Noll Vey had shared bills with trained pigs in Bracken Ford, a blindfolded knife-thrower in Greyford who cheated by peeking down his nose, and a pair of singing sisters whose voices could sour fresh milk at twenty paces. Never once, however, had he been upstaged by barley dough.
“Move the north baffle three inches left,” Hobb said, not to Noll, who owned the wall, nor to Prit, who kept the books, but to Tessa Dene, who was helping him wedge a flat sheet of salvaged boiler iron across the stones of the fuel-less hearth. “If you leave that stone partition jutting out by the inner arch, it catches the draft from the drain culvert and sends the steam up into the rafters. I don’t want the rafters smelling of honey. The rafters don’t have copper in their pockets.”
“My baffle,” Noll protested from the mortar seam above the chimney breast, “is placed at that precise angle to conceal the third counterweight rope until the delver rounds the corner! If I draw it back three inches, any fool standing at the mirror exit can see the sandbag hanging from the beam!”
“Any fool standing at the mirror exit,” Hobb said, dropping a fist-sized lump of white pig lard onto the hot iron sheet with a loud, fragrant hiss, “is going to be looking at my pans, not your sandbag. Pull the stone back, Vey.”
