Emissary- Of Gods and Monsters, page 1
part #1 of The Divine Monsters Series
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Preview of Emissary: Beasts of Burden (Book 2)
About the Author
Other Works by Silas Post
Copyright © 2019 Silas Post.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication, including the cover, ideas, or format, may be used, copied, disseminated, or reproduced by any electronic or non-electronic means, or in any form whatsoever, without consent from the copyright owner.
This writing is entirely fiction. All names, places, events, people, characters, and unintentional likenesses are the product of the author’s imagination and are fictitious.
1
This was my last good brush. Bristles on all the others had started to fray outward, threatening errant stripes on my handiwork. A single strand out of place and the brush would trace a gossamer line of red well past the intended lip, blue across a forehead when it was meant to shadow the eyelid, or perhaps touch a delicate earlobe rather than grace the cheekbone it hoped to caress.
There was only tonight left to work my shop, so there was no reason to preserve this brush any longer. I dipped it in a small vial of crimson paint and touched its tip to the naked wooden lips of a buxom marionette.
“Mr. Coin,” I said, raising my pitch to a raspy falsetto that no rational adult would mistake for a woman’s voice. “I love the way your fingers curl around my body while you paint my face with new emotion.”
“Yes, Nessa,” I said, naming the marionette as I imagined her coming to life in my hands. “This is how a man treats a lady. You are a work of art and devotion.”
Red paint glistened off her new lips as my steady hand pulled away to admire my work. She was a small puppet, and my customers rarely fancied toys so tiny, but I wasn’t painting her for them. Whether or not she sold was inconsequential. Tonight I painted in tribute to the gods of art and beauty, even though they seldom answered my steadfast prayers.
It wasn’t that I could afford this dalliance, this slow-paced indulgence in my chosen craft. Quite the opposite. In a matter of days my rent would come due, and I was disastrously short. It didn’t matter anymore whether I painted with skill or with haste, for love or for money. Tonight, I painted my heart.
“Nessa,” I said, running my thumb down her fragile hickory jawline. “Should I tailor you a common housecoat or a flowing shawl? No, don’t answer that. You deserve a stately gown. I’ll get my tailoring kit ready in the morning. A lady should be dressed before her toe touches the street.”
“Thank you, Mr. Coin,” I spoke on her behalf. “You’re everything a woman could dream of.”
If only that were true. Without a pocket lined in gold or the confidence of a gladiator knight, I was a man who women paid attention to only in commerce and never in love. But life was long, and much of mine still lay ahead. I hadn’t stopped waiting for my lucky moment to strike.
As I set Nessa on my work table so her fresh coat of paint could dry, the sound of sniffling wafted through my open window. Outside, kneeling on the cobblestone street before a shuttered provisioner’s shop, rested a woman. Her head was shrouded in a dense burlap hood attached to an ill-fitting cloak of the same scratchy fabric. Her voice, labored through sharp breaths and sad sighs, was muffled only by hands that covered her face.
My bed was calling me. The morning would be filled with boxing up my life’s work and finding a donkey cart to carry me away before the landlord could set his locks against the front door and trap my puppets, my tools, and my meager possessions within.
And yet, I wouldn’t rest if I abandoned a fellow soul to the long, lonely night. I took the small lantern that lit my work table and descended the steps from the private room which, though small, took up the entire second floor of my shop. I lifted the plank that separated my cashier’s counter from the display area ahead, and crossed the shop of sleeping dolls and dormant puppets on my way to the front door.
Creaking it open slowly only elongated the sound of old wood grinding against rusting hinges. The woman startled, pulling her hands away from her face to tighten them around the cloak that hid her features from view.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” I said, my voice at once quiet but also booming in the abandoned stillness of the village street. “Or rather, I’m willing to intrude, if it would help.”
“What do you see here?” she asked. Her voice cracked with the telltale strain of a stifled sob. “I understand the drawing, but…”
“Say no more,” I said, crossing the cobbles to where she knelt. She could not read and there was no shame in that. Umberton’s village held no interest for men of letters, distant as we were from the heart of the kingdom. My own literacy was an unlikely gift I was ever grateful for.
The wall this woman knelt beside held a cheap wooden board, two feet across and three feet tall. No doubt this public posting board was meant to draw onlookers to the shop’s door, who might marvel at the blocks of cheese and dried meats behind the window pane. Perhaps they would enter, and perhaps they would even buy. In the meantime, the board was a public boon, a free chance at spreading news, offering work, or begging for help.
Central among the bills and flyers posted was a parchment larger than the rest. I held my lantern toward it. A drawing of a woman wearing a tiny crown and a broad smile took up the lion’s share, though printed words above and below gave context.
The paper was rough and the ink had bled away from some of the fine lines the printer intended, but there were doubtless hundreds of these posted throughout the kingdom by now. Quantity had a way of cannibalizing quality in that way. Not that it mattered greatly anymore. The entire poster had been defaced.
Rather than the plain, unblemished face of a natural beauty, two curling horns extended from the drawing’s forehead. A scrappy beard stretched from her chin. The printed words on the poster promised a pageant to be held in the castle’s great hall, but the misspelled taunts some miscreant had scratched across the paper said otherwise.
Words too cruel and coarse to ever say aloud. I looked away to avert my mind from sounding them out, but it was too late. They mocked the pageant as a farce, as an opportunity to lure maidens both ugly and stupid from the outskirts of the kingdom so the civilized capital-dwellers could put them on parade. It was a circus for the hideous and deformed, drawn to a waiting audience to spare their pampered feet from the indignity of travel. Freaks led to verbal slaughter the way a farmer herds pigs toward the abattoir.
“A juvenile cartoon,” I said. “A silly caricature marked by immature words. Please don’t take this to heart.”
“How could I not?” the woman asked. “I spent months working up the courage to set foot in this village — a real village with real people and real homes — but no one will hire me, let alone look at me. I’m a joke to them. I’m a silly caricature.”
It was then that she stood, rising on legs covered in brown fur. I mistook them for pants of some kind before I realized the fur stopped mid-thigh where a pair of rough-hewn shorts began. Those shorts gripped tightly against thick legs and a tapered waist.
Glancing again, my eyes traced toward her feet. They were hooves six inches high.
“Madam,” I said, unsure what words could possibly follow.
She removed her hood then, captivating my attention with her deep, black eyes. They were unnaturally large, more akin to a fawn than a human woman. There was no discernable iris or pupil. No white at all. Her eyes were polished onyx spheres and they bore deeply into my own.
“You haven’t spat in my face yet,” she said. “That puts you in the minority among your kind.”
“Have my people really been so cruel?” I asked. She lowered her head and glanced away. I wondered how heavy her head was, perched upon her slender neck while boasting two large horns that curled from her forehead just below her hairline. They arced upward in a spiral like the horns of a ram. A cascade of red-brown hair fell behind her, though much of it still nestled inside the hood that now rested against her back.
Yet, despite her gentle beauty, she clearly was no human woman. Her nostrils were large, surrounded by a nose that was dark and bestial. Her lips were thick and formed a mouth out of human proportion, stretching farther toward her ears than any person I had ever seen. And those ears — those long, fur-lined ears — flicked with a mind of their own as she stood there, otherwise still.
“You really won’t read the words to me?” she asked.
“They are vile,” I said. “I would rather not read them to myself either, if that’s alright with you.”
“A beard,” she said, her eyes landing once more on the imprint of a woman beset with boorish markings. “I know I’m a hideous monster, but a beard?”
“You’re not hideous—” I started.
“Stop,” she said. “I don’t want pity or false flattery. I know what I am, and I know now why my kind stays in the forest that birthed us. I ju
With a gentle clack of hoof against cobblestone, she strode away, the moonlight failing to disperse the shadows as she disappeared toward them, quickly escaping the radius of orange light cast by my small lantern.
“Wait!” I yelled. I should be afraid of this creature. Whatever stories the forest-born told of humans, we had stories of our own. Monsters that would disembowel a man with her bare teeth. Winged beasts that suck the souls from children’s bones. Creatures of dirt and stone that trap a still-living person in an infinite chrysalis of granite torture.
I should lock my door and go to sleep. I had my own worries to attend to. Nessa was waiting.
No. I was waiting. Waiting for my luck to turn and my fortunes to change, but waiting was folly. Time does not deliver a man his due, he must reach out and claim it himself or he was never a man in the first place, only a sack of failing flesh that would never know his measure.
I extended my arm toward the horned woman that strode away and called out, “You never told me your name.”
Perhaps my voice was too loud, or perhaps the cobbles chose that moment to echo back my final plea. A few curtains rustled in the second-story windows that lined this narrow street. Neighbors clucked their disapproval and glared down at me in their nightcaps but I didn’t care.
She stopped walking and spoke without looking toward me. “Rikki. Rikki Silena.”
“Rikki Silena,” I said. “My name is Victor Coin. And I’d like to offer you quarter.”
2
She stood in the middle of the street, her burlap cloak held close around her. Gradually, she turned back. I waited and watched, in that tenuous moment, certain that I would chase after her to the forest and back if I must, but hoping she would not require it.
“Quarter?” she asked. “Why?”
“If the village of Umberton is a sea of unwelcome, let me provide an island of refuge. The forest is many hours from here on foot, and the country roads are rife with highwaymen. I have a warm bed and a private room, both of which I offer freely. I can sleep in my workshop while you rest, and you’ll have daylight to guide you home in the morning.
“After the way my people have treated you today, you deserve this small kindness. Please take it.”
She stepped closer, her dark eyes barely visible beneath her hood. “What do you make in this workshop?”
My cheeks warmed against the summer night air. I was never ashamed of my life’s work, but I held no delusions. It was not a manly art. “Puppets.”
A smile beamed at me from down the road. “Puppets?” she asked. “I’d like to see that.”
Relief and excitement washed over me, twin torrents of optimism to wash away the smallness and quietude of my workshop’s final eve. I held the door for Rikki and she stepped inside, ducking to clear her horns from the doorframe as she strutted toward the middle of the small room.
With the door shut behind us, I set my lantern on a hook. The shadows of puppets large and small danced against the wooden walls as the flame battled against an occasional draft that cut through the room.
“May I take your cloak?” I asked.
She recoiled at the question, much to my surprise, like a skittish animal approached too quickly by an indelicate farmhand. Slowly, she calmed and unclasped the loop of twine that hooked around a single button at the cloak’s neckline and unwrapped the garment from her shoulders. Her long hair fell down her back, wavy and auburn, the color of cinnamon bark fresh from harvest. A single stretch of cloth wrapped around her chest, holding her breasts tight against her body. That cloth, like her coat, was the cheapest burlap, and it tied in a bow in the middle of her back.
I hung her cloak on a coat hook and stood momentarily dumbfounded by the vision that walked across my workshop floor. She was young and robust, with a body that spoke of strength and instinct. While her hooves and legs were goat-like in their shape, her tail was a wonder onto itself. Long and thin, it ended with a cute puff of fur that tapered to a fine point like a ball of shaped cotton.
She must have hidden her tail completely beneath that cloak as she walked about the town, but now it was free to flick and swish behind her as she perused my wares.
She paused before a large toy I had carved a year ago, though she was the first to take any particular interest in it.
“With work like this,” she said, “I’m sure your shop is a great success.” Her eyes scanned marionettes large and small, though she lingered on each of the females.
“Human puppets for human crowds,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever crafted a satyress?”
“Not because I don’t want to,” I said. “I can only craft what I know. Anything else would be dishonest.”
“And if you did craft a satyress,” she said. “Would she be pretty, or would you make a monster out of her?”
“You’re the only satyress I’ve ever met,” I said. “So I’d have no choice in the matter.”
“I see,” she said. She reached for her cloak, but I stepped to the side, blocking her.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Rikki,” I said. “In your own right. That’s what I would aim to capture in puppet form.”
She forced a gust of air from her dark nostrils. “You’re too kind to be credible. Hand me my cloak.”
“Or I’m too kind to lie,” I said.
She glanced back at the shelves that lined my shop. “I don’t want to be beautiful for a monstrosity. I want to walk the streets of a human town without mothers pulling their children tight. Without constables trailing me with nightsticks in hand.”
“Sit down,” I said. “There’s a chance I can help you with that.”
Even through the endless black of her glistening eyes, I knew her glare for what it was. Suspicion. As we stood there regarding the possibilities that lay ahead, the soft patter of a gentle rain touched upon the cobblestones. It fell heavier with each moment, shifting the value in staying or going.
“Fine,” she said. “My cloak tires from ardent travels. Let it rest, for now.”
“And you as well,” I said, guiding her toward a wooden stool. She sat and crossed her legs, the short brown fur of one thigh gliding against the other as her hooves tilted demurely toward the floor.
I dug around for several minutes to find the right tools for this job. I had never painted a doll at full size, let alone a living breathing woman, and certainly never a marvelous creature like Rikki.
I chose my brushes carefully, pruning as best I could the bent and frayed bristles that might stray upon the canvas of Rikki’s face before I got to work.
A larger brush dusted her eyelids with a deep purple chalk. A thinner one, dipped first in white ink, traced a line around her eyes, highlighting the depth and darkness of the orbs that rested within. Bronze powder mixed with paste added contour against her cheekbones.
Her lips stole the most of my focus. They are a very important feature, and deserve the utmost attention, but part of my carefulness was self-serving. With her pointed chin pinched between my forefinger and thumb, I used my brush as an extension of my own fingers, thrilled at the touch of her wide, plump mouth as I painted it red like wine.
With a clean rag, I dabbed away a spot of burgundy paint that escaped the contour of her mouth, leaving her face the perfect image of a hand-crafted puppet. In my estimation, my finest work to date. No other subject of my artisan attention required a mirror to prove my work was done, but Rikki was no ordinary subject. I dug around for a small reflective surface, then handed it to her.
With her lips parted in pure wonder, Rikki regarded her own reflection. It was such a subtle difference to me, and yet she sat in awe of the face that looked back at her. “I look… like a woman. Like one of the pretty young girls that carry milk from the farms or better still, the women that lean against dark alleys without a care in the world.”
“You are not a woman of the alley,” I said, stepping around toward Rikki’s back so I too could watch her reflection and see the parts of herself she focused on with unbridled approval. She pouted her lips together, sucked in her cheeks. She tested the bounds of her painted face to see which angles might ruin the illusion, but none did.
