Chapter 44: Allies

The bell in the Hearing Hall was older than anything else in the Bureau, and nobody had rung it in ninety years. Ming knew because she had looked it up, the night before, item four on her list: The bell. When does the Bench have to sit? The answer was in Of the Bench, the last section of the last volume but one, in the short plain way the Bureau wrote everything. Any officer of this Bureau, living or dead, may ring the bell of the Hearing Hall and present a petition. The Bench shall sit at the third dawn after the bell, and hear it. Any officer. Even a recorder. Even a recorder whose debt stood at one line, with four cases' worth of concealment on her file that a Magistrate had kindly agreed to forget. She went to the Hearing Hall on the morning of the tenth, with…