of it.” His eyes were alight with excitement.
I gasped. “Encrypted in shadow and myth…An inscription of decipherable wanting…” This was it! The object fitted all of the Book’s clues.
“How does it work?” I asked him.
“It works by simple substitution,” he explained. “Devices like this are used to encode secret messages. Each letter can be shifted a certain number of places up or down the alphabet. We just need to figure out the number of positions we need to shift the text to decrypt the message. Julius Caesar used a similar technique to encrypt his private correspondence so his plans wouldn’t fall into enemy hands.”
“So you’re saying we just need to plug in the encrypted message—those gibberish words the sprite gave me, and—” At once, my excitement deflated. “Cas, we don’t know the number of letter positions we need to shift to decode the message.” We couldn’t very well decrypt a code we didn’t have the key to.
Casimir hummed. “I suspect the sprite included that in the clue as well. Perhaps we merely overlooked it. Recite the riddle again for me?”
I recited it in full, and then Casimir asked me to repeat two lines in particular.
“An inscription of decipherable wanting
lies betwixt F-A-R-R-O-W and F-L-Y-N-C-H.”
Neither of us spoke for several moments as we puzzled over the riddle.
Interpreting the verse literally, I counted six letters in both Farrow and Flynch. Between them, there were twelve letters in total. But could the answer truly be so simple? I frowned. What if it was a trick? What if the sprite had written the clue to be intentionally misleading? There was no way to know other than to test it.
betwixt Farrow and Flynch.
“Twelve,” I said.
Our eyes met over the cipher.
“I think the numerical shift is twelve,” I repeated.
Casimir’s lips broke into a smile. “Let’s try it,” he said. “Do you have the encrypted text?”
I nodded and unfolded the piece of paper where I’d scribbled down the encrypted words:
A, Tqud, ftuzq aiz nxaap nqefaie pqxuhqdmzoq
Casimir handed me the cipher. It felt heavy in my palms. “Ready when you are.”
We began the painstaking process of decrypting the text, letter by letter, shifting the disc twelve positions for each input. Casimir found a pen and began jotting down each decoded letter. When the final letter was decoded, I craned my neck to read the short sentence Casimir had written out.
O Heir, thine own blood bestows deliverance.
I stared at the message. It was as cryptic as anything the Book had ever thrown at us, and every bit as useless. The daemonic little sprite just kept weaving more riddles and evading answers in an endless fucking goose chase. And again, there was mention of the Keeper’s Heir.
Everything came back to her, and we were no closer to unearthing her identity.
Casimir hummed as he frowned down at the message.
“Well?” I said. “What does it mean?”
When he did not immediately respond, I prodded him in the ribs. He cast me an irritated glance. “Let me think for five seconds, Farrow.”
I sat back on the stone floor and stifled a yawn. We’d been down here for nearly an hour.
After a moment, Casimir said, “I think the cipher is giving us the answer to a question we haven’t thought to ask.”