Chapter 71
The lamps guttered out one after another. Like a curtain being pulled, dark fell over the private archives.
Maryam stood alone on the roof before the face of three gods and the absence of a fourth. She did not long have to wait for her enemy to arrive – Hooks formed out of the gloom almost eagerly, like a mouse so hungry it would squeeze through the cracks in the wall to claw at the grain. No stolen looks tonight, neither the garb of the Watch or of a home that Hooks had never truly known save through what she took from Maryam.
Instead her enemy wore a simple pale dress, barefoot and without jewelry. Pale skin on pale cloth, and loose hair like raven’s wings. Hooks looked halfway between a corpse and a princess. A brutally fitting reflection of her nature.
“It doesn’t have to end like this,” the enemy said.
A flicker of annoyance. They didn’t understand, any of them, what it really meant for her to abstain from the ritual. To be forever held hostage to another’s will when tracing Signs, only a single harsh tug on her nav away from disaster if tracing anything dangerous. To live with Hooks was to forever keep a knife at her throat. And to come to an agreement with her…
“What else is there?” Maryam scorned. “Am I to let you swallow a third of my soul, to rob me of the Cauldron all because you think your putting on a white dress ought to make me squeamish?”
Maryam had spent her life learning the arts of the Gloam – Craft and Signs, art and tool. Cutting away her own nav and tossing it to Hooks would be renouncing all those years, destroying the very soul-effigy that allowed her to manipulate the Gloam. Never.
She reached inside her pocket and put them on one after another, her rake-rings. One, two, three – all the way to ten, as she never had before. Tonight it was all on the line. She wound her nav around the rings, Hooks watching her without a word, and twitched her fingers. The strings of her soul-effigy pulled taut.
“All I want is to be whole,” Hooks quietly said. “A person entire, no longer a force-fed collection of your scraps.”