Chapter 8: The Fact-Checker Cometh
She was waiting at my door when I got home.
This was strange for several reasons. The first was that nobody waits at my door, because until that week nobody knew where my door was. The second was that she was clearly not a fan — there was no notebook, no shining eyes, no shrine-building energy whatsoever. She stood by the laundry’s entrance with her hands folded, perfectly still, dressed in the crisp dark robes of someone official, and she looked at me the way a tax collector looks at a number that doesn’t add up.
"Lin Bo," she said. Not a question. A confirmation, ticked off a list.
"...Yes?"
She produced a token from her sleeve and held it up. Jade, faintly glowing, stamped with a seal I recognized from a hundred Bureau forms — the seal of the Heavenly Records themselves.
"Yun Shu," she said. "Accuracy Division. I’m here regarding a recently filed legend of which you are the subject." She tucked the token away and took out instead a brush, a slim black ledger, and the air of a woman who has already decided how this conversation ends. "I have some questions. This’ll go faster if you don’t lie to me. People always lie to me. It never works."
I should explain who Yun Shu was, because it matters, and because the irony of it nearly broke me.
The Accuracy Division is the part of the Heavenly Records that hunts down false legends and corrects them. They debunk frauds. They deflate inflated heroes. They find the crack in a story and pull until the whole thing comes apart. It is, in other words, exactly my old job — except where I was a sad little clerk shaving rumors off provincial nobles for two coppers, the Accuracy Division does it at the level of the heavens, for the whole world, and they are very, very good at it.
A woman whose entire career was deleting fake fame had come to delete mine.
I could have kissed her.
"Yes," I said, with feeling. "Yes. Please. Come in. I need to tell you everything, and I need you to know up front that I completely agree with you, and whatever you’ve come to prove, I will help you prove it, because the legend is fake, all of it, every single word—"
Yun Shu’s brush paused over her ledger. Her eyes lifted to mine, flat and tired and not even slightly fooled.
"They always say that too," she said.
We sat at my tiny table. She declined tea. She opened her ledger to a fresh page and began.
"The legend states you felled a demon king with a single breath. Describe the demon king."
"There was no demon king."
She wrote something down. "Describe the demon king’s appearance at the moment you felled him."
"There was no demon king. It was a mugger. A small nervous man with a bad knife and one shoe, who I knocked over by sneezing."
"Mm." She did not look up. "And the parting of the clouds? The rearranging of the stars?"
"That didn’t happen either! Bards made that up! I sneezed, he fell over, he ran away, that’s the whole thing, I swear it on—"
"On what?" she said, and now she did look up, and her gaze was sharp as a filing pin. "Frauds always swear on something. It tells me what they think is sacred. Go on. Finish the sentence. What do you swear it on?"
I opened my mouth. And I closed it. Because the true answer — I swear it on the noodle shop I’m never going to get to open now — was the most pathetic thing a man had ever almost said out loud, and I couldn’t.
Yun Shu watched me fail to finish, and wrote one careful line, and I had the sinking feeling it said something like subject grew evasive when pressed.
"Here’s what I think," she said, setting her brush down, lacing her fingers. "I think you’re a clerk who learned, somewhere, somehow, a trick for inflating Renown. I think you staged an incident on Cinder Lane. I think you’ve been manufacturing a legend at a speed that should be impossible — four days, Lin Bo, from Nameless to Renowned. Do you know I have never once in eleven years seen a rise that fast that wasn’t a fraud? — and I think the false modesty, the ’oh it was nothing, it was just a mugger,’ is the cleverest part of the whole act, because it makes the crowd love you more." She tilted her head. "It’s good work. It’s the best fraud I’ve seen in years. And I’m going to take it completely apart."
And the terrible thing — the thing I could not make her understand no matter what I said — was that she was almost entirely right. Someone was manufacturing the legend at an impossible speed. There was a trick. The false modesty was making it worse.
It just wasn’t me doing it.
It was the smug, glowing scroll sitting on my windowsill, which she could not see, and which had gone very, very quiet the moment she walked in.
"Talent," Scroll murmured, just for me, in a low delighted hush. "Do you understand what just walked through your door? An official correction inquiry. From the Accuracy Division. Do you know what happens when the Heavenly Records open a formal case on a legend?" Its painted grin stretched wide. "Everybody finds out about it. Every soul in the province is about to hear that the demon-slayer is so important the heavens themselves sent an investigator." The numbers in the corner of my eye were already, impossibly, beginning to tick up. "She’s not going to take us apart, my friend. She’s about to be the best thing that ever happened to our reach."
I looked at Yun Shu — competent, certain, armed with facts, the one person in the entire world who wanted the same thing I did, who was about to spend all her considerable skill trying to free me from this nightmare.
And I understood, with a cold sinking dread, that she was going to make it so much worse.
"Ms. Yun," I said weakly. "Before you open a formal case. Can I just— can I explain how this is going to go?"
Yun Shu was already stamping the first page.
"Correction Inquiry, opened," she said, not looking up. "I’ll need a week. Don’t leave the province."
Above us, the number climbed.
