He walked up to the librarian with the huge black halo of hair, Rea Siluz, and handed her back the basic strategy book she’d told him to memorize. “Metagame,” he said.
She grinned. She had beautiful, full lips. “That was quick.”
“Quick? That took me weeks!”
“The next step shouldn’t take you so long.” She handed him a lambskin-bound book. “Hang in there with this one. It’s a bit dry.”
Kip took the book. She’d said the last one was interesting. If that had been interesting and this was dry… But he forgot his complaint as soon as he thumbed open the book. “What’s this?” he asked.
The writing in the book was odd, blocky, legible, but unnaturally cramped. And unnaturally even. Every letter looked like every other letter, whether it was at the beginning of the word, the middle, or the end.
“It’s an Ilytian book. Not more than five years old.” She glowed, genuinely excited. “They’ve figured out how to copy books with a machine. Think of it! Apparently it’s hideously difficult to make the first copy, but after that, they can make hundreds of copies. Hundreds! In a few days! The Ilytian scribes are up in arms, afraid their craft will go extinct, but the goldsmiths and clockmakers are flocking to it. They say even tradesmen own books in Ilyta now.”
Strange. There was no personality to it. No human hand had inscribed these lines. It was lifeless, everything the same. No extra space after a difficult sentence to give a reader time to grapple with the implications. No space in the margins for notes or illuminations. No particular care taken on a memorable line or passage to highlight it for a tired reader. Only naked ink and the unfeeling stamp of some mechanical roller. Even the smell was different.
“I think I’m going to get bored even faster,” Kip said. “It makes a book so… tedious.”
“It’s going to change the world.”
Not to something better. “Can I ask something rude?” Kip asked.
“Generally when you preface a question that way, no, you shouldn’t,” Rea Siluz said.
Kip tried to figure out a more diplomatic way to ask if she was spying on him. He looked up, thinking. “Um, then… do lists of the books students are reading get passed on?”
“If librarians wish to keep their jobs, absolutely. Sometimes we neglect to write down all the titles, or miss things, however.”
“Ah. Can you miss that I’ve moved on to this volume?”
“Want someone to underestimate your skills, huh?” she asked.
“I don’t know if it’s possible to underestimate my skill at this point,” Kip said. “I’m hoping my skill takes a leap sometime soon and surprises everyone. Including myself.”
“If you want to take a leap, you have to start playing.”
Kip opened his hands, helpless.
“I’ll teach you,” she said. “At the end of my shift, I can stay late for an hour or two. I’ll bring decks.”
So now, a week later, he was waiting for Rea to come play against him as she had every day.
She came out and gestured Kip to follow her to one of the side rooms. “I’ve figured out your problem,” she said.
“I’m not smart enough for this game?” Kip asked.
She laughed. She had a nice laugh, and Kip was nicely infatuated with her. Orholam, was he fickle or what? But the women here had been a handful of heavenly beads nicer to him than the girls back home. He wondered if things had been unfairly bad before because he’d had the baggage of his mother back home—or if they were unfairly good now because he had the father he had. He couldn’t tell—and he never would. He was who he was, and nothing could change it, nothing could tell him how things would have been if his parents had been different, normal.
“I doubt it’s that, Kip. Every card has a story.”
“Oh no.”
“Every card is based on a real person, or a real legend, anyway. But a number of the cards you’ve described to me are archaic, pulled from use years ago. They’re sometimes known as the black cards, or the heresy cards. The odds of the entire game have shifted without those cards. Some cards can’t be countered in ways they easily could have when those cards were in play, and so forth. You can’t tell anyone you’ve been playing with those cards, Kip. Playing with heresy is a good way to get a visit from the Office of Doctrine. But I’ll tell you this: you won’t win against someone playing with black cards. The basics are still the same, but all the deep strategy books in the last two hundred years have been written around the holes that yanking those cards has created.”