SSCS 04: Installment 7 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 7 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…
“Alright. Give me a minute,” she answered, a jerk of her small chin to make Lot scooch over, then settled down in her place. Back-to-back with the still-playing half-djinn, semi-shielded, El brought her bag of medicines and measures up onto her lap, opened it, and then opened another place inside of that.
Because for necromancy, one always needs the proper tools, most usually a very sharp knife.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 7: 21.1121
The dead hand was a relatively small thing, and so for this El selected a narrow, silver scalpel. When she drew it from its casing, it gleamed in the iron-clad lamplight, sigils carved into its handle, infinitesimally small, winking each just once or twice. Then she beckoned San to come closer with his and Lot’s find.
They laid it out on the table between them, the fingers twice again too long to be anything like human, the skin grey and wet, but not yet with decay. Seeing it there, it was Ki who pointed out the obvious, which in hindsight had somehow not been obvious at all.
“There’s no wound that severed it.” They leaned forward, ran a white finger along the grey skin of the dead wrist. And it was true, grey skin looped the wrist and covered the end of it, no bone showing through, though it tapered in the shape of something cracked and torn. “Nor does it really look healed over; there’s no scarring.”
“And yet, quite dead.” El turned the hand over, palm up, fingers splayed out backward. It rustled like a bundle of damp sticks.
“They were all like that,” San spoke up from across the table. Having passed over and arranged the hand, he’d moved back to his seat beside Ki, back pressed against the wall, removed from the death he’d brought up to the surface. Though at his words, Lot looked across at him sharply. What they had seen at the bottom of the river, in the faintest of light, had been dozens of Trawerlers, all dead, most in pieces, but that particular detail had eluded her in the gloom and her own foreboding—she could neither confirm nor deny.
“Well, it is not a lasting thing.” El bent over the hand, small, dark nose only a few inches from it as she studied it. She’d cut a shallow line from the heel of the hand down the wrist and now was carefully peeling back the skin. The edges of skin where the knife had sliced through showed the mark of the blade like normal. “But there is a secret here still lingering.” Her child’s hands moved quick and delicate in their work, peeling further, searching with the tip of her blade. “It seems to want me to chase it. Or…” She lifted her head, looking for a moment blankly at the iron wall, then turned an ear toward Du and his piping. “Play something sweeter for a moment, Du.” She’d dropped all her childish pretenses by this point, well-hidden behind Du’s shoulder and elsewise preoccupied. Somehow the child’s voice was dropped as well, and a ripple of too many memories passed through Du as he shifted to obey her. Obedience. Fear. Pride. Weariness. Joy. They rippled over his skin and were gone in a flash of piping and lamp-light.
Meanwhile El’s eyes narrowed, and she bent low again over the hand. Dark blood seeped from it, a blackish green ichor. Her knife sliced a tender path around the palm and up the longest finger. The while, the lamp-light seemed almost to sway in time to Du’s melody. “There it is.” Gently, slowly, El plucked the tip of her scalpel into the fingertip, and coaxed something from it.
It was as silver as the scalpel, and to Lot it first looked as though El drew a long, thin needle from the hand’s dead flesh. But then it twisted, looping back, resolving instead into some sort of silver thread.
“This is a binding thread,” El pronounced, still not touching it as she used the knife to lay it out across a scrap of cloth pulled from her bag. “Something bound those Trawerlers to a purpose, and something else came along and cut that binding swift as silk. …and yet did it in a way that would not cut anything.” She gestured to the smooth skin rounding the end of the not-severed wrist. “Did you get any sense at all of what it might be?”
“Just a heartbeat,” Lot answered. “It sounded like part of the Trawerler song at first, but then the song stopped and the hearbeat was still there, for a few moments. We thought it must be hers, the Gull Queen’s Huntress. What other heart should it be, unless the folk of this city are often wont to let their hearts go missing.”
“Not missing. We were told that it was stolen. And perhaps this is a clue as to why.” El rolled the silver thread up in her scrap of cloth, swift and careful, and tucked it away. “Put this back in the river.” She gestured to the hand. “If there are other threads still hiding in it, we don’t want to give them time to catch us unwary.