SSCS 04: Installment 8 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 8 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…
“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.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 8: 21.1217
As if their leader’s words were a herald, Du’s music drifted away in that moment, and his voice, too low and smooth and beautiful to be entirely human, drifted in in its stead.
Hollow hills and purple vines
‘Neath the sun-laced cloudy rinds
White mice darting
Or mayflies dancing, their bellies skim the water, and time
It was a scrap of music from a very long time ago, and—despite themselves, despite the warning—the other four all stilled a moment to remember it. That had been a very different time and place, wrapped in silks and sweet ices and the scent of rotting meat gusting in sometimes from the plains. A time when El’s face then had crackled under a perpetual half-mask of blood, and San and Ki had yet to guess they ever could be parted.
“Yes, get it quickly away,” El growled and stood, snatching up the dead hand and jerking on San’s sleeve so that he knew to follow her before she dashed up the metal stairs, playing the role of a naughty child running off with something. San gave chase and caught her up just outside the tavern door, swept her up and almost out over the river before she landed over his shoulder, calling her ‘silly sweeting’ as she pounded on his back in mock fury. Downstairs again, Du put away his pipes and scowled over her, and let his own voice growl with a mock scolding to hide the fear quaking through him that they (but especially he) had been so easily made to forget themselves.
The other folk eating in the downstairs room, jostled out of the lull of Du’s melodies, looked over, yet were quickly satisfied and quickly bored and soon turned back to their own tables again.
“It is calling for people to come join it,” Ki mused softly, once the returning low buzz of conversation had swaddled their nook in its blanket of privacy. “But why Trawerlers, and why kill them? Is it just a scavenger’s glamour, luring in its prey?”
“The binding thread is no glamour,” El answered them. “It would have to be placed deliberately, or at the least set out as a trap. If San and Lot heard a heartbeat before the Trawerlers died, that suggests the Huntress’ heart was stolen to use as a tool of some kind—and that perhaps something was being stolen from the Trawerlers also.
“They had been cut through and half scattered,” Lot’s voice sawed from the corner. “But if something was taken, it was taken very quickly.”
“Did you find children’s bodies also?”
“Yes.” A dark word, made momentarily darker by its speaker and her anger.
“Alright, then. This rest is over.” El rose again. And this time the others followed her.
—
The audience chamber where the five Lazarine had bound themselves to their current mission had been plain and cold. In a city where most buildings shone with silver latticework, and miniature gardens glowed with orange trees and weeping planters of butterfly bush, that room had seemed to stand in protest. There had only been two others present.
“You can name any price for this service.” The Gull Queen was older than most in this city would have guessed. Her long, white hair, falling in a smooth, parted sheet to her waist, was the only pale thing about her. Her soldier’s uniform, like her face, was brown, and creased by time and use. Of the five Queens who ruled in Kolssidir, this City of Bridges, her part demanded the greatest physical discipline. “My Huntress, as you can see, will not last long without her heart returned to her. And my soldiers cannot be trusted to search for it. It can be blinding to look upon, for those already bound into my service. They would not see who they were hurting to get to it.”
The Huntress in question had stood just behind her Queen, looking tall and thin and drawn, but still deadly. It was clear to look at her that she was not whole, but their eyes had all skittered sideways over the details, as though not being really allowed to see what it was that was amiss. If they had been told directly, though, that what they were looking at was a walking corpse, they would have believed it…probably.
—
“Could the silver thread have come from the Heart itself?” San whispered to El, remembering that conversation as the five climbed the rusty stairs back up to the street. “The Queen said those ‘bound’ to her would be affected by it.”
But El just shook her head. “No. She said ‘bound to her’, not ‘bound to the Heart.’ The Heart is probably bound to her also, and if that was done with thread then there would only be that one.” Their leader was silent a moment as they reached the street and paused at the base of the bridge, seeming to stare out at the glow of street lamps starting to light up throughout the surrounding sprawl of the city. “But you’re right, though. It might have been the Gull Queen’s purpose those Trawerlers were bound to, and so then her purpose that was cut.”