Chapter 46: The Hearing

She pushed the doors and walked in alone, and the Hearing Hall was full. Ming had never seen it full. She had never seen it with anyone in it at all, except on the morning she rang the bell. Now the long cold room under the red pillars was crowded from wall to wall with the dead. The clerks of the outer hall stood in a block near the doors, Bao at the front with his cap set straight. The archivists from the Hall of Registers stood behind them with ink on their fingers. There were dead she didn't know, from corners of the Bureau she'd never been to, and crimson-sleeved clerks of the Magistrates' households along the walls, and all of them were quiet, and all of them turned to look at her as she came in, and then down at the stone floor. At her shadow. The only…