The Turn was the oldest thing the body still did in the open. The candle-clock stood at the Hall’s east end and the Mouth sat at its foot, and at the appointed mark the voice that spoke for the whole of the Hold passed from one Hand to the next, hand to hand, as a lamp is passed down a long table. It was simply the handover, neither a vote nor a Charter, and every Hand in the Hold knew the words for it, and said them, and then went quiet while the next one spoke.
Sella had spent the morning under the Gatehouse with the bones. She did her matching by lamplight in the Undercroft, at a trestle set between the Keystone’s pedestal and the foot of the stairs, with the skeletons laid out along the north wall on their boards in the order the Hold had found them. There were a great many. The Foundation Dead had been built into the walls and the cellar-floors of the first Hold, and when the old rubble had been cleared the bones had come out with it and been laid in rows, and nobody had given them names until Sella started. She gave each one a line in her ledger. A line for each builder’s injury, matched to the bone that bore it, with a small neat tick in the margin when the match was certain and a question-mark when it was not.
