Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (5 page)

“Bound,” Nissa said. “Or not at all.”

As if in answer, another baloth howl drifted slowly through the trees, and Nissa started to walk.

T
hey walked once again into the deep forest, and buried the fallen elf Hiba near a young jaddi tree. While Nissa kept watch, Anowon dug a hole with a length of turntimber bark. With a face that betrayed neither thought nor emotion, Sorin watched the vampire sweat in the humid air. When the shallow grave was dug, Nissa dropped down from her high perch and placed a green paphian flower—picked from a clump she’d found growing in the crotch of a jurworrel tree—in Hiba’s gnashed fingers.

An hour later they were traveling the branchways of the turntimber. Nissa, in the lead, was careful not to shy away from the serpents that hung like vines in that part of the forest, careful not to show her strange traveling companions any sort of weakness.

At sundown they stopped at a huge hedron stone, pointed at each end and broken in two enormous pieces, with a huge jurworrel growing out of the largest fissure.

“We dare not stop for too long.” Nissa said. She wondered how long it would be before the Onduan baloth caught up. Before it tore them apart. A baloth was a creature that floated at the edge of every action in the turntimber—a pure predator that
could cut through bone and muscle with the slightest slash of its claw, and which possessed an appetite large enough to devour a whole Tajuru squad. Those who lived there never left the safety of home without thinking, however briefly, about the likelihood of encountering one.

Sorin nodded once and looked back the way they had come.
Fool
, Nissa thought.
He has no idea
. She climbed to the top of the ruined hedron and cupped her hand to her long ear. “They are eating our scent even now.”

Sorin yawned. He casually took a handkerchief from an inner fold of his black cloak and dabbed his brow.
“You
are the fool,” he said. His voice was soft—so soft that Nissa found herself leaning in to hear him, unnerved that he had somehow read her thoughts. “You are a fool if you do not understand the true nature of the danger we are in. Do not trifle over
whatever
is following us. We must watch for the brood, and hope they haven’t grown too powerful to counteract.” He put the handkerchief back into the folds of his cloak and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Ghet!” he yelled.

Anowon looked up from where he had been peering at the hedron stone’s inscription. Even though his wrists were bound, he had managed to pinch a small book between his thumb and first finger, and was copying the engraved symbols into the book with a bone pen.

“Find me food,” Sorin commanded.

Nissa hopped down off the hedron. “I can bring you game.”

But Sorin was looking ahead at the rising mesas in the distance. “The Ghet will acquire my food. I have special tastes.”

Nissa looked from Sorin to Anowon, who was tucking his small black book into a little pack he’d rigged from vines strung through the leaf of a gourgi bush. The vampire walked over to Sorin, who untied his hands.

“How do we know he will not flee?” Nissa said.
Or waylay us to our doom
, she thought.

“He will not,” Sorin said, looking at Anowon, who kept his eyes forward. “He is an archaeomancer; his interest lies in the magic of this ruined empire. He has no use of such things as ambushes or bold combat. Anyway, he wants to take us to the Eye of Ugin. Don’t you, Ghet?” Sorin’s voice raised in volume and pitch. “DON’T YOU?” he repeated.

For a moment, Nissa could feel the weight of Sorin’s ominous words float in the air like a physical presence, and then they settled onto Anowon. The vampire’s pupils dilated, Nissa noticed. He nodded once, then turned and walked under a branch and disappeared into the high grass.

Nissa looked at Sorin.
Why would a vampire do what a human ordered him to do?
she wondered.

“He will meet the baloth,” she said. “And die.”

“You don’t know vampires,” Sorin said.

And you do?
Nissa thought. She moved her staff to her other hand. “You don’t know baloth. A vampire bleeds like anything. I have proven that many times.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Yes, but they have the rather unerring ability to sneak up on things. A bit like elves, I must say,” Sorin said, laughing.

The shrill screech of a barutis bird rang out in the high canopy.

“Where do you want to travel?” Nissa said, once her pulse had calmed. The barutis’s cry, so senseless and without reason, always shocked her.

“I have told you. Akoum … The Teeth of Akoum,” Sorin said.

“But do you have a path in mind?”

“I believe it is called Graypelt now,” Sorin said. He was looking into the west again, at the high mesas.

“Graypelt? Why travel through Graypelt? Graypelt is full of trappers and stinking humans,” Nissa said as she looked down at the ground and cursed herself inwardly. “Of course there’s nothing wrong with humans,” she said. “Humans are fine.”

“Humans?” Sorin said, drawn out of his own thoughts. “Oh yes, humans. They’re wonderful. Such large noses!”

Soon the sun fell in the sky. The forest took life, and the crash and hiss of insects was so loud that Nissa’s ears rang. Something loud but slow crashed through the forest to their right. Probably a fang deer, Nissa thought.
Or worse
. But it was no baloth—Nissa knew that from the sound. One did not
hear
baloth.

She gathered wood and stood it with the tips together over a small wad of special moss that had been soaked in flammable sap.

“No fire,” Sorin said, suddenly loud in the total darkness. With her elf eyes she could see him sitting cross-legged. His lips were moving, but she could hear no sound. An incantation of some sort perhaps. She wondered if he could see her as well as she saw him.

“Baloth hate fire,” she said.

“Brood lineage love it.

“Brood lineage love it,” she repeated. “What are the brood lineage?”

Sorin’s lips stopped moving. He turned to her in the darkness. “How can you not know? Have you not traveled?” he asked.

“Only a bit. I am from Bala Ged on the other side of the ocean,” Nissa replied, sensing a trap.
Tell no one of your abilities
. It was more of a curse than anything else—this ability to planeswalk. It allowed her to lose her family and be exiled from her tribe and people. And to make matters worse, it wasn’t worth it.

Sorin’s lip curved up and to one side. “Only a bit,” he said, his turn to repeat.

He knows. How can he know?

Sorin cleared his throat. “Do you know the Eldrazi?” he asked.

“A childhood fable—the ancient ones of Zendikar.”

He nodded. “They are no fable,” he said. “Believe me. These are their children, free at last.”

“The Eldrazi are real?”

“Did we not bury your little friend in the forest?” he said. “Did you not interact with their brood today?”

Nissa felt the sweat on her forehead in the cooling night air. “And these
brood
dance in their crumbled palaces and eat sky mushrooms and steal children? Like the stories say?”

“They are both children and minions …”

“But what are they?” Nissa interrupted.

Sorin kept talking. “… and they will eat this plane.”

“But how. Why?”

Sorin didn’t reply. He was looking up at the star-spattered sky. Nissa waited. Soon a particular sound, a rustle, issued from the forest. She listened for a time, expecting against expectation a red-eyed baloth to come bounding out of the trees. Or a troupe of tree stalkers, the baloth’s smaller relative. They were almost as bad as baloth. Some said they were worse, because their size allowed them to sneak better than a baloth. One thing was sure: they had all the ferocity and cunning of their larger cousin.

With baloth, and tree stalkers for that matter, it was wisest to be on the ground when they attacked. In the branches, an individual was vulnerable from all sides and from above and below. On the ground and with somewhere to put your back, you had only one area to guard.

Sorin took first watch.

Nissa kicked a depression in the moss on the forest floor for her hip and lay on her side with her back against the hedron stone. It gave off a curious heat.

In the dark she listened to the waja lizards tearing the bark of the trees while the screamer bugs split their shells in the high branches. The trees knocked together in the breeze, and in a moment Nissa fell asleep. She dreamt for a time that she was floating in the deep, black space above her head. She screamed down at the green forest below, but still she floated higher and higher.

Suddenly she started awake. Sorin was standing above her in the dark. As she watched, he bent down over her. Her staff was beside her, and she knew she could have her stem out in a split second. “What is it?” she said.

Sorin froze.

“It’s your watch,” he said, after a time.

She rose in the cold dark and stretched, feeling the kink in her back loosen. The stars overhead had the quality of the finest velvet and a certain depth that Nissa had always liked. Anowon was back. She could smell him sleeping someplace nearby and even hear his slow breaths. He must have been as stealthy to not have woken her. She pulled her cloak around her bare neck and drew her knees up. She sat with her arms holding her knees and her back to the hedron and listened.

Sorin was awake, she could hear. The breaths he drew were less even than Anowon’s. He sat back against the hedron watching her. She imagined she could hear him scheming in the dark.
Who was he really?
She had intended to ask him, but the right time hadn’t presented itself. Well, if he slept tonight, if he ever slept, she would know. It was all fine to creep into camp and breathe quietly, but nobody could be stealthier than a Joraga, and she intended to prove it. But first Sorin had to fall asleep.

And he did. But by the time his breathing became steady and long, the stars had moved in their nightly rotations past the jaddi tree’s top branch, and the sky to the east was starting toward gray. She stood and stole as quietly as dust to where Sorin slept next to the hedron. She’d seen him draw his handkerchief out of an inner pocket of some sort. She carefully put her fingers to finding the pocket. But she couldn’t. He was wearing a black leather jerkin with plates affixed to it. There were no pockets in his cloak that she could find. It seemed that no part of his attire involved pockets, but the one pocket she could find in his pants contained only a common gray stone..

Nissa crept back to her lookout.
No pockets. How no pockets?
A human appears in the Turntimber Forest, widely known on Zendikar as an extraordinarily dangerous place, with naught gear but a smooth gray stone? And he is lost. How did he find his way into the forest without knowing his way out? It is as though he appeared in the middle of the forest.
Strange, unless he is a planeswalker
. She backed against the warm rock and looked out at the dark shadows in the forest. When the hedron she was leaning against had fallen long ago, it crushed flat the trees that had been growing. Tajuru popular legend named the huge hedron the
sudkin
, and many believed that one could hear the trees pushing and scratching underneath. And that the trees will try but never move the stone. There was even a saying about it: “That will happen when the sudkin moves.” Meaning never.

A form moved in the darkness. Nissa blinked and leaned forward. She stared until her eyes went dry, and she had to blink again. Anowon and Sorin were asleep to her left. Their breathing was the only sound in the forest. The only sound. A stiffness began to radiate from the back of Nissa’s neck, and her stomach turned suddenly.
The only sound
. The forest was never quiet, yet it was, and so suddenly. It had very recently been teeming with the sounds of spiral beetles foraging in the spent leaves on the floor … of snail, and the claw birds scrapping at the crotches of the turntimber and jaddi trees nearby, looking for bugs and frogs. But there was nothing anymore.

She rose quietly, holding her staff with both hands. Nothing moved in the shadows. She stood and watched, unmoving. She stood for so long that a snake slithered across her foot, and she looked down for a split second to see if it was poisonous. But it was only a nectar snake, with dark circles on its back. When she looked up again a shadow had moved. A normal eye would not have noticed it, but Nissa’s eyes weren’t normal. The change was slight: what looked like the shadow of leaf was curved ever so slightly, whereas previously it had been straight. Nissa bent and took hold of the jaddi nut that she’d placed next to her when she took watch. She brought the nut to her lips, whispering a spell, kissed it, and tossed it into the shadows. A green mottle arced up, following the nut’s path as it flew through the air.
It is almost time to wake up anyway
, she thought.

The nut hit the ground with a sudden flash of light. The tree stalkers—three, in fact—were caught standing, blinking their eyes in the flare. One was young—probably the one that had moved enough for her to detect it—but even in the blinding light it did not move again. She had precious seconds. Unlike the baloth, the stalkers’ fur was white. They were lean. Their teeth-crammed mouths hung open tasting the air, and as was their way, each was standing on its hind legs with its two over-sized front legs dangling so their purple claws almost touched the ground.