New Prague keeps everything. The University Archive holds fourteen separate accounts of the Document Wars, and the staff on the certification floor will tell you, without any visible embarrassment, that all fourteen are accurate and that none of them match. In most cities that admission would be a scandal. Here it is the product.
Between 2028 and 2041 the archives burned, and what burned with them was not only the record but the ability to check one record against another. Everyone knows the consequence because everyone lives inside it: an intact pre-Upheaval document is wealth, remembering the original is status, and faking either has been a working profession for thirty years. What almost nobody outside the trade understands is that the wealth does not sit in the paper. It sits in the chain of custody attached to the paper, the chain is issued by third parties, and the third parties bill on a cycle.
So here is the manual. Six steps, tested against people who have used them at counters in this city, and then the fee schedule. The fee schedule is the story. Read the steps if you have paper. Read the schedule regardless.
One. Work out what you are actually selling. It is not the content. A pre-Upheaval municipal ledger is not valuable because of what it says about water in 2019. Twenty brokers can tell you what it says and nine of them are guessing accurately. It is valuable because somebody can demonstrate an unbroken line from the shelf it sat on to your hands. Couriers in this trade get hired to move a master chip whose copies are already everywhere, and the client is paying for the line, not the file. Once that lands, you stop protecting the object and start protecting the line.
Two. Copy it three times, in three different media, before you show it to anyone. The Ashkeepers have run this rule since the Fellowship formed and they run it as an article of faith. Use it as arithmetic. The instant you request an assessment, the request becomes a record with your name on it, and that record now sits inside an institution with an interest in the outcome. Three copies, three media, three holders who are not each other, is the only leverage a private seller ever gets.
Three. Lead with the custody line, never the document. Every assessor on the floor has a way of asking to see the object first, and every one of them is gracious about it. Do not. Hand over the line: who held it, in what year, under what roof, with what corroboration. If your line is good the object becomes a formality. If your line is thin, showing the object early hands the assessor a description they can circulate for free.
Four. Buy the attestation that names a person. Vera Holanova has worked the University counter for twenty-two years, a loupe on a cord and a habit of turning a page face down before she turns it face up. Her signature travels. Collectors in four territories know it, which is why a certificate carrying it survives contact with a hostile second opinion. Institutional certificates do not travel the same way, because institutions here reorganize, and every reorganization quietly orphans the paper the old body signed. Holanova put it to me plainly. A name can be asked a question. A letterhead cannot.
Five. Watch the lapse date, because that is where they live. A Class 3 attestation at the University counter costs four hundred credits flat plus two percent of assessed value, and it holds for eighteen months. Class 2 runs nineteen hundred, holds for three years, and requires two independent media comparisons you are expected to arrange yourself. Class 1 is priced on application. Nobody publishes what happens at the end of the eighteen months, so I asked the floor for a year of its own numbers and eventually got a version of them. Seventy-one percent of certification revenue came from renewals. Twenty-nine percent came from first attestations. The archive is not in the business of establishing that things are real. It is in the business of establishing that things are still real, on a clock it sets.
Six. Sell into a dispute, never into a consensus. A record four parties are arguing about carries a premium, because each of them is pricing the version that helps them. Valentina Sereni, who has moved archive material for longer than she admits in rooms and exactly as long as she admits in ledgers, does not chase settled provenance at all. She waits for the fourteen versions to disagree in public and sells the fifteenth. It is Document War rules and she says so herself, cheerfully, as though the phrase were about somebody else.
Now the part I promised. Class 1, the certificate that opens doors, requires the applicant to deposit a reference copy with the archive. Permanently. It is written into the schedule in a sentence so bland I read past it twice. The most prestigious authentication available in this city is therefore a transaction in which you pay a fee, then pay again in the only currency your document has, and the institution that sets the price of scarcity is handed one more unit of the thing it prices.
Ondrej Bilek did not know that. He inherited three pages of a pre-Upheaval municipal water ledger from his grandmother, walked them to the counter, paid four hundred credits and two percent, and came away with a Class 3 card and a valuation that pleased him. Eleven months later a broker told him his grandmother's pages are the fourth known copy on the reference stack, and quoted accordingly. He is not angry at the archive. He keeps saying the assessment was fair, and it was. He asked me twice whether the eighteen months can be extended.