Broad smiles around the world when we see ‘Sabre’ on the top line, and a few shaky knees too, as we realise we are, as usual, facing a Sabresque challenge.
We find four sets of clues (all spyderish): Common; Trapdoor; Spinning; Jumping. We are also going to get an instruction from extra letters not entered in the grid, in each clue’s wordplay.
The grid fill is tough. Initially, though some solutions are evident in the Trapdoor, Spinning and Jumping sets, we can enter only the common ones and get a skeleton grid.
What an intriguing new idea the Trapdoor clues are. GLIA/DIN fitted nicely at the top and bottom of the grid (I’ve added the ‘IN’ here) and I suspected that SHEATHED, AGHAST, MAWTHER etc. would do the same to create little traps, but it was not to be. Fortunately, letters already in place and clue numbers helped site the other trapdoors.
The spinning clues had to fill those spaces and did so with just four daunting empty cells and, of course, we had the Sabre special, his Knights’ moves, to complete the grid (see below with those missing letters in place).
That wasn’t easy: the other half of the Dash team’s grid reveals a real spyder’s web!
So how did we proceed?
The instruction? PERFORM A CAESAR SHIFT TO INITIAL LETTERS OF ALL CLUES.
We have to do an A to M shift (12 letters) to get MORSE GRID A to M = DIT, N to Z = DAH MAKE BREAKS AT BROKEN BARS (so that’s why we had those strange bars in the grid!) How on Earth did Sabre manage to make his grid produce this third message? REGARD LETTERS IN WOLF SPIDER AS RAISED DOTS. REST BLANK. READ BRAILLE, so now we had to partition the grid into 2×3 boxes to get the Braille message: SHADE NAME OF TOLKIEN SPIDER. And there was SHELOB. Stunning! What a masterpiece of construction!
A star solver friend explained his solving process: “The puzzle was quite straightforward after the grid fill; in fact the grid was perhaps only 60% filled when I inferred the message from the extra letters (CAESAR SHIFT was readily apparent) and it took very little time to decode the Caesar shift. At that point I had several rows that were either complete or nearly so. So I started marking dits and dahs and had REGARD at the top and BRAILLE at the bottom and lots of indicators for the other Morse choices. That helped me make decisions about how to unscramble or make knight moves and to constrain unknown letters for the unsolved clues. I.e. the endgame actually helped me fill the grid. Once the grid is filled of course the Morse code message is immediate and obeying that gives an unambiguous set of Braille letters…i.e. the grid fill is the only hard part.”
Of course Sabre retains his place in the Elite Listener Oenophiles: ‘Chicago drinks station at back of pub in fashion (6, two words)’. That gave us [A]T B in WEAR so WET BAR. “Cheers, Sabre!” I’ll be raising champagne to this spectacular one.