TEXT: Secrets Kept  
  from the Sun
  By Chad Walker
  
  Copyright © 2018 Rowan, Rook and Decard Ltd.
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, 
  distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including 
  photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical meth-
  ods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except 
  in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and 
  certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For 
  permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.
  Rowan, Rook and Decard
  113 Forest View Road
  London E12 5HX
  www.rowanrookanddecard.com
  Writing and design: Chad Walker
  Illustrations: Adrian Stone
  Layout: Alina Sandu
  Proofreading and copy-editing: Harry Goldstone
  Production: Mary Hamilton
  Spire is a game by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor
  
  1
  THE PRIMER
  Congratulations on surviving your trials, Minister. 
  You’ve proven yourself to be skilled and resourceful 
  enough to enter the fold and be trusted with our se-
  crets. Here and now, I will be giving you the resources 
  and information you will need to execute your sacred 
  duty. If you heed my words, you will evade the hate-
  ful gaze of the Solar Guard long enough to do them 
  irreparable harm. If my words fall on deaf ears, you’ll 
  be neutralized by myself or another magister unless 
  our enemy gets to you first. We do not suffer liabilities 
  to our cause, and our structure, our web, is more im-
  portant than any individual spider who dances upon 
  it. We’ve invested much in you, but you can and will 
  be replaced. As will I, if I am found wanting. And with 
  that caution, let us begin. Take this; it is your codex.
  THE CODEX
  This leather-bound tome is small enough to fit into 
  your pocket, and for good reason. If you are caught 
  with this tome, your life is forfeit. A codex is perhaps 
  the single most illicit piece of contraband in Spire. 
  Possession of one is a capital offense, as it indicates 
  your affiliation with the Ministry. You must not be 
  caught with the tome on your person under any cir-
  cumstances. Despite the immense risk that comes 
  with ownership of a codex, you will want to keep it 
  handy. It is your lifeline to the Ministry and you will 
  need it to communicate with your magister.
  We use the codex to mask the messages we write 
  to one other in the form of private letters or public 
  ads or articles in one of Spire’s many newspapers. If 
  an adversary intercepts our letters, or reads the clas-
  sified ads we have submitted for publication, they will 
  not be able to discern our meaning. Allow me to ex-
  plain how it works.
  Your codex is not unique. There are hundreds just 
  like it. Every cell has at least one, as does every magis-
  ter. Some have even fallen into the hands of the Solar 
  Guard. That is no matter, and you’ll learn why very 
  soon. Open it up and look upon its contents. Every 
  codex is exactly 100 pages long. On each page, there 
  is a cipher, which is a set of rules that instruct you 
  how to transform a message from one thing to anoth-
  er. Look at this page, for example. It says:
  Move every verb in the message to the location of the 
  verb that follows it. Move the last verb in the message to the 
  place of the first verb in the message. Adjust conjugation 
  as needed.
  Then it gives an example:
  “Dridane hunts in the forest to benefit a family that 
  hides from the Solar Guard,” becomes “Dridane hides in 
  the forest to hunt a family that benefits from the Solar 
  Guard.”
  With this subtle shift, the meaning of the message 
  has changed dramatically. Dridane has transformed 
  from a subsistence hunter providing for a family of 
  refugees into a murderous stalker laying in wait for his 
  enemies. This example is only the tip of the iceberg.
  There are 100 ciphers in the codex, each providing 
  unique instructions of varying levels of complexity. 
  Some instruct you to move words around, as we just 
  discussed. Some provide lists of words that should be 
  exchanged for other words (e.g. coin becomes dagger, 
  prayer becomes arson, etc.). Some provide rules to ob-
  scure identifiable names (e.g. Dridane becomes Esje-
  bof). Some instruct you to add extra words or phrases 
  as padding. The end result of every cipher, howev-
  er, is a message that has had its meaning obscured, 
  but still appears to be a valid message (i.e. complete 
  sentences instead of a nonsensical string of letters). 
  When an adversary reads a transformed message, it 
  will not be apparent to anyone but a trained analyst 
  that the message has been transformed by the codex.
  The process of transforming a message with a 
  cipher to hide its original meaning is called mask-
  ing, while the process of reversing a transformation 
  to discover a message’s original meaning is called 
  unmasking.
  If you know which cipher was used to mask a mes-
  sage, you also know how to unmask it. It only takes a 
  few minutes to mask or unmask a message. The So-
  lar Guard, possessing their own copies of the codex, 
  know every single cipher we know. That is why we al-
  ways use three ciphers. We mask with one cipher, then 
  mask the result with another cipher, and then mask 
  that result with a third cipher, until the transformed 
  
  2
  message looks almost nothing like its original. Our 
  intended recipient, knowing exactly which three ci-
  phers we used and in what order, unmasks the mes-
  sage using the same three ciphers but in the opposite 
  order. All others will struggle in their attempts to un-
  mask the message.
  With three transformations chosen from 100 
  unique ciphers, there are 1,000,000 possible ways to 
  mask a message. If it takes an enemy analyst 1 minute 
  to unmask a message that was transformed with a sin-
  gle cipher, it will take her nearly 700 days to unmask 
  a message transformed with three ciphers. If 100 ana-
  lysts are working on the same task, it will take them a 
  full week to reverse all possible transformations. This 
  is why we do not worry about the Solar Guard’s com-
  promise of our codex. We do worry, however, about 
  them compromising our triads.
  THE TRIAD
  Both the sender and recipient of a secret message 
  must establish agreement on what three ciphers they 
  are going to use. For example, you and your magister 
  might agree to use the ciphers on pages 12, 89, and 
  63 of the codex. If your magister wants to send a mes-
  sage to you, he will use the codex to mask his message 
  with the cipher on page 12, then mask the result of 
  that with the cipher on page 89, and then mask one 
  more time with the cipher on page 63. Once you re-
  ceive the message (perhaps it was published in the 
  Silhouette’s classified section), you will use the codex 
  to unmask the message with the same ciphers, but in 
  the opposite order; first unmasking with the cipher 
  on page 63, then page 89, then page 12.
  The most important secret of our communication 
  method, then, is not the codex, but three ciphers that 
  any two participants have agreed upon. We call these 
  three ciphers a triad. We must protect our triads from 
  the Solar Guard at all costs.
  There are two precautions we take to protect our 
  triads. First and foremost, we never communicate our 
  triads in print, even print that has been masked. We 
  must always assume that by luck, skill, or patience, 
  our enemies will eventually unmask our messages. 
  If they unmask an old message that says “Our triad 
  might be compromised, so here is our new one,” you 
  can see how problematic that might become for a cell 
  that trusts their safety to the new triad. Second, we 
  change our triads frequently, relying on triad engines 
  to do this for us.
  The triad engine is not a machine nor a device, 
  but is simply a reliable and somewhat random phe-
  nomenon that occurs regularly somewhere in Spire. 
  For example, one triad engine might be “The first 
  three verses of scripture quoted by the blood priest 
  at mass” or “how many candle-lit windows you can 
  count on the eastern sides of these three buildings 
  at midnight,” or “what are the ages of the dead in 
  the last three obituaries in the Silhouette, and if they 
  are over 100, subtract 100.” There is a near infinite 
  number of natural and artificial phenomena in Spire 
  conforming to the mysterious rule of three. So long 
  as their manifestations can somehow be used to point 
  to three of the 100 pages in the codex, they can serve 
  as triad engines. We seek them out and then establish 
  agreement on how we use them. You and your mag-
  ister will establish agreement on a triad engine and 
  then defer to it for your daily and weekly masking 
  and unmasking tasks. For example, you may know to 
  look in the obituary section of yesterday’s Silhouette 
  in order to determine the triad your magister used to 
  mask a secret message published in today’s Silhou-
  ette. Alternatively, one of your cell members might at-
  tend the evening mass every night, to determine what 
  verses (and thus, ciphers) should be used to mask to-
  morrow’s report.
  Triad engines are immensely powerful founts of 
  secrecy. They permit two or more parties to rapidly 
  change up their triads without either party needing 
  to meet up or discuss it. They are also somewhat re-
  silient against Solar Guard attempts to compromise 
  them. For example, assume that you and your mag-
  ister were using the blood priest’s verses as a triad 
  engine, but the Solar Guard discovered this fact by 
  interrogating one of your cell members. Going for-
  ward, they might be able to unmask all of your fu-
  ture communications, but they would not be able to 
  unmask all of your historical communications with-
  out knowing what verses the blood priest was quot-
  ing on those days (which no one was writing down). 
  The same could be said of the “candle-lit windows” 
  example I just mentioned. Documented triads, like 
  the “obituary” example, are not as resilient, but they 
  still make historical unmasking more laborious to  
  our enemies.
  THE CHANNEL
  The codex was first developed to assist in protect-
  ing written political and military intelligence from 
  the prying eyes of the couriers delivering it, or any 
  adversaries intercepting said couriers. We could not 
  use it in that fashion, at least, not for long. To deliv-
  er a letter to someone, you need to know their given 
  name, or at the very least, their location, otherwise 
  your courier will be unable to assist you. However, if 
  a minister knows the location or even the given name 
  of his magister, this information can do the magister 
  
  3
  serious harm if it is interrogated out of a captured 
  minister, or if the courier is followed by agents of the 
  Solar Guard. We had to find a channel that facilitated 
  secure communication between minister and magis-
  ter, but also allowed them to do so without forcing 
  them to ever be in the same location, or even know 
  the true identity of the other. Spire’s many newspa-
  pers were the answer we were looking for.
  The newspapers Ambrosia, the Furnace, the Sil-
  houette, the Chronicle, the Torch, and even the taboo 
  Liberate! all provide avenues to publish masked mes-
  sages for the consumption of other members of the 
  Ministry. So long as a message, and payment for pub-
  lication, finds its way into the hands of a courier by 
  midnight, it will find itself immortalized in print by 
  dawn, no questions asked. The recipient of your mes-
  sage will be able to see it, so long as they know where 
  to look. This leads me to the topic of what newspaper 
  you’ll be reading, what sections you’ll be focusing on, 
  and what type of articles or advertisements you will 
  be writing to communicate with your magister.
  As you’ve surmised, each magister directs the ac-
  tivities of multiple Ministry cells. Some have a hands-
  off approach, trusting in the independence of their 
  cells, while others are very involved in orchestrating 
  their cell’s daily activities. Each magister, however, 
  uses a specific newspaper to establish communica-
  tions with her cells. For example, one magister uses 
  Ambrosia exclusively, another uses the Torch exclu-
  sively, etc. Then, that magister uses different sections 
  of each paper to communicate with the cells under 
  their control. For example, the magister that reigns 
  over the Chronicle might use reader-submitted con-
  sumer reports to communicate with one cell, ads for 
  fake products or investment opportunities to com-
  municate with another cell, and ill-informed mar-
  ket predictions to communicate with a third cell. So 
  long as the paper’s editors allows the content to go 
  to print, all is well. A user submission can be entirely 
  masked (which is easily done in a free for all section 
  like classifieds), or the masked content can be buried 
  in a legitimate looking entry (like an obituary for a 
  fake person) to ensure it finds its way to the intended 
  section of the paper.
  When you meet your magister, she will discuss 
  what paper falls under her domain and what section 
  of that paper you’ll be working with to receive in-
  struction and report back to her. I don’t know what 
  paper is her channel, nor does she know mine. This is 
  the will of our exarch, the one who manages the mag-
  isters like a magister manages ministers. That is likely 
  the first and the last time you will hear mention of an 
  exarch until, our Mistress willing, we topple the aelfir. 
  Just know that we magisters are bound by conduct 
  and strictures as well. The entire Ministry is built on 
  structural secrecy and segregation. We assume that 
  some cells will be devoured or turned by our enemies, 
  so we keep them separated to protect them from each 
  other. We assume that some magisters will betray 
  our cause or be drawn into the danger of daylight by 
  treacherous ministers reporting to them. Should this 
  happen, the separation between magisters contains 
  the damage. We have learned these lessons the hard 
  way, for our enemy is ruthless in his pursuit of us.
  Given that many of the papers publish once per 
  day, your communications will need to account for 
  this constraint. Be thorough in your reports and re-
  quests to your magister, spreading the information 
  across multiple ads or articles if necessary. However, 
  there may come a time when you need to contact your 
  magister immediately because of a dire emergency. 
  Perhaps someone in your cell has been captured by 
  the Solar Guard or has proven to be a spy. Perhaps 
  you’ve stumbled upon intelligence regarding a ma-
  jor operation against the Ministry that will transpire 
  hours before tomorrow’s newspaper hits the market 
  stands. We have a method for such occasions, but it 
  must be used sparingly.
  THE UPLIFT PUSH
  We have assets among the “Uplifted,” as they call 
  themselves: those members of the Brazacott Tech-
  nical Institute who have magical crystals implanted 
  into their heads to be part of a living neural network. 
  While their “gift” permits them to rapidly share 
  knowledge and insights with others like them, acute 
  levels of stress or concentration allow them to trans-
  mit sensations to their entire population. If one of the 
  Uplifted reads a written message over and over, ei-
  ther with intense deliberation or held at knife-point, 
  all others who are Uplifted will hear this message rat-
  tling at the very edge of their consciousness. Most 
  will dismiss this as a side-effect of their gift, but there 
  are a few who are trained to grab quill and ink when 
  they feel this sensation and scrawl down the words 
  coming to them. They will then deliver this written 
  message directly to the magister that recruited them. 
  It is through this method that a cell of ministers can 
  send an urgent message to their magister within an 
  hour or less. However, it is imperative you mask the 
  message before making one of the Uplifted read it, 
  lest you wish that entire population to know of your 
  plans. And not just with any triad, but a special emer-
  gency triad that your magister will communicate  
  to you.
  There are some limitations to this technique, 
  which explains why it is only employed in the case of 
  
  4
  emergencies. First and foremost, it requires immedi-
  ate access to one of the Uplifted, and they must be 
  convinced (or coerced) to perform the task of read-
  ing a written message. This is not an experience they 
  will forget, let alone forgive, depending on how you 
  approach them. Second, it is a one-way street. You 
  will be able to push a message to your magister with 
  this technique, but she will not use the same chan-
  nel to reply. Be sure you are clear in your directives 
  so your magister is able to devise the most effective 
  response. Lastly, this technique mobilizes one of the 
  Uplifted to proceed to your magister’s physical loca-
  tion with great haste. What is critical, here, is that this 
  event presents an opportunity for keenly aware Solar 
  Guard assets to tail any of the Uplifted who abruptly 
  leave their duties for an errand after anomalous feed-
  back is experienced by many of their numbers. It is 
  likely that our enemies are aware of this technique 
  and have built contingency plans for it, hoping to find 
  and neutralize magisters contacted this way. This last 
  item is why the emergency triad is split among your 
  fellow ministers.
  When you meet your magister, she will share one 
  cipher of the emergency triad with each of you, and 
  swear you all to keep it secret from one another until 
  the very moment you must use it. This prevents one 
  of your cell members from going rogue and working 
  with our enemies to ensnare a magister. It is also a 
  triad that the Uplifted messenger knows. Remember, 
  this masked message will go to all of our Uplifted as-
  sets, not just your magisters. The assets who work for 
  the Ministry will attempt to unmask the message with 
  their unique emergency triads. If they are unable to 
  unmask the message, they know it was not intended 
  for their magister, and will take no further action.
  THE OPPOSITION
  The Solar Guard is a massive state apparatus, near-
  ly as diverse, populous, and bureaucratic as a small 
  country onto itself. I won’t waste your time with 
  this organization’s history, character, or propaganda, 
  though there are a number of resources out there if 
  you are interested in the topic. Instead, I will briefly 
  outline the Solar Guard’s personnel and how to deal 
  with them.
  The public face of the Solar Guard is its paladins: 
  masked brutes donning golden plate-mail, flowing 
  robes, and weapons of war, all meticulously main-
  tained by drow and human thralls masquerading as 
  squires. While their appearance is grandiose, there is 
  nothing frivolous about their capabilities in battle. 
  With their equipment, their training, and their zeal, 
  the average paladin is more than a fair match for even 
  a battle-hardened minister, if not two. A stand-up 
  fight with these warriors is a circumstance your cell 
  should avoid at all costs. 
  Paladins have two functions. The first, which you 
  probably witness on a daily basis, is to simply be pub-
  lic and present, a glittering and menacing reminder of 
  the futility of resisting our aelfir overlords. This is why 
  they stand at the center of bustling bazaars, march 
  down the streets in the drow districts, and form the 
  entourage of high elf nobility. Were they huddling in 
  a barracks, we might forget the martial superiority of 
  our oppressors. They couldn’t have that. Their second 
  function, put simply, is to be the fist of the aelfir; kick-
  ing down doors, setting flames to drow tenements, 
  and brutally crushing public demonstrations before 
  they can become anything more than sideshows. Were 
  it not for the Ministry, they would execute such vio-
  lence with impunity. As it stands, they frequently do 
  anyway, and will continue to do so until the final day 
  of our uprising. 
  If the paladins have come for you, run. Always 
  run. But remember, even these brutes need to eat and 
  sleep and engage in vice when they aren’t donning 
  the Sun’s Gold, the name they’ve given their impres-
  sive armor.
  The bureaucrats are the financial and analyt-
  ical machinery of the Solar Guard. You will rare-
  ly see them, for they are cloistered in Solar Guard 
  facilities, toiling over tomes by gaslight, but they 
  number in the hundreds, if not the thousands, and 
  might be the gravest threat to our enterprise. We can  
  outrun the fleetest of paladins, or lead them into death 
  traps if they won’t break pursuit, but we have yet to 
  find a way to shield the gaze of the Solar Guard’s 
  analytical eye. Where other races have schemed to 
  find magical paths to divination and surveillance, the 
  aelfir have arrived at omniscience via the quill and 
  notebook. 
  By 
  meticulously 
  documenting 
  suspicious 
  events, fugitive sightings, rumors of uprising, and 
  the aftermaths of Ministry operations throughout 
  Spire, then piecing these distinct events together  
  through analytic conversation, the bureaucrats are 
  learning our techniques and predicting our next 
  move. They are guiding paladins to places most in-
  opportune for Ministry cells, whether to bolster the 
  defenses of a mark we need to kill, or interdict a 
  shipment of supplies we need to fuel our operations, 
  or to prevent parlay between us and potential allies.  
  We know they have acquired a number of codexes  
  and some of their most gifted mathematicians are 
  working diligently to reverse-engineer our ciphers, 
  identify our triad engines, and inject chaos into our 
  communications. The most high-value of bureaucrats, 
  
  5
  for our targeting purposes, are the Confessors: the 
  ones who listen to and direct the Solar Guard’s cov-
  ert assets.
  Assets are those who do the Solar Guard’s bidding 
  in an unofficial capacity, secretly reporting to a Con-
  fessor; they may be high elf, human, or more likely 
  drow. Most assets have been bribed or coerced into 
  service, though some are simply dedicated to main-
  taining aelfir hegemony. They mostly serve as spies 
  and gossips, compelling us to maintain the strict se-
  crecy and security we have become known for. Some 
  of them act as enforcers doing work that is simply 
  too dirty or politically perilous for paladins to get in-
  volved in. Solar Guard assets exist in virtually every 
  social, financial, and racial strata in Spire, without ex-
  ception. Whether it’s the butcher, the beggar, or the 
  blackpowder gun-maker, anyone you encounter could 
  be an asset. That includes the Ministry. In fact, one 
  of your fellow ministers could be a Solar Guard asset 
  who has undergone extensive alchemical poisoning in 
  order to erase this affiliation from his memory. With 
  one quaff of a special tincture, served to him by a bar-
  keep on the Guard’s payroll, he could remember his 
  mission and murder you in your sleep. Don’t get too 
  preoccupied with that possibility, though – it’s only 
  happened once. You will undoubtedly encounter and 
  uncover Solar Guard assets during your operations, 
  but I implore you; resist the urge to kill these traitors. 
  The drow ones, at least. Every time a drow slays an-
  other drow because of Solar Guard machinations, the 
  aelfir win. They wish to divide us, to make us punish 
  ourselves. Sometimes they will out their own assets 
  just to watch us tear each other apart and paint the 
  Ministry as bloodthirsty. Do not give in to this ploy. 
  Our final strategic victory is more important than a 
  single moment of petty justice. Instead, if you uncov-
  er an enemy asset, make him a better offer, or break 
  the yoke a Confessor has placed upon him. Turn him 
  on his masters.
  THE WEAK SPOT
  Forget everything you know about hierarchy, min-
  ister. Rank and title are illusions. Your magister is not 
  powerful because of any innate characteristics or spe-
  cial abilities. She is powerful because she is the broker, 
  the gatekeeper, between multiple cells of ministers, as 
  well as between you and other magisters. She controls 
  the flow of information between these groups, chore-
  ographs their actions, and decides who lives and dies 
  in the moment of truth. At the same time, that power 
  makes her a desirable target for our enemies. If she 
  is destroyed, you and your fellow ministers are sev-
  ered from the Ministry’s purview, losing all external 
  support and guidance. If she is compromised, she is 
  a threat to you, her peers, and even the exarch. You 
  now understand why we take such extreme efforts to 
  keep a distance between you and your magister. It is 
  to protect her, one of the most critical actors in our 
  network. However, take this logic and extend it to the 
  most critical actor in the Solar Guard; not the gener-
  als who command the paladins, nor the taskmasters 
  herding the bureaucrats, nor the high priests issuing 
  edicts of death on the enemies of the Church. It is the 
  Confessor.
  Think about it: the Confessor is the one who is 
  gathering intelligence from his assets, the eyes and 
  ears of the Solar Guard distributed all over Spire. He 
  takes this intelligence and provides it to the bureau-
  crats, who assess it, analyze it, and use it to formulate 
  how the paladins should be deployed in a manner 
  that best disrupts the Ministry. The Confessor is the 
  linchpin of Solar Guard operations. If he is destroyed, 
  he will quickly be replaced, but not without a seri-
  ous strain on the relationships the previous Confessor 
  built with the assets in his employ. In fact, the new 
  Confessor may have to start over, operating blind in 
  the Spire district he has been assigned to manage. 
  This all leads to degraded intelligence sent to the bu-
  reaucrats, which leads to a less optimal distribution 
  of paladins. 
  While assassinating a Confessor may seem an at-
  tractive strategy, it pales in comparison to compro-
  mising a Confessor, either by becoming one of his 
  assets and feeding him false information, or better 
  yet, getting leverage on a Confessor and compelling 
  him to poison the Solar Guard’s analytical machinery 
  with a campaign of lies. Why kill a Confessor when 
  you can use him to thrust a hundred paladins into 
  harm’s way, or nudge the Solar Guard into doing 
  something so outrageous it triggers the great uprising 
  we have been pining for?
  It is safe to say our enemies understand this struc-
  tural weakness and staff this position accordingly. 
  When you hunt a Confessor, or court one, or par-
  lay with one, know you are tangling with some of the 
  Ministry’s most cunning and ruthless enemies. Re-
  member, the Confessor wields bribery, blackmail, 
  and intimidation alternately with the precision of a 
  stiletto and the brutality of a cudgel. He cajoles a 
  people who hate him into doing the bidding of the 
  very machine that crushes them. There are people 
  who would die for him, if only to protect their secrets 
  from being revealed. He is formidable on his own, but 
  surrounded by the truly desperate and fearful people 
  on his payroll, he is a king of his district.
  
  LOMBRÉ’S WEB
  We need to talk about the inevitable. I have been in 
  this trade for years now, decades maybe. I have wit-
  nessed ministers fall in bloody combat against our 
  oppressors, or have their heads taken by the guillotine 
  in public displays of aelfir power. I have also heard 
  from witnesses, often petty criminals sharing the 
  same cell as our captured brothers and sisters, of the 
  trials of misery, pain, and humiliation we suffer when 
  our enemies capture us, interrogate us, and torture 
  us. The high elves are virtuosos of harm, maestros of 
  suffering, and artisans of fear. If you are captured by 
  them, you will be sent to their inquisitors, where you 
  will endure pain and terror that dwarfs whatever you 
  could possibly imagine for your worst enemy.
  The aelfir still engage in torture of captured sub-
  jects. We eschewed that practice long ago, for it only 
  yielded outright lies, half-truths, and old intelligence 
  from desperate prisoners willing to tell us anything 
  to make the pain stop. Sending ministers to validate 
  a tortured subject’s claims was either an enormous 
  waste of time or a surefire way to get them killed. 
  Fortunately for us, the aelfir still cling to the prac-
  tice of torture. Their immortality and fertility has 
  made them so soft, and so arrogant, they think they 
  can compel a minister to turn on their own through 
  pain and humiliation. The fools! The everyday pain 
  and humiliation of the aelfir yoke is what birthed the 
  Ministry in the first place. It is the very substance 
  that fuels our resistance. So let them feed the fire, 
  and know that there is nothing more dangerous to the 
  aelfir, nothing more lethal to Solar Guard operatives, 
  than the captured minister, for only he, or she, is in a 
  position to weave Lombré’s Web.
  Lombré’s Web is the web of lies you will weave for 
  captors when they subject you to torture to glean in-
  formation about the Ministry. If you tell them your 
  tale convincingly, they will believe you, and send their 
  agents tumbling into the snare of death and deceit 
  you’ve set for them. Here is how it will work. I do not 
  mean to frighten you with this knowledge, I mean to 
  steel your resolve.
  Upon capture, you will be brought to a secret lo-
  cation where you will be attended to by trained in-
  quisitors. You will fight and kick and spit and defy 
  your enemies. You will show them our true hate for 
  our oppressors. But, oh, they will break you. Be it the 
  wheel, or the burning coal, or the burrowing vermin, 
  or the mirror they place before you so you can watch 
  the horrors they inflict on you, you will break. You 
  will sob. You will beg for mercy. You will acquiesce to 
  their every demand. And you will tell them everything 
  you know.
  And do tell them everything, every last detail. Tell 
  them of the hand signal you make at the bazaar to let 
  your magister know the coast is clear. Tell them of 
  the weekly meetings at midnight, before the fountain, 
  where you exchange intelligence with your fellow 
  ministers. Tell them where your triad engine is and 
  what newspaper you use to organize. Tell them about 
  the hidden cache in the sewers, full of weapons and 
  armor the Ministry has been stockpiling for our final 
  insurgency. Tell them of the aelfir we have turned to 
  our cause. Tell them all of these lies, and more. For 
  once they have broken you, they will believe you, and 
  that is your opportunity to weave Lombré’s Web.
  When their agent goes to the bazaar and raises the 
  signal, he will be cut to pieces by widows hiding dag-
  gers in their dresses. When the paladins of the Solar 
  Guard swarm the fountain, they’ll find it full of kero-
  sene, not water, ignited into an inferno by an archer’s 
  flame arrow, and howl in agony as the fire eats away 
  at their flesh. The paladins storming the sewer cache 
  will find a gate closed behind them, just as the tide of 
  filth rises, and they will drown, choking on our very 
  waste. And in a rage of paranoia and doubt, our most 
  cunning enemies, the wisest and craftiest of the high 
  elves who oppress us, will be implicated as traitors, 
  captured, and subject to the same interrogative cruel-
  ty the masked ones would inflict on us.
  One of your first orders of business upon estab-
  lishing your cell is to discuss the details of Lombré’s 
  Web. Discuss the lies a captured minister will tell his 
  captors. Decide which districts and locales will facil-
  itate the perfect ambush. Architect the death traps 
  and arrange the lethal assets to be ready the moment 
  they are needed. Build both the seductive fiction and 
  the violent reality of Lombré’s Web, and then pray 
  to the Mistress you never need to use it. But if you 
  do find yourself on the wrong end of the torturer’s 
  implements, take heart in knowing that your fellow 
  ministers lie in wait, ready to cut anyone you send 
  their way to ribbons.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Spire - the City Must Fall/Secrets-Kept-from-the-Sun-v3.pdf