Page 93 of The Orc's Captive Bride
“The humans he employed to teach us would sometimes leave messages for each other hidden in other texts.”
“Steganography,” she said automatically. “Hiding information within other information.”
“Is that common?”
“In espionage, yes. In ancient religious texts…” She trailed off.
But why not? If you wanted to preserve dangerous knowledge, you’d hide it and make it look like something else.
“Show me,” he said. “What would that look like?”
Her mind raced as she considered the question. Steganography took many forms. Acrostics. Null ciphers. Coded references.
“The simplest method would be an acrostic,” she said. “Using the first letter of each line to spell out a hidden message.”
She scanned the text.
Nothing. The first letters were random. No pattern.
“Or maybe…” She grabbed a fresh piece of parchment. “What if it’s not the first letter? What if it’s something else?”
She started writing. Testing patterns.
The first word of every third line.
The last word of every fifth line.
Every seventh character.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
“I’m missing something,” she said, frustration bleeding into her voice. “There’s a pattern here. I can feel it. But I can’t see it. What did your teachers use when they left messages for each other?”
“I don’t know. I never saw the actual messages. Just overheard them talking about it once.”
She closed her eyes and tried to think. What were the common methods of steganography in medieval texts? Invisible ink, but that wouldn’t survive centuries. Microdots, but those were modern. Code words, but she’d already checked for those.
Unless…
“The scrolls,” she said suddenly.
“What about them?”
“When I first started working, there was a set of scrolls that were commentaries on ancient texts. I thought they were just religious philosophy, but what if they weren’t?”
She stood too quickly and the room spun, but he steadied her. “Careful.”
“I’m fine. I need those scrolls.”
“Which ones?”
“Third shelf. Southeast corner. There was a set of six. All by the same author.”
He retrieved them for her and she unrolled the first one. It contained a lot of dense text, philosophical meanderings about the nature of balance and power. She’d skimmed it days ago and dismissed it as not relevant to her immediate research.
But what if I was wrong?
She grabbed the main text and placed them side by side, scanning them both. And then she saw it.
