Gaunt objected to the lock on the Undercroft door before he had even seen it. He had heard about it from Korrin, who had heard about it from Ysra, who had said it in the voice she used for things that were certain to be unpleasant, and that was enough for a smith. A lock was a bad idea in a body. A lock meant that one part of the Hold had decided it knew better than another part what should be opened, and a body that could not open its own doors was not a body at all but a stack of stones with opinions. He said this in the forge, to the anvil, at the top of his voice, and then he went to find a file.
He did not intend to make the key. He intended to object to it, which was a different thing, and he said so to Harrow at the forge door as he went past, with a long-suffering look that was meant to make the mason feel responsible. Harrow counted the steps from the door to the bench, and said nothing. This was how Gaunt knew he had already begun.
The bit was the hard part. A key needed a bit that matched the wards of the lock, and the wards of the lock were not shown to anyone, and Ysra would not let him see the lock itself because she said it was not finished being looked at. So Gaunt began with the bridge rails. He had a length of old railing from the bridge over the Sallow’s north channel, which had come up in the spring flood and been dragged up the causeway by Korrin on his back, and he had decided that the railing was the right metal, because it had been forged by a Lessary smith who did not know what he was doing and had got it right by accident.
He cut a blank from it. He objected to the cut.
“The line is wrong,” he said, to Korrin, who had come to stand in the door with his arms folded and the bruise on his shoulder showing dark under his jerkin. “The line should be straight. I have cut it crooked because I am angry, and anger is a poor sort of chisel.”
“Make it faster,” said Korrin.
“I am making it as fast as I can make it.”
“Make it faster than that.”
Gaunt took the blank to the anvil and heated it in the fire until the metal went the colour of a dying sunset, and then he began to beat it into the shape of a shank. The hammer rang. Harrow, at the yard gate, began to count the strokes under his breath, one for each blow, in the rhythm of a man laying stones, and Gaunt, who had heard that rhythm for two months across the court and had come to resent it, found that his own hammer had begun to fall in time with it, and he hated that, and he hit harder.
“Four hundred,” said Harrow.
“Stop counting my strokes.”
“I am not counting your strokes. I am counting the stones the yard does not need.”
“Five hundred.”
“The bit,” Gaunt said, to nobody, through his teeth, “is going to be a disgrace.” He had got the shank nearly straight. He turned it in the tongs and began on the head, which had to be cut with a set of teeth, and the teeth were the hardest part of any key he had ever made. He filed the first tooth. It was too deep. He filed the second, and it was too shallow. He stopped, and looked at the two teeth in the grey light from the forge door, and objected to them both.
“Six hundred,” said Harrow, from the yard gate.
“Seven hundred,” said Gaunt, and at seven hundred he threw the half-made key at the anvil with all his strength. It struck the iron with a crack that rang through the forge and the yard and the stair beyond the wall. It bounced once, twice, and lay on the floor under the bellows, where Gaunt could see its bit lying flat against the stone like the tongue of a dog.
“I will never make another key,” he said. He said it to the forge in general and to the anvil in particular. “Never. Not for the Undercroft, not for the Warden, not for the boy who breaks his shin on the fourth stair and calls it a cellar. I am a smith. I make hinges. I make gates. I make things that stay where they are put, and I am not a locksmith, and no locksmith ever loved the Hold.”
Korrin, at the door, said nothing. Harrow, at the gate, said nothing. The forge fire popped. Gaunt stood with his hands on his hips and his breath heavy in his chest, and he waited for the silence to become unbearable, and it did not. Nobody came to tell him to stop. Nobody said, Gaunt, the key is good. So he bent down, very slowly, with an audible groan that everybody in the yard could hear, and picked the thing up again, because it was the only key in the Hold and because he was proud of it, and he did not intend to say so.
He filed the teeth. He filed them properly, once, and then again. He set the bit, and then he set it again, and he tested the tooth against the lock’s shape, which he had seen only through the crack of Ysra’s door, and he was almost sure. Then he wrapped the key in a rag, took it across the court and down the Undercroft steps, and found Ysra sitting on the flat stone at the top of the passage, with her back to the door and her eyes shut.
“Here,” said Gaunt. He held out the rag.
Ysra opened her eyes. She took the key without thanks. She weighed it in her palm and looked at the bit and then at the fourth stair, the one with the chip out of its nose, and she said, “It is the exact length of the step that is missing.”
“That is an insult,” said Gaunt.
“It is accuracy,” said Ysra.
“It is a stair that has been counted too many times, and you are taking a smith’s work and laying it on its wrong edge, and calling that an accuracy. Give it back.”
“No,” said Ysra, and put it in her apron pocket, and stood up. Her knees cracked. She looked older than she had in the morning. “You made it in seven hundred strokes. Harrow counted them. He says your rhythm is improving.”
Gaunt turned on the stair, and his face went hot all the way to his ears. “He said that?”
“He said it to the stone,” said Ysra, “which is the same as saying it to you, since the stone has no ears, and you have a great many of them, and they are all listening.”
Gaunt made a noise deep in his chest. It was not a laugh, because he did not laugh about smithing. It was a sort of cough of outrage, and he turned around again and went back up the stair with his back to her, so that she could not see his face, and he called down over his shoulder, in the loudest voice he had: “The rhythm is not improving! It is merely less loud! Harrow is a fool!”
From the top of the stair, Harrow’s voice came back, unhurried. “Six hundred and eighty,” it said, meaning the strokes.
Harrow had come to the foot of the Undercroft steps by then. He stood with his cap in his hands and his hammer-count still running in his head. He had heard the key come out of Ysra’s apron, and he had heard Gaunt’s breath go short on the stair, and he decided, for once, to say nothing that could be counted. He went instead to the lamp on the bottom step and turned its wick a little higher, so that the passage would be bright when the door opened. It was the only thing he did all day without a number in his head. He could not have said afterwards why he had done it. A door should not be opened in the dark when there is a lamp to light it.
“Good,” said Ysra, without looking round. “Now the bit.”
Ysra put the key in the lock.
She did not turn it at once. She stood with her hand on it and her head bent, counting, the way she counted anything that might be about to move. Gaunt, halfway up the steps, stopped and turned back. He had heard her breath go quiet. He had heard the stair go quiet beneath her, as a stair does when it is listening for someone else’s foot.
She turned the key. It did not catch. It went round a quarter of the way and stopped, as if the bit were the wrong length after all, and then the lower door swung open on its own, slowly, on hinges that had not been oiled in two centuries and that made no sound at all.
Beyond the door was a room. Gaunt saw it over Ysra’s shoulder, and then he came down the last steps without meaning to. It was not dark. It was lit by a row of lamps along its far wall, small brass lamps of an old pattern that had not been in the Undercroft the night before, when he had come down to check the bolt. There were nine of them. Each was burning. Each had been set on a stone shelf at the height of a standing man’s head, and the flames in them stood perfectly straight, as if there were no air in the room at all to move them.
Ysra said nothing. Gaunt said nothing. For once in his life he could not think of a single objection.