Chapter 21: Bai Qing’s Challenge
Ten days before we left for the capital, a sword went through my door.
Not a person with a sword. A sword. It came through the wood of my front door, point-first, hummed there for a second, then withdrew, and a voice on the other side said, cold and clear and absolutely furious:
"Lin Bo. Come out and fight me, or I’ll come in and make you."
I opened the door, because it was that or lose the door.
Standing in the courtyard was a young woman in travel-worn fighting leathers, a real sword now back in her hand, her dark hair tied up tight for battle, her whole body wound like a spring. She was not glamorous like Ji Lan or composed like Yun Shu. She was honed. Everything about her — the calluses, the scars, the way she stood balanced on the balls of her feet(Through why balls???) — said I have trained every single day of my life. And everything about her face said and I am about to make you regret yours.
"Bai Qing," she said, like the name was a challenge by itself. "Sword Hall of the Eastern Reach. I have given my life to the blade. Twenty years. I have bled for every scrap of glory I own, earned it stroke by stroke, the only honest way there is." Her jaw tightened. "And then I hear about you. A man who can’t fight. Who admits he can’t fight. Who ’sneezes’ and topples demons. Who ’stumbles’ and steals a Storm-Marshal’s trousers. Getting more glory in a month than I’ve earned in twenty years, for deeds you didn’t do." Her sword came up, level with my chest. "I don’t know how you’re faking it. I don’t care. But I will not stand in a world where a fraud out-glories an honest blade. Fight me. Right now. And when you can’t — when the great demon-slayer goes down to one real strike — the whole continent will finally see what you are."
It was, I have to say, a completely reasonable position. I respected it. I agreed with it. I was a fraud, and an honest fighter deserved better than to lose glory to me.
"You’re right," I told her. "About all of it. I can’t fight. There’s no technique. I’m a clerk. So please — don’t fight me. You’ll only get hurt, and not by me, by the—" I stopped. By the belief. I couldn’t explain it. "Please. Just don’t. I’d lose. I’d love to lose. But it never works out that way and I don’t want you caught in it."
Bai Qing’s eyes went flat with anger.
"Coward’s words," she said. "Beg all you like. The fraud always begs." And she came at me.
I want to be fair to Bai Qing, because what happened next was not her fault, and it broke something in her that I spent a long time afterward trying to fix.
She was extraordinary. In the half-second she crossed the yard I saw more skill than I’d seen in my whole life — a strike so fast and clean and perfect that a real cultivator would have had to work to meet it. She was everything she said she was. Twenty honest years, coming down in one flawless cut.
And of course, by now, the courtyard was full of people. It always is (Which I still think is work of that Damn Scroll). Hundreds of them, packed at the gate, leaning over the walls — the demon-slayer in a duel, the event of the day — and every single one of them knew, with total certainty, that they were about to watch the great Lin Bo do something incredible.
So when her perfect strike came down, and I did what I always do — flinched, threw my arms up, and tried to fall over backward out of the way —
— the belief took it.
My panicked flailing arms, charged by the certainty of hundreds, came up in what looked to every witness like a flawless and impossibly casual deflection. My terrified stumble backward read as an effortless, contemptuous sidestep. Her flawless cut met nothing, slid off the empty air where belief said a master had simply chosen not to be, and her own twenty years of perfect momentum carried her past me, off balance, for the first time in her life.
And then I sneezed.
You know what the sneeze does by now.
The belief-charged gust caught her mid-stumble and put her on her back in the dirt, sword spinning out of her hand to land point-down, quivering, ten feet away. In front of hundreds of people. In front of the whole continent through the Records.
The great swordswoman Bai Qing, twenty honest years of the blade, defeated in under two seconds by a clerk who had been actively trying to fall over.
The gold letters bloomed. The crowd roared. And Bai Qing lay in the dirt of my courtyard, staring up at the sky, and I watched something far worse than losing happen to her face.
I watched her stop understanding the world.
Because she hadn’t lost to a better fighter. She could have borne that. She’d lost to a man doing nothing — to flailing, to a stumble, to a sneeze — and the not-understanding of it, the sheer impossibility, was tearing through twenty years of everything she’d believed about effort and skill and honest glory.
I crossed the yard fast and crouched down by her, ignoring the cheering. "It wasn’t real," I said quietly, just for her. "I told you. I didn’t do anything. I flailed. You’re a hundred times the fighter I’ll ever be — I’m not a fighter at all. Please. You have to believe me. You didn’t lose to skill. There is no skill. There’s just—" I gestured helplessly at the screaming crowd, at the gold letters, at the whole insane machine of it. "Them."
Bai Qing turned her head and looked at me. The fury was gone. Underneath it was something rawer and more lost — a person who had built her entire life on a foundation that had just turned out to be standing on someone else’s quicksand.
"...You’re not lying," she whispered. She could see it. The honest ones always can, eventually. "You really did nothing. You’re as confused as I am."
"More," I said. "I promise you. So much more."
She lay there a moment longer. Then she sat up, retrieved her quivering sword, sheathed it, and looked at me with a new and terrible determination that I would come to know very well.
"Then I’m not leaving," Bai Qing said. "Not until I understand it. Whatever’s really happening here — this thing that beat me that isn’t you — I have to know what it is. I have to face it for real." She set her jaw. "I’m coming to the capital. And before that tournament’s done, demon-slayer, I’m going to get one honest fight out of this world if it kills me."
Behind me, Scroll sighed happily. "Another one. Talent, your cast is getting wonderful."
I put my face in my hands, sitting in the dirt, crowd still roaring around me, and wondered when, exactly, I had acquired a cast.
