Sect Year 4 · seventh month · day 8 · Serai, the Vault’s cord hall
The Vault did not sit on the seventh day. The runner had said it would sit when its scale was set. The scale was not set, so Lin spent the day in the post-house yard watching the canal boats tie up and cast off and tie up again. He tried counting them and gave up at nine. Twice he walked to the Vault gate and stood under the signboard, reading the Scale’s terms again in the rain, and twice he walked back.
At noon he sat on the edge of the water trough with his cold hand in his lap and let the sun warm the other one. On the eighth day the post-house clerk came out across the wet cobbles with a letter in one hand and his cap in the other.
The letter had been forwarded from the sect. The paper was the coarse grey stock Pei always used, and the hand on the cover leaned forward as if it couldn’t wait to reach the next word. Lin read it standing in the cold light by the gate.
Pei wrote the way she talked, quickly and without much care for the margins. She asked when he was coming home. She said the east well in the sect tasted of mud again, that the well-keeper would not listen to her, and that the well-keeper had told her the water was clean because the Registry…
