Sect Year 6 · fourth month · day 5 · the Reaches, the reading hall
The clerks had stopped going near Tsai’s desk. Nobody said so. They walked the long way round the head of the hall, past the foot of the gallery stair, and they didn’t lean on the blotter or the brass rail. So when Pei went up to the desk that morning with her book under her arm, Lin noticed that she walked straight to it, as though it were only a desk.
Tsai’s ring of keys lay on the blotter where it had fallen. Pei did not touch it. She crouched beside the lower drawer on the left, took hold of the brass pull with both hands, and tugged. The drawer stuck halfway. She tugged again, then set a knee against the side of the desk and lifted with both hands under the front, until the whole drawer came away from its runners with a short, rough sound.
“It’s heavy at the back,” she said.
Lin knelt beside her. His left hand hung at his side and would not close, so he braced his right on the edge of the desk and looked down into the empty drawer. Its floor was bare wood. Its back board had come loose at one corner, and the nail heads stood up through the grain like the teeth of a comb.
