Caleb Frost into his cabal, and Caleb had suggested employing Bethany. Because she was known to have edited Owen’s book, and to edit the Gazette, it was easy to make people believe that she was working with the Prince on an immense, multi-volume work on the flora and fauna of Mystria. That fit with what most people knew the Prince for, and quite common was the sight of Bethany hauling papers to and fro.
Where Bethany had proved an incredible boon was not only her facility for working ciphers, but her ability to use the thaumagraph. She’d grasped its potential immediately, and in conjunction with Gisella had suggested refinements to the design. Bethany had become far more adept at employing the device than any other operator. The Prince installed a thaumagraph in the attic of the Gazette building and from there Bethany and Caleb were able to gather and send messages from and to the other units.
She looked up at him, her brow creased. “Can the Queen’s advisors not see what reading this will do here? Who could have suggested she take a step like this? Bishop Bumble?”
“I have no doubt that bits and pieces of messages he’s sent have been communicated to the Queen, and may have influenced her.” Vlad shook his head. “Bumble is a grasping man. He’ll be more than happy to read that aloud and preach long and hard about it. Still, even he would see that the emotions stirred up by it would not be easily controlled.”
“So when rebellion happens, the Church offers to exert control where there is insufficient military to secure it?”
Prince Vlad shivered. “That is far more likely than I would prefer to imagine, though if that were the plan, would the message not be more laudatory of the Church?”
Bethany bit her lower lip. “That is an excellent point. Will you have it read aloud?”
He shook his head. “No. I immediately reply with a need for clarification and another copy. I held the original too close to a candle, can’t get the exact wording. It would be June before the duplicate arrived.”
“Unless you’re anticipated and a second copy has been sent to you or someone else.”
“If the seal has been broken on the message, I cannot be certain it is genuine. I would be a fool to publish in that case.” Vlad slid his spectacles on again and sat to study the ledger pages. “I know it’s a dangerous game, but I have no choice. By June we’ll know the nature of the threat from the west.”
“Would you like me to draft a response for you?”
He laughed. “Please. Stuffy, stupid, and craven would be the right notes. Fear of the Queen makes me incompetent. It will please her and annoy whoever wanted action to cause trouble.”
“My pleasure, Highness.”
Prince Vlad glanced at the first ledger page. As with all book code, words had been reduced to digits, with the page number acting as thousands, paragraph number as hundreds and the word being behind the decimal point. Every sixth entry was a number which, when totaled with the five previous, would produce the number ten million. Not only did that provide a way for both the encoder and decoder to make sure they had the right numbers from a transmission, but it provided nonsense-data to confuse anyone attempting to decode the message. Moreover, numbers alternated being recorded in the credit and debit ledger columns, with the totals making running sense, but signifying nothing. Credits formed the first half of the message, debits the second.
The longest message came from Fairlee and Bethany’s uncle, Major Forest. He reported no incidences of anything unusual to the south. Moreover, he’d managed to pull the Southern Rangers together and had trained them in the way of “green” powder. He’d had great success and would continue training men, anticipating a call to head west by mid-May.
A second message had come from a training camp Count von Metternin had set up. He reported continued success educating men with the new brimstone spell. He’d also been training more thaumagraph operators drawn from Caleb’s Bookworm squad in the Northern Rangers. Once they became proficient in sending and receiving messages, he was going to move to the second phase of their training.
The Prince looked up. “Anything from Plentiful?”
Bethany shook her head. “Double-nought sent from them two days ago, right on schedule. All is well.”
The thaumagraph in Plentiful was the unit they’d placed furthest afield. The Prince had set it up such that the Plentiful station would send something at noon and sundown, just to make certain they were still there. When the messages came in, the Temperance operator would note the time, which was always later than noon or sundown. Through this method, and allowing for storms and other delays, Prince Vlad had been able to roughly calculate Plentiful’s longitude.
This calculation placed the village just over a hundred miles as the crow flies. Getting there with troops in sufficient quantity and supply to deal with the Norghaest would be the work of weeks. The twice-daily messaging was less to let Plentiful feel it could send for help, than to let the Prince know, by its silence, that the Norghaest had overrun the settlement and were on their way east.
Despite that reality, he did expect some useful information to come from Plentiful. “Please let me know when you hear anything.”
“Of course, Highness.” Bethany set down her quill, rose, and handed him a sheet with clear writing along even lines. “Make notes and I shall copy it over.”
He shook his head. “I’ll copy it out myself. It will please my aunt that I wrote her directly. This is very good. You have a flair for writing.”
Color flushed her cheeks. “I merely edit, Highness.”
“You edit Samuel Haste, I believe.”
Her eyes tightened. “When he makes things available. Why do you ask?”
Vlad handed her the Shipping and Commerce Act. “What would you gauge his reaction to this to be?”
She scanned it quickly, her bright blue eyes flicking back and forth. She chewed her lower lip, then frowned, running a finger under certain sentences. She reread passages, then shook her head. “I don’t know how Mr. Haste will react, Highness. I can tell you that my brother and his friends will be very upset. The document tax is nothing compared to this. This is… this is…”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Yes, Miss Frost?”
She handed him back the act, then retreated to her desk. She made some quick notes. “Forgive me, Highness. If you do not put this act in place, you invite intervention. This is far more than our having to pay customs. This requires everyone to keep track of everything they produce, such that Her Majesty’s government could figure out who to tax and when, correct?”
“Precisely.”
“What if you choose to apply the act universally, and not selectively?”
The Prince removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief. “This would invite an immediate revolt.”
“Not if you were to focus it.” Bethany smiled. “Who are the most educated and literate people in each community?”
“The ministers and priests.”
“Exactly. If you ask Bishop Bumble and his peers to not only announce this program, but administer it, anger will focus on them. But, there’s something which is even more important. This act, and compliance with it, will force people to create a lot of paper. If Makepeace Bone, for example, was to sell a skin at a trading post, he would need a receipt, the trader would have to keep one, and one would have to cover the sale and be sent to be recorded. And then if that trader sells the skin to a broker in Temperance, more receipts are created and must be recorded. If everyone is doing this, and if farmers would be required to track grain by the bushel, and distillers rum by the gallon…”
Vlad chuckled. “My aunt’s surrogates would drown in paper, and that would keep them too busy to pay to much attention to what we are doing.”
“And if men like my brother and Samuel Haste urge compliance with the law, pointing out that burying the Queen in paper is better than burning her in effigy, the people will do it for the amusement. When you have countless receipts all signed with a man’s mark to sort through, the system will collapse.”
“True.” Vlad tossed his glasses on his desk. “However, it will still increase resistance to the Crown in the future albeit more slowly than otherwise.”
“Highness, do you think you can insulate the Crown from its own stupidity?”
“No.” Vlad slowly shook his head. “I just hope I am able to insulate the people from the Crown’s ire.”
