The Book of Secrets

XVII

Kingdom of Iskiard

The inn stood on a wind-blown hill above the great river, tall and crooked like the blasted trees that surrounded it. The sign that hung from its gable swung like a noose in the breeze. In the far distance, the four Castles of the Guardians stood silhouetted against the setting sun, watching over the realm as darkness descended. The lone Wanderer hurried his pace, tapping his staff on the road. He did not want to be abroad after nightfall, when the wargs hunted.

He climbed the stairs and entered the inn, surveying it from the deep shadows of his cloak. The candles had burned low, and the fire in the hearth was no match for the surrounding gloom. Three swordsmen, still in their armour, sat drinking horns of mead and boasting of their deeds. In a corner, two merchants – one a dwarf – muttered and counted coins. Otherwise the hall was empty, apart from from a wench in a low-cut blouse behind the bar. She edged her way to serve him.

‘Prithee, what is thy desire, stranger?’

‘I seek Urthred the Necromancer.’

Her face didn’t move, but the tone of her voice spoke of awe. ‘Urthred keeps to his chamber upstairs. Be warned, stranger: he is fearsomely guarded.’

The Wanderer nodded. He made his way to the twisting stair at the back of the room and climbed: past narrow, barred windows laced with cobwebs, through a wizened door into a dark corridor. Shafts of moonlight tiled the floor through the windows; at the far end, a blue skein blazed and crackled in front of another door.

The Wanderer took a step towards it, then halted. Had he heard something?

‘Ni-yargh!’ A figure came charging out of the shadows. The Wanderer just had time to glimpse a hooked nose and savage fangs, the gleam of a sword in the moonlight. But the Wanderer was the hero of a thousand battles in this land. He stepped to one side and tilted his staff like a lance, straight into his assailant’s body. The goblin flailed back, off balance; the Wanderer stepped forward, swung the staff around and with two swift blows dispatched him.

‘Who trespasses in the Necromancer’s abode?’ The voice came out of nowhere, echoing in his ears. The threads of light at the end of the passage pulsed like the strings of a harp.

‘Nicholas the Wanderer.’ He pulled back the sleeve of his cloak to show the mark of the Brethren seared onto his wrist. ‘In the name of Farang, let me pass.’

The glowing tendrils pulled away. The door swung in noiselessly. The Wanderer stepped through.

The room beyond was a dim stone chamber, lit only by moonlight and a pair of naphtha torches bracketed to the wall. The ceiling above was so high that the rafters, where bats roosted, were almost invisible. Magickal and alchemickal apparatus filled the corners of the room – siphons, flasks, jars of dragons’ bane and unicorns’ mane. And behind a stone table, staring at his uninvited guest, an old man with piercing eyes and a straggly grey cloak, a silver circlet enclosing his long white hair. Urthred the Necromancer.

‘Nicholas the Wanderer. Many moons has it been ere you crossed the threshold of these lands.’

‘Sorry,’ said Nick. ‘I’ve been kind of busy.’

Urthred’s face stayed expressionless, but Nick knew he didn’t like the irreverence.

‘Listen, I’m sorry I don’t have time for the formalities. I need to talk to you.’

‘Then why didn’t you pick up the phone? This isn’t a chat room.’

‘I didn’t want to be traceable.’

Urthred sighed. ‘Job making you paranoid again?’

‘My room-mate was murdered last night.’

It was unnerving to say it to the avatar, to look for shock or sympathy in the digitally drawn face and see nothing. Its blank eyes just stared at him.

‘Shit, man, I’m sorry.’ Urthred’s portentously Anglicised voice was gone, replaced by the Midwestern twang that, somewhere in Chicago, belonged to a geek named Randall. ‘How did it happen?’

Nick told him, starting with Gillian’s message. He added in what he’d learned about the card. ‘If it’s real, it’s worth something. But it could just be a fake.’

‘Want me to take a look at it?’

‘Please.’

In the Necromancer’s chamber, the Wanderer reached inside his cloak and pulled out what looked like a giant marble, a glass globe filled with swirling coloured mists. He handed it to Urthred, who placed it in a rack on the wall with other, similar spheres. Somewhere on a server farm in Oregon or China, a file copied itself from Nick’s account to Randall’s.

‘I’ll just run it through.’

Randall’s avatar went still as he dropped offline. After a few seconds, the Necromancer began to shuffle on the spot and swing his arms, a sort of human screensaver. It was odd, Nick thought, how although nothing had changed on screen, the mere knowledge that Randall wasn’t looking out of that rendered face made him feel alone in the imaginary room. Even odder, he supposed, since he’d never seen Randall in the flesh.

They’d met at an online conference a couple of years back, both participants in a Web symposium. Randall had just made a name for himself by convincing a judge that a tabloid photo of a supermodel entering rehab was actually a fake. The supermodel had received an undisclosed sum from the newspapers; Randall had earned a reputation as one of the smartest researchers in the field. Informed rumour had it he’d also taken a juicy cut of the damages. Scurrilous rumour added he’d enjoyed a more personal thank-you from his grateful client.

‘The reliability of digital evidence is one of the biggest challenges for law enforcement in the twenty-first century,’ he’d told the conference. ‘With a fifty-dollar camera and a PC, there’s almost nothing that can’t be faked. But there is hope. The moment you change a digital image, you leave fingerprints on it. It’s almost impossible to combine two pictures realistically without rotating or resizing something. Those are mathematical manipulations, and they make marks in the data like ripples when you toss a rock in a pond. If you could measure all the ripples, their height and wavelength and velocity, you could work backwards to figure out where the rock went in and how big it was. This is the same idea.’

It was an idea that required some chunky mathematics – maths that turned out to be as useful for piecing together real documents as detecting fakes. Nick had emailed him afterwards to compare notes, and from there they’d become occasional collaborators. Randall had also brought him into Gothic Lair. For several months they’d roamed across the online fantasy kingdom almost every night: killing dragons, saving princesses and storming castles filled with unimaginable treasures. Before Nick swapped the company of the princesses for Gillian.

A nimbus of white light flared around Urthred the Necromancer as he came alive again.

‘Any joy?’

‘All I got was garbage.’

Nick had spent enough frustrated hours waiting for a computer to deliver its verdict to know not to expect much. But this wasn’t just another exercise. He squeezed the mouse in frustration, accidentally sending the Wanderer scuttling across to the far corner of Urthred’s chamber.

‘It’s not the algorithm. The picture’s completely screwed up.’

‘What do you mean?’ Nick guided the Wanderer back to the centre of the room. ‘Is the file corrupted?’

‘It’s not the file.’

Belatedly, Nick realised Randall was trying to tell him something.

‘You know my analogy about the ripples in the pond? Well, imagine you pull up a sample and it turns out the pond’s not even water. That’s what I’m talking about.’

‘I don’t-’

‘Someone’s done something to this file. The picture’s still there, obviously – I can see it fine. But something’s going on under the surface that’s completely changed the file coding.’

Nick finally got it. ‘Encryption.’

‘Exactly. Someone’s buried something inside this file that doesn’t show up when you look at the picture. There are over five million individual pixels in that image, each one stored as a string of six characters. All you have to do is change a handful of them so that those numbers and letters spell out a message, and you can hide a whole string of text without anyone knowing. Invisible to the naked eye.’

Nick knew how it worked – he’d come across it before. Why didn’t I think of that?

‘Would Gillian have known how to do that?’

‘Sure. There are a bunch of programs you can get to do it for you. Figure out which one she used, run the file through and it’ll just pull the data back out. It’s probably password-protected though.’

Bear is the key. ‘I’ll get right on to it.’ For the first time since Gillian’s name had lit up on the screen, Nick felt hopeful again.

‘You could try to her IP address as well,’ Randall suggested. ‘See where she got to?’

‘She Buzzed me. Peer to peer. I thought that was impossible to trace.’

‘Someone must have managed it.’ Urthred turned and looked at him. ‘Otherwise how did they find you?’

On screen, Nicholas the Wanderer leaned on his staff and stared across the moonlit chamber at the Necromancer. In a busy Internet café on lower Broadway, Nick leaned back on the stainless-steel barstool. The place was full: no dwarves or magicians, but just about everyone else. Filipinos and Indians checking in with their families back home; European backpacker-types bragging to their blogs; some Mexican kids playing Counterstrike. A tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the chatter shooting around the world over wires and airwaves. Yet through all that hubbub, someone had traced a message from a frightened girl in Europe to an apartment in New York. Nick glanced over his shoulder. A Korean man with pimpled cheeks and a buzz cut seemed to be waiting for a free machine. Was he familiar? Had he seen him before?

‘Are you at home now?’ Randall asked through the earphones.

Nick shook his head, then remembered Randall couldn’t see. ‘Home’s a crime scene. I’m not allowed back there.’

‘That’s probably a good thing.’ Urthred came around the table to stand right in front of the Wanderer. ‘You’ve got to be careful. You and I, what we do, we’re so used to seeing this illegal shit as paper, pictures, numbers we hack up. But this is real. Real people, real bullets. Don’t fuck around.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

Nick hit ESCAPE and dropped out of Gothic Lair. Into a world where there were more than monsters to fear.