Sect Year 6 · second month · day 1 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
The tithe book came to him in the morning, carried by the same narrow clerk who had carried the bowls up the stair since the first week. The clerk set it on the reading table in front of Lin and opened it at the last leaf, at the signed name line. He laid a pen across the line, its nib toward the gutter. Then he stepped back and looked at the wall, the way the clerks had learned to look at a wall when a thing was about to be done in front of them.
Lin looked at the line. It was a plain strip of ruled paper with a name written above it in a faded clerk’s hand and nothing written beneath. He picked up the pen in his right hand and held it over the paper for the length of one breath. The nib did not move. Then he set it down again, parallel to the line, exactly as the clerk had laid it.
He thought of the tithe book’s first page, which he hadn’t yet been shown. Jiang had told him the names on it were the living debtors to the cycle, and that his own was among them, entered with its count. The book was grey and heavy and smelled faintly of cold leather. It had waited a long time for a name at the foot of its page, and…
