Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (3 page)

“What are you doing?” Hiba said.

Nissa ignored him. She knelt. The creature’s tentacles were not moving. She carefully looked the thing over from tentacle to tip, moving its appendages. She found one curious thing. Under the creature’s right arm, a proboscis-like tube extended four feet. The tube was fleshy and very thin, and looped so that it did not dangle down.

“Strange. They have no mouths,” she said, glancing up. The small group of Tajuru watched her silently from the door of the longhouse.

“So they have no mouths?” Hiba said. He glanced at the group.

“How do they eat?” she said, poking at the spongy tentacles. She could almost hear Hiba’s shrug, but she didn’t look up. “Why were they here if not to eat?”

“Maybe they don’t like Joraga?” Hiba said. The comment was meant for her, but she ignored it.

Hiba walked over to the group standing around the door. Nissa could hear them muttering, but couldn’t make out any words. Instead she looked more closely at the creature.

It was like nothing she had ever seen on Zendikar. It had tentacles, yet no webbing between its digits, and no gills. Its lidless eyes and ridged skin spoke of a subterranean life, but how could something without a mouth live underground? There were no weapons and no clothing. And the creature smelled somehow clean and tangy, like she imagined a snake would. She curled her lip in disgust.

Still, something about the creatures was familiar. She had felt it the second she had seen them squatting on the branch. While she considered that, Hiba came down the stairs and stood.

“Do they look familiar?” she said, standing.

“Like something from a children’s story,” he said.

That was it! They looked like the monsters in the old stories she’d heard from the kor troubadours.
Those that lurk
.

“Do ‘those that lurk’ have tentacles?” she asked.

“We did not call them that,” Hiba said. “And I do not think ours have tentacles. Ours have horns.”

She nodded. Still, there was something about them.

Hiba jerked his chin at the Tajuru at the door of the longhouse. “One of them just stumbled in from MossCrack. These creatures attacked there before they attacked here.”

MossCrack was the next settlement, just down the forested gully through which the WhiteShag coursed.

“What else did he say?” Nissa asked.

“That he does not care for Joraga,” Hiba said. He gave her a grim little smile.

“That he does not care for Joraga,” Nissa repeated. “That is comical.” She thought for a couple of seconds before deciding. “Alright,” she said. “We’ll take the zip. Collect those in the doorway and any others Tajuru who care to make a trip to MossCrack.” She started walking down the boardwalk, then stopped. “Or they can cower here and let the Joraga deal with this menace.”

“The zip, Leaf Talker?” Hiba yelled after her.

“The zip,” she confirmed.

By the time Hiba arrived at the zip-line platform he had twenty elves, grimly outfitted and smeared with their combat colors. Some wore red circles around their eyes; others had blue lips. Each configuration represented the elf’s personal totem. “Very pretty,” she muttered to herself. “But can they fight?” She was painted in the fashion of a Joraga: black bars that came in from all sides of the face and pointed at the eyes. It meant she was Joraga. It meant she trusted only her own.
The heart of another is a dark forest
, the Joraga saying went.

They all squeezed into the topless gondola made of woven vines. It was attached to the zip-line by a curved vine and two jaddi-wood pulleys housed in a turntimber-bark sleeve. The bark-twilled zip led away into the greenery.

The compartment bobbed and swayed as Nissa stepped on. She’d ridden it once before, and despite its appearance she knew it worked well enough. Those were the contraptions that the Tajuru excelled at. Still,
Nissa could not totally blot out the realization that working well or not, the gondolas made good targets.

Hiba was at the front. With a foot pedal he could slow their speed, but he didn’t seem to know that, Nissa thought, as they hurled at greater and greater speed through the forest. Branches slapped at the sides of the car, and the wind sang through the gaps between its vines. Soon she could see the WhiteShag far below, smashing down through the rocks. Her breath caught in her throat for a moment when a lean Onduan baloth stood on its hind legs next to the river and watched them intently. But even a baloth couldn’t catch them in the zip.

She knew they were near MossCrack when the Tajuru began unhitching bows from their back and fixing arrows. Nissa closed her eyes and felt the wind whistling over the tips of her ears. She breathed in the forest, and felt the sap in the trees rising in her blood, and she felt the great raw lump of the ground far below pulse as though it was rising to meet her.

Soon MossCrack’s home tree rose before them above even the tallest turntimber. Hiba had not slowed their speed, so Nissa reached out and allowed her hand gather the energy that writhed up and around every tree in the Turntimber. She let a moment pass to bond with the invisible mana that permeated the entire forest. The trees all grew around these spikes of mana in their characteristic twisted way. By bonding to to the mana, Nissa was able to slow the car’s progress, and she eventually pulled it to an easy stop. When she opened her eyes the elves were all looking at her.

“Did you think we would march right into the midst of them?” she said. “I know you’re not the best warriors
in the forest, but try to keep up.” She could feel them bristle at that, but instead of looking back she peered over the edge. The forest floor was far below, mostly obscured by undergrowth and tree branches. “Ready,” she said. Without waiting for a response—this wasn’t a tribal council meeting, there would be no handholding—she hopped out of the gondola and landed softly on the nearest branch. After a moment, they grudgingly followed. When they were all on the branch, she turned to them. In the dappled light, her black and white camouflage blended perfectly. “Now,” she whispered. “You are all honorary Joraga. As Joraga, we are going to fall upon our enemies unawares and destroy them, whatever they are.”

She turned back and led them down the branch and to the next, and over many more until they neared the home tree. Nissa stopped frequently. But, strangely, she heard nothing. Then Hiba stopped and flicked the tip of his long ear and pointed off to the left. Soon she heard it too: a particular cracking sound and the swish of branches. They crept closer, and the sounds grew louder until they saw movement through the trees.

Her Joraga stopped and took out small, dried scute-bug shells. As the Tajuru watched, her Joraga carefully dipped the points of their arrows in the shells before quivering them again. Then they held the bug shells out for the Tajuru to clumsily dip their own arrow heads in.

“Distillate of bloodbrier,” Nissa hissed. “Shoot for the neck … if they have one.” She motioned to Hiba, and they got down on their hands and knees, crept to the edge of the branch, and carefully parted the leaves.

Hiba was the first to get a good look. Nissa heard his sharp intake of breath. And in a moment, she understood why. The creatures were there, at least
one hundred of them. But it wasn’t their numbers that shocked her. It was the sun. There was sun on the forest floor. With turntimber trees around there was never full sun on the forest floor. But the creatures had managed to do what Nissa had not thought could be done. They’d felled a small turntimber. They’d dug large holes and were in the process of stripping the leaves off the fallen tree, hauling them to the holes, and stuffing them in. And the creatures were not all the kind they’d fought earlier. Some flew and were only masses of floating tentacles with thin and vile arms extending out. Some were tentacled and crawled on the ground with round, white heads that appeared to be made of solid bone and lacked even the slightest face. Some were huge … the size of a stomper and just as thick. Others were the height of three elves, and as she watched one grunted and stood, towering over all the rest. “That one must have killed the tree by pushing it over,” Nissa muttered. “It goes first.”

Some among them had no tentacles. They were white-skinned even as a corpse might be and they were bound at the shoulders and elbows with what looked like leather straps. Some of those pale beings were stripping the leaves off the trees. Others were bent over the Tajuru strewn over the ground, sucking their blood from their bodies.

“They have vampire slaves,” Hiba hissed.

As Nissa watched, one of the tentacled creatures casually seized a vampire by the neck. It wasn’t done cruelly, exactly. More like an elf might seize a wild fig off the branch. The tentacled creature searched until it found the tube under its right armpit, and it jabbed it into the vampire’s chest. Then the creature squatted and stared down at the ground, while the vampire stood stock still, growing whiter and whiter.

“What is it doing?” Hiba whispered.

“Prepare the attack,” Nissa said. She pulled her eyes away from the grisly scene. “Right now.”

The words were not fully out of her mouth when a branch snapped in the forest behind them, and the tentacled ones were upon them. The climbing kind they’d met at the home tree, perhaps thirty of them. They charged from branch to branch.

Nissa brought her staff sweeping from the right, pulling energy from the branch she was standing on and directing it in a wide swath out the tip of the staff. The mana touched the trees, and they animated and pulled in together, forming a wall of branches and vines that reached out for the beasts. The elves began shooting between the branches at the creatures, two of which fell as Nissa watched. The other creatures threw themselves at the wall, thrashing against it as the elves shot them dead.

Nissa heard a swish behind her and turned to see a squad of twenty flying creatures rushing at them. On the ground, more creatures converged on the tree they were in. The giant one lumbered on tentacles twice as wide as her waist.
This could be the end
, Nissa thought.

She screamed a warning, and some of the elves turned, but not before the flying creatures crashed through the foliage. One of the beasts bashed into the Tajuru standing next to Nissa, and she knew by the impact that the elf was lost. Another came at her, but she whispered the secret name of her favorite flower, the dendrite, and with that spell delivered a blow with her staff that sent the creature shooting backward off the branch. Other elves had turned and shot many of the flying creatures before they reached their ranks. And the climbing creatures on the other
side of the grasping wall of branches and vines, Nissa noticed with a quick glance, were much diminished.

Then she felt the turntimber under their feet jerk hard to the right. She regained her footing, but the tree shifted again. She looked down and saw the huge creature through a gap in the leaves, pushing against the trunk of the turntimber.

One of the flying creatures slammed against her, and they fell crashing through the leaves. She silently mouthed words that pushed mana ahead of her like a pillow, and in a moment she was falling slowly, eventually landing next to the creature that had fallen with her, its body still.

And then they were on her again: two of the creatures with blue eyes, and the giant one the size of two forest trolls. The giant had lowered its shoulder against the tree and was pushing, its tentacles churning up the soft earth as it struggled for purchase. She focused her mind and felt the mana boiling, making her hands glow green. She twisted her staff and pulled out her stem sword—a long, thin green shoot hidden inside its wooden sheath—just as the first creature lowered its head and charged. She stepped to the side and pivoted hard to her right leg. As the beast barreled past she inserted the rigid stem neatly into its side, just where its heart ought to have been if it had one. She pushed the sword all the way to its wooden handle before yanking it out. With a whispered word, the bloody stem became flexible. She snapped it like a whip, and the stem lashed out and took off the arm of the behemoth pushing on the tree. It turned its body and regarded her calmly, as pale blood bubbled out of its arm stump.
No scream, no anger
, she thought.
Not even a sneer
. The creature simply planted its other shoulder against the trunk and kept pushing.

She was about to take the behemoth’s other arm off when the second creature charged hard into her side. But as she fell, she kicked away and turned, whipping half its tentacles off with a puff of emerald-colored mana.

She landed just as the tree shifted to the right. Its flat root ball heaved up and out of the ground, slapping Nissa violently against the giant creature. She clambered up its back and onto its shoulders, and wrapped her stem sword around what should have been its neck. As she pulled and twisted, the creature’s hundreds of blue eyes blinked and turned to look at her, but still the creature did not stop pushing. She’d seen single-minded animals in her life, but never anything like the giant. She pulled hard for some minutes, and began to fear that the creature had some enchantment about it, but eventually she heard a crack and the creature went slack and fell forward into the trunk.

They must have a spine
, Nissa thought. She looked around as she sheathed her stem sword in her staff once again.

The tree had settled into its new position, pitched off to the north. She followed its trunk with her eyes, hoping to catch a glimpse of her squad through the branches. But she heard neither the twangs of their bows nor their battle cries. She walked away from the trunk. A loud grinding sound echoed somewhere through the canopy. A common sound of two floating hedrons rubbing against each other in the sky above the trees came to her.

She walked to the clearing, ducking under the white-barked boughs of a young jaddi tree.

A narrow draw extended to her right, and farther down it, the pound of the WhiteShag thundering
through its deep ravine echoed off the still trunks. The sunlight shone through the trees ahead and she walked toward it as if in a dream.