Sect Year 2 · second month · day 27 · the capital, the copy hall, late
The Wheel had said nothing since the grade at the end of the Hall. Lin had listened for it through the first days of the copying, the way a man listens for a footstep in a house he has just left. It hadn’t come, and after a while the listening wore itself smooth. Tonight he sat up in the copy hall after the lamps were lit, with his left hand flat on the desk and the pen laid beside it, and he didn’t ask anything of the quiet. He let it stand.
He had once taken the Wheel’s silences for judgment, the way a boy takes a teacher’s turned back for a verdict. Over the weeks since the Hall he had come to take them for what they were, which was room. The room was not empty. It held the stove and the faint resin smell of its kindling. The scratch of a brush two rows away that was not his, and the slow knock of the Archive’s night gate being barred somewhere over the court.
The hall was warm from the stove, and the air smelled of ink that had sat too long in its pot. Somewhere beyond the north door a porter was whistling a tune that had no second half. The copy desks ran away from him in their rows, each with its blotter and cup and pile of weights, and…
