SSCS 04: Installment 26 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 26 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…
The flesh would need to rest, its magic to be let to cure into the magic of the horde (we all), but already Lot could look outward with other eyes. In its way, the horde had many eyes. Hundreds, thousands, tens-of-thousands. Just like home.
Lot closed the eyes of her body, and remembered—there was something she was searching for. She couldn’t abandon the search. It would hurt (this flesh, this precious bit) to abandon it all together.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 26: 24.0102
***
Pain prickled through San’s sinuses as he willed the flesh there to shift. As it ebbed, the raw scents of the silver City of Bridges flooded in in its stead, a wash of humans (and mostly-humans) and wet, mossy stone, of rough smoke and, distantly, of orange blossoms. Lot was long gone from these back halls of the city Assembly, and if she had been just another one of these humans hurrying this way and that probably impossible by now to track. But her flesh held faint traces of a musk that came only from deep in the sea, of dark-silt ocean bottoms and corals ground down over eons into silt, of something that wasn’t brine but yet rode the waters next to it, an un-sweet, eel-like kin. And then of course there was her perfume (rubbed ambers), the powdered paints she used on her eyes and lips (purchased in an inland city nearly 1000 miles from here), and the soap with which she’d last laundered her clothes (the same as used for San’s own). And beyond that she was Lot, and San knew her, always, scent and all.
By scent San tracked her, back to the Assembly courtyard and swiftly away again, the press of bodies there and the droning of the proceedings a mute background only to the bright-scent trail that was his quest. Without conscious thought, his face flickered with images of mundanity so that few noted his passage past them and none cared. Like smoke, like a fish in the River, San flowed through the crowds and out onto the street.
It was still morning yet, and at this end of the city, presumed seat of the government, the sunlight flashed brightly off the silver filigrees laced onto the surrounding buildings, on window screens and awnings and lampposts, on the rails of the next in the never-ending series of bridges, flashing against the grey of stone like the silver lining to the clouds. If San had paused to consider his surroundings, he might have been surprised to see the path he followed ran openly through these spaces so bright and polished and new. Though many a staircase ran down to the River, the scent-trail he followed stayed ever well above the water line.
Until it didn’t. Until it slipped into a neat crack between buildings too tight to properly be called an alleyway, and dropped down a hidden, tarnished-silver-filigree, iron-bound staircase tucked into one wall at the far end.
San looked down the dark spiral and thought about following, breathed long and deep of the scents collected here and realized he could hardly even taste the River. Instead there was the scent-thread that was Lot, and then all around it something else. Something that wasn’t quite people—it was too…dusty for that—and wasn’t death, at least not in any of its obvious forms. Another deep breath. The air at the top of the hidden staircase was crowded thick with something dark and dusty and…fizzing with a strange, scurrying multitude of magics.
***
Meanwhile, as San slipped from their side in the back hallways of the Assembly, Ki, tall and pale as cobwebs, and El, small and bright-clothed with night-black skin, faced their half-djinn kinsman whose pan-flute was brought already to his lips, his long-lashed eyes already dancing with a black flame.
The low, dark, sweet notes of Du’s flute shook the very air around him and then rolled outward, a slow wave that, slowly, an inching of time, swept others up into it as they came too near, seeming to pause them in their steps, seeming, almost, to lift them off their feet on a note just this side of dark rapture.
Only El and Ki stayed grounded in the center of this sweet storm of sound, Ki with hand up-raised and pressing side-long against it, long, pale fingers flexing, questing for the way through. El had dropped her black bag at her feet, dark eyes locked on the djinn-lit eyes of Du as he played, then reached inside and pulled out a golden, sickle-shaped knife. As Ki’s fingers, like wind slipping past sound, found the purchase or path that they sought, El slashed upward with her knife, the magic tearing and parting in its wake.
But they were both too slow, too soft in their reflexes, too late.
Catching the wake of his own music, Du had already ridden it past them, past stone pillars and twisting stone hall, through the growing press of bodies and the crowd, to land with a dark-euphoric splash of ringing stillness in the very center of the great Assembly courtyard.