Sect Year 6 · first month · day 15 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
The lamp at the reading desk had burned down to a bead by the time grey light came through the high window, and Lin did not trim it. Four days had passed since Tsai squared the deposit card and told him to bring the witness. He had spent most of them here, at the head of the stair, with the leaf he had copied in the Ledger room lying on the wood beside him and a clean sheet of the Court’s paper waiting on the other side. The clean sheet had stayed clean. He hadn’t known how to begin on it without spoiling the leaf.
He began now. He weighted the top corners with two brass counters from the rack, so that the sheets would lie flat. He set the leaf between them the way the clerks set a tithe page before they copied it. Then he dipped his pen and wrote with his right hand.
The purpose line came first, in the careful letters he had learned from Su’s record. Pull until the field is ready. He wrote each word slowly and did not hurry any of them, because the ox had never hurried anything. Under the line he set the grade. The Wheel had given him that word twice, for two lives he had lived to the end, and he had never written it in anyone’s hand but his own. It looked…
