Sister Oda knelt on the damp slate tiles beside the warming basin, tucking the hem of her gray wool habit neatly behind her ankles so the blood-tinted overflow from the scupper groove would not soak the cloth.
Before she reached for her brass-rimmed archivist’s lens, she laid two fingers lightly against the dry stone coping above Warden Brecht’s forehead and spoke the four short sentences of the bridge-shrine commendation for the unshriven dead. She did not add the customary praise for a faithful servant of the realm, nor did she invoke the mercy of the high cathedral in the capital. The shrine of Harth kept a simpler book: a man had drawn breath in the valley, had spoken words that were written down, and had now gone where neither royal charter nor temporal rewind could alter his account.
“May the stone remember the truth of your tongue,” Oda murmured, finishing the formula, “and may the water wash the lie from your hands.”
She rose from her knees, drew her folding horn-framed magnifying lens from her belt pouch, and leaned over the limestone rim of the bath to inspect the dead commissioner’s stiffening fingers before the warm mineral water could macerate the skin.
