But it's still not proof of the kind that Winters is going to need. Everything I've got is circumstantial.
Now, if I had some proof that somebody was being targeted, being followed…
Yeah, like who?… He was in no position to go through Deathworld and start asking questions of everybody he met. Word about nosy "strangers" and "newbies" traveled fast in these online demesnes. The Banies were probably no different than any other kind of fans defending their territory, in this regard. Anybody who showed up and started asking a lot of questions would be identified as a stooge, maybe a cop, and isolated, within hours. Or else just get fed a lot of misinformation that would completely screw up any serious investigation.
No, there has to be another way.
Charlie sat there for a long while, as it got lighter outside in the London of two centuries ago, and the sky started to turn a pale peach color up in the high windows.
Then he sat up straight.
All right, Charlie thought. When investigation takes you as far as it can, when the data won't support the conclusions securely enough… then, if you're really sure you're right, you go find the information to make it support them.
By catching somebody in the act…
Nick stood quiet between the dark stone walls, in the dripping darkness, with his eyes closed, and listened. It was the only way, down here, to tell truth from falsehood. Appearances were deceiving, as he had learned higher up in Deathworld, and there was no point in wasting your time on trying to work things out from the way they looked.
The inside of the Dark Artificer's Keep was the kingdom of fraud… all the different sorts of it: flattery and lies, hypocrisy and purposeful misdirection, rumors started to make trouble or destroy reputations. Counterfeiting and impersonation were punished there, and all the kinds of theft. Illegal copying was punished there, too, and theft of ideas… and since Joey Bane had suffered enough from that kind of thing in his early career, Nick was not entirely surprised to see the Thieves of Song hung up from the trees in the Black Arboretum, squawking out twisted fragments of song while the blackbirds picked at their tenderer bits. He had passed through there with some amusement, picking up in passing, from under a rock in the Arboretum, the clandestine lift of "Steal from Me…" with all the pirated versions of other Bane songs sampled and intercut into it, Joey Bane's own convoluted joke-7- the audio version of a trophy wall, one that grew and grew day by day, so that every new version was a collectors' item.
The punishments down here in the stony black tunnels and passageways were all variations on a single theme. Those who had stolen others' stories and lives and taken them for their own use were now bound forever in one place, immured in the black stones themselves, and forced to listen in silence to those who actually had lives of their own. It was the living who had the key to the secrets here. Their questions, asked of the darkness, were the answers to the Keep. As elsewhere in Deathworld, some of the people you met in the Keep were real players, but some were actors or "plants," part of the game, and to find out what they knew about the way down to the doorway into Nine, listening was the key.
At first it had seemed to Nick merely a frustration de- signed to weed out those who weren't really serious about finding the way down to Nine. But slowly he had begun to suspect the truth lay elsewhere. Whether he would find i it in time to descend to Nine before his money ran out, and before his folks entirely lost patience, was now his main concern.
He sat down on one of the benches let into the wet black stone wall, underneath one of the occasional torches that were fitted into iron wall-brackets, and listened. It was damp down here. He was below the level of the lake, Nick guessed, and that warm saline body leaked and oozed through to most places on this level, trickling down walls, welling up as puddles in the narrow, close, dark stone passages. Listening was the whole art of finding your way around here, listening for the sound of water and the direction in which it ran, listening to other voices, finding your way to them, discovering what they had to say. It was not like Seven, where manipulation of the pain of the Damned was how you found out what you needed to know. Here, keeping your own mouth shut and your ears open was everything. Someone's story told in a long soft monologue, a phrase of music heard in silence and waited for, was what would make the difference. There was always a clue, something useful.
It's a shame that listening to people in the real world isn't always this useful, Nick thought. If it could be this way with other kids at school, or with parents, or other people you met, what a difference it would make. Unfortunately they were usually intent on forcing you to come around to their way of thinking, and any listening on their part was limited to checking to see whether you were agreeing with them.
Though who knows, he thought. Maybe it would be possible to outlisten them, if you just had enough patience. He got up again, stretched. Last time Nick sat there for nearly two hours before he caught that faint soft shimmer of music, far away in another passage, and after much feeling his way around in near-total darkness, he finally found his way to the little chest set into one of the stone walls, where the lift of "Down the Narrow Ways" had been hidden. But Nick didn't think there was any point in waiting here any longer, for a certain "feel" was missing to this tunnel/passage which the other one, where he'd found the lift, had had. So now Nick was trying to cover as much ground as possible in each session, trying to locate spots that had the same "feel," and which could also conceal doorways or hidden passages that might somehow lead to the Maze itself.
He turned right, then right again, down another low-ceilinged passageway, paused, and listened for sound, for that particular "feel." Nothing. Nick went on, trailing his hand along the wet, cold stone.
"Ow!" he said then, stopping and looking at the wall. Nothing but lumpy rock, and here and there something jutting out that might have been an elbow, a knee, frozen in the stone. Except where his hand had been-there was someone's mouth, there were teeth, and half-buried in the stone, the glint of an eye, watching him.
"Sorry," Nick said, making a resolution to watch where he put his hands in the future, and went on walking. This could take me a long time, Nick thought. Some of the walk-throughs claimed that the so-called "anteroom chambers," the approaches to the Maze itself, regenerated themselves in new and random patterns every few days, so that you would think you had learned them and then return to find them completely different. Others said that no such thing happened at all, and that the people making the claim were confused. Nick wasn't sure what to think. In his cynical moods, it struck him that randomly regenerating the pattern would be a great way to make some extra money. But somehow he didn't think Joey Bane was quite that desperate for funds…
Nick came to a dark opening on his right and paused, looked in. It was just a little cavelet, not much bigger than a walk-in closet, with a stone bench built into the black stone wall and going right around from one side to the other. The light from the burning cresset out in the main "hallway" reached it only dimly. Nick had run into these in other parts of the "anteroom chambers" over the past few hours, and often enough they were in places where you might hear something if you stayed there long enough. So he went in, and sat down, and spent a little while more just listening.
His head turned as, down the corridor, in the direction from which he had come, he heard voices, and the sound of soft footsteps approaching. At first Nick was torn, and thought about leaving… not sure I want to meet anybody right now… But he was also feeling a little lazy, and a little curious, especially as the voices got closer. One was a guy, one a girl, though her voice was not that light-it had a husky sound. So far he had tended to keep to himself in Deathworld, except for a few chance encounters such as that with Shade, but maybe it would be better to start putting aside that tendency down here.