Harrow counted the stones before the light came up. He had counted them every morning since the first line went onto the gatehouse board, and he counted aloud, because a stone that went uncounted was a stone that could walk off in the night. “Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.” The east gate-wall stood grey in its coat of frost, eleven courses high on this face, and where the day’s first warmth found the mortar it gave up a thin smoke that smelled of lime and cold water. “Forty-one,” he said, and put his hand flat on the last block of the lower course, the one still waiting on its bed.
It had been waiting since the frost came down. The mallet had rung flat on it the evening before, a dead note like a cracked pot, and Harrow had marked it with a chalk cross and gone to his supper, because a mason who hurries a bad stone into a good wall is only building a second bad wall on top of the first.
“Forty-one,” said Gaunt, from the foot of the ladder. He had come down from the Forge in his leather apron with the frost on his shoulders and his breath going up in pillars. “You have said forty-one three times. The wall does not change its number because you are cold.”
