SSCS 04: Installment 24 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 24 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…
When Ki’s magic came down hard on Du, binding him still, blocking the song of the thing that would have fed his hunger, the half-djinn turned with a snarl. As he did, San stepped to the side to let Ki to step closer. And El hurried forward, too, slipping through a knot of passing strangers to stand guard against one of her wayward own, to battle him back to himself and out of the treacherous, long-abstained past.
And Lot looked back when a frission of something, longing, brushed softly, sweetly, against the tips of her tentacled hair. Like a breeze of half-forgotten memories, it pulled her to a stop, then into one step and then another toward a something that waited for her on the far side of the Assembly courtyard. Which one was the dead Queen was forgotten. Which was the mission she’d bound herself to as Last Seeker was forgotten. It was easy to slip through the crowd. It was easy to reach out and touch a memory, and slip away.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 24: 23.1029
***
“Was it dead?” El demanded of Ki, coming to stand solid and too small in her child’s body beside her second. Du was still bound to stand where he was, but there was a black flame dancing in the half-djinn’s eyes, and his hands twitched, reaching, slowly reaching for his pipes and his music, his magic.
“I don’t think so,” Ki answered, holding fast to the thread of magic they held leashing Du in place. The two of them were stronger than him, but Du was cunning and swift and would take advantage if their guard dropped. “But there was something not human…” They shook their head. ‘Human’ was a word they’d long meant to let go of. They’d traveled too far, through too many lives, for it to be meaningful. “Not a person,” they amended.
“It was calling to him, luring him,” San supplied. “He didn’t notice me at all, following, and usually Du is the last of you to lose sight of me in a crowd.” Though they were off a side hall from the Assembly where the crowd had grown thick, there were still some folk going past them here, back and forth, and San kept his visual focus outward, on the ebb and flow of nearby strangers, kept his physical focus on standing just so, on showing a face truly forgettable, so that none of them really looked this way.
“You said the Architect called them ‘calling threads?’” El asked. “The dead Trawerler had them, but this one wasn’t dead. And also not a person.”
“And I didn’t get even a hinting sense of binding threads just now,” Ki added. “Neither a glimmer, nor the scrape of the mind sound. Though not seen proves little.”
“Too little,” El agreed. “The Salt Queen is dead.” She tipped her head slightly, back in the direction of the Assembly. “The youngest of the Queens, up there on that balcony. And decidedly more so than the Gull Queen’s Huntress, who can still, maybe, be saved.” El’s eyes as she spoke were, as ever, too still and serious to be a child’s eyes. “But just the Salt Queen. If Du hadn’t been snagged just now, I would have said her avatar, ‘the Salt Queen’s Emissary’, so called, must be the necromancer we’re looking for, or otherwise culpable. Those avatars are too close to their Queens for him to possibly be fooled into thinking her still living.”
“And the necromancer seems to be collecting the Queens’ instruments,” Ki nodded, “which would be easier if they possessed one of them already. I should have sent a warning to the Moth Queen. It was her agents we were following when San found the dead Trawerler.”
“Perhaps we should send her Du, once we’ve called him back to us. Better a distraction of the flesh than a lure to the old magics.”
But San hissed just then, a curse from a millennium gone. “No, we should keep him by us, close and tight. Lot is gone.”
“Foolish child,” El snarled, turning, dark eyes flashing to scan fruitlessly what little could be seen along this side hall. “If she abandons the sworn quest, the oath curse will take her.”
“Will it truly?” The voice was dark and smooth and seductive, the words spoken just a breath before Du put his pan flute to his lips, the first low notes sounding out sweet, and seeming to shake the very world.
“Go. Track her,” El ordered San, before turning back to battle her wilding own.