Sect Year 6 · first month · day 10 · the Hanging Reaches, the Ledger room behind the reading hall
The Ledger room sat behind the reading hall, through a door no wider than a man’s shoulders. Lin had walked past that door a dozen times since he came up the stair, and he had never once seen it. On the morning after Su went down, the clerk who carried the bowls stopped in front of it and waited with his hands folded in his sleeves until Lin noticed him. He didn’t speak. He lifted one hand out of his sleeve and pointed inward, and then he went back to his bowls.
Pei had walked up the gallery at his side, her book held flat against her chest. At the door she stopped, and he stopped with her.
“Do you want me in there?” she asked.
“You’re the witness.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He looked at the narrow door and at the cold that came out around its edges. “Yes,” he said. “Come in.”
Inside, the air was colder than in the reading hall. Shelves ran up both walls, crowded with tithe books bound in the same grey as the Ledger, each with a brass tag on its spine that nobody had bothered to polish. Tsai Huanmu sat at a table no larger than a tea tray, with a single lamp drawn close beside her elbow. Nothing on the Reaches seemed to warm, not the bowls or the stone…
