Sect Year 4 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the thirty-eighth life: the Vault quarter, his sixty-third year
The dust had got into him the way it got into every cord in the upper room, slowly and along every fold. Jorn coughed once into the grey cloth he kept folded in his sleeve, looked at what came up, and folded the cloth again before anyone could see it. He had done that every morning for years.
When he was a boy at the notch-board the cough had been a small thing, a catch in the throat that his father did not remark on. Now it came hard and single, like a clerk clearing one last paper off his table, and then the room was quiet again.
The light through the high window was the flat grey of a day that could not decide on rain. It lay across the long desk and the open ledger and the cords hung on their pegs along the wall, each one gone the grey of old rope. Below, on the quay, a salt-cart rattled over the stones and a carter shouted at his mule. The room smelled of tar from the net-yards by the river, of wet brass, and of the animal fat the clerks burned when the lamps ran low.
