Sect Year 1 · eighth month · day 20 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court
The ledger hall was a long room of slanted desks under high windows. At this time of day the light through the windows went from white to gold to the colour of old honey. Forty copyists sat with their heads bent and their brushes moving, and the sound in the room was the sound of forty men trying hard not to listen to the two people at the end desk. The air smelled of ink and warm wood, and of the dust that rose off old paper every time a leaf turned.
Lin had been in this hall once before, in his first year, sent up from the Outer Court to copy a rota that nobody else wanted. The master of the copyists had watched him hold the brush for a quarter of a page and then told him, without unkindness, that a hand which shook like that would never be trusted with a ledger. His right hand held the brush steady now. The left lay in his lap, cold to the elbow, and had not been asked to do anything difficult since the Cold Ash bout.
