CHAPTER ONETHE VIEW FROM THE UNNAMABLE
There was a great tameness upon the land. Cats licked their paws, the trains ran on time, our bellies and our calendars were full.
In those days the barbarian was back and forth over the stony marches, sampling cigars at Scales & Co one day, plundering the tomb of some ancient demon-prince the next. Long before his taking of House Derby this was, Gotchimus the only name we knew him by. A delver, a drifter, an outlander in every land, he gazed over teacups as though from a dream of the old dream-haunted world, but he kept his pocket watch wound even in the meanest pits of the far wilds.
Most agreed that he was not handsome, but beautiful in the way that certain rare and deadly beasts are beautiful. His nose was misshapen, his cheekbones perhaps too strong, his jaw set with a sardonic crookedness that might have been mistaken for cruelty or caprice in someone of a more dissembling nature. But the brightness of his eyes, which were the gray of storm clouds at dawn, coupled with the stout openness of his bearing, made one feel not judged but somehow in on it with him, even if one struggled to say precisely what it was.
His manner of dress could not be faulted. We saw him most often in a worsted suit of oxblood and cream, perfectly tailored to his extraordinary dimensions. Later he adopted the sable eyepatch that both accentuated his strangeness and leant him an air of grave refinement.
His choice of lodgings was, alas, less discriminating. He had with him that peculiar tent of bone and hide, which he insisted on erecting each night in the river district. Among the drunks and criminals, in the oily flicker of trash fires, the barbarian slept and dreamed barbaric dreams—dark wings flapping and a cold light in the pines, black frothing streams, a yawp that echoes forever in mist-laden valleys. Girded by such visions as though by a sheltering pentacle, the barbarian slumbered undisturbed by his rough neighbors.
The trouble began when wizards started turning up dead. Some of those wizards we had loved, if not as friends, then as friends of friends whose gardens we had hoped to tour someday. With their deaths, the tameness was ruffled. Would-be sleuths made charts, took drugs, skulked about the harbor. Letters to the editor were penned, dispatched, and printed, then scissored and pasted into albums by those who had penned them. As for what the wizards thought, that was plain from the extra squads of Committee Lamentables stalking the streets, dowsing rods swishing in the glow of their light-knife smiles. Meanwhile, the witches of the High Godsward hid their souls in smooth stones and gave the stones to their granddaughters, saying, “Hide these under your pillows, dears, and try not to think on your dreams for a while.”
Gotchimus was suspected from the beginning, of course. If we seem quick to judge, only consider that his own friend and closest associate, a certain Mister Hecksley, felt obliged to raise the matter with him one fateful morning in mid-autumn, when the oaks of Charnel Square had adopted their first rusty blush. High above the square, on the top floor of the Unnamable, Gotchimus had just seated himself at their usual place when Hecksley tossed his copy of the newspaper onto the table.
“That’s the third this year,” Hecksley said. “And this one’s the most gruesome of the lot.”
Hecksley was a brisk, portly man with lustrous dark hair and eyes like unpolished sapphires. A thief by trade, he had in recent years stopped stealing things in order to spend more time profiting off what other people stole. “Well?” he demanded. “Anything to say for yourself?”
The barbarian regarded the article impassively. It concerned a wizard called the Head of Ven, a mechanician of the highest order. Though he usually kept to his floating tower workshop, dispatching cogsbodies of his own making to perform errands, the Head of Ven was sometimes seen abroad on market day, harnessed to a mobile platform of his own design, its steam-powered legs a wonder of spiderish poise. We had chuckled to see Ven, surely one of the most powerful members of the Fifth Committee, frowning as he tested with clockwork pincers the firmness of melons, the crustiness of bread loaves. He had been discovered dead in his own tower, smothered in a bucket of naphtha, the lid held shut with a heavy gear. Now, all across the city, the click and whir of the wizard’s automata had taken on a melancholy timbre—or did we only imagine them pining for their lost creator as they tossed feed to the birds?
“I had nothing to do with this,” Gotchimus said, folding the newspaper and returning it to Hecksley. “Someone else must have gotten to him first.”
“So! You admit that you would have done it yourself—had you, as you say, gotten to him first. Bold words, Gotch, with worrying implications. I’m not sure I should be seen dining with you. I’m not sure we should be talking at all.”
But the barbarian had stopped listening. He seemed—much to Hecksley’s puzzlement and chagrin—to be giving all his attention to the table between them. He ran both hands over its surface, then leaned forward with one ear close, as though to hear a whispered secret. “There is something wrong with this table,” he said.
“Stop trying to change the subject,” Hecksley said. “It’s the same table we had last week, and the week before that. It’s a good table, sturdy and uncreaking. One of the best in the house.”
Certainly it had the advantage of a very good view. The club called the Unnamable—we should explain for the benefit of nonmembers—was built inside an enormous skull at the south end of Charnel Square. The skull had belonged to some nameless god, but in the early days of the Sundering, Rosefrost Derby herself had parted it from its owner’s body with a crescent-headed bolt launched from a polybolos of her own design. Some of that god’s ribs still arched over the trees in the square, and whole rows of structures on Bonesea Boulevard used its femurs and tibiae as their foundations. Because the god had been nameless, the club housed in its skull resisted all attempts at naming. For the sake of convenience it was referred to as the Unnamable, but not even its most longstanding members could pretend that the word was fixed with any firmness.
Gotchimus and Hecksley were seated before the easternmost of the skull’s three eye sockets, under the cranial dome. From here, the beauty of morning in the capital could be appreciated fully. The knife grinders of Charnel Square were out in force, their calls like the dirge of some spectral choir. Meanwhile the majestic ghost tortoise of Bloodletters Pond traced her slow route along the paths beneath the oaks. Visible at the opposite end of Bonesea Boulevard were the high parklands upon which sprawled the countless wings, galleries, and turrets of Inwardly, the House on the Hill, shared home to our ruling families and their attendants. Farther north and a little to the west stood the Thousandfold Tower, the city’s highest spire and the Fifth Committee’s headquarters.
It was to this tower that Hecksley now gestured with his rolled-up newspaper. “The wizards look after their own,” he said. “Every one of their servants is out hunting for the killer. I can’t think of a worse set of enemies to make.”
“Then you lack imagination,” the barbarian said, finally turning his attention from the table.
“On the contrary, I possess enough for both of us. It is thanks to the efficacy of my imagination that I can picture the variety of tortures the Fifth Committee might subject us to, should we fall into their clutches. Gotch, for your sake as well as mine, you must lay low for a while.”
“Shouldn’t you be relieved that the Head of Ven is no more?” Gotchimus asked. “Or did I misunderstand some detail of your history with the man? Maybe you actually paid him for that pretty contraption at the end of your right arm?”
The contraption to which the barbarian referred was a hand of living brass. How Hecksley lost the original was a story he refused to tell, but he had boasted on several occasions of stealing its mechanical replacement from the Head of Ven’s floating workshop.
“I have been very patient with you,” Hecksley said, “and you’ve always trusted my advice. On sartorial matters, on questions of etiquette and protocol. I like to think you consider me a faithful guide, and perhaps even your friend. So when I tell you—” But here the thief paused, for their waiter Beauchamp had arrived with tea and a platter heaped with food. “Ah,” said Hecksley, “I hope you don’t mind that I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for both of us.”
Beauchamp, like Hecksley’s hand, was a creation of the Head of Ven. Several such cogsbodies were employed by the club, all to work on the third floor, which was frequented by those—like Gotchimus and Hecksley—who did not care to have their conversations overheard by anyone who might repeat them. (These mechanicals, though attentive, were one of Ven’s early designs, and they lacked the gift of speech.) Limbs whirring, Beauchamp set down plates of eggs, sausage, pies, hot rolls, and berries floating in apple jelly.
“Thank you, Beauchamp,” Hecksley said. “And I am sorry about—you know, your maker.” He shook his mechanical hand as though to demonstrate his own connection to the unfortunate matter, but Beauchamp only turned and walked away.
“They’re all a bit prickly today,” Hecksley told Gotchimus. “Can’t blame them, I suppose. Especially if they think you had something to do with it.”
Gotchimus said nothing to this as he filled his plate with food, avoiding the meats because he refused to eat the flesh of any animal he did not kill himself. The thief did not know whether this was due to pride, conviction, or some tradition of his people. Sensing, perhaps, that Hecksley was about to ask, Gotchimus took a velvet purse from his jacket and emptied its contents onto the table between them.
Gemstones, a great mound of them, liquid puddles of light caged in faultless geometries. Trying to remain composed, Hecksley folded one of his mechanical fingers into the palm of his hand and a jeweler’s loupe emerged to take its place.
“This might be the finest assortment you’ve ever brought me,” he admitted, examining a particularly large and luminescent opal. “I’m not sure I can pay you for all of them today.”
“I think you can,” the barbarian said.
“You believe I am outrageously rich,” Hecksley said, “and in this you are not mistaken. But I am also very cautious. You think I come to breakfast with this much coin on my person?”
“I don’t wish to be paid with money,” the barbarian said. “All I want is information.”
Hecksley set the opal down. “I have that in great store, but some of it is costly indeed. What do you want to know?”
“There’s a wizard.”
“A wizard,” the thief said darkly. “The last time I helped you find a wizard—”
“This one wears his gray hair cropped short, and plain robes like the habit of a humble monk. But he possesses extraordinary power, and a voice like dark velvet, and his eyes are bright green.”
Hecksley looked ill at ease. “No, not another word,” he said.
“His specialty is peculiar,” Gotchimus went on. “He isn’t focused on any one element or sphere of arcane study. He claims to walk the in-between places.”
“Stop, stop, stop,” Hecksley said.
“I have sought rumors of this man here in town and beyond the stony marches. I consulted the scribes of Duskend Alley and the oracles of Bottle and Gloam, challenged riddling demons, scoured the library of the Manse of the Five Winds. My adventures have won me riches, but not what I seek. I need to know who he is, and I need to know how to find him.”
Hecksley looked ready to storm off, but a glance at the jewels calmed him enough to say, “Why, pray tell, would you go looking for the man you describe?”
“He and I have unfinished business, as I’ve heard it put.” Gotchimus gestured to the patch over his left eye. “It’s to do with this.”
Hecksley went quiet. Months had passed since the barbarian first donned the eyepatch, and Hecksley did not believe, as some did, that it served as mere accessory. He knew Gotchimus well enough to guess that the man had suffered some true and calamitous injury. But his curiosity had gone frustrated, for every time he tried to steer the conversation to the matter of the eyepatch, the barbarian either changed the subject or stared into the distance until Hecksley was forced to change it for him.
“I think,” Hecksley said at last, “that if we are to continue this conversation, I will need to have the whole story. What do you say, Gotch? These fine gemstones plus a proper explanation, in exchange for the information you seek. Surely that is not too much to ask of a friend?”
Gotchimus crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. The barbarian had never haggled with him before, never protested the fees Hecksley charged for fencing his plunder. Now the thief wondered if he had gone too far, presumed too much. But the words were out of his mouth, and there was no stealing them back.
“Your proposal is a lopsided one,” Gotchimus said. “To explain what happened to my eye, I must tell you all I’ve been doing with my time here in the capital. And if I am to trust you with that story, I’ll need a true tale of your own. I want to hear the story of your hand.” After a moment, he added, “Not too much to ask of a friend, I think.”
The thief slowly flexed his clockwork digits, looking at them as though for the first time, and in his eyes was a mixture of grief and fear and something else—revulsion, or maybe wonder. “Very well,” he said, suddenly subdued. But a moment later, when he called for Beauchamp, his voice was strong and clear. “Another pot of tea, my good man. Better make it one of those large ones.”
Outside, a crew of cogsbodies were scrubbing clean the statue of General Alban Moog astride his charger. Out on Bonesea Boulevard, a little crowd had gathered to watch a troupe of juggler-priests recite the hundred precepts of the gyring divinities. Farther off, an airship buzzed toward the dock atop the Thousandfold Tower, its envelope fluorescing in the morning sun.
Beauchamp refilled both their cups and left the pot. And so it was that the barbarian and the thief, with an autumn breeze frisking at the threshold of a dead god’s eye socket, settled in to tell the tales of how each had lost a part of himself.
“Well,” Hecksley said, “you first.”
Copyright © 2026 by Jedediah Berry
