“I’ve given up on your soul,” said Enrique. He cleared his throat and pointed at the hologram. “What you see before you might look like a board game, but it’s actually an example of Chinese cleromancy. Cleromancy is a type of divination that produces random numbers that are then interpreted as the will of God or some other supernatural force. What you see in this silver diagram are the sixty-four hexagrams found in the I Ching, which is an ancient Chinese divination text that loosely translates to ‘Book of Changes.’ These hexagrams”—he pointed at the small squares composed of six stacked lines in an eight-by-eight arrangement—“correspond to certain cryptic words, like ‘force’ or ‘diminishing.’ Supposedly, these arrangements translate fate.”
“What about the spiral things on the edge?” asked Tristan.
The four symbols bore no resemblance to the Chinese characters or sharp lines forming the hexagrams.
“That… That, I’m not entirely sure,” admitted Enrique. “It doesn’t match anything recognizable from Chinese augury. Perhaps it’s an added-on signature from whoever possessed the compass after it’d been made? Either way, it doesn’t seem like a map to anything. Which, honestly, is disappointing, but that doesn’t mean it won’t fetch a good price on the market.”
Laila drew herself up on her elbows, tilting her head to the side a little more. “Unless it’s a map in disguise.”
The room fell silent. Séverin shrugged.
“Why not?” he asked softly. “Any ideas?”
Zofia counted the lines. Then she counted them again. A pattern nudged against her thoughts.
“This is nothing we haven’t seen before,” tried Séverin cheerfully. “Remember that underwater Isis temple?”
“Distinctly,” said Enrique. “You said there wouldn’t be any sharks.”
“There weren’t.”
“Right. Just mechanical leviathans with dorsal fins,” said Enrique. “Forgive me.”
“Apology accepted,” said Séverin, inclining his head. “Now. When it came to that code, we had to rethink the direction. We had to question our assumption. What if what we’re looking at is not just a map, but a hint to what it might lead to?”
Tristan frowned. “A bunch of divination lines do not a treasure make, dear brother.”
“Lines,” said Zofia distractedly. She tugged at her necklace. “Are they lines?”
“That,” said Séverin, pointing at her, “is exactly the type of reasoning I’m talking about. Question the very assumptions. Good thinking.”
“What if you shine it under a different light?” mused Tristan.
“Or do those symbols at the four corners correspond to something that’s a hint?” asked Enrique.
Zofia kept quiet, but it was as if the pattern had peeled off the metal square. She squinted at it.
“Numbers,” she said suddenly. “If you change the lines to numbers… it becomes something else. We did a similar procedure last year with the coded Greek alphabet riddle. I remember because that was when Séverin took us on that expedition to Nisyros Island.”
All five of them collectively shuddered.
Tristan drew his knees to his chest. “I hate volcanoes.”
Zofia sat up, excited. A pattern had finally taken shape in her mind.
“Each of those hexagrams is made up only of broken and unbroken lines. If you make every unbroken line a zero, and every broken line a one, then it’s a pattern of zeroes and ones. It looks like some kind of binary calculus.”
“But that doesn’t tell us anything about the treasure,” said Tristan.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that. The ancientswereobsessed with numbers,” said Enrique thoughtfully. “It’s clear in their art. Which makes me wonder what else might be here. Maybe it’s not a strange calculus after all.” Enrique tilted his head. “Hmm…”
He pointed at the symbols tucked into the four corners.
“Séverin, can you alter the image and break off the four corners?”
Séverin manipulated the mnemo hologram so the four corners broke off. Then, he shrank the I Ching diagram, enlarged the four corners, and placed them beside one another.
“There,” said Enrique. “I see it now. Séverin, place them in a blockand rearrange the order. Turn the first symbol sideways, attach it to symbol two, symbol three should hang down, and the fourth symbol goes on the left.”
