Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (2 page)

Nissa forgot about what Sutina was wearing when she put her arms out and started to speak.

“Friends,” Speaker Sutina said. The word seemed to hang shimmering in the air above their heads. Nobody spoke. One of the Tajuru dropped his bag of wolf berries on the wood floor. With the smallest trace of a smile, the Speaker’s eyes cast around the room. When they met Nissa’s eyes, her smile faded. “Friends,” she repeated in a voice suddenly louder. “I won’t mix words now that I have traveled so far to visit you. We have come to Ondu to alert others to a great rot in the roots of the forest.”

Sutina’s eyes fluttered for a moment. When she spoke her lips were dashed with green phosphorescence, and the words that came out of her mouth were guttural, rasping, and filled with chirps. Her eyes fluttered open, and the smile flitted across her lips again. “This is the language of the infection traveling in the forest right now. Do any of you recognize this talk?”

Nissa didn’t bother to look at the faces around her. She knew the language belonged to nothing from their plane … It sounded like flint chips knocking together. Even mountain trolls spoke more pleasantly.

Sutina’s eyes fluttered and went to their whites again as she channeled something else. “What is that?” a concerned male Tajuru’s voice echoed out of her throat. “What are those holes? Stina, Rawli, give that thing a volley.”

“But the wind,” this time a female voice. “The wind.”

A silence lasting nearly thirty heartbeats followed.

Nissa watched the muscles in Sutina’s cheeks and around her eyes twitch and spasm. Her chin jerked side to side and up and down, and Nissa knew she was reliving the last moments of each of the scouting party’s lives. Then the whites of Sutina’s eyes blinked back into place, and she smiled. All around her the Tajuru had grown quiet. All the elves had bowed their heads. Their lips had all become slightly green, she noticed with a bit of unease. The elves did that sometimes at meetings.

A Joraga would never share consciousness with her tribesmen—it would be a shameful action. But the Tajuru seemed to want to do it when even the smallest thing went wrong. Nissa waited. Through the windows of the longhouse she could see patches of sky through the trees.

“Stina is my sister’s name,” a Tajuru said from the crowd. “We haven’t heard from her in a week.”

Another spoke up. “That was Leaf Talker Gloui’s voice.”

“He patrolled the far west,” someone else said, almost in a whisper.

Wind
, Nissa thought.
Where was there wind in a forest?
Breeze, yes, but never wind. She still didn’t know the topography of the Tajuru’s lands as well as she would like, but she did know that wind would be something of a rarity in a forest.

Hiba leaned over. His lips weren’t green, Nissa noticed. “The Binding Circle,” he whispered. “It’s on a plateau.”

Just then, in response to his thought, someone across the room said, “The Binding Circle is in the west.”

“The Binding Circle,” other elves repeated, almost in unison.

Nissa hated when they did that, speaking together like the undead.

Nissa
, Speaker Sutina’s voice said, suddenly speaking in her head. The Speaker’s eyes were on her, and then she spoke aloud, “You will take a force of Tajuru and your own significant abilities to find and eliminate this threat.”

Nissa nodded. She’d been a Leaf Talker for the Tajuru ever since her arrival in the Turntimber. The Tajuru always gave her the most difficult assignments. Many at the home tree were impressed with her abilities, she could tell; and many others thought she was a threat—the first step to a Joraga invasion. But for whatever reason, Nissa liked taking the dangerous assignments. What was she leaving anyway? A cold room in the home tree with a slug oil lantern and the distrustful stares of the Tajuru.

Nissa looked around the longhouse. Most of the Tajuru were filing out of the hall. She walked toward the door with Hiba following close behind.

The other Tajuru edged away from her as she passed. That was as it should be, she figured. It wouldn’t do for them to get too friendly with a Joraga. Hiba was different. He appreciated her Joraga ways of disciplined magic and combat. When she’d first come to the home tree, some Tajuru had refused to sit at the same dinner table with her. She couldn’t blame them. The experiences they’d had with the Joraga had not been pleasant. Nothing about the Joraga was particularly pleasant, unless your idea of pleasant involved training all day, leading raiding parties all night, and sleeping on the hard ground in between. Except for their distrust of scholarship, Nissa liked
the Joraga lifestyle. She had the fetid jungles of Bala Ged in her blood, but she couldn’t go back yet. And so she was leading a scouting party to defend the land of elves who distrusted her.

As Nissa walked out of the hall, she recounted what she’d heard about Speaker Sutina. The leader lived far away in the Tumbled Palace—an ancient structure crumbling to pieces on the cliffs of Sunder Bay. It sat clutched in the boughs of an ancient jurworrel tree which was slowly walking its way to the edge. Rumor had it that the Speaker partnered with the Moon Kraken once a month when that creature made its disastrous rise from the depths of sea.

Hiba’s hand closed around Nissa’s shoulder, stopping her mid-step. She turned. Tajuru in rustling silks and dyed leathers walked quietly around them. Her lieutenant’s long ear was cocked to the sky, and his large jaw was slack, listening. That ear was his best asset in many ways, and it alone made him useful to have around. He could hear an owl preening from three tall timbers away, and that was impressive even for an elf. And from their scouting expeditions together she’d come to know his facial expressions very well. She could tell what creature lurked by how his lip curled and where his eyelids sat on his eyes. But the expression he showed just then, standing on the boardwalk outside the longhouse, was new to her.

A moment later the warning horns began to moan through the undergrowth. The Tajuru on the boardwalk stopped walking and stared down at the forest floor. Nissa fell to a crouch, and her hand went to grasp the staff strapped to her back. Before she could get to it, however, Hiba grabbed her wrist and pulled her off the edge of the branch. The ground rushed up as Hiba snatched a hook off his belt and threw it away,
catching the crevice of an old tree. The rope jerked hard when it caught, and Nissa felt her teeth snap shut, but then they swung in a long arc away from the tree.

As Hiba let go of the rope, Nissa caught a spinning, blurred look at the branch they were hurling toward, gauged the distance, and executed a tight flip that plunked her feet squarely into the branch’s mossy duff. She grabbed Hiba’s arm and pulled him in as the larger Tajuru teetered on the narrow branch. Somewhere far off an eeka bird cried. A brace of giant hedron stones floated in the tree canopy above their heads, knocking unceremoniously together. It was a sight so common she barely took notice, but today their movements seemed more patterned than normal. They listened for the sounds of battle but heard nothing; neither horn, nor the sizzle of magic coursing through the air; not even the clash of steel. For a moment Nissa thought she heard a far-off scream, but when she asked Hiba, who was listening hard, he shook his head.

A moment passed, and then another, until suddenly Hiba jerked his head. “They are coming,” he said. He seized the short sword clipped onto his belt, and Nissa held her staff firmly in both hands. She heard a low whistle and moved her staff at the last moment to deflect the dart, or some such thing, away into the greenery. And then, whatever it was in the trees was jetting toward them, chirping as it flew.

She got almost no look at it—gray with many arms—before she and Hiba were knocked off the branch and falling through the air. Nissa heard Hiba slice at the air with his sword, before they hit the forest floor and rolled off in opposite directions.

Nissa hopped to her feet and held her staff in both hands while she whispered the incantations she knew so well. As always, her staff felt burning hot as
the lines of energy rippled through her body to spin around her head and away. She felt her mana lines stiffen and intensify until they were like glowing veins running straight from the jungles of Bala Ged. And in a moment, the four Joraga warriors she had summoned from the æther were standing in loose formation around her, blinking in the dim light of the forest floor, and smelling like spicy jungle orchids. Their eyes were sharp. They snatched small bows from their backs, nocked arrows, and drew back in one fluid motion. The arrows flew to the two beings squatting in the trees looking down at them.

Black and gray with highlights of vivid color, and covered with geometric plates of chitinous material, each of the creatures’ arms was split into two; their legs were shiny tentacles. They had no heads—only bumps on their shoulders. And their bodies were covered with lidless blue eyes that stared down without expression as their thin arms knocked the arrows away. From behind, Nissa heard a titter and chirp, and she turned to see four more creatures swinging silently on branches. The Joraga released more arrows, but most were knocked away by the creatures. One arrow did find its target, catching the thing in the upper torso, and the creature gave a strange moan, pitched foreword, and fell spinning to the ground. The remaining creatures jumped with surprising fluidity and found their way to the forest floor to surround the one that had fallen, touching it all over with their tentacles.

The Joraga nocked their arrows and shot another creature as it stood over its fallen comrade. The remaining four turned slowly. It was their eyes that caused Nissa to pause—those blue, expressionless eyes that covered their bodies. There was no anger
or sadness in those eyes, no evil or good. She had the unsettling feeling that they saw her the way she might see a zeem beast—as prey.

The Joraga shot a third creature and the three remaining beasts broke into a smooth charge on their powerful tentacles. One seized the Joraga next to Nissa with its thick arms and pulled him to meat. With a muttered incantation, Nissa took up her staff and thrust a blow into the chest of the nearest creature. The thing stepped back, and its blue eyes looked at the green glowing dent in its hard flesh. Suddenly a stalk and a leaf popped out of the impression.

Nissa had seeded adversaries in the past, of course, but never had one reacted so. She had once seen a petra giant yank the plant out. When he had taken hold and pulled, the root had popped out of his chest clutching his pumping gray heart. But this tentacled creature watched as the plant grew, shimmering and stretching, until it was taller than the monster itself, at which point a bud appeared and opened to reveal a mouth that snapped shut around the creature’s head.

Something whizzed by Nissa, and the monster that had been poised behind her fell with Hiba’s short sword sticking out of its chest. Its tentacles kneaded the handle of the sword as it lay in the rotting leaves on the forest floor.

The last creature knocked away the arrows the remaining Joraga fired. Nissa struck her staff into the earth and took a deep breath, feeling the energy pulse up through the soles of her feet and along her spine, and shimmer all around. She ran and jumped into the air, swinging her staff so that it connected with a dull thump on the top of the creature’s head. It stood still for a moment in the dappled light coming through the trees, and then crumpled to the ground.

Nissa landed, turned, and walked back to the creature. She bent down for a closer look at its body. To her surprise, the plants trapped under its body had turned brown and died. She would have liked to investigate further, but Hiba was already running back to the home tree. Nissa took one last look at the creature on the ground before following him with the two remaining Joraga keeping in step.

Hiba stopped at the base of the gigantic home tree—so thick it would have taken one hundred elves holding wrists to encircle it. But instead of elves, twenty of the tentacled creatures lay still around it. Some were festooned with arrows, and one was strangled with vines. All had fallen from above. Hiba wasted no time in hopping onto the tree and climbing. Nissa and her Joraga followed.

There were at least twenty more of the dead creatures scattered on the platforms of the settlement, some of which were still writhing. Small groups of Tajuru were walking from creature to creature with long knives clutched in their pale hands. Nissa watched as an elf shoved the blade of his knife deep into one of the creatures, stilling it forever.

“Here,” Hiba said. He was running to the longhouse. He stopped outside the door of the house, near a small crowd. The elves in the crowd were bending down and lifting something.

“It isn’t her,” Nissa said to herself as she ran.

But by the time she arrived, they had already lifted the body of Speaker Sutina. She was still wearing the same smile on her lips, but the elf leader’s leather jerkin was torn and bloody. Her arm flopped free and something rolled out from her dead grasp. The object bounced twice, rolled over a plank, and came to rest in a crack. Nissa glanced at the other elves. None seemed
to have noticed. Without thinking, she bent down and plucked the smooth object, which appeared to be a large pearl.

As the body of the Speaker was borne away, a small group of Tajuru around the door of the longhouse did not help hoist the body, but watched the procession leave. When it was gone they turned and looked at her, each with a less-than-friendly expression. Nissa glanced at the two remaining Joraga leaning against the side of the longhouse.
Wonderful
. Had they
all
seen her take the pearl? She hoped not.

Nissa turned her back to the other elves and had a closer look at what the Speaker was holding when she died. A pearl the size of a human’s eye rolled in the palm of Nissa’s hand. She had never seen one so smooth and round. A strange, squiggled script was etched into its blue opalescence. She could feel the mana emanating from the script.
Where had Sutina gotten such an object, and why was it in her hand when she died?
It didn’t bear thinking about. She looked back at where the Speaker had fallen. Two creatures lay crumpled on the stairs nearby. She bent over one.