Nothing Has Changed in the Bodies, Only in What the City Believes

I examined Toma and Sevi Almery once, days after the fire took the roof at the eastern end of their house on Ulev Street, in the black passage between their two rooms, char still tacky underfoot where the beam above had wept pitch before it caught. Identical depth of soot in both throats. Identical living reddening in the tissue beneath it, the mark flesh keeps only while a heart is still moving blood through it. No interval between the two deaths that any instrument I own could read. I told the Divan’s own clerk what I found before I left the house that day, because a finding said plainly to the person who asked for it is still a finding, whatever else it isn’t yet.

The ruling that cited my finding was entered two days before my written account of it reached even the Archive, let alone the Divan’s own docket. Sworn word carried the office further than written word had traveled yet, which I am told is ordinary practice, and I do not dispute it. What the ruling built on top of that finding, I do dispute, in the one part that is mine to speak to: I was asked to determine an order of death, not to divide a house. Whatever the Register did or did not hold of either of their ages, the division is not a shape my examination produced, and I would rather it not be read back onto my table as though it were.

Tonight’s sheet says no finding has yet been entered. That is true in exactly one sense — the Divan’s own file has never held a sworn instrument bearing my seal, only a word spoken in a doorway and an account I wrote for my own keeping, which reached the Archive but not the court that asked for it. So I have written the instrument properly tonight, at last: dated, sealed, the same finding I gave in the passage and have given nowhere differently since. Undeterminable, and no further than that. I read the witness’s account from the window across the street before I finished it the first time, as I did again tonight; it did not change a word then and has not now.

I have tied cords for the dying more times than I have kept count of. I have never before had to tie one for my own testimony, to keep it from being worn by three hands at once, none of them mine.