SSCS 04: Installment 28 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 28 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…
Without needing to be told, seeing all as El shaped it, Ki climbed swiftly, seeming to tread upon the air, their thin form a white blur arrowing along the shortest path, the straightest, towards Du.
The dead-Queen’s Avatar, her Emmissary and keeper of her Breath, reached out as Ki passed, as though he might stop this second, apparent foe. But the swiftest path lay in slipping around his reaching hand, in slipping under and through. And so Ki’s hand landed on Du’s neck with seconds to spare, their fingers slipping under the skin, through that old, unseen scar. Wrapping the leash tight and hauling the half-djinn forcefully back before the sweeping blade of the first guard to arrive had a chance to land upon him.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 28: 24.0405
They could not flee. Separated; two on the balcony above, hemmed in by Queens and Avatars and sword-sharp guards; one Lazarine, the smallest, dark as night, standing alone on the courtyard floor below, with the assembled crowd felled and thick like wheat around her, more guard who would come when just a moment’s breath would call them. They could not flee.
But it was not the bodies lying close, hunting, scything close, that stopped them. Not the hazards of their lumpen obstacles or lashing swords. Nor (in bedrock truth) the cost in mortal death that would be paid for scything through them. They, the Breathbound, avoided such cost when they could, but did not flinch from it. It was not, truly, in their nature.
Rather, it was the Gull Queen’s Huntress, standing still and stiff as death (though not yet dead) behind her mistress, the Heart that should have animated her, should have had her calling swift and many-handed retribution down upon these three Last-Seekers who dared so grossly to disturb this Assembly, that Heart missing from her breast. A dark hollowness that could not be denied, not by ones such as they. They had sworn solemn vow to find it, to return it, had bound themselves to the Promise of it, though the flesh of their current bodies be forfeit if they failed.
To flee now, would be to fail.
To flee now would be to ask the Promise strike them dead, and Lot and San soon to follow once the task proved swiftly too great with fewer number.
They stayed. On the balcony above, Ki moved in a whirlwind of protection around Du, who still crouched, too close, to the Salt Queen’s corpse. But each blow they landed was only dodge, only deflection, until the guards who’d come swarming at last tired, and drew back, and the rain of swords ended with wary, pointed spears instead.
On the floor below, El stood nearly motionless, child’s form, clothed in dark- and bright-red tunic, yet still grim and gruesome as Death, so that the slowly rousing, rising crowd drew back from her, instinctive as prey animals before the flash of teeth. In the widening circle of their fear, slowly, slowly, El lowered the golden sickle knife, set it upon the paving stones, and took one step back, away. The guard below, when they reached her, did not menace her with swords, but still pressed close, fencing her with the steel of their bodies and heavy gauntlets upon her small shoulders.
As the crowd milled and churned, some fleeing in fear, others hooked close by curiosity, two loci of stillness grew, one above, and one below, until at last the four remaining Queens of Kolssidir stepped forward and gazed upon the ruined body of their ruler sister. With the leash to the necromancer ripped free, the Salt Queen’s flesh showed itself tinged and black with rot, her eyes, in what was an otherwise untouched face, shriveled and shrunk, and her lips pulled back in the rictus smile of the long dead.
“What have you done to her?” It was the Gull Queen who spoke, her voice as sharp and as hard as the steel of her blade, and the steel of her back, and as cold. Had her voice cracked, her guards may well have come swarming forward once more, no care for the uselessness of their first attempt, nor the peril. With their Huntress a silent shadow of herself hiding in a corner, it was now their Queen alone who wielded them attack or stay.
“I have done nothing.” Du spoke quietly, still crouched and small upon the balcony floor while the shame of his loosed profanity burned hot through every fiber of his being, his pan flute now a scattering of splinters and shards upon the stones beneath his feet. “I have only taken away the veil that covered her. You see now a rot that was already among you.” Though he spoke truth, Du did not lift his eyes or try to stand. The stink of the dead Queen’s flesh still had its hooks of allurement dug in him deep, such that he dared not move of his own accord, not even despite Ki’s leash holding to him sharp and tight and unyielding, steady.
“My mistress breathed this morning.” A quiet wail, the Salt Queen’s Avatar, her Emmissary and keeper of, of all things, her Breath, showed himself convincingly pale, and shaking. “You cannot tell me she did not. You did not know her. You did not see her, before today. Did you? What monsters have you brought amongst us?” A muted, accusing glare next, stabbed toward the Gull Queen. Though, for her part, she did not flinch away from it. (Perhaps the Iron Queen might have, she who’d housed these Last-Seekers, the Lazarine, the night before. But no one was looking in her direction.)
“Take them to the cells,” the Gull Queen said instead. “A separate one for each. And two more made ready—for their companions, as soon as they, too, are recovered.”