C+7

  Lord Oliver looked the worse for wear. Flor went to his side and helped him into a chair next to Lady Rosa.

  Flor said, “Will you be okay?”

  Lord Oliver answered, “The wound is bad but should not be fatal. Can you find something to bind it?”

  Flor looked around and noticed that Lady Rosa’s dress was ready and available but might be difficult to tear. Instead, she went to Irving and, with a bit of effort, pulled the tunic off the dead thug, which seemed clean despite a splatter of blood. It would work. She returned to the Lord and he took the tunic, folded it a couple of times then pressed it into his wound.

  “I can’t speak for binding, but keep it pressed here while we find the table and solve the Keep puzzle.”

  Maelstrom remained on the dais, still green, with Sparks by her side. Flor approached them. Maelstrom looked up, then vomited on the floor.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m spent.” Maelstrom laid down, avoiding her puke pile, and passed out.

  Flor looked at Sparks. “Did she say anything else?”

  “She repeated that she was spent a few times. Nothing else.”

  “Do you have any ideas on what happened?”

  “Only wild guesses. But the more important part. Where is the control for the table?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say probably a control on or near the throne,” said Flor.

  “Let’s go look, then.” Sparks stood and joined Flor. They approached the throne together. “Maybe some switch or button or something? But the more pressing question is…what do we do with the Lord Necromancer, here?”

  Flor had overlooked Lady Oriol seated on the throne, slumped over as if drugged. Flor looked around the Great Hall and realized several others were in the same state. “Oh, wow! How did we overlook her? Maybe we should try to wake her? It seems she got caught in something the Lord Chamberlain was doing, so maybe she’ll help us out.”

  Flor went to shake the sleeping necromancer, but Sparks caught her hand. “Let’s just let her sleep. If we can’t find a solution, we’ll wake her.”

  “Well, then, back to buttons. It would be something that could be reached by both the Necromancer when seated, and maybe externally also.” The gilded chair wasn’t overly ornate but had a few flourishes. Sparks checked one arm and Flor did the other. Then Flor looked from the necromancer’s perspective. An inscription adorned the inside. “Sparks, look at this.”

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  Sparks looked, then said, “It’s trying to pull at my interface. I can resist, but it wants to pull me into a puzzle.”

  “Are there any puzzles you struggle with?”

  “Not really. Crosswords. But I think that’s a translation thing, and there aren’t any in the game. So maybe the Codewords, which are also kinda challenging.”

  “Do we have any idea what type this might be?”

  “Theories, but not really. Are you weak in any of the puzzles?”

  “Slower on the Sudoku, but not by much. I think they’re all somewhat easy.”

  “You go ahead, then.”

  Flor reached for the inscription. Her interface flashed. A scroll rolled out across it. A fifteen-by-fifteen grid aligned similarly to a crossword with numbers in each square, and a few squares also had letters. A countdown timer showed thirty minutes, already clicking down toward zero. So, a timed Codeword it is, then.

  She started by identifying each of the squares with a known letter and transitioned those letters to the rest of the corresponding numbers. And then she made some assumptions. She looked for any overly obvious words before realizing a puzzle this challenging would require placing and replacing letters a few times. Fortunately, the game didn’t immediately fault bad guesses, so she could assume that the most common missing letters would likely be E then A then R. Flor filled in a few words allowing her to guess a few more. The challenge came with ambiguity on a couple of possible letters which could make a couple of different words. That required additional guessing.

  This is probably an expert-level Codeword. She felt anxiety at the timer counting down in the top right corner. She saw that she had been in the puzzle for almost twenty-five minutes already, which meant she had five minutes left. She placed the last character and then used the remaining time to double-check her work.

  Nothing seemed obviously out of place. Arguably, the solution she had set worked. But if it had been correct, the puzzle would have closed out and the interface would have told her she had completed it. So something must be off, which infuriated her. Puzzles shouldn’t have more than one solution if the multiple solutions aren’t considered correct.

  Flor started looking to ensure every word she had entered had been spelled correctly. Then she looked at the words that might have different English spellings. From previously playing through Codewords, she knew that most of those were the odd z for s or maybe i for an e, but those should be fairly obvious since they would change so many other words. {The histogram of letter frequency between languages isn’t exact, but commonly used letters include e, s, and i. Therefore, one incorrectly spelled word would technically be correct based on the number in the square rather than the inherent spelling of the word.} Maybe there was a y for i, but that would also mess up all the other words with i in them.

  Swapped spelling wasn’t her issue, and the countdown timer clicked down to one. Think Flor, think! She worked systematically, top to bottom, left to right. And then she noticed something. Some of the numbers looked smudged as if they could be mistaken for either a one or an eleven. Flor quickly looked for any of those numbers, marking them in her head. If she changed them, swapping the s for a z in cases, all the words would make sense. She did so as fast as she could.

  Puzzle Complete. +1 to Codewords.

  Complete Puzzle again? yes/no?