by Marc Secchia
The great Thundering Wyrm, all silvery hide and untrammelled power, poured forth from beneath the barrens now, making the pebbles near her paws leap about with the force of its passage. Fanning out around the great one came the smaller burrowing Wyrms, their hides splotched with mauve, crimson and gold, wriggling across the wasteland with no visible form of propulsion that she could see. Every so often, light flared from their armoured hides, strobe-lighting the early evening skies as they pulverised everything larger than small insects and drakkids; soon, she began to discern trails of ores in multiple hues left by the labouring Dragonkind. She watched pensively, eventually working out a pattern. They were raising new lands and bulwarks from the desolation, building layer upon layer of substrate according to a design she did not fully comprehend, even though her mind told her it seemed logical. Silver. Dark iron. Even darker granite and, a mile further afield, stripes of orange sandstone. Here came the Thundering Wyrm, laying a glowing bluish trail for all the world as if it were a slug measuring several miles long.
As though the Wyrm heard the insult, light speared toward her.
KAAAABOOM!!
Whiteness thundered against the cliffs.
Groggily, Whisper extracted herself from beneath a pile of rubble. That was very nearly Whisper served freshly toasted with extra-frizzled whiskers, she thought wryly, and wobbled off in search of a less dangerous spot from which to spectate.
* * * *
The following morning, she awoke before sunrise to discover a new problem. Fading eyesight. After fashioning herself a leg-splint from sticks and the remains of her empty sling, Whisper departed. Time ran against her. She had no doubt that the Warlock’s army would need weeks, if not longer, to cut through the route she must have identified. What the Humans of Arbor did not have was the luxury of complacency; she had to reach them before she went blind. This was a rare but known consequence of draconid-poisoning, and the only antidote was one, her Beacon-augmented knowledge suggested, she might be fortunate enough to find at Arbor – distillate of the rare charbis worm.
The broken terrain was fantastically difficult to navigate, forcing Whisper to climb or descend two miles for every mile gained in the direction of Arbor. Her route meandered like a drunken dracoworm tying itself into knots, covering every conceivable direction in the full sphere of possibilities, and perhaps a few that could not even be named. She climbed cliffs, forded rivers, sneaked through caves, slid down mossy trees and bounded from fungus to luminous pink fungus down in the lower reaches – and saw less and less of all she passed as her eyesight weakened. Whisper dodged more species of draconid and drakkid than she cared to count; all with ready fangs and claws, stingers and organic nets and tentacles and spike-fringed mouth traps … she yawned widely. Honestly, did everything in this world want to eat a Whisper?
Even as she collected bruises, scrapes and puncture wounds by the dozen, she made progress. Slowly, the maze became more regular. Perhaps the blast of Sundering had pushed the canyons about? She saw less and less signs of rockfall and fresh, not-yet colonised cracks and drop-offs. Walls and tunnel roofs carpeted in flowers greeted her dimming gaze. Whisper sniffed out several fragments of old trade routes which catapulted her across buttresses and through mountains with insane ease; she fought the pain unrelentingly, and several times found herself talking to flowers.
Was she hallucinating? Going mad? Not good.
Twice, crossing buttresses over yawning canyons, she spied the Brass Mirror far, far below, and a third time, lapping in the distance, which she observed through an inlet that permitted sunstrike to penetrate deep into the wilderness. She traversed this area with care, finding a safe, sheltered pathway through groves of tangled lurkibor trees, a relative of the sentikor that grew in trunk-clusters many hundreds of individuals thick. Closer to the city, the garden-like aspects of the terrain grew more and more pronounced. Great walls of flowering vines obscured the stele and canyon walls and even invaded tunnels deeply, adding yet another layer of complexity to her navigation, but her Whisper-senses burned strong within her now, leading her with greater and greater certainty toward her final destination.
That imperative eclipsed all else. She lived to run, to reach her goal.
Singing a silly ditty to cheer herself up, the half-blind Whisper wandered straight into a nest of purple-crested draconids.
Fangs applied prejudicially to the region of her buttocks burned through her fug. With a wild yell, Whisper tore away and crashed through the nearest bushes, before ducking into the narrow gap between a sentikor and a tall crag. The draconids howled in frustration as two became stuck right behind her; their fellows sympathised with talon-swipes and nips before darting after Whisper. She charged on, using a stick she had carved for herself as a second leg rather than dragging her left knee, which in the last two days had become completely useless.
Kicking through a huge screen of fragrant flowering vines, she came within inches of charging right off a precipice. On second thoughts … was that a grey city wall across the canyon? She peered blearily ahead, but did not wait for a half-sensed bite to trim her head off her shoulders.
Jump!
Whisper flattened herself instinctively, making a shallow, painful glide toward a trail on the far side of the narrow canyon, where the vegetation had deliberately been cut back to expose a ledge some three hundred feet wide and a mile long, leading past a bridge that connected her side of the canyon to the far side, toward a huge flying buttress. Under that? A manmade wall! A fortress! Guarded by dark blobs that might be men, or very small Wyrms, for all the detail she could make out with her waning eyesight.
Just then, those blocks of dressed stone were the most beautiful sight she had ever beheld. The blood-oath thundered in her veins: Arbor!
The world seemed to open before perceptions she had not known she possessed. She felt a weight of souls there in the city, utterly distinct from anything she had passed so far. It was multifarious, comprised of stellate constellations of life-bright nodes, yet was also an entity which surpassed the sum of the souls it contained. The canyon’s cliffs brooded over this treasure they guarded like the flanks of an impossibly vast mother. Her own consciousness yearned to unfold and join this vision, but with a violent convulsion of her small tail, the powerful sense of grandeur and its life-affirming beauty vanished. Whisper groaned. When would she be whole again?
Danger-sounds jolted her awareness.
Howling and spitting in fury, the purple-crested draconids poured over the bridge behind her, a manmade affair of stone buttresses and a swinging rope footbridge, over which the Dragonkind raced as though it were a broad, safe trail. These draconids could not fly, but they were ten feet of whipcord muscle and wild Dragon emotions, riled to a fine pitch by her blundering into their nest. They moved with sinuous speed on all four paws. Some even ran beneath the bridge, digging in with their talons.
Great. Whisper curved her flight toward the startled dark blobs. Time to call in any and all help.
Flaring in for a landing, she cried, “Help!”
“It’s attacking, men!” bellowed one of the blue-faced soldiers, raising a battle axe that looked dismayingly well-used. “Defensive shields!”
He swung a scything overhand blow toward her shoulders, but having anticipated the strike, Whisper threw her body aside. WHAM! An axe blade slammed into the ground, throwing sparks across her paws. She wailed as her injured knee bent horribly in the wrong direction. WHANG! A viciously sharp shield-edge splintered rock near her nose. Rolling away between several pairs of legs, she managed to trip up two of the heavily armoured axmen. Another slammed his axe into his fellow-soldier’s shield boss, while a female warrior dodged the tangle and pursued Whisper, her pale blue face set in grimly intent lines beneath her round metal helm.
“I’ve a mess – ouch! A message!” yelled Whisper, scrambling backward.
“Take no prisoners!” roared the unit leader. “Draconid attack incoming! It’s one of them, Myntix!”
>
“Come to mama, scaly,” growled Myntix, thumbing the blade of her axe with one mail-clad hand. “I’ll turn you into nice Dragon steaks, sliced real thin.”
“King Rhuzime. Please,” she panted, backing up further. That woman might be only five and a half feet tall, but she was built like a muscled boulder, with biceps thicker than a Whisper’s waist. “I’ve a – stupid Human!”
This was as the woman feinted a blow that would have split the Whisper’s skull for firewood.
Suddenly, the draconids pounced. Obviously hearing the scratching rush of talons and leathery scales, the female soldier wheeled smoothly on her heel, taking the leader flush in the chest. Her blow launched the draconid fifteen feet to her left hand. The Human patrol seemed to shrink like an interlocking puzzle, and turned into an armoured tortoise. Whisper blinked. How? And … oh no, she was the only one left in the open! Better and better. Taking advantage of the draconids’ sniffing about the virtually impregnable Human formation of interlinked shields, and their confusion as the entire metallic beast picked up and began to shuffle back toward the city – well, she bolted. Not a dignified retreat. A pell-mell withdrawal, madly hopping on her good leg and the stick. There was perhaps only a quarter-mile remaining to the city wall after her angled glide, but the ground seemed to sway beneath her paws with every hop, while the blackness around her vision gathered in clumps like cave-draconids slavering over a feast.
Behind her, the purple-crested draconids swarmed over the metal tortoise, which split unexpectedly to produce an axe. Swish. A decapitated draconid rolled away, and was instantly mobbed by its overexcited former nest-mates.
Immediately, the Human tortoise lifted and lumbered into a run.
Impressive discipline. The effect was hilarious, like the shell of a silver, armoured insect with several dozen legs wiggling about beneath. What did they fear of draconids? Whisper put on an extra spurt of speed, charging for the huge wooden double doors which swung steadily closed, ahead. No!
Boom. The doors came within inches of amputating her nose.
A large, fancifully carved Dragon’s-head brass knocker hung from the enormous wood-and-metal city doors, but her paws could not reach. She banged hopelessly against the massively thick timbers. “Message! Message for the King!”
Draconid!
Spinning away, Whisper raised the stick. “Mangy cur!”
The draconid lunged, bit down with its long muzzle against her hip bone and across her stomach, and flung her into the air. Somewhere up there, a burry male voice yelled for someone to help, then cursed luridly.
She fell. An arrow sprouted in the draconid’s heaving flank, staggering the beast, but there were three more just behind. Whisper’s head jerked. Selfishly, the soldiers had assumed their formation once more. Fungazoids! No help there. Fangs surrounded her. Twang! A searing pain bit her shoulder, hammering her back against the ground. The draconids’ purple crests flared in shock, then the narrow-jawed grins widened perceptibly. Dinner on a skewer, Whisper thought dully, struggling to rise, but finding herself neatly pinned to the broad granite flagstones outside the Human city.
This was the moment her fleeting world-sense would end in a bluish smear of blood outside Arbor. One less soul to the constellation …
Clang! With a ringing clang, oddly similar to a bell, one of the draconids dropped with its skull caved in. Hammer? Whisper heard herself laugh as if from a distance, for now a thickset Dragon of a man dropped from the sky, burning his tough dragonhide gloves on a rope as he came. He deliberately used a draconid for a landing pad. Crack! The dark warrior sprang aside with startling grace, despite the weight of chainmail armour he wore about his prodigious girth and even more prodigious shoulders, and twirled one war-hammer about his head, while the other, he shook at the draconids.
“Have at’cha, yar skanky sons o’ fungus!” roared the man.
One boot planted itself to Whisper’s left flank, the other, to her right, shaking the ground. Her memory decided to pick this moment to inform her that she had never seen a man to compare, not in any past life and certainly not in this one.
Punctuating his sentences with the whirring of his hammers, attached to his wrists with short leather thongs, he thundered, “Are ye sons of lice? Open thar doors an’ help yar men!”
With that, he slammed one hammer into a draconid to his left and rearranged a set of fangs behind him, which Whisper presumed he could not possibly have seen, with a simultaneous blow. The purple-crested draconids trusted in their numbers, rushing at the warrior in an overwhelming wave, but his blood-mad laughter belled out over their chirruping, spitting fury. He cracked skulls like nuts and threw draconids hither and thither, taking cuts and blows himself, but he seemed rooted, unstoppable, a primal beast in his own right. Whisper yanked herself loose of the stones, despite the arrow that pierced through her shoulder. Swaying to her paws, and finding that she had no need to duck beneath the arch of his body, she purloined a dagger secreted in his right boot-band, and neatly gutted a draconid as it made to sink its talons into the unarmoured gap at the back of the man’s right knee.
“DREXOR!” roared the giant. “To me! Git down, yar!”
Ignoring an invitation to cowardice, Whisper darted over his left boot, swinging the dagger sharply. Strike to the throat! The warrior finished the draconid with a thundering hammer blow to the crown of its head. Bone splintered audibly.
“Ha! To me, men! DREXOR!”
Rallying the soldiers – or perhaps, they broke cover out of shame – the warrior and his comrades smashed the draconids’ attack. The Dragonkind darted away, perhaps two dozen or more draconids with eyes as crimson as Human blood, but a second later they paused to mill about, sniffing the air. Scenting the enemy.
A huge arm, scarred and freshly bloodied, swept down for Whisper, who found herself sitting legs apart, staring stupidly at a mound of her own intestines. Oh. The draconid had torn open her stomach and she had not noticed? White teeth flashed brilliantly as a face darker than coal broke into a grin above her. “Yar mine charge now, lil’un. I’ll keep yar good. What yar doin’, fightin’ these-like on yar own-some?”
His speech patterns reminded her of the Arboreal Dragon, only his accent was very different.
Whisper’s head lolled against his arm. When had the plants all turned purple? She whispered, “King … urgent …”
* * * *
Voices rose and fell around her like distant thunder. Angry voices. Accusing voices. A voice with a military bark; another that spoke with soft, understated authority.
Whisper tried to turn her thoughts back from the darkness, but she was weak. So weak. All she wanted to do was to sleep a forever-death, but a hand tweaked her toes now. Water squeezed between her lips. “Sorry, yar. They’re insistent-like.”
“Captain Drex, you were out of order!” insisted the military voice. “When your commanding officer gives you an order, you obey it, no questions. You were disgraced before. Don’t make this any worse on yourself.”
The hand cupping her head stiffened in outrage, but his touch remained gentle. “Warleader Ammox, thar’n lil’un’s a Whisper –”
“So you say! From where? Following whose orders?” Ammox rapped. “What dangers and diseases does this – this furry little backstabber – bring to the City of Blue? The King is too ill to hear any message.”
“Aye, these are portentous times,” said another man, in a smarmy sneer that made Whisper’s fur creep. Her eyes refused to open. Were her eyelids gummed shut? Worse, taped shut? Was she a prisoner of these Humans? “We must read the signs –”
“Pompous, mystical fool,” said the older female. “Here’s Princess Rhyme. Shut the beards and listen, you men.”
The unctuous voice whispered, in muffled tones, “Command us, o youth unready for rule, while your father lies abed. Whose hand was it that administered the poison, I ask? Could it have been yours? The signs are unclear, unclear …”
Boots tapped crisply upon a ston
e floor. The Princess was not light on her feet, but perhaps that was because of an accompanying jingle of armour. Whisper struggled to process the unfamiliar scents in this room; the sense of danger, although she could not identify from where. Too many nuances swirled about her like a smothering cloud …
A soft, crisp voice said, “Your report, Captain Drex?”
This newcomer was younger than the others, and concealed her nervousness behind a calm inquiry. Whisper warmed to her presence immediately.
Drex, the soft-voiced giant, said, “Yar Majesty, this afternoon at five clicks o’the hour, thar were a disturbance I done heard by t’ rear gate. Rushin’ up to thar battlements I saw thar gate bein’ pushed closed urgent-like and I looked and saw a contingent o’ our own under attack by a nest of purple-crested draconids. Prob’ly thar nest on the Sundering-bound trail, yar’l agree. Well, our cohort was experiencin’ some difficulty –” someone else sniffed rudely at this assessment “– an’ as the gate were swung closed on the lil’ critter yellin’ for help, I did borrow yar good King’s statue, Yar Majesty, for my rope –”
“The Commander ordered the gates –”
“Warleader Ammox, a moment, please,” said the Princess. “I’ll hear one report at a time.”
Ammox began, “Insubordination is –”
“Thar’n Whisper,” said Drex.
“A Whisper?” gasped the Princess. “I thought they were all –”
“Aye,” hissed the slimy voice. “And you’d be right, Princess Rhyathala-Shimmira. I mark this event for the utmost suspicion.”
“One of our own shot a Whisper?”