Up close, Noll Vey had to tilt his carved stone chin back at an awkward angle to meet Eske’s eyes.
When Noll and Ossa Flint and Tessa had shaped the basalt-and-lime host frame four days ago during the lull between the archive rescue and the forest fire, Noll had insisted on making the body his own true height—five feet eight inches in his split leather boots, with the slightly round shoulders of a man who had spent thirty years carrying pine prop-crates up tavern back stairs, and the crooked bridge of the nose a wagon-carter in Greyford had given him over a three-card table when Noll was twenty-four. At the time, Noll had joked that a taller body would ruin his timing on low doorways.
Now, kneeling on one stone knee beside the witness rail while Eske stood full height in its coal-ash coat, Noll felt every inch of the difference between the small, shabby con man who had died on a coaching-stable floor and the towering thing he had conjured out of a valley’s terror.
“Well,” Noll said. His stone thumb slipped out of the chest recess and braced itself on the scarred oak of the witness bar. “That’s a good name. Better than anything I ever put on a handbill.”
