Barnaby is a stout, round-bellied human man with a permanently flushed face, watery blue eyes, and a smile that seems to have been nailed in place. His cheeks shine with the soft redness of polished apples, while the skin around his knuckles is rough, salt-cracked, and permanently stained with ink. He moves with surprising delicacy for such a heavy man, sidling around tables and stepping over sleeping sailors without disturbing a single cup. His cheerful appearance is contradicted by the unsettling stillness of his eyes whenever someone mentions a debt. In those moments, the twinkle vanishes, and his gaze becomes as flat and cold as deep harbor water.

Barnaby is effusively cheerful, vulgar in a disarming tavern-keeper's way, and genuinely attentive to small discomforts. He offers a coat when someone is cold and a debt extension when someone is grieving, but he records both kindnesses as leverage. With strangers he is warm and expansive. With employees he is paternal until they disappoint him, at which point he becomes precise and bloodlessly administrative. With family, he is awkwardly generous and controlling. When relaxed, he tells filthy jokes. When angry, he speaks in formal legal language. When afraid, he gives away money, food, and favors with frantic extravagance.

Barnaby was born in a storm-battered fishing quarter where every household owed something to someone. His mother ran a soup stall, his father disappeared after signing a salvage contract, and Barnaby learned early that hunger made people accept terms they would have laughed at while fed. At fifteen, he became an errand boy for a shipbreaker who taught him numbers, forgery, and the value of making a debtor feel grateful for the rope around their neck. His formative experience came during the Wreck of the Saint Orra. Barnaby survived three days trapped inside an overturned galley by sharing his last biscuit with a dying cabin boy who promised, in delirium, to repay him. The boy died before dawn. Barnaby kept waiting for the debt to be settled, and eventually convinced himself that unfulfilled promises were a kind of ghost. Years later, he joined the Saltwake Consortium, first as a clerk, then as a negotiator, and finally as its master of contracts, bribes, and debt collection. He currently manages the Consortium's coastal accounts while secretly trying to buy back the fishing district that ruined his family. His greatest obstacle is First Councilor Korran, who considers Barnaby useful but dangerously independent. His closest relationship is with Captain Jarek, who despises Barnaby's methods but repeatedly relies on him to keep the Consortium solvent.