Sect Year 6 · third month · day 1 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
The lamps had not warmed in the night. Lin noticed it slowly, as he noticed most things on the Reaches now, with a dry tightness at the back of his throat. Before the day came up he had laid his palm against the glass of the nearest lamp and waited for the heat that ought to have been there. The glass stayed cold under his hand. The reading hall was long and quiet at first light. The high window let in a thin, milky brightness that fell across the tables and never reached the floor.
Tsai’s ring of keys still lay on her desk where she had left it at the close of the last reading. Nobody had touched it. The iron rings had gone dull in the damp, and the largest key had turned on its ring so that its bit pointed at the wall. The clerks kept their voices low. They spoke to one another across the room in the murmur people keep for a shrine, and whenever a page turned, every head lifted and then bent again.
Lin sat on the clerk’s stool at the end of the long table with his right hand flat on the wood. His left lay beside it, closed about halfway, as it had been for months. He could feel the knot in the cuff of his left sleeve, small and hard under the wool. Su…
