The Charter had not passed, and Gaunt had the iron hot in the Undercroft anyway.
Pell heard about it from the lads at the coal-heap, who heard about everything in the Forge before it had finished happening, and she came down the Undercroft stair at the hour of the lamp-lighting with a loaf under each arm and the bread-knife through her belt, because she had decided that a Smith who was going to pour iron in the dark without a Charter would need feeding before he did something stupid. The stair was cold. The Foundation’s old steps went down in a long curve, nine of them to the first landing and then the rest, and at the fourth from the bottom she stopped, out of habit, and touched the wall with two fingers, the way the carriers did, and went on.
The north vault was lit. She could see the glow of it from the passage, a deep orange light lying along the flags and up the curve of the wall like the light from a banked oven. She could hear the Smith too, grunting and muttering, and the hiss of the furnace-bellows, and under that the thin high sound of iron that was almost ready to flow.
