The air in the antechamber was dry, which Sella had not expected, and thin, which she had. It came into her lungs with a faint gritty taste, like the dust that gathers in a bread-oven’s corners when no one has swept it for a year, and it left her throat rough and her eyes stinging. Her bone-ledger’s pages began to curl at the edges almost as soon as she opened the cover. She heard the small dry crackle of the paper and looked down and saw the corners lift, one by one, the way old paper lifts when it has been kept too long in a cold room and then brought into a warmer one. She smoothed the page flat with her palm, and it crept back up again under her hand.
Diagnosis first. She had given it on the threshold, and she would give it again here, because a diagnosis was not a single sentence that could be said once and filed. It was a discipline, and a discipline had to be practised in the place where it was needed.
She knelt on the grey tiles and set the ledger on her knee and took the tally-rule from her coat. It was the Forge’s rule, brass-tipped and scored along its length in fine divisions, and Gaunt had given it to her in the autumn with a long speech about the honour of the Smith’s measures and a warning not to lose any of the divisions. She had not used…
