The sixty weights from Coldharbour came into the Forge yard the way everything from Coldharbour had always come into the Hold, which was badly packed, in a bad cart, with a Chancery carrier sitting on the tailboard looking pleased with himself. Gaunt objected to the cart. He objected to the carrier, who had asked for a receipt in the Ink, and to the bars, which were stamped with a Coldharbour factor’s mark that he did not recognise and did not want to. Then he took the first bar off the tailboard himself, because nobody else in the yard would lift it properly, and carried it across the flags on his shoulder as if it were a sleeping child, and set it down on the Forge scale with a grunt that shook the brass pan.
“Weigh it,” said Idrin, from the arch.
“I am weighing it, Highness. Stand where you are and keep your opinions in your coat.”
He weighed it. Then he weighed the next bar, and the next, and the next, one by one through the whole of the cart’s load, and he wrote each figure in the Forge’s tally in his square hand, and read each one aloud in his own deep voice so that the lads at the coal-heap could hear and check him. Nobody checked him. The lads had learned long ago that Gaunt’s figures were honest, even when Gaunt was lying about everything else, and that a bar which weighed what Gaunt said it weighed…
