by Marc Secchia
“And, while you’re dangling Garar over a five-mile precipice, can I scout ahead?”
Rhyme cautioned, “Don’t show yourself or betray our presence. Most especially, I don’t want that Warlock despatching your furry rump to Illuxor.”
Whisper bowed, “With respect, Princess, I’d just hitch a ride on a passing Leviathan.”
“I believe you might be brazen enough to do exactly that.”
Chapter 24: A Warlock’s Whisper
WHISPER SNEAKED UP-CANYON, searching ahead with her senses. She had no doubt a well-prepared Warlock would have laid further traps, and she was not far off the mark – there were dragonets everywhere, at least five different types, all spying for the Warlock.
She returned to brief the Princess Blue, finding her, to her surprise, standing sideways on the canyon wall supervising the trio of Earth Element Enchanters tossing boulders over the edge. Leaning over, she called, “Sanfuri will know you’re here any moment. Any chance Shivura can create a diversion? Why don’t you bore a tunnel through this heap?”
Seconds later, the three Element Enchanters switched tactics, building and shoring up a low tunnel – they chanted in concert, a rich, earthy kind of magic that reached deep into the roots of sod and stone, and summoned forth its power. Twenty minutes later, Rhyme and her troops were crawling through on hands and knees, which was all the space that the area’s instability allowed, to the accompaniment of a certain amount of grim grumbling. They formed up again, axes in hand now, she observed.
Rhyme said, “Men and women of Arbor, I don’t need to tell you the odds. Our job is to get stuck into that Warlock until he turns tail and runs away, and since we know he’s after the Grey Queen, we will protect her with our lives. For the honour of Arbor, I plan to bring back Warlock Sanfuri’s head to decorate my wall.”
“AYE!”
“Shh,” Whisper hissed, drawing a number of dark glares. She added, “Let your axes do the talking. That’s the Arborite way.”
The Warlock was escaping, and they had no real idea how they would stop him.
“Aye,” said Rhyme. Her gaze measured the wetness around Whisper’s eyes.
“He took my tail,” she said to the Princess as they set off. “He took –”
“Never again,” said her friend. “Never.”
The column trotted at the same easy-seeming pace which had consumed the miles from Arbor, but now, Whisper detected a new urgency about them. Two hundred and eighty strong were the axmen of Arbor, led by the mighty Captain Drex and the powerful Princess Blue. Each man and woman carried a double-bladed axe in one hand and roundshield in the other, and they were armoured in heavy chainmail down to their knees. Beneath the knee they wore protective greaves and heavy boots, and on their heads were the round helms of Arbor. Just one Mage and four Element Enchanters accompanied them, and Shivura was sweating over producing the very best camouflage shield he was capable of. Drex alone among them eschewed a shield. Instead, he held his hammer loosely in his left hand.
In a moment, he growled to Whisper, “Yar an’ I take thar Ignothax. A Warlock might be attacked through the familiar bond.”
She nodded. “Alright. If we can hit them, this time.”
“I got a feeling about thar’n Xola an’ her mana,” Drex grunted.
Half a mile. A quarter-mile. The pace picked up. Whisper slipped ahead to scout the battle. The Azar had breached the defences on the near side of the bridge – how, she did not know, since sunstrike lay heavy upon the centre of the bridge. Their numbers were few and the battle savage, but the Men of Grey fought like cornered Dragons as Sanfuri’s Irregulars pressed in with huge force. Where were the Ice-Orange and Gold-Red Dragons? And Sanfuri himself, most importantly?
From this angle, the black granite battlement manned by the Warlock’s soldiers separated the Arborites from the Azar. A phalanx of perhaps two hundred Irregulars stood ready this side, and many more were visible through the archway and the open doors on the far side, but Whisper scanned the scene unhappily. Where could that Warlock be hiding?
Rhyme thought the same. “Semoki. Drex. Hit the group this side and crush them. Then, whirl full about, link shields and hold – Captain Drex, you’ll hold the line. Let nothing through. Everyone else, prepare to aid the Greys on my mark. I’ve no doubt the Warlock will make his appearance very shortly after our arrival.”
Whisper pointed upward. “The dragonets!” They wheeled away, crying stridently in their high-pitched, carolling voices.
“Warning given,” said the Princess, raising her axe. “FOR ARBOR! CHARGE!”
“DREXOR!”
The phalanx drew together with all the discipline Whisper had come to appreciate of the Arborite axmen. The shields lowered at an angle to the charge, while the axe blades gleamed just past the polished, sharpened edges of the roundshields. How they ran without tangling each other up, she had no idea, but for once, the clumsy Humans seemed to operate as if they possessed but one mind. Whisper blinked. Was this an unsuspected magical power? A communal power?
If so, they were effective.
Drex opened the account with a scything blow of his hammer. Ping! Then, the phalanx struck the Warlock’s battle line at full tilt. KERRAA-CK-ACK-ACK! She had never heard a sound like it. So powerful was their momentum, the axmen smashed up a bow-wave of enemy soldiers and drove them backward, higher and higher, until the entire mass slammed against the new battlement. The axes, amongst the deadliest of short-range weapons, rose and fell like a milling machine, and every enemy within their ambit wilted under the relentless, terrible blows.
It seemed but seconds later that the Princess roared, “WHEEL!”
One hundred axmen turned. The shields clicked together and lowered. Phalanx! Rhyme stared over their top edges, hunting the cliff, the trail, the whole area. Behind her, more axmen finished off any enemy that moved. “The Dragons?” whispered the Princess. “Where are those scalies hiding?”
Shivura popped up beside her, also searching. He shook his head.
Rhyme raised a hand. “Perhaps we have a second or two’s grace. Captain Drex? Whisper?”
Whisper startled into motion. She had not even fired a shot.
“Shivura, find me that fungazoid Warlock. Men. Let’s secure this gateway. No man escapes. With me, for Arbor!”
Arrows were starting to fly down from the slopes above the V-shaped entryway to the bridge area, but the axmen entered the gateway in another tight formation, keeping their shields high. Whisper swirled past them. The crossbow twanged twice, taking out two archers. She sprayed her flechettes liberally into the thick throng ahead of her, trusting that there were so many Irregulars, she could not possibly miss.
“ARBOR!” roared the Princess Blue.
For a moment, Whisper thought they had made a terrible mistake. Rhyme led that heavy phalanx on a charge straight into the middle of perhaps three hundred defenders, crowding them and wedging them apart. She reloaded rapidly, awaiting the terrible moment when they would force their own allies off the edge of the cliff. The Princess skidded to a halt, decapitating a man with a free strike of her axe.
“WHEEL!”
The shields snapped outward.
“STRIKE!”
The terrible milling motion began again, the axes rising and falling with a frightening rhythm as each Arborite soldier struck past the notch created by the overlapping of their shield with the next shield. The Irregulars struck back with every weapon at their disposal – swords, spears and crossbows in the main, but metal flails and maces were also present. Whisper fired as fast as she could reload. Rhyme was in there, fighting like a feral Dragon, slamming enemies left and right with scant regard for her own life. Whisper aimed carefully. Whap! Whap! Two archers fell before they could bother her Princess.
The battle was thick and brutal. Whisper whirled through strange scents, the fluids of dying men and the incredible din of armour clashing against armour, and weapon against weapon. Men fell away on both sides, but the A
zarinthe soldiers were boiling up from beneath the bridge now, released into additional space. She sprayed the archers lining the slopes a second time, dropping several more with her paralytic flechettes, before Whisper felt a sharp pain pluck at her left flank. She ducked and rolled away, fiddling with the crossbow. No time for that. She triggered her daggers, and darted forward amidst the knees and belt buckles, moving as though every soldier waded through treacle and she was a dracowasp, fleet and darting, scoring knuckles and stabbing kidneys and jabbing at ankle bones.
Xola stalked forth, her hands wreathed in blue. “Taynis-at-yapara!”
Blue lightning flashed. An entire cohort of Irregular Colours peeled away from her as though she had decapitated a flower of its petals. Arrows pinged down around her, and crumpled off her shield.
Whisper dashed away, up-slope. No time to hamstring archers. She moved in a blur now, simply cutting strings. Chopping fingers. She whipped crosswise through the mass of archers, feeling her fur jerk and reorient as an arrow passed narrowly across her abdomen. She could self-heal? Or had her skin deflected the point? She danced rapidly, taking a heavy boot to the chest before she suddenly found herself up against the battlement. A Mage loomed over her, laughing as he formed a spell between his hands.
Ping! He dropped, struck from behind.
“Yar can thank me later!”
Whisper heaved the hammer over the edge. “Catch!”
Then, she paused in shock. The cliff-side seventy feet beyond the new battlement shivered, shedding rocks and bushes, and swung outward. Warlock Sanfuri emerged. Incredible. He could disguise his creations so effectively?
His pitiless grey eyes measured the conflict.
“So, all my old friends together,” he said conversationally, but his voice carried across the battlement and down into the canyon, where the Azarinthe troops were deploying in numbers now, having crossed beneath the protective buttress. In minutes the sun would set, Whisper saw, and the canodraconids would be able to make the crossing too. The Warlock said, “Where’s my future bride? She must be here … somewhere.”
Ducking behind the battlement, Whisper reloaded with a blur of paws. Dragon neurotoxin. Why? The Azarinthine and Arborite soldiers were in full command of the bridge approach area now, and shielded by the Warlock’s own battlement from his sight. But Sanfuri would know. The passageway behind him stood strangely empty, save for Ignothax. Leaning her head against the warm stone, she gazed up at the sky. So much death. So many weapons. So many hopes shattered, and the Warlock’s final act was about to proceed exactly as he had planned, unless a Whisper could find a way to tame the fates. Her fur waved as if her own personal breeze shook her. She did not understand what she was feeling. Why this sense of numbness and dislocation? Why the unbearable waiting for a voice a tailless Whisper could never hear?
She felt so helpless.
What if she could plug her ears the moment he began to speak that magical command? Would it work through the magical aether, eschewing the ordinary paths of hearing?
“Come on out, Queen Xola. Face me if you dare,” Sanfuri taunted.
She raised her eyes, and saw the evening mists above the bridge eddy strangely.
Whisper could not seem to move. Her throat constricted, while her heart slammed the inside of her ribcage. Then, a sensation like fire speared from her instincts into her paws. She sprang off the battlement, crying, “Dragons above! Dragons!”
* * * *
Her vision seemed unfocussed. Wings beat more in her memory than in reality, for the Dragons were still far away, but closing in. As she landed with a jolt through her thigh muscles and rolled, King Xan was just scrambling up the steps from the platform just below and beside the bridge. He limped heavily, a trail of crimson leading down his leg from a wound that had been firmly bound with cream bandages, while another large bandage sat somewhat rakishly upon his head, like a medical crown.
Rhyme’s eyes widened as she sank beneath the shields being raised and linked together above her head, and those of her troops. The Arborites shuffled together, making tiny clinking sounds as they raised shields, and – the mists remained unbroken. Xola stood alone, gazing at the sky as though transfixed. Mage Shivura was muttering something, but the Element Enchantress stood just two feet from the flying buttress, unmoving or incapable of movement.
The Princess’ hiss carried clearly over the rising murmur of her troops, “Why Whisper, you rascally –”
A shrill whistling sound drowned her out. Orange blossomed within the mists, followed almost instantaneously by a sound like a concussive cough of thunder: Dragon attack! The world went white about Whisper as an enormous pressure attacked her ears. She leaped to her paws, thrilling to the song of magic building in and around her body. Xola! She could feel the subtle flow of the woman’s mind, the enormous charge of her power, and knew it could be harnessed – somehow.
In exact concert with the Element Enchantress, she found herself whirling her arms, shouting, “Tensku-ska’é-utru!”
The lava-and-fire attack of twenty massed Gold-Red and Ice-Orange Dragons, blasted at the crouching Human forces from a mere two hundred feet overhead, bent away from the Enchantress’ raised fists like a curving wave, swept over the battlement in a single, reverberating torrent, and smashed down upon the Warlock and his familiar in a blaze of untrammelled fury. Dragon fire lashed him for as long as the Dragons sustained their attack, which was several seconds before they realised belatedly what they had done. Fangs chopped off the fires; throats choked in shock. The Dragons pulled up with wild bugles of alarm and confusion.
With a deep groan and a deafening crack, the cliff collapsed atop Sanfuri and Ignothax.
Rhyme gaped though the archway, then examined her smoking shield in evident bewilderment. She rose slowly, staring first at Whisper, awed, then at Xola, who looked as befuddled as a dragonet which had lost its own tail.
The sense of connection with Xola was immediate and almost unbearably poignant. Whisper squeezed her eyes shut. What had she just done? Clearly, in that fraction of a second before the Dragon fire lashed down, she had felt a jolt, or perhaps a shifting of the world beneath her paws … and something had changed. Something magical; as deep and dangerous as the Brass Mirror itself. Fate had faltered before the touch of a paw, and changed.
Every hair on her body stood rigid.
The scrape of Xan’s boots arrested her attention. Leather against stone. Whisper’s eyes flicked open, and what she saw caused a most agreeable frisson to run from her whiskers down into her tail. The tingle made her giggle. The tall King, approaching the Princess, looked as if he had just been struck by a winsome sunbolt. Rhyme had apparently lost all power of speech, and the feeling in her fingers too, for she dropped her axe on her boot. She did not even wince.
“My Lady Blue,” Xan managed at last, bowing stiffly.
Rhyme made a bobbing motion with her knees completely at odds with her blood-splattered, gore-flecked appearance, and turned the movement into a convulsive grab for her axe. She stammered, “Your Highness. You’re just as grey as the day I … uh, remember.”
“You’re still so very … blue,” he sighed.
Whisper found her paws stepping toward the royals, drawn by forces she could not fathom. With a small bow of her own, she said, “King Xanho-das-Azarin of Azarinthe, may I present your old friend, Rhyme of Arbor, the Princess Blue? And this is Queen Xola-das-Azarin, also of the Grey City.”
Xola snapped, “You! What did you just … make me do?”
“Haven’t the faintest sight of the canyon on a foggy morning,” Whisper sang out cheerfully, “but it’s an excellent result, wouldn’t you agree?”
The Queen just ground her teeth like a Dragoness cleaning bones of any available gristle. Meantime, Xan and Rhyme had not yet managed to break eye contact. It seemed neither desirable, nor physically feasible.
Eventually, Xan whispered, “Well, what a day this is. You certainly grew up a beauty, Princess Rhyme.”
Muddle, muddle, Rhyme could barely string words into a coherent sentence.
“Allow me,” he said, reaching out to pluck something grey and stringy off her cheek.
“Ah, intestines,” Rhyme noted.
“Hmm, so they are,” Xan observed just as dreamily. “You’ve been busy.”
“So have you. Injured?”
“A mere scratch.”
If Xola rolled her eyes any more wildly, they might just pick up and fly away, Whisper thought. Dancing dragonets! For the buzzing euphoria of this moment, she could have braved the dangers of ten thousand canyons. This was what all her whispering was for. This reconnection. This still-shy touching of souls – but she was convinced they would overcome their emotional hurdles very shortly. After all, Rhyme was not the sort of girl to let opportunities go begging.
Did she exist but to serve others, living a life not her own, but as some kind of emotional proxy to their hopes, dreams and needs? She had no-one of her own to love, not in the way Xan now flushed and pretended to check his troops deploying around him, and Rhyme nervously tucked a stray tendril of hair beneath her metal helm. Surely, she should be happier. All the chasing after her own identity roared back into her full awareness as Whisper realised she had disguised her disremembrance and inner fractures behind keeping busy, running here and there, doing everything she could to please and serve others.
My existence is vicarious.
For once, her inner knowing did not ring victoriously. Instead, it was a bittersweet whisper.
Captain Drex poked his head through the archway. “Ahem! Yar ’scuse my interruptin’ and all, but the mountain’s moving!”
* * * *
Rhyme roared, right into Xan’s face, “Arbor! Form up!”
Xan waved his hand rather more delicately. “Uh … Azar army, why don’t we –”
