A horrific bellow cut straight through the night, longer and louder than any so far. Maggie thought for a moment, and decided it was around three quarters rage, maybe a tenth pain, and the rest had a rather unusual tinge that could have been grief, if things that made sounds like that were still capable of such emotions. The screams had bothered her at first, so she had taken to analysing the louder ones as a way to tuck them neatly away in a corner of her head where they wouldn't cause any trouble. Satisfied with this analysis, she turned back to the task at hand – namely, cleaning. She had managed to avoid life as a maid, but hunting, as it turned out, had its fair share of menial tasks. The vast array of trick weapons in the Dream's arsenal took a lot of maintenance, and most of them had to be taken apart to be cleaned properly. One table had a cloth spread neatly over it with a large array of killing tools laid out; it was rare but not unheard of for a weapon to break mid-hunt, and if a hunter was still somehow able to make it back to the Dream, he would need a replacement ready to go.
As she ran her cloth along the blade of the axe, Maggie caught a glimpse of her own face. It had been over half a year since the bandages came off. The scars hadn't faded at all, but she was used to the sight of them, and she chose to think of them as a good-luck sign, a souvenir of the night that had set her on this path. If she closed her better eye, the world still had a greyish overlay, but she didn't have much to do with mirrors, and nobody here cared what she looked like. A lot of the older hunters carried worse marks than hers.
She set the cloth aside, picked up a tool and began the complicated process of putting the axe back together. She'd barely been able to lift it with both hands, the first time Henryk had ordered her to. He hadn't cared, and had made her swing it about for half a day, so that the next day she woke up with her arms screaming, which he also hadn't cared about. Now she quite liked this particular weapon. She'd gained quite a bit of muscle, relatively, but she would never have the strength the men carried so easily. She was better with weapons she could get some momentum behind.
Sometimes she lay awake at night counting all the things she had learned. Henryk had told her that the first lesson was to put pain aside until she had the time for it, and she already knew how to do that. She was probably on lesson three hundred and something by now. She knew all of the hunters' runes. She knew the names of all the weapons, the guns and the blades, and how to take each one apart and put it back together. She was a decent shot, and improving with daily practice. She couldn't yet 'punch like a man', as Henryk had put it, but she was getting better. Yes, he'd accidentally broken her nose a month ago when she'd had a slow day, but she was sure she was getting better. Besides, now that she was no longer a stranger to blood treatment, a broken nose wasn't such a terrible thing.
Henryk never complimented her on anything – the best she got was a satisfied nod on rare occasion – but Gascoigne would wink from time to time, and when he told her what she was doing wrong, he would occasionally thread in something she was doing right. It was just enough. "Look, girl," he'd said to her very early on, "you need to understand, Henryk is a harsh old bastard." She'd said nothing, waiting for the but, but there wasn't one. It was just the way he was. She'd met harsher, for sure.
Another drawn-out cry slammed against the windows of the Dream, much closer than the last. Roughly equal parts threat and warning, she decided. Perhaps whatever it was had encountered a hunter. Perhaps it was Henryk and Gascoigne. This was their second hunt since she had become an apprentice, and she managed not to worry about them. Or, perhaps, she was treating the worry the way she used to treat the pain, and just sending it away for now. They were both highly skilled, and even better off since they worked as a pair. A lot of the League hunters worked alone. She'd asked once why that was, and received a non-specific answer about certain people needing to keep an eye on each other.
Hefting the axe in her hands, she moved away from the table and gave it a few experimental swings to test the mechanism, then, satisfied, laid it out on the cloth with all the others that were ready to go, and allowed herself a moment's rest, looking around the room. It was smokier than usual with the haze of incense that kept the beasts away on the night of the Hunt, and she had lit several lamps in an effort to give herself a good enough light that she could work without the risk of losing an essential screw. The fire burned low in the grate, a small pot of stew still simmering over it. There was a much larger pot in the kitchen, waiting for one-legged Rake to finish it off as the sun came up. The Dream had been a tavern once, and functionally it still was, though the Hunters were the only ones who met or drank there, and all but a few of the upstairs rooms were now used for storing weapons and armour, the more useful sort of books, and crafting all manner of tools and devices for the Hunt. The head of the League lived here, as did his son, and the old retired hunter Rake, who had taken on the role of both barman and cook in his old age. Space to lay a pillow and a blanket could always be found for a hunter in need. The courtyard out back and the old stables were a firing range and training ground now. Most of Maggie's learning had taken place here.
When the sun rose, the Hunt would be over. One or two hunters would head straight home, and more than a few would have need of Iosefka and her unsympathetic apprentices, but over the morning, most of them would find their way here. Some of them had told stories, last time, making her think of soldiers and war tales. Others sat in silence, some drinking far more heavily than others. Some who really should have gone to the clinic would come straight here instead, needing the company of other human beings more than they needed blood ministration and bandages in that moment. They would all go home eventually, but last time, there had been a certain sense of finality, like drawing a line under the grim business of the night, that helped them to remember that ninety-nine days out of a hundred, they were simply people, and the Hunt was not forever.
Henryk hadn't given a reason last time, when he'd ordered her to spend the night of the Hunt at the Dream rather than in her own room. He hadn't exactly given her a reason this time either, except something vague about Rake being too old to stay up all night keeping the lanterns lit, but last time when he did come through the door in the morning, moving stiffly and rubbing at a fresh bruise that spread the length of his jaw, he had looked over to her and, for a moment, she got the sense he was glad to see her. Perhaps, then, she was here waiting for him. She could live with that. She was his apprentice, after all.
Maggie wandered over to the murky window. It was a pointless exercise, as all was black outside, but she squinted and looked for movement in the dark, until the sudden toll of the church bells made her jump. The Grand Cathedral bell didn't sound any different to any other church bell, as far as Maggie could tell, though she'd heard others complain from time to time that the ringing would stay in their ears for far too long, and leave them with headaches. The bell starts the Hunt, Henryk had told her. Gascoigne had explained it better. It could take months after blood ministration for a person to lose their mind and turn into a beast, but something about the Grand Cathedral bells sped the process up so that everyone in Yharnam who had the beasthood growing in them changed completely within a few hours. Once upon a time, there had been no night of the Hunt. Hunters had simply patrolled the streets night after night, hoping to catch the beasts before they did too much harm. This was more efficient. Every hundredth night, the Cathedral bells would ring, turning the unfortunate Yharnamites into beasts. The incense would drive them out of their homes into the streets away from their families and other potential victims, and then the hunters would clear them up. It was only one night in every hundred when the streets weren't safe to walk, and when the expensive purifying incense needed to be burned.
Personally, she was glad of the bells. They rang out every hour on the hour, neatly marking out the passing of time in a night that might otherwise have seemed to go on forever. This one told her there were four more hours until dawn; more than half the night had passed. Turning back to the pile of weapons she still had to clean, Maggie saw that she was far less than halfway through them. Sighing, she reached for a cleaver with a little build-up of rust around the mechanism, and went back to work.
She had barely begun when the church bell rang again, the sudden unexpected sound making her drop a screw, which fell to the floor and rolled perilously close to a gap in the floorboards; she flung herself to her knees to catch it, clipping her head on the edge of the table, and swore loudly, cursing whoever had chosen to break a tradition that had lasted her entire lifetime at the most annoying time possible. That was another thing she was learning from the hunters – some of them could swear very creatively.
Then she found the screw, and in the relief of not having lost such an awkward piece, she rubbed at the lump forming on the top of her head and went back to work. She didn't spare any other thought for the out-of-place bell. If she had thought of it the same way she thought about the screams, she might have decided it had a slightly less organised feel to it than they usually did, as though whoever rang it might have done so in a panic.