Old Dabbeth

A half-mad hermit who has lived in a wash-cave below the Unhushed Tower for forty years, watching its dead walk their same unfinished round — and the Tower's dead step around him, though he will not say exactly why.

Forty years ago Dabbeth came east on the barrow road as a young scholar of the Listening College, meaning to chart the Tower's old bronze workings and go home in a fortnight. He is still here. He says the dead keep him company and that he learned the order of the wards backward by accident, watching long enough that the dead started walking them out for him to be polite — the same slow circuit, door to door, latch to latch, over and over, the way the Unclosed repeat whatever their ending left unfinished. He will trade the ward-order for a hot meal — not any food, a hot meal, he is specific about this — and will not explain how he knows the wards except to say that the dead are better at explaining things than the living give them credit for, and that none of them have troubled him since he started closing his own door behind him the same way they close theirs, every night, without fail. He is the only living thing the Tower's dead step around. He treats this as unremarkable.