Gaunt started the argument at the anvil before Tallow had got his coat off, and by the time Tallow arrived with the allotment tally under his arm, the argument had grown a second side, a Chamber, and a grievance about the hour.
“Twelve bars,” said Gaunt, without turning round. “Twelve bars is a joke told by a clerk who has never lifted a hammer. I will not hear it.”
“It was not twelve bars,” said Tallow mildly. He set the tally down on the bench by the bellows, where it was instantly splashed with a drop of quenching water. “It was eighteen to twenty-four bars, and the range is the honest figure, since the Forge’s own reserve is not counted in the same book as the Chamber’s stock.”
“Then the Forge’s reserve is a fine thing to be counted in a book that does not belong to it.”
Tallow let that pass. He had learned, in three years of working the Chamber’s business, that Gaunt’s objections were a kind of weather. They came up quickly out of the Forge’s heat and were gone again before the smoke had cleared, and the only sensible response was to wait with one’s coat on until the sky decided.
