The bell was a Corvanne mischief, and Gaunt had said so before he had even reached the Kitchen yard, which was the only way he had ever known how to begin an argument.
He said it again when he got there. He said it to the mounting-block, which was cold and wet with the morning’s damp, and to the Kitchen’s back step, which was empty, and to the cistern grating, which took his words down into the dark without a sound. Then he said it to the Hold at large, in the voice the Forge had always used for the lads who came in late, because a silver bell that rang over a proof-board was a toy. It was a Venn toy. It was a thing a Forge could make a poor noise with, and he had heard it ring twice in the night from the Smithy’s loft, and each time he had lain on his pallet with his bad hand under the blanket and cursed the thing as if it had been struck on his anvil by a fool.
He had a hammer in his good hand. It was the small cross-peen from the Forge’s bench, the one with the worn handle that had been his grandfather’s, and he had not carried it out of the Smithy in four years. He carried it now. It weighed exactly what it had always weighed. He was pleased about that, in the part of him that was not angry.
