Sella gave the diagnosis first, as she always did, and the diagnosis was that the thing on the trestle was not alive.
She said it to the room. The room was the Great Hall’s side chamber, a low stone box with one window and a Watch guard at its door, and it held a trestle table, a lamp with a tin shade, a basin of cold water that Pell had sent up without being asked, and the grey figure from the Congress, laid out on the boards with its long hands folded on its chest like a bishop’s. The Dovereach clerk stood against the far wall with his hands behind his back. He had given his consent in writing, on a sheet with the Bench’s wheat stamped in one corner, and Sella had read the sheet twice and told him that the Bench’s consent was worth exactly as much as the Bench’s knowledge, which was not very much.
“No pulse,” she said. “I have not found one at the wrist, the throat, or under the arm, and I have looked in all three. There is no warmth in the joints. I have put my palm on the elbow and the knee and the place under the jaw, where the Hold’s warmth collects in a Hand, and there is nothing there but cold. There is no bloom.”
