The engine was finished on the seventh morning, and it was badly built, and Gaunt had been waiting all week to say so.
He stood on the Forge’s stone-watch with his good hand on the parapet and his bad hand held up at his chest, half-closed, as a man holds a pair of tongs he has not yet decided to use. The stone-watch was a flat slab of masonry on the Forge’s roof, built by the first Smiths of the Hold for the purpose of looking down the valley at anybody who was coming to complain about the noise. Gaunt had been complained at from it for two years. He had never once been out of the view.
Below him, in the valley, Vesk’s engine stood in the mud like a crane that had been left to think.
The arm was the first thing. It was long. It was longer than the Forge’s own roof was high, and it stood up from a massive wooden cradle on a pivot of black iron, and at its far end, where the sling would be, there hung a counterweight of Corvanne stone the size of a grain cart. The stone was cut in blocks and bound in chains. The chains were good. He would give the chains that. They had been made by a smith who knew what a link wanted to carry.
