Sella had gone down the Undercroft stair on her own legs, which was a stubbornness she would have to answer for later, and she sat on the ninth step with the bone-ledger open across her knees and the Keystone’s niche clock ticking faintly in the dark below her.
The heart that had counted backwards in the Mound’s yard was counting slower now. She could feel it in her wrist and under her ribs, a dull heavy beat that came a little late, like a foot on a stair that was not where the foot expected it. She took her own pulse with two fingers, the way she had taken a thousand strangers’ pulses in the Hold’s first winter, and counted it against the clock. Forty-one beats in a minute. She wrote the figure down in the margin of the ledger, in her own square hand, because a bonesetter who did not record her own failure was a liar in the most useful sense of the word.
She had learned bones in this Undercroft before she had learned anything else in the Hold. In the first winter, when the body was still a rumour of nine people with nine different sets of hands, Sella had come down these same steps with a lamp and a box of tallow candles and begun to match the Hold’s injuries to the skeletons laid out in the niches. The Foundation dead had lain there since before the Crossing, each one in its own cut recess…
