Sect Year 5 · eleventh month · day 29 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
Lin woke with his palms closed. The stool under him was hard and cold through his trousers, and for a long moment he couldn’t tell whether the thing in his hands was wood or the edge of the seat. He opened the right hand first, and it came open at once. The left took longer. It closed as far as the middle of the palm and stopped there, as it had stopped since the Glass Shelf, and when he pressed it flat on his knee it shook until he gave up and let it lie.
The reading hall was long and nearly empty. A row of lamps stood in iron brackets down its length, a dozen of them, their flames steady and yellow and giving no warmth at all. The clerk on the top stone had told him so on the first night, as a matter of record. The lamps here had never been warm. He sat with his back to the wall and looked at the nearest one, and he felt nothing from it.
He tapped the iron rim of the stool with one knuckle. The note was clean. It went down the room and came back off the far wall. He had done it without deciding to. The sound turned something over at the back of his head, a sleeper stirring behind a shut door. Then it lay still again. He didn’t…
