SSCS 04: Installment 30 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 30 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…
She lay supine on the floor of a small chamber at the end of the passageway, nested upon and wrapped or covered in something like rags, and something like the shifting night-blackness of the figure who’d greeted him. But the lights, like constellations across her skin, shone through, made her clearly visible as soon as San’s eyes were willing to see her. Head propped up slightly, she was staring back at him.
“San.” Her lips didn’t move, were wrapped with something. It was one of the other, nigh-invisible figures in the chamber that spoke. Still, that buzzing taste of her told San that Lot was the one who was speaking to him now. Or almost. The next words belied that certainty. “This flesh holds so much magic. So many wisdoms. But it is trying to die. We have wisdoms to Bargain/trade. Help us.”
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 30: 24.0428
***
The holding cells near the Assembly Court of the City of Bridges were sunk down into the River, iron-bound and cold. From inside each, there was a ladder leading up to a hatch built into a large wrought grill that interrogators might stand upon and look down through to the cell’s occupants. In this case, the would-be interrogator paced, from one cell grill to the next, whilst El and Du and Ki, each in their individual prisons, sat still upon the thin mattresses that were all the cells were furnished with and did not bother to crane their necks and look up as they answered questions.
They were not very insightful questions, ranging from the absolutely useless, ‘Where are you from?” to the tedious and irrelevant, “How did you gain access to the Assembly Court?” It wasn’t any of the Queens asking, and the three in the cells had to wonder whether the Gull Queen had ordered this interrogation—perhaps to weary them sufficiently for when she did arrive—or if one of the more enterprising officers of the Guard had simply decided this was what ought to be done. It also wasn’t clear whether the woman had any actual interest in understanding them, but she did slosh buckets of cold water down into the cells if they failed to answer. So, they answered each question with whatever amount of words seemed like it would be sufficient, listening to the River swirl around their cells more closely than to the actual questions that were being posed.
One thing they were mindful of, though, was that for all questions of origin they answered only what was relevant to the flesh of their current lives. Even Du did not drift so far as to forget himself on that count. Nor did El pretend that such answers, from a girl apparently so young, in any way made sense. They were simply the answers that were given.
Eventually, there came a pause in the questions, a faint argument overhead, and some rattling and clanging that seemed to indicate the changing out of their interrogator for someone else. There was silence for a bit after that, the someone else just audibly present somewhere above their cell cages but not bothering to speak for several minutes. During this time, El and Ki especially wondered what they thought they were accomplishing by the wait. All three in the cells knew who it was, could feel his presence palpably, viscerally, just as they had registered his presence there upon the balcony of the Assembly Court.
Like so clearly called to like.
The necromancer, the Salt Queen’s Emmissary, who had puppeted the dead Queen around for the better part of a month before the truth of that death had been exposed today. Even if he was pretending now that it was them and not him who had killed her, they knew.
Finally, it was Du who spoke first, the half-djinn uncoiling at last from the crouch he’d held the past hour to lay back upon his thin mattress, something of his usual fey light igniting within the black of his eyes. “She wouldn’t have been nearly enough, I don’t think,” he said, voice a low, soft thrum. “Even as intimate as you had her. Is that why you started taking others? The ones from the wharves and the alleyways, the not-quite-humans who wouldn’t be missed?” Du gazed straight up as the shadow of the Emmissary’s robes, the necromancer, moved to stand over his cage. “She was sweet, though, wasn’t she?”
“What would you do—” the necromancer ignored Du’s question and asked his own instead “—if you knew the result would feed your Hunger truly?”
This, unfortunately, was an insightful question, and Du drew his breath in very slowly.
Ki, one cell over, cocked their head slightly, listening for a strange glimmer and slice of sound, just on the edge of hearing.
But it was El who answered, softly from her cage, young voice carrying clearly up through the bars. “It cannot be,” she said. “Repent. You are not so far gone that you cannot yet.”
There was a whisper, like something sharp. Ki very nearly felt it shave itself over their skin.
“But you have already forfeited your goal, Last Seeker.” The Emmissary’s voice had shifted, had turned nasty and sharp, a voice to give a young girl nightmares, and it prickled El’s skin, even as she cocked her own head, feeling instead with that push-and-pull beneath her breastbone, that Like seeking and hating Like that would always kindle when they crossed paths with another of this kind. Of their kind, in a way. Necromancer. But he was still speaking, and there was a power in his voice, in his Breath, that continued to crawl, hard and merciless, across her skin, plucking at her flesh. “Time is draining away for her. Soon she will stop, and you will stop with her, won’t you?” And there was awful truth in that. The Gull Queen’s Huntress could not last much longer without her Heart, and they had bound themselves to the promise of finding it. “Does it hurt when that oath is broken, do you think? No one ever lives to say, do they? Come into my flock instead, and I will be merciful. You will know peace.”
The words held more power than they ought to have. At the speaking of ‘peace’, Du felt a longing so strong wash over him that he nearly cried out. And El’s child’s heart beat hard and fast beneath her breastbone. Only Ki did not flinch. They had had peace, for a very long time, or something close enough. But they were curious what lure would be offered to them next. That knife-sound of something like the binding threads seemed all tangled in upon itself. What did the Breath bind this Emmissary to if the liege Queen was dead? But this necromancer seemed to be possessed of some sort of power of knowing, or almost knowing, not just of speaking. It would be interesting to see what was next.
Instead, there was a crash from above as some gate was pushed open, and some other voice—the Gull Queen’s this time—announced, “Bind them first, and then bring them all to the second-floor witness court. One of the others has come and is claiming to offer to bargain.”