Emissary- Of Gods and Monsters, page 12
part #1 of The Divine Monsters Series
There was no door to this wispy structure, but Prince Taron stepped forward anyway, vanishing as if stepping into a dense mist.
“It can’t be true,” Rikki said, “can it? I served a god once. Kirsis was no sorcerer, his power stemmed from divine sources.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “the prince is small-minded and jealous like his father, a man too foolish to believe in a power greater than his own.”
She nodded slowly and I folded my arms across my chest, satisfied that my insight had chipped away at the esteem she held for the prince.
Our quiet conversation quickly shifted to one of dire concern. A scream erupted from inside the spire of dark wisps, then it collapsed and blew away into nothing. At its center stood the prince, his sword held outward as if in battle, though there was no opponent at all.
The narrow band of black decoration that extended from his broadsword’s tip to its hilt seemed to pulse as he gripped that weapon in his hands. My eyes burned just to look at it, though the radiating glow of that dark strip was only barely less than black, a deep pulse of mysterious purple energy so dark that I doubted it even existed.
“A damn shame,” the prince said, sheathing his blade. “Not a body left behind. A clever trick, I’ll give her that.”
“You killed her?” I asked. “The goddess of abnegation?”
“I will not fall prey to a witch’s wraith,” he said. “Now, there is a matter of a reward.”
My fingers tensed around the handle of my staff. “Jarah is no man’s trinket.”
“It is ironic, in a way,” the prince said. “The man that asked for a reward is the man whose sacrifice saved us all. But I am in a giving mood, and with him swallowed by black magic I will instead reward the astounding creature who so valiantly stepped up to defend me.”
The prince plucked a rolled piece of parchment then from the saddlebag hanging at his steed’s side and passed that paper to Rikki.
“Me?” she asked. “I was engulfed by cowardice when the moment called for a steady resolve. Surely it was Jarah’s strength that saved us all, not mine.”
“I cannot bestow a gift upon her for… political reasons,” the prince said. “And much like the man now vanished, your human companion is a royal subject forbidden passage through the forest. That I do not arrest him at once is reward enough.”
“Which means you never intended to reward Triskin at all,” I said.
“Tell me your name, soft woman of the trees,” the prince said.
“Rikki Silena.”
“Rikki Silena,” the prince said. “This permits you free entry to the castle Greenloft and its bustling city surrounding. I must race onward — there is ever much work to do — but I hope to see your beaming face inside the castle walls before the next fortnight is up. Remember that. This is a free pass to a human city with my royal seal affixed, but it will expire.”
“Your highness,” I said, but the prince raised a hand to stop me.
“My generosity need not be highlighted,” he said. Then he leaned close, the maroon-plated armor of his shoulder bumping against my arm. He spoke close to my ear, his voice barely above a whisper.
“I recommend,” he said, “that you abandon the one-eyed freak that accompanies you at your soonest convenience. These are difficult times for our kingdom. Don’t make them more difficult for yourself through her company.”
“Your advice is most seriously noted,” I said. It was the most honest I could be while maintaining decorum. What came next would require politesse. “While we discuss the difficulties that may befall our realm, there is still the matter of a loathsome monster—”
He clapped me on the back and stepped toward his steed, cutting my query short. “I must away,” he called out. “Important matters to attend at Greenloft.”
“But your highness,” I said. “A monster lurks—”
“In the heart of every man,” he said. “Yes. But you will overcome yours, the same as I have overcome mine.” He climbed onto his white horse at that point and kicked the animal’s hind quarters.
With a neigh and a buoyant Gya!, they were gone.
16
The journey ahead was a difficult slog through repetitive terrain at a tiring pace. Without mounts of our own, we marched from daybreak until the sun was well under the horizon. Our nights were our only respite — fishing in lakes and rivers, feeding each other the berries we stealthily gathered throughout our day, and partaking in pleasures of the flesh before starting our shifts with one watching and listening for any danger while the other two slept in tight embrace.
The constant work and minor pleasures of our tour through this stretch of the world forest strengthened our bond and our resolve. Jarah, determined to see her brother if not to save him. Rikki, pledged to rid the forest of a marauding force. Myself, steadfast in my support for any cause these women held dear, as their anointed guardian and as the fledgling emissary of the goddess of captured light.
And then there were the forestkind. Along the way we buried golems whose wrinkled pink flesh was bloodied and torn, stripped of the rough, drab stones that plated and protected them along with the shimmering burgundy flecks embedded in those slabs of gray.
We laid harpies and lamias to rest, their wings and tails severed from corpses left otherwise to rot. There were other creatures too — a majestic centaur, its hooves sawed off; a wyverness, her scales plucked bare.
For all the tortured corpses we interred, there was no monster to take credit for the carnage. We were left to wonder and watch in vain. The uncertainty unsettled us, and Rikki became shorter of speech until the sobriety of our trek impressed a near-total silence on her.
Each morning she reached first for her invitation to Greenloft, and throughout each long day she clutched the prince’s parchment tightly in her grip as if afraid her pockets might conspire to dissolve the paper before she could make use of it.
We soon entered the fourteenth day of our travel — the date of her royal reward’s intended expiry. This day felt new, a separate entity from the thirteen before it, because today we witnessed a warm light that eked out the spaces between trees on the horizon.
We trod on instinct then, trekking toward the warm invitation of daylight’s glow that beckoned us from outside the forest wall.
Gaging true north from the trail of the sun, we left the trees and their mysteries behind, emerging onto the grassy field that ran the outer ring of the realm’s continent. It was here that the towns and settlements, villages and cities all sprang up near the forest’s edge where hunting and lumber were plentiful, but far enough away that the dangers that lurked deep within and the gods that ruled with holy caprice would hold themselves away.
“It’s not far now,” Jarah said.
“We’ll find him,” I replied. “You’ve come too far not to ease your brother’s predicament with your vibrant grace and gentle affection.”
The fatigue in our legs left us, replaced by an anxious excitement with our goal so near. Rikki raced ahead on all fours, charging through the high grasses, pausing for us to catch up to her, and then racing off again with her tail whipping behind her. At last, we could see the bridges of the guards’ noses and the small pupils in their dual eyes, constricting against the midday sun.
We had arrived.
“Aho!” Rikki called to the pair of men that watched the wide gate to the city within, then craned her head back toward me. “That’s the greeting in these parts, yes?”
“You’re doing fine,” I said.
She smiled and fixed her posture, standing tall and proud while her dark horns spiraled into added height above her. When she approached the guards it was with confidence, though she had requested no false red upon her lips or powder to color her eyes and cheeks. Her confidence flowed from a different source now, one replenished by my and Jarah’s palpable esteem for her.
“Prince Taron welcomed us into the city with this invitation,” Rikki said, “and I request that you kindly allow us passage beneath the welcome arch without undue delay. We require an audience with him.”
“Passes ain’t for parties,” the guard said. He gestured toward Rikki alone. “She’ll be the one pass holder.”
I put my hands on Rikki’s shoulders and intervened. “I believe you are mistaken. This pass was given to Rikki, but it includes us all. We three assisted the prince in a time of certain danger.”
The guard squinted at the paper, his mouth forming slow words he chose not to voice.
“May I?” I asked.
With reluctance, the guard handed the pass to me. I gave it a quick read to myself, admittedly for the very first time. Rikki had been so covetous of the paper scrap that I hadn’t dreamed of touching it with my own hands — until now.
The bearer of this note, and she alone, is entitled entry to the castle Greenloft and all that surrounds it without submitting to question or search if arriving prior to the pageantry event. If thereafter, detain the carrier until further review.
—Royal decree of Prince Taron.
The pageant. The deadline for entry and the commencement of the event that first injured the sensitivities of my satyress mate were one and the same.
“Good sir,” I said to the guard, handing the parchment back, “this is not the ordinary pass you may generally receive. The prince was on his last blank sheaf and so he wrote a new invitation, one that clearly describes a human man, a cyclops, and a child of the forest. The words are clear, and if you will not read them to your satisfaction we will invoke our right to summon the prince hence.”
I strained to keep my volume controlled, but my voice rose in my throat nonetheless, masking my bluff with bluster. If I were right, the guard could not read, only recognize the general shape of this note as one he was instructed to apply to solo visitors.
He grumbled and passed the note to his fellow guard, but the second man simply shrugged.
“The prince has better to do,” the guard mumbled, gesturing for us to pass through the city gates and step into Greenloft proper.
With a collective sigh of danger passed, we relaxed into our new surroundings, gaping in awe at the magnitude of the buildings and throng of people.
The first to catch our eye was the castle itself, set in the distance and looming stories higher than any other structure in sight. The guards atop its towers were tiny specks outlined against the clouds above. A drawbridge was raised to block the stone arch that led into the keep itself, bounded as it was by a trench or a moat.
The central road ahead was wide and tightly cobbled, opening at its farthest end into the central square that led to the castle’s drawbridge. We walked that road due north, admiring the buildings dense and tall that rose along even the narrowest side alleys.
The scope and breadth of this settlement was beyond comprehension for a man like me, long shut away in tiny Umberton. I was grateful for the long walk from the city’s entrance; it allowed my mind a moment to expand and my sense of awe to shrink to a manageable proportion.
The square ahead appeared as the city’s true heart. All manner of shop existed along its perimeter. Not only for adventuring gear as a general matter, but for swords alone; for archer supplies; for leatherwork. Each specific type of ware had its own storefront, with windows displaying varied designs and shapes for their goods.
Those shops lined the eastern edge of a large and open square full of people trading stories as well as goods. On the western edge, a butchery sat alongside a cheesery placed next to a bakery. Only a small stage interrupted our view, a wooden platform with a long pole overhead and an empty stretch of rope, an idle gallows to remind all present that the crown would choose who died and when, but until then, the faithful servants of Greenloft’s human realm were free to go about the business of living.
We stepped slowly through the crowd. I could have been a ghost for all it mattered. Each passerby stopped to stare at Rikki or at Jarah, their eyes transfixed on the exotic view of women from distant walks of life.
Jarah’s posture changed as the crowd thickened around us. She hunched down a few inches, minimizing her obvious height. She looked down to hide her glorious eye, the gold flecks in her lavender iris slowing in their timidity.
“I love this,” one women said, stopping to take Rikki by the hand. “The horns, the fur. Even hooves. All so realistic!” She dropped Rikki’s hand and giggled as she wandered away.
“Of course your shape is realistic,” I said. “Few women are as real about their lives as you are about yours.”
“It was a compliment,” Rikki said. “They don’t stare in fear or disgust here. They appreciate me!”
“I wish I knew that sense myself,” Jarah said. She took a risk then, tapping a man on the shoulder so that he spun back, his eyes level with Jarah’s central breast as it hung plump and wide across her chest.
When his gaze rose to meet her singular eye, she asked, “Have you seen a man like me, by the name of Koby Lin?”
“I…” the man started. “No. No one like you.” He hurried away after that.
Jarah continued to ask about her brother by name, but every interaction was halting and strange. Rikki, however, took to stepping high in a prance that drew others into her spectacle. A few people clapped for her as she strutted past. I kept my arm looped with hers, certain that her luck would change. That some fool would spit in her face or throw rotten food that might knock her down, body and spirit. I kept alert to pull her from harm at first notice.
The crowd in the city’s square grew denser still as we approached its middle. Rikki pointed across the way, at the very bakery I had noticed before.
“Victor,” she said. “Have you a coin to spare? The quality of sticky bun here must be high, in the royal city.”
“Of course,” I said. “We will make our way there gradually, through the thicket of human bodies that cling tighter with each passing moment.”
“I can go,” she said. “I’ll be quicker alone.”
“I loathe to imagine you with no one at your side in a city that might easily turn against you,” I said. “Let us have patience. It will make the indulgence of dessert sweeter as an earned reward.”
“Please,” Rikki said. “We’ve traveled so long and eaten so little. I have my cravings, Victor, and I don’t share the same fear you have. I have known the hostile tinge in the air of a city that clings to hate. I feel free here. Safe. And hungry.”
Jarah continued to tap strangers on their shoulders while I pinched my lips together and thought on a response. One that could possibly stop a satyress from doing as she pleased.
“I could even ask about Koby on the way,” she said. “Splitting up might yield swifter information.”
“Thank you,” Jarah said. “That would be helpful.”
Caught between competing desires, I relented. “To the bakery and back,” I said. “No diversions.” She smiled broadly as I pressed a coin into her palm and set her on her task. I trusted Rikki; that wasn’t the issue. I just feared on her behalf. Not that anyone here had yet said an unkind word.
We continued to ask after Jarah’s brother, but icy stares and clipped responses were all we received in turn.
A few stone columns pocked the square’s otherwise flat expanse, each with wooden boards for posting notices. I gravitated toward those boards, curious what news they might hold. I was forced to sigh when I saw for myself.
“These posters regard the royal pageant,” I said. “Even here in this enlightened city, they deface the pageant’s handbills. They speak praise to Rikki’s face, but insult her from anonymous source. They speak of circus taming and butchers’ blocks, in all-too-dreadful detail.”
“We should collect Rikki and reconsider our purpose here,” Jarah said. “Perhaps there lies an underground with better information on people like us. The general populace has little to share.”
A trumpet blared before we could push through the crowd and the drawbridge lowered over the castle moat. The clopping of horse hooves on cobbles drew a hushed murmur through the plaza and then everyone knelt at once — man, woman, and child bending their knees and bowing their heads as Prince Taron crossed the wooden bridge and entered the square.
Jarah and I knelt as well. The prince brought his horse to a stop and climbed onto the wooden platform that otherwise served for public hangings. Today, it was a stage. Behind that stage, the gate to the castle’s outer grounds opened to allow a cavalcade of men on horseback and a parade of guards leading a prisoner of sorts whose hands were tied behind his back and whose face was obscured by an ill-fitting burlap sack.
“Good people of Greenloft!” the prince called out. “Aho!”
“Aho, Prince Taron!” they called back.
“The sheer size of this crowd and the exuberance your souls have added to the city’s atmosphere tells me you have not forgotten today’s importance.”
The gathered mass of royal subjects chattered among themselves, some cheering and hooting at the prince’s words.
“Yes,” the prince continued, hushing the crowd with his voice. “The pageant will commence shortly, and it will be a spectacle of beauty, but also proof. Proof that our efforts have paid off and that all manner of armor and skill await the war ahead.”
Now the sound rippling through the multitude was one of curiosity tinged with fear.
“That is correct,” he said. “War comes to Greenloft. War approaches the human realm. But fear not, for we will meet these horrendous foes with the fiercest of warriors and conquer new lands and subjects!”
The crowd cheered at this while Jarah and I stood tensely waiting for details to follow the vague pronouncement.
“Upon our peace-loving shores,” the prince continued, “a deformation arrives. They peer at the world as though better than every life, and they speak ill words about our customs, our kingdom, and even our king! Behold, my brethren, the harbinger of evil omens and the would-be assassin of humankind.”
The prisoner was dragged toward the platform while guards affixed the gallows-rope around his throat. His hands were tethered behind his back, though he made no effort to struggle. His languid body and slumped posture suggested a long time spent deprived of food and comfort, leaving him dispirited and weak.
