Part 6 of the How He Got Here series

Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story

Graveyards had always pulled at him — the quiet of them, the crooked stones, the deliberate gloom of the whole business — since long before he had any real reason to think about death. Word reached him of an old cemetery gone half-forgotten out past the newer streets of Founder’s Point, in the stretch locals still called Morgan’s Rest, and he went looking for it on purpose. What he found was a cemetery gone permanently dusky: crooked stones, iron railings gone soft with rust, a low mist that never fully burned off even at midday. Foxes moved through it at dusk, long-eared, their eyes throwing back the lantern-light bright green instead of the usual dull orange. Ravens kept to the older trees.

The deed was unclaimed, going for almost nothing, because nobody local wanted to think too hard about it. When he asked what had happened to the place, he got the shape of people avoiding an answer: a clerk gone quiet in a practiced way, a neighbour who mentioned a dragon and then walked the sentence back. Nobody would say outright that the tower’s builder — a necromancer, near as anyone could work out, the graveyard placement no accident for a man who wanted his materials close at hand — had died fighting something with wings and claws and more teeth than sense, up in his own workshop, in whatever working had ended with a dragon’s head and neck fused straight into the stonework partway up. Nobody would deny it either.

He didn’t restore it. The necromancer’s walls held. Everything added since had held less well, floors gone soft with age and UG’s own experimenting, until climbing the place stopped being a matter of stairs and became a matter of picking a route and trusting the right beam. He moved in around the wreckage instead of clearing it. He added the gryphon roost, the windmill, and a reckless framework of ladders that gets him to the top, where the last surviving floor beams had settled — or been arranged — into the unmistakable shape of a pentagram. He’s weighed up more than once whether it’s worth finding out which. Curiosity votes yes every time. Structural engineering votes no every time, and structural engineering has won every vote so far.

He did, once, get as far as removing a single beam to actually test it — a controlled experiment, in his own estimation, involving one plank and no other safety measures whatsoever. The resulting bang, and the following week spent picking splinters out of a windowsill three floors down, ended the investigation before it produced any actual data. He has never gone back to it. Not because the question stopped interesting him. Because a more interesting problem turned up that same afternoon, and gnomish attention span was never built for patience.

His engineering circle grew up around those same years, and it was them, not him, who built the clockwork train set that still sits in the corner of his workshop. He’s taken apart every other machine he owns at least once, usually more than once. The train just runs, quietly, exactly the way they built it, and he’s left it alone.

Nobbybanks‘s letters arrive regularly — not friendly concern about the cost of the place, but proper statements, itemized, interest calculated to the coin, a due date underlined twice. Every one arrives at the tower correctly addressed, gets read once, and then gets repurposed: folded, layered, and stuffed into whatever gap in the stonework needs filling that week. Nobbybanks has no idea this happens. Given what he actually is underneath the tidy front counter, UG suspects finding out wouldn’t hurt his feelings so much as move the tower itself onto the ledger as collateral.

The house down the ridge is the only real neighbour the tower has — small, warmly lit, a proper chimney, crates stacked by the door, the picture of an unremarkable cottage sitting right next to a graveyard as if that were the most ordinary arrangement in the world, cellar door in full view of the path, absolutely nothing to see here. Nobody in Founder’s Point has ever looked twice at it, which is either the neighbourhood’s greatest strength or its most obvious blind spot.

Down in that cellar is Klasa‘s stock room — human, businesslike, selling the sort of goods a respectable shop would never put in a window: cobwebs by the yard, bones, the occasional eyeball, all priced like ordinary inventory because to Klasa, it is. Further back, Rein, another gnome, works through an open coffin with the same calm, unhurried focus most gnomes reserve for a broken engine. They are, by any honest reading, grave robbers, running a supply business roughly forty feet from the largest cemetery in the neighbourhood, and the whole arrangement survives purely on everyone’s collective agreement not to say so out loud.

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More in the How He Got Here series

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