Emissary- Beasts of Burden

by Silas Post

  “An alarm,” I said. “Bad news on any day, but worse on this one. Prince Wick and a contingent of the royal army are here. If they assist the Telapan guards we are vastly outnumbered.”

  “Then what?” Jarah asked. “Get inside the city only to flee from it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but not by land. Can you sail?”

  “Growing up on an island, I have tried my hand at small watercraft,” she said. “Though I am no skilled navigator.”

  “You’re the best we have,” I said. “Come on.”

  We three ran through the streets of Telapa without the same native instincts of the thief that had slipped from my grasp. We charged past intersections that held guards looking out; our boots and hooves pounded the dirt in a mad dash; our labored breaths and grunts foretold our arrival.

  By the time we hit the central plaza, a squadron of guards had amassed behind us and others approached at the fore, twin walls of orange-clad colossi running as fast as their fat frames allowed. Yet, the path toward the port itself was blocked by only one man: a royal solider in his green tunic and chainmail. His gait was unsteady as he approached.

  “To the harbor,” I said, turning sharply and leading Rikki and Jarah toward that single guard who stood in our way.

  “He’s here!” the man yelled, pumping his arms as he ran but not thinking to pull his sword from the scabbard that swayed at his side.

  I ran at him headlong and stabbed at his chest with my wooden spear. His chainmail and tunic were protective of his skin, but less so of the squishy places in his core. I knocked the wind out of him with a powerful forward thrust and kicked him down a second later. We sped past his writhing body and toward the giant masts that lined the western shore.

  The drunken warriors of Prince Wick’s squadron littered the wharf. Some of them had cracked open the wooden crates that held shippers’ cargo and gorged themselves on exotic fruits. Others simply smashed what they found and delighted in the damage they caused.

  Alarm bells may have roused the city’s guards into an uproar, but Wick’s men were unconcerned. Their liege stood in the center of the wharf with his hands on his hips and his greatsword resting against a nearby barrel, supervising this disorderly affair without a pang of emotion on his flat face.

  “Come on, men,” he said. “Ropes, manacles, whips. A fecking riding crop would do, just find me something useful amidst the fruit and grain.”

  One pair of guards walked down the pier that led to Dineel’s ship and the tentacled woman that lay suffering aboard it, though without climbing high they would not know she was truly there. Yet.

  “We can’t let them board that fishing vessel,” I said, nodding slightly toward Dineel’s trawler. “That’s the boat we’ll claim. Rikki, ready your dagger to cut the rope that tethers it to shore.”

  “I cannot command a ship that size,” Jarah said. “That’s no sailboat, it’s far too large and complex.”

  “We have no choice,” I said. “It’s the smallest in the harbor, and it is important. To me.”

  Rikki gave me a puzzled look, but Jarah accepted my insistence with a nod.

  “The stacks and columns of crate and barrel are blockade enough to hide us one to one, but not three across,” Jarah said. “We could separate.”

  “I’ll take the left if you head right,” Rikki said. When Jarah agreed, they split off, dodging behind shipping containers piled high enough in sporadic stacks to provide pivot points for evading oncoming guards. Should our sneaking approach erupt in a violent brawl, they might even spring an ambush counterattack from the hidden spaces behind discarded cargo. It wasn’t long before even I didn’t know where they had fled to.

  My intention was to give the girls their start and follow the most likely path behind them, but even a fractional second was time enough for circumstances to shift beneath my feet. The man whose voice I had stolen when I forced his gut to expel his supply of air had crawled to his feet and returned to his master’s service.

  I knew this because his voice rang across the wharf, cutting a path for itself through the constant gonging of brass bells throughout the city behind him and bringing these words to the prince’s ear: “Stop him!”

  8

  A coterie of Telapan guards closed in behind the man that had drawn the prince’s attention. They stooped over themselves, panting and wheezing from overexertion. Their wide frames and heaving bellies sealed a wall of fat and flesh across the harbor’s entrance, leaving me to handle Wick and his rotka-soaked guards.

  The prince’s hands slipped from his hips to rest at his sides, the tips of his fingers bare after his gauntlets ended just past the final knuckle. “And here I thought you wouldn’t amount to significant trouble,” he said.

  Rikki and Jarah had not drawn any attention as they skulked around the wharf, crouching and darting between columned crates when the moment allowed.

  “I’m no trouble of yours,” I said. “This hardly rises to royal concern.”

  “He attacked me,” the gasping soldier yelled.

  “And broke the city wall on attempted flight from the royal curfew!” yelled a portly guard further back.

  “The curfew my father demanded,” the prince said. “This does rise to my attention then.” He seemed disappointed, almost frustrated that I had become a problem he couldn’t simply leave to the city’s second-rate guards. “Arrest him.”

  Royal guards nearly fell over themselves to fulfill the prince’s wishes, their legs turned to rubber from drinks too stiff for their livers to stand.

  I prepared to defend against any on-comers with my wooden staff held close to my chest. Their unsteady swords drew near, but the prince held his hand out and stopped them.

  “On second thought,” he said, “continue your work. My father’s schedule for us is ambitious and this runty scofflaw is ill-equipped. The delay of an arrest and trial is obviated by a prince defending his prize.”

  Wick made the slightest movement then toward his sword, but his attention was stolen by a sudden ruckus at the ocean’s edge.

  The splashing plunge of two armored men into the harbor’s waters caused a furrow across Wick’s brow and a turn of his head toward the pier. Rikki had headbutted one man while Jarah lifted and tossed another. Their panicked cries ended quickly, too heavy and drunk to keep their faces above the waves.

  I used Wick’s momentarily diverted concentration to seize a hurried grasp at his mighty weapon, bending to my knee with my pole in one hand and my other outstretched toward the gleaming hilt of the prince’s greatsword.

  Realizing my gambit, the prince reached for his weapon as well. Our hands landed upon that handle simultaneously, but our reactions were mirrored opposites. The metal was hot and fierce against my skin, draining my vitality and blackening my vision. I released it immediately.

  Wick’s grip only tightened, a sinister glimmer erupting in his pupil’s hollow core, as dark and pulsating as the curious band that striped his blade from tip to hilt. He lifted that weighty blade with ease and slashed as I scrambled to raise my staff to meet his blow. I swung upward, connecting the handle-end of my weapon with the razor edge of his blade. Two inches of wooden pole lobbed off in a clean cut that did nothing to slow the prince’s inertia. Had I stood just a footstep closer, it might be my hand that tumbled onto the pier’s surface instead of a sliver of wood from my staff.

  While Wick grunted and lifted his massive sword, I recovered my footing and yelled. “Start cutting rope!” Rikki and Jarah had climbed aboard the trawler and now worked at severing the cord that kept it moored.

  “You will not take a vessel the crown has claimed for its fleet,” Prince Wick said, “even a fishing boat for which we have no present use.”

  “Yet you killed its owner to prove your claim,” I said.

  “He defamed me,” Wick said.

  “No,” I said. “Defamation requires falsity. Any ignobility he accused you of was proven true by your own hand.”

  The prince lift
ed his sword in a high arc and slammed it down in my direction, but his heavy armor encasement and densely forged blade left me the lighter opponent of us two. I leapt to the side with ease while his sword splintered the pier’s rough boards below.

  He paused a moment to yank his blade free of the wood that had captured its fine edge. In that time, I sought the shelter of a crate stack a few paces closer to Rikki and Jarah’s position.

  Wick’s men, despite their order to keep at their task, watched on as their liege stalked forward with his sword ready. I pushed a crate from the top of the stack, allowing it to fall and crack apart to send a wave of tropical fruits past his feet.

  “Hurry!” Rikki yelled. She leaned over the edge of Dineel’s former boat, both hands clutching the frayed end of the rope that led from the pier’s supportive post. The majority of the rope lay limp against the boat’s side, fully severed from her knife’s edge.

  Jarah’s firm hands gripped Rikki by the hooves, keeping the satyress from slipping overboard. Still, it was a struggle they could not maintain.

  “Your accomplices escape without you,” Wick said. He swung as he taunted me, but I sprinted ahead toward the pier that Rikki and Jarah threatened to drift away from if either lost their grip.

  I evaded Wick’s blade, allowing it to slice through a fruit and sink deep into the pier’s battered slats. His weapon’s own gravity made it difficult to wield and harder to reclaim, though I assumed one sure strike would cause a critical wound in any person so lightly armored as I was. To stay a step ahead of him was to keep the hope of survival.

  Twice his men attempted to snatch hold of my arm or leg, and twice I knocked them down with cargo containers shoved from haphazard stacks. I pressed my staff against the top rim of a barrel and flipped it to its side, slicking the wharf with cooking oil. I powdered the air with mill-ground grains as I stabbed holes through woven sacks.

  Wick’s men slipped and they coughed, lacking the coordination to handle a fast-changing environment, thanks to the slowing sting of the rotka that poisoned their blood and mind.

  The creak of wood and groan of voice signaled the end of the ocean’s patience. It was poised to whisk Rikki and Jarah away in our intended vessel. Similarly impatient was Prince Wick, fast approaching with his sword ready to cleave me in halves.

  I braced for another attack, a knot of futility tightening in my stomach at the prospect of meeting his blade with my simple wooden staff — really just a forest branch I had smoothed and honed with a carving knife I no longer carried.

  “Let go of me!” Rikki yelled. My attention pulled back toward the boat. Rikki had lost her battle to hold the rope’s frayed end, and Jarah held her by the waist now to prevent her from leaping over the boat’s rail. “I won’t leave him!”

  The boat drifted from the pier, first by inches then by feet.

  “There is nowhere you can run now,” Wick yelled flatly, as if stating a simple and inescapable fact.

  “Yes,” I said. “There is.” I turned and set my legs to furious motion, sprinting down the pier that no longer held our boat at its side. My wooden staff, clipped shorter by Wick’s blade, was still a long and sturdy stick.

  “You can sail, or swim, or dig, or channel,” he called after me as I ran. “I will have your head on a pike at castle Greenloft for your insurrection against the crown.”

  I did not intend to swim or dig. I intended to fly.

  At the pier’s end, I jammed the base of my staff against the wooden slats below and leapt, using my staff as a lever to propel myself higher into the air. The full weight of my body cracked the stick down its center and I released it beneath me, grateful for the assistance it provided in vaulting me on a long and auspicious route ahead.

  Rikki’s hand outstretched toward mine as the gap between my body and the bow of our ship contracted. I might land on its deck in a forward roll, or at least clasp my woman’s hand as Jarah reeled us both toward a haven both safe and dry.

  Had the boat not continued its wayward journey from the port toward the open sea, my pole-assisted leap might have sufficed. Instead, the tips of my fingers flew past Rikki’s as I descended beyond her reach.

  I continued to fall along my downward arc toward black night waters below, but my fingers touched the coarse stretch of rope that now lay limp in the wind. My senses were alive with the possibility of a pitiful crash into the painful surface of rough waters, but I was also alert to my own reflexes. My fingers clutched that rope and I swung with it, slamming my body into the hull of the ship just above the waves.

  I ascended through no effort of my own. I was in Jarah’s hands now, her powerful muscles flexing above me as she reeled me aboard. Rikki leaned far forward, cheering me on while I clung to my saving rope.

  As I climbed over the rail and caught my breath on the deck, the silhouette of Prince Wick stood at the harbor. He was lit faintly from the city behind while alarm bells calmed their incessant plea.

  The emergency was over, and yet one heavy truth thickened the air around me: Humbert Carver had made a firm enemy in Prince Wick, and removing this beard would only disguise me as the wanted man Victor Coin.

  9

  Rikki pulled me to my feet on the fishing trawler’s deck. The boat itself was fairly small, with a central mast that held a billowing yellow sail rumpled loose against its pole and a deck that extended twenty feet ahead and again behind. A few bulging nets filled with dead fish sat in quiet heaps, but there was no sign of a pink-skinned beauty with tentacled arms.

  “Help Rikki raise the sail while I take the helm,” Jarah said, heading toward a wooden wheel at the boat’s front. Eight teak knobs extended from the circular steering device, likely linked to a rudder beneath the boat that would aim us toward Jarah’s chosen direction.

  “Do we know what cargo is aboard?” I asked, craning my neck toward a small mound of fish rotting away beneath tight nets. None moved with the languid gestures of a woman long trapped. None moved at all.

  “We should wait to inspect at sea,” Jarah said. “Telapan archers take aim.”

  Several piers extending from Telapa’s harbor now held men in orange uniforms with bows and arrows nocked in their strings. The first few shots fell wide, but they were only testing the wind’s strength and direction. If we didn’t add distance to their calculus, they would pierce our sail and stymie our departure.

  Jarah stood with her legs set wide, powerful thighs and calves tensing and flexing as she spun the ship’s wheel. She kept perfect balance despite the rocking and twisting of the ship beneath us. Her singular eye focused steadily ahead while long blonde hair and a flowing cyan skirt whipped to one side against the wind’s fervent assault.

  I gripped the sail’s halyard rope while Rikki did the same, taking turns pulling the cord that lifted the yellow fabric up and out, allowing its triangular shape to form against the backdrop of night. I was oddly relieved for the disguising embrace of the darkened sky, hoisting our pirated ship’s sail the way I had hoisted Prince Wick’s brother to his demise, tangled in the pulley-fed ropes of the pageant stage curtain.

  The image of his panicked face and throbbing veins as that rope tightened around his neck would never leave me, but I could turn my thoughts to happier analogies instead. To the puppet strings that gave life to the creations of my former vocation. To the smooth carved bodies and patiently painted faces of my little marionettes.

  My attention snapped back to the task at hand when Jarah’s voice cut across the ocean waves once more.

  “She’s off balance,” Jarah yelled. “Cut the lines.”

  “What lines?” I asked.

  “The fisher who ran this boat took in a hefty haul,” Jarah said, “but nets of fish hanging starboard disrupt the water and slow our path.”

  “I’ve got it,” Rikki said, pulling her knife ready.

  “No!” I yelled. This quick protest drew a confused look over Jarah’s shoulder, as well as from Rikki’s face nearby.

  “Victor,”
Rikki said. “It’s just fish. Let them swim.”

  “Not yet,” I said, stumbling forward as the boat lifted off a violent wave and crashed forward again onto the ocean’s choppy surface.

  “But—” she started.

  “Trust me on this,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Fine,” Jarah yelled back to us. “Find our wind, we’ll deal with the cargo later.”

  “It’s everywhere,” Rikki yelled. “It’s wind in every direction!”

  “No,” Jarah replied. “It’s the central winds we must invite, the ones that course hardest and fastest. What direction does your hair blow?”

  Rikki pivoted to one side. Astonishment lit up her face when her reddish-brown hair, at first a mess of confused strands beating every which way, resolved into a stream of auburn locks that flowed behind her in harmonious beauty. “I’ve got it!” She pulled a wooden pole that connected to the sail and spun the mast, tilting the yellow fabric until it faced those central winds.

  Our vessel lurched from the change in forces and I grabbed a handle on the mighty mast to catch my footing. Rikki delighted in affecting the ship so suddenly, and swung the pole back to jostle us all again.

  “We can play midshipman later,” I said.

  “Fine.” She relented and set the sail so that it faced the wind dead ahead, forcing the canvas to beat madly against the relentless air.

  “Now to the side,” Jarah said. “We can’t sail head-on, but we’re almost set.”

  Rikki’s final maneuver smoothed out our passage and sped us away from Telapa for good, quickly escaping the farthest range of even their most agile longbow.

  The city’s low light receded as we parted the water around us, Jarah finally relaxing her powerful legs as the emergency of our escape had passed. The full moon cast its soothing light upon us, reflecting off the droplets of seawater that beaded on the deck and our skin.