SSCS 04: Installment 21 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 21 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…
El stopped before they had the chance to be pushed too far into the public ways, closing her eyes and bracing herself against Lot, who had stopped with her, knowing to wait. El closed her eyes, and breathed in. Breathed in everything this small, quiet hallway could tell her about the larger, grander building, set in the heart of this City of Bridges, which itself lay, suspended and sprawling, across the breadth of a great, wide river, twenty miles from the sea.
There was a hint of it, drifting in small eddies in the air. The fear of rats and a moonless tideline. Rotted wharf stones…touched by a bright, sharp hunger.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 21: 23.0507
Lot studied El as the apparently-young girl stood with her eyes closed, nostrils flared, the hand not holding her potions bag creeping upward as though to trace something invisible through the air. She saw the moment her once-Mother caught the psychic scent she’d been searching for, and had to quell a sudden rush of excitement in her own blood, had to force the tentacles of her hair to lie mostly still.
Beside her, the Architect hoovered, caught between impatience with their delay, and a subtle, helpless terror. His instruments of detection and control had been taken from him—he no longer had the situation in hand. And where that would have dampened the presence of most folk (low spirits causing them to fade readily into a crowd), with this man it sharpened him somehow. Ki, when they’d met back up last night, had introduced him as ‘this strange, bland man’, but even by then it hadn’t been true. He was, Lot realized now, sensitive to many things, not wholly unlike her mother El, and without his instruments, that sensitivity was building up beneath his skin, forcing him to feel every flicker of anything wrong within the city. Presumably that was a useful quality in an Architect—until there was no way to channel it.
“Will you show me the way, sir?” Lot asked now, taking his arm as though it were everything natural and drawing him close to her side. It calmed him a bit, as she’d hoped, distracting him from this city and this building that he knew so intimately, with herself, who was sure to be quite alien. Whether he considered her close presence intriguing or annoying didn’t matter if it kept his mind here. And, it helped to cool her blood a bit as well. There was something on his skin, that faint, faint touch of dead Trawerler that he would have had a hard time washing off with no hands. Lot could taste it in the air around him, and it made her feel cold, like she had the night before when she and San had emerged from the river. She wasn’t sure what about the dead Trawerlers frightened her so, but…certainly violent unbindings were nothing to be taken lightly.
They moved down the hallway and into an almost-sudden crowd that was all moving in one direction. Perhaps El and the others followed. Perhaps they took their own path. Either would certainly do, as Lot could easily pass along whatever this Architect showed her—assuming it was ultimately relevant.
Soon, they were swept entirely through the building and out into a broad, paved courtyard or plaza. Or, not quite through, Lot saw, for the building still encompassed them, even as the sky showed bright and grey overhead. All around them, high arched columns held up the silver-sculpted facades of a series of high balconies, the crowd all continuing to move forward, pressing itself toward one end of the plaza.
And, as they drew closer to the semicircle of arches that must be the front of this Assembly space, the Architect ducked closer to Lot’s side, ostensibly so that he could speak into her ear as the noise of the crowd rose around them. Yet Lot felt that as much he might wish to speak, he was also trying to hide in some way, though from the others in the crowd or from whomever might look down from that balcony she wasn’t sure. Perhaps both. Perhaps he was remembering someone had taken his hands last night and had tried to enslave him, and so was feeling a bit paranoid.
“The Queens will all stand up there.” He pointed (with his arm) with great certainty, though Lot still couldn’t distinguish one set of balconies from another, and there were many more than five ringing the wide, loud and echo-y space. “Always from their own respective places,” he continued. “Iron Queen, Gull Queen, Haven Queen, Moth Queen, Salt Queen.” His blunted arm, pointing, moved from one balcony to the next to the next. “And, depending, their avatars may also stand beside them. Do you know the Queens’ purviews?” Lot shook her head. Ki had sketched that information for everyone when they’d come to the city, and more when they’d gotten commission from the Gull Queen, but she hadn’t listened closely, and it was good to hear it from someone of the city besides.
The Architect had lowered his arm by now, pulled himself to stand even closer beside her. He was a small man, and Lot guessed that on top of everything else, he did not like crowds. “Iron Queen oversees the needs of the city’s infrastructure. I…am her avatar”—he sounded uncertain—“her Architect. Gull Queen commands the Guard and soldiery, such as we have. Her Huntress is her avatar and is, right now…also broken, as you know.” He cleared his throat, though Lot also felt the shudder he tried to suppress. “Haven Queen oversees the archives and civil offices. She doesn’t always use an avatar, but has recently appointed a new Cipher, who may or may not be here today. Moth Queen hasn’t used an avatar in my memory—she speaks for the laborers but also runs the…less public functions of the city.” Yes, that part Lot had already guessed from last night. “And the Salt Queen—she’s youngest—oversees the merchants and trade. Her avatar Emmissary is often away, but he returned a month ago, and has appeared in the last three Assemblies.”
Finished with that, the Architect tried to pull away from her then, to slip away into the crowd, clearly wanting to be gone from this too familiar place, but Lot held him fast, drew him back again. “And what did you see”—she whispered, but her voice had that way of carrying—“at the last few Assemblies that had already put you on your guard? It wasn’t the Huntress alone; you said it started before that.” She tried to keep as much of the alien Trawerler shudder out of her voice as she could. Right now she needed him remembering.
But he shook his head. “Not here,” he said, and shuddered, hard. “It wasn’t here I saw it. It started in the outskirts, almost two months ago. Now that it’s advanced as far as it has, I can feel it stronger when we gather. But Gull’s missing Heart was the first I felt it here. We’re each tied to them, each Queen and her avatar, with the one or two calling threads that’s needed. But that’s all. Whatever it is, it’s a deeper tear than Gull and her Heart. Broader.” The crowd began to quiet, and the Architect shuddered again, desperate to be away. Lot released him, and he fled.
“Thank you, Lot,” El said, stepping up beside her and taking her hand like the child she appeared to be. “That was almost more than he could bear. He knows he’s been swallowed, but not by what. Strange. He can sense so much. How can he not taste the dead approaching?”
As the not-child spoke, five Queens and three avatars stepped out onto their balconies.