The Black Tooth-Shaped Shard

The 105th king was dead.

The examination was carried out by ancestral custom in the side chamber of the Royal Tomb, with only three Tomb Hierophants and one clerk present. When the white cloth was drawn back, the clerk's pen stopped for a long while — something that should not have existed had grown on the inner side of the old king's breastbone: a hard black curved thing, like a tooth and like the tine of a crown, half of it grown out of the bone and pushed through the flesh. About half a finger-joint in size.

A Hierophant took hold of it with the silver tweezers: hard, and it would not move. Its root was joined to the bone, there was no wound, and the flesh had been forced open from the inside. The thing gave off light — a very faint silver light, not a hair different from the layer of light on the back of the Throne.

The form of an examination record is fixed and has not changed in three hundred years (300 years); the columns are copied straight across:

Royal Tomb examination · Year 412 of the Royal Era, Cold Moon
  Deceased: the 105th king
  External injury: none
  Foreign body: inner side of the breastbone, hard black curved object, about half a finger-joint long
  Finding: (blank)

The Finding column was left empty. Not one of the three Hierophants would set his pen to it — set the pen down and the thing becomes a record, and once it is a record it has to be reported upward.

The shard was wrapped in silver wrapping-paper and hidden away where it would not be turned up. As to how a man comes to grow a piece of a crown out of his breastbone, those who could explain it either dare not say, or are no longer here.

Silver wrapping-paper is what the Royal Tomb uses for sealing things up: two layers with a layer of hemp between them. Anything taken off a body at an examination that cannot go into the coffin is wrapped that way, numbered, and put into the wooden cabinet in the side chamber. The register of that cabinet is kept by House Silverhall. This time, no new number was added to the register.