Sect Year 6 · first month · day 1 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
The lamps were still cold when Lin came up out of sleep. He knew it before he opened his eyes. The air in the reading hall had the dry, even chill the Court kept in every room. His right hand, which had lain on the edge of the desk all night, had gone stiff from the wood. He sat up slowly. The stool complained under him. Somewhere along the shelves a clerk turned a page, then turned it back, as if the first reading had been wrong.
He counted the lamps before he counted anything else. Twelve hung from iron arms along the north wall, each in its glass, each dark at the wick. He had counted them on the first morning, when he still believed the reading would be quick, and he had counted them every morning since. Twelve. He couldn’t have said why the number helped, but it did.
The rest of the twelfth month had gone by on this stool. He knew it the way he knew the weight of his own boots, without being able to point to anything. There had been lamps and bowls, and the grey light moving across the windows, and a clerk’s voice now and then. He had come to the end of the month without once getting up to leave.
