Sect Year 1 · ninth month · day 20 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court and Outer gate
The ledger room under the Elders’ wing had been built for keeping things rather than looking at them. It had no windows. It had a long run of cedar shelves that climbed into the dark beyond the lamplight. Every shelf was packed with the sect’s books in brown covers, each spine lettered by a hand that had been dead for hundreds of years. The air smelled of paper and damp and the thin oil of the lamps. Lin stood by the door with the journal under his arm. He listened to the rain on the roof far above, and he counted the shelves, because they were the only thing in the room that was not waiting for him to speak.
The Elders sat around one long table under the lamps. The clerk’s book lay at the Sect Master’s elbow, closed, with a strip of grey cloth laid over its cover. The Sect Master was at the head of the table. Xu Bairen was at the reformists’ end, with his cane hooked over the chair back, and three others sat on either side with their hands flat on the lacquer. The sixth place had been cleared. Someone had carried the chair away, and the square of wood where it had stood was bare and a shade paler than the rest. Gao Shun’s body lay in the nook at the far end of the…
