The first sitting read forty-six names in one morning, and Gaunt had prepared an objection to every one of them.
He had prepared them in the Forge the night before, on the back of a cut-off strip of iron that he had then thrown into the slack tub, because the Chamber did not need to see the list and because the list was his own. He had written them in the Forge’s rough capitals with a burnt stick, and had numbered them, and had crossed out three that he thought too petty to say aloud. By candle-clock he had forty-three left. He had not slept well. He had lain on his bench in the Mason’s sheds with the crooked arm across his chest and listened to the Hold breathing in the dark, and he had found himself thinking, for the first time in years, about the men who had stood at the Foundation’s forge before him and had objected to their own work in exactly the same way.
The Great Hall was full. It was the fullest it had been since the Full Writ, though the nine seats were the same. Lowgate had come up the Mason’s Yard steps in a body and stood at the back under the windows, with Osk at the front and the lodgers’ book under his arm. Dilly sat on the top step of the east stair, with a kid in her lap that somebody had told her was not allowed in the Hall, and…
