Sect Year 5 · second month · day 20 · the Loom’s record room
The record room at the Loom had one window, and the window faced the sea. Shen Ruo had pulled the sloped desk a hand’s width from the wall so that the lamp lay across the page and not in her eyes. She had done the same in the copy hall in the capital, Lin remembered, and he didn’t say so.
The oldest book lay open under her hands. Its boards had gone soft with sea-damp, and its pages were the colour of weak tea. Every line was in the Hall’s older script, small and crowded and leaning to the left like reeds in a current. Lin could make out the shape of the characters and nothing of their sense. Where he looked for a sign he knew, there was none.
Along the outer margins someone had drawn knots. They were small pen drawings, one to a page, each a loop and a hitch and a pull sketched in a few strokes, with the end of the cord left open. Lin had tied the Loom’s hitch a dozen times since the Point, and he knew the drawings were meant to be copied by hand. Whoever made them had wanted the next clerk to be able to tie what the page described.
