Chapter 6 · Untitled Chapter

The corridor outside the majlis was thirty paces of cool marble, and I had spent eleven of them before the sound behind me changed.

It was not the noise of a room breaking up. It was the particular quiet of men who have decided to stay, and then footsteps, unhurried, at a pace that assumed I would wait for them.

I waited, because the man coming was the steward who had carried the tray, and a steward who hurries is a steward with an order.

"Sayyidati. They have called for the ledger."

I looked back at the doors at the end of the corridor, still standing open the way I had left them.

"The bound one," I said.

"The bound one."

I had seen it opened twice in my life, and both times it had been for a death, and both times the men reading it stood nearer to it than they stood to each other. A register of names is not a book about the past. It is a book about who may still be spoken to.

I went back. Not because the hall had called for it.