Dabbeth's Roost

A wash-cave under the Unhushed Tower where the hermit Old Dabbeth lives — smoke, a strung line of scavenged bone-and-brass chimes that clatter warning off the Tower's draft, and forty years of listening at its door.

The cave is a wide shallow bite under the mesa skirt, fifty yards from the Tower's shadow. Old Dabbeth has made it habitable in the way of someone who stopped noticing discomfort decades ago: a bedroll, a smokeless fire, a wall of notes scratched in chalk and covered in scratched-over chalk. The wind-chimes he has strung across the mouth are bone and hollow brass, hung to catch the draft that rides down off the Tower whenever something inside is moving. Forty years of nights have taught him to read that draft the way another man reads footsteps — which vents breathe, which go still, which nights the air runs wrong. He says the Tower's dead step around him because he learned their climb backward, and will not explain further except to trade the order of the wards for a hot meal.