Pazeli looks like a respectable academic who got dressed during an earthquake and decided the result was an improvement. His long coat is expertly cut but crowded with instrument loops, chalk marks, and little stitched pockets that bulge at different angles. He moves with a quick, precise sidestep, as if constantly leaving room for someone invisible to pass. When unsettled, his breath catches in three small, dry clicks before he can speak; nearby candle flames often lean toward him. A tiny brass listening bell hangs on his lapel, its rim worn smooth at one thumb-sized spot from years of nervous rubbing. Unexpectedly, he keeps a bright, childlike collection of pressed flowers in the back of his field notebook, each labeled with the name of a place where someone died.

Pazeli is clever enough to notice the detail everyone else misses, but eccentric enough to announce that detail in the middle of a funeral. He is gentle with frightened people and impatient with confident experts. His enthusiasm for the paranormal makes him bold in the field, while his private fear of repeating his old mistake makes him painstakingly cautious around companions. He rarely gives a straight answer, not to deceive, but because he believes the first answer is usually the least useful one.

Pazeli was raised among the archivists and instrument-makers of a hill town built over a succession of abandoned burial chambers. His mother, Ntek, repaired surveying tools; his father, Kallpa, taught him to read old inscriptions and to distrust any history that called a death convenient. At nineteen, Pazeli joined an excavation beneath the town's old bell foundry. A collapse trapped his team in a chamber where the dead had been sealed alive during a forgotten plague. He heard them before the stones gave way, but mistook their cries for echoes and led his mentor, Tekk, into the collapse. Tekk survived, though he lost the use of one arm. Pazeli has spent decades making instruments that distinguish a ghost's memory from its warning, and has become a renowned, erratic investigator of hauntings. He sends money home, visits Tekk when he can, and keeps a friendly correspondence with rival historian Gatu, who thinks Pazeli's methods are reckless nonsense. Now the spirits beneath the foundry have begun repeating the same phrase in his mother's voice, though she is very much alive.