Sect Year 6 · fourth month · day 1 · the Reaches, the gallery lamp
The gallery ran along the far wall of the reading hall like a shelf built for birds. It had a waist-high rail of dark wood, a lamp hung from a bracket at its centre, and a long clerk’s table at the western end where the index lay open under its weight. Lin came up the last steps with Pei behind him and stopped at the rail, and for a moment he didn’t go further. Below him the hall was grey with the afternoon. Beyond the gallery’s end the gravel slope fell away toward the Reserve’s edge, and at the bottom of it lay the still water, black and flat, holding no light at all.
Pei set the lamp on the rail. It gave no warmth, and she held it anyway, tilted out over the wood, so that the light fell across the Court’s paper in a clean white circle.
“Give me the sheet,” Lin said.
“You have the cover.”
“I want the sheet under it.”
She passed it across. The paper was thin and cream-coloured and smelled of the Court’s ink cupboard, sharp and faintly sour. Lin laid it flat on the rail and smoothed it with his right palm. His left hand lay on the wood beside it, closed halfway, the fingers curled like a leaf that had dried in the wrong shape. He looked at it briefly and then looked away, which was…
