For four hours, while the autumn dusk thickened into cold mountain night, the kitchen table of the fort became a stage carpenter’s drafting bench.
Hesta Quill worked with a ruthlessness that made Prit look lenient. With sharp, decisive strokes of her willow charcoal, she crossed out line after line of Noll’s old promotional patter. The Abyss of the Silent Watcher became The Echo Chute. The Mirror of the Unseen Soul was stripped of its spectral pretensions and labeled simply The Bent Gallery.
“You don’t tell them the mirrors show their true inner nature, you idiot,” Hesta scolded, jabbing the charcoal at the packing paper until black flakes flew across the pine planks. “If you tell a superstitious weaver from Mere that the glass shows her soul, she’ll look at a ripple in the tin plate, decide her late grandmother is calling her from the well, and throw herself down the culvert! You tell them the truth! You tell them: Three curved sheets of polished tin, angled by clever iron pins to make your nose look like a winter parsnip!”
From the flue, Noll groaned in mock agony. “A parsnip, Hesta? Have some dignity. I toured with the Royal Polytechnic Exhibition in Westfall. We called it The Geometric Refractor.”
