Chapter Text

"Hey, Cio."

"Mike? It's been ages since I've seen you use a phone to actually make a call."

"Text messages aren't safe." There was no way to make that sentence sound reasonable, was there?

"What?" Cio was worried. Good Cio. "Mike, is everything okay?"

"I fucked up."

"Tell me."

"Sein pulled more bullshit."

"Your pronunciation has improved."

"Yeah. I googled their name. Asked whether they were German. They didn't like that."

"What?"

"Turns out there's a reason they haven't told me anything about themselves in two years. They're a fucking con artist."

"What? Slow down, Mike. Start from the beginning."

So I started from the beginning. Cio understood, but she wasn't as convinced I was, yet. She asked about details, phrasing and timing, the way our discussions had gone, as though my conclusions might be wrong. Before she could ask me to read the entire chatlog out loud, I hung up.

After reading The Shadow of the Wind, I followed it up with Chesscourt Manor. By the time I went to sleep, I had finished that as well, and was halfway into The Mainspring, the second book in the series.

After waking up at four AM from a vaguely Chesscourt-related nightmare, I resumed reading. I had just finished The Creatures of the Plains, the fourth book, when I realized that it was already 11:30 am, which meant that I had missed most of my lectures for the day. I didn't mind. I was engrossed.

Friday ended with Other Mirrors.

Saturday started with The Sea of Glass, and ended with Chesscourt Regained.

On Sunday morning, I started reading The Northern Caves with tear-filled eyes. I hadn't eaten for three days. I knew something was wrong with the way I wasn't hungry at all. In a moment of gallows humour, I thought that at least I wasn't on any drugs.

I wonder whether I would have slept that night, whether I would have put the book down at all, if Cio hadn't knocked on my door.

"Hey Mike."

"Hey." Though I had left my seat to get the door, I had done so with a loose page of The Northern Caves in hand, and was still reading.

"Look at me, Mike."

Reluctantly, I did. It was almost startling to see something else than black letters on off-white paper.

"Mike, I say this as a friend. You look terrible."

I probably did. I had huge bags under my eyes, and visibly had not showered for two days at least. I made a weak attempt to crack a joke. "What is this, an intervention?"

"Your phone was dead, and I had a feeling I should check up on you. But—holy shit is that TNC?" She grabbed the sheet out of my hand. "You're on page 1143?"

I nodded weakly. I hadn't really kept track of the page numbers, but she was right.

"Okay, this is an intervention now. Take a shower. I'll make some food in the meantime."

Cio was good people.

"Tell me what this is, Mike. You're behaving as though you went through a bad breakup."

I turn this statement over in my head. Thoughts move more slowly with a full stomach, and it takes a while for me to process what Cio has asked and why she has asked it. "Oh, the Sein thing."

"What did you think I was talking about?"

"No, I-" I chuckled. "I'm just a bit beside myself right now. I suppose three days of Chesscourt can do that to people. I don't think those books are very good, but they induce one hell of a trance."

"Yeah, that figures. This was far, far worse than your usual reading binges, though."

"Was it?" I tried to remember. "That one time when I read The Lord of the Rings—"

"No, you were done with that one in two days, and you didn't stop eating."

"Huh. Maybe the Sein thing did have something to do with it."

"It always seemed to me as though you weren't that close."

"We didn't know much about each other, but I spent so much time with them. Do you know how many words I wrote to them? I don't, because we switched chat clients midway through, but I must have read a hundred books they got for me. Seems you can't spend that much time without forging some kind of connection."

Cio nodded. I opened my mouth, ready to rant, and closed it again. Then, I reconsidered. There was no stopping this. "Maybe it was worse because of the way it went down. I could have let that sleeping dog lie, I think, but there had been too many coincidences. Too much bullshit. Sure, Sein had only been my internet pen pal, and I should have been able to handle a pen pal ending the friendship. They didn't just end the friendship, Cio. They had been some kind of manipulating sociopath the entire time. Wait, I've got to show you this."

I got out my phone before I remembered that the battery was dead.

"Anyway. They manipulated some internet dudes into giving out the contact details of the guy who uploaded The Northern Caves and all that other stuff, and when I asked them about it, do you know what they said?"

Cio raised a single eyebrow. I got the message: she would stay and listen, but she wouldn't enable me by answering my rhetorical questions.

"They said that it was "what they do". Who the fuck defines themselves by their tendency to lie to people?"

"Alright, Mike, I got it. Sein was bad news."

"Damn right they were."

"You're in some kind of anger feedback loop here. You might want to stop here and start thinking about the next step after you've gotten some distance."

I nodded reluctantly. Despite my righteous anger, I knew that Cio was right, as usual.

She smiled. "Change of topic, then. I hadn't heard that you got the books already. May I look through them?"

"Sure. You won't find anything on the publishers, though, or anything else useful."

Cio leafed through the books for a few minutes in silence. "They do seem pretty old."

"Yeah. I suppose that might have been faked, though."

"It might have been. Do you still want to find out where these came from?"

"I paid good money for them, didn't I? Might as well get a sense of what they're worth."

Cio smiled again. "How would you feel about going to an antiquarian bookstore? An antiquarian might be able to get an estimate of their age."

I had always held the preconception that antiquarian bookstores were dusty, sparsely-lit places. It just didn't seem right to blast antique objects with modern electrical light. Of course, the owner of Smith and Willum had a business to run, and entertained such preconceptions only when they led to profit. It turned out that sparse lighting was bad for business, and as a result, Smith and Willum resembled an art gallery, except that there was a larger number of objects on display.

The man whom I assumed to be Smith further contradicted my concept of an antiquarian. He was in his mid-thirties, clean-shaven and sharply dressed. He wasn't absorbed in studying an old book, but gave us his full attention from the moment we came in.

"I'm Cio Cielle. We spoke on the phone."

"The appraisal, right? May I see the books?"

We hadn't brought all of the books with us, rather choosing only those whose age would truly be interesting. Among those was Ashes On Mars, which seemed as though it had been published long before Mr Nobody came out, as well as the first book of the Chesscourt series, which similarly predated its work of origin.

The antiquarian looked over the books in a methodical and efficient manner. After checking for a printed publishing date without success, he checked the binding and compared the paper to several samples he brought from the back. He didn't bother to explain the process to us, and it was obvious that questions would only waste his time. Nevertheless, I was intrigued. There seemed to be a number of techniques to date books which I had not been able to find in my shallow internet research on the topic.

Finally, he looked up from his work. "These books aren't antiques by any stretch. From the binding methods used and the state the paper was in, I would guess this one-" he indicated Chesscourt Manor "-is no more than fifty years old. The other one might be thirty years old at most."

Cio nodded. "Early seventies and early nineties, respectively. Could you offer any estimates for how old they are at the least?"

"That is, of course, a far more difficult estimate to make. Innovations in the field of bookbinding happen slowly, and paper can age faster depending on the circumstances. I don't think any of those books is less than ten years old. I might extend it to twenty, in the case of the older one."

We exchanged a glance. While this estimate didn't tell us much about Ashes on Mars, in the case of Chesscourt Manor, it was a death sentence for the fanfiction theory.

"Would it be possible to fake that kind of age?", Cio asked.

"Certainly. Under strong UV light, among some other conditions, the ink will fade faster. A skilled artisan might use old paper, which would make even radiocarbon dating methods unreliable. Of course, such an effort would only be justified in the case of books of great worth, which are usually well-known enough that fakes could be spotted by checking for minor details."

I opened my mouth for the first time. "You don't think these books are worth anything, then."

"No. I'll admit that what appears to be a mass-market paperback without even the author's name printed on it is a curiosity. Also, each of them bears the mark of a so-called unpublished library, which is certainly mysterious. However, there's no demand for unknown books."

I had prepared another book in case of this result. I put The Grasshopper Lies Heavy on the counter. "How about this one? It's mentioned in the Philip K. Dick classic The Man in the High Castle."

Cio shot me a look, and I felt somewhat guilty. I hadn't talked about this strategy with her beforehand.

The antiquarian thumbed through the book. "Interesting. Hardcover, seems like a first edition, and it bears all the same marks as the other books. I understand that this book is generally held to be fictional. Where did it come from?"

I shrugged. "We don't know, exactly. We were hoping that this visit might clear up some of our questions."

"I fear I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I can estimate the book's age, and if I thought it was worth anything, I could put a price on it. I don't think there's any specialist in the world who could tell you which printing press it came from."

Cio nodded. "Thank you very much for your time, then."

When we were outside again, Cio turned to me in what I hoped to be mock anger. "I don't think that was very wise."

"I hoped we might gain some more information. What did we have to lose?"

Cio scoffed. "Haven't you noticed that this is starting to seem more and more like a plot?"

"Are you becoming paranoid as well?"

"Not a scheme. I mean that this seems like the plot of a novel."

"A novel." I said flatly.

"Think about it. We've been presented with a mystery that is too impossible to be mundane. There are two options at this point. Either there's a massive conspiracy producing fake books somewhere, which means we're in a thriller à la Dan Brown. In this case, telling the antiquarian too much is a really, really stupid idea at best, and Lethal Genre Blindness at worst. With his specialized knowledge about old books, it's likely that the antiquarian knows someone who knows someone who's involved, and that person is going to off us for leaking this stuff."

I raised my eyebrows. "What's the other option?"

"The books came straight from some enchanted bookshelf in Diagon Alley, and now that we told an unrelated muggle, the Masquerade is in danger." Cio laughed. "The thriller option still holds up, though. Someone is investing resources into this, and we have no clue who is doing it or what the motives behind it are."

"I don't think so. If this is a thriller, where are the corpses? This far into the mystery, there should have been at least one death to provide suspense."

Cio considered this. "Maybe we just haven't seen the corpse."

"An unseen corpse might as well be nonexistent from a literary standpoint."

"No, I mean, what if we aren't the point of view characters? After all, we are pretty boring."

I buried my face in my hands. "Now I remember. You literally wrote a book about this."

"And a sequel to that book. You might consider me the expert."

"Enlighten me, expert. Who is the main character?"

"If I had to guess, it's Sein."

I looked at her in wordless disbelief.

"Why not? Sein is full of contradictions. For one, Sein sought you out specifically to find a friend, only to push you away with creepy observations. Secondly, Sein downloads several gigabytes' worth of ebooks every month without the intention of reading them. Contradictions are vital to keep a main character interesting, and Sein delivers."

"That is... absurd doesn't begin to describe it. I mean, this entire discussion is absurd, but your arguments are absurd on top of being wrong."

Cio was grinning widely. "Can't deal with it, hmm? You're now torn between keeping your distance from Sein because Sein wronged you, and getting closer to be relevant to the story again. Ironically, this inner conflict makes you more interesting, and therefore more likely to be a point of view character."

"No. Just... No."

"Face it: your further behaviour should be informed by literary analysis. For example, you know that trope where hitting people on the head is a harmless and reliable way of knocking them out? That's just one of the many ways—"

There was only one way to shut Cio up now: changing the course of the conversation entirely. "There's a third option."

"What?"

"You said we were either in a thriller or a fantasy novel. But with this conversation, a third option became more likely."

"Which is?"

"We're in something so metafictional that you can't trust genre conventions. Something so post-modern that there's no such thing as an answer to the central mystery, and your observations are meaningless. In other words, something that might have been written by you."

"Are you making fun of my work?"

"Exactly. And in this case, we are probably the main characters."

"Because Sein isn't Genre Savvy enough!"

"I guess."

Cio's expression became pensive, then annoyed. I laughed. I had beaten her at her own game. If the hypothetical book which contained reality was genre-aware enough for us to have this conversation, any clichés we pointed out were likely to be avoided later, or might even be ironically turned against us. Further discussion on the topic was not only meaningless, but could prove to be actively harmful.

On the rest of the way back, we talked about more mundane topics.