" Then I'd best start rewriting your message," he said. "While I'm doing that, perhaps you could weigh the pebble and the lead weight on the arrow?"
Malcolm picked up the arrow and the pebble.
"Consider it done," he said, turning toward his little workroom at the back of the house.
5
In the tower, Alyss began her nightly ritual with the lamp, holding it high in one corner of the window, then moving it progressively to the other three corners.
She did this five times, then stopped, setting the lamp on the floor and scanning the dark countryside outside the walls of the castle. She had done this for the past two nights and so far had been disappointed to see no return signal. She clung to the hope that Will would reply. But the hope was getting fainter and fainter. Perhaps he was -
A light! There it was, off to her left, moving among the trees! For a moment, she felt her excitement surge, then, just as quickly, it deflated as she realized that the light was red and that it was moving along at a fixed height from the ground, alternately fading and flashing as trees obscured it. She knew that strange lights were often reported among the trees of Grimsdell Wood. Perhaps this was all it was.
Then, out to her right, she saw another. This one was yellow, and it moved up and down in a straight line. Then it disappeared for a few seconds, reappearing some distance to the left of its original position, moving up and down.
As she watched, it went out again and the red light reappeared, flitting in and out of sight among the trees. Alyss's heart sank. For a moment she had thought her attempts had been successful.
Then she saw it! At a point halfway between the other lights, a bright white light suddenly appeared. And it traced a steady square pattern, just as her own had done – from one corner of the square to another in a steady sequence. Top left. Top right. Bottom right. Bottom left.
Far below, she heard the muted murmur of voices on the battlements as the sentries also saw the lights, and she realized what Will was doing. He knew there was no way he could conceal the light from the guards. And once the news of a flashing white light was reported to Keren, it wouldn't take long for the renegade leader to guess that somebody was signaling. And there was only one person they might be signaling to.
So Will had decided to hide his signal lamp among other lights, the sort of lights people expected to see on the fringes of Grimsdell Wood. She smiled to herself – Will was hiding a tree in the forest, as the old saying went. Another light, this one blue, was flashing. Then the yellow one was back. Then the red one. And then the white one in the center. She set herself to ignore red, blue and yellow and watch only white. She picked up her own lamp, concealing it behind a stiff piece of old, dried-out leather she had found discarded in the bottom of the wardrobe.
She centered the light in the window and then flicked the leather back and forth five times, sending a series of five rapid flashes to the watchers at the edge of the forest. In the code, five rapid flashes from the center of the square meant communication had been established.
Immediately, the other light replied in kind. Five rapid flashes, then a pause, then three longer flashes – the standard response meaning, Are you ready to receive a message?
33
The Siege of Macindaw
She hurried to the table and seized paper and a graphite chalk. She knew Will would wait until she was ready. Back at the window, she raised the lamp in a vertical line, up and down three times. The white light outside mirrored the action. In her peripheral vision, she could see the moving colored lights flashing and winking away. She even realized that another red light had joined the display. But her attention was focused on the white light.
It began to flash, and she noted down the letters as Will sent them.
The Courier's code was a simple but effective system. Twenty-four of the letters of the alphabet were arranged in a grid of four numbered lines, six letters to a line. To achieve an even grid, the letters Z and W were omitted. S and V would take their place if necessary.
This meant that the letter A was represented by the cipher 1-1, being the first line of the grid and the first letter in the line.
By the same token, G would be 2-1, and P would be 3-4. The person sending the message would stipulate the line number by holding the lamp in a specific corner of the square. Top left was 1, top right 2, bottom left 3 and bottom right 4.
For example, if the signal lamp were moved to the bottom left corner, then back to the center where it was flashed twice, the receiver would know it meant third row, second letter, or N.
Unlike Will, who had to draw up the grid to compose his message – a fact that Halt would have found highly unsatisfactory – Alyss knew the grid by heart and could note the letters down directly as they were sent.
The light flashed out steadily. To the untrained eye, it was just another random flashing light in the forest. But to Alyss, the series of flashes were as easy to read as an open book. She noted them down quickly. She smiled once. Will was not a rapid sender. Any Courier would easily beat him. Then she realized that speed was less important than accuracy and he was probably fiercely intent on his task, the tip of his tongue protruding, as it always did when he was concentrating.
The light moved vertically several times, then disappeared, signaling that the message was finished. She seized her own lamp and replied with the same signal, then turned to read what she had scribbled down. She was pretty sure she had read it accurately as it was transmitted, but it paid to make sure. She moved her finger along the letters. They were roughly scribbled and uneven, as she had written them with her eyes firmly riveted on the light.
There was no punctuation in the code, of course, but she understood that Will would be firing a message arrow through her window in ten minutes and was warning her to be clear of the window. The work ACK was a standard code shortcut for acknowledge. The sign-off, LOVE WILL, was highly irregular. That sort of personal touch had been frowned on during her training. She smiled once more. You could read the words before her as saying she was to acknowledge the message itself, or the two-word ending, LOVE WILL.
"Either way," she murmured to herself. Hastily, she picked up her lamp and moved it vertically in the window three times: up, down, up. It was the standard signal for acknowledge.
Then she drew the curtain well back from the window and scanned the forest one last time. The colored lights continued to flash, and now the white light was swinging in an arc. There was no more signaling, she realized. They were just keeping the light show going. Below, on the battlements, the sentries had grown bored with the lights. The murmur of voices she had heard before had died away as sergeants ordered the men back to their duties.
She kissed her fingertips gently and blew a kiss out into the dark night.
" Thanks, Will," she said softly. She set the lamp in the center of the windowsill to provide him with an aiming point, then moved to one side to wait for his arrow.
Once he had seen Alyss's acknowledgment, Will started to move forward from his position just inside the tree line. As he had done previously, he ghosted from one patch of shadow to the next, blending with the natural movements of the night and becoming part of the landscape.
After five years of rigorous training under Halt's watchful eye – and with occasional input from Gilan, the Ranger Corps's acknowledged master of concealed movement – he didn't need to think about his actions any longer. They had become instinctive. He had already picked the spot from where he would shoot. He had to be within a hundred meters of the castle walls, allowing for the extra distance the arrow would have to travel to reach the top of the tower. There was a slight knoll crowned by a clump of large bushes some ninety meters from the wall. The additional few meters of height would be an advant age, as would the broken, shifting shadows formed by the bushes, with their dappled patterning of white snow and dark foliage. He would blend easily into the landscape there, allowing him to stand and aim carefully.