Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“It’s an old tale,” Mina said, lowering herself into a chair. “Are you sure you’ve never heard it?”

“They don’t tell the old tales so much anymore, ma’am,” said Anim. “Perhaps you could enlighten me.”

“The story is about a prince who loved to go out among his subjects in disguise, to learn things that they would never have told him to his face,” said Mina, her face dancing in the lamplight shadows. “One day he returned infatuated with a peasant girl whose beauty, kindness, and intelligence had captivated him.”

“And they married, and lived happily ever after?”

Mina laughed. “The old tales rarely have such an ending, child. They have been…sanitized…even when they are occasionally related. The prince’s chancellor investigated the matter and found that the peasant girl was very much in love with, and betrothed to, a local lad.”

“What happened next?” said Anim.

“The chancellor appeared before the king with a choice: he could let the girl marry her love and live a life of happy and ignorant obscurity, one which would likely lead her to fade and her virtues to falter. Or he could exercise his autocracy to marry the girl himself, ensuring her beauty would be immortalized in oil and sculpture, that her kindness would advise the highest in the land, and that her intelligence would be nurtured, even at the cost of a broken heart. The chancellor represented the choice to his prince with two items: a simple molded clay pendant, and a beautiful necklace with a cracked diamond.”

“Which…which one did the prince choose?” Anim breathed, clearly riveted by the tale despite himself.

“The prince chose the cracked diamond,” Mina sighed. “The former peasant girl put up with ten years of luxury before stepping out a window in the highest tower of the hold.”

“Deeds and receipts, mostly. Eutilli International is very thorough about their bookkeeping.”

“Anything incriminating?”

“Not that I can see–lots of offshore stuff, outsourcing to places with lax labor laws…not exactly warm and cuddly, and unethical as hell, but not illegal.”

“Take it all. We’ll sort it out at our leisure and find out what we need.”

That was all Nellis needed to hear. He nodded to the security guards on either side of him and gave the thumbs-up signal. They’d agreed on it beforehand, and if any of the men had misgivings, they didn’t show it.

They were ready to kick that door down and execute both burglars Mozambique-style, on behalf of Eutilli Int’l., without hesitation.

A later census reveals an unusually exact number for the Formocci in the Empire: 11,632. Surviving court documents and imperial correspondence indicate that a number of important government, military, and trade posts were held by men with the distinctive -ci and -su Formocci suffixes on their names.

The next census, though, does not mention a single Formocci. Their suffixes abruptly disappear from court records as well, and later copies of earlier works that mentioned them, even in passing, appear to have been edited.

Historians still debate the meaning of this sudden and inexplicable disappearance. Many have pointed out that the disappearance of the Formocci was soon followed by the disastrous period in Imperial history known as the Barracks Anarchy, when dozens of claimants to the throne nearly destroyed the Empire through civil war. It could be that the sudden loss of experienced Formocci politicians left a power vacuum for eager claimants to fill. Some have even speculated that the Formocci were the power behind the Imperial throne, and that in their absence weak and incompetent emperors were vulnerable to coups.

But the question remains: what happened to the Formocci? Long-ago chroniclers, writing after the fall of the Empire, speculated that they had bargained the collective souls of their race for power and disappeared bodily when infernal agents came to collect. Today, though, the prevailing scholarly opinion can be summed up in a single word: genocide.

Tsupor Developments was one of the large luxury housing complexes that had sprung up after the fall of communism to cater to the crowds of nouveau-riche. The buildings weren’t to code and were stuffed full of nasty things that would turn a Westerner’s stomach, but they had all the outward trappings and there was a waiting list just to be considered for a spot.

Arranged in a grid along streets named after famous pre-communist heroes, the townhouse that Mina was looking for was listed as Rodyic 19.4. Rodyic street, named after the local prince who had fallen in battle against the Turks, building 19, number 4.

She looked up after absentmindedly walking for some time from the transit station. The buildings ended at 18; there was nothing but a pile of rubble where 19 ought to have been.