Sella went into the bone-room with a lamp in one hand, her roll of tools in the other, and her ledger tucked under her arm where it always was, because a ledger that was out of reach was a ledger that would be wrong by morning. She had never been inside the room before. She had known it was there, the way one knows a cupboard in a house where one is a guest. It lay beyond the Chest, through a low doorway with no door in it, and the air that came through the doorway was cool and dry and smelled of nothing at all, which was more unsettling to Sella than any smell would have been.
The bones were laid out in rows.
There were many of them. She counted the first row without meaning to, the way she would have counted the stitches in a wound, and she stopped at twenty-two. Each skeleton lay on its back on a shelf of pale stone, its arms at its sides and its feet together, its skull turned very slightly toward the lamp. Each had a small wooden tag tied to its left wrist with a loop of grey cord. The tags were the same size and shape. They were carved with a trade-mark and a number, in the same plain hand, and the hand was a neat, careful, impersonal hand that Sella did not recognise and did not like.
She did not sigh. Ysra, who had come in behind her with a second lamp and had stopped in the doorway with her back very straight, noticed that she did not sigh, and approved of it. Sella saw the approval in the set of Ysra’s shoulders. It was the only comfort she had been given all morning, and she took it without comment, which was her way.
“Diagnose it,” said Ysra.
“I have not finished,” said Sella.
“Then diagnose it when you have.”
Sella set her lamp on the nearest shelf and opened the ledger.
She had kept it since the first morning of her waking, when she had set Idrin’s burned left hand in the Kitchen by Pell’s fire, and the pages were filled with the Hands’ injuries in her own small cramped script. Each entry had a name, a date, a site, and a description of the damage, and each entry was followed by a short line of notes that she had written in the same dry tone she used for everything. Korrin, fourth rib on the left side, fractured in the marsh raid, healed crooked, favours the left. Gaunt, right wrist, sprained at the forge, will not admit it. Ysra, third rib, old, from the stair, aches in cold. Tamsin, none, which is wrong; she cannot be that well. She had written more than a hundred entries in the time she had known them. She had never once looked for where the injuries had come from.
She looked now. She went along the first shelf with the ledger open and the lamp held low, and she matched each entry to the bone it described.
The rib came first. It was on the third skeleton in the row. It was a long, curved, slightly bowed rib, and when Sella turned it over in the lamplight she found, on the inner curve, a healed break in the bone, a knot of callus where the two halves had mended. It sat exactly where her notes said Korrin’s injury was. It was not the same shape, precisely. It was the same break, in the same place, at the same angle, healed the same crooked way.
“Korrin,” said Ysra, very softly, from behind her.
“Korrin,” Sella agreed. She set the rib back on its shelf with a kind of care she did not usually bring to a bone. The shin came next. It lay in the second row, a long bone with an old fracture in its upper third, and the ledger had a line for it that Sella had written in the Hold’s second month and had marked untrue. Gaunt, left shin, old break, which he calls a Lessary wound from a fight he lost. She had written untrue beside it because Gaunt had told the story with such relish that she had known he was making it up. The bone did not care what he had said. It had been broken in the Foundation’s work, and it had knitted in the Foundation’s way, and it had come through the Form with him like a debt carried across a river.
The matches came quickly after that. The burned bones of a hand, charred to the knuckles, were laid at the end of the third row, and Sella had to hold the lamp very close to see the marks of the fire on the finger-bones. The ledger said Idrin, left hand, burn, the Hall’s first winter, set by S. She had set that burn herself, with Pell holding the basin. The bone in the row was a builder’s, and it had been burned on something in the Foundation’s forge, because the same scorch lay across the same knuckle, as if the fire had been waiting two centuries to be reminded which hand it had first touched.
“Diagnosis,” said Ysra.
Sella took a breath. She did not like the taste of it. “The Hands are the people whose bones lie here,” she said. “Or their trades are. The trades are on the tags. The people are in the rows. Their injuries were carried into the body the moment each builder fell, and the body has kept those injuries since. It has been carrying them for two hundred years. My notes are not the first record of them. They are only the first I have been able to read.”
“Comfort,” said Ysra.
“Comfort is that the bones are tagged,” said Sella. She put her hand on the nearest tag, a small thing with a worn trade-mark, and turned it gently with one finger. “A tag has a name on it, or the place where a name goes. The tags are names that nobody has yet said aloud. That is not a comfort to me. It is a sort of comfort to the bones, I think, if bones have any opinion. They are still waiting to be called.”
Ysra went along the rows in silence. She did not carry a lamp; she used her own counting, which Sella had come to recognise over the summer as a kind of physical arithmetic. Her lips moved. Her hand went from one skull to the next, touching each briefly, and her eyes went with it, from the crown to the chin, as though she were checking a stair for the step that was wrong.
She stopped at the end of the fourth row. She stood with her hand on the last shelf, and her finger went still against the stone, and she said a number under her breath.
Sella did not catch it at first. Then she did, and she felt her own hand move on its own, reaching for the ledger, the pen, the clean page at the back where she had kept her counts of the things nobody else wanted counted. She wrote the number down. She did not ask Ysra to say it again. She did not comment. The number was larger than the number of Hands. It was larger than the number of tokens in the Chest, or the number of trades on the tags, or the number of entries in the Register’s back leaves. It was a number Sella had seen before, in a different context, and had been unable to place, and now she could place it, and wished she could not.
“How many?” Ysra asked.
“Enough,” said Sella. “More than the Chamber could seat in a year. Not more than the Chest holds. But more than the Hall has ever been told.”
“Then the Chest is not the whole of it.”
“The Chest is the wages,” said Sella, and closed the ledger, and looked down at the bones. “These are the men.”
There was a silence in which the lamps burned steadily and the dry, cool air made no sound at all. The bones lay in their rows with their hands at their sides and their tags at their wrists, as neat as if they had been laid out by someone who expected a visit and had prepared the room for it with great care, and who had been waiting, patiently, for a very long time, for the visitor to come down the stair.
Sella found that she had been holding her breath. She let it out. It sounded very loud.
“They look as if they were expecting someone,” said Ysra.
“They were laid out for a visit that did not come,” said Sella. “That is what I would write, if the ledger had a line for it. A visit delayed. The ledger does not have such a line. It has only the injuries.”
She reopened it, at the back, to the clean page with her counts. The last line on the page had been blank the evening before. Sella had gone to bed with it blank, and she had woken and come down to the bone-room with the lamp, and now she looked at the line, and there was a single, neat tally on it, four strokes and a bar, in a hand that was not quite hers.
She had not written it. She was certain she had not written it. But she recognised the bar, which had the fine, unhurried curl at its end that she always used on her own numbers, the one she had been taught by a surgeon in a Lessary hospital who had told her that the tail of a number showed whether its keeper had been frightened when she made it.
The tail of this one was very steady.
“Someone is keeping the score,” said Ysra quietly, looking over her shoulder, “and it is not you.”
Sella closed the ledger again and held it against her chest, and did not answer, because the honest answer was yes, and she had never in her life had a patient she did not know.