...

Sven sat on a bench. The bench was located inside a small cell. The cell had a stone floor, stone walls, and a door with an iron lock.

Sven needed to understand how the twenty Frankish soldiers had found him at the marina.

"The innkeeper..." Sven whispered to himself in the dark cell.

Three days ago, Emperor Louis had raised the tax on salt by 50% to fund the new blacksmith forges.

A real salt merchant would have complained loudly to the innkeeper about the 50% tax increase. Sven had ignored the innkeeper and walked out the door in silence.

The innkeeper must have realized Sven was a fake. The Emperor was likely offering a reward of ten silver coins to any citizen who reported a suspicious foreigner.

The innkeeper traded Sven’s life for ten silver coins...

The lock on the door clicked loudly.

Two Frankish guards walked into the cell. They grabbed Sven by his arms and pulled him off the bench.

One guard opened the door and pushed Sven inside.

In the center of the room, there were two wooden chairs. Sitting in one of the chairs was a man wearing a plain black wool tunic.

This man was Minister Hugo. Hugo was the Chief of Intelligence for the Frankish Empire.

Resting on the table was Sven’s leather bag.

"Sit down." Minister Hugo commanded.

Sven sat down on the empty wooden chair. He kept his breathing steady at exactly sixty beats per minute.

Minister Hugo opened the leather bag. He pulled out the ten pounds of salt. Then, he pulled out three pieces of paper.

These papers were Sven’s intelligence reports. They contained the exact locations of the Emperor’s secret blacksmith forges and the exact ratios of sulfur and charcoal the Frankish alchemists were testing.

"My guards tell me you call yourself Pierre, a salt merchant from Burgundy~" Minister Hugo stated, looking at the papers. "But salt merchants do not write detailed reports about royal blacksmiths. You are a spy... You work for King Ragnar?"

"Yes." Sven answered directly. There was no advantage to lying when the evidence was sitting on the table.

Minister Hugo leaned forward. "Your King thinks we only know how to ride horses and swing swords. But Emperor Louis the Germanic is adapting. In two months, we will know how to mass-produce the firing mechanisms. When we build our own muskets, we will wipe your Iron Kingdom off the map."

"Minister Hugo~" Sven said, "I do not care about King Ragnar. If you pay me a higher salary, I will work for you."

Minister Hugo looked at Sven with confusion. In the Frankish Empire, spies were usually religious fanatics or blindly loyal nobles. The idea of ​​a spy who worked only for money was completely foreign to him.

"You want to betray your King?" Hugo asked.

"Yes, I will betray my King~"

Hugo stared at the table. If this spy was telling the truth, the Frankish Empire could use him to feed false information back to City Titan.

"If I hire you," Hugo said cautiously, "how do I know you will actually help us? What can you offer me right now?"

"I can provide you with instructions from Queen Gyda’s intelligence network."

"Right now, you do not know how the Iron Kingdom spies send their messages. I will tell you. We take the alphabet and shift every letter forward by exactly four spaces.

"The letter ’A’ becomes ’E’. The letter ’B’ becomes ’F’."

"Furthermore, we do not write the messages in regular ink. We use a chemical compound made from lemon juice and water. The writing is completely invisible until you hold the paper exactly three inches above a hot candle flame."

Hugo’s eyes widened. He quickly grabbed the three pieces of paper from the table. He walked over to a lit candle on a small wooden shelf. He held the paper exactly three inches above the flame.

Within ten seconds, brown letters magically appeared on the blank paper!

Hugo read the letters. They were written in the exact four-letter shift cipher Sven had described.

"You are telling the truth!" Hugo said, placing the paper back on the table. "This is brilliant! If we know the cipher, we can intercept and read every single message the Iron Kingdom spies send across our borders!"

"Exactly~" Sven nodded. "And because I am an spy for Queen Gyda, I have a direct communication line to City Titan. I will write fake reports using the lemon juice and the cipher. I will tell Queen Gyda that your blacksmiths failed to reverse-engineer the musket. I will tell her that your alchemists blew themselves up. King Ragnar will believe the reports, and he will not attack your secret forges~"

Hugo smiled. "You are now an employee of the Frankish Empire. I will assign two guards to follow you at all times. They will live in your inn. As long as you follow my orders, you will get your silver coins."

"Thank you, Minister Hugo," Sven said. "It is a pleasure doing business with you." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Hugo called the two guards into the room. They escorted Sven out of the door, down the stone hallway, and out of the prison. They walked back into the freezing, snowy streets of Paris.

Sven walked quietly between the two armored guards. He looked down at the dirty snow. A small, invisible smile formed on his face.

Minister Hugo thought he had just bought a double agent. But Minister Hugo was wrong.

Sven was actually a triple agent~

Everything that had happened today was exactly according to Queen Gyda’s master plan.

Before Sven ever left City Titan, Queen Gyda had warned him about the new Frankish security network.

She ordered him to carry the ten pounds of salt and complain about nothing. She wanted him to be caught.

Furthermore, she instructed Sven to reveal the four-letter shift cipher and the lemon juice invisible ink. However, this was a decoy cipher.

The Iron Kingdom had abandoned the lemon juice method two months ago. They now used an advanced chemical mixture of iron sulfate and gallic acid that could only be read by applying a specific alkaline solution.

By giving Minister Hugo the outdated lemon juice cipher, Sven had convinced the Frankish intelligence network that he had flipped. Now, Sven was officially on the Frankish payroll.

He had full access to the city~ More importantly, because Hugo believed Sven was sending fake letters back to City Titan, Hugo would provide Sven with the exact details of the musket reverse-engineering project just so Sven could write the opposite!

Sven did not have to sneak into the Emperor’s study anymore. Minister Hugo was going to hand him the highly classified information directly.

Once Sven gathered the exact production numbers and the location of the hidden blacksmith forges, he would write a real report using the new iron sulfate ink.

He would hide this real report inside the leather binding of his fake lemon-juice letters.

Queen Gyda would receive the letters, ignore the visible lemon juice lies, extract the hidden iron sulfate truth, and use that data to send Commander Bjorn’s artillery units to blow the Frankish forges into dust.

Sven was extremely happy. The Frankish Empire was paying him one hundred silver coins a month to destroy them from the inside.

At this rate, he would buy his pig farm in Wessex in exactly twenty months instead of forty!

Sven adjusted his wool coat and walked back to his inn, fully prepared to write his very first fake letter to his beloved Queen...