Chapter 5: The Sultan's Confession

The chess player spoke again on the third morning. Crane had been in the drawing room since six, working by lamplight, when the mechanism in the base of the Ottoman sultan figure activated with the low musical click of precision engineering. The hand, still raised, rotated four degrees. A new card appeared between the fingers. He retrieved it carefully, without touching the mechanism. The new card contained not numbers this time but a series of symbols — not letters, not mathematics, but pictographic in nature, rendered in a hand that matched neither the original manufacturing marks on the automaton nor any of the written records in the estate. A third party, then. Someone who had access to the automaton after its manufacture and had modified it further. He examined the symbols with his magnifying lens. Twelve of them, arranged in two rows of six. Each one distinct. He had seen some of them before — not in any single location, but scattered across three different disciplines he had reason to be familiar with. He needed a semiotician. The estate's library provided, after two hours of searching, a partial key: a monograph on pictographic systems used in European alchemical traditions, authored in 1887 by a Dr. Elowen Crane — a name that made him pause. Not his family, but close enough that he read the entire monograph before setting it down. Four of the twelve symbols matched Dr. Crane's alchemical catalog. Four of them matched a separate system he found referenced in a later text on Victorian industrial cryptography. The remaining four he could not place. "Mr. Fenn," he said when the head of staff appeared with his third cup of tea. "Inspector." "Mrs. Farquhar's engineer contacts. The collective she corresponded with. Do you have any documentation of their communications?" Fenn's expression shifted in the direction of "yes" while his posture attempted "no." "There may be some correspondence in her private study," he said. "Which I was not certain was my place to offer." "It is very much your place," Crane said. "Lead the way."