SSCS 04: Installment 10 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 10 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
(And the character list is here.)
Previously…
Reaching the gate at last, in their turn, the five Lazarine faced now one more obstacle before going through. It was the gate-guard, standing just to one side, who lowered her spear to block their path. But it was the leanly elegant man standing next to her, half-invisible in a silver-belted robe of deep-green velvet, who spoke: “To enter the Moth Queen’s garden, you must pay the fee.”
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 10: 22.0221
“And what form is this fee,” Lot inquired without missing a breath. She let her voice show as she asked the question, raising the hairs on the backs of the arms of all those nearest her.
“A silver coin apiece,” the man answered, his own eyes glinting green and silver as he spoke, yet remaining dark, just the same. There was something hungry about the curl of his mouth. “Unless you care to offer a comparable secret.” The hungry smile grew wider, glinting like his eyes.
“Yes.” Lot drew the word out, let it hiss and shiver through the air with a hunger all her own. It was clear they’d come to a place where deadliness was its own sort of coin, and Lot had sufficient experience with that to make her own felt. “Indeed.” With one blue-tinted finger and a flick of the ends of her ‘hair’ she beckoned the man step close enough for whispers. “I have a very useful secret, for those willing to take advantage.” Though quiet, she didn’t let the knife drop out of her voice, and the skin along the man’s neck prickled under its caress. “An entire band of Trawerlers was recently slaughtered—less than two hours since—and they, and all of their belongings, lie as we speak at the bottom of the river just upstream of the furthest north-western pylon to the Larks’ Bridge. Not one among them lives to walk away with any bounties they may have had, nor to speak their location to others.” Lot’s eyes flicked up to the man as she finished, whose own eyes had widened, and she looked at him long and deadly beguiling. “Sufficient?”
“Entirely, madam.” His smile regained its hungry edge, but by the lifting of the guard’s spear and the quick presence of a messenger boy to the lean man’s side, they’d been clearly and efficiently dismissed to proceed on their way.
“Did the Trawerlers appear to have had anything of value?” Ki asked as they proceeded through the gate and up a winding road swaddled in suddenly thick greenery and lit with hanging lanterns holding the now-familiar green-glass lights—no blue in sight.
“I don’t know.” Lot answered with a shrug that rippled through the tentacles of her hair. “If they did, they don’t need it anymore.”
“True.” Ki’s pale face was bland and lazy as they spoke, but Lot and the others still noted the reproving twitch of one eyebrow and an imperiously tilted chin. A priest of AkunSoohn did not begrudge death, but nor did they approve of those who were dead being taken lightly.
But now was not the time for squabbling. They needed more information. The deadline for finding the Huntress’ heart was ticking steadily nearer.
The road turned several times winding up the hill, and the five Lazarine followed it in procession with the steady stream of others who’d paid to enter. At last, though, the foliage parted, and the Moth Queen’s Garden—if that was what it was supposed to be called—at the top of the hill was revealed. The green lights were clustered thickly up here, but the view, high and open now, showed the dark and glimmering expanse of much of the rest of the city, and San was quick to note, in the distance, another hill that glimmered faintly blue. Some other Queen’s garden, perhaps? They had not been in this city long enough to guess which it might be, nor why the two seemed to oppose each other.
For now, this place was enough for their purposes, and without needing to speak, Lot and Ki broke their group into two, Ki moving in one direction with San and Du lockstep at their heels, while Lot and darkly quiet El drifted in the other, this time lady and sweetly-young lady’s maid, rather than governess and charge.
The garden was clearly set up as a maze, and a deceptively open one at that. All greenery had been left to the periphery, leaving the entire crown of the hill open and exposed. Within that bare circle, though, the place had been molded, using massive blocks of white marble, into a space of many and abruptly shifting levels. While in some places the gaps were narrow enough to step across, in others, silver-filigreed gates blocked passage while leaving line-of-sight still entirely open. And, drawing near to one mini-chasm, Lot and El found that, in a few select places, bridges in the same design spanned the distance between areas that would otherwise be entirely separate. At many other locations, junctions, granite-cut stairs led up and down, so that what at first glance seemed terribly open and exposed was revealed as a three-dimensional labyrinth. And, though the maze’s center was starkly visible, raised and ringed by a wide chasm, very few people stood there, their imposed distance from everyone else making their business entirely private. Many others, though, lurked on lower levels, finding alcoves to give their own meetings some measure of privacy.
“Who shall we accost, then?” Lot asked, while appearing to stare musingly across the elaborately built space. “Will pauper or prince give us better answers?” And indeed, the gathering seemed strongly a mix of all types, at least as could be made out in the green-lit gloaming.
“Someone who will not speak of our questions to the Moth Queen, I should think,” El answered. “If collaboration would have been fruitful, the Gull Queen would have sought the aid of her sister-Queen already. So, who here looks like they’re holding a grudge?”