I am told this deposition shall be entered into the permanent record of the Magistracy of the Sixteenth Canon, under the provision for posthumous testimony, which is to say testimony given by one whose standing has been formally erased, and that the scribe shall transcribe my words exactly as I deliver them, with all their infelicities and, God help me, their jokes, because I have been informed — correctly, I suppose — that a man facing nullification of status may speak in whatever register he damned well pleases, and so I speak.

The mantle I wore that season had been my father’s. Grey wool, sixth-grade weave, the kind they issue to clerks of the Tenth Order and below, which is to say clerks whose duties involve the maintenance of ledgers no one reads and the filing of petitions no one grants. The left shoulder had been patched twice. The right cuff had frayed to a threadbare scrim through which my wrist showed pale and blue-veined, and I had taken to folding it under, a habit that became, over the eleven years of my service, less a repair than a gesture, less a gesture than a second skin, so that when the Chief Magistrate’s secretary asked me, on the morning of the seventh day of the Month of Ash, why I kept fiddling with my sleeve, I answered: “Because it is the only part of me still under warranty.”

He did not laugh. No one in the Magistracy laughed. This is, I believe, why I persisted in the habit.

“You are assigned,” said Secretary Bao, without looking up from his ledger, “to the matter of the witness Lin Suyin, deceased, found in the Archive of Sealed Testimonies on the morning of the fifth, no visible wounds, no sign of forced entry, door barred from within. The Archivist confirms the seal was intact.”

“Intact,” I repeated.

“Intact.”

“And the witness?”

“Deceased.”

“Yes, but deceased how? Did the scrolls fall on her? Paper cut of sufficient severity?”

Secretary Bao set down his brush. “The examining physician has ruled the death consistent with divine adjudication. Trial by sacred ordeal. The Lords of the Canon have accepted the finding.”

This is the part where a sensible man would bow and leave. I have never been accused of sense. “A sacred ordeal,” I said, “in a locked archive, with no priest present, no invocation recited, no ordeal-fire kindled, no sacred water drawn — the gods, it seems, have become very efficient.”

“Your assignment, Clerk Deng, is to confirm the finding and close the matter. Not to question it.”

“And if I question it anyway?”

“Then you will be reassigned.”

“To where?”

“To a place where questioning is not among the listed duties.”

I bowed. I left. I questioned it anyway.

The Archive of Sealed Testimonies occupied the lowest level of the Magistracy compound, a windowless vault of stone and ironwood, accessible by a single staircase that descended from the Hall of Petitions. The air tasted of old paper and older damp. I arrived to find the vault already occupied by Investigator Hong, a man whose mantles were always new and whose father had purchased his appointment, and who served — whether by design or accident — as the most effective mirror a poor clerk could ask for: everything I was not, he was, and everything he was not, I was, which is perhaps the only honest definition of partnership the Magistracy ever devised.

“Deng,” Hong said, peering at the far wall. “They sent you?”

“They sent me to confirm the finding.”

“Of course they did.”

“Which means you’re here to confirm it too.”

“I’m here to investigate.”

I smiled. “Then we’re both liars. Shall we compare notes?”

He did not smile back. He pointed to the floor. “There.”

The chalk outline remained where the body had been found. Beside it, a circle of ash — the remnant, ostensibly, of a sacred ordeal, the divine fire that was said to consume the guilty. Except sacred ordeal-ash is white, the product of blessed pine, and this ash was grey, the colour of ordinary charcoal, the colour of a fire built in haste, the colour of evidence.

“Has anyone sampled it?” I asked.

“It has been entered into the record as sacred residue. I am not permitted to sample it.”

“And you’re fine with that?”

“I did not say I was fine. I said I was not permitted.”

I crouched. I touched the ash. I rubbed it between my fingers. It was greasy. Sacred ash is dry. “This is lamp oil,” I said.

“Deng —”

“Lamp oil and charcoal. Someone burned evidence in a haste-fire and called it divine.”

“You cannot prove that.”

“I don’t need to prove it. I just need to say it loudly enough.”

Hong looked at me with an expression I had seen before on men about to do something they would regret: admiration, pity, and fear, compressed into a single blink. “You’re going to get yourself nullified.”

“I’ve been told it builds character.”

The witness Lin Suyin had been a laundress. This I learned not from the Magistracy’s records, which described her only as “a party to a sealed matter,” but from the other laundresses in the eastern quarter, who remembered her because she had once refused to wash a magistrate’s robes until he paid the outstanding bill, which is the kind of story that survives among poor women long after it has been stricken from official memory.

“She was brave,” said a woman named old Qi, wringing a sheet with hands red as raw meat. “Brave and stupid. She saw something she should not have seen and she told someone she should not have told.”

“What did she see?”

“The Magistrate’s courier, accepting silver from the merchant Feng, in the archive, where the sealed testimonies are kept. She was delivering the Magistrate’s personal robes — she was the only laundress permitted in the compound — and she saw them altering a testimony scroll. Adding lines. Changing names.”

“And she told someone?”

“She told the Chief Secretary.”

The Chief Secretary. Bao. The man who had assigned me to “confirm the finding.”

“She told Secretary Bao,” I said, “and three days later she was found dead in the archive, in a locked room, by sacred ordeal.”

Old Qi looked at me with the particular patience of the very old and the very tired. “You understand now,” she said.

“I understood before. I just didn’t want to be right.”

I confronted Secretary Bao on the morning of the ninth day. I wore my father’s mantle. The right cuff had come fully undone and I no longer bothered to fold it. The frayed edge trailed like a penitent’s flagellum.

“You sent her to the archive,” I said. “After she reported what she saw, you sent her back, alone, to identify the altered scroll. And then you sealed the door.”

Bao did not look up from his ledger. “Clerk Deng, the finding of divine adjudication has been accepted by the Lords of the Canon. Your assignment was to confirm it. Have you confirmed it?”

“I have refuted it.”

“That was not your assignment.”

“The ash is lamp oil. The door was barred from outside — I found the tool marks on the bar bracket. And the physician who ruled sacred ordeal was paid three months’ salary in advance, which is unusual for a man who works on salary.”

Bao set down his brush. He looked at me for the first time with what I can only describe as occupational sadness, the expression of a man who has nullified many clerks and no longer finds the process interesting.

“Deng,” he said, “why do you think I assigned you?”

“Because I’m thorough.”

“Because you’re poor. Because no one will advocate for you. Because you wear a mantle that should have been burned five years ago, and that mantle is the only thing standing between you and destitution, and you are about to remove it yourself, and I want you to understand, before you do, that I gave you this assignment so that you would have the chance to be sensible, and you have chosen, with full knowledge of the consequences, not to be.”

I stood. The frayed cuff hung at my wrist like a dead thing.

“What happens to her testimony?” I asked.

“It has been sealed.”

“Sealed. Not destroyed.”

“Sealed. The provision for posthumous testimony. If, at some future date, a clerk of sufficient standing and sufficient evidence chooses to reopen the matter —”

“The matter will have been sealed for years. The witness will be forgotten. The evidence will be ash.”

“Which is, as you have observed, lamp oil and charcoal.” Bao resumed writing. “You have three days to submit your confirmation. After that, your position will be reviewed.”

I did not submit a confirmation. I submitted a deposition — this deposition — in which I set down everything I have said here, and more: the tool marks, the ash, the payment to the physician, the laundress’s testimony about the courier and the merchant, and the fact that Secretary Bao knew all of this before he assigned me, because the witness told him first, and he sent her to die.

I submitted it knowing it would be sealed. I submitted it knowing that the provision for posthumous testimony exists precisely for this: not to protect the witness, but to bury her, under a stratum of red ink and silence so thick that no future clerk will ever think to dig.

I submitted it because the mantle was already gone — metaphorically, I mean; I still have it, it is still grey wool and threadbare, but it no longer belongs to me, because I no longer have a position from which to wear it, because I have chosen, with full knowledge of the consequences, not to be sensible.

Lin Suyin loved her daughter. This is the part that does not go into the deposition, because love is not evidence. But the laundresses told me: after her husband died, she took in laundry twelve hours a day to keep her daughter in school, because she believed that literacy was the only door the poor could open without knocking, and when her daughter learned to read, Lin Suyin wept, not from joy but from relief, because she had held open that door with her body and her hands and her ruined wrists, and her daughter had walked through it.

I never met Lin Suyin. She was dead before I was assigned. But I carried her — not her body, not her memory exactly, but something more primal, something that lived in the place where the mantle touched my shoulder, something that did not feel like grief because grief implies loss of something you once held, and this felt instead like the discovery of something that had always been there, lodged between the ribs, instinctive and immovable, a love for a woman I had never known whose courage had been extinguished by the same system that extinguished me.

I thought justice would come. I thought that if I found the evidence and wrote it down in the correct ledger and submitted it to the correct office, the system would do what systems are designed to do: process the truth and produce justice. I believed this with the same stubbornness with which I believed that a frayed mantle could still function as a mantle, that a poor clerk could still function as a clerk, that a joke told in an empty room still counted as a joke.

I was wrong.

The deposition was sealed on the eleventh day of the Month of Ash. My position was nullified on the twelfth. The mantle was returned to me — they had no use for it — and I folded it and placed it in the chest where my father had kept it before me, and I left the compound, and the door barred behind me.

I am told this deposition shall be entered into the permanent record. I am told the provision for posthumous testimony guarantees preservation. I am told that some future clerk, of sufficient standing and sufficient evidence, may one day reopen the matter.

I am the forgotten witness now. I have become what I investigated: a name in a sealed file, a body in a locked room, a voice that spoke and was not heard.

The mantle is in the chest. The cuff is still frayed.

I thought justice would come.