Sect Year 6 · second month · day 13 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
Four clerks came to lift the Ledger’s frame in the first light, and they moved it with the care of men carrying a sleeper down a stair. They set the frame on its rests. The book lay open on its stand with its pages turned to the last of the slot sales, and nobody spoke while they worked. When the frame had settled, Tsai came to the table and stood with her hands at her sides for the length of one breath. Then she closed the great cover with her own hands in a single movement. The clasp sounded once in the quiet hall, a dull iron note, like a bell rung at the far end of a valley. No clerk moved to take the book up. They stood along the wall with their pens in their hands and their eyes on the Ledger, and not one of them stepped forward.
Tsai unhooked a ring of keys from her belt. There were a dozen of them, iron, worn bright along the bows where a thumb had turned them for years. A brass tag hung from the ring, stamped with the Court’s seal: a closed wheel, every spoke whole. She laid the ring on the desk beside the Ledger’s cover, and the keys made a small, heavy sound against the wood.
