Harrow laid the footing stones of the new buttress one at a time, and he counted each one aloud as it went down, because a stone that was laid without a number was a stone that would be laid again.
“Three hundred and ninety-eight,” he said, settling the block into its bed with the flat of his palm and then with the heel of it, the way his father had shown him in the quarry at Lowgate before the Hold had a wall to be proud of. “Three hundred and ninety-nine. Four hundred.”
The footings ran down into the river-gate bank in a stepped course of grey dressed stone. Each block had a bed cut to receive it, and the beds had been cut by his own hands in the first week after the siege, with the Forge’s bad chisels and a lot of swearing from Gaunt in the next yard. Harrow did not mind the swearing. A man who objected to a stone was a man who was thinking about it, and a stone that had been thought about was likely to stay where it was put.
“Four hundred and twelve,” he said, and stopped.
The buttress needed a fifth course, and the fifth course needed a stone he did not have yet. He stood with his hand on the top of the fourth and looked at the place where the stone would go. The counting had brought him to the number, the way counting always did, before he…
