The verdict came the way the worst of them always did — not as anger but as observation. You have raised a great deal, the Architect wrote, in the small hours, in that hand that never pressed too hard, and grown nothing. The Builder read it twice. They had towers and halls, a library of workings, a lodge of tended flames; and they had, beneath the robe, gone soft as a candle left near the grate — strong enough to lay weave all night and not strong enough to carry their own water up their own stairs without resting on the landing. The letter did not say fix this. It did not need to. The Builder had a vow about false victories carved into stone, and a body is a stone you cannot lie to.
So they raised a forge. Not the kind that bends iron — or rather, exactly that kind, only the iron was to be themselves. It was a low red spire, hot at the heart, and it held almost nothing: a single great bar, and two bells you could make heavier or lighter by hand. The Builder had been to grander halls full of clever engines, each promising to do the work for you, and had distrusted every one. Two bells and a bar, they said, hanging them on the wall. Everything a body can become, it can become from these, if it is asked correctly. The whole art of the forge would be in the asking.
The first law they carved over the fire was the law of where. A body, the Builder had learned, is not heated all over at once; it glows only where it is struck, and the rest stays cold and ignorant. So on the long wall of the forge they hung a figure of grey iron, front and back, a plain mannish shape, and bound it by some sympathy to whoever laboured below. Strike at the chest and the chest of the figure warmed — dull rose, then amber, then the deep orange of metal that means business, and at last, if you were honest and unsparing, a molten red. Everything you had spared stayed cold steel. There was no hiding from the wall. It showed you, in colour, the exact shape of your courage and the exact shape of your excuses.
The second law was the law of cooling. Heated iron does not wish to be struck again at once; struck hot, it cracks. So the figure cooled slowly — two nights, near enough, for a glowing limb to come back to cold grey and be ready. The forge would not forbid you to strike a still-hot place, but it would let you see it glowing there in warning, and a body that ignores its own colour is a body the Architect will be writing about again before long. The Builder set the rhythm of the place by this cooling: a turning wheel of mornings — a day of pushing, a day of pulling, a day for the legs, then the whole frame above, then the whole frame below — so that while one quarter cooled, another was struck, and nothing was ever asked to glow two dawns running.
But the law that made the forge a forge, and not merely a room with a wall, was the third — the law of heavier mornings. The anvil remembered. Whatever you had carried last time, to the last stroke, the forge had written down; and when you returned it did not greet you with the same weight. It greeted you with a verdict of its own, plain as the Architect's: last time you struck this many, this heavy, to the very top of what was asked — so today the bar is heavier by a hand's width of iron, and you begin again at the bottom. If you had fallen short, it did not punish you; it simply held the weight where it was and asked for one stroke more than before. There was no standing still in the forge. You climbed, a rung of reps at a time, until the rung was full, and then the floor rose under you and you climbed again. It was the cruelest kind thing the Builder had ever made: it would never let you stay, and it would never ask of you a leap, only the next honest step.
And the forge kept one ledger above all the others — the heaviest single stroke a body had ever truly landed. The Builder had no patience for the vanity of counting every grain of effort, but this one number they thought worth keeping, because it could not be argued with. The first time you bettered it — drove the bar past any mark you had ever set — the forge did a small theatrical thing the Builder allowed itself to be proud of: it stamped the moment white-hot, a sear of pale gold on the page, the colour of iron a breath from melting. Ran it hot, the keepers would say of such a stroke, and mean it as the highest praise the place could give.
Before the deed could be signed the Auditors came, as the law since the seventh chapter demands they must. They walked the forge in their identical masks and tried it the way they try everything — not once but again and again, every door and stair and lever, on the broad floor and on a narrow one and once more in a hush with all the motion stilled, to be sure the place did not lie to a tired hand at the third watch. Sixty-and-five trials they ran, and counted them aloud, and where the iron figure had once been drawn with a flaw they found it and would not sign until it was mended. Then it was. Every door held. They signed.
The Architect came at the last, as the fire was banking, and stood a while before the glowing wall and the heavier-by-a-hand bar and the white-hot mark on the page. The Builder waited for again, which was what they had trained themselves to expect. It did not come. Now, the Architect said, and the word was warm as the forge itself, now you will grow. And somewhere in the dim behind them a quill the Builder had never managed to catch sight of moved once across a page, and set this down too, and the heat of it was the heat of a thing that means to be remembered.