by Marc Secchia
While drinking thirstily from her water gourd, Whisper practiced snapping the dagger into and out of the sheath with her free left paw. Clever of Drex. A weapon that suggested the warrior was far more than met the eye, that there was even muscle of the good sort between his ears. She gobbled down the last of the nuts in her carryall. More foraging would be in order, for she burned energy at a phenomenal rate while on the run.
A scratching sound made her whirl lithely, dagger swinging up, but she quickly identified the sounds of Arboreal Dragons swarming through the foliage above her, travelling back the way she had come. Why? A sneaking suspicion filtered into her mind, but neither her scenting the wind, nor concentrating on vibrations rising through her hind paws, nor any other sense could tell her what might be amiss.
Still, it would not do to let moss grow beneath her heels. Whisper pressed on.
* * * *
That evening, by the light of Hoalith, the white moon, Whisper bounded down a zigzag staircase cut into the side of a place where four canyons, clad in luxuriant green, mauve and pink vegetation, met at suspiciously exacting right angles. Perhaps the Wyrm-builder had been fond of mathematical exactitude? The scent of pollens and crystal dust hung thick in the air, and so much had fallen or blown about, her paws left clear prints in the trail-dust. How, she wondered idly, did those delicate-looking, leafy green chrysoprase formations develop? Did the crystals grow? Or the pink kunzite and the sprays of delicate purple fluorite to her left paw, with their surprising white pyrite inclusions? The crystal formations nestled cosily within the towering walls of vegetation, as if pointing the way to treasures hidden somewhere beneath these bulwarks.
This location was five Human days’ travel from Arbor, according to the maps – made when the trail was in better shape, admittedly. She had reached it in just under three by pushing hard. Too hard. Her injuries and scars ached. She rubbed her shoulder, remembering the feeling of being pinned by an arrow. Best be on her guard when she entered Azarinthe.
Yet she was also daily growing stronger. Her endurance grew, as did her desire to learn the deeper skills the Mage Shivura had alluded to.
Were those tail-powers, stolen from her but now regenerating? Could she hope?
She licked the shoulder pensively, massaging the spot with her tongue. Just as she had experienced before, the idea of Azarinthe was growing in her mind. She knew that the trail took a long, meandering detour here, but Azarinthe lay directly ahead. The problem, as always, was the terrain. The need not to climb mountains seven miles tall. The need to discover something akin to a passable route through a crazy labyrinth, which she was about to enter once more. Stick to the trail, she decided. Hurry. Always, the need for speed.
With that in mind, she stepped to the edge and looked down three miles. Why was she being a ground-bound fool? Was she afraid? She had faced worse.
Whisper leaped off the edge, taking her churning stomach with her.
Chapter 9: Whisper of Dragons
NOT A BAD landing. Whisper pulled herself out of a majisberry bush with a wince. At least the berries were delicious and plump, and the thick foliage had saved the worst of her blushes. To her surprise, on landing, her skin had un-flared and her neat shorts made a reappearance. Her whiskers tingled at a sudden thought. She carried extra skin about in the form of a clothing-like storage system? It rearranged itself according to need? She had just cheerfully stuffed her mouth full of berries when a familiar howling almost made her crumple at the knees.
A lime-green Arboreal Dragon burst out of the undergrowth several miles overhead and behind her, whirling a darker green whippet-draconid about his head with one paw. With a disgusted roar, he tossed the flightless draconid over the edge. Good riddance. Ten or fifteen more whippets surged out of the undergrowth, their long tongues panting as they set paw to the downward trail. The Arboreal kicked two more of their number over the edge for good measure – well, had that been a branch, or a Dragon’s paw? The Arboreal then vanished into his native forest.
How many whippet-draconids had been killed on their way through the crack?
Could the Warlock somehow have crossed the Sundering already, or released his Dragons to carry the tracking whippets far ahead of his ground troops? Whisper knew she was missing some element of the Warlock’s strategy.
Nonetheless, these old friends were not exactly welcome. Putting her head down, she scurried up the steps carved into the canyon’s far wall, passed through a mile-tall grove of flowering istilaki giants with their hundred-foot veils of yellow blossoms sweeping down like a girl’s lacy, layered skirts, and soon vanished into the maze of thickets beyond.
Plenty of running, dodging and two more leaps kept her ahead of the draconids for a further day and a half of hastily-grabbed snacks and the odd dunking in the ever-dangerous rivers or shady, aqua-drakkid-infested pools, but she also had to backtrack four times to find a viable route and that set Whisper back badly. The draconids drew close. She would have to fight.
That afternoon, another cloudless, blisteringly sultry affair with no change apparent in the weather save hotter and stickier days, Whisper finally pushed through a dense screen of assumbi blossoms overhanging the trail, turning herself a fine, creamy white as she was covered in sticky pollen, and broke out into the canyon where the air-bridge used to be. One hundred feet to her right paw, metal pylons had been attached to enormous rock anchors, drilled with the help of Draco-Mages controlling rock-boring black dracoworms, to support the air-bridge that spanned almost a half-mile of canyon imperfectly protected by sentikor trees. Below was another sheer drop to the Brass Mirror; above, the equally sheer, unrelieved majesty of green and ultramarine cliffs, striated with mineral and crystal deposits in a variety of colours and textures. The problem in this area was sunstrike. From the maps, Whisper guessed it might be possible to round this inlet perhaps forty or fifty leagues to the strongside, but neither Man nor Whisper had ever forged or found such a path due to constant volcanic activity and the presence of highly dangerous, territorial Igneous Dragonkind. They were the bite-first, ask-questions-later sort of Higher Dragons that clearly, according to her memories, were to be avoided even by the most desperate Whispers.
Had Whispers been many, once?
I am forlorn.
The dappled sunstrike bedazzled Whisper, so she quickly resorted to the trick of peering through her fur. Aye, the bridge had been sundered by a phenomenon the Mage Shivura called a ‘sunbolt’, a word which her memories refused to define for her – sunbolt? Sunstrike? Sundering? What was the difference?
She leaned over the edge. Whatever a sunbolt was, exactly, its effects from five years before were clear from the melted, twisted metal-mess that lay some three hundred feet below her position on the trail. Not a whole lot left, there. Most must have fallen into the Brass Mirror, where it would have been eaten quicker than a starving Whisper slugging slugs into her internal slug-pit – she flashed a quick, fierce grin at her joke. If she squinted hard enough, she could just about see the same on the far side, perhaps a thousand feet of cable and twisted metal leading to … nothing.
Climb. If she was to fly this dangerous canyon, with its swirling winds and openness to Whitesun’s forbidding glare, she would need to do so from higher up.
At once, Whisper set her talons to the cliff. Here, and for perhaps a mile or two’s climb toward the distant heights that curved slightly into the wide, blistering furnace of the sky, she would be sheltered by the sentikor growth and the mighty crystalline outcroppings above, of a type she could not identify through the brilliant glare. After that? It rather depended on her pursuers, or on her ability to brave direct sunstrike … she looked away quickly, blinking sunspots from her retinae. Careful, Whisper. To gaze upward at the unprotected sky was foolishness.
I will cross the divide.
Speaking to herself for encouragement, Whisper stretched her limbs and began to climb swiftly, competently, relying on instinct to select the right paw-holds for talon or paw-edg
e, and ascended at a pace that for her, approximated a fast walk. Where she could, she swarmed up the hanging ansarblue flower vines – even faster, a perfect vertical highway for a wayfinder. Ten minutes later, she heard and saw the draconids appear lower down. They appeared confused, milling about and scenting the air with eager, high-pitched yips that carried upward to her position. Why?
The assumbi pollen!
Suddenly, impressions clicked together in her mind. Assumbi contained a magical screening or dampening element similar to what Mage Shivura had demonstrated to her; the prickling of her whiskers was similar, but organic in origin rather than force-field reactive. Yes! She flattened herself against the cliff-face as the draconids spread out, searching, testing the air with their long snouts. Working silently with all four paws, she levered herself upward without disturbing leaf or bush, slowly increasing the distance from the questing draconids. Then, her rear left paw slipped. The weaker leg. A stone pinged off a boulder next to one of the whippet-draconids. Immediately, every muzzle snapped upward and the draconids charged up the cliff, digging in their talons to gain grip and leverage, yipping at each other in their strange proto-language as they fanned out across the cliff, clearly meaning to flush her out of hiding.
Discovered! Go!
Whisper charged upward in a blind panic.
No. She was rational. Smarter than these predators. Levering a rock loose with a dagger, she balanced it in her forepaw, and then hurled it downward. Wham! She whooped as the stone scored a direct hit on the beast’s muzzle. The surprised draconid skidded backward, struck a blue fandolite ledge, and cartwheeled into space.
One less set of fangs looking to trim her tail.
Now Whisper climbed more deliberately, seeking out places where there might be loose shale or boulders and crystal spars that she could kick loose. She had the satisfaction of dropping a pyrite spear five hundred feet and pinning one of the draconids in the lower flank; it tried to continue climbing, but eventually convulsed and fell. The whippets, however, were quick enough to avoid the worst of her avalanches and rocks, and as the sweltering afternoon wore on, it became clear to Whisper that they would catch up long before the light faded. That was the moment she had hoped to use for her jump, twilight, when the sun’s rabid bite might finally be weakened enough for her to risk the jump, or if it vanished completely behind the mountains … less likely, now, given the height to which she had clambered.
Glancing outward to try to choose a likely sentikor branch as her launching point, Whisper discovered a new problem she had not anticipated. Wind. As the incandescent point of sun dipped toward the canyon’s lip, the wind conversely began to rise. It was already whipping the outer branches about with abandon. How could she glide in that gale?
One second’s inattention, and a handhold crumbled. Whisper plummeted. She did not even scream. No time, no breath.
A draconid just forty feet below glanced up in alarm and began to yawn in anticipation of meat introducing itself to waiting fangs; she landed hard on the point of its muzzle, clacking its fangs together with a satisfyingly sharp snap, and deliberately rebounded outward. Skin-flare and grab for a branch! Swing, balance with flailing arms – run! Arms pumping. Talons digging into the rough bark. Not quite the elegant prancing across noses Drex had imagined, but she would tell him she had trampolined off a whippet-draconid’s snout … the sentikor was her path. Her trail. The tough, mottled bark was both shiny and reflective, her brain’s documentary-like contents informed her, reinforced with metal alloys to prevent catching fire under direct sunstrike. It conducted heat into its core and dissipated it by evaporation using special cooling spiracles half-filled with water, or passing the heat into the rock clasped in the never-slackening grip of its tough, wiry roots.
Fascinating, when one was trying to avoid being eaten alive.
Two hundred feet. Three. Secondary and tertiary growth flew by beneath her blurred paws. Thick, waxy leaves of a khaki-blue colour in this area. Another sentikor variant. Charred outer bark layers. The sun, low on the openside horizon, flashed through the thinning foliage. Each touch was a pinprick of instant heat, like an infestation of biting insects.
How could life exist around such a star? Surely, the spectrum was too white, too hot, too inimical … she narrowed her focus. There was nothing but branches as thin as her paw, now. The wind rushed through her fur with a rising roar, while her thigh and calf muscle-bundles protested as she demanded their fullest output. The draconids’ howling gathered volume and urgency as they doubtless grasped the madness she intended. Maintain the momentum! Run!
Bursting through the final layer of curling, blackened leaves, Whisper entrusted her body to the wind.
* * * *
Heat licked at her body like an open firepit, cooled by the wind but far from sufficiently. Sunstrike! Whisper gritted her fangs as she flew in a long, shallow arc, desperate to find shelter under the towering crystal screens still two miles higher up. The sun’s low angle caused it to blaze through a crack in the canyon and beneath most of the crystals. She could not look directly at that inferno, for she valued her retinae with the zest of one who had recently been stuffed with an antidote to restore her vision from draconid-poisoning. Instead, Whisper concentrated through the mounting pain on the canyon walls starting to flash by as the gusts snatched at her body. The blast was irresistible. Her body and skin-flaps vibrated with increasing violence. She strained to maintain her gliding posture. She slewed more and more toward the direction of strongside, down-canyon toward the mainland. Shade! Oh, thank … sun! Shadows flickered over her, so that it seemed for a second that she flew past a succession of open mouths of fire-breathing Dragons. Her skin crisped, then cooled. She gasped at an unexpected spray of cool water from above! Gorgeous.
Now, the unadulterated brunt of sunstrike. Fire seared her sensitive soles, her legs, her upturned behind for longer than she imagined she could endure, but instinct tucked her into an aerial somersault, allowing new patches of fur to be persecuted. Squeezing her eyes shut, she faced the whiteness beneath her eyelids with arms outstretched as if to embrace that faraway yet devastating warmth.
I open my soul.
What? Mystical echoes of impending death?
As her body oriented like a leaf catching the wind, the airstream snatched her up and away. Tumbling. Gurgling with relief as she found shade once more, cast by a turquoise garnet spar twenty miles distant, but enough to give relief. Suddenly, with all the lurching about, fear speared into her gut – what if she became confused and aimed for the wrong cliff? That would be a complete waste …
If she listened, her directional sense was already starting to howl – wrong! Go back the way you came! She was miles off the trail and blowing along briskly now, sheltered from sunstrike by the natural curve of the canyon walls as she drifted lower. The geography changed rapidly. Darker, fire-blackened rocks interspersed with flashes of gemstone colour and bands of mineral deposits in strong, vibrant hues, reeled by as she flew the winds, helpless captive to their imperative. How long had she been flying? Whisper tilted her body, trying to force her way to the canyon’s far side, but the wind kept swirling and buffeting her backward. Sunstrike … she whipped past a promontory covered in sentikor growth, and startled to find the canyon’s bulwark edges flattening out. Suddenly, she spied pools below. Crimson. Emerald. Grass-green and mustard yellow, with crazy colours swirling around them through the black rock as if a child had dipped her fingers in paint and smeared it about with whimsical abandon. Farther, rugged forests snaked about between the open, steaming lakes. A vista of smoking, conical russet hills greeted her upon on the horizon. And, a new problem. An Orange Dragon of flamboyant, multi-frilled wings and long, snakelike neck detached itself from the canyon wall just behind her, from somewhere upon that huge outcropping, and winged powerfully in pursuit.
Whisper’s heart lurched nastily in her chest.
She had just swapped ten sets of ravening fangs for a much larger set attached
to a brain of significantly higher complexity and intelligence. Excellent work, Whisper!
‘No use crying into a trumpet-blossom,’ was an expression Drex had taught her. With the wind now easing due to wider airspaces, she had few options. Whisper tilted her body forward, and tried her utmost to outfly a Dragon.
Her foolish gesture lasted for about ten minutes, which was the time the Dragon took to catch up with its intended morsel.
“Greetings, o Dragon,” she called over.
The Dragon did not respond with surprise, but reached for her with its fore-talons. Whisper folded her arms, performing a decent aerial dodge. If she could just reach a treeline! That was four miles away. Sunstrike bathed them both, blazing furnace-orange through the Dragon’s outstretched wings and gleaming off his brilliant, fire-red and orange scales, as he regarded her through narrowed fire-eyes. Not the sharpest blade in the armoury, she deduced from his brutish frown.
He growled, “You do know what I am, don’t you?”
“A valiant and beautiful Dragon,” Whisper replied, hoping flattery might save her hide.
“A Titian Igneous Dragon of inimical disposition and woefully empty belly, chasing a nice little snack through the skies,” retorted the beast, with a scorching, intimidating snigger. Smoke billowed past his nose. “You strayed onto my territory. For that, you shall dance upon my tongue – hurgh, hurgh, harrr!”
“I’m not at all tasty,” she said hastily, battered by the smoky gusts of his laughter. “Not even bite-sized. Just flying through on my way to Azarinthe. I’ll be away in no time.”
