Harrow counted the sluice’s iron as it came back from the marsh road on the cart, piece by piece, aloud, because a piece that went uncounted was a piece that could walk off in the night.
The cart came up the Lowgate road in the grey afternoon with Rook’s men walking at its wheels and the Forge’s boy at the reins, very white in the face. It was loaded with what was left of the sluice. Harrow stood in the Mason’s Yard and watched it come, with his square hands at his sides and his count-cord wound round his left wrist, and he began on the chain before the cart had stopped.
“One link. Two. Three.” The chain lay in coils in the straw, black and dull, the links bent and scored where the saws had bitten. Some of them were half-sawn through and had snapped apart under the leaf’s weight, and their ends were ragged and grey. He counted them all. He counted the whole chain, and then he counted the sawn ends separately, and then the ones that were still whole, which were fewer than he would have liked. “Forty-one. Forty-two. That is the chain. It will take a month to re-link and the Forge will hate it. Tell the Forge that from me.”
