Tikaya shoved a hand against his chest and tried to thrust a knee into his groin, but his strong embrace left no space to maneuver.
His lips curled into a snarl. “We may need you, but you deserve a lot of pain for the deaths you caused.”
Ottotark’s fingers gouged her breast, and she gritted her teeth at the pain, determined not to gasp or cry out, though fear surged through her body. She craned her neck toward Agarik, hoping he might step in. Though his clenched jaw made tendons bulge on his neck, he made no move against his superior.
“What’s the matter with your sergeant, Corporal Agarik?” a deep voice spoke from the other cell. Though quiet, it cut through Ottotark’s angry lust, and he jumped, relaxing his grip. “Doesn’t he know the Kyattese are sorcerers as well as scholars? In another second, she’ll probably cast a spell to shrivel his testicles into wrinkled, rotten walnuts.”
Ottotark frowned into the cell. “Nobody wants to hear you speak, Five.” Still, he released Tikaya, shoving her toward the corporal.
Agarik was gaping at the dim cell, but he recovered enough to take her arm. Under his firm, professional grip, the heartbeats hammering in her ears slowed.
Tikaya watched over her shoulder as the guards led her away, but the unseen man did not speak again. The trek took her up to the main deck, where they marched past two long rows of cannons. The sharp tang of gun oil competed with the briny scent of the ocean roaring past beneath them. She peered through an open cannon port, hoping to glimpse her islands. If they had not sailed too far, maybe she could escape to a lifeboat—if the Turgonians had lifeboats. With that warmongering culture, one never knew. They had idiotic notions about glory in dying a warrior’s death, so they might condemn their men to go down with the vessel.
Dozens of marines occupied the deck, some sparring in a makeshift arena in the middle and some cleaning rifles, pistols, and cutlasses at tables folded down from the wall space between the massive guns. The men slanted her looks ranging from openmouthed bewilderment to sneering hostility, by which she assumed some knew who she was and some were not in the need-to-know camp. The empire did not employ women in their armed forces, which likely meant she was the only one on board. Not a comforting thought. More than one man arranged to bump or jostle her as paths crossed. Unlike at home, everyone she passed was as tall or taller than she, and their wayward elbows and shoulders battered her with the force of falling coconuts.
Past the galley, aft deck, the loitering marines thinned. Tikaya’s guards stopped her in front of a whitewashed door. A bronze sword-shaped name plaque read: Captain Bocrest.
Sergeant Ottotark thumped his baton against the wood planks, eliciting a barked, “Enter.”
Inside, a bare-chested man performed pushups on a polar bear rug stretched before a desk. Though his short hair ran the same color as the plethora of steel comprising the ship, the defined muscles of his broad torso promised him hale. Arms like pistons in a steam engine, he pumped through another fifty pushups, while Tikaya stood and waited. The space was large, as one would expect of the captain’s cabin, but spartan with nothing so frivolous as curtains for the portholes or cloth for the dining table.
The captain finished his pushups, jumped to his feet, and faced Tikaya. Her eyes were level with his nose, but he probably weighed sixty pounds more than she.
“Dismissed,” he told the guards without looking away from her.
Evidently, he was not worried about her walnut-ifying his balls. He was probably not worried about much. The collection of dented and scratched daggers, swords, pistols, crossbows, and rifles on the wall beside his desk did not appear decorative.
“Sit.” The captain jerked his thumb toward an uncomfortable-looking wood stool and strode around the desk to his own chair.
Tikaya wanted to cross her arms and stare defiantly, but suspected he would force her into complying. And, like Sergeant Pissed and Horny, he might like it. She perched on the edge of the seat.
“Tikaya Komitopis.” He gripped the sides of his desk, his eyes intent. “Daughter of Loilon and Mela. Three siblings. You grew up on your parents’ plantation and showed a gift for languages at a young age. You studied them at your university where you went on to teach for four years until the Western Sea Conflict, which involved your island. Your people chose to fight against—”
“Against becoming slaves to Turgonia, like everyone else you’ve conquered in the last seven hundred years.”
“—Turgonia,” he continued as if he had not heard her. “You were recruited by your government to break our ciphers, which, despite having no background in cryptography, you did. Repeatedly. And then your people handed our decrypted messages to our enemies.” His eyes narrowed, his knuckles whitened where he clenched the desk. Powerful arm and chest muscles twitched beneath his bare bronze skin. “You cost us our victory. Your dishonorable tactics forced us into a stalemate with those cursed Nurians, and we ended up losing tens of thousands of men for terms no better than we started with. Is there anything pertinent that I don’t know about you?”
“I like coconut shrimp and my favorite color is blue.” Antagonizing him was probably stupid, but she would rather burn her favorite books than ingratiate herself with these people.
His eyes narrowed further. “We were researching you in order to identify and kill you for your crimes against the empire, but there’s been...an incident. We need something translated and our languages experts are taking too much time.”
That probably meant they were stupefied and stumped. How desperate did the empire have to be to ask a foreigner for help?
“Time?” Tikaya asked.
“There isn’t much of it.” He unlocked a drawer and withdrew the paper she had already seen along with two rubbings.
He laid them on the desk, and she started to lean forward, despite her intent to remain aloof. She caught herself and forced herself to sit back. Yes, the symbols interested her, but what could she do without the reference texts in the Polytechnic? Even at home, she would likely be stymied if nothing like the Tekdar Tablet existed: a bilingual source that said the same thing in two languages, one already known.
“Why is time a factor?” she asked.
“You don’t need to know.”
“Where did the symbols come from?”
“You don’t need to know.”
She tamped down irritation. “Is it ciphertext? Or a language?” She lifted her hand. “And, yes, I do need to know that.”
“We believe it’s a language. An ancient language. We need you to decipher it and compile a dictionary. Our team can handle the rest.”
She snorted, both at the idea of being able to simply look at these rubbings and produce a dictionary and because she would not hand anything to their ‘team’ even if she could. “You mean your people can take my work, hide it from the rest of the world, and keep whatever knowledge it affords you to yourselves.”
“That’s none of your concern,” he bit out, fingers still rigid where they gripped the table.
“If you’re not going to tell me anything, then I’ll have to guess. I figure you’ve found some ancient ruins guarding some fabled treasure and you’ve gotten your people in trouble trying to extricate the goods without knowing who or what you’re dealing with. You need to know what the writing says so you can get at whatever it is you’re after, hoard it from the rest of the world, and no doubt shoot the foreign translator who helped you. You people are—”
The captain leapt around the desk so quickly she did not have time to brace herself. He grabbed her by the neck and thrust her against the wall. Swords and pistols clattered to the deck. Her feet dangled above them, and she grabbed his bare forearms, scrabbling to loosen his grip.
She gasped, tried to suck in air. His fingers dug deeper into her windpipe. Though a rational part of her mind said they needed her and would not seriously damage her, pain and terror pumped uncertainty through her heart.
“Everyone on this ship wants you dead,” the captai
n growled, breath hot against her cheek, chest heaving with rage, “and I’d like nothing more than to snap your neck right now.”
Tikaya barely heard him. She clawed at his wrists and wheezed for air.
Idiot, she cursed herself. Why had she goaded him? She knew what they were, what atrocities they had committed during the war. Blackness encroached on her vision.
“But my orders say to get that language translated, and you will do exactly that. We know where your family lives. If you don’t help, your parents and your siblings will be sacrificed. Your help or their lives. You choose.”
The captain dropped her abruptly, and she collapsed before she could get her feet under her. She bit her lip, and blood tainted her mouth. He hauled her to her feet, his hand digging bruises into her arm. He took the papers, smashed them into her palm, and shoved her so hard she crashed into the door, cracking her shoulder against the unyielding metal. Tears stung her eyes, and she dashed them away. She would never let these people see her cry.
He pushed her aside to open the door. “Get out of my office.”
Tikaya, rigid back to him, walked out. Corporal Agarik and Sergeant Ottotark waited outside. Agarik spotted the blood running down her chin and gave her a sympathetic frown. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it seemed that guilt lurked in his eyes.
“Pampered librarian,” the captain muttered before his door slammed shut.
Unsurprisingly, the sergeant eyed Tikaya with lasciviousness and went out of his way to rub against her on the way back. She clenched her jaw, determined not to react. When they locked her into her cell, she willed them to go away. Alone, she would not have to maintain the stalwart facade.
Before they left, the corporal pressed a kerchief into her hand. After the hatch clanged shut, she staunched the blood trickling from her lip.
She threw the notes on the floor and paced circles around the confining cell. That bastard wanted the impossible. And he was going to kill everyone she loved if he didn’t get it. How was she supposed to translate a dead language with nothing more than a couple rubbings of runes?
Tikaya slammed her hands against the hard metal wall. Her short, fast breaths rasped in her ears. She forced herself to take deeper ones. Panicking would not help. She needed to escape and get her family to safety. Yes, that was the best plan.
She eyed the cell across the way. An ally would make escape easier.
“Five?” she said. “Thanks for the help earlier.”
She waited several moments, but no answer came. Maybe he had been taken from his cell. Maybe he was sleeping. Or—she grimaced at the idea—maybe he would not talk to her because he hated her as much as everyone else on the ship. Just because he had not wanted to see a woman manhandled did not make him a devotee. Though it did suggest he was decent, maybe worth the effort of bringing around.
“I now know why I’m here,” Tikaya said. “Sort of. I’ll tell you about it if you tell me why you’re here. And why you have a number instead of a name.”
She stepped close to the gate, propping her elbows on the cold metal bars, and peered into his cell. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and she made out his form in the deep shadows of the back corner. He sat, slumped against the walls, and, though she could only guess at his height, she had the impression of a big man.
“Are you a crew member being punished for something? Or are you a prisoner too?”
He had only voiced the single sentence, but that rich baritone had sounded native Turgonian. Of course, she spoke the language like a native and was not one. Maybe he was another linguist brought in to help. And they had chained him because... Why? He was more dangerous than she? She snorted. Who wasn’t?
Neither her questions nor mental musings stirred him to answer, and only silence came from his cell. For now, she would have to plot an escape on her own. She ticked the bars with a fingernail. As long as she remained in the cell, she would not have a chance. Reluctantly, she allowed that cooperating with the captain, or at least appearing to cooperate, might be the only way to get herself moved to less secure lodgings.
Tikaya slid the rubbings through the gate and laid them on the floor. The single lantern burning in the corridor provided wan illumination, and she had to squint to read.
“I wish I knew where these rubbings had been taken. I can’t even assume it’s the Turgonian continent, because the empire’s ships troll the world. This is a short sample, but some of the symbols do repeat.” She spoke out loud and in Turgonian for the benefit of her neighbor, just in case hearing her voice might bestir him to comment on something, but she soon lost herself in contemplation and forgot him, the poor lighting, and even that she was on a ship full of marines.
“If it’s alphabetic, it’s a large alphabet,” she murmured. “I’m more inclined to believe we’re dealing with a logographic or logophonetic script. In that case, there could be thousands of symbols in the lexicon.” She sighed, daunted at the prospect, but she tingled a bit too. It had been over a year since anything challenged her like this. “As far as I can tell, the symbols are abstract, not like Jutgu Hieroglyphs where so many are ideograms that represent ideas or physical things. That would have been useful.” She tapped a page. “That glyph reminds me of the Aracha vowels, but I suspect it’s just a coincidence. This is far more complex. The way the symbols are clustered and linked is unique. I’d guess the groupings represent words, or maybe sentences or concepts. Some are quite large. Seventeen in that series. Eleven, two, seven, seventeen again.”
“Prime numbers.”
Tikaya had forgotten her silent neighbor, so she cracked her forehead on the gate in surprise when he spoke. She grunted and rubbed the nascent bump. “What?”
“Are all the groupings prime?” It was the same deep, mellow voice he had used to speak to the guards, though a note of curiosity had entered it.
Tikaya recovered and bent over the rubbings again. She almost asked him to come forward and have a look, but remembered the clink of chains. He was probably shackled in the back specifically so he could not reach the gate and any passing guards.
“Huh,” she said after a moment. “They are. The highest grouping, which appears only once in these samples, is twenty-nine.”
She gazed thoughtfully into her neighbor’s dark cell. She would have noticed the prime number commonality eventually, especially if she had been scribbling notes, but that his mind went right to that gave her an inkling that she was sharing the brig with someone more than an average thug.
“You’re sure you’re working on a language?” His chains rattled, and his dark form changed position. She could make out little, but guessed he had shifted to face her.
“I’m not, no. That’s what the captain told me. An ancient language that he wants me to decipher. Though I don’t think he knows much or he’d understand there’s no hope of translating a text by looking at a sheet of symbols. I’m guessing he was just parroting what someone higher up told him.”
“Likely.” Was that an amused note in his voice?
“I’m not sure how much stock to put in his claim of ‘ancient’ either. The Turgonians don’t use the mental sciences and can only rely on the relative dating method for judging age. Even that’s questionable, since they’ve only been on their continent seven hundred years, and I’m not sure how much, if any, documentation they did of the existing cultures before they assimilated them. Or killed them off. Brutes.”
Her neighbor—Five, she reminded herself—said nothing at that, and she winced, recalling he might be Turgonian himself. She rubbed her lips, annoyed at her mouth’s proclivity for blurting things out without lacing in any tact.
“Erm, anyway,” she said, “all primes between two and twenty-nine are represented in these samples.” Casually, hoping she could draw him out, she added, “Supposing this is a language, do you have any thoughts as to what might be the significance of incorporating primes in the core structure?” The first thing her mind flashed to was that each number might signify a diff
erent part of speech, but using seventeen symbols to represent a verb seemed like overkill.
His chains rattled. A shrug? “I’m sure you already know prime numbers are the building blocks of natural numbers. They can only be divided evenly by one and themselves, and anything that’s not a prime number is made up of prime numbers.”
“Building blocks,” she mused. “Like letters are the building blocks of my language, perhaps. Though in this case the numbers are the wrappers, not the content.” She stood and stretched, wishing the cell afforded her more room to pace.
“You are Kyattese, is that correct?”
Tikaya stilled, realizing he did not know who she was to the marines. If he was a Turgonian, her chances of turning him into an ally might plummet if he found out she was their cryptomancer.
“Yes,” she said carefully.
“Did your president survive the war?”
Surprise and then suspicion flooded her, and she regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Yes, why wouldn’t he have?”
“Is he...a good man? Good for your people?”
Tikaya did not know what to make of this line of questioning and responded only with another clipped, “Yes.”
She folded her arms across her chest and decided not to answer anything further about her people or her nation, especially not anything the Turgonians might use against them. Fortunately, Five asked no more.
“Why don’t you answer a question for me since I’m answering yours?” she suggested.
He did not respond.
“I’ll settle for one,” she said. “Will you answer me one question?”
His soft snort hinted at amusement. Tikaya decided to take it for consideration.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
A sigh mingled with the hum of the engines. “Not that question. Ask another.”
“Why not that?”