The Forge was cold at the back and hot at the front, the way it always was when the bellows had been worked too long and the brazier had been let to sink. Gaunt stood at the anvil in the hot part with a single lamp hung on its hook above him, and he worked a bolt with his right hand and did not say anything about the left.
The left hand held the lamp. It did not hold it well. The fingers would not close on the bail, so he had hooked the bail over the crook of the thumb and the first knuckle, and the lamp swung a little each time he struck, and the light went up and down across the anvil in an uneven swing that made his eyes ache. He did not object to the swing. He had stopped objecting to things at about the second bell, when he realised that the objection had nowhere to go.
He lifted the hammer. He brought it down. The bar gave under it with a clean, bright note, and the heat came off the iron in a sheet that he felt on his face and his chest, and the stroke was wrong. He knew it was wrong before he had finished. The angle was off by a finger’s breadth. The bolt would seat badly in the gate’s socket and would have to be cut again. He had done that stroke ten thousand times in his life, and he…
