by Marc Secchia
The Warlock hissed, “And …”
Ignothax pointed a claw delicately at the Whisper’s neck. “It is said that no creature navigates like a Whisper. This creature possesses unmatched directional, spatial and gravitational senses, greater than any hunter or tracker, intelligent or sub-intelligent, under the sun. Their magical enhancement is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. If any route exists between Mirror and sunstrike that should lead to our enemies, she will find it for us. By oath-imperative, a Whisper is bound to strive unto death.”
The man began to make a strange, gurgling-coughing sound. At first, she thought he was choking; belatedly, she recognised laughter. Vile, devious laughter. The man chortled, “Ah … you are shrewd, Ignothax. Go on.”
Every last inch of that monstrous, fire-stuffed reptile writhed in vile pleasure.
She spat at the man and his familiar, “I will never serve you.”
I defy evil!
The Whisper’s declaration surprised herself.
Uncaring of the attacking green flame, the lizard palmed the entire cage and tossed it toward the Warlock’s boots. “Grasp your future, Warlock. Conquer all!”
As if she had not spoken.
Whisper gripped the wood mid-tumble, earning three more searing burns before finding her balance on the plank once more. This time, she made no sound.
She smelled the Human’s greed-stench. The beat of his life’s pulse proclaimed an untrammelled lust for revenge, mirrored in the upward quick of his cruel lips. She smelled strange scents upon his breath. Intoxicants? Plant-based drugs? A significant look passed between the Warlock and his familiar. Suddenly, they seemed to be of one mind. Magic. She sensed its touch upon the sensitive silken threads of her whiskers. She stroked them rapidly. A chance would arise. She must snatch it fearlessly …
“Bring bindings,” ordered the Dragon. “You. Go.” The man leaped to obey, palming a length of leather thong. “And you, snot-shot chakkur. Open the cage.”
After fiddling with the locks, the other soldier cracked the door open. She hesitated. Freedom beckoned … but where was the trick?
Go! Her legs blurred.
The Dragon missed his swipe, but not the Warlock. With a flick of his left wrist, the man unleashed an ethereal grey hand that shot through the air with an audible whine before clamping down on her tail like a vice. He reeled her in casually, despite her squirming, spitting opposition. The Whisper struck out at the soldiers with her bared talons, opening a welter of minor cuts, but in her weakened state, could put up little resistance. They twisted her hands behind her back and trussed them expertly. She was so much smaller than they. Barely half a man’s height, and very slight to boot – but she still left one with an open bite wound on his hand. Hopefully it would turn gangrenous in this atmosphere of sultry heat and high humidity that already dampened her fur.
“You can’t do this to me!” she spat.
“What?” laughed Sanfuri. “A Whisper thinks she has rights?”
On cue, all of his men and the Dragon raised a chorus of cackling mirth. Even the draconids paused their scrapping to expel a few beastly chortles. She heard rustling in the undergrowth – lizards, avians and miniature draconids taking cover, most likely. Her gaze darted in every direction. Escape. When would it come? How? She must – she was no beast – was she?
The Warlock’s ruthless eyes pierced and held her, his gaze quarrying at her mind like a pawful of ghastly, unseen talons. Pain blossomed between her temples and her long ears quivered in reaction, but after a moment, he desisted.
She could fight. Her body might be violable, but her mind resisted.
He said, “Whisper, thou art animal. Thou livest but to serve, appearing when the times are needful unto fruition. Thy sole function is to deliver thy message. Runner thou art, and wayfinder, gifted in the arts of penetrating enemy lines and defences and evading all the dangers of canyon and cave, of bulwark and openside, and the myriad, swarming beasts that prey upon the unwary and unwise. In ancient times thou didst serve the Human cities and races by linking even those separated unto the scourge of Sundering or swarming. Kings and paupers, merchants and scoundrels, all alike hast thou served, and now mine desire shalt thou master be.”
It was clear he quoted from scroll-lore. The Warlock’s scarred features hardened into forbidding planes as he regarded the captive dangling from his arcane hand. “Rights? You don’t know who you are, Whisper. Let me demonstrate.” Tossing his silvery locks, he bellowed, “Yula-îk-yyrrkûdi, Whisper! I bind thee!”
An unknowable force seized her limbs, her tongue and even her mind. She heard herself say clearly, “O Master, describe the person, place and imperative.”
Sanfuri licked his lips. “I command you to deliver my message to King Rhuzime at the City of Blue, also known as Arbor.”
The grey pools studied her callously, taking in the blood soaking her fur and the bindings lashing her hands immovably behind her back, but most of all, her inevitable response. “King Rhuzime of Arbor, upon my blood-oath,” she declared.
No! Who speaks from my throat? What is this magic?
Yet she could not withhold. Her mind was a dense fog. Even the pain in her tail, from which she dangled, was nothing but a dull, distant throbbing. She lived for the message. Her brain was a blank canvas waiting for the painter’s brush. Every word would be burned there, indelible. The masterpiece of knowing her purpose would consume her soul even as the art might consume the artist, frustrating and infuriating her, until the exultant process of catharsis began. Her catharsis would be to run the byways of her world, but the final reckoning was delivery.
Vastness beckoned, brooding and immense, with a presence all of its own. A whisker-sense itched her cheeks. Aye …
The Warlock said, “I wish you to convey this missive: ‘Greetings to you from Sanfuri the Conqueror, o King Rhuzime of Arbor, in the name of a long-overdue and bloody revenge. I hope your health remains … good. I wish to inform you that I am coming to visit with my army of Dragons, that I might pave your streets and halls with fresh corpses. I wish you congenial days until I personally crush your skull in my fist, sunstrike speed the hour!’ ”
She stared vacantly at him.
“That’s the complete message, you imbecile!”
The Whisper nodded. “I have memorised the message.”
“Repeat it.”
Unwillingly, she repeated his sentiments, word for word and inflection for hateful inflection.
“Very good.” Sanfuri glanced at the Dragon. “Shall we dispatch our messenger?”
The Dragon’s smooth, snakelike head loomed above, furnished with jailhouse fangs and a wicked grin. His complex, draconic scent was overwhelming, like a bouquet of fragrant fire broiling her senses with leisurely abandon. “Aye, Master.”
Again, that sense of the unspoken tingled her fur. So many sensations, dulled through the filter of rising pain. Could there be a moment’s respite, that she might find her place and footing and work out the multi-layered nuances of environment that continually assaulted her senses? Already, the imperative scorched like the black residue of acid-burns in her mind. Arbor, or die. Her nostrils scented the slight breeze for clues, ignoring Ignothax, now. Setting those nearby scents aside. Her fur rippled. Her trussed paws clenched and unclenched behind her back.
Who am I? Where did I come from? Why no memories before this day, before this captivity …
The mechanical mage-hand lowered her until her soles touched loose rock. Grit scrunched between her long toes. Again, the sense of connection, of knowing her environment and being known by the world, expectant in some indefinable sense, was immediate and overpowering. She would have crashed to her knees, battered by cruel waves of sensation, save that the unbreakable grip on her tail kept her upright.
The Dragon began to prod her legs with his talon, drawing blood from the taut thigh muscles, but the Warlock stopped Ignothax with a low growl, “What are you doing?”
“Drawing scent for b
lood.”
“She needs to be able to run far and fast enough,” mused the Warlock, fingering the scars on his left cheek absently. “The whippet-draconids require a scent-indicator. What would you suggest, Ignothax?”
The Dragon’s inner fires swelled audibly into a rumbling that curdled the Whisper’s marrow inside her bones. “Blood!”
Warlock Sanfuri clucked his tongue impatiently, as though addressing a child. With a meditative air, he drew his massive sword from his belt with his right hand. “You know, Ignothax, your problem is simply a lack of imagination. You need to learn to think outside the confines of that armoured cranium. Damage the legs and the critter won’t run far. But, who needs a tail?”
Snick.
The Whisper froze as a cool breeze passed by her haunches. There was a tugging sensation accompanied by a sharp tingling, as if she had pinched a nerve. Then, heat roared through her flesh, presaging a sun-bright detonation of pain. It seemed the entire world roared through her mind in a white torrent. There was mewling and shrieking and … an absence of pain. Insensibility.
Water! Wrenched out of darkness, she spluttered furiously, then bit her tongue as the pain seared deep, deeper, deepest.
“Missing something, are we?”
Dangling his blood-smeared sword from one hand, the Warlock held up a bloodied scrap of rope with the other – no. Her precious tail! The sound that erupted from her mouth was the nethermost cry of her soul’s anguish. No pain compared. The fire behind her was like sitting in a pool of concentrated acid, yet the twisting sensation drove between flesh and spirit. Instinctively, she knew far more had been stolen from her than just a vital appendage.
Sanfuri tossed the severed flesh-rope to the whining draconids. “Issî-táe-isceetha! Scent!”
Three long snouts dipped as one. Heard from where she lay, curled up on her left flank, their combined huff of breath as if but one beast inhaled. She saw the whippet-draconids stiffen, but something was awry with her senses. Information yearned to arise, but failed.
Her tail’s loss meant this?
Utterly unblinking, the jade-green draconids fixed their gaze upon the Whisper. Their long, lanky bodies quivered in anticipation. Hunters primed for action.
Turning to her with a casual mien, Warlock Sanfuri gritted out, “Arbor is in that general direction, Whisper.” He waved toward the clearing’s edge behind her back. Despite the fluid gesture, his grey eyes were as pitiless as daggers of ice. “Since we’re the hospitable sort of invaders, we’ll give you a modicum of a head start. Say … a whole minute?”
She gazed speechlessly at him, tears of humiliation and agony streaming down her cheeks for the first time since her quickening.
The Warlock raised his split-bladed sword threateningly. “I suggest you start running, little Whisper. Ignothax, release the whippets.”
Falsity belied his every word. In the space of the Warlock’s eyes flicking over to check his Gold-Red Dragon’s movement toward the agitated whippet-draconids, resolve steeled in her heart. Adrenaline laced her veins. She kicked to her paws and, with the vehemence and mild insanity of a creature transported into a realm beyond anguish, hissed, “You’ll never catch me, you witless beetle!”
She sprang away.
Quick as a whisper, she was gone.
Chapter 2: Whisper of Death
THE FIRST IMPERATIVE of survival was to run.
The Whisper’s flight was a blind, pulsating rush through broad, slapping leaves and musky scents. Loamy trails. Insect-buzz, a swirl of iridescent wasps pinging off her skin. Paws skittering so rapidly across bare rock, her footsteps sounded like dry leaves rustling in a canyon breeze. High-pitched, bloodthirsty howls filtered through the dense foliage – pursuit! Yet oddly, the sound steadied her panicked flight along a narrow stone arch connecting two abutting granite ledges. She began to listen to her body. To the labouring of abused muscles; the torn skin of legs and shoulders irately protesting the demands of flight. Knowing the nuances of the way the muscular pads of her paws responded to the different surfaces she ran over, the ruddy shendite and stronger, darker indigo fandolite striations, or stirring the crystal dust filtered down from higher above that collected in eddies about her racing paws, so distinct from the softer, decomposing loam in the forested reaches. Blood burbled in her ears. Air whistled into her lungs. Always, the searing pain of her amputated tail-stump chased her, for even the movement of air played unbearably on the rich, exposed nerve-clusters.
She rushed for life. No question. Both ears, torn and whole, oriented backward on the sounds made by the chasers. Fast. Lithe. One set of scrabbling talons sounded further behind than the others.
Pausing to mark the trail.
How did she know? Data simply arrived in her brain as if vapours arose from unsuspected, shaded pools of the hidden psyche, even as she had risen that morn, unbidden and unheralded.
Who am I? The question pounded with each imbalanced footstep, and sparred combatively with every spurt of pain. Mystery. All she had was an incoherent puddle of partial answers and clues. She was nameless. Alive. Oath-bound to the task. Seething with outrage at the injustice imposed upon her trussed person, but helpless before its magical verdict. A Whisper – whatever a Whisper was. Wayfinder. Messenger. A creature bereft of rights. Born into the moment’s need – how could that be? She could not articulate the deep, helpless affront that this idea sparked in her breast, knowing only that it lived like molten lead in her throat and stomach, fuelling her charge.
How many whippet-draconids chased her? From further back, the sounds reflected between the narrow canyon walls to her hearing betrayed the stirrings of a much larger army than she had suspected. Querulous, gruff Dragon voices. The jingling and clanking of armour. A stiff, leathery flapping, like outstretched wings being briskly shaken out to stimulate blood flow to the flight muscles. Were those flight-capable Dragons? Her mind enumerated them automatically, using the cadence of wingbeats and the differences in tone. Forty at least, perhaps fifty. Her quick ears identified the heavier, gruffer rumbling of Dragonkind she did not recognise, but their tread trembled the leaves infinitesimally even at this distance. Rough Human voices broke out into a marching plainsong, a haunting lament that nonetheless swelled with a steady musical cadence, which unexpectedly modulated the rhythm of her paws.
Informed, her body settled into an easier yet no less rapid lope.
The Whisper primed her senses. Impressions from her surrounds flashed inward. Trees. Fruits. Shelter. The chuckling of lapis lazuli waters. The … pain! I hurt! She struck a boulder heavily and rolled. Her balance was muddled. Recovering, she slammed into a meskuhi thornbush, retreating with a shoulder pierced full of lime-green bristles, and fell backward onto her tail.
The world shuddered, black through white. Olivine leaves. A flash of burgundy feathers in the foliage. Where was she?
Jaws! Teeth savaged her leg before the blazing crimson eyes set in jade armour flicked upward, tossing the hapless Whisper ten feet into the air. Another set of fangs flashed toward her; she blindly snagged a vine with her toes and swung away before crashing through a screen of creamy assumbi blossoms and bouncing off a branch. A paw-swipe! A weal of blood appeared as if by magic on her upper left arm before she spun away from the lunge of another of the hunting whippets.
Now, all was mental darkness. Flee! Endure! The Whisper sprang from branch to branch, hampered by the bonds and the lack of her prehensile tail, but her body fathomed necessity and sprang her toe-talons from their sheaths. They bit into wood. She ran a hundred feet vertically up a trunk before cutting along a narrow branch. Balanced. Whistling through the leaves. Her judgement failed and she fell, fetching up spitting leaves in a nest of screeching violet-crested chirrubirds. They pecked furiously at her retreating head, and beat her with their claw-tipped wings.
Leap! Snag a foothold! Employing her short yet sharp fangs, she snagged a vine with her mouth and swung again, sensing rather than seeing a whippet-draconid twisting as
it fell past her, its vestigial wings fluttering helplessly as it tried to arrest what might be a fatal drop. Hopefully.
Impressions flashed by the unnerved Whisper. A cave. A narrow tunnel gleaming with luminescent orange lichens. Sprinting up another tree leaning over at twenty-four degrees from the horizontal. Patches of different aromatic flowers each tickling her nostrils uniquely. A despairing leap across a divide that yawned beneath her paws as if the ground had unexpectedly sprouted a jag-toothed mouth. An impassable tangle of jastabriars fronting a fallen stone column at least a quarter-mile thick, which completely barred her way. Forced to backtrack, she suffered another mauling that bruised but did not break the skin of her neck-ruff. Protected by a thick layer of silky fur, the draconid had not bitten deeply enough to penetrate the skin. Paws scrabbling! Escape! The despairing knowledge that her strength faded steadily due to blood loss as the chase lengthened … suddenly, after an unknowable time, she missed her leap and tumbled down the sheer precipice of a canyon so mighty that the white-hot sun winked briefly overhead. Sunstrike! Heat flashed momentarily across her head and left shoulder.
She fell so far, the imperative began to scream that she was heading in the wrong direction. The knowing simply was. Existent. Unarguable. This was a Sundering. A place where sunstrike had devastated the stele lining the sides of a canyon, exposing interconnected caves and tunnels bored by rock-chewing dracoworms – or were these sign of the mighty land-building Wyrms, her non-memories asked her? She recognised streaks of the distinctive, deep silver-blue emforite substrate that formed bulwarks against the devastation of Wyrm-action, and remembered how life came to survive here in the mid-reaches. Emforite. Protector, saviour, excretion of Wyrms.
Smash! Soft yet stinging leaves exploded around her body.
Light as she was, the impact was still heavy, knocking the wind out of her lungs in a pained wheeze. She flashed by great outcroppings of crystal-ruby formations and turquoise feldspar. No! Her hips and thighs slammed down on a slope of petal-like, delicate myrkiorite formations, a beautiful rose mineral that shattered at her advent, yet cushioned the blow in a blast of curiously sweet tasting crystal dust. She rolled slowly off the end of a ledge, fell ten feet, and landed flank to flank with a mother Lesser Blue Wyvern brooding over a clutch of eggs, in a nest neatly constructed from warm fragments of onyx.