by Marc Secchia
BATTLE WAS NEVER fun. There might be moments of grim amusement, a kind of ghoulish pleasure in evading evisceration or being chargrilled, say, or that first Mage’s bone-rattling dance as the electrical charge partially cooked him inside his metal armour.
Mostly, battle was a bloody, grinding waste of life.
Did the very earth not cry out in anguish, and the bulwarks of life groan at the travesty enacted beneath their sheltering flanks? Whisper considered this. How would a pacifist survive this day, yet another where the light grew misty and the heat was as intense as the inside of an oven? Surely, the swarming must come soon.
By afternoon, the steady rumbling and grinding of Warlock Sanfuri’s incoming siege engines resounded in the canyon. Whisper had used up every last whisper of fortune, camouflage and her capacity to annoy Sanfuri’s Element Enchanters, Mages and Dragons. The magic users had learned, to their loss, that to poke so much as a toe out from behind a shield – literally – meant a nasty death from the furry sniper. Even an army as powerful as the Warlock’s could not sustain such losses. She learned that Sanfuri learned, too. First, dense flights of Dragons burned out every last leaf of cover along the trail. Then came the sweepers, Warlocks or Mages working with teams of scouts to clear the way. Next, Element Enchanters pulled down every cave, river, screen of vegetation or cluster of boulders of that might possibly provide even a hint of cover. At last, the main advance ground slowly uphill toward Rhyme’s fortifications and Arbor itself, heavily guarded by swarms of green-crested, four-winged dragonets numbering in the hundreds.
Whisper could not fight such a number. Further, her ability to camouflage was running out.
She clung to the last overhang before the trail passed her favourite outcropping, from which she had perpetrated the mayhem of her first ambush of the day. It curved up around the outcropping and then widened, running for a quarter-mile between the major canyon to its left side as one approached Arbor, and the minor canyon she had crossed several weeks ago as she was chased by the whippet-draconids. The bridge had now been destroyed.
There, the Arborite forces stood arrayed in their armoured phalanxes, with Mages and Warlocks at the ready. Several tight-knit groups had advanced as far as the outcropping, aiming to create as much trouble as possible. Warleader Ammox was visible among them, instantly conspicuous due to his golden helm and distinctive golden armour, apparently a family heirloom.
Humans. Didn’t that just scream, ‘Aim at me. Here! Shoot here!’
Then again, that seemed to be the response of Sanfuri’s troops whenever they spied a russet-furred paragon of impertinence – usually a second too late, when a flechette plugged into an arm or a wing. She was down to her last three darts.
“Make them count,” Whisper growled. “Just one more Warlock.”
She waited, bated of breath.
The advance came slowly, like a malevolent centipede comprised of many parts. Whisper noted the dragonets sweeping the cliffs above and below. Sanfuri seemed to want no surprises. She saw long, low catapults rolling along on carts with tall wooden wheels, with tubular loading parts and loading trays full of ten-foot bolts that had hollow cut-outs near the tip, probably for carrying a payload of acid, mana or magic-enhanced dracowasps. She trembled – warn Ammox? No, he would know these tricks already. He had his own Mages studying the advance. Shivura was down there near the frontline with Ammox’s phalanx, waving his arms as he explained something to the Warleader. Further down the trail came a giant slingshot machine, dragged by four Dragons including – her paws cramped painfully – Ignothax. She would know his brutish expression anywhere.
She fiddled with the crossbow. Warlock Sanfuri was still too far back. She needed to take a shot or two and then disappear before it became too dangerous.
Whisper away, fight another day.
Smoke drifted ahead of the shield, billowing up and down the cliff faces in clearly magical defiance of ordinary physical laws. An Air Enchanter would be controlling that behaviour. Why smoke? Poison gas? She sniffed the first whiff charily. No. Wood and jentiko-distillate, if she was not mistaken. Wreathed in thicker billows now, she stretched her right arm, talon ready upon the trigger.
“There it is!” roared the lead Warlock, pointing at her nose from thirty feet below.
She snapped off a reflex shot. The flechette pinged off the Warlock’s shield and by a freak of luck she had not enjoyed since the morning, flitted down the ear canal of a Gold-Red Dragon walking right behind him. Ooh. Acid down the earhole. That had to hurt.
Then, the enemy educated her in the uses of smoke to detect Whisper-movement and form. Howls of fury rose from the ranks. Arrows! Daggers! Thundering fire and flurries of ice-shards! She raced away, then jinked and doubled back as the Dragon lashed about in the agony of its audibly hissing earhole, crumpling one of the carts and knocking over the Warlock, who lost his concentration for a vital second. Whisper extended her left fist, aiming the flechette. Whap! A hardened, armour-piercing dart punched home squarely between his flailing legs.
The Warlock’s bellow of agony eclipsed even the thundering Dragon for a second.
“Fungaslug!” Whisper hooted, making a universally rude gesture.
At that instant, a wall of earth exploded in her face. Whisper rode the rising dracoworm more by luck than design, tumbling down its back together with a small rockfall that served to protect her from a hail of missiles. Her left ear ached as a dagger sliced shallowly across the tip, and she tried to hurdle a flying hand axe but failed, tangling her legs and taking a hard tumble. Whippet-draconids! Her old friends pounced through the drifting smoke, only to be shovelled aside by the far bigger, angrier form of a type of Dragon Whisper had never seen before. That had been no dracoworm. It was brown, snakelike in physique and immensely nettled. Limbs as gnarled and twisted as roots lashed out; the tip of one caught her left hind leg, but a snap-and-slash dagger manoeuvre amputated it.
Whisper pelted away, chased by draconids and Dragons and a dozen whirring axes.
So quick across the ground was she, enjoying unparalleled motivation, that Whisper outpaced the Dragons as they tore past Ammox’s position without slowing. She knew she had to lead them closer to Rhyme … but her legs seemed to slow with the passage of time itself … she dodged a whippet and left her last Dragon-flechette in the flank of another … and angled a foot to avoid a huge, spinning circular blade that tore through the whippet-draconids as if they did not exist … she hurdled a spring-spike trap, twisting and flattening her body to pass between the spikes that impaled numerous draconids in what should have been the flash of an eye, but was a curiously elongated moment of perception … and dashed on, covering the quarter-mile sprint in record time.
Dratted Whisper-senses! Now was no time to play tricks with her perception!
Suddenly, Rhyme’s soldiers seemed to rush toward her, their eyes widening in what to the racing Whisper registered be ultra-slow reaction. Weapons held ready. Shields locked in formation. The thrumming tension of crossbows held by archers behind them; white-knuckled fingers gripping release-levers.
Heat! Fire blossomed slowly behind her, seeming to suck the air away from her fur and lungs as one of the pursuing Dragons let rip with a broad sweep of fire designed to give her nowhere to run. Whisper felt the concussion punch her in the back and lift her, but she flattened her skin to allow the blast to whip her upward. In that superheated, flying instant, she heard chanting drifting over the crackling roar of Dragon fire.
Water sprayed upward; she smacked right into it.
Simultaneously, the Arborites unleashed their canyons-deep wrath upon the maddened Dragons. The Brown Dragon-thing was sliced up by a dozen axes. The whippet-draconids wilted under a barrage of crossbow bolts and ice, cast by a trio of Element Enchanters. Dragonets exploded before or against the lines, blowing four or five Arborite axmen into pieces.
She slapped against someone’s armour. The axman tumbled, absorbing the impact with perfect timing. Hands slapped a
t her smouldering fur – Rhyme!
“Almost a furless furball, there,” the Princess said gruffly.
“Nice catch, Rhyme. Thanks.”
“Thank the Enchantress.”
Whisper peeked over Rhyme’s shoulder. “Inshari!”
“You sure won’t thank that Dragon for your new fur-style,” the Enchantress said, dimpling happily. She patted the water barrel beside her. “Wet enough?”
“Freshly laundered,” said Whisper. Blistering Dragon fire, she did look rather frazzled, but the fraction of a second between catching alight and being doused meant she had barely even felt the heat. Still, she had another black mark to enter on the Warlock’s scroll. Fungazoid!
That said, everyone used the word as a curse, but she had never seen a fungazoid and her memories drew a blank on what type of creature it might be.
“You stink of sulphur and burned fur,” said Rhyme. “Right. Double-quick briefing, girl. Then I have a message from Xan that you need to decode.”
“Decode? Oh. It’s –”
“Serious,” said the Princess. “Serious enough to send ten dragonets, of which exactly one arrived.”
Shivura pressed a tube into Whisper’s hand. She turned the slim metal tube, about two inches long and a half-inch around, about in her paw. Then, she rapidly outlined all that she had seen or done during the day. Whisper compressed the information in ways she hoped would be most useful for the Humans, who were apt to forget details two seconds after they passed into the ears or over the lips. That was why they wrote everything down.
Then, she worked with the scroll’s contents, passing it through an Azar-complex series of cryptographic transformations which she had memorised in order to arrive at the final message, three brief statements:
Beware the third vector.
I need to debrief Whisper.
Sanfuri is at the bridge.
Warleader Ammox, who had turned up for the briefing as if drawn by the vision of Whisper’s smoking body flying into the ranks, cursed unhappily. “Sanfuri? Sunstrike blast that moronic son of a putrid fungus! Whisper, I thought you said –”
“Aye, but he’s tricky,” Whisper mused. “Ignothax was at the rear – if that was indeed him … interesting. I need a few minutes to reprocess my memories, but it is possible we’ve been duped. What’s the third vector, Princess?”
“Treachery from within,” Ammox answered for her.
“King Xan has reason to believe Sanfuri prepared his treachery from beyond the Sundering?” asked Rhyme.
The Warleader rubbed his stubble. “Nay, Princess. I think this means the plot has been years in the making, perhaps from the time of your youth. A sleeping Dragon in the city.”
Whisper winced at the proverb. That meant a traitor who might be activated after many years, by a means they could only guess at – a message, or events, or … Xan knew something more. He would not risk her life frivolously. If he needed her to re-cross the bridge, he must have excellent reason. She nodded slowly. “Princess?”
“Permission to give the Warlock a seizure? Granted.”
“Something worse, please,” Ammox growled, cracking his knuckles one by one.
“Beheading?” suggested Rhyme.
“Too quick,” said Whisper.
The Princess clenched her fists. “Drop him in the Brass Mirror, Warleader?”
“He might choke a Leviathan through sheer cussedness,” Ammox retorted. “Right. Time for Operation Mirror-Shot. Shivura? Take care of King Xan’s request. I’ve a front line to rally. The Princess is needed right here.”
Whisper glanced from one man to the other as Rhyme hissed between her teeth. What were they up to now?
Shivura gave her one of his feral-dragonet grins, all snarling teeth and narrow eyes. “Captain Drexor had an idea of how you might cross the bridge again.” Whisper groaned. “It’ll take you, a clever Element Enchanter, a Warlock familiar with the use of explosives, and a great deal of luck.”
This time, her jaw dangled like a dragonet sieving the air for insectoid delights.
Shivura clapped her upon the shoulder. “Come on, Inshari. I’ve been meaning to blow up this Whisper since … oh, forever. Want to help?”
The Water Enchantress brightened. “Aye, Mage Shivura. Pick me. Pick me!”
Whisper glared at her. “I find your enthusiasm quite distasteful.”
* * * *
Ten hours later, she had not developed so much as a hint of enthusiasm for Drex’s so-called inspiration.
She stood at the juncture of the canyon that led from Arbor with the much mightier canyon that housed the bridge, just a thin grey-orange thread way, way above them to her right paw. To her left paw was a gushing torrent that fell an unbroken five and a half miles into the Brass Mirror below, and its openside half joined with a second torrent falling from far above. That was a trick of an overhang combined with a steady breeze that kept the air at least somewhat bearable in this area, but the atmosphere was noticeably denser than the cool heights of Arbor above. Whisper felt as if the canyon’s walls were leaning together, slowly compressing lungs and lives.
Here they stood as Shivura explained how they planned to strap her into the padded interior of a missile, which would be shot over the waterfall. Inshari would encase her missile in ice as it whizzed into the depths – not before the explosive thrust, which would shatter the ice, but afterward. That should take care of the minor issue of the highly acidic Brass Mirror. Whisper would motor to the far side and draw the vessel out of said nasty acidic death-bath, so that it might conceivably be reused for an even more insane return journey. This method had the advantages of avoiding the Wyverns, which rarely flew to such depths, and most of the whistling wind, if it did not, say, smash her against the cliff-side before dumping her crushed corpse into the Brass Mirror. Additionally, the missile’s additional, single-use explosive thrusters should scoot her across the Mirror at a velocity unlikely to be matched by any of the aquatic predators, namely, several tens of thousands of species and subspecies of nasty, acid-loving Dragonkind, crustaceans and acid toothfish.
Congratulations, Drex!
Clever man. Perhaps she should strap his explosive thrusters to a few places she could name and set them off in opposing directions!
Whisper sighed. “Right. It’s for the Kingdom of Arbor, right?”
“That’s the spirit,” Inshari agreed. “Tuck the paws in. Give my regards to the Brass Mirror and any passing Leviathans.”
“Of course it’s the spirit,” Shivura huffed angrily. “She is a bondservant to Arbor’s needs. Warlock Gauge, are you ready?”
“Ready,” said the dour Arborite Warlock, whose dominant personality trait appeared to be an affectation of boredom.
Eyes agleam, Shivura declared, “Yula-îk-yyrrkûdi, Whisper! I bind thee!”
Stiffening against the straps, Whisper heard herself respond crisply, “O Master, describe the person, place and imperative.”
Inshari objected, “But Mage Shivura, Princess Rhyme said that a binding wasn’t –”
“Shut your yapping drakkid-hole, child!” snapped the Mage. “This is to ensure that there are no mistakes or side-trips – say, to Sanfuri’s encampment – before the Whisper reaches the Azarinthe forces. I will take no chances.”
The oath-binding lay so thickly upon her Whisper could not even summon anger at the suggestion of betrayal. She lay perfectly still, even when Inshari laid a sympathetic hand upon her shoulder.
Shivura said, “Whisper, listen well. A message for King Xanho-das-Azarin to be delivered to his army’s location beyond the bridge above this canyon. Tell the King, we Arborites are deeply grateful for his help and we look forward to welcoming him in the city itself.”
“Is that the full message, Master?”
“Aye. Much could be said, but since you’ll be briefing him anyway, this is just a means of securing your loyalty.”
“You already have my loyalty, Mage.”
His face darkened. �
�I do? What kind of fool do you take me for? The Princess Blue has your loyalty. I do not.”
Did he deserve it? Whisper thought not, but did not voice the thought. Instead, she said, “Well, let’s not waste your time, Mage. You’ve quite the hike back to Arbor.”
The trail ran alongside the river for miles, passing farms and mining operations, before turning vertical. Thankfully for the unfit Mage, there were many levels of basket-relays to transport goods and personnel up and down from the canyon. Ammox and Consul Yara were convinced that the canyon was not a viable vector of attack. Substantial, hidden emforite deposits ensured that the city itself could not be undermined from either side, which made the location an excellent choice. Warlock Sanfuri would need to blast his way in the ‘old-fashioned’ way, which he appeared quite prepared to do.
Inshari pointed. “Remember the release button is here, if you need it. Safe travels, Whisper.”
Magic burned in her mind, dark and compelling, already aiming miles upward. She sincerely hoped she did not pass out from the pain when she started heading in the opposite direction.
* * * *
BOOM! The Warlock ignited the thrusters. Whisper gasped as a massive Dragon’s paw seemed to shove her backward into the padded seat. Skss-skss! Ice poured over the projectile as it accelerated, solidifying around the narrow tube but not the stubby stabilising wings – at least, she hoped that was the case. Water hissed by beneath as the vibration built up rapidly, and the Dragon of thrust tried to press her ribs out through her back.
Whoosh! She was over the waterfall and flying. Well. She glided far better than this useless hunk of metal. A powerful buffeting shook the craft as the wind built up, but Inshari had promised to try to keep her on track by manipulating the waterfall as far as she could reach, in magical terms. The missile rotated slowly, allowing her to watch through a small glass porthole as the waterfall and the cliffs rushed by. On and on. She had never imagined it took this long to drop one and a half leagues, but it was a long, long way down. Wyverns! She left the flight of astonished Tamarind Wyverns in her dust – well, her spray. That was all that was left of the waterfall at this level. Above, there had been ferns, but now she was down into the old fungal growth, such as it was. Great plates of shrivelled black fungal matter whipped by, kept damp by the constantly falling water. Splat! She hit something nasty, but the momentum blew her straight through and then the missile was tumbling, tumbling … Whisper wrestled with the basic controls.