Sella examined the Form the way she examined anything that had been set by somebody else: slowly, from the feet up, and with her hands before her eyes.
It lay on a trestle in the Mound’s shed, under a sheet that somebody had folded neatly at the corners, because the garrison had been told that the captain’s face was a grave-thing and must not be left uncovered in the rain. Sella drew the sheet back. The Mourn copy looked up at her with the captain’s eyes. They were a little too open, and the lids had been cast a shade too heavy, as if whoever had poured the wax had been trying to make a man look like he was about to make a joke he had not finished. The jaw was right. The scar at the lip was right, a white crescent where a horse had caught him at Lessary’s southern gate. The grey at the temples that the cough had taken was there in wax, every hair of it.
It had been cast in the Undercroft on the night Ansel Brume died. Sella knew that because she had signed for the wax. The Mason’s copy had pressed the death-face into the first sheet while the captain’s body was still warm on the cot in the barracks, and the Mourn family’s spare mould had been opened and filled from the sheet by the Mason’s own hand, and then the Form had been carried up the Undercroft stair by two…
