SSCS 04: Installment 4 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 4 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…
They didn’t yet know this city or its people, but that shouldn’t matter. Music always spoke, and in the hands of a half-djinn—in the hands of Du besides—it coaxed as well, teasing at the mood of the room. Long, low, intricate notes pulled first on breaths of melancholy, then of liveliness, until the music had threaded itself beneath every conversation, buoying them, making the folk around them less wary. They’d likely drink deeply of their cups tonight, fall deep into dreaming when they sought their beds, and wake with a distant longing.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 4: 21.0323,22.0127
Within this music, Lot and San gulped down their food. Then, once fortified, they rose to depart. They drew no notice, the music making them seem little more than shadows in the under-river room. And when they ascended the stairs, a skirling of notes followed after them a little longer, drawing a bit of shadow upward with them, until they were among the crowd and then slipping out the door.
There was little traffic outside, actually very little of outside outside, with just the landing from the stair that led down from the bridge and then a narrow stone walk away along the river line, curving and disappearing. And there was almost no light, this under-space lit only by what spilled out of the den doorway or glanced off the water from beyond the twilit bridge. In an alcove, they discarded their clothes, and San finished making himself more like Lot, gill-slits opening up along his sides. Without needing to speak, they slipped into the river.
And swam straight down. Trawerlers were not open-water creatures. They kept their homes and themselves tied down tight along the seafloor, and if they were moving through an area, they would keep to their roads along the same. And the river this City of Bridges rested upon was broad. Some of its bridges connected small islands in its midst, or even came to a stop at nothing but deep-set pilons; almost none of them spanned the river itself from shore-to-shore. From where San and Lot had entered, even in broad daylight, neither shore would be readily visible. If there were Trawerlers here, they would be far below them.
But in the water, the Trawerler song could be heard clearly. It shuddered over them and rippled past them, clicking out a message that neither had ever learned to understand. But the sound was enough to lead them, into the deep black river.
As everything else was, in the river at night the two immortals were blind. Except that Lot’s hair, always limp and hidden up above, was now fanned out around her, the blue tentacles stretching and sampling the currents, feeling the shape and the flow of things. And Lot’s ears, part Trawerler as they were, didn’t know the meaning of the song, but could catch the echoes in the clicks and moans, could make out, vaguely, the shape of what was around her because of it, just as the other Trawerlers were likely doing, wherever they were.
San had not changed himself so much that he could do the same. His gift was not so overt or swift or strong. In fact, the heart of his gift was mere subtlety. But there was one light now, in this deep black river, by which San was able to see and swim after. A delicate bioluminescence had picked itself out in patches and swirls along the rims of Lot’s gill-slits, and curling the length of each not-hair tentacle. It was so pale and weak, that if there had been any other light in the river he wouldn’t have been able to see it. But as it was, it seemed as though an alien version of Lot danced before him in the water, a fleeting glimpse of something rarely seen, precious and beautiful to a man who had lived so many lifetimes.
This trick of shape and light was something San had glimpsed only twice before, and tonight, some strange melancholy lodged in his breast, he vowed he would take the time to learn these patterns into his own flesh. Some night, when there was little to do but quiet and dreaming, he would play them out across his skin for Ki to marvel at, to share a sweet, rare wonder with his lover. Perhaps in their next body Ki would be able to see with part-Trawerler eyes, as Lot did in this one, but probably not, probably not for many, many bodies to come, if ever. But, past purpose, wonder and beauty were the true meat and bread of those with too many lives behind them to count. Because he could do so, this one San would share.
In the black of the river, in the cold, they swam downward, following a clicking, moaning, shuddering song, while Lot breathed in the shape and the swirls of the river around her, and San imagined that he swam after starlight.