The Book of Q

Without warning, the left side of his neck constricted, a sudden twinge in his arm. At the same moment, his head began to convulse, more of the vomit curling up through his throat, his body slumping to the cold stone below. Somewhere within the pain, he heard shouts, whistling. Nothing registered, his body no longer his to control.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Arturo Ludovisi had been dead for over six minutes, the cards still clutched in his hand.

Shkoder came and went with a quick stop for gas, no letup in the rain, the car managing the border just as the guard had promised. The various passports and transit cards Mendravic had produced hadn’t hurt their chances, either-Albanian migrant-worker ID required no pictures.

“So this book, the one in Visegrad, it will do what for them?” asked Mendravic, still trying to piece things together.

“Not really sure,” answered Pearse, his attention on the final quintet of the Ribadeneyra entries. He’d been struggling with them for over an hour. “Whatever it’s supposed to do for them, they’re very eager to get their hands on it.”

“And what you’re doing there”-Mendravic nodded toward the small black book-“that’s going to tell us where we go?”

Pearse hummed in response, not really having heard the question. He continued to stare at the words, bits and pieces he had scribbled on the page, countless little circles of crossed-out letters, words on top of words, side by side in odd configurations.

It hadn’t taken him long to realize that Ribadeneyra’s “quaestio lusoria” was far more complex than simply a series of arcane anagrams. His first stab at entry number two, during his second night at Kukes, had made that clear. There had been nothing to it that even remotely hinted at an anagram. The same held true for numbers three through five, each of them either too long or too short to make even the most subtle reconfigurations provide an answer. It was only when he had moved on to number six that he’d seen the pattern. Here, again, was an intricate yet solvable anagram. Seven through ten, impenetrable. Eleven, doable. Every fifth one. It had suddenly dawned on him what he was looking at. As with the “Perfect Light” letters, the entries here held to the Manichaeans’ predilection for divisions within divisions, and always in sets of five. In the scroll, it had been through the prophetic ascents; here, Ribadeneyra had managed it through the distinct types of wordplay. Five categories, five of each kind. The question remained: Aside from the anagrams, what sorts of manipulations would the other four categories require?

It had struck him that, perhaps, there was a simple way to find out. Stealing a few minutes on one of the camp’s computers, he’d quietly scanned the Internet for anything on cryptogrammics. Not the most detailed or accurate source, but at least something to give the hunt direction. The result: long, drawn-out lists on the various forms of modern cryptic wordplay, far more than the five categories he was looking for. Procedures called “deletions,” “reversals,” “charades,” and “containers” dominated, each with a quick explanation and an equally simplistic example. Tools for the elite crossword fanatic. The “quaestio lusoria” had clearly come a long way in four centuries. Pearse wondered how many of its modern enthusiasts understood its darker history.

Back in his tent, he had discovered that the two-line (as he had come to refer to those entries in the same category as number two) resembled a charade, albeit in a slightly less straightforward form. The modern version, according to the Internet, required the solver to break the answer into several words, each defined independently: syllables, as it were, of the final charade. For example, “sharpen the pen for truth” had produced the answer “honesty.” The derivation:

hone (sharpen) + sty (pen) = honesty (truth)

A one-to-one relationship. Ribadeneyra had relied on more obscure references, some using only partial words, but all creating longer sequences between the clues and their combining forms, especially when the answer was a phrase rather than a single word. In all cases, though, they required a very creative understanding of a given definition.

To make things even more difficult, Ribadeneyra had rarely chosen to include the answer as part of the clue; he offered no phrases such as “for truth” to hint at the solution. One of his more vexing had read:

Ab initio, surgunt muti in herbam.

Loosely translated:

From the beginning, they rise without speaking into the grass.

Strange as it sounded, it made perfect sense, given the Manichaean influence. In fact, the real mark of Ribadeneyra’s genius was his ability to construct entries that revolved around references to those things that could help set the light free: “rising,” “fruits,” “herbs.”

The answer, Pearse discovered, was “deversoriolum,” the Latin word for “inn.” The derivation had gone quite easily at the start:

DE = from

VER = the beginning (the Latin for the season spring, the beginning of all things)

OLUM = into the vegetable (the accusative form of the word herb, olus, thus olum)

But what of “sori,” stuck in the middle? Here was where Ribadeneyra had shown his special gift (the kindest way Pearse could think to put it). After too many hours tossing the clue around in his head, Pearse had realized that the verb “to rise”-here “surgere”-could be replaced with the Latin sororio (“to swell,” primarily as with milk in a mother’s breast, another appropriate choice, given the metaphor of beginnings and birth). In conjunction with the second-to-last part of the clue, “muti” (“without speaking”), he saw he needed to remove the Latin word for “to speak” (“oro”), so as to make the combining form, literally, “speechless.” Removing “oro” from “sororio” (with a little tweak) left “sori.” Hence:

De — ver — sori — olum

A lot of work for a three-letter answer.

So it had gone with the three- and four-lines, each a more opaque version of a modern cryptogram, naturally made more difficult by the interplay of Greek and Latin references. The three-line had worked primarily with deletions-single or double letters removed from one word to create another. The Internet example, “headless trident bears fruit,” had given the answer “pear.” The derivation:

spear (trident)? s (its “head”) = pear (fruit)

The most direct of all the categories.

The four-line, however, had proved the most difficult, combining elements from the other three to create the longest phrases. For example, to unearth just the single word “pons” (meaning “bridge”) in one of the answers, he’d had to take the word “pomus” (meaning “fruit tree”), eliminate “the Greek Medusa” and replace it with the “the Roman Neptune.” Here, “the Greek Medusa” had signified the letter Mu-the Greek for M, the first letter in Medusa; “the Roman Neptune” had implied the letter n. Replace mu in “pomus” with n, and you have “pons”-“bridge.”

Granted, the gnosis here wasn’t quite as deviously hidden as with the “Perfect Light”-no letters and cross- references to construct the map. Then again, the earlier Manichaeans had had five centuries to devise their puzzle. Ribadeneyra had taken a few months. An effort certainly worthy of their legacy.

Pearse quickly came to appreciate the beauty of the game, its precision. Everything was there from the start, no landmarks to be found, no mechanisms to be unhinged. A genuine alchemy, the gold trapped within the obscurity of a language waiting for release. A strange taste of the Sola Scriptura. Discovery in its purest form.

Pearse knew Angeli would have needed, at most, a few hours for the entire lot; he had taken the better part of four days. Even when helping with the refugees, he’d been aware that his subconscious was continuing to play with the clues, flashes of understanding bubbling to the surface at the strangest of moments, often a word or two in conversation enough to spark revelation. Though frustrating at times, the process nevertheless gave him a real sense of satisfaction, each of the entries offering up tiny moments of triumph. Given the mayhem of the last week,