An old carny who has worked the back-road tent shows learns early that you never insult a customer’s hat, even if he made it out of a dead badger and three yards of upholstery fringe. You tip your own brim to the effort, you set a chair where the draft won’t catch his neck, and then you talk to him about the bill before he orders the whole tavern.
Noll Vey bent his heavy limestone knees with a slow, dry rasp of mortar dust.
Seven hundred pounds of carved stone was an awkward garment for crouching on a narrow cellar landing, and the iron dowels Ossa Flint had fitted into his hip-sockets gave a low, complaining creak as he lowered himself to one knee before the ninth door. Inside the hollow cavity of his stone ribcage, the blue core facet pulsed with a steady, measured warmth.
“Hand me that napkin, Hobb,” Noll said.
The cook passed down the hemmed square of bleached flax linen he had brought from the upper kitchen. Noll took it between his broad, blunt limestone thumb and forefinger, shook it out once, and spread it neatly on the grey flagstone six inches to the right of the threshold slot, safely out of the draft.
