She stared at the poem, nonplussed. She had not paid enough attention to the form of the poem at the time she first read it due to the freshness of her grief, but now, in a calmer frame of mind, the strangeness of the poem struck her.
Her teacher had a genuine love for Classical Ano forms and was an accomplished writer and poet in that ancient language. But this poem followed no Classical Ano form that she knew of. The ancient Ano prized visual symmetry, and poems composed in Classical Ano always followed fixed patterns dictating the number of logograms per line. The poems were meant to be recited aloud as well as silently admired as visual compositions.
But each line of this poem had a different number of logograms: seven, six, four, three, two, five, zero (the blank line), eight, nine, one. Why would her teacher be so careless?
True, her teacher had written this on his deathbed, and it was possible that he had lost the ability to compose with care for visual appeal. But Zomi knew instinctively that couldn’t be the real explanation.
The poem has ten lines, each line being a different numeral.
Her teacher had always instructed her on the importance of engineering as the art of assembling existing machinery to achieve a new purpose. Was he using the form of the poem to send her a message, a different message than the words of the poem indicated?
Zomi went back to the calculations in Gitré Üthu concerning the opening of passages in the Wall of Storms. There were too many skipped steps in his derivations for her to be able to reconstruct his work fully, but all the steps that she could follow made sense.
Her eyes were drawn to a doodle in the margin of one of the pages: rows of dots arranged in numerical order—blank space, one, two, three, four…
And she finally understood what her teacher had intended with the poem: It was a code. The number of logograms in each line indicated the “real number” while the position of the line in the poem was the cipher. Thus, zero mapped to seven, one mapped to six, two mapped to four, and so on.
Luan Zyaji had done what he could to obscure his method of calculation and presented false results to the Lyucu. But he had also left a key to Zomi for deciphering the false results to get at the real numbers. At the time of his death, however, he couldn’t be sure that whatever information he gave to Zomi wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Lyucu, and so he had embedded the key in the poem.
As Théra and Takval watched, the Wall of Storms closed in on the city-ships.
The cipher text in Gitré Üthu had predicted a false opening; the real opening, according to Zomi, wouldn’t happen for another ten years. It was a testament to his skill that even the false calculations pointed to a temporary opening in the Wall, completing a trap that must have taken him days to work out.
Théra imagined the terror the thousands aboard those ships must be feeling as towering mountains of water and clouds loomed over them, bolts of lightning flashing within—hopeless, numbing terror, knowing that there was no escape, that death was just seconds away. In a single moment, nature would kill more people than had died at the Battle of Zathin Gulf. Pity overwhelmed her heart, and she turned her face away.
Luan Zyaji would have his vengeance after death.
Pékyu Vadyu’s forces on Rui and Dasu would still be a threat to Dara, but without Cudyu’s reinforcements, there was a much better chance that Phyro and Jia would be able to deal with them.
She shook her head; she had to change the subject of her thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” said Théra to Takval. “Looks like Zomi was right. There will be no path through the Wall of Storms today.”
Takval was distraught. “But we can’t afford to wait! In ten more years, who knows how many more of my people will die in winter storms and summer droughts?”
“We may not have to wait that long,” said a smiling Théra. “Zomi gave us another way just in case this passage didn’t work out.”
As if in response, the sea around them roiled and exploded. Ten crubens, the majestic sovereigns of the sea, surfaced and bobbed next to the ships, dwarfing the vessels with their bulk.
Théra laughed. “Looks like the old friends of the House of Dandelion have decided to help us again.”
The ability of Dissolver of Sorrows and her sister ships to dive beneath the sea wasn’t just a means of concealment; it was a way to bypass the Wall of Storms.
Inspired by the way Prince Takval himself had come to Dara, Zomi had come up with a bold new idea. Since whales were clearly able to swim under the Wall of Storms safely, then it made sense that underwater boats could as well. Although the mechanical crubens were limited to sailing along underwater volcano ranges, a ship that could sail underwater could also take a page from the whalers and be propelled by cetaceans.
Dissolver of Sorrows and the rest of the fleet were equipped with harpoons and strong cables. The idea was to take advantage of migrating whale pods who were headed in the right direction and hitch a ride underwater. The whales would pull the boats under the Wall of Storms, at which point the lines could be disengaged and the boats resurface.
Only now, instead of having to harpoon whales, the crubens were offering to give them a hand.
Strong cables were attached to the tails of the great crubens. The ships were ready to dive.
“Incoming!” one of the lookouts shouted.
In the distance, the Wall of Storms was almost completely closed. As the city-ships of the Lyucu foundered, a single garinafin had taken off without a pilot in an attempt to escape the doomed fleet. It saw the Dara fleet and winged its way directly at them.
Observers on the city-ship sent by Pékyu Vadyu, after suffering the shock of witnessing the destruction of the Lyucu fleet, now also steered their ship toward the Dara fleet.
“Dive! Dive!”
Théra and Takval and the rest of the crew scrambled belowdecks. Hatches were closed and oar ports closed and sealed. The ballast tanks began to fill with water. The ships began to slowly sink under the waves.
“We forgot to cast off the signaling kites!” Théra said. She gazed through the underwater portholes at the turbulent water in the wake of the massive cruben flukes. “And we never got a chance to let Pan know that the second Lyucu fleet is destroyed.”
“Too late to worry about that now,” said Takval. “They’ll figure out what happened soon enough.”
Above them, the garinafin circled. The cyclones of the Wall of Storms had destroyed the city-ships, depriving it of a place to land. The garinafin—riderless, terrified, and enraged—ignored the safe haven of the approaching Lyucu city-ship, despite the bone trumpets blaring from its deck. The beast would have its vengeance on these barbarian ships.
“We have to do something,” Théra said. “It takes time for the ships to dive, and the crubens are vulnerable as long as they are near the surface.”