by Marc Secchia
“You’ll sate my hunger in even … uh, less time.”
Whisper ducked another talon-strike, wondering if the Dragon could actually manage the mathematics he had just alluded to. Just a minute or two. Keep him talking. “Look, here come your friends!”
The Dragon glanced about, snarling massively as he spied a quartet of Titian Dragons closing in from the direction of the volcanoes. She tucked herself up into a little ball, and willed herself to disappear. She did not. Thankfully, falling like a rock had the desired effect. In the Dragon’s perception, she was there one second and gone the next.
GNARR-ARR-ARRRGHH! he snarled horribly.
The Dragon scanned the skies around him furiously. Whisper shivered, but then the moment of his misperception was lost. With a low gargling sound like rocks mashed beneath the blanket of his hide, the Dragon clipped his wings and dived in pursuit.
“I’m a Whisper!” she squealed, jinking sideways to evade his razor-edged grasp.
The wide, multi-jointed wings flexed subtly on the breeze. The beast sneered, “I’m an evil Titian Dragon. What of it?”
“Dragons respect Whispers.”
“Respect?” he laughed. His left forepaw snapped out, and this time there was no escape from the orange-hued cage of his talons.
“I can … I can help you negotiate with the Azarinthine King?” Whisper gasped. His grip felt as if the Dragon had locked her in a vice and was gleefully turning the screws.
“How did you know about that?” he growled, cracking open the gap between his first and second knuckles to stare incredulously at her trapped muzzle. “They’ve too many demands. Bridges, treaties, supplies – it’s all nonsense! Nonsense, I tell you!”
Whisper tried to wriggle away, yelping as his blue-hot Dragon fire singed her whiskers. She caught the ends in her left paw and licked them frantically. To her surprise, the Dragon appeared amused and gratified by this display of abject fear. Booming his cruel, rock-smashing laugh deep in his chest, he called:
Wing-brothers! I have captured me a Whisper!
Huh. Thought those furry pests were all dead? came the reply. Bring it over here.
She gasped. Had she just heard Dragons in her mind?
The ground raced past as the Dragon swooped sharply, then lurched as his wings beat with massive power, the great flight muscles contracting beneath his chest and around his stalwart shoulders to drive the beast upward, seeking a dominant position in the air.
Landing conference, wing-brothers, called one of the incoming Titian Igneous Dragons, the biggest of the five, she judged, at perhaps forty feet in wingspan. Perhaps he was the leader.
Three minutes later, the Titian Dragons landed in a fur-flattening flurry of wingbeats on a patch of exposed granite between a coniferous forest to one side and a vermilion-coloured, steaming pool on the other. Arranging themselves roughly at the apexes of an invisible pentagon, the Dragonkind shuffled toward each other and her captor opened his paw, displaying one Whisper as the central point of a Dragon buffet.
Thankfully, they also shaded her from the last sunstrike of the day.
“Well, far too small to share as fresh kill,” snorted one. “Waste of my time.”
“Disappointing indeed, Falgurth,” agreed the second, cuffing the first powerfully on the shoulder. Twins, she decided. Dragons called them shell-twins, or shell-duplicates. “Stringy meat covered in nasty fur. Obviously tasteless.”
“Get off me, Astrogurth!” growled the first Dragon, bristling up his ruff of display-spikes just behind his long skull, and puffing out his chest.
The biggest Dragon chortled, “Oh, go practice in a water-mirror, you minnows!” Straightaway, he scratched his thickly armoured chin with an openly baffled air. “What’s a Whisper? What does it … um, do?”
Her captor snorted, “Gnargurth, you slug-brain, you’re billowing nothing but smoke. Leave the thinking to those with actual cranial goings-on.”
At least three of the Titian Dragons sniggered openly at this statement, rolling their fire-eyes at each other, posturing and contorting their admittedly impressive physiques into muscle-popping poses. There was a quality about watching tonnes of fire-stuffed Dragonkind rolling their boulder-sized muscles beneath sleek, armoured hides of closely overlapping orange scales, tearing up rock with their talons and ruffling their wings, that filled Whisper with awe and aye, fear. Yet, these Dragons were not at all like the Chalky Dragoness who had mothered and sheltered an injured Whisper. They bristled and blustered, and argued openly, insulting each other’s lineages and eggs and sires with increasing irascibility.
Shortly, the argument faded due to severely limited attention spans. Other ideas intruded. Gnargurth cocked his head like a feline stalking a rodent and growled with avaricious venom, “She’s real pretty. Can I keep her? Give her to me, Volcagurth!”
Volcagurth’s talons curled dangerously. “Mine! I found it first.”
GNARR!!
GRR!
Magnificent, breath-taking, magical – and a clutch of draconic hooligans. Before she knew it, a giggle stole treacherously out of Whisper’s throat. What? She regarded her memories balefully. What was this hint of rascally humour doing in a situation like this?
Five pairs of crystal-like orbs, swirling and fluctuating with fires of yellow, gold and white within, turned to glower at her. Gnargurth blurted out, “What? Nibbles never laugh at me!”
Volcagurth’s paw twitched as he glared at the Whisper, but thankfully he did not crush her like a bean beneath a boulder. “Are you laughing at us?”
“Sure, we’re all laughing at the swamp water you burble from your snot-dripping nose,” sniffed Falgurth. “How do my scales catch the sunstrike, Whisper-thing?”
“Oh, you are glorious!” she gushed.
For a moment no longer than the twitch of her whiskers, all was the hot, panting breath of living furnaces. Then, the Titian Dragon demanded, preening shamelessly, “How glorious? Tell me more!”
His voiced low howls of untrammelled jealousy.
“Like fiery jewels ignited deep in Xisharn’s intemperate bowels,” she temporised, then felt her fur crawl at the terrible pun she had just made. As one beast, the Dragons gurgled horribly – but it appeared to be pleasure rather than fury, or perhaps fiery delight might best describe their response. The mood-change tingled her whiskers. Truly? This was a viable path?
Astrogurth shouldered Falgurth aside. “What about me?”
His flesh was a relief-carving of striations all over as the Dragon tensed himself into a mighty, dominant pose. Whisper felt fear-sweat soaking her fur. Nothing for it now but to run her chosen trail … fear being the precursor to lightning-swift thought.
“Why, your girth is … uh, it blocks out the entire horizon!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Astrogurth, you certainly are amazing.”
Someone wash her tongue off with caustic lye.
Gnargurth slammed the ground with his long, muscular tail, and raked up soil and rock with his talons. Jealousy made him hiss like leaky forge bellows as he thundered, “And me? Tell me all about me!”
“You’ve all the brains of a lump of shendite,” Volcagurth advised him.
Gnargurth roared, “Your cracked egg whelped a scaly dracoworm, and you fly like a dracoworm, too!”
“Do not!”
“Do too!”
“Go bury your moronic skull-clanger in a volcano!”
“Boys, boys,” Whisper laughed again, deliberately forcing the sound past the constriction in her throat. “You’re all beautiful.”
Five ten-foot Dragon throats blasted her fur from every direction. “BOYS?”
Sulphurous hurricane!
Picking herself up and smoothing down her fur, she cast a deliberately admiring eye over the Dragons, who ranged from twenty-five to forty feet in length, muzzle to tail. Gnargurth had to stand twelve feet tall at the shoulder – still, Ignothax had been bigger than these. Every ruff was displayed, every nostril leaked fire as they glared at her. Ag
ain, an odd liberty possessed her spirit. She would not be eaten this evening. She was a Whisper, and she had more than a few things to prove.
Even to draconic ruffians.
Leaning against one of Volcagurth’s upraised talons, Whisper held a paw to her heart, clenched into a fist. “Oh. Oooooh …”
“She’s going to faint,” said Falgurth.
“Ugh, spoils all the fun when they just fall over and die,” rumbled Gnargurth, sounding deeply disappointed. “No chase, no exercise for my jaw. Alive is so much more flavoursome, especially when they wriggle down your throat.”
The other Dragons nodded sagely. “Aye.” “Lovely.” “I’m so hungry,” they chorused.
Volcagurth prodded Whisper with his fore-talon. “Stop that.”
Gazing up his six-foot muzzle to the cruel eyes behind, Whisper brazenly plagiarised a memory as she declaimed:
Oh, Volcagurth, thou art mighty,
No Dragon can compare!
Thy voice is thunder over canyons,
Thy talons rend the air!
O wondrous, wondrous day, I do declare,
That this vision should meet mine eye,
Exemplar of all Dragonkind, alas! I die!
She pretended to crumple on his paw.
Volcagurth squirmed with such pleasure, his stomach audibly creaked as it contracted, causing him to inadvertently belch a fireball. Whisper leaped for her life, slapping flames out of her fur as the Dragons chortled contentedly, their good humour waxing as their prey finally behaved in a way they understood.
“Gnurr, pretty poetry,” Gnargurth just about managed.
Whisper said, “So, I was just on my way to Azarinthe. How may I serve you Dragons? May I convey a message to the King of Azarinthe? Will you treat with them to rebuild the old air-bridge down that canyon toward the openside?”
Cupping his paws about her as if he expected Whisper to bolt – which was unlikely, given as he had the wings and his paws stood a foot taller than her, even turned on their sides – Volcagurth peeled back his bright orange lips to reveal a double-row of fangs top and bottom of his mouth. “I never negotiate with my dinner. Spoils the savour, you know.”
“That, I can well imagine,” said Whisper, placing a paw on his fangs to deflect his questing nostrils – a futile gesture. She summoned up her courage. “Dragons, I plead for your help by saying, Whisper of the Inferno-Spirit. Will you help me?”
Bellows of shock!
Hope blossomed in her heart. Aye, the Chalky Cloud-Dragoness had spoken truly.
GNAARGGHH! Volcagurth silenced his kin with a mighty roar and a wild, circling spray of fire, forcing the others to duck or take the blast on their shoulders. Then, his long neck snaked about the Whisper, immobilised by shock, a slow, predatory coiling that was as malicious as it was terrifying. For a very long time, the Dragon’s rasping breathing was all she heard, drowning out the nearby hot spring’s bubbling and the occasional call of a bird or wild animal from the small forest nearby.
Her mind wailed – mistake!
Volcagurth sneered, “Ignorant fool! Thought you to bind the Dragonkind by this ancient plea? It’s a formula only if you specify your need, and if you treat with Titian Igneous Dragons, or any Dragon in the spectra of yellow through crimson, you had better be very specific indeed! For we are not nice Dragons! We are fierce and proud and unchangeable!”
His bellowing thundered over forest, dell and pool as he worked up to a majestic crescendo of fury and spite, shaking the Whisper’s bones and turning her courage to dust. “I will most certainly help serve you as a titbit to my kin, you withering, fur-brained excuse for a walking slug. I will gladly aid your passage down my gullet into my food-stomach. Because you are a worm and I am invincible, the shining pride of all the Dragonkind!”
As his fury stormed over her being, ruffling her fur and blasting her ears flat, Whisper wished desperately that she could draw the ground over her imprudent head. The stench of the Dragon’s halitosis washed over her, the reek of rotten meat and sulphur mingled with a hint of rich spiciness that seeped into her lungs with the guile of a thief and the force of a thunderbolt. She knew this scent. Mage Shivura’s experiments had imprinted it upon her mind; the Dragons and draconids she had met, run from or been tormented by, all emitted this scent to a greater or lesser degree. For this, she was primed.
Magic!
Glorious, spine-jangling, nerve-searing magic!
Whisper wavered on her paws as a new sensation rippled over her skin, right down to the painfully sensitive tip of her tail. It tingled with the pleasure of guffaws of belly-laughter. It riffled her fur up and down her spine, with a peculiar, eerie understanding that caused every Whisper-sense within her to ignite.
She stared up the Titian Dragon.
The Dragon’s eyes bulged as he gawked at the space between his paws, his eyes oddly unfocussed. Then, Volcagurth bellowed, “WHERE DID SHE DISAPPEAR?”
Chapter 10: Scented Whisper
FOR A FROZEN second, Whisper did not grasp what had happened. Her paws would not move. Her heart thundered in her ears. Before she had even apprehended the sweep of the Dragon’s paws, she darted away. Scratch, scratch, scuffle. The Dragons were making far too much of a kafuffle to hear anything. Or was it still the effect of her aromatic coat of pollen, somewhat dusted off by the wind, but still crusted thickly in her fur?
Then, Falgurth inhaled deeply. Deliberately. His posture lowered, bellying along the ground, his long neck snaking about as he brought his powerful Dragon senses to bear – the senses of a supreme predator. The other Dragons copied him, spreading out. Whisper wished she could have wafted over the ground without disturbing a stone or a blade of grass, but had to settle for trying to drift away cat-footed. Their every step was a dozen of hers. Her mind prickled. They searched even with their magic …
I am invisible!
I hear a heartbeat, Volcagurth hissed.
Bluff? Or were they talking telepathic Dragonish, assuming she would neither hear nor understand?
This way, said Astrogurth, pointing a talon vaguely toward her position as Whisper skirted a large boulder. Head her off, Gnargurth. My snack’s sneaking away!
Freaking furry dragonet-thing, growled Volcagurth. Who knew she had magic? No mind. I’ll make the creature dance on my tongue while I flay her skinny little trickster-hide. Gnarr!
Gnargurth grumbled, What’s it doing here, anyways?
His mental voice was even duller than his physical voice, but Falgurth was a different presence altogether, like flames crackling against her mind. Spying for the Azarinthe Humans, no doubt. Whispers could never be trusted. Two-faced, filthy do-gooders. Makes my throat itch just to think about their virtuous perfidy.
Whisper knew she had misread these Dragons badly. Every nuance of their complaints told a tale of brutish, unmitigated malevolence. Evil alignment? Check. Ruthless cunning? Check. Well, an upgrade in the brains department would have ensured a successful snack time, on the one paw, and most likely the destruction of any Humankind within a hundred leagues on the other – might she be grateful for their stupidity? Indeed.
Spineless lackeys of their oath-masters, said Astrogurth. I smelled something familiar about her, a magical resonance that echoed of … a presence I have not felt for five years and more.
Sanfuri!
Whisper jumped inadvertently as Volcagurth’s mental roar thundered through her mind. Slipping, she skittered between the boulders. Sanfuri? They smelled Sanfuri upon her? Like one of her scent-echoes, the oath magic must leave traces in the magical aether that Mage Shivura had introduced her to, or more likely, the Dragons could scent magic as richly as she scented physical smells, knowing that if a draconid had passed that way days or even weeks before …
In here! cried Gnargurth, quarrying into the boulder pile with far greater zeal than accuracy. His talons flicked two-foot boulders about as if they were as light as petals.
Catch the slimy spy! roared Astrogurth.
&nbs
p; Whisper bolted as the pile threatened to collapse around her furry ears.
By coincidence, her rapid exit from the boulder pile took her right between his forepaws and beneath his belly. One of the Dragons bellowed a warning; the belly flopped downward, but not in time. Astrogurth grunted as he winded himself. Her paws blurred! Whisper had no idea how she did it, but she bounced over a lashing tail, dodged several talons hissing through the air with a somersault-come-aerial-barrel-roll, and shot away toward the forest, whereupon the Dragons apparently lost track of her once more.
Wrong direction! Hellish migraine! She quelled the directional magic with a furious inner wrenching; of course she was headed for the Azar capital, only, this was a necessary deviation.
Suddenly, her paws … floated?
Her ears seemed to wriggle against her head. Gravity inversion! Her memories knew about gravitational fluctuations; her experience and her body, not nearly so much. Her short legs pumped as she rose, then slowly tilted until she reached fifty degrees to the horizontal, and she was still running as though along flat ground. What? How was this even possible? Some magical effect in the ground or the atmosphere, she reasoned, resorting to swimming motions to keep moving. The five Titian Dragons bellowed and blundered about behind her, trying to work out how the Whisper could possibly have vanished.
She hoped they did not resort to fireballs to knock her out of the sky.
“BURN IT ALL!” roared Gnargurth.
Great dancing canyons! Had her thoughts somehow transferred to a listening Dragon?
Mud-brained idiot!
Five Dragons’ throats swelled as, with a tremendous roar, they unleashed the molten fury of their kind upon the forest. Lava attack! Molten rock, held in their tertiary rock-fire stomachs, spat forth in deadly combination with their ultra-hot Dragon fire. Billows of superheated air tossed Whisper up, up into the sky. She felt her fur changing, reacting, somehow drawing from her environment through a magical mechanism or innate knowledge she could neither pinpoint nor understand, the ability to mimic and camouflage her against the darkening evening sky.
