Haven's clothing was simple and cool, no more than a light tunic and breeches, but in spite of that the heat of the day had worked up a sweat out of him and sapped most of his energy. It preoccupied him with thoughts of stopping early today and finding a place to make a night of it. So preoccupied was he that it wasn't until he paused to tighten the knot of the blindfold about his head that he noticed the change in temperature.
The sun was no longer warm upon his skin; he was in shade. Cloud shadow? He reached one hand out to the side and it encountered the sun again, and there was no wavering between the two, between the warm and the cool. So not clouds then. Something was casting a stable shadow and he had stepped into it.
Moving forward carefully, prodding the ground ahead with the end of his staff, he realized it must be a very large something, for he walked for many paces and still did not encounter the shadow caster. What could it be, way out here? Curiosity demanded he find out. At last the staff end ran up against something solid with the distinctive, dull clunk of wood on stone.
His hands were his interpreters. Touch could tell a story if you paid attention to the language it spoke. His fingertips, those ten invaluable and versatile receptors, explored the stone before him, skimming over ridges and cracks, moving in a seeming random manner along the wall, but in truth there was nothing random about it. They were telling him a story. The stone was cut and in regular shapes, so the structure was artificial and not nature-made. People had built this. But the stone was also crumbling, worn at the edges, and hardy weeds snaked upward in its cracks, and this told him the structure was in a state of abandonment or disrepair. No sounds from within or without, neither voices nor the bustle of activity.
He judged the time to be late afternoon and decided he would explore the place and perhaps make it his shelter for the night. The rucksack on his back was beginning to feel heavy so he shrugged it off and left if slouching against the wall as he went about tracing the edge of the building, staff reading the ground before him and right hand trailing upon the wall. There had to be a door or entrance somewhere, and if he just went in one direction he'd eventually find it and get an idea of how big the place was in the act. It seemed round, so far. As he walked, he counted paces and built a mental map up in his head, with his waiting rucksack at the center of it. It was an automatic process, in a way, something he did in any new place without even thinking about it.
He stopped abruptly and stood there with his hand on the wall, very still, his head cocked to one side. He could have sworn he heard a noise just then, something beyond the wind moaning about the top of the structure and whistling over the bare ground, and he waited patiently to try and catch it again.