Sect Year 6 · first month · day 11 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
Tsai had the deposit open on the long table before the lamps were trimmed. It was the card that carried Lin’s own entries, the one the clerks had drawn from the shelves on the morning he first climbed the stair. She had turned it so that the margin faced his side of the wood. The tithe book sat on its frame at her elbow, grey and closed. Its brass tag caught the lamplight and gave none of it back.
“Sit down, Lin Cang,” she said. “We will do this properly, while the margin is still clean.”
Grey light came in through the high window and lay across the floor without reaching the tables. The clerks had set two bowls at the end of the nearest desk, and the porridge in them had gone cold and skinned over before anyone thought to take it away. Nobody on the Reaches seemed to eat hot food in the mornings. Lin had stopped noticing it some time ago. He noticed it now because the skinned bowl brought back a small, dull ache of something he had once liked the taste of and could no longer name.
