Whisper Alive

by Marc Secchia

  She hoped that Styxor the Arboreal Dragon would have survived. Would he know what had become of the Red cities? The maps seemed rather unreliable, in her experience, misrepresenting distances and elevations by a considerable margin in some places.

  Whisper handled the set of darts carefully. There were four in the set, linked by a clever piece of reinforced webbing, that Yadron showed her how to clip into the sheath and unclip. “Flechettes,” he said, “or, in the common tongue, poison-loaded metal darts. These attach to the outer portion of the wrist, while the spring-loaded dagger remains on the inside. Please?”

  She placed her daggers in his preferred palm, then removed her old wristlets.

  Yadron said, “They pack quite a kick, so do handle these weapons with care – unless you’re facing a Dragon, in which case you slap a few in his mouth or eyes, sharpish. These ones with the blue band deliver a vial of fast-acting paralytic. Red is for Dragonkind. Neurotoxin. It won’t affect you, but a dose of the paralytic would probably kill you. You need more darts, come see me. Right. Let’s fit you and show you how it all works.”

  “Drex made these wristlets?”

  “Technically, these are probably closer to vambraces,” he said. “However, vambraces are usually just plate armour, such as is worn by the Azarinthe. Drex is a cunning son o’ the canyon, weaponising these. Got to love his eye for weaponry.”

  Three of his apprentices looked on, clearly having been instructed to observe closely and take notes, while many others worked around the forge and in other linked caves. The clanging din rose and fell against the backdrop of the forge’s roaring, where five young Blacksmiths worked under the attentive eye of an older Master Blacksmith on making axes, judging by the shapes and forms they were creating. Whisper’s memories told her that female Blacksmiths had to be unusual.

  Meantime, Yadron checked Whisper’s fitting of the straps and clips, and then showed her how to arm the flechettes. She could launch them with a smack of her paw in the right place, one at a time or all at once, but not when twisting or battling, as there was too much danger she’d trigger the weapon accidently.

  “Close range only; up to twenty feet or so,” he said. “Go on. Hit that sack over there.”

  Taking careful aim at the tan canvas sack holding some kind of meal or grain, Whisper struck the release. Flit-flit!

  “Oh … dancing dragonets!” The flechettes had completely penetrated the sack, vanishing inside in a narrow spread. The apprentices clapped politely and discussed the spread in low voices. Wider? Narrower? More darts?

  Yadron almost managed a smile, but the corners of his mouth drooped like tired slugs. Whisper kicked her unworthy thought into the canyon. Not now! “These are so good, we’re thinking of working the design into the uniform for our scouts. Now, for something with a bit more punch – yer crossbow, Whisper.”

  He pulled a small weapon out from beneath his workbench and handed it to her with a quirk of his scarred left eyebrow. She examined the crossbow with a gasp of delight. “It’s … extraordinary!”

  “I know,” he grinned at last, showing a fine set of steel-capped teeth. “Yer’d thank Drex good for this one. Same flechettes. So, there are two tubes which can be loaded simultaneously. After raising this clip, you crank it here. Drex said you’d be strong enough not to need a foot stirrup; that you’d value a compact-sized weapon. If you need modifications, we can do those in the workshop. Do you like it?”

  “It’s deadly,” she whispered. “So light.”

  “Aye.”

  “The craftsmanship is masterful,” she added, sensing a query implicit in his voice. “Perfectly fitted to my paw. It’s almost too beautiful a weapon, Master Armourer. May I test it?”

  “Outside,” he said firmly. “Made this prototype myself, Whisper.”

  Ah. She bowed gravely. “I shall be pleased to present your personal compliments to Warlock Sanfuri’s larynx, Master Yadron.”

  “Aye, that’d be a trick,” he grinned.

  Stepping into the cooler, fresh air outside the busy cavern, Yadron pointed sixty feet along the balcony to a chunk of sentikor branch which had evidently seen previous use, dangling over the canyon on a short rope. “Gemmini?”

  “Father.”

  Whisper jumped as another apprentice, clad in the black smock and round, flat hat of her Guild, appeared with a small tray in hand. She knelt at Whisper’s side. “So, I made these for you,” she lisped cheerfully. “As my father said, red is for Dragons. Blue, paralysis. These unmarked ones are hardened especially for penetrating armour, and I’m working on a design to deliver mana-shock as well. Green injects a vial of dracosnake poison and yellow shatters on impact, creating a larger wound.”

  “Delightful,” said Whisper, rather drolly, eying the selection. The girl made it sound like a tray of assorted fruit rather than an array of deadly weaponry.

  “Gemmini is sixteen and a very fine apprentice,” said her father, returned to sounding as if someone had died.

  “Try the armour-piercing type,” said Gemmini, dimpling. “Is it true you ran to Azarinthe for us, Whisper? Did you convince the King of Grey –”

  “Shoot first. Girl-chat later,” ordered Yadron.

  Whisper missed with her first shot, overestimating the drop of the dart over that distance. The hawser holding the chunk of wood twanged. Smoothly, she adjusted the weapon downward and struck the wood with a satisfying – and slightly unnerving – hss-thonk! Like a sharp hammer blow. Satisfying. Buried up to the fletching. Whisper was just turning to congratulate the Master Armourer when the rope snapped with a loud twang. The wood dropped.

  Clang! It struck something out of sight.

  “Which idiotic lump of drakkid-faeces drops trees around here?” came an outraged yell from below. “The same metal-mashing moron who hung it up there in the first instance?”

  “Oops, that’s Mom,” said Gemmini.

  “YAAADROOOONNN!” The Armourer turned a rather watery shade of blue as a voice like a constipated dracoworm thundered from below.

  “King Xan’s coming with his army,” said Whisper.

  “Xan? Is he handsome? I can’t wait!” cried Gemmini, forgetting all about her tray as she waved her hands about excitedly. “You’ve brought us so much hope, Whisper!”

  Whisper dived!

  “Oh dear,” said Gemmini, eyeing the blue dart stuck in her thigh.

  “I saved you from the bad ones,” said Whisper, showing the girl a couple of green darts and a yellow cupped carefully in her paws.

  “Aye, but I –”

  Gemmini stiffened and fell over, thankfully not atop her creations.

  Yadron sniffed unhappily, regarding his daughter with a jaundiced expression. “Aye, a very fine apprentice. Just a touch forgetful, as in, she’d forget her own backside inside a furnace. Oh well. She’ll recover in five hours or so. I guess I’ll go below and speak to the Dragoness.”

  Chapter 18: A Necessary Whisper

  LEAVING THE ARMOURER to check that his daughter was able to breathe adequately, Whisper loped toward the city’s rear entrance. There was none on the openside flank of the canyon, for the thickset supports dived straight into a sheer, unrelieved vertical mile of granite. The builders had simply finished a hundred feet of battlements flush against the buttress above, which itself had to be five or six hundred feet thick, Whisper supposed, wondering how such geological anomalies came to exist. Oh. This was Wyrm-design, of course. Why would Wyrms design? Were they not engines of destruction – yet she had seen them labouring intelligently toward a goal, building layer upon layer of sediment and substrate, and marshalling their minions to the work. Still, why blast anything and everything that moved nearby? Would their labours eventually result in an entire Sundering being refilled with vaulting cliffs, tremendous depths, and a broad variety plants and animals? What seeded the new plant growth? She eyed the Arborite Engineers nearby affixing a war-crossbow to command a field of fire beneath the buttress toward the direction Arborites
called windward. Were Wyrms a kind of maintenance team? Repair and reconstruction?

  Well, it was not as if she was about to trot out there and make enquiries.

  Whisper settled the two bandoliers of darts Yadron had given her crosswise over her shoulders, chafing at the discomfort. She would have to work with Drex on this problem – she startled as, several gantries ahead, she saw a large troop of axmen rushing toward the rear gates. Trouble? Oh no – her Whisper-senses located the Princess out there somewhere! Hefting the ultra-lightweight crossbow, she broke into a flat-out sprint.

  The heavily armed axmen shook the metal gantries as they trotted along, double-time. Whisper flashed past as though they were standing still, then thought the better of charging into an unknown potentially populated by brutish militia, hostile Dragons, sundry Warlocks and their nasty familiars. She slowed.

  “What’s happening?” she called down, rushing along the railing next to, of all people, Myntix.

  “You’re back?” the woman growled. “Keep out of the way of us real soldiers, hairball.”

  “That’s the Whisper, Myntix,” snapped another. The man waved an arm, speaking in rapid-fire bursts. “I’m Tyrax. The Princess was inspecting the fortifications nearby. They received a message from one of our troops. The Warlock’s minions attacked them four days ago; they’d been struggling to fight their way back up the canyon to Arbor. The Princess rushed out to give aid –”

  “The message was fake,” Whisper gasped.

  “No, true. But, sent by the Warlock to draw them in,” the soldier gasped. “We just spied the conflict from the long-sight above the city.”

  Whisper gaped at him.

  Tyrax grinned. “State secret. Don’t even whisper that one.”

  Myntix punched his shoulder so hard with her chainmail-clad hand, Whisper felt the impact from four feet away. “Fool. Shut your yapping-drakkid mouth!”

  She darted aside to dodge a looming bridge support and crossed onto solid ground alongside the troop. “If I shoot a few, Myntix, will you be upset?”

  The woman essayed a ferocious grin. “I’ll gladly dice up your leavings, Whisper. I saw you act to protect Drex – don’t think we soldiers didn’t notice. Now, you’re twice as fast as us! Straight down-canyon, four or five miles. What are you waiting for? Go!”

  Her legs blurred.

  Whisper overhauled the troop and left them in her figurative dust, seeing as her talons only kicked up moss from between the chinks in the paving stone in this section. She must have come in on a secondary trail, she noticed. Just near the small bridge, a larger trail led windward, rounding a small promontory before slowly dipping lower into the canyon. Four hamlets down this way, she recalled. A tunnel which could be blocked against invasion, but likely had not been to save the villagers from being cut off.

  Refugees!

  Whisper’s paws clenched involuntarily, almost toppling her as she beheld the state of the first family straggling up the long slope toward the city of Arbor. The man carried two children in his arms, their faces bloodied and burned, as was his. His wife hobbled along using a stick, stumping along strongly despite her wounds. Dragon attack. Dragon fire. Behind them came others, some dragging hand-carts, a few driving carts drawn by hexapod drakkids, piled high with people rather than belongings. Had the Arborites not anticipated an attack on this vector? Or was this Sanfuri’s Conqueror persona, the one whereby he ground down his enemies by sowing fear and destruction?

  She saw a few soldiers amongst the people, those too badly wounded to continue fighting. Other soot-blackened men and women put their shoulders to the carts, heaving them up the sometimes uncertain trail.

  Draconids! A trio of her least favourite draconids in the world, the swamp-green whippets, thrust their muzzles out of a cave lower down the trail. Sniffing. Hunting. For her? Or worse, contemplating a trailside ambush of these refugees? Reflexively, she raised her new weapon. Too far. Wait. Racing down the trail past the carts, which almost filled the scant fifteen feet of ledge in this area, Whisper sighted with the crossbow. How did one fire this thing when running?

  Boulder. Veering, her instincts took her to the side of the main track. She raced up the slope of a large, flat boulder and leaped from the top, delighted when her skin managed to flare despite the bandoliers. For two seconds, she skimmed along in a stable position in the air. Fire one. Fire two! She pinned one draconid in the neck and missed her second shot, but it took a lucky ricochet off a stone and plugged in the right hind leg of the draconid at the rear of the group. Now, she swooped down as the third draconid leaped forward, raising her left arm – Warlock! Not Sanfuri, but a shorter man, hardly less fearsome in his commanding presence and dark grey cloak. Raising his hands, he pushed outward. Veins and tendons in his neck popped into sharp relief as the man tilted a cart toward the edge of the precipice!

  Whisper punched her wrist. Four darts sprang away, taking the man in the shoulder, chest and tearing into his jaw. One missed. The cart dropped, slewing as the Warlock lost control of his conjuration. A man missing one leg at the knee hopped away from the cart, with what looked like a blacksmith’s metal tongs gripped in his hand. He bludgeoned the Warlock twice over the head before the whippet-draconid tore out his throat.

  Palming a red flechette, Whisper hurled it into the draconid’s lower flank. Even as it whirled, she saw the poison’s effect on its muscles. The whippet stumbled, and then fell to its knees with a surprised gurgle. Within ten seconds, it was convulsing; in less than a minute, it lay dead.

  Useful!

  Should have been obvious Humans would have developed methods of fighting Dragons.

  She raided the draconid bodies for leftover flechettes, and the Warlock for good measure, then rearmed her wristlets and the crossbow. Loaded for Dragonkind.

  A soldier in the cart groaned, “You’re the Whisper? It’s bad down-trail, ’bout a mile … bulwarkside …”

  “Thanks.”

  After remembering to check the small cave for any further nasty surprises, and finding none, Whisper ran down-trail again, passing thick screens of tumbling assumbi and jentiko foliage and splashing across a narrow river leading from a cleft to her left paw, along to where the canyon appeared to take a sharp bend. According to her mental map, the first hamlet was located across another buttress, through a tunnel and around a number of stele to a location a day’s travel away, deeply buried in the wilderness. That trail appeared deserted.

  She bounded past another group of refugees. Someone called, “You’re going in the wrong direction.”

  “Where’s the battle?”

  “Just keep going. Poor little thing …”

  The voice faded into the distance, but her annoyance did not. Whisper decided to save her anger for later, which meant about two minutes, give or take.

  She charged around a corner, and skidded to a halt. A wall of fire roared up from a huge pile of dry tranbis-vine which appeared to have peeled off the cliff above to fall across the trail, blocking it entirely. Hot ash rained down around her. The flames leaped to a hundred feet tall and were gathering intensity as more foliage, dry as tinder on the underside, slid down. Whisper backed up as her whiskers threatened to shrivel in the heat. Dragons would enjoy this. Not Whispers, and surely not all the Humans trapped on the far side. All she could hear above the massive crackling of the bonfire was the occasional earth-shaking roar of attacking Dragons, and a metallic clacking or ringing that she took to be the work of axmen or Warlocks.

  Up? Down? How could she –

  With a new, mighty roar, a river crashed through the conflagration. Hissing branches swirled past her as the Whisper haplessly floated into the embrace of a spiky sabbis-thicket, perhaps twenty feet down the cliff. For a few seconds more, the deluge roared over the edge, sweeping tonnes of debris and a few bodies into the canyon below. Whisper gasped as a Dragon heaved himself out of the flow, gasping with the effort as the water threatened to crush his outspread wings. Strange colour – Ice-Orange, he
r memories said, but she could not work out why. Lava attacks. Evil … an impulse raised her hand and the crossbow with it. Red dart. Fire!

  The flechette feathered into the base of the Dragon’s pricked left ear as he veered away, perhaps obeying an instinct of his own. Now, the clash of battle came clearly to her ears. Whisper began to move, and then froze as the Dragon swung about, searching. She was under no illusion that her flechettes might stop a thirty-foot Dragon in its tracks, for there were just so many more tonnes of flesh to poison. The Dragon’s throat swelled; the white-fire eyes narrowed as the beast appeared to fixate on her bush. Did it see? Smell her? Sense the crossbow waiting, her paw curled upon the trigger for the second shot?

  She could not possibly outrun a Dragon from this position. One tiny shake of a leaf and the Dragon would treat her to an especially toasty reception.

  Then, a fist of ice whizzed out of nowhere and smashed the Dragon across the jaw.

  Her paw jerked. The flechette vanished between the fangs and down the beast’s maw. Thirty very irritable feet of Ice-Orange Dragon flapped hard, rising to address someone standing on the trail. “So, Water Enchantress. Running short of mana, are we?”

  Shards of ice shot at the Dragon; it responded with a lazy stream of fire, melting most of the attack. A few spears penetrated its flank and neck, but hardly enough to cause permanent damage.

  “Curse you, Dragon!” screamed a woman.

  “Curse me? I find that … offensive,” chortled the beast. Whisper raised her right arm, checking its flechette load with the merest flick of her eyes. Two armour penetrating bolts. One Dragon-toxin. One yellow … she would have just one chance before the Dragon rediscovered its joy in burning hidden enemies.

  She aimed for the eye.

  The Dragon’s chest heated up from the inside, white clearly highlighting the snakeskin pattern of its scales as the fire burned within its throat, hotter and hotter, held back by the inner valves. Ice-Orange. That colour was why. A thin splutter of water washed over its scales. The Element Enchantress was finished.