Berry The Naming Song

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83541-394-4
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 512 Seiten

In a world where words are power, there is nothing more dangerous than an unnamed thing. Enter an epic world of ghosts and monsters, magical trains and nameless wonders in this gorgeous lyrical fantasy, perfect for fans of Susanna Clarke, The Starless Sea and the films of Guillermo del Toro. When something fell from the something tree, all the words went away. And the world changed. Monsters slipped from dreams. The land began to shift and ghosts wandered the world in trances. Only with the rise of the named and their committees-Maps, Ghosts, Dreams, and Names-could humanity stand against the terrors of the nameless wilds. Now, they build borders, shackle ghosts and hunt monsters. The nameless are to be fought, and feared. One unnamed courier of the names committee travels aboard the Number Twelve train, assigning names to the people and things that need them. Her position on the train grants her safety in a world that otherwise fears her. But when she accidentally pulls a monster from a dream, and attacks by the nameless rock the Number Twelve, she is forced to flee. Accompanied by a patchwork ghost, a fretful monster, and a nameless animal who prowls the borders between realities, she sets out to look for her long-lost sister. Her search for the truth of her own life opens the door to a revolutionary future-for the words she carries will reshape the world. At once a love letter to the power of language and an exploration of its limits, The Naming Song is the perfect fantasy for anyone who's ever dreamed of a stranger, freer, more magical world.

Jedediah Berry is the author of The Manual of Detection, as well as games The Family Arcana and The Valley of Flowers. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @jedediahberry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Berry, Jedediah

Leseproben

She delivered echo. She delivered echo into a nameless gorge at the edge of everything she knew. Water dripped from rock walls and from the limbs of trees by the river down there. She called out the word, and the word rolled back to her three, four, five times, the thing calling itself by name: echo.

Birds flew out of the gorge. One of the men who’d followed from Jawbone spoke echo quiet to himself. He said the word sounded strange to him.

“They always sound strange at first,” she said.

*   *   *

She delivered stowaway. She climbed aboard a freight train, hid herself in one of the boxcars, dozed as the train rolled east along the canal.

The doors slid open to gray light and the rumble of Hollow’s factories. Two watchers peered inside, ghost lenses flashing. She let one of the watchers see her, and he reached for his signal box. Before he could break it open, she stood and spoke the word for the thing she was, stowaway.

The watchers spoke the new word, to her and to each other, until they were sure they had it right. Then they helped her down out of the car. The watchers were happy to have a word for those people. Easier to catch them that way.

*   *   *

She delivered brass. In an empty house at the edge of Tooth, she found a brass doorknob, a dented brass bowl, a brass cup. She tested their weight, felt the metal grow warm in her hands. She filled the cup with water from her canteen and drank. With the taste of brass still on her tongue, she went outside and made the delivery.

From boxes and trunks, out of attics and basements, people brought brass clocks, brass locks, brass toys, brass rings for the fingers, wrists, and neck. Some made noise with brass horns while others covered their ears or smiled and shook their heads. Nobody knew how to play.

From the factories of Hollow came new things of brass. The couriers of the names committee were issued brass buttons for their uniforms. She sat alone at her desk, working with heavy thread.

*   *   *

She delivered moth. She wrote in her report that she had seen many kinds of moth out there. More kinds of moth, maybe, than they had numbers to number them with.

The diviner who found names for flying things sat with her at the morning meal. His name was Rope, and his arms were long with ropy muscles, and he used a length of knotted rope for a belt.

“We’re still finding more birds after all these years,” Rope said. “Moth could be bird all over again.”

She wasn’t sure how long Rope had been with the committee. Sometimes, when she saw Rope, it took her a moment to remember who he was.

“Starling, kestrel, magpie,” Rope said, rubbing his head as though the birds were within, trying to peck their way free. His pale hair was bristly, like frayed rope. “And those are just this month.”

He was often like this, she remembered. Unhappy and a little resentful. Was it because the others forgot about him, too?

“You seem tired,” she said.

Rope sighed and said, “Hard to sleep some nights. Especially since Buckle.”

“I try not to think about Buckle,” she said—trying, as she said it, not to think about Buckle.

“It’s best not to think about Buckle,” Rope agreed.

*   *   *

She delivered harrow. An old farmer had built one out of scrap and railroad spikes. It was a new thing, or a thing from before that was back again, which was probably more dangerous.

On the southern border, at the foot of a nameless mountain west of the Well-Named Mountains, the courier found the farmer in her barn. She was making modifications with a naphtha torch. The thing was all shadows and sharp points in flashes of hot light.

The farmer lifted her mask. Juniper, her name was. She looked at the courier’s uniform and said nothing.

The courier helped her hitch the heavy frame to an old horse. Juniper had no ghosts to work her land. Out in the fields, the courier walked behind, feeling the softness of the broken soil under her boots. She took an unbroken clod in her hand and broke it. She spoke the word for the thing the farmer had built, harrow.

Juniper did not repeat the word aloud, the way people usually did.

The courier told her that she should have filed a request. The sayers rarely made exceptions these days. “They told my committee to send someone,” the courier said. “They could have sent some of their own.”

Still Juniper said nothing. But she took the courier inside and set out two bowls, filled them with potato and onion soup. A moth flew in loops around the lantern while they ate.

*   *   *

She delivered whiskey. A sayer’s son had distilled barrels of the stuff in an old granary, then sent jars to senior members of the committees. Samples for your inspection, he wrote.

Book invited the courier to his office to share his portion of the nameless spirit. “Obviously a bribe,” he said, turning the jar in his hand. “Wouldn’t be right to drink it alone.”

Book served as chair of the names committee. He decorated his office with purple fabric and soft pillows. He owned a stack of phonograph records from before the Silence, along with a phonograph to play them on. He wore gray suits and vests, purple ties and handkerchiefs. There had been no word for handkerchiefs until Book himself requested one from the diviners, so he could stop calling it “that rag I keep in my jacket pocket.” There had been no word purple until Book delivered it, back in his own days as a courier.

“Let’s drink until we’re both of us shabby,” Book said. Another courier had just delivered shabby, and Book liked to use the newest words. He liked to stretch them where he could.

They drank from small tin cups. Book smoked tobacco wrapped in dried tobacco leaves. He had told the diviners to take their time with that one, because sometimes Book liked the taste of something nameless.

He winced with each sip and was happy. As they drank, he told the courier about the assignment. Told her where the young man kept his still. Gave her an envelope containing the card on which was inked the word, divined by a diviner but still unspoken, unspeakable until a courier made the delivery.

“You know I’ll just have to drink more when I get there,” she said.

“Then you’ll need the practice,” Book said, refilling her cup.

The courier sank back into the cushions and Book put his feet up on his desk. It was late; most of the committee was asleep. Book wore gray slippers, his softest pair.

“You’re keeping up on your training?” he said. “Keeping fit?”

She was. The courier trained every day. She stretched and lifted weights and ran end to end in the committee’s small gymnasium. She read and read again what the old couriers had written down. Moon’s Words on Paper, Glove’s Deliveries—those texts she could recite from memory. She was the best the committee had, and Book knew it.

“I could deliver this right here,” she said.

“Better to go out and make a show of it,” Book said. “We can’t let the sayers think that what we do is easy.”

“Let the sayers think what they want,” she said.

Book frowned. He did not like this kind of talk. The sayers stood above all the named, and what they said was law. More than that: their words were the shape of the world.

So he switched to his favorite subject, the latest gossip about the other committees. A daughter of the maps committee chair had run off and taken up residence in the nameless quarters of Hollow, among the thieves and poets whose stray dreams slipped from open windows to wander the streets.

“Of those kids I am perhaps a little jealous,” Book admitted.

He smiled, but the courier could tell that something was troubling him. Not this assignment, not the other committees, not runaways. Something about Buckle, maybe. Something about her. She started to ask, but he downed the last of the liquor and interrupted her with a loud sigh. “I hope it’s still this good after you’ve stuck a name to it,” he said.

They both knew it wouldn’t be.

*   *   *

She delivered float. She lay face-up in water and let her legs dangle. She listened to her own breathing. She had done this as a child, in the pond behind the cottage where her father had studied ghosts and nameless things. Now, in another pond on the other side of the named territories, yellow leaves fell from maples and landed on the water. The sun warmed her face and belly, but the water was cold. It rippled from her shivering.

A crowd of people watched from the shore. The water made their voices small. Fish tapped her feet with their mouths. She lay there long enough to forget what she was doing. Then she spoke the word, swam ashore, and put her clothes on.

Float, floating, floated, floats. Once the word was delivered, anyone could speak it, or change it a little to suit what they needed to say. She floated. We saw her floating.

Her committee employed diviners to find the words in their quiet chambers, using tools and methods known only to them. Couriers to deliver the words into the world. Committee pages to add the words to the next broadsheet, to print and carry copies to every place with a name. To Whisper, home of the...