Away from the site itself, on a road that snaked its way along the side of a hill, among a small city of new work buildings overlooking the site, lay the blacksmith's shop. It was quite large, compared with such places Richard had seen before. Of course, Richard had never seen anything on this scale being built. He had seen grand places that already existed. To see one just beginning was a revelation. The sheer scale of everything was disorienting.

Jori expertly backed his team, putting the rear of the wagon right at double doors standing open into blackness.

"There you be," Jori said. It was a long speech for the lanky driver.

He pulled out a loaf of bread and a waterskin filled with ale and climbed down from the wagon to find a place farther down the hill, where he could sit and watch the building while Richard worked at unloading the iron.

The blacksmith's shop was dark and stifling hot, even in the outer, cluttered, stockroom. Like all blacksmith's shops, the walls in the workroom were covered in soot. Windows were kept to a minimum, mostly located overhead and covered with shutters, so as to keep it dark in order to more easily judge the nature of the glowing metal.

Despite being recently built for the work at the palace, the blacksmith's shop already looked a hundred years old. Nearly every spot held some tool or other in a dizzying array and variety. There were rows of tools, piles of them. The rafters were hung with tongs and fire pots and crucibles and squares and dividers and contraptions like huge insects which looked to be used for clamping pieces together. Low benches seemingly cobbled together in haste were hung all round with long-handled dies of every sort. Some benches held smaller grindstones. Slots around some tables held hundreds of files and rasps. Some of the low tables were covered in a jumble of hammers in such variety as Richard had never imagined, their handles all sticking out, making the tabletops look like huge pincushions.

The floor was choked with clutter: boxes overflowing with parts, bars, rivets; wedges; lengths of iron stock; clippings; pry bars; pole hooks; dented pots; wooden jigs; tin snips; lengths of chain; pulleys; and a variety of special anvil attachments. Everything was covered with soot or dust or metal filings.

Broad short barrels full of liquids sat around the anvils where men hammered on glowing iron held in tongs, flattening, stretching, cutting, squaring, clipping. Glowing metal hissed and smoked in protest as it was quenched in the liquid. Other men used the horns of their anvils to bend metal that looked like bits of sunset held captive in tongs. They held up those fascinating bits and matched them to patterns, hammered on the metal some more, and checked it again.

Richard could hardly think in all the noise.

In the darkness, a man worked a big bellows, putting all his weight on the downstroke. The blast of air made the fire roar. Charcoal overflowed from baskets sitting wherever there had been room to put them. Cubbyholes held pipe and odd scraps of metal. Metal hoops leaned against benches and planks. Some of the hoops were for barrels, bigger ones were for wagon wheels. Tongs and hammers lay here and there on the floor where men had dropped them in the haste of battle with the hot iron.

The whole place was as agreeable a clutter as he had ever seen.

A man in a leather apron stood not far away at a door to another workroom. He held out a chalkboard covered with a maze of lines as he studied a large contraption of metal bars on the floor in the room beyond.

Richard waited, not wanting to interrupt the man's concentration. The sharply defined muscles of his sooty arms glistened with sweat. The man tapped the chalk against his lip as he puzzled, then swiped a line clean on the board and drew it again, moving its connecting points.

Richard frowned at the drawing. It looked familiar, somehow, even though it was no recognizable object.

"Would you be the master blacksmith?" Richard asked when the man paused and looked over his shoulder.

The man's brow seemed enduringly fixed in an intimidating scowl. His hair was cropped close to his skull-a good practice around so much fire and white-hot metaladding to his menacing demeanor. He was of average height and sinewy, but it was his countenance that made him look big enough for any trouble that might come along. By the way the other men moved, and glanced at this man, they feared him.

Taken by inexplicable compulsion, Richard pointed at the line the man had just drawn. "That's wrong. What you just did is wrong. You have the top end right, but the bottom should go here, not where you put it."

He didn't so much as blink. "Do you even know what this is?"

"Well, not exactly, but I-"

"Then how can you presume to tell me where to put this support?"

The man looked like he wanted to stuff Richard in the forge and melt him down.

"Offhand, I don't know, exactly. Something just tells me that-"

"You had better be the man with the iron."

"I am," Richard said, glad to change the subject and wishing he had kept his mouth shut in the first place. He had only been trying to help.

"Where would-"

"Where have you been all day? I was told it would be here first thing this morning. What did you do? Sleep till noon?"

"Ah, no, sir. We went right to the foundry first thing. Ishaq sent me right there at dawn. But the man at the foundry was having problems because-"

"I'm not interested. You said you had the iron. It's already late enough. Get it unloaded."

Richard looked around. Every spot seemed occupied.

"Where would you like it?"

The master blacksmith glared around at the crammed room as if he expected some of the piles to get up and move for him. They didn't.

"If you'd have been here when you were supposed to be here, you could have put it out there, just inside the door in the outer supply room. Now they brought that big rock sled that needs welding, so you will have to put the iron in the back. Next time, get out of bed earlier."

Richard was trying to be polite, but he was losing his patience with being castigated because the blacksmith was having a troubled day.

"Ishaq made it quite clear that you were to get iron today, and he sent me to see to it. I have your iron. I don't see anyone else able to deliver on such short notice."

The hand with the chalkboard lowered. The full attention of the man's glower focused on Richard for the first time. Men who had heard Richard's words scurried off to attend to important work farther away.

"How much iron did you bring?"

"Fifty bars, eight feet."

The man let out an angry breath. "I ordered a hundred. I don't know why they sent an idiot with a wagon when-"

"Do you want to hear the way it is, or do you want to yell at someone?

If you just want to spout off to no point and no useful end, then go right ahead as I'm not much injured by ranting, but when you finally want to hear the truth of the way things are, just let me know and I'll give it."

The blacksmith peered silently for a moment, a bull bewildered by a bumblebee. "What's your name?"

"Richard Cypher."

"So, what's the truth of the way things are, Richard Cypher?"

"The foundry wanted to fill the order. They have bar stock stacked to the rafters. They can't get it delivered. They wanted to let me have the whole order, but a transport inspector stationed there wouldn't let us have the whole hundred bars because the other transport companies are supposed to get their equal loads, but their wagons are broken down."

"So Ishaq's wagons aren't allowed to take more than their fair share, and fifty was their allotment."

"That's right," Richard said. "At least until the other companies can move some more goods."