Ash knew how to move through moonlit alleys without drawing attention. It was a small art he had practiced since childhood, the kind of art that paid for bread and kept fingers whole. He slipped between carts and sleeping dogs, a shadow among shadows, counting heartbeats in his chest like a metronome. The city smelled of wet iron, roasting meat, and old promises that had gone bad. Tonight the promise he was after jingled in a coin pouch that swung at the hip of a merchant who walked too proud for his own luck.
The pouch came free with the practiced lightness of a borrowed breeze. Ash felt the familiar thrill, the same smooth line of satisfaction that ran from his knuckles to the pit of his stomach. He had other things he could steal: the time of a bored guard, an apology from someone with more guilt than sense. Coins, however, were honest. Coins made the world work.
The merchant noticed. One hand tightened on his cane. Ash had already folded himself into the crowd, but a shout cut the night. "Thief!" it said, bright and angry like a lamp. A cluster of boots answered. Ash ran.
He liked running more than fighting. Running left no lasting marks. He darted into an alley between two collapsed storefronts, a shortcut he had taken a dozen times, and then the ground fell away as if the city had decided it did not care for his kind. Roots, black and old, curled across the cobbles like the fingers of something sleeping. The air tasted wrong, metallic and cold.
A sudden hand caught his shoulder and another knocked him backward. He hit soft earth and, for one ridiculous second, thought he had been pushed by a weathered beggar. Then he saw the book.
It was small and plain, bound in leather so dark it seemed to drink the moonlight. No title. No ornament. It lay on his chest like a small dark thing waiting for permission. Ash blinked. The book opened of its own will and a voice slid into his head that was not voice at all but a pattern of thought, dry and amused.
"At last," it said.
Ash, who had spent a lifetime listening for other people's secrets, could feel the book listening back. He pushed himself up on his elbows, heart and lungs loud, and said what felt right. "What are you going to do, then? Read me my fortune?"
"Contract? Or a murder of chance? Choose," the book answered, as if conversation were a game it enjoyed.
Ash laughed because that was his habit when surprise wanted to be fear. Laughter took up room in the chest and sometimes pushed the worse parts aside. "You silent things always ask that," he muttered. He should have run. He should have left the book to whatever shrine or curse or old foolishness had birthed it. He did not. He did what he always did when life became complicated. He lied to himself about it.
"Then laugh. Tomorrow you will barter your first memory for the power to silence someone who laughs at you." The book's words were soft and precise. Ash felt them like cold wind at the base of his skull.
He tested the page with a careless fingertip. The paper was not paper. It burned with the careful warmth of a truth. For a breath the world narrowed to that single sensation. A laugh he could not remember spilled from his lips and then was gone. Confusion rose like smoke. He reached into his own head and found the space the laugh had occupied was a blank with the faintest ache around its edges, the kind of ache left by a missing tooth.
"Memories are not for keeping," the book said, as if offering an explanation. "They are for payment."
Ash had known poverty. He had known the hunger of empty larders and the way shame could sit in the joints like cold. He had not known what it meant to lose a thing that lived inside him rather than on him. He had not known the particular shape of a void that still smelt faintly of laughter.
"Who are you?" he asked, because names were armor and he liked to know the shape of what he bartered with.
"Rook," the book said. "I remember more than I should. I remember fewer things than I could."
A sound from the alley entrance made both of them look up. A figure leaned against a lamppost, hands in the pockets of a rough cloak. The figure had a grin that was all teeth and light. "Nice catch, Ash," the newcomer said. "You always pick the good ones."
Ash's heart hit the ground. He had not been thinking of other pickers tonight. He had been careful. The newcomer pushed off the lamppost and stepped into the small circle of ruined stone, boots sending up sparks where they struck the grit. A braid of leather hung from their hip and tiny knives winked in the weak light. Youth in movement, cleverness in the set of their shoulders. Lys, he thought with the same casual relief he had when he found a familiar coin in an old coat pocket.
"You took my lead," Lys said without accusation. "And you made it fun. I thought you'd be smarter tonight, Ash."
Ash sat up fully, the book heavy against his ribs. He looked at Lys, at Rook, at the ruined shrine clutching its secrets, and felt the bristling sensation of doors that had been closed his whole life starting to unlatch.
"We need to go," Lys said. "Guards are coming."
"Do you have a plan," Ash replied, because asking that felt like normal. "Or just faith and knives?"
"Faith comes from foolhardy decisions," Lys said. "Knives come from pockets. Both are useful."
They ran, because running had rhythms and sound and left less time for the book to do things it should not. The city folded around them and then folded itself out again into the market quarter where light pooled like spilled honey. The chase dissolved into bustle and then into laughter and into the comfortable lie that nothing had happened. Ash tucked Rook into his pack and pretended the leather was a weight like any other.
That night, in a garret that smelled of old ink and the last of supper, Ash opened the book properly. Rook spoke in a voice that sounded like a ledger being closed and opened and a dozen small arguments about money.
"Contracts are straightforward," Rook said. "I assign tasks. You perform tasks. I grant boons. You pay in noctes."
"Noctes?" Ash asked. He had heard whispers of words that meant many things. "What kind of coin is that?"
"Not coin," Rook corrected. "Experience. Intense moments. They crystallize into noctes. You can give them willingly, or I can take them through my work. Some are bitter. Some are bright."
"Aren't you just a fancy way to lose your mind," Lys asked, sitting cross legged on the floor, knives glittering like small moonbeams.
"Fancy is subjective," Rook said. "Useful is not."
Ash wanted to believe useful. Useful meant bread. Useful meant safety for a single night. Useful meant maybe enough wealth to stop running for a while. Useful said nothing about what the cost would take when the bill came due.
"Tell me what you do," Ash said. He felt a curious calm at the base of his thoughts, the small, clear concentration a thief develops when he is about to make a choice that cannot be undone.
"I can weave shadows," Rook said. "I can make a silence where a shout used to be. I can bind the feeling of a man to his shoes so he cannot stand against you. I can mend a thing broken by use but I require noctes to do more than merely patch. And each nocte I take takes pieces of you. Not your limbs. Not your heart. Pieces no one else can measure until they are gone."
"Pieces like what?" Lys asked. Her voice had a wariness that gave it the shape of an edge.
"Small things. A smell you like. The name of someone you loved. A time you laughed so hard you could not breathe. Replace them and you get stronger. Lose too many and the you in you becomes smaller and quieter."
Ash laughed and then he did not. The simple act of laughing had already cost him a memory. He tasted the hollow space where something used to live, and it was sharp and cold. He thought of Bren's battered hands and of the market that paid in gossip and of a mother he could not place cleanly under any thought. He thought of what useful had bought in the past. He thought of the nights he had spent dreaming about a life that did not require pocketing other people's misgivings.
"How do I refuse you?" he asked.
"You cannot unnoticed." Rook's tone had the patience of ledgers. "But you can use me sparingly. You can bargain. You can refuse the net, though few do. The ledger is not the only temptation in these realms. It is merely one that writes well."
Outside, the city sighed and a bell struck midnight. Lys leaned forward, eyes bright. "So what now, Ash? Take it or burn it?"
"Do not burn ledgers," Rook said quickly. "Burning ledgers is bad for everyone."
Ash closed his eyes and named nothing at all, the habitless, simple act of not speaking. For a moment he felt the ledger's attention like hands. He imagined slipping the book back into the shrine and walking away. He imagined setting it on the librarian's desk and having a scholar lock it away. He imagined a world without bargain and without noctes and without memory for sale. The images had the same soft, impossible quality as a child's coin.
He did not walk away. He did not burn the book. He made a choice that tasted faintly of fear and faintly of hunger. He placed his palm on Rook's cover and felt the small tremor of a thing that had kept vigil for centuries.
"Then we do business," he said.
Rook hummed in reply, a sound like a coin sliding across a table. "A modest start. Tomorrow you will find someone who laughs at you. Take silence for them, and I will teach you how to bind the shadow around a hand. Pay what is due."
Ash slept badly. He dreamed of laughter like splintered glass and woke with the feeling that something inside him had rearranged its furniture. He could not remember the laugh he had traded, but he could feel its absence in the way his jaw fit when he smiled. It made him quieter when he thought he was being clever.
Dawn found him at the street market's edge, fingers damp with persistent drizzle. He watched the city wake with the careful attention of a man who knows that attention saves lives. Somewhere a bell tolled, and someone laughed, and he felt the ledger pulse in the pack like a heartbeat not entirely his.
He had agreed to begin a business arrangement with a book. He had named the book Rook. He had not yet imagined the shape that name would take in his life. In the market a child followed a man too close for comfort and a laugh rose, bright and loud. Ash stood, breath steady, and the memory of what he had traded hummed like a secret in the margins of his thoughts.
He moved without dramatics, as a man who had learned to make choices before he felt them. The world had just become slightly less honest, and he had a feeling it would want to be paid.