SSCS 04: Installment 18 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 18 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…
Even as they stopped a good ten paces away, the Trawerler lifted its head, somewhat slowly, weary, and gazed around at them. Its expression was remote and strange, but that faint whirling and dappling like starlight glowed suddenly brighter as though in invitation. And the sound from before, like a knife, cut through Ki’s mind once more.
“Is it?” San whispered, holding close to Ki’s side.
And Ki whispered back, “Oh yes.” The knife sound had gone again from their mind just as quickly as it had come. The figure before them remained wreathed in night and fog and splendor. “It’s quite dead.”
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 18: 23.0210
“So.” San shifted beside Ki in the muffling fog, and Ki knew there was more to that shift than simple movement, knew that if they looked at their lover’s face right now they would see a hardness come into it that was entirely real and manifest. “It’s been a while since we’ve gone up against a necromancer. Can you tell if it really does have anything to do with our trail? Those binding threads…”
“Are definitely present,” Ki answered. “Maybe the mist has muffled the flash of them, but now there’s a sound to it, sometimes.” They broke off, turning pale eyes to look back over their shoulder to where a similar, fainter sound had seemed to whisper at the back of their skull. There was someone coming, walking steadily, crisply, through the fog-black streets, their scent a mix of salt-rusted iron and something powdery, like herbs sprinkled into a book. A twitch of Ki’s hand on San’s arm alerted the shape-shifter, who was suddenly, soundlessly, no longer by their side.
It was the middle of the night, on a street that held little beyond looming, blank-faced warehouses and the river jetty. And a watching, glimmering, dead thing. Curious what would happen next, Ki seated themself across the jetty from the dead Trawerler, amidst night shadows and starlight, and waited.
The figure who appeared out of the fog, small lamp in one hand, was surprisingly unassuming—a slightly built, fussy-looking man, blandly dressed—bland enough that Ki believed, for a moment, that they’d misheard that second knife-sound coming nearer with this one’s approach. But then they caught a quick flash, a glimmering wrapped around the man’s hands where he held the lamp, as well as a wide, leather ledger he clutched close against his chest.
When he caught sight of the Trawerler, the man stopped, kneeling to set down the lamp and brush a hand along the paving stones, then drawing out a writing implement and shifting the book, ready to take down some notation. But then he glanced in Ki’s direction and, seeing the pale priest among the shadows, a look of puzzled irritation flickered across his face, to be smoothed over again by blandness. Standing, he took a few steps toward Ki and gestured for them to rise. “You should do well to keep away from her. She’s not at all safe.” His voice was neither commanding nor cajoling, as fussy-bland as the rest of him. Ki remained seated.
“She? Trawerlers aren’t usually violent,” they answered instead. “I’m surprised to see one so far from the sea…” Then they tipped their head in a thoughtful hauteur they knew would pair uncomfortably for most folk with their seated posture and threadbare shawl; most folk were more revealing when they were uncomfortable, though. “But it is unacceptable for a priest of AkunSoohn to fear the merely unfamiliar, and…she seems interesting.”
“Is it acceptable for priests of your order to be fish-caught in a net of calling threads?” the man asked, but then stepped away back to his lamp, as though not sufficiently interested to argue with Ki. “There’ve been traces of folk gone missing, you might want to know. This one hasn’t fled yet—have you noticed her respond to you at all?—but she’s got the threads, meaning someone else must have set her out as a lure to capture more of you.” He looked pointedly at Ki, but then away again, so apparently disinterested in what Ki might have been doing out among the warehouses in the black of night that Ki almost missed the implications of his words.
But indeed, the (dead) Trawerler continued merely to watch them soulfully, glittering with bits of starlight and lounging where it had been since Ki got here. At last, the hairs along the backs of Ki’s arms prickled as they realized the incongruity of that. Snare perhaps, but a necromancer certainly didn’t set out their puppets for no cause. Unless…but this fussy, little man was no necromancer. That was something Ki would have known instantly (and possibly have been known themself). Another puppet? One being more skillfully played?
Ki stood. “You’re wrapped in ‘calling’ threads yourself,” they said, watching for a response.
But the man disappointed, already kneeling and turned away, back toward the Trawerler, and flipping open his ledger. But then he answered, “Of course. Only the two, though, and tight bound to me alone. Most can’t notice them.” He glanced over his shoulder, finally curious. “Are you one of the Seekers Gull hired? The Heart would have only had the one tied to it—it would hardly make a windfall like what’s clearly being used here. But if you can notice it”—he turned back to his book—“That would be one of the few ways to track it—not that I’ve caught a hint of it myself. But I’ve got more than hearts to hunt down, and this trouble”—he nodded toward the Trawerler—“started before that anyway. Don’t tell Gull,” he added, the bland pitch of his voice barely changing. “She still brings her Huntress to Assembly with her as though the rest of us can’t feel the hole in things…well, maybe some of the others can’t… But they’ll notice this. And one of them will have to answer for it.”
He rose again, lamp in hand, and was turning—either to face Ki one more time or to head back down the street—when the Trawerler struck.
Long-fingered hands, now dark and no longer sprinkled with starlight, reached from long-jointed arms upward much further and faster than Ki would have guessed. They wrapped around the man’s wrists, yanking him back down to his knees, while long, dark tentacles reached for his face, calling with a knife sound in Ki’s mind.
Without thinking Ki reached forward themself to intercept the binding thread.
Just as they felt it wrap like fire around their wrist, burrowing into flesh and more than flesh, the bland man cried out and fell back, his arms now ending in stumps and the dead Trawerler-puppet now lunging away, diving for the deep, black river.