said. “I am too slow. You prefer some food and not others. Why?”
“The taste,” Shallan said.
“I should understand this word,” Pattern said. “But I do not, not really.”
Storms. How did you describe taste? “It’s like color . . . you see with your mouth.” She grimaced. “And that was an awful metaphor. Sorry. I have trouble being insightful on an empty stomach.”
“You say you are ‘on’ the stomach,” Pattern said. “But I know you do not mean this. Context allows me to infer what you truly mean. In a way, the very phrase is a lie.”
“It’s not a lie,” Shallan said, “if everyone understands and knows what it means.”
“Mm. Those are some of the best lies.”
“Pattern,” Shallan said, breaking off a piece of flatbread, “sometimes you’re about as intelligible as a Bavlander trying to quote ancient Vorin poetry.”
A note beside the food said that Vathah and her soldiers had arrived, and had been quartered in a tenement nearby. Her slaves had been incorporated into the manor’s staff for the time being.
Chewing on the bread—it was delightful—Shallan went over to her trunks with the intent of unpacking. When she opened the first, however, she was confronted by a blinking red light. Tyn’s spanreed.
Shallan stared at it. That would be the person who relayed Tyn’s information. Shallan assumed it was a woman, though since the information relay station was in Tashikk, they might not even be Vorin. It could be a man.
She knew so little. She was going to have to be very careful . . . storms, she might get herself killed even if she was careful. Shallan was tired, however, of being pushed around.
These people knew something about Urithiru. It was, dangerous or not, Shallan’s best lead. She took out the spanreed, prepared its board with paper, and placed the reed. Once she turned the dial to indicate she had set up, the pen remained hanging there, immobile, but did not immediately start writing. The person trying to contact her had stepped away—the pen could have been in there blinking for hours. She’d have to wait until the person on the other side returned.
“Inconvenient,” she said, then smiled at herself. Was she really complaining about waiting a few minutes for instantaneous communication across half the world?
I will need to find a way to contact my brothers, she thought. That would be distressingly slow, without a spanreed. Could she arrange a message through one of these relay stations in Tashikk using a different intermediary, perhaps?
She settled back down on the couch—pen and writing board near the tray of food—and looked through the stack of previous communications that Tyn had exchanged with this distant person. There weren’t many. Tyn had probably destroyed them periodically. The ones remaining involved questions regarding Jasnah, House Davar, and the Ghostbloods.
One oddity stood out to Shallan. The way Tyn spoke of this group wasn’t like that of a thief and one-off employers. Tyn spoke of “getting in good” and “moving up” within the Ghostbloods.
“Pattern,” Pattern said.
“What?” Shallan asked, looking toward him.
“Pattern,” he replied. “In the words. Mmm.”
“Of this sheet?” Shallan asked, holding up the page.
“There and others,” Pattern said. “See the first words?”
Shallan frowned, inspecting the sheets. In each one, the first words came from the remote writer. A simple sentence asking after Tyn’s health or status. Tyn replied simply each time.
“I don’t understand,” Shallan said.
“They form groups of five,” Pattern said. “Quintets, the letters. Mmm. Each message follows a pattern—first three words start with one each of three of the quintet of letters. Tyn’s reply, the two that match.”
Shallan looked it over, though she couldn’t see what Pattern meant. He explained it again, and she thought she grasped it, but the pattern was complex.
“A code,” Shallan said. It made sense; you’d want a way to authenticate that the right person was on the other end of the spanreed. She blushed as she realized she had almost ruined this opportunity. If Pattern hadn’t seen this, or if the spanreed had started writing immediately, Shallan would have exposed herself.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t infiltrate a group skilled and powerful enough to bring down Jasnah herself. She just couldn’t.
And yet she had to.
She got out her sketchbook and started to draw, letting her fingers move on their own. She needed to be older, but not too much older. She’d be darkeyed. People would remark upon a lighteyes they didn’t know moving through camp. A darkeyes would be more invisible. To the right people, though, she could imply that