Sect Year 6 · first month · day 22 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall and the lower room
Tsai set the terms before the lamps were lit. The reading hall was still cold, and the clerks had not yet carried the bowls up the stair. She did it at the desk in the voice she used for the tally, laying each condition on the wood like a weight she had weighed herself. “The reading of your deposits begins on the first day of the second month and runs as long as it takes,” she said. “The tithe book is yours to sign when the reading is done. Until then it stays closed on its frame, and nobody touches your pen but you.”
He had expected terms. He hadn’t expected her to deliver them so quietly, as though they were no more than the weight of the book itself. He found that the quiet was harder to answer than a raised voice would have been.
Her ring of keys hung from her belt, a dozen iron keys on a brass ring, with a brass tag stamped with the Court’s wheel. She didn’t look at it while she spoke. Lin noticed that she didn’t look at it, and he noticed too that the ring had come to rest against the same fold of her coat every morning since the Ledger room.
