Sect Year 2 · second month · day 28 · the capital, the road outside the Archive wall
Su was awake before the lamp was lit. Lin lay on the cot and listened to her turn the pages of the record in the dark, and then the small scrape of her pen, and he watched the square of the window go from black to the colour of wet slate. He had slept badly, with nothing to lean on.
“You will tell her today,” Su said, without looking up.
“Yes.”
“Tell it in the order it happened. Not the order you wish it had happened in.” She turned a page. “She will know the difference. She is a copyist.”
“That is how I mean to tell it.”
“Good.” She blotted the line and closed the book and held it against her coat. “Then go before the porters have the gate open. She will be waiting, and she will not say so.”
He dressed in the cold with his back to the stove, which was not yet lit. His left hand was stiff until he had worked the fingers for a while. The two halves of Shen Mo’s jade slip lay against his ribs in their grey cloth, where he had carried them since the spring at Azure Stream, and he didn’t take them out. He knew their weight without looking. The crack between the halves was as clean as a seam, and the cloth had worn soft at the corners from…
