28 | ACT I, SCENE XXVIII

P R E V I O U S L Y

Blood was splattered everyone, pooling around the feet. And there was a very familiar looking bag of gold pooled near the ankles, stained with crimson. A sound of disdain escaped my lips.

It was Adam's corpse.

CALCHESTER CITADEL, STEFFITH.

ERIC

"OH LORD... I KILLED HIM," Edwina kept on repeating over and over, as we reached up and cut down the dismembered corpse.

I had the place cleaned up and the body taken away to be buried respectfully, but she sat down on the floor with her head in her hands, eyes alight with regret.

"I killed him. He's dead... Adam is dead because of me," she whispered, backing up against a wall and defensively curling up. "Oh lord... I'll never forgive myself for it."

"He was a mortal, cousin," I coaxed, trying to console her as she drowned herself in seas of regret. "Mortals die - one way or the other."

"You don't understand!" her head whipped up. "I called him here to help me. Adam tried to help me, he saw the piano! And now someone killed him after he revealed to me that there existed a secret passage...." she lamented, her shoulders visibly shaking.

"And you gave him a bag of gold to keep his mouth shut? Are you insane, woman?" he demanded, shaking the bloodied bag of gold in front of her. Dead man's gold.

"Can you stop being a dick for once?" I glared at him. "Or at least pretend to console her? She's regretting her mistake, the least you could do is to make her feel better!"

"You don't get it, do you?" Tristan fumed angrily. "Her single mistake has cost an innocent his life! And what's more, someone else now knows about the passage and the piano!"

His outburst left us in silence, the only sound being the harsh breathing as our heartbeats returned to normal. Edwina's face had completely drained of color, and she still looked very much shaken at what had transpired. It had been at chilling message, written in the dead man's blood.

Gold can only keep a mouth shut for so long, Queen Regnant. Try stopping his heart the next time.

Edwina had tried to keep Adam's mouth shut with her gold, but it had ultimately... resulted in his death.

"The music," I asked, putting my hand out for the sheets. "You found some papers down there, didn't you?"

"They're illegible and in pieces," she muttered, bending down to look at the sheets as some color returned to the face. I carefully extracted the first sheet and the three of us leaned in, poring over.

"You can read music?" Tristan asked her, eyes flickering with feigned surprise, as the nose turned up in irritation and annoyance.

"I'm not an insufferable know it all like you, Valmont, but I'm not as stupid as I look!" she snapped, skimming the music and trying to make sense of the notes. "Something is wrong about this," she concluded.

"That's just a polite way of saying that you don't know what you are doing," he argued, taking it back and reading the notes.

"Can you both stop?" I sighed, resting my head in my hands. Neither of them answered and I turned back to see what they both were up to after a long minute.

Edwina was leaning against a carved pillar, blue green eyes frowned in concentration as she regarded the sheet of music keenly. Tristan was reading the same page over her shoulder, lingering near her. I could clearly see the soft flush slowly creeping up her lovely cheeks as she tried hard to ignore him. Tristan shifted a bit suddenly, shoulders brushing against hers. Color rushed once more to her face as she threw back her head and let out and low moan, quickly shutting her mouth. I heard Tristan give an appreciative groan and then quickly steady himself as she turned to look at him.

Oh lord. These two seriously needed to get it on. The sexual tension was scorching the air.

"This looks like a cipher," Edwina said with a flourish.

"The music looks completely unfamiliar. It's not even just music," Tristan added nonchalantly, handing the sheet to me. "Look," he observed carefully, "there are some music notes. But if you observe, there are some letters scattered in between."

"They are!" I exclaimed, peering at the strange letters and music clefs. "It seems like this is a sort of code that needs to be broken to reveal a message. Maybe an explanation for all the strange things happening in the Citadel?

"Explaining the flying tall lady?" Tristan quipped jokingly, receiving a murderous death glare from his wife.

"Look," I pointed to the encoded music, "the person has repeated the same melody but the signatures keep on changing every time."

The music signatures had changed thrice already in the first few lines. The jumbled notes seemed to be making no sense at all.

"Hmm..." Tristan muttered, lost in thought and drumming his fingers on the line running tangentially to the treble and bass clef. Suddenly he jumped up. "Cicada!" he exclaimed with a jolt of surprise.

"Cicada?" Edwina echoed. "What does a Cicada have to do with this?"

"Damn it," he said, trying to hide his excitement. "This music is in the form of a Cicada! It's an ancient form of encoding messages that was invented by Uranus millennia ago!"

"And how do you know that this code is a Cicada?" I asked curiously, shaking my head.

"Look," Tristan's trembling fingers traced the loops of the words in the foreign code. "Look at these two notes here," he showed. "That's a dyad. A g and a c together in the first line. However, if you notice, the rest of the melody does not contain that pattern." His clever blue eyes gleamed as he traveled to the lower bottom of the page. "And here, the number of beats in every phrase... is a perfect prime number," he whispered reverently.

"So what?" Edwina asked casually, shrugging her shoulders. "You identified the Cicada. Do you know how to crack it?"

"There is one standard method of cracking this code," Tristan grinned sheepishly, "you take each odd numbered letter present in between the notes and read the sentence which forms in reverse."

"Ah, is it. Let me try, Valmont," she said sarcastically, grabbing the sheet from him.

"No, I want to try," I interjected.

"Oh, please," Tristan rolled his eyes, nudging us both aside to squeeze in. "Move aside, peasants."

Edwina was already counting the letters in her head as the three of us silently fought over the piece of paper, excited by the new discovery and no longer haunted by the previous tragedy. In a quiet race to see who would finish decoding the music first, we kept on pushing and shushing each other.

I finished first.

"This is a joke!" I shouted. The glass vase sitting near me fell down and broke to pieces. The god and goddess sitting near me looked up, their concentration broken.

"What is a joke, Eric?" Tristan asked in a dangerously soft voice, words sliding like silk.

"What did it say, Eric? What did it say?" Edwina demanded.

I gulped, closing my lips shut. My hand gestured for them to go on. They both looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and completed reading the music.

Their jaws fell open as they finished decoding the last word. It was a long message, precise and instructed, and reading it had frozen my blood in my veins.

'Danger lurks before the gods, while safety lurks behind,

Somewhere still exists the contraption I hid for you to find.

Concealed is the Logogram under golden gilded weight,

For ten moonlit hours the gates open when the hour strikes eight.

Put together the crafty device, strike it up and down,

So Tytos can be free once again and cause the Triarchy harm.'

Cosmo and his whimsical Logogram had never been a joke.

The Logogram was real.

• • • • •

The Cicada here has been inspired by the Cicada 3301, a mysterious online organisation that has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolvable problems. The message revealed has a very specific meaning, but that comes up next time :)