The replacement heart’s channels lay on the bench in the Quiet Forge’s outer hall, and Mara put her hand on the frame.
The Quiet Forge was the old hands’ name for the inner chamber where a heart was worked: the long chamber at the top of the service stair where Hearth’s old heart sat in its housing, and the cradle beside it. The outer hall was the anteroom before it, a wide stone room with benches along the walls where the parts of a heart were laid out and fitted before they went in. It was not quiet. Nothing near a heart was. The old heart’s ragged tone came through the wall, low and constant, with the burr in it where the fracture ran. Anwen’s grinding wheel screamed at the far bench. Gell and Brisk were hammering at a rib on the anvil by the door.
Mara stood at the main bench.
The replacement heart’s frame was there. Only the frame of it, the skeleton, sitting in a cradle of timber on the bench. A sphere of iron ribs, bolted at the poles, open between them. And inside it, seated in the ribs, the six channel bodies the shops had made: the guild shop’s, the River Mill’s, the Coil Stair’s, and three more the shops had made in the night. Six offset channels around an open center, the pattern she had built at Lorn.
