Sect Year 2 · second month · day 3 · the capital, the Imperial Archive, east copy hall
The east copy hall was still half dark when Lin set the parcel on Ruo’s slanted desk and she worked the cord loose. He had carried it for two days without opening it, because she had made him promise at the door that it would be opened at a desk and nowhere else. The lamps had not been lit. The rows were empty except for two clerks at the far end, bent over yesterday’s sheets with their heads close together. The window at the end of the room showed only a grey square with the edge of a roof in it. Pei stood at the threshold with the bucket on her arm, exactly where she had stood on the first morning. She didn’t come in.
A boy came down the rows with a taper on a long stick and lit the lamps one by one. The room came up out of the dark in pools of yellow that spread across the slanted desks and stopped short of the walls. Behind him the copyists began to arrive. They came in quietly, shaking the wet from their sleeves, and they took their places without greeting anyone, the way people do in a room where they have sat every morning for years. The smell of ink thickened. A brush began to scratch somewhere near the middle. Then another, until the hall was full of the…
