Sect Year 6 · first month · days 3 to 8 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall and the galleries
The days after that ran together in a line he couldn’t break into pieces. Each morning two bowls came up the gallery on a clerk’s tray. One was for him. The other, which he didn’t ask about, was for Su, who ate hers standing by the reading-hall door with the record open against her forearm and her eyes on the page. Each morning Pei came up from the bench under the third window, sat at the far end of the long table with her witness book. Then he spoke with Su in voices too low for him to follow. Neither of them looked at him until the Court’s first bell had rung and the clerks had begun to move along the shelves.
On the first of those mornings Lin tried the deposits. The Court’s sheets lay in a stack at his right hand, each one a column of names and years in the Ledger’s small hand, and each name had a figure beside it that the Court called a deposit. He began at the top and got as far as the third column before the figure he had been carrying slipped out of his head like a dropped coin. He sat for a while with the pen above the paper. Then he wrote the number anyway, struck it through, and wrote it again with a question mark beside it…
