The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,299

quick to access,” Teia said.

“It’s between floors. You get to it from the back of the lift. A quick pause, set the brake, reset the weight to an empty lift, and the lift returns to the top floor automatically.”

“So the Old Man has to be someone who gets on the lift alone often,” Teia said. It narrowed her list a little. A Blackguard captain? “No, never mind. That isn’t true,” she said. “I was assuming the Old Man would have to visit his lair often. But he might only visit fortnightly, or even monthly. Anyone who takes these lifts regularly would have many chances to be alone briefly enough to get into such a room.”

She wasn’t going to find out who he was in time. She was going to fail again.

Teia went invisible, and they all got on the lift.

It was surprisingly easy to find, when they knew where to look. It was two and a half floors down from the top of the Prism’s Tower. Just below where security started.

They pushed against the wall, and a narrow section simply sank in and swung open on hidden hinges, the seam invisible in all but bright light.

There was a small vestibule on the other side with a brake so that an empty lift could be halted on its passage up or down.

Teia carefully checked the vestibule for traps, then they released their brake on the lift and soon watched it go, summoned by someone far below.

After parting a curtain and stepping into the darkness beyond the vestibule, they found a stone letterpad with the entire Old Parian alphabet on it.

Her heart sank.

When Quentin moved forward to examine it more closely, she said, “Careful. It’ll be trapped, somehow. The wrong code could wash the whole room with fire, for all we know. Maybe this one, maybe the one beyond.”

Quentin stepped away gingerly.

With paryl, it was obvious that five of the letters had been smeared with finger oils more often than any of the others. Some of the letters looked like they hadn’t been touched in years, and some had maybe been touched irregularly.

Teia relayed everything to Ben-hadad, who wrote down the letters in groups according to how much they appeared to have been touched.

“Well, there’s good news,” he said.

“You’ve taken up code breaking in the last year?” she asked.

“Not that good.”

Of course not. She hadn’t thought she’d be so lucky.

“It’s long,” he said, “and people are lazy, so it’ll probably be a word, or a phrase. Unfortunately, that means there’ll be repeats of letters, which makes breaking the code harder. And we don’t know how long the phrase is. And I don’t know Old Parian well enough to guess at letter frequencies. And it’s possible that if we make any errors, something bad will happen.”

“I’m still waiting for that good news,” Teia said, as Ben watched the lift shaft to time an approaching lift.

Weights plunged past them, and a moment later, a group of discipulae chatting with each other zipped by, none of them noticing the three in the darkness.

“Ah,” Ben-hadad said, “that’s what this drawing is. Correct number of weights on the line to tell you the lift is empty. Nice engineering all around. Here’s an empty one now.”

Weights plunged past their faces; the desired number, apparently, because Ben applied the brake, and stopped the empty lift in front of them perfectly.

“You were saying?” Teia prompted.

“I was? Oh, oh, right. Well, if there’s one great thing about being brilliant, it’s that other brilliant people like talking to you. I know someone who might help.”

“Might?”

“She didn’t like me that much. Back in the day. That was a long time ago, though.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Magister Kadah.”

“Kadah! You’ve got to be joking. The woman’s a bitter little tyrant!” Teia had strong memories of her being the worst of their magisters.

“Yeah, but she’s also the only magister I know with an interest in cryptology. Six hours.”

“Six hours?” Teia asked. “To figure this out? How—”

“Actually, I have no idea,” he said. “I was just picking a number. Quentin, you memorized which magisters are lecturing where, right? Of course you did. You can point me in the right direction. Now, let’s get out of here before someone notices how long this lift has been stalled.”

Chapter 85

The world had not stopped moving simply because Kip was spending hours gambling its fate with his grandfather. Andross had handed Kip a few things and then hustled out of his apartments to take care of a dozen tasks for the