My last post will need to be Reduxed, too. But I've put Landen's half on top of a barren hill in sight of 500 Venetian horse on purpose. Knight to bishop's three, LD.
T_H, I know they're in the previous books, but I couldn't think of any names. Maybe they are distant cousins or something.
Smoke signals: You probably know as much as me, if not more. I would have thought they used a morse code like system too. But instead of each symbol representing characters, they are words instead. However, as you say, since smoke tends to dissipate as it floats up, the dots and dashes or whatever will have to be longer in duration. Add to the fact that one symbol = one word requires a large lexicon of symbols, some words can get quite long (in dots and dashes, and thus in time). That's bad.
One improvement that can be made is to use both the smoke and non-smoke states to transmit information. Morse code is also binary state: button-down and button-up. However, button up is used to separate the dots and dashes, and a long button-up means a new character is coming, so you're really wasting one of your states. But you can have "short-smoke, short-gap, short-smoke" and "short-smoke, long-gap, short-smoke" mean two different words. (Yeah, I'm an electrical engineer in communications. We're weird like this.)
Ooh! What we could do is use two fires. Assuming both columns rise with the same speed (no reason not), then you can use the state of both combined in a sort of quadrature modulation encoding... er, I'll stop now.
