Read Chapter 18: — THE MAGISTRATE’S SEAL

The arrest of Li Sheng did not clear everyone.

Zhou Yunqing, the prefect who had seemed either incompetent or complicit depending on the hour, demanded a formal hearing.

Lin agreed.

They met in the same hall where Tang Zheng had been thrown to the floor as a fraud.

This time Tang entered without a badge.

He preferred it.

Su Shanhe was brought from prison, thinner and bruised but upright. Xiaoxi crossed the hall in three steps and threw her arms around him.

Zhou looked away to give them a fragment of privacy.

That small gesture did more to change Tang’s opinion of him than a dozen speeches would have.

The ledgers were compared. The warehouse inventory was counted. Surviving boatmen testified. The men who had worked the river-god ceremonies described how offerings were collected and grain redistributed at absurd prices. Divers explained how hulls had been damaged below the waterline.

Li Sheng denied everything until the evidence became too detailed to deny gracefully.

Then he blamed subordinates.

Then Yagyu.

Then the prefect.

Then fate.

“Remarkable,” Tang said quietly. “A man can fit many people inside one body when a sentence is approaching.”

Lin almost smiled.

Zhou Yunqing was cleared of direct participation in the thefts, but not of negligence.

He accepted the finding without protest.

“I trusted the wrong man because he made my work easier,” he said. “That is not innocence.”

Lin studied him for a moment.

“Write that sentence into your own memorial to the throne.”

Zhou did.