Chapter 170: Measurements

I did not tell her. I was going to, and then something happened that made it very difficult to tell her anything, because about a week after I got back, a young woman from Xue Ningzhi's belief office published a report calling Pang a fraud.

— • —

Her name was Ling. She was twenty-four, exact, extremely good at her job, and had been sent round the eastern provinces to survey what the office calls false legends with an economic effect — which is to say, any lie about me that somebody was making money from.

There are, it turns out, four hundred and eleven of those. She had catalogued all of them. The report was very thorough.

The Greenmarch doorway was entry one, because it was the oldest and the most famous and the most obviously false, and she had written it up with a rigour that I could tell, even from the first page, was going to be a problem.

THE GREENMARCH DOORWAY: A FRAUD.

The claim that the Calamity passed through the doorway is unsupported by any record. The claim of his height is false (see measurements, attached). The proprietor has collected an estimated forty-one thousand coppers over thirteen years under false pretences. The ledger kept on the premises contains visitor testimony that is, without exception, either hearsay or retraction. Recommendation: the premises be required to remove the signage.

It went out down every thread. By the end of the week there were two councils asking whether they should do something about the doorway, and a man in the Greenmarch square shouting that he wanted his two coppers back from nine years ago.

Pang sent a note. It said: Well, that's torn it.

— • —

Yun Shu read the report at breakfast and went very quiet in a way I did not like.

"It's good work," she said.

"Is it?"

"It's excellent work. Look at this." She turned it round. "She measured it. Four times, at different times of day, because wood moves. She's got a column for humidity." She put a finger on the table. "Two hundred and six sworn statements in that ledger and she's gone through every one and categorised it. She's found the Reedmoor cooper arguing with himself and she's flagged it as internally inconsistent testimony."

"It is internally inconsistent."

"It's the best thing in the book," said Yun Shu, and then stopped, and looked at me, and I watched her realise what she'd said.

"...You've read the book," she said.

"I went to Greenmarch."

"When?"

"Two weeks ago. Tao Tao found your ferry tickets in the tea tin."

Yun Shu put her face in both hands and made a noise I have heard from her perhaps three times in our whole marriage, and which is not really a word.

"All of it?" she said, through her fingers.

"All nine."

"Oh, no."

"The one about the room," I said. "The not being cold."

"Lin Bo, I am going to put you in the soup."

"I know," I said, and she lowered her hands, and she was crying a bit and laughing a bit and very red, and I have never in my life wanted to hold on to anybody harder.

"It was supposed to be the one place," she said. "That's all. Everybody writes about you as if you're the sky. I wanted somewhere I could write down you were five foot seven and burnt the onion and have it just sit there with all the other disappointed people. And now some child from Ningzhi's office wants to take the sign down and the book with it, because it's a fraud." She wiped her face. "And the worst of it is she's right. On every single point she's right. I would have written that report myself at her age. I'd have written it worse."

"Would you?"

"I'd have left out the humidity column," said Yun Shu, and then laughed properly, and got up. "I have to go to Greenmarch."

"Why?"

"Because she's done excellent work," said Yun Shu, "and she's missed one thing, and I have spent my whole life being the one person who checks the thing everyone else missed, and I am not going to stop now just because the thing is about my husband."

— • —

She went on the third ferry. I went with her, because she said I could come as long as I didn't speak, which is the terms I get for most things now.

Ling was there, in Pang's shop, with her measuring rod and her report and the look of a person who has come to see a fraud shut down and is finding it more difficult than expected, because Pang had made her tea and was being extremely nice to her.

Yun Shu walked in and held out her hand.

"Yun Shu. I ran the Accuracy Division."

Ling went white.

"I've read your reports," she said. "All of them. We study them. The Lin Bo case files — two hundred and six — "

"Then you know I'm going to ask you about your sourcing," said Yun Shu, and sat down at the corner table. "Show me the first page."

Ling showed her.

"The claim that the Calamity passed through the doorway is unsupported by any record," Yun Shu read. "What records did you check?"

"The office logs. His travel records. The published itineraries for every year since—"

"Since the tournament."

"Yes."

"And before the tournament?"

Ling hesitated. "There aren't any. He was a clerk. Nobody recorded where a clerk went."

"No," said Yun Shu. "They didn't." She reached across and opened Pang's ledger, not to the middle where her own entries were, but right to the front. The very first page. "So you'd want another source. And the only other source there is, is the man who owns the door." She turned the book round. "Did you read the first entry?"

"It's in the proprietor's hand. It's self-interested testimony."

"It's dated," said Yun Shu. "Read it."

Ling read it out, slowly.

"Year of the long rain. A clerk from the Bureau came through on the tax survey. There were stories going round already that he'd killed a demon lord and was huge. I did not know what size he'd be. I widened the door that morning, just in case, because it seemed rude not to. He came in about noon and was about five foot seven and looked at the door and looked at me and said, 'You didn't have to do that.' I said I'd heard stories. He said, 'So has everyone,' and paid for the fence post he'd come about, and left. Nice man. Very tired. I have kept the door as it is. — Pang."

Nobody said anything.

I sat in the corner, which was my only job, and tried to remember a fence post, and a carpenter, and a morning in the year of the long rain, and could not. I had walked through a great many doors that year. I was a nobody on a survey.

"I don't remember it," I said. I was not supposed to speak.

"You wouldn't," said Pang, not unkindly. "You were having a very bad year."

— • —

"So the doorway claim is true," Yun Shu said, to Ling, gently. "He passed through it. It was widened to accommodate him. Both clauses are accurate. The sign doesn't say he's seven feet tall. The visitors say that. Somebody painted a line on the frame about eleven years ago and it's been argued about in that book ever since." She closed the ledger. "The only false thing on the premises is a belief, and a belief isn't a fraud. It's just wrong. Proprietors aren't responsible for their customers being wrong."

Ling stared at the page.

"It's the first entry," she said. "I didn't — I went to the claims. I went straight to the statements."

"Everybody goes straight to the statements," said Yun Shu. "That's why I always read the first page first. It's the one nobody has bothered lying on yet." She stood up. "It's still very good work. The humidity column's showing off, but it's the good kind of showing off. Keep it."

Ling looked at her like somebody had handed her a sword.

"What do I do with the report?"

"Correct it," said Yun Shu. "Publish the correction in the same place, the same size. Entry one: claim verified, first-hand testimony, year of the long rain. And leave the rest of your four hundred and ten exactly as they are, because I'd bet you're right about most of them." She paused at the door. "And then come and visit the Records sometime, because they've got a woman there called Ninth Pen who I think you'd like very much, and who would enjoy the humidity column even more than I did."

— • —

Pang changed the sign. Ling suggested the wording, which I think is the funniest thing that happened that whole year.

HERE THE CALAMITY THAT WALKS PASSED THROUGH Year of the Long Rain. He Was Five Foot Seven. The Door Was Widened Anyway. He Said It Didn't Need To Be. 2 Coppers (Children 1) (Returned Souls Free)

Visitors doubled. Pang says it's the honesty. Ji Lan says it's because a true story about a man being unimpressive is funnier than a false one about him being huge, and people will walk four days for a funny true thing where they'd only walk two for a big false one.

The seven-foot line is still on the frame. Pang won't paint over it. CLAIMED and NO IT ISN'T are still under it, and there's a fourth line now, in a very small square hand:

Five foot seven. I checked.

— • —

The warm — late.

I made the soup. I was careful with the onion. Yun Shu noticed, which is the point.

"You're not going to stop going," I said.

"No."

"You're going to keep writing in it."

"Yes." She ate. "I'll sign them now. There's no point not."

"You don't have to sign them."

"I know I don't." She put the bowl down. "Do you want to know why I started? The actual reason, not the nice one in the book."

"Yes."

"Because I spent two years trying to prove you were a fraud," said Yun Shu, "and I lost two hundred and six times, and every single time I lost I learned something true about you that I couldn't put in a report because the reports only had room for whether you were lying." She picked the bowl back up. "It's a lot of true things to have nowhere to put. That book was the first place I found that wanted them."

I didn't say anything for a while.

"Five foot seven," I said.

"Five foot seven," said Yun Shu, and leaned against me. "I checked."