Re: Steel and Gunpowder

Resting in the center of the table were Valerio’s boots. They had been sliced open.

"Take a seat," Elise instructed, not looking up from a ledger she was annotating.

Valerio pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down.

Elise finally set her quill down. She reached across the table and pushed the contents extracted from his boots toward him. There lay his lockpicks, his slender stiletto, and the oilcloth packet containing the classified charcoal rubbings of the traction engine.

"My counter-intelligence officers inform me that you go by the name Tomas, a deaf-mute iron puddler," Elise stated. "But iron puddlers do not carry lockpicks, nor do they break into my private counting room to steal military schematics. You are an operative... You work for Lord Kinsky?"

"I do," Valerio answered, his voice hoarse. There was absolutely no strategic value in denying the truth when the evidence was literally sitting between them.

Elise leaned back in her chair, steepling her fingers. "In six months, we will have heavily armored, mobile artillery rolling across the plains. When those traction engines reach the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, we will crush your archaic tercios into dust."

"Princess Elise," Valerio interrupted gently, leaning forward. "I do not care about Emperor Charles. Nor do I care about Lord Kinsky. If you double my current salary, I will gladly work for you."

Elise blinked, genuinely taken aback.

General Voss narrowed his eyes in disgust.

"You wish to betray the Habsburg crown?" Elise asked, her tone laced with skepticism.

"Without a second thought," Valerio smiled. "I want a vineyard in Tuscany. Emperor Charles pays me in promises of heavenly reward and meager stipends. I want gold florins."

Elise stared at him. If this spy was telling the truth, Alemannia could use him as a perfect conduit to feed catastrophic misinformation directly into the heart of the Habsburg high command.

"If I were to put you on the royal payroll," Elise said cautiously, "how do I verify your usefulness? What operational intelligence can you surrender to me right now?"

"I can give you the exact methodology of Lord Kinsky’s covert communication network."

"Right now, you cannot intercept our letters because you do not know what to look for," Valerio explained. "I will tell you. We do not use ciphers. We use a chemical wash made of crushed alum and distilled water. The operative writes the message with a fine quill. The alum water dries completely invisible, leaving no residue or texture on the parchment."

"And the revelation process?" Elise asked, her interest undeniably piqued.

"You simply submerge the parchment in a basin of clean water. The untreated paper becomes translucent, but the alum-treated lettering remains opaque and visible. You read it while it is wet, and once it dries, it vanishes again."

Elise’s eyes widened slightly.

She quickly reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a seemingly blank piece of parchment they had confiscated from Valerio’s boarding house room.

She turned to General Voss. "Bring me a basin of water."

Voss quickly obliged, fetching a washbasin from a side table and setting it before the Princess. Elise gripped the edges of the blank parchment and plunged it beneath the surface of the water.

Within seconds, stark white lettering magically materialized against the darkening, wet paper.

Elise read the script. It detailed standard troop movements and safe-house locations in Munich!

"You are telling the truth," Elise murmured, a smile breaking across her features as she pulled the dripping parchment from the basin. "This is incredibly elegant. If we possess the development method, we can intercept and read every single courier dispatch crossing the Bavarian border!"

"Precisely," Valerio nodded, relaxing his shoulders. "And because I am one of Kinsky’s most trusted shadows, my reports bypass the lower handlers and go directly to his desk in Vienna. I will draft counterfeit schematics using the alum water. I will tell Lord Kinsky that the traction engine boilers are structurally defective. I will report that Baron Klaus was killed in a catastrophic explosion. The Emperor will believe the threat is neutralized, and he will delay his mobilization."

Elise smiled. "You are now an asset of the Kingdom of Alemannia. General Voss will assign two Jaegers to shadow you at all times. They will secure a private residence for you in the upper district. As long as you follow my directives to the letter, your Tuscan vineyard will be fully funded by my treasury."

"Thank you, Princess Elise," Valerio offered a polite, seated bow. "It is a distinct pleasure doing business with the new world."

Elise signaled to General Voss, who hauled Valerio to his feet.

The General and another Jaeger escorted the spy out of the office, down the corridors, and finally out into the streets of Augsburg.

Valerio walked between his two heavily armed minders. He kept his head lowered against the biting wind, but beneath the collar of his coat, a small smile formed on his lips.

Princess Elise believed she had just purchased a double agent. But Princess Elise was operating on incomplete mathematics.

Valerio was, in fact, a triple agent...

Everything that had transpired over the last forty-eight hours had been meticulously scripted by Lord Kinsky long before Valerio ever crossed the Swabian border.

Kinsky had thoroughly briefed Valerio on the terrifying intellect of King Konrad’s sister. He ordered Valerio to adopt the deaf-mute disguise knowing it was flawed, fully intending for the local informants to burn him. Kinsky wanted him captured.

Furthermore, Kinsky had explicitly ordered Valerio to surrender the alum-water invisible ink.

The Habsburgs had abandoned the alum method six months ago after a Spanish inquisitor accidentally spilled wine on a document and revealed the text.

Kinsky’s network now utilized a pinprick cipher... tiny, almost invisible holes punched through specific letters in standard, benign merchant ledgers to spell out hidden messages.

By surrendering the obsolete alum technique, Valerio had successfully convinced the Princess that he had flipped. Now, Valerio was officially embedded in the Swabian intelligence apparatus!

He had unrestricted access to the capital. More importantly, because Elise believed Valerio was transmitting perfectly crafted lies back to Vienna, she was going to personally hand him the exact production numbers and engineering tolerances of the traction engines, just so he could write the opposite!

Once Valerio gathered the true metallurgical limits of the Swabian artillery, he would draft a genuine report using the pinpricks.

He would hide this real intelligence inside the very parchment containing the fake alum-water lies.

Lord Kinsky would receive the dispatches, ignore the visible alum-water misdirection, extract the pinprick truth, and use it to instruct the Duke of Alba exactly where to strike Konrad’s supply lines.

Valerio was thrilled. The Swabian Crown was now paying him a fortune in silver thalers to dismantle their empire from the inside out.

At this rate, he wouldn’t just buy a small vineyard in Tuscany; he would buy the entire estate in half the time!

Valerio adjusted his coat and walked toward his new accommodations, eagerly preparing to draft his very first counterfeit report for his beloved Princess.

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