Chapter 3 · free to read
Rule one: three lamps after dusk and no fourth. Rule two: no ink ground after the drum tower. Rule three: no scroll leaves a shelf without a tally signed in the hand of the one who took it.
Four years of duplicate copies, made by a boy too frightened to be inaccurate, kept in a box under a bed, recorded nowhere.
Nine hundred convoys. Two hundred and eleven of them entering the capital in the seventh month alone.
The case had never come back. Nobody had asked for it, because nobody in the Hall of Records asks a ministry for anything.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.