Anwen worked the remote arm from the control console, and the arm was slow.
The arm was the Quiet Forge’s own, older than anyone in the yard: a jointed limb of iron and brass, mounted on a rail along the inner chamber’s ceiling above the cradle, ending in a hammer head and a pair of tongs that could be swapped by a keeper’s command. The Founders had built it for hammering a heart in the cradle without a listener in the field. Nobody had used it in living memory. Cant had found its control routines in the shrine’s archive that afternoon, after the exception, and Anwen had spent the hours since learning them.
She sat at the control console in the outer hall now, behind a thick glass port that looked into the inner chamber. In front of her, a bank of levers and a small screen. Beside the screen, pinned to the console, a card. The arm’s limits, in her capitals: the force of each stroke, the angle, the speed, the number of strokes per minute. Nothing faster. Nothing harder.
Through the port, the arm moved. Slowly. It lifted its hammer head, paused, and brought it down on the replacement heart’s frame in the cradle. A heavy flat strike. Then it lifted again, and paused, and turned a few degrees on its rail, and struck again.
