Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (23 page)

The elf that had refused to speak to her before leaned close to her ear. “A life bloom,” he said. “Truly we are blessed.”

Nissa looked again at the strange living pillar. The ground stopped trembling, and the plants started moving in the wind. Well, maybe not blessed, she thought, but it was an interesting occurrence.

“How long will it last?” Nissa asked.

“Not more than a day,” the commander elf said. “But you shall soon see one that has lasted over a hundred years.” And with that, he turned and began walking.

Soon a different tower than Tal Terig appeared on the dark horizon. When they were nearer, Nissa saw that this one did not have the same smooth sides of the Puzzle Tower. Its irregular form stood out like a natural monument in the dry basin.

“Ora Ondar,” the elf commander said. “The Impossible Garden.”

Nissa knew the stories, as did every elf and most humans. Examples of every plant that grew on Akoum grew on a basalt tower that shot up out of the wastes. The tower was shaped similarly to the pillar that had formed after the lava Roil she’d seen, except Ora Ondar was larger.

As they neared, Nissa could see the fabled plants growing off the pillar in a lush cascade.

“Formed by the Roil more than a hundred years ago,” the commander said. “And tended continuously by the Nourishers. Come.”

She led them to a hole at the base of the tower. Stairs chiseled out of the black rock spiraled upward. Again, the commander led the way. Nissa noticed with a pang of alarm that the elves waited to go last, and that they did so with arrows nocked on their bowstrings. As the group walked up the staircase they passed doorways that led out into the rooms where the plants grew. Each level of the tower seemed to grow another kind of plant. One level had only a plant that smelled like water and produced flowers as large as an elf. Another was all tall ferns. Yet another had plants with flowered mouth parts that lunged at the elf keepers who protected themselves with huge shields of skins stretched across frames.

“Where are we going?” Nissa asked.

The elf commander said nothing.

They climbed the spiral staircase until Nissa’s thighs burned and she was huffing with exertion. On the top level, the sky was dark and huge. A group of elves with crystal lanterns was busy picking something off the small trees that grew there—a white fruit that glowed slightly as it hung off the boughs.

The elves that had come behind up the spiral staircase pushed the group forward with their short bows. Soon a figure stepped out from behind a tree. He was an older elf with fruits in each of his hands. As they watched he took a large bite out of one of the fruits. Juice ran down the corners of his mouth as he gave a wide grin. His teeth glowed. His eyeballs glowed. His unkempt hair looked like a snipe falcon’s nest on his head. He smiled again.

“I had a dream last night,” the figure said. “In this dream a voice said, ‘Ser Amaran?’ and I said ‘yes?’” Ser Amaran took another bite out of the fruit in his right hand. He chuckled as though he had just remembered a good joke, and more juice ran from the corners of his mouth. The he frowned, and his whole face seemed to fall. “This voice told me that Ora Ondar would fall. The voice told me that our sacred kolya fruit would be scattered across the barren waste that the Eldrazi will make of our world … those parasites in the deep.” His glowing eyes flashed from Nissa, to Sorin, to Smara, to Smara’s goblin, and finally rested on Anowon.

“You have all been captured for being too close to the forbidden tower,” the elf chief said. “What were you doing there?”

Nobody said anything.

“Speak. Or are you minions of the tentacled creatures with the beautiful hearts?”

Nissa looked out the corner of her eye at Anowon, but the vampire’s face had the same perplexed look she imagined she had.
Beautiful hearts?

“Very well, do not tell me,” he said, taking another bite of the fruit in his hand. “But I will know this vital piece of information. An odd party such as yours clearly does not travel for pleasure. You are spies, of course. Vampire spies for the tentacled invasion.”

The elf commander hurried forward and whispered in the chief’s ear. Ser Amaran turned his head as the commander spoke, but he did not take his eyes off Anowon.

“Lock them away, all of them. At dawn throw the bloodied one from the grove, and feed his crushed body to the slaughter shrubs. Throw the guide to the salt flats.”

N
issa, Sorin, Smara, and her goblin were thrown into cells carved out of the basalt. They tried to sleep, but the spiny floor would not allow them.

Anowon was in another cell, and all that night the stone door of the cell opened and closed, opened and closed. Once Nissa heard Anowon moan. But aside from that, there was no sound from inside the cell.

“We have to free him,” Nissa said.

Sorin shrugged. “Vampires do not fear pain or death,” he replied.

“He is not that way,” Nissa said.

Sorin turned to her and raised his eyebrows. “He is not what exactly? A vampire?”

“He is not that
kind
of vampire.”

Sorin smiled. “He’s the kind that wanted to drain you before I dissuaded him.”

The door of Anowon’s cell slammed shut.

“But he is our only guide,” Nissa said. “The human is gone.”

Sorin said nothing.

The goblin coughed and glanced at Smara. “I know the way,” the goblin said. “To Teeth of Akoum.”

They both turned to the goblin, who had not spoken
since Smara had bumbled into their camp in the Makindi Trench.

Smara also stared at the goblin, who clapped its claw over its mouth.

Sorin turned back to Nissa. “You see, there is our new guide.”

“But Anowon saw how the brood was released. Perhaps he knows how to put them back?”

Sorin’s smile dropped a jot. “The vampire does not know how to put the brood back,” he said. “You can trust me.”

The door to Anowon’s cell opened. Someone laughed as they exited his cell. Then the cell door slammed again. She could understand some of what the strange elves were saying. Two were talking about “the fruit eater” whoever that was.

“Who is this Ser Amaran from the grove of fruit trees?” Nissa said.

Sorin waved his hand. “Some minor figure.”

“Anowon would know who Ser Amaran is,” Nissa said.

Sorin snorted. “We should be more concerned with how we are going to get out of this cell.”

“When they open the door, you can use your rot talk to destroy them.”

“I cannot risk that … not with this many crystals and lava rock around. The sound could echo. And nobody wants that.”

“Then I will have to end whoever opens the door,” Nissa said.

“Perhaps if there is one guard or two,” Sorin said. “But six? I think not.”

Nissa pushed her chin out. “I am Joraga,” she said.

“You are unarmed,” Sorin said. “Anyway, I don’t think they plan to let us out.”

“They have to some day.”

“Do they?” Sorin said. “Did you happen to notice what the kolya trees were growing in? Or were you too busy watching the minor elf stuffing his mouth with his sacred fruit?”

“I did not notice anything unusual about the bed the trees were growing in. This pillar is the remains of a life bloom Roil. Did you not hear the elf?”

Nissa waited for Sorin’s response.

“Yes,” Sorin replied. “But I also heard her say that most life blooms last a day or two at the most.”

Nissa’s trap had worked: Sorin had been listening. He had good ears for a human, as she had been at the end of the line and he’d been the first. She would have to watch him closer. Humans did not have ears capable of hearing a whispered conversation from half a mile away. That was an elf’s ability … or a vampire’s.

“I saw bones protruding from the soil under the trees,” Sorin said.

“Bones?” Nissa said. Could elves do something like that—kill and bury beings to ensure their plants lived?
Sure
, she thought. Her own people often killed any sentient beings they found in their forest, regardless of species. If these Nourisher elves tied their way of being, their tribal identity, with those trees, then they would do any sort of thing to ensure that they thrived and prospered.

“Yes, bones,” Sorin said. “If they are to use us for fertilizer, why not kill us here in this cell with poison?”

Nissa looked down at the empty bowl of gruel her jailer had shoved at her. She’d eaten it all without a word, gagging slightly at the grubs which she had seen the elves picking off the kolya leaves earlier that day. But at least she had known they were fresh.

“Then we need to free ourselves quickly and rescue Anowon,” she said.

“Are we not back to the discussion we were having before?” Sorin said.

From far away Nissa heard the low drone of a horn. It was a tremendous dusty sound, the loudness of which increased then dropped off then built again to a crescendo. She heard the sound of thick-soled sandals shuffling in the hallway.

“What was that?” Sorin said.

“Death,” Smara said, suddenly. “Death, death, death, death.”

“Hush,” Nissa said. She listened to the horn for a while longer. “A signal horn. They use a similar code to the Tajuru—a force approaching.”

“Well, we must get out now,” Sorin said. He cast his eyes around the cell. They had been over the cell in the daylight and found nothing. The simple bench was carved out of the wall, and there was no window. The solid door was the very piece the builders had cut to make the doorway, presumably. It fit into the doorway so snugly that Nissa could not see light at the seams.

Sorin got to his knees before the door to look at the lock. After a moment of inspection he inserted his long first finger into the keyhole and drew it out again.

“If the door were wood,” he said, “if it had ever been alive, I might have had some enchantments that could putrefy it or make it an entity for us to command.” Sorin pushed on the door, and when it did not move he strode over to the bench and sat down.

Nissa bent down for a look in the keyhole. She’d heard the elf unlock and lock the door three times—when he and the others put them in the cell at Ser Amaran’s order, and the two times they had been
brought food. She had never heard the jingle of keys, or the scrape of metal on metal, or metal on rock. They were elves after all. If she were to design a lock, it would not feature metal … a useful but untrustworthy creation. She would use something natural. Nissa looked into the lock hole again.

The hole was dark, or course. But Nissa could see clearly enough the hallway on the other side of the door. There was no keyhole shape to the hole, just a circle.
What kind of key would fit a circle?
she wondered.

One thing was certain: the cell had not been built to hold elves. Either the occupants of the Impossible Garden never thought they would imprison an elf, or there were other cells for elves elsewhere in the tower. The door was very small, and Nissa concluded that the cell had been built in all likelihood for goblins. Even the cruellest elf would leave a window if he knew elves were being held. Not being able to see and smell the outside world was paramount to the most inhumane torture for an elf. No, their cell had not been built for elves.

Nissa looked into the hole again. Silent figures passed in the hallway. Inside the lock’s hole the opening from keyhole to keyhole was absolutely smooth. She pushed her finger into the hold and felt a sensation. The feeling was neither hot nor cold, but buzzed slightly.

“There is a field of power here,” Nissa said.

Sorin rolled his eyes. “You are coming to that realization only now?” he said.

Nissa ignored him. “Goblin,” she said. “Have you looked? You are of the Lava Steppe Tribe, are you not?”

The lead goblin stood and walked to the lock. He did not glance at Nissa. With a grunt he bent and peered
in the rock. He looked up at Nissa, then back at the lock, and then back at Nissa, before shrugging.

They heard footsteps approaching in the hall. Soon something was inserted into the keyhole from the other side, and the door swung out into the hallway. A force of six armed elves strode in. They had bright bladed scimitars and armor composed of pieces of chipped slate wired together.

Nissa could smell the fear on them, and it smelled like warm copper coins. She peered closely at them.
They are not afraid of us
, she realized as their eyes jumped toward the hallway. The lead elf tucked something into a pocket in his robe. A key, Nissa supposed. He closed the door and frowned at Nissa.

Sorin took a deep breath. Nissa saw what was to happen, and she just had time to clap her hands over her ears. A moment later a string of rasping, somehow vile sounding words emanated from Sorin’s open mouth. Many of the words came with a guttural boom from the back of his throat. Sorin snapped them off in such a way that his tongue clicked wetly in his mouth.

The effect was instantaneous. The elves fell dead and rotting a moment later. Nissa found herself on the basalt floor as well. The very room vibrated when she stood, as did the contents of her skull.

Sorin stood in the middle of the floor, cleaning his fingernails with his small eating knife, which he pointed at the mess on the floor. “Now,” Sorin said. “Who will find the key in all that muck?”