Sect Year 9 · third month · day 28 · Azure Stream spring
The frost had not left the rim of the basin when Jiang laid the Court’s form on the flat stone. It was a single sheet of grey paper, folded once and then opened, with the Court’s seal pressed at its head: the closed wheel, every spoke whole. She set four river stones on its corners to keep the wind from it. They were smooth and dark, and she had picked them from the water’s edge herself, one at a time, and set each one down with the care of a woman laying a table for guests.
“A rung is kept before the account closes,” she said. “Kept, and then named.”
Su sat on the stone bench cut into the rock on the north side of the basin, the record open across her knees to a clean leaf. Her pen was capped. She hadn’t yet written anything on the leaf, and the pale paper lay open under the grey light with nothing on it but a faint ruling. Pei stood at the basin’s edge with the lamp held in both hands. It was the Glass Shelf lamp, plain and brass-bound, with a glass chimney, the one the Lantern gave its witnesses and the one Pei carried whenever a count was to be witnessed. Its flame stood small and steady behind the glass, and the glass was warm in the cold morning.
