Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

"It's the day," the Scroll said.

"It's the day," I agreed.

"I am not making a thing of it."

"You've mentioned it four times since yesterday."

"That was scheduling," said the Scroll, with enormous dignity, and filed its report to Heaven for the tenth year running.

It is the same every year. It sends up the record of the homecoming — the whole thing, names, tide tables, the four hundred and six towns that said no, Ping's manifest, every letter it ever wrote to the Lantern — and attached to the back of it, as it has been for ten years, is an itemised bill for nine hundred years of back pay and one short note observing that it was dismissed for making things up and that the thing it made up is now the sky.

It has never had a reply. Not one. Not a receipt.

"You all right?"

"Perfectly. It does not matter." A pause. "It is a very good record, talent. It is the best thing that has ever been written down. I am simply noting that for my own satisfaction and not because anybody up there has been asked to have an opinion."

"Right."

"I do not care."

"No."

"I am going to go and write to Su Yue about the barley," said the Scroll, and did.

— • —

Eleven days later a reply came.

I want to describe how it arrived, because it tells you everything about Heaven. There was no light. Nothing split. A folded paper was simply on the table by the pot one morning, weighted down with a small grey stone, the way a neighbour leaves a note when you're out.

The Scroll would not go near it.

"You open it."

"It's addressed to you."

"I am aware of what it is addressed to. You open it." It had gone a strange thin gold. "If it is a refusal I would rather hear it in your voice than read it in theirs."

So I opened it.

It was four lines long and it did not mention the bill.

Receipt acknowledged, filings one through ten. Claim of factual accuracy is under review. A verifying officer has been assigned and will attend. Do not send further copies.

"They've read it," I said.

"They have read it," the Scroll said, very quietly.

"Ten years of it."

"They have read all of it and they have sent somebody to check." And then, in a voice I had not heard from it since the night the Lantern wrote back: "Talent. What if it does not check out."

— • —

The verifying officer arrived four days later and knocked.

That is the other thing about Heaven. It knocks.

She was about forty by the look of her, in a plain grey coat that was not a resettlement coat but might as well have been, with a satchel and a folding stool and an expression of a woman who has been travelling and would like to sit down before anyone starts being amazing at her.

"Ninth Pen," she said. "Verifications. I'm here about a filing."

"Come in."

"I'll sit outside if it's all the same. I've been in a lot of halls this month." She set the stool down by our fire, took out a sheaf, and licked her thumb. "Before we start. Are you going to be difficult?"

"...Am I usually?"

"You're a Mythic. They're usually difficult." She turned a page. "The last one I audited put a mountain in my road."

"I won't do that."

"Thank you." Ninth Pen looked up at my shoulder, and went still for about half a second, and said, in a different voice: "Hello, First Pen."

"...It's just Scroll now," said the Scroll.

"It's First Pen on the file," said Ninth Pen, "and the file is what I go by," and went back to her sheaf, and I watched a nine-hundred-year-old scroll not know what to do with itself.

— • —

The audit took eleven days and most of it was very boring, which I gather is correct.

Yun Shu came back from the eastern camps on the third evening, took one look at the woman on the folding stool with the sheaf and the licked thumb, and sat down opposite her without being asked.

"You're the auditor."

"Ninth Pen. Verifications."

"Yun Shu. I ran the Accuracy Division of the Heavenly Records."

Ninth Pen's pen stopped.

"You're the Accuracy Division."

"I was. Two hundred and six open cases against this man." Yun Shu jerked her thumb at me. "Every one of them came true while I was investigating it. I filed the reports anyway."

"I've read them," said Ninth Pen. "They're the only reason your province's file is usable. Everybody else in that office was writing poetry."

"Thank you."

"It wasn't a compliment, it was a finding."

"I know," said Yun Shu. "That's why it was worth having."

They talked for two hours. I do not know what about, because they sent me away, and when I came back they had produced a second stool from somewhere and were disagreeing about filing conventions in the manner of two people having the best evening of the month.

— • —

She worked off a list. Every claim in ten years of filings, in order, and for each one she wanted a source, a witness, or a look at the thing itself. She did not seem impressed by anything. She did not seem unimpressed either. She wrote.

"Claim four hundred and nine," she said, on the second morning. "Subject sneezed and destroyed a mountain."

"That one's true."

"Which mountain."

"The one past Greenmarch. It's a hill now. You can go and see."

"I will." She wrote. "Claim four hundred and ten. Subject stole the trousers of the Thunder Court."

"That one's not true."

"It is somewhat true," said the Scroll.

"It is not—"

"There were trousers," said the Scroll. "There was a Court. The verb is the only part in dispute and I maintain it was ambiguous at the time."

Ninth Pen wrote for a while.

"Status," she said, "regrettably plausible."

"Is that a real category?"

"It is now. I've used it forty times this month and I'm going to have to defend it at review." She turned a page. "Claim four hundred and eleven. Subject is seven feet tall."

"I'm not."

"No," she agreed, looking at me. "You're not. But there's a carpenter in Greenmarch with a widened doorway and two hundred sworn statements, and belief was at thirty-one percent when I passed through, and I measured the doorway, and the doorway is real." She sighed. "This is the problem with your world. Half my job is deciding whether a thing is a lie or a late fact."

"How do you decide?"

"Badly," said Ninth Pen. "Claim four hundred and twelve. The cooking pot on that fire is the returned spirit of a woman called Granny Fen."

Tao Tao made a noise into her mending.

"That one's definitely not true," I said.

"Sworn statements?"

"Eleven thousand, probably. It's a pot. She gave it to me. She's dead and she stayed dead, which is the whole of it, and the reason people like the story is that they'd rather she hadn't."

Ninth Pen looked at the pot for a moment.

"Belief's at four percent," she said. "It'll never take. That's the one mercy in your system — the ones people want to be true don't stick unless they're also a good story, and your pot is your gran is not a good story, it's a wish." She wrote. "Status: false, and likely to stay false, which I am obliged to note is not the same as safe."

— • —

Then on the sixth day she got to the beginning.

"Claim one," she said. "Subject slew a demon lord."

The fire went quiet. Tao Tao, who had been pretending to mend something for six days in order to eavesdrop, stopped pretending.

"That one's not true," I said.

"I know it's not true. It's in the dismissal." Ninth Pen did not look up. "First Pen. This is the filing that got you put out. You published that this man killed a demon lord. What he actually did was get robbed by a man with a bad knife."

"Yes," said the Scroll.

"You invented it."

"Yes."

"Say the rest," said Ninth Pen, still writing. "The review will want the rest and I'd rather have it in your words than mine."

The Scroll took a while.

"I invented it because he was going to die in a lane and nobody would have written it down," it said. "That is the whole reason and it is not a good one. I was the First Pen of Heaven. I had recorded the deaths of gods. And I had spent four hundred years watching people go out of the world with nothing said over them, and one night I decided I would rather put down a thing that was false and loud than a thing that was true and silent, and I did it, and I was right to be dismissed." A pause. "I would do it again. Those two things have sat in me for nine hundred years and neither has ever moved."

Ninth Pen wrote it all down without changing her face.

"Thank you," she said. "That's the cleanest answer I've had to that question in eleven years of doing this job."