Sect Year 2 · second month · day 15 · the capital, the copy hall after the lamps are lit
The copy hall emptied at dusk the way a threshing floor empties, all at once and then not at all. The copyists capped their ink, pressed flat stones onto their sheets, and filed out through the north door two by two, arguing about the price of charcoal. The clerk at the entrance counted them past his table and locked the box of spare pens. Lin heard the bolt go home at the far end of the passage. After that there were only the lamps, the smell of cold ink, and the iron stove in the corner, which someone had banked too high for the night.
He meant to go back to the lodging. Instead he stayed on his stool at the end of the third row and rested his hands on his knees, palms up, the way the Hall had taught its ink-boys to sit before they were allowed to touch a brush.
The method was simple to describe and hard to do. You let the breath go out past the place where it usually turned, and then you let the next one come up by itself, and you didn’t help it. In the Hall’s cold upper gallery, in another man’s body, the breath had fallen so far that the lamp flames leaned away from him. Here, in a warm room with a stove ticking, it fell less far. Lin…
