A field guide to the Root Trial.

Contents

Everything in the guide, in climbing order: four plates of front matter, then one chapter per clue type.

How to use this guide

Eight colored tabs run down the edge of this guide, one for each clue type you'll meet on the climb. Behind each tab is a chapter: what the technique does, the words that signal it, worked examples, and a quiz to clear.

If cryptics are new to you, start with the front matter, especially the anatomy plate on the next page. If you've solved before, jump straight to a tab; the chapters stand alone.

The quizzes remember. Clear a chapter and its tab stays marked, however long you're away. When all eight are marked, the Tower is where you prove it.

> progress saved locally

Anatomy of a cryptic clue

Every cryptic clue is two clues sharing one line. At one end sits a definition, a plain synonym for the answer, the same as any ordinary crossword. Everything else is wordplay: a second, independent route to the same answer, built from instructions hiding inside innocent-looking words.

The trap is the surface reading. A good clue reads as a sensible little sentence about one thing while quietly meaning another. That picture is decoration. Your first move as a solver is to stop reading the clue as a sentence and start reading it as parts: which end is the definition, and what is the rest telling you to do?

The game is rigged in your favor, and that's by convention, not kindness. Every letter of the answer is accounted for by the wordplay; nothing arrives by magic. The number in brackets, the enumeration, counts the letters of the answer exactly. And when a setter stretches a meaning, a question mark owns up to it. A setter is allowed to mislead you. A setter is not allowed to lie.

The surface paints something odd, a transmission with no sound. Now the parts. Hear is the definition, sitting at the front. Broadcast suggests scattering: that's the indicator, the word naming the operation. What gets scattered is silent, the fodder. Rearrange its six letters and they settle into LISTEN, which matches the enumeration and means to hear. Both routes land on the same word, and that agreement is your proof. You don't guess in a cryptic. You check.

Scattering letters is one technique. There are eight, and each colored tab on this guide's edge opens onto one of them. Take them in order or take the one that's been beating you. Either way, the tab comes back marked.

The Island and the Tower

You notice it in small things first. A gull's cry that lands in your ear as a word. Letters washing in on the tide and coming ashore in better order than they left. On this island, language is physics. Wordplay is the weather here, and the techniques in these pages are its natural laws, the way water knows downhill.

At the island's center, a root of the World Tree breaks the ground and keeps going up. That is the Tower. Scholars call it the Root Trial, and you climb its living wood. Up close the wood is warm and it is not still: the grain drifts under your palms like a sentence being revised, and the sound of the surf arrives from farther below than you'd like. Your arms will tire before your reading does, if you've trained the reading.

That is what this guide is for. The island is gentle with a careful reader and inventive with a careless one; take a word at its surface out there and the ground may take you the same way. These pages are the island's laws written down. Chapter 01 is the first. Learn it here on the page, where the weather is mild.

AIndicator glossary

An indicator is the word in a clue that names the operation: shuffle these letters, read them backwards, listen instead of look. Appendix A gathers every indicator taught across the eight chapters, grouped by type. In the field, run it in reverse: spot a word from this list in a clue, and you know which technique the setter is playing.