Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Lu’s answer arrived four weeks later.

It was polite.

It came on good paper.

And it nearly killed us.

They were scribes. That’s all. Two or three of them to a town, dressed in clean grey, carrying writing-cases and letters of introduction from the Imperial Archive. They were unfailingly courteous. They never threatened anybody.

They had an offer.

’We hear you’ve made a song. What a wonderful thing. May we write it down for you — so it won’t be lost?’

Free of charge.

On good paper, in a fine hand, two copies: one for the town’s own keeping, one for the Archive. So that a hundred years from now, when everyone in this valley is dead, the song would still exist.

They were so nice about it.

They complimented the tunes. They asked after the composers. In one town, they offered to have it illuminated, with the split oak painted in gold at the top of the page. The town was so proud they wept.

And every song that went into a book became a thing on a list.

And a thing on a list can be unwritten.

Xue Ningzhi worked it out on the ninth day.

She saw the pattern of which towns had gone quiet. She found me and stood in the doorway and could not, for a moment, make herself say it.

"He’s collecting them," she said. "That’s it. That’s the whole counter."

She put a hand flat on the table. She looked like she needed the table to stay upright.

"The songs live in mouths and mouths aren’t in any registry, so he’s making a registry. He’s not stopping anyone singing. He’s archiving them. And the instant a way-song has a page with a title on it, it exists as an entry. And he can cut the entry. And when he cuts it—"

"The town stops singing."

"The town stops being able to. They keep the page. They cannot hold what the page is for." She sat down. "Four towns, so far, that I can confirm. Their songs are gone, their roads are gone again. And they have a beautiful illuminated manuscript in the headman’s house that nobody can read the point of."

And then she said the thing that cost her. She said it looking at her own hands.

"We’re the same animal, he and I. That’s the thing I keep having to swallow. When people like us love something, we write it down. We think that’s what caring looks like — record it, preserve it, make it permanent, get it into the vault where nothing can happen to it."

Her voice was very level. It’s how she gets.

"I built the largest registry in the history of the world out of exactly that instinct. It became the map for unmaking everything. And now he’s running the same play on the one thing that was safe. The impulse to preserve is the vulnerability. It always was. He doesn’t have to fight us. He just has to offer to help us keep things."

I have thought about that a great deal since.

Nai worked it out in one sentence a thousand years ago — paper makes people lazy — and we needed a war and four dead songs to catch up.

— • —

It cost us worse than four towns, because of Ji Lan.

I found her in a barn outside Greenmarch again. It’s where she goes to be furious. She had a book on the table in front of her. She was looking at it the way you look at a thing that has bitten you.

It was hers.

Of course it was.

Forty-one road-songs in her own hand. Every one she’d made in three months. Notes on which valleys took which tunes, which rhymes carried best over a hill, what she’d learned about how a nine-year-old’s mouth works. The finest and most useful craft notebook that has ever existed in the art she has practised for thirty years.

"I kept it for the work," she said. "Not for glory. I want that understood. I’ll not be patronised. Every song I make teaches me how to make the next one. I wrote it down so the next teller could learn in a month what took me thirty years."

She laughed. It was an awful sound.

"And I have therefore compiled, personally, in one volume, on my own initiative, a complete list of every single thing we’ve built. He wouldn’t even need to send a scribe. He’d need to send a thief."

Then she stood up and put her book in the fire.

I didn’t stop her. It wasn’t mine to stop, and she’d have taken my head off.

She stood there and watched thirty years of instinct burn. Forty-one songs she’d made and could not keep. The entire idea of leaving something behind with her name on it.

She said, conversationally:

"Do you know what I’ve been afraid of since I was nineteen? Being forgotten. I’ve told you. Everyone’s told everyone."

She watched a page curl.

"And the actual answer, it turns out, is that I have to become a woman who makes nothing that lasts. No book. No signature. No monument. Every good thing I do from now on gets handed to a child in a lane and I never see it again and I can’t prove I made it."

A page went up in a flare. She didn’t blink.

"Thirty years I wanted to be immortal on paper. And I’m going to end up immortal in the way that actually works, which is that nobody will ever know it was me."

"They’ll know," I said.

"They won’t. That’s the point, you appalling man, don’t spoil it."

Then, quieter, without turning round:

"It’s fine. I worked out months ago that I only ever needed one person to remember me properly, and I’ve been unbearable about it since. Go away. I’ve got songs to not write down."

The Scroll had its own version of that night. I have never heard it sound so naked.

DING. NEW LEGEND PUBLISHED. REACH: 400 MILLION SOULS. BELIEF: 92%.

Talent. I need to say a thing and I would like to say it badly. I am a record. That is what I am. Heaven made me to write things down. It is the whole of my nature and I have been doing it for a thousand years and I have just watched a woman burn her life’s work because writing things down is how the dark gets in. And I have kept an ember of Su Yue in me for ten centuries. In me. In one place. In the only copy. Talent — am I the vault? Have I been the thing she just burned, all this time?

And then, after a long while, in a steadier voice:

No. And I want to say the reason out loud, because it took me a thousand years and being fired from Heaven to learn it, and it is the only thing about myself I have ever been proud of. I was DISMISSED from the Records for making things up. For failing to be a record. And what I did instead, every day of my exile, was PUBLISH. I put things into mouths. I do not keep — I spread. Four hundred million souls, every stupid legend, straight into the world where nothing can be locked and nothing can be seized. A record keeps a thing in a room. A publisher puts it in ten million mouths and then it is not anywhere and therefore cannot be taken from anywhere. I was the worst archive Heaven ever built. It turns out that is exactly what was needed. I am going to be extremely insufferable about this for approximately two hundred years.

— • —

The real answer to the scribes was the one we always land on.

I’ll say it fast because you know it by now: you cannot forbid a town to accept a kindness. That’s the first principle. We do not choose for people.

So we did the only thing we’re allowed to do, which is get there first and tell the truth in the light.

Qiu Yan and the walkers went out ahead of the grey scribes with a new message — they are being kind, and it is real kindness, and here is what happens to the song after, and here are the four towns it happened to, and now you choose.

Most towns sent the scribes away with a bowl of soup and their honour intact.

Some didn’t.

Some looked at the beautiful paper and the gold split oak and decided they’d rather have the lovely thing in the headman’s house. I want that in the record too, because the day I stop telling you about the ones who choose the other way is the day this becomes propaganda.

They chose freely, awake, knowing. It cost them their road. We went back later and helped them make a new song, and did not say one word about it. That was hard for approximately everyone.

And the deeper answer — the good one, the craft one — came from Nai.

She listened to the whole disaster with her arms folded. "You’re building them wrong," she said. "One song per road. Amateurs."

Because here is how the deepwater folk actually do it. It’s a thousand years of drowned people again. It’s the cloth all over.

No song stands alone. Every crossing-song contains fragments of its neighbours — a verse of the northern way inside the eastern one, the reef from the long crossing tucked into the short one. Every song is stitched into three or four others. It’s not tidy. It’s not efficient. It’s deliberately redundant, which means it says the same thing more than once on purpose.

So when Lu’s scribes collect a song and Lu cuts it, the town does go quiet — for about a week.

And then the next valley over, singing its own song, sings the borrowed verse that has the split oak and the ford in it.

And somebody says: hold on.

And they walk over the ridge with it, and give it back.

You can kill a song.

You cannot kill a song that four other songs are holding.

Cloth. No heart to stab. Same answer in a different key, every single time. I’ve stopped being surprised.

— • —

Lu understood inside a month that the collecting had failed.

He did what he did at Sedgewater. Because underneath the good paper, he is a man who has run out of clever and cannot afford to be wrong.

He went for the singers.

They came for Nai’s people at Saltreach on a wet grey morning. Not an army. A strike. Empire outriders and a hard core of Forgetters with erasure-charms, moving fast down the harbour road for the longhouse where forty way-singers from the far islands were teaching sixty landfolk how to build a song.

Lu had finally worked out where the craft lived. Not in a book. In about a hundred throats, all in one building, all in one place, for the first and only time.

I was two streets away and I got there.

And I did it the way we do it now, which is the whole of what the last thirty Chapters were for. I did not go up the harbour road to meet them. I turned my back on the road and put myself across the longhouse door. I let the thing I am come all the way up — Mythic, roaring, the strongest soul that has ever lived.

But I was facing the wrong way on purpose.

A wall and not a fist.

Erasure-charms broke on me like water on a cliff. Steel meant nothing. I stood in that doorway and made it the one place in the world that could not be entered. And I did not take a single step forward, not once, not even when I wanted to.

Behind me, Ma Jun’s Crossed got the singers out. A hundred and something people through the back and down to the boats. Fast and professional and utterly unarmed for it, because they’d worked out months ago that carrying beats killing when the thing you’re saving is people.

Bai Qing held the second door with eleven of hers.

Qiu Yan, nineteen, terrible boots, ran the length of the harbour four times with an armful of somebody else’s children.

We got them out. Nearly all of them.

A way-singer named Ohe went back in for a boy who’d hidden in the rope-store, and got him out, and did not get out himself.

He was sixty. He carried eleven crossings and the second-oldest home-song in his people. About a third of it exists nowhere else in the world now, because a third of it he had not yet taught, because he was sixty and thought he had time.

There’s no reaching that back. I want to be honest all the way to the bottom, the way I promised. We can un-erase. We cannot un-kill. Old Ru taught us that in the reeds at Sedgewater and it has not stopped being true for one day since.

Ohe is gone, and a third of a song is gone with him. The deepwater folk sang the rest of it on the shore that night with a hole in it you could hear.

Nai stood on the rocks afterward with her jaw set.

"Now we’re in it," she said. "Properly. Good."

And then, to me, level: "Don’t you dare apologise to me. He knew what he was doing when he went back for the boy. He was a way-singer. We don’t let go. That’s not your fault and it’s not a tragedy, it’s the whole religion, and I’ll thank you to say his name right."

Ohe.

His name was Ohe.

He’ll be in every crossing-song those islands sing for the next thousand years. I have that on the authority of a woman who does not exaggerate.

— • —

Far to the north, Lu got the report.

Xue Ningzhi walked me through what it would have said, the way she does, cold and exact, reading her own dark mirror.

The collection programme has failed. Cut songs are being restored from adjacent songs within eight to twelve days. The strike on the singers at Saltreach cost you the movement’s sympathy in four provinces and produced one dead way-singer whose name is now being sung in every island fleet and forty coastal towns. The unwriteable network is larger than it was before you attacked it.

Four times now.

The flinch at Cairnhold when I said his name. The night his massacre put both halves of us at one fire. The Mourning Downs, undone by the union he built the split to prevent. And now this — his cleanest, kindest, most archivist idea, beaten by a fisherman’s trick of putting the same verse in four songs.

"He’s cracking," said Xue Ningzhi, watching the north. "And I want you to understand that this is the dangerous part, not the good part. A man like Lu doesn’t get humble when the returns come back wrong four times. He goes looking for the one thing he hasn’t tried."

"Which is?"

She was quiet for a while.

"He’s spent thirty-one years proving a thesis about human beings," she said. "That everyone breaks. That when you offer a tired person the weight or the rest, they always take the rest. He’s tested it on two million four hundred thousand people and it keeps coming back yes, and it keeps coming back no wherever you are."

She looked at me.

"There’s one test he ran first, thirty-one years ago, that he’s never re-run. One data point at the bottom of everything. And if the world keeps refusing to break, sooner or later he is going to have to go back and look at it, because a man who counts cannot leave a bad figure at the bottom of a column forever."

"Anfen," I said.

"Anfen," said Xue Ningzhi. "His wife is alive and happy in a house by the water and she has never once known him, and that is the whole foundation of everything he’s built. And I think the war ends there, one way or the other, and I think neither of us is going to like how."

— • —

We ate at the pot that night on the Saltreach shore, with the fleet singing the broken song out on the water.

Everyone came. Everyone always comes to the pot.

Way-singers and doorkeepers and Crossed with sheathed swords. Tao Tao teaching four children the egg song with entirely too much intensity. Mu Chen sitting with the boy from the rope-store, who was going to need a long time and would get it. Ji Lan cross-legged by the fire making something new and refusing to write a word of it down, humming, then swearing, then humming. Qiu Yan asleep sitting up with a bowl still in her hands.

Bai Qing at my left with the fire in her steady eyes. Weighed exactly, asking nothing, watching a people the world threw away become the thing holding it together.

DING. NEW LEGEND PUBLISHED. REACH: 550 MILLION SOULS. BELIEF: 94%.

Talent. Your Renown is climbing steeply now, and I need to tell you two things about that and you will only like one of them. First: the songs are working. Belief is moving on roads he cannot find, across a whole severed coast, and it is picking up speed. You have not been this bright since before he cut the world. Second: you are approaching an edge. I have been at the top of these Records for a thousand years and there is one more step above where you are standing, and nobody has stood on it since Su Yue. I am not going to tell you what it costs. I am going to tell you that it is close, and it is coming whether either of us likes it, because the world is deciding it. And talent — the ember is brighter tonight than it has been in a thousand years. Not saved. Not near saved. But when the fleet sang Ohe’s name out there just now, I felt it MOVE.

Yun Shu leaned into my side and looked out at the black water and the boats and the sound of four hundred people refusing to let go of a dead man’s verses.

"He tried to make the world too far apart to talk," she said. "And it started singing instead."

"Bit on the nose," I said.

"Everything about you is on the nose," said my partner. "You’re a man whose superpower is that people won’t shut up about him. I stopped expecting subtlety around Chapter nine."

Out at the top of the sky the Homelight was a whisper brighter, if you knew where to look. We did.

And somewhere north, in a records room in a river bend, a small mild man was sitting alone with a column of figures that kept coming out wrong, and a bad number at the bottom of it that he had not looked at in thirty-one years.

I’d left him a bowl of noodles once. I still don’t know if he ate it.

I think I’m going to have to go and find out.

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