by Marc Secchia
Whisper Alive
Whisper Book 1
By Marc Secchia
First edition Copyright © 2017 Marc Secchia
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.marcsecchia.com
Cover art copyright © 2017 Joemel Requeza and Marc Secchia
Cover font design copyright © 2017 Victorine Lieske
www.bluevalleyauthorservices.com
Dedication
Always whisper truth,
For its power is greater than any shout.
To the truth-whisperers of the world,
The voices of the voiceless,
I cry,
Whisper!
Table of Contents
Whisper Alive
Dedication
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Whisper of Quickening
Chapter 2: Whisper of Death
Chapter 3: Whisper of Light
Chapter 4: Whisper Beacon
Chapter 5: Whisper of Doom
Chapter 6: Whisper Home
Chapter 7: Cartographical Whispers
Chapter 8: Whisper into Mission
Chapter 9: Whisper of Dragons
Chapter 10: Scented Whisper
Chapter 11: Grey Whispers
Chapter 12: Reasoning with Whispers
Chapter 13: Whisper Aloft
Chapter 14: Whisper of Olde
Chapter 15: Whisper Scout
Chapter 16: Whisper to War
Chapter 17: Whisper of Hope
Chapter 18: A Necessary Whisper
Chapter 19: Whispering to Kings
Chapter 20: Whisper Where?
Chapter 21: To Hear a Whisper
Chapter 22: Death’s Whisper
Chapter 23: A Panicked Whisper
Chapter 24: A Warlock’s Whisper
Chapter 25: Dashing Whisper
Chapter 26: Pestiferous Whispers
Chapter 27: Whisper of Dawn
About the Author
Chapter 1: Whisper of Quickening
MALEVOLENCE IGNITED HER embryonic awareness. An inchoate, unspoken cry echoed from the depths of her soul: I am alive!
The first quickening of life pulsed in eerie counterpoint to an encircling electrical field. Humming sounds broken by sharp crackling overwhelmed her hypersensitive hearing. A metallic tang seared her throat. Ozone, mingled with the sickly stench of singed fur. Her smoking, flame-red fur.
The creature shrank backward, blinking multiple times.
The miracle of sight shot rainbows in her mind. Colours ablaze. The sweeping bonfires of incarnation shivered before another elemental shout: I breathe!
The glory of nascent life faded into a melodious fizz that ruffled her silky fur from the points of her fright-flattened ears to the tip of her long, delicate tail. Impressions cascaded over her overstimulated senses in great, kaleidoscopic waterfalls of tint and scent and sensation, sparking wild, skirling squalls of thought despite a lack of words in which to couch them. Instinct led. She scented the air with a rapid-flare movement of her nostrils, filling and refilling her lungs. Awakened to myriad smells. Vegetation. Musky sweat. Unknowable tangs and nuances, so evocative, inciting secondary cataracts of sensation, including the awareness of a rank fear-odour – her own.
Cold wetness crashed over her body, driving her against the humming sound, against hardness. Pain! I hurt! She yowled, squirming away from the burning bars, clutching her rump in agony. Rough sounds battered her ears. Painful sounds, both for their deafening volume and for a quality she recognised as cruel derision. Words battered her ears, groaning and booming as if they were the first words she had ever heard, yet she understood.
“There now, you frightened it.”
“Can’t stand to see an animal burn.”
“Witless weed-licker. I’ll stitch your pox-raddled gullet-strings up through your rancid –”
A new voice cut in, cold and sibilant. “You’re worse than a flock of gabbling gaspafinches! Still your tongues!”
Snake, her mind suggested. No. A predator – starlight exploded behind her vision, but the white-hot motes cascading away from that crux of agony seemed conversely, to bring forth from the unheralded halls of memory, understanding.
Dragon!
She froze, transfixed by the unfolding ripples of mindfulness within her being, like tunnels and caverns and canyons opening before an explorer’s questing gaze. Treacherous, unreliable fire-breather. Dragon-sorcerer. Flier. Killer. Tiny paws fleeing from the relentless seeker, its sulphurous breath hissing heatedly between trees and across mountaintops and down cliffs and the pounding of her heartbeat as her remembrance-trace bolted for its life … a final, consuming knowledge of heat mixed with a curious, redolent scent of mellifluous jasmine mingled with the saccharine stench of freshly roasted flesh … aye, Dragon!
Her tail had wrapped twice around her body. She stroked its nervously-flicking tip for the comfort conducted down its nerve-rich length, peering out of her … cage? The word curled her tongue as though she had sucked upon an acidic narthafruit. Solid iron bars bounded a space perhaps three feet wide by ten long and four high, floored by a rough scrap of plank which had been tossed carelessly inside. The bars stood a paw-span apart, wreathed in unburning green flame. Her light, fleet hind paws had taken their stance upon the plank, since the hungrily-crackling flame covered every inch of metal, even where the bars rested upon naked shendite, the russet substrate of this forest clearing.
Her mind shovelled geological speculation aside as a steely talon rapped the cage firmly. “Scream again. Go on,” hissed the beast, all fire, catlike curiosity and loathing. The metallic length of talon, as long as she was tall, jerked back as the green flame licked toward its claw-sheath. Ghastly clarity invaded her gut with fresh sensations. Fear. Claustrophobia. Take flight! Seek a bolthole, somehow …
The Dragon laughed gruffly. “Escape is impossible.”
She looked up past the golden-red, gnarly tops of his four forward-facing fore-talons, cataloguing information at a staggering rate. A pair of fiery, sallow orbs regarded her above a gleaming cavern filled with fangs far more impressive than her cage’s bars. The Gold-Red Dragon, his colours proclaiming avarice, power and a predilection toward an evil alignment, was a hulking monster measuring twice the height of any of his Human companions even given his crouched stance. A living, walking furnace clad in scaly armour, his tail lashed restlessly behind him as he regarded her narrowly through the bars. Sulphurous, cloying smoke curled lazily out of his left nostril, which she could have clambered inside with ease. Her nostrils tingled, hurling scent-notes of alarm into her mind.
Terrifying as that flame-snorting monster was, he was not the source of the malevolence she had sensed.
The Dragon began to purr, “Ah, little –”
“Playing with your food, Ignothax?” rapped one of the men. Her gaze snapped just as quickly to – him! The source of malice, standing with his back turned to the cage. “Disgusting habit. If your flabby belly must shout so loudly, devour the morsel.”
For an instant, the beast’s eyes filled with unholy swirls of crimson fire, twin beacons of loathing fixed on his captive. Then, with a leathery-metallic rustling of scales, the Dragon shifted his long, barb-topped neck and murmured, “Don’t you know what you’ve managed to conjure, Warlock Sanfuri?”
A heavily beringed hand, dark and scarred, waved past the edge of the tall man’s sooty cloak. “Should I care?”
She stared at the hand in fascination. So many rings, thick with metal! Jewels the size of penpiper’s eggs! Strength more than
hinted at in the play of robust tendons beneath the dark skin, and the vigorous pulse in the wrist. She did not question her intuition. A tangible miasma of hatred oozed off him, thicker than the cloak; thicker than the deathly tendrils of fear delicately entangling every fibre of her being. She sensed the necromantic touch of his magic. A mind as keen and deathly as Whitesun’s own gaze. Power to lather oceans into a thundering fury. Even compared to the Dragon, which the other Humans gave a respectful berth, this Warlock was the deadlier creature by far.
With a taunting lilt to his reptilian voice, Ignothax said, “Your genius is of course unrivalled, o Master.”
Instantly, another white-hot mote invaded her brain. Dragon and Warlock. Master and familiar. Amongst all magic users, only the most accomplished Warlocks possessed the willpower to bind the minor Dragonkind to their bidding, but the connection benefitted both creatures by merging and augmenting their capabilities – so said the lore. Never had a beast of such aged power as the Gold-Red Ignothax been bound as familiar to a Warlock. Never before, her memories reiterated. Inconceivable.
Unmoved, Sanfuri drawled, “Must we stoop to flattery, Dragon?”
“Master, you have truly excelled yourself this time.”
“That is a risible failure!” stormed the man. Shocked, her fur crawled at his outburst. The force of his roar knocked back his hood, exposing a wealth of grey-white hair that spilled over his shoulders. “Dispose of it. Now!”
“Don’t you wish to know –”
Four words exploded separately out of the Warlock’s mouth, “Don’t. Try. My. Patience.”
“Ah, but you summoned –” the Dragon licked his chops rapidly with a violet, forked tongue “– a Whisper.”
Extraordinary how the hunched shoulders could one instant communicate fury, and the next, disbelief. He whirled. The ash-grey cloak swirled much as the early morning mist swirled around the boles of the mighty, fragrant jentiko trees surrounding the clearing, she noticed peripherally, focussed on how the thick material swept aside. The lean, wolfish frame concealed beneath, clad entirely in shades of iron grey – stippled draconid-hide boots, dark grey trousers and heavy metal greaves; an unsheathed split sword hung from a wide leather belt … her eyes travelled in hasty upward leaps, taking in the pouches at his belt, the well-worn body armour, the tense tendons like hawsers of riven flesh and fibre running up beneath the man’s hoarfrost-shot beard. His mouth, a cruel gash marked between ritually scarred cheeks, also notably leaden of cast. Strong nose. Heavy brows. Steely eyes glinting like ice-rimed forest pools as they lit upon her, the creature in the cage.
His left hand tightened on a whip coiled at his belt. When he spoke, Sanfuri’s voice was the ravening crack of a sunstrike. “A Whisper! How … remarkable.”
* * * *
The Whisper-creature recoiled onto her haunches. Blithely, words labelling his emotions thundered like unfamiliar gongs deep in her throat. Malice. Calculation. Hope as consuming as a starving Dragon’s appetite. Cruelty. Nuances of delivery and physical approach that informed her as clearly as the white-hot sun’s fatal kiss, ‘Your being a Whisper is good for me, and terminally unhealthy for you.’
Wet her lips. Check every corner of the cage. Bindings. Locks? Impossible to force or pick without tools. She enumerated seventeen raffish characters dressed similarly to the Warlock, armed with long split swords and curved dirks, and light oval shields in addition. Professional mercenaries. No help there. Forty steps across the small clearing, bordered by great stands of foliage sporting the quintuple clusters of mauve, horn-shaped jentiko flowers, she spied a trio of smaller, whippet-thin draconids – a broad class of Dragonkind of lesser intelligence – which had been chained to a fallen log, where they scrapped fitfully over a Human thigh-bone with piercing hisses and a clack-clack of needle-sharp fangs. The long snouts and sensitive nostrils proclaimed them hunters. Vicious tempers. Bellies curved up toward the spine, filled only with a lust to satiate their emptiness. Finally, her gaze turned hopelessly sunward, toward the topside. Light filtered down from the heights of this major crack, but the clearing was mercifully shielded by many layers and miles of cheerful, light-shot green sentikor foliage and rock ledges, for all knew that to brave direct sunstrike was to die.
Unmistakably, these were the mid-reaches, the level of Human abode. The miles above were the domain of flying Dragons and draconids, and other avian and winged creatures. Down here amidst the unnavigable, tangled cracks and canyons, was shelter from sunstrike and the mighty Dragon swarms of mating or migration season. Somewhere beneath her paws, unseen, lay the final buttresses that separated the fungus-dominated semidarkness from the true deeps, and finally, the Brass Mirror below. The acidic, deathly Ocean.
All this flashed through her mind in the two seconds it took the Warlock to approach the cage.
His grey eyes filled her vision. Powerful. Mesmerising. Pitiless.
“Pretty little thing,” he said conversationally, studying her like an insect he had accidentally scuffed beneath his boot. “Are you quite certain of its identity?”
Ignothax vented a venomous growl. “Ask her, Master.”
“It speaks?”
“Whispers are rumoured to possess basic intelligence.”
The Whisper retreated as far as she could along the plank without singeing her fur on the cage wall behind her. Now, visceral terror shook her frame. A song of distress lodged in her heart, elevating her pulse-rate to the mad tempo of a triple-drum. Yet, she was also furious. Basic intelligence? What did that overgrown lump of submissive reptilian snot think he was …
Swish! Crack! Her fur leaped.
Pain struck in a whip-crack driven by the blurring of the Warlock’s hand.
She screamed, and then screamed a second time as the cage-magic discharged against her shoulder. She patted her fur frantically, feeling a trench seared into the underlying skin.
Hsst! Crack! The Whisper writhed away. Nonetheless, a tendril of biting pain seemed to cling to her lower back. Acid-bitten.
“Speak!” ordered the Warlock.
Her blinking confusion purchased her another cut of the whip, splitting her left ear. She touched the spot, retracting the talons of her long, motile digits back into their sheaths.
“Speak!”
The Warlock laid into her methodically, as though he were merely out for a stint of unloved morning exercise. His strokes through the bars were a miracle of precision; his speed, inhuman. Her panicked leaps to evade the blows became a blur in that cramped space, but the whip-tip still scored her fur and skin mercilessly, raising bloody welts and digging trenches into skin and muscle. Every time she touched the cage, lightning discharged against her fur. Soon, she was just a snarling ball of fury and stinging, rolling about helplessly on the plank.
React! Her mouth snapped forward. Despite the slashing pain, she caught a good mouthful of whip-leather and bit down. The Warlock jerked it away, but her refusal to release her jaw immediately jammed her face against the bars. She spat charred fur and blood at him as the whip slid free.
Sanfuri wiped his cheek, before glancing at the blue-red smear of her blood with clear interest. The Whisper’s breathing slowed as she focussed on the Warlock. What did he see? Defiance? Spirit?
“Huh, latent magic,” he grunted. “Ignothax. What would you have me do with a mythical creature? Replace you as my familiar?”
“Previously mythical,” sniffed the Dragon, clearly underwhelmed by the threat to his job. “Do you know the forms –”
“Of course I know the binding forms, you calcified, rock-chewing excrement of Wyrm-spawn!”
The Whisper bared her teeth at the pair, snarling deep in her throat. The Gold-Red responded in kind, following his own animal instincts, in a decidedly unequal contest between her less than three-foot self and a Dragon whose fangs alone topped half her height. Still, she spat the only insult in her limited vocabulary, “I’ll sup on your entrails, Dragon.”
The Dragon cuffed the cage across t
he clearing. Clang!
Over and over she tumbled until the cage crashed into a tree. The jungle-green draconids howled eagerly, champing at the ends of their chains, but recoiled when the grass-green lightning spiked into their snouts.
The Warlock seemed mildly amused by her battle to cling to the plank – eventually, she had to throw her scant weight against the dented cage to knock it flat. She perched on the scrap of wood, panting heavily. The metallic-jasmine taste of her own blood filled her mouth. What use, hatred? The cage remained unbroken and unbreakable; her captivity, abject, and her pain, nigh unbearable.
“It’s a messenger,” Sanfuri noted blandly. He recited, “Give a Whisper person, place and imperative. Have it memorise the message. The message will be delivered. The oath is their bond. How do you propose to use this creature, Dragon? I assume you have a plan?”
Ignothax stalked her now with reptilian sinuosity, his laughter rumbling deep in his impressive chest. His strut caused the draconids to draw back in fear. “Think, Master,” he hissed. “Let’s say you wanted to deliver a message to our accursed enemies at Arbor –”
The Warlock vented a murderous curse.
“– aye, Master. But Arbor was cut off by the last Sundering. Long seasons have we sought the path, topside, openside, strongside, bulwarkside, canyons twenty miles deep riddling a cracked and broken landscape … there is no access, for this sunstrike-blasted realm is nought but a three-dimensional maze bound between the impassable mainland and endless, acid Oceans. A Sundering produced our curse and our reality; it changed all. The Arborites, thrice cursed be their scut-sucking ancestors, laugh at us. They laugh and thrive in freedom!”
Sanfuri tented his fingers, unperturbed by the Dragon’s furious fireball searing across the clearing. A sixty-foot bruiser, Ignothax could produce a fireball two feet in diameter. Vegetation burst into flame. Dozens of birds fled in raucous chorus, some burning up mid-flight. Nausea roiled in her stomach at the scent of charred flesh and feathers.
