SSCS 04: Installment 5 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 5 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…
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.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 5: 21.0513
The riverbed, when they reached it, was surprisingly cold. Just as Lot had promised, it seemed there was a backward current here running up from the sea, the water it carried cold and briny and haunting in a way very different from the rest of the river. When their feet sank into the rocks and mud, it suddenly made sense that Trawerlers would come this way. There was a thread here that pulled on the part of their ears that was different from humans’. There was a heartbeat.
Lot froze when she realized that that was what it was—a heartbeat, threaded throughout the clicks and shudders of the Trawerler song. Ignorant as she was of Trawerler ways, something within her was suddenly wary—though perhaps that was her mind only, a Last-Seeker-for-hire remembering that it was a heart that they’d been bound to finding. She looked back the way they’d come, for San, but he was barely visible within the shroud of river blackness. She held out her hand, and was grateful to feel him there when he clasped it.
Then, between one watery breath and the next, the Trawerler song stopped.
To Lot, it was like being plunged into sudden darkness, the shape of the world around them no longer clearly outlined within the echoes of sound. To San, it was the reverse, Lot’s bioluminescence flaring suddenly bright with her fear, as though distant stars had suddenly rushed closer.
The heartbeat was still there, though, the heavy double rhythm filling the riverbed and the salty backwards current. Faint, though, as though still far away, but growing…not louder, but faster. Fainter and faster. And then it was gone, though Lot and San could not have said whether it was cut off, or faded, or simply…left. Whatever that might mean. The heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress had been stolen, but the Huntress herself remained at the Gull Queen’s side, or at least it had been so this morning. Yet what other heartbeat could it have been?
For long moments, San and Lot hung within the cold blackness at the bottom of the river, listening for anything else. Lot’s tentacled hair reached out in every direction, seeking, faintly glowing and haloing Lot’s head in starlight. But it was San who moved first, trailing his fingers near the river-bed where the cold flow of the backward current could be felt strongest, he turned and let it tug him onward.
***
When they found the encampment of Trawerlers, it wasn’t until they were fully within its midst that Lot and San even realized it was there. The shape of a boulder was too round to be a boulder and was revealed to be a cask once Lot’s light drew close enough. And then they realized at once that there were other made shapes all around them. But there was no movement. And Lot’s was the only light, though each Trawerler should have outshone her many times over.
They froze together, and waited, watching, until they saw the waving of long, graceful limbs, and, after the signs of the camp, the bodies at last became clear to them.
There were a few dozen—about three family groups, perhaps? Though of course they might have missed some, it took so long to fumble through the black of the river to find all that they could. And not all of the bodies were…whole. They weren’t battered or torn, and their faces all showed composure, or even sleep, yet their bodies were not all complete or all of the pieces connecting one to each other. If they’d died when Lot and San had heard their music stop, they shouldn’t have been so scattered, even if Trawerler bodies were long and thin and had a way of trailing away to places you didn’t expect. Still there hadn’t been time for scavenger fishes to have pulled them apart this much. Something else must have happened. Some violence or…something else. Something Lot and San needed to be wary of, and needed to understand.
One Trawerler woman was stretched out as though resting, one hand laid across her chest, even though there was nothing there between the hand and the shoulder. Gently, San lifted the hand up, pressed the cold, long, thin flesh to his own chest, and turned away from the camp, swimming upward and back downstream. Uncertain, Lot followed him, grateful for her comrade’s straightforward manner.
Though death was an old, close friend to her by now, still this scene had her greatly unsettled. It shouldn’t have been so, but her skin shuddered away from the thought of touching any of these dead.