Gaunt worked the Forge until the second bell, because the iron was poor and the coal was damp and the bellows were an insult to anyone who had ever pulled one properly, and because a bad bar on a flooded sluice would drown a marsh girl before the Chamber had finished voting on her name.
He said all of this to the Forge’s boy, at the top of his voice, as the boy worked the bellows. The boy had been working them for two years and had never once, in Gaunt’s hearing, been told that he pumped the air correctly. He pumped it now with his thin arms going red and his jaw set, and Gaunt watched the coals in the hearth brighten from grey to orange to a clean bright white, and said that the air was still too thin, and the boy pumped harder, and the coals went white, and Gaunt said nothing else about the bellows for a full minute, which the boy would remember for the rest of his life.
The lock-bar was the first thing on the bench. It was a length of Forge-steel as thick as a man’s thumb and as long as his forearm, with a notch cut in one end to take the sluice chain’s ring, and a second notch at the other end where the bar would be dropped into its bracket in the stone. The old bar was beside it, cold now, its end worn bright and bent a finger’s…
