SSCS 04: Installment 32 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 32 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 did not have time to protect the Gull Queen, or any within the mob who might be innocents carried along by the twisting of the binding magics. Nor could they reach the necromancer to stop him. Even as he stood beside the Queen, who could surely see now just what, and through that what who, he wielded, his own knife was out just as quickly as El’s. A shadow of slicing, black iron, the first cut he made wasn’t a killing blow. In fact, it struck nowhere that the eye could clearly see, and yet the Queen turned white in an instant and doubled up in sudden agony, helpless before the weight of swords swiftly bearing down upon her.
It was, weirdly, the presence of Lot that prevented the Gull Queen from being swallowed up in that moment. Lot and the alien tide of magic. Lot and a sudden vast and swarming horde.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 32: 24.0531
For within the breath of a moment, it was not merely Lot that was standing there, not just a sense of a vast, alien magic flowing around them, but a large host of other people, people who’d seemed not to be there a moment before, as though they’d peeled themselves out from beneath the edges of reality. And as though the edges of reality were still lapping up close around them, ready to fold shut again and hide them in an instant, or split and part and deal a different sort of disappearing upon whoever should happen to be their enemies.
They filled the end of the corridor, nondescript in themselves, but with something like darkness swarming at their backs. And then Lot reached for the Gull Queen, the tentacles of her hair lashing and sparking like underwater stars in a halo all around her face, and that something like darkness, like the peeling edges of reality, rushed to follow her command.
The guards with their swords met those edges of reality, and faltered. And again El and Ki and Du heard a great and furious whispering rising up all around them, something buzzing just below the edges of their comprehension—except for Du, who shuddered and sank to his knees and pretended he did not feel the tears coursing down his cheeks, the washing, gossamer memory of promises that could never now be fulfilled buffeting him from all sides in whispered waves.
But the necromancer, the false Emissary, did more than falter. He screamed, rage and petty betrayal howling through the ragged edges of his voice. And he would have plunged the black knife into the Gull Queen’s breast in that instant, except that that alien swarming of reality stayed his hand, too.
It stayed his hand, and flowed over it, until the knife was little more than crumbled bits of iron. And, slowly, it stayed the rest of him as well, pressing him down, down. To kneeling. To bowed down upon the stones. To splayed out on his belly like a worm. And then it pulled, irresistible, at his other hand. Forced it out and forward, stretching inch by inch toward the Gull Queen still collapsed herself in pain. Forced the hand to unclench, to open.
When the Gull Queen reached out, her white hand shaking, to take what the necromancer was being forced to offer her, the screaming of the binding threads suddenly stopped, leaving the air ringing to the senses of all present who’d been able to hear them, even as the tide of alien whispers still pressed close as smothering velvet for some.
In the quiet, the Gull Queen, grey of hair and white of face, heaved a ragged breath, the exhale offering up a bitter whisper. “Hush now.”
As one, the violent press of her guard-turned-against-her suddenly collapsed back and away from her, half of them swooning immediately into unconsciousness, half sobbing and retching and flinging their swords from them as though burned.
Only the necromancer was left perfectly still, still stretched out on his belly, the black crackle of his magic still struggling and hissing fury against the crawling, alien unreality that held him pinned.
And to this, Lot stepped forward, looking down upon him with a distant, almost abstracted air, while at the same time the crowd, the Horde, of others who’d appeared so suddenly with her, faded back behind her, seemed to fold away into a strange, crawling, black darkness, winking out one by one, though the ocean-tide of whispers remained.
“Good-bye, Bargaining One / enemy / friend.” It was Lot’s mouth that spoke to the prostrate necromancer, the breathy, sawing pull of her Trawerler-bred magic echoing eerily in the corridor. But to the ears of the Lazarine, her voice seemed to swell from out of the tide of whispers and alien magic. “We have found wisdoms better suited / more whole / more willing. You cannot match this treasure / nesting / safety – and so we bargained you instead / your treasure / your fine pieces. We will withdraw and you can keep your nesting dead.”
The last of the other people, the strange horde, flickered out behind Lot, and she turned then to Ki, a crawling blackness of unreality flickering around her now, too. “Bind him, Ki,” she said, and this was with Lot’s voice alone. “I’m not staying, and the Chiton Horde’s magics will leave when I do. We are vast as the stars.” And so saying, fast as an indrawn breath, she vanished.
Ki was still tying the knot in the leash to hold the necromancer Emmissary still upon the stones, when three more figures stumbled around the corner and into the corridor: San, and the Moth Queen, and the Gull Queen’s nearly dead Huntress held supported between them.