SSCS 04: Installment 22 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 22 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…
“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.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 22: 23.0530
They already knew that one of the avatars was half-dead. Even without El and Ki’s sense of these things, it was almost obvious by the Huntress’ stillness and stiffness, by her pallor. How she continued upright another day longer without a Heart, Lot did not guess, but she felt a coldness pass through her just to look upon the avatar now—and again she wondered at the depths of her own fear. The Huntress stood beside her Gull Queen, both of them stiff and straight and formal, enduring a trial they feared to share.
Was that part of it, the fear? the secrecy? Was it spreading so far as the Architect feared because even the victims kept it hidden? But surely El would have known, would have seen and tasted it in all their walks of the city yesterday, if it were truly as widespread as all that. Lot glanced over now, to see what she could glean of El’s thoughts, but found it was not the Huntress the not-child gazed upon at this time, her ancient, dark eyes sharp and assessing. It was one of the others, one of the Queens.
***
Standing behind Lot and El, Du let his eyes and thoughts wander with the crowd. One of the Queens had begun to speak—Haven maybe? She looked ancient of body, stooped, her lithe, young avatar standing just a bit too close to her side as though to support her. But she didn’t have that ancient look in her eyes Moth Queen had had last night, and Du found he had no interest in whatever it was she might be saying. Ki would attend to it, if it were important.
But there was an interesting energy flowing through the crowd today that kept catching at Du’s ears instead, like a tune not quite hummed aloud, or the snag of a miniscule splinter catching on silk. It flared a hunger inside of him, plucked and irritated, that reminded him this body had appetites that could not all be sated with simple food and drink. And there was something in the crowd, brushing up against him in a way the people by themselves really couldn’t. Brushing up against his magic, perhaps, reminding him that he had appetites, though some of them were best left buried under—were meant to be, covered over and smothered, lifetime after lifetime suppressed. They shouldn’t be wakening now. But something in the crowd all around them sighed and sidled closer, and Du could feel them, yawning inside of him—hungry.
The touch of cold stone surprised him a little, and Du jerked back from the marble pillar he’d somehow drifted up against, was reminded of Ki’s hand, sharp on the invisible scar at the nape of his neck the night before, promising to leash him if necessary. The pinprick of his nails drawing blood. Du feared he needed it now, but that now was too late. When he looked up from the stone beneath his hands, it wasn’t back into the crowd, back toward Ki and El and their safety, but toward the shadows beneath the colonnade, toward a pair of eyes that looked at him as though through a window…a window of multitudes.
Beautiful.
A horde that could subsume him, move through him, feed upon his hunger and replenish it with plenty. There was a tune, not quite hummed, drifting in the air. And Du followed it.
***
And carefully, soft and simply, San followed Du, blending into the crowd as it grew thinner and thinner and farther away from the Assembly space. He could not call his comrade back to him the way Ki might have. But he clutched two drops of blood in the palm of each hand, and he knew how to pull on them, hard, if necessary—that would have its own affect, and bring the others swiftly.
Better to wait until there were fewer people, though. Du had drifted away so swiftly, the half-djinn light flaring so bright behind the blacks of his pupils, that San had felt the pinch that came with a reflexive mimicry moving too swiftly. Du would fight the blood pull, possibly viciously. Possibly indiscriminately. It might take Ki and El together to bind him back into himself.
So San waited, drifting toward some back hallway where the crowd thinned almost to nothing, where the stairs turned downward, and the lights were not lit. There was something with Du up ahead, but they were almost alone.