On a Crooked Track

Chapter 3-2

The young man who raised his head near the front of the room waved a hand in acknowledgment and unfolded himself from his work at a table. Munraz turned to the tower master and bowed again. “My thanks to you, raer, and I will try not to be a disruption to you.”

He grunted. “It’s just as well for foreigners to get an idea of how we Ellechen taurath manage things, I suppose. Don’t take up too much of his time, now.”

He stalked off and made his way to the right of the room, where Munraz saw a group of doorways with windows to view the activity in the central space. A supervisor’s room. Must be complicated, this work they do here.

“You’re a Zan, aren’t you? I’m one of the signals clerks.”

Munraz turned to look at his guide and then tilted his head back. Younger than me, even with that little yellow beard he’s got, but does that mean he’s going to be even taller when he stops growing?

He bowed anyway, deadpan. “I am indeed. My name’s Munraz, apprentice to Najud, come to visit the Collegium. My master has told me to find out more about how things are done in Ellech, so… what do you do here? How does it work?”

“Oh! You’re a wizard, then? I guess they don’t wear the colors where you come from.”

Munraz pictured himself in the yellow robes of a student and was grateful for his familiar clothing. He waved a hand at himself. “No, as you see.”

Gechendair glanced at the closed door where his master had vanished. “What we do… we send messages, all around the country.”

Munraz blinked. Could he find the shopkeeper’s message? “We don’t have anything like this in sarq-Zannib. Can you show me?”

“Sure. Follow me.”

Munraz tried not to feel that he was scurrying to keep up with those long legs as the two of them headed for the central column.

“Up to the top.” Gechendair grinned, and opened a door next to the stairs to reveal a small cubicle, large enough to hold four people, illuminated by a device embedded in the ceiling. He waved Munraz in to join him and shut the door, while Munraz tried not to panic in the small space. Still grinning, Gechendair yanked the top lever of four next to the door, and the tiny room jerked and began moving.

“First time in an ossanutkenbendu? Thought it might be.”

Munraz swallowed and refused to let his reaction show on his face. This is like the lift cages in Yenit Ping, he told himself, only much, much smaller.

His dignified silence apparently abashed his guide to some degree, for a note of apology crept into his voice. “Don’t worry—only the best lifters for the signals tower. The hortkendrosi look them over every week.” At Munraz’s blank look, he added, “The wizards, the ones that check and inspect all the devices and keep ’em powered.”

Munraz looked for power-stones, now that his fear was subsiding. Penrys had showed him how they felt, and now he recognized them, first in the ceiling device that provided light, and then in the levers. Floors—they must indicate what floor to lift this little room to. But they seem like small devices. How could they do all that work?

He forced his body to relax. “Yes, my first time. What pulls this little room up?” He kept his voice friendly, the good-natured recipient of a joke.

“Oh, there’s a device at the top that turns a wheel attached to a rope, and the controls here tell it how far. We’re lucky to be one of the long-distance towers—the shorter ones don’t have this luxury. Stair-climbing all the time for them.”

The room stopped moving, and Gechendair opened the door. “Top of the tower,” he announced.

When Munraz followed him out, he was confronted by a noisy clacking sound. Before he could pinpoint it, Gechendair dragged him over to one of the windows that penetrated each of the four sides of the room. “How do you like this?”

They faced west, where no other buildings restricted their view at that height, though others almost as tall ringed them. Before them, the land dropped off rapidly to the river, and Munraz could see the concentrations of structures across the water, and boat traffic, but no bridges.

He walked over to the north windows, and looked past the great tower there which partially blocked it. The city continued, and then the land rolled out beyond it, a mixture of fields and forests. “Can you see the big mountains from here?” he asked.

“What, the Dunnarfeol? Much too far away,” Gechendair replied. “It’s the south tower that gets most of the visitors—they want to see the harbor.”

Munraz turned away and looked for the source of the noise. There were two complex machines, one above the other, and strips of paper.

“This one sends.” Gechendair patted the bottom one. “And this one receives. We’re getting a message now. Come see.”

Munraz felt a cluster of power-stones in the two devices, both large and small ones. These must be very expensive devices. Everything in this building must be very costly, and there are how many buildings like this, clustered on this hill?

This is as big an investment, in its way, as the places where they forge metal in Yenit Ping. Do we have anything like this in sarq-Zannib? I’ll have to ask Najud.

Meanwhile, his guide was explaining things. “We get the messages from the distant west—the lower buildings below us get the more local traffic. If you were already at the Collegium, your message would come in here.” He grinned at Munraz.

“The scriber marks it on this double strip of paper, see? The first part is the destination tower and priority, then the person it should go to, and where, and then the person sending. The rest is the message itself, and this little bit here marks the end so you know you’ve gotten the whole thing.”

To Munraz’s eyes, these were holes punched in the paper grouped in little clusters of nine, with the center hole always punched and larger than the rest in its cluster, while some of the other eight holes were punched and some were not. He could see that each cluster was different from its neighbor. “You can read this?”

“That’s what we do all day.” He lifted the upper strip which was loose at the end and accumulated in an open wooden bucket—the lower strip was wound up slowly on a wheel, kept aligned by a ratchet through the large center holes. “This one is for some woman at the Stumbling Man, from some man, about a shipment of brandy being delayed.”

He let the paper strip drop. “They swap buckets every few minutes, cut the rekenponkenkiemmenbar—we call it a ponka— into individual messages, sort them by priority, and send them downstairs. We use the tubes for that.” He pointed at the central column, and Munraz saw the buckets of empty colored capsules and an opening they would fit into. A woman sat there and spun paper strips into tight inserts for the capsules, then dropped them through the opening.

“The daily wheels are saved for a week, in case there’re any questions.”

A man brushed by them and perched in front of the lower device with a punched strip of paper. He carefully fed it in, and beside him, another strip copied it and accumulated around a wheel. His beard was neatly trimmed, and Munraz realized he had seen nothing but short beards on the men in the building. I guess you wouldn’t want to catch one in the moving machines.

“Now he’s sending a message. If you walked in downstairs, you’d write your message on a piece of paper and pay the fee. The clerk would send it back to us, and we’d use a different device to transcribe it onto a ponka. That comes up here, and it gets sent.”

“What happens if two messages are sent to you at the same time? From different towers?”

“The competing strip won’t advance past the tower name, and the sending tower will just have to try again later. Sometimes they can send to another tower and relay it, if it’s a long delay—a broken receiver, say. Last year there was a fire which damaged a tower and they had to route around it for weeks.”

The shopkeeper’s message is around here somewhere, but how would I find it?

“What happens to the original message?” Munraz said.

“We keep the message sheet, and a wheel for messages sent and received, so we can tell if a message was never sent. Some people pay more to get an official receipt from the other tower, when it’s important.”

Gechendair looked at Munraz cheerfully. “You going to study this at the Collegium?”

“I’m thinking about it. I’ve never seen such a complicated combination of devices before.” This was no deception. There was something about the designed nature of the system that fascinated Munraz, the creation of something that had never existed before. Like Najud’s planned caravan in the west… No wonder it appealed to his jarghal, fond as he was of organizing people. This added devices to the mix, and Najud would never do that. The Zannib with their prohibition against physical magic would never permit it. Too bad.

“Can I see how the original messages are stored, just so I can get a clear picture of it in my head when I report back to my master?”

‘Of course! Follow me.”

The little lifting room was in use, so they clattered down the stairs instead. Munraz wondered what he was missing on the intermediate floors but couldn’t think of a way to ask.

At the bottom, Gechendair led the way to a set of painted bins with individual sheets thrown haphazardly in. “The bins in front hold the messages from the senders, sorted by priority. One of us goes over and takes the oldest message with the highest priority—those are the ones in the red bin there— and makes a ponka for it. We send that upstairs, and then put the original message into the bin in back. Every time that fills up, someone swaps it out for an empty one, and we stash it over there.” He pointed at shelving that held a dozen bins in four colors. “That’s the traffic for a day. Someone compares it to the sent-message wheel each day to make sure they’re all accounted for, then they sit over there for a week before we discard them.” He waved over at bundles tied with string on a different set of shelves.

Munraz watched the process. The bins not yet sent were almost empty, so the message form he wanted was probably in the bin in back, already sent. He strode there casually and poked around the slips of paper, but nothing caught his eye until he noticed one near the top. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Gechendair leaned over him to see what he was talking about. “Oh, one of those.” He plucked it out of Munraz’s hand. “That’s in code, you see. Merchants with secrets, sometimes government stuff. They’re a nuisance to transcribe—you have to be very careful to get them right. And look, see the destination? It gives the tower name and then says ‘Relay 1139.’ That’s the big central tower for the west, and they’ll look that number up and forward the message according to instructions. Even the sender’s name looks like code, doesn’t it?”

A dead end. Munraz’s heart sank. He ran his eye over the room full of chattering voices and busy hands. The ingenuity that put all of this together supported even more ingenuity that obscured the information he wanted. Clever systems and devious minds.