Gaunt objected to the Watch’s penance.
He had decided, somewhere in the small hours, that he would object to it at the next sitting, and he had got up from his bed with the objection already formed and carried it down to the Forge in his head like a red-hot bar in a pair of tongs. He had not yet put it on the anvil. He had only walked round it all morning, in the yard and the Forge and the corridor, turning it over, looking for the place where it would crack.
He found the place in the Chamber, a little after the bell.
“Thirty nights,” said Gaunt, rising from his stool. He did not wait for Tallow to read out the minute. “Thirty nights on a stair of fourteen steps. That is a sum that comes out wrong. Everyone in this Hold knows the Watch counts fifteen when she is tired. She counted fifteen on the night the Lessaran box first spoke to her, and she has been counting fifteen ever since, and the Hold is asking her to climb a stair she cannot count without going up one more step than she should. The arithmetic is wrong, and the stair is shorter than the Hold thinks. I object most of all to the Chamber for being so pleased with its own arithmetic that it cannot see the stair is short.”
