Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (13 page)

“What did she say?” she asked finally.

“Some of it was classical Vampire,” Anowon said. “The rest …” He looked at Sorin.

“It was Eldrazi, but spattered with vampire,” Sorin said. “Look.”

Nissa looked where Sorin pointed. The piece of earth the palace was perched atop moved slowly, pulling its tethers tight. Many tiny things were flying around the palace. As she watched, one of the ropes fell.

Suddenly there was a small tremor in the earth and a sharp creaking, and the fluid in the vial hanging from the leather thong around Nissa’s neck began
to boil so that she felt its heat all the way through her jerkin.

“Roil!” she yelled.

Nissa twisted her staff in two and drew the flexible stem blade from its sheath. With a snap of her wrist the blade stiffened enough for Nissa to jab it into the ground. She felt the green blade shoot roots out and anchor in the black dirt. And in the next moment the Roil was on them.

Before the shaking became too violent, Nissa was able to catch a glimpse of a grass bloom—a wild and rapid groth of stalks that sometimes came with the Roil. A patch of earth jutted and tore out of the ground. Dirt sprayed, and Nissa closed her eyes and held onto the handle of the stem sword. The ground buckled and shook, and dirt sprayed down on her. Soon there was a massive tearing sound, and the ground heaved up and to the side. Nissa put her left hand over her eye, and through the slit between her fingers was able to see that the ground she was lying on was floating.
If I roll off, I’ll be at the mercy of the Roil
, she thought. But staying would mean potentially floating high in the sky.

Nissa made the stem rigid, pulled it from the earth, and rolled off the ground she was on. She barely felt the fall. As soon as she hit the ground, the Roil bounced her back into the air, and she came down in a crater of some sort. She scrambled up, not wanting to sit in a low space if whatever had come out of the space slammed back in.

She was almost out of the crater when the Roil stopped abruptly. A shadow fell over Nissa. The land that had come from the crater was falling. She brought the stem sword back, and the blade lengthened and turned flexible as she snapped it out and
wrapped it around a boulder that had not been there before the Roil.

Nissa was glad it was there. She pulled herself out of the crater and looked up, expecting the ground to slam back into the hole. But it stayed aloft.

The air seemed to shimmer after the Roil. She wiped the dirt from her eyes and looked around. The breath caught in her throat. Where there had been a plain of grass only moments before, there was an expanse filled with floating islands of ground. Nissa quickly counted seventeen of the islands, but more dotted the landscape. And the palace was not one of them.
Where is the palace?
she wondered.

She located the palace near the base of the mountains, lying on its side, perhaps a day’s walk away if she judged the distance correctly. She heard a sound and turned. Anowon was standing near, looking out at the floating land. Smara was next to him somehow, talking to herself; or was she talking to Anowon? The vampire’s face was impossible to read.

Behind them, Sorin was floating unconscious in the air, with his long white hair floating all around him like a shroud. As Nissa watched, he woke with a violent lurch that knocked him out of the air, and he fell with a grunt.

Sorin lay on the grass, which had shrunk again to the length of normal grass in the wake of the Roil. Many elves worshipped blooms, when plants and trees grew suddenly huge. And when the plants shrank back to their normal size after the fact, they saw that as divine as well. Not Nissa. Plant blooms did not seem natural. For the bloom to be holy, then the Roil would have to be holy, and that was something Nissa could not believe. Nothing holy could be that devastating.
After a moment, Sorin stirred and rolled over. He put his hand to his forehead.

“I’m beginning to like Zendikar,” Sorin said, sitting up. “I really am. It feels like I’ve been here for years, when it’s been more like weeks.”

When Sorin saw the floating islands of grassland, he shrugged.

Anowon was with Smara at the edge of the mesa, peering over the edge. He looked up at Nissa and showed his teeth. She walked over to where they stood. Anowon pointed down at the canyon floor far below. “How are your eyes?” he asked.

She detected the movement on the canyon floor almost immediately.

Nissa doublechecked before speaking. “Brood,” she said finally.

“What are they doing?” Sorin said, standing next to her.

“It’s hard to tell, but some of them seem to be eating the ground.”

Nobody said anything for a time.

“Eating it?” Anowon finally said.

“There are some large ones with tentacles for back legs and long muzzles …”

Sorin moaned. “Are their muzzles blue?” he asked.

“I can’t tell,” Nissa said. “But, yes, it is possible, now that you put words to it.”

“Trackers,” Sorin said.

“But why would they—”

“They are probably tracking the kor refugees,” Sorin said. “But they will find us in the process if we don’t move.”

“How do you know these things?” Nissa said. “The ‘blue muzzles’?” The words were out of her mouth before she knew it.

Sorin said nothing, but looked over the edge and squinted. For a moment Nissa wished he’d just step right off the edge. Then the feeling left her, and she wondered what his weak human eyes could see.

“There must be four hundred of them,” he said. “The floor of the trench is covered with them. Wonderful.”

Nissa looked over the edge.

“The giants were right,” Anowon said.

“The giants are down there,” Sorin said. “Their bodies are being dismembered right now.” He was quiet for a moment. “Rather interesting entrails.”

Nissa turned. “They will find our sign and ascend to us by day’s end.”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Sorin said.

“But we will not be here,” Nissa said. She began walking toward the mountains, along the trail on Khalled’s map. The trail would take them past the tipped castle. “We should run.”

And they did. They ran, holding what gear they had against themselves to keep it from bouncing. The goblins managed to carry Smara. One held each limb, and a fifth ran in the middle, while others scampered behind.

Nissa felt the mana from the grass course around her ankles as she ran. With this mana she spun a camouflage spell around the whole party, hoping to make them appear as a patch of grass on the expanse to any prying eyes that might be watching. Nissa dropped back a bit and squinted at her companions. But it was hard to tell if her spell had worked. She was too close to gauge its effectiveness. Nissa sped up.

The party ran through the shadows of the floating islands of land, which dropped clods of dirt from bare roots as they passed. Nissa saw a small rodent
poke its head out of a hole and almost plummet the distance into the massive crater where the other side of its hole continued.

The wind picked up and began to blow in their faces as they ran. Soon they were sweating with exertion. Nissa couldn’t help but think about how the wind in their faces would help spread their scent for the brood tracking them. She ran faster, and the others picked up their speed as well.

The sun was half-past zenith when they fell to the ground panting. Nissa laid her face down and breathed the rich smell of dirt and grass. Her tongue was swollen, and her cracked lips hurt. She needed water.

“There might be water at that palace,” she said.

The palace was closer, but it still lay tipped with its many tethers strewn around it. Nissa had watched for movement as they approached, but she had not seen any. It must have been inhabited by humans. They had begun to pass fields of grain, but what huts there were had been abandoned long ago. She was no judge of crops, but the stunted plants in the ground did not look like the most prosperous bounty she had ever seen.

After a bit of rest and hard tack, Nissa stood and began running again. Sorin was on his feet in an instant and following her at an alarming pace. He had passed her easily as they ran earlier, and she had the distinct feeling that he was slowing his pace so the rest of them could keep up. Nissa sped up to keep ahead of Sorin. It is the poor food I am eating that is allowing the human to run faster, she thought as she pumped her legs.
But what is
he
eating?
she wondered again.
How is his body functioning without food?

Anowon, on the other hand, was not having as easy a time. Vampires were capable of alarming feats of
physical prowess. They were naturally stronger than most elves Nissa had met. In the jungles of Bala Ged, Nissa had seen a vampire literally run up the trunk of a tree. They could jump better than most elves, but Nissa had never seen a vampire freefall off a tree, spin in midair, and catch itself on a branch. Still, a vampire should be able to run at least as fast as an elf.

Anowon was not running as fast. In fact, the vampire was midway between Nissa and the goblins that were, after all, carrying a mad kor. She had little doubt that it had been Anowon who had disposed of one of Smara’s goblins. If that were the case, then Anowon should be quite fit and able to run. Nissa found it strange.

They ran past more huts hunched next to the fallow fields, then topped a low rise. The palace loomed ahead. In its course it had floated away and then back again to its original crater, only to fall hugely canted to the right. There were three lines of smoke rising sideways from the ground around the palace.

Then Nissa saw the first hole. Soon she saw more dotting the landscape ahead. She stopped running. Each was about a man’s length across and just as deep. Many of the holes were stuffed with what looked like crops. Others were empty.
Brood holes
, she muttered.

When Nissa saw a hole with a pair of bare legs jutting straight out, she jumped behind a nearby hut and crouched. When Sorin and Anowon joined her, she leaned over.

“Brood,” Sorin said before she could even open her mouth.

Anowon nodded.

Ahead the ground was flat and grassy with small undulating ridges. The huts were more common along the foot-trod path they had been following. Each hut was made of thatch and turf bricks, and as
Nissa crouched behind one, she could smell cooking grease from within. A gust of wind blew her hair in her eyes, and with the hooked finger of her right hand she pushed it behind her long ear.

“There were people cooking in this one earlier today,” she said.

The brood holes that dotted the landscape were fresh, and as she looked, Nissa saw plenty more legs sticking out of them.

“Why do they stuff the corpses in the holes?” Nissa said.

Sorin and Anowon said nothing, but Nissa had the distinct impression that one or both of them knew why.

“What’s that?” Anowon whispered. He pointed.

A large column of dust far to the right in the grassland. The point from which it emanated was hidden behind one of the rises.

“That, friends, is the dust thrown up by a great host,” Sorin said. He stood and began walking forward to a high point occupied by another hut.

When he reached the hut, he stopped and stared down. Nissa stared too. It was a group of something walking along the ridge between the grassland and the mountains.

“Sizable,” Sorin said.

“The tentacled scourge,” Nissa said. She could not make out the individual forms, but she could see that some were taller than others, and that some of them moved in strange ways.

“I suppose we should count ourselves lucky to be seeing their backs,” Sorin said as he turned and began walking toward the palace.

Nissa had never seen anything like it. The populations of Zendikar did not have the discipline to form ranks. Plus, there was never enough of anyone, other
than the wild creatures and trees, to form any kind of organized fighting force. And even though the brood were not formed in anything like ranks, they were traveling in a group.
Where had they learned to walk together in lines? she wondered
. She did not know enough about the brood to answer the question. But she would find out, she promised herself.

Behind the brood, the grasslands swept up in a smooth transition to the Piston Mountains. As she watched, the top of one mountain came hammering down on the base, and the ground shook.

“If we are very lucky,” Sorin yelled over his shoulder as he walked, “The brood that did this”—he kicked at a leg poking out of one of the holes—“will meet and join forces with the brood advancing on us even now from behind.”

Nissa looked back the way they had come. There, far away, was a smaller dust cloud.

“Should not be long now,” Sorin said.

T
he holes became more common as they neared the palace, which, itself, had bodies hanging from their riggings—heavy humans, dead in their armor with strange fighting devices strapped to their arms. Plumes of smoke spiraled from within somewhere. The huge tethers Nissa had seen from across the plain lay strewn on the grass, as thick as a man’s torso.

Soon they were past the last hut and near the roots of the mountains. Ahead, a huge rock stood on its end, balanced precariously next to the trail. Nissa stopped and took out her map. The trail wound into the foothills and then skirted to the right. They would be moving parallel to the brood lineage that were beating their way around the base of the mountains.
Will they cut into the mountains when they find our path?
she asked herself as she rolled up the maps.