The letter from Thornwick came up the Lessary Road on the forty-eighth morning, folded round a twist of paper that held a sample of the quarry’s stone. Gaunt opened the paper first. He held the stone up to the light of the forge-door with his good hand, and turned it, and looked at the grain as if the grain had insulted his mother.
“Coarse,” said Gaunt.
“It is quarry stone,” said Harrow, who had come across the yard from the Mason’s sheds with his count-cord coiled round one wrist. He gave the stone no glance. He looked at the letter. “It is always coarse. That is the nature of quarries.”
“It is coarse enough to crack a wall at the bed, and it will crack it, and the man who bought that wall deserves what the crack does to him.” Gaunt put the stone down on the forge’s anvil-end with a click, very deliberately, and took up the letter in his good hand. He read it slowly, with his lips moving, the way he read anything he meant to answer in person. It was a short letter in a clerk’s neat hand. It described the first four days’ tally of the Form’s laying. It described a crack in the first wall’s lower bed, which had been extended by a third, as the lord had ordered. It did not say whether the copy had been fed. It did not say whether the copy had been rested. It said that the Form…
