Gaunt had an idea, and he told it to the forge before he told it to the Hall, because the forge was the only thing in the Hold that could not argue back.
He stood at the anvil with the hammer in one hand and the bar of the morning in the other, and he said it aloud to the coal-boy, to the bellows and to the cold black face of the anvil, in the voice he used for the things he was most pleased with. “The chapel bell is iron,” he said. “Not all iron. The bronze has a good deal of iron in it, the way every bell does, because the founders in the old days threw in whatever scrap they could get their hands on. Scrap iron. Bolts and hinges and the like. I have seen it in the Lessaran bells on the ridge. And that bell hangs over the nave doing nothing but being looked at, and the Hold is starving for iron, and I say melt it.”
The coal-boy, Ned, looked at him with his red hands folded on the bellows-handle and his face blank. He had heard the Hold’s arguments before. He had learned that a smith who was pleased was a smith who would soon be sorry.
