The Place
Windcliff Roost is a cliff face, and the cliff face is the whole of the home. The face stands 200 m above the farmlands and runs 12 km along the road, and the road is the only straight line the wind allows. The stone is soot-grey where the wind keeps it, and the grey breaks to a pale tan where the rain has worked the year out of the rock. The face is studded with roost-platforms — packed stone set on living ledge, woven branch laid over the stone, each platform wide enough for a talon and no wider than a wing-span, 3 m across at the generous ones. The platforms climb in a broken lattice, forty to a face in the good stretch, and the lattice is the roost's own writing.
The wind is a constant howl, and the howl is the clock, the alarm, and the welcome, and the three are the same sound. The light is the cliff's: amber at the hour the sun drops behind the far range, and the amber holds on the ledges an hour after the valley below is dark. The sky over the roost is a lattice of rises — the thermals, 10 m wide and steady as a stair — and the rise is the only road the sky keeps honest. The air smells of rain on hot stone and of the road below, and the smell of the road is the smell of the raid coming.
The landmarks are few and they are all stone. The Howling Face is the 40 m stretch that sings a low note when the wind is north, and the note is the roost's own weather. The Great Ledge holds the roost-temple, where the Feather-Keeper keeps the season's dead laid out on the grey stone, and the keeping is the roost's longest silence. The Low Roost is the single shelf 10 m up where the young learn the fall before they learn the flight. The silence is broken only by the feather and the flight, and the feather is the only honest promise the sky keeps.
How They Live
They build on the ledge with what the ledge gives: packed stone taken from the face's own shelf, woven branch from the valley trees, feather and hide for the lining, and the low door that faces the rise of air and nothing else. The roost-chamber is one room, 2 m across, and the one room is the whole of the house, because the house is the ledge and the ledge is the cliff. Food comes from the sky and the season: the cliff-bird, the small game of the valley, and the road, which is raided when the fields are green, and the road pays in grain and in a feather of the dead left before the taking, so the taking is the paying and the paying is the quiet. Water is drawn from the cliff's own springs, the seep that works down the grey stone to the shelf, and the springs are tended by the feather-readers, who clean the stone the way the ground-folk clean a well. Light is the sun by day and the low fire by night — a fire kept small because a fire that signals is a fire that raids. The defense is the cliff itself: a visitor who finds the path is already in the flight's path, and the flight is the alarm and the sentence and the welcome, and the three are the same dive. The day is measured by the feather: the rise at first light, the flight at amber, the silence at dark, and the silence is where the day is kept. The rite the place imposes on everyone is the feather-word — a promise made to the wind is kept, because the wind carries the word down the road, and the road remembers.
People
Windcliff Roost is home to the Vantari, and the roosts are counted by platform. Each face holds its own roost, fifteen to forty strong, and the lattice of forty platforms on the main face is the whole of the city, because the city is the face and the face is the sky. The roost is led by the Feather-Keeper, and rank is decided by the feather — whose call is truest in the raid-season, and the deciding is the whole of the law. The ground-folk are not welcome on the path, and the not-welcome is not malice, it is arithmetic: a body below is either a meal or a mistake, and the mistake is the one the feather remembers. A Human trader who has bought the road's quiet calls the roost "the sky that sells its wind," and the trader says the feather left on the road is the only honest price he has ever paid for a silence.
In Stories
The place where the feather is the only honest promise, and the promise is the flight, and the flight is the raid, and the raid is the end.
In the current story the roost stands above the farmland the camp is crossing, and the raid-season has come. This season one vantari landed at the edge of camp and did not fly, and the roost is calling him the one who forgot the feather.