Sect Year 3 · tenth month · day 3 · Azure Stream Sect, Registry room, then the outer court gate
Jiang wrote the Registry’s account in the middle of the morning, at the long table, with the schedule pushed to one side under the weight of the inkstone. Lin sat across from her and watched. She wrote in her own hand and not in a clerk’s.
The Registry had a form for losses at sea, printed on grey paper with columns down its left margin. She filled the columns one at a time: the vessel’s name, the day, the place of the striking. Then she came to the line for the name, and she stopped with the brush above the paper.
Registrar Tang Hengzhi, with the original writ.
She wrote the last words of the line in the same square hand, and blotted them.
One unrecovered.
“Why not lost?” Lin asked.
“The Registry has no word for a man who went back below for the writ.” She laid the brush along the edge of the inkstone. “Unrecovered is what the rolls write against a tithe that did not come in. It is the word for a sum that is owed and has not arrived. I don’t like it.”
