Where is the human guide? Anowon asked the goblin.
Sorin rolled over and looked at Anowon, who was watching Smara.
You only want to know where the human is because you want to feed on him, Sorin said.
The goblin did not reply. Instead it propped Smara against the cooling beast and began fanning her face. The kor stirred, and her eyes popped wide.
The titans stir, she said quite clearly.
Anowon said nothing. Sorin stood.
A movement caught Nissa s eye. Look there, she said. Nissa saw the tip of what looked like a bow disappear behind the edge of a pillar. They all turned to look. When the bow did not reappear they waited. But there was no bow, no movement of any sort.
Do not move rapidly, said a voice from behind. Nissa turned. A small force of elves was arrayed behind them, with bows drawn and nocked arrows trained. Nissa immediately recognized the arrow fletches of their shafts as the same ones sticking out of the dead brood.
Throw down your weapons, said a female elf with a strange accent. Nissa could not place it. She could not tell what kind of elves they were their skin was darker then hers, and they were shorter and stockier. Their bows glittered in the sun, and Nissa realized with a start that they were constructed of some wood she had never seen before.
Who are you? Nissa said.
Close your mouth, foreigner, said the female elf.
Throw down your staff.
Nissa let her staff fall with a thump. Sorin slowly took his great sword out and laid it carefully on the grass. Anowon kept staring down.
The elf commander turned her head. Collect the weapons and bind the vampire s hands, she said. Drag the human out from under the tentacled menace.
An elf collected Nissa s staff. Nissa watched him move. He was muscled like a human and harnessed as heavily as a kor. There were scars all over the exposed skin of his hands and face, and the tip of his right ear was missing, replaced by a thick edge of scar tissue.
The elves all crouched as they worked. The commander kept her eyes on the sky, holding a nocked arrow in her bow. She was as scarred as the other elves, and her eyes glowed.
Nissa s eyes lingered on the mass of brood moving around the base of the tower. They looked as though they were building something. A square wooden form was clearly visible in their midst.
What are they doing there? Nissa asked.
The commander turned and took a quick look at Nissa before looking away again. They are preparing an attack, she said, simply.
The elf pressed Sorin and Nissa s weapons into the commander s hand. Was that really everything we have? No wonder we captured by the elves, she thought.
The elf commander turned Nissa s staff in her hands. Her fingers detected the seam and pulled, then twisted.
Be careful with that, Nissa warned.
A drum started beating at Tal Tarig, and once it started, others pulsed behind it. The elf commander twisted the staff back together and turned. We go, she said.
They were crowded together into a tight group by the elves. The human was there too. The commander broke into a run and launched herself into the air at the end of the pillar, landing on the other pillar top. One by one, each of them jumped the pillar gap. Nissa looked down when she jumped and saw the deep undergrowth of the trees and shrubs that grew between the pillars, and below them a long, long fall into darkness.
When it was Anowon s turn to jump, the elves jabbed his ribs with the tips of their bows. Run, blood slurper, they hissed. Run, run. Anowon took a running start and easily jumped the gap, but an elf shoved him as he landed. Trying to regain his balance, Anowon spun, tripped, and went sprawling in the grass of the pillar. The elves broke into peals of laughter at this humiliation.
Nissa closed her eyes so as not to watch Anowon, hands bound, struggle to his feet. Did he not deserve the ridicule? she thought. He was a vampire after all a merciless vampire. He could not be trusted. On the other hand, he had conducted himself fairly, and who could blame him for feeding on the goblins, who were, after all, barely lifeforms. They were not children of the forest, but rather opportunists of the stone and dell.
In fact, Nissa reflected, most times Anowon was a scolar. He had not chosen this affliction of vampirism.
The elves lined them up, and they all jumped the next gap between the pillars. They jumped again and again, until everyone was at the other side of the canyon. With Tal Terig grinding itself into different positions behind them, they made their way through the rocky outcroppings that puckered at the edge of the canyon. Without the elves, the maze of rocky hills and crystals would have been impassable. But throughout the remaining daylight, the elves walked ahead and behind.
The sun was halfway below the skyline when the commander elf raised her hand and all the elves stopped. The commander looked behind and in all directions. Using her foot she brushed a patch of ground bare. Then she bent over and with her hands cleared away the branches and brush that had been pushed into the dusty soil. She revealed a hole, and without a word lowered herself into it, disappearing.
One by one the others followed. When it was Nissa s turn, she lowered herself down and felt ladder rungs. She descended the ladder in the dark, with the blotch of daylight above her head filled with the dark shadows of elves climbing down after her.
They climbed through the ground for so long that the hole that they had climbed through became a tiny dot and then disappeared completely. The elf above Nissa kept stepping on her fingers or putting his foot on the top of her head. The wooden ladder creaked in the small tunnel, swaying slightly.
A patch of light appeared below. It grew larger, and the elves below her were exiting though it. Nissa put her foot through the hole and crawled out onto sand. The light was too bright at first, and Nissa closed her eyes. When she was able to open them, she saw that they were in the bottom of a dry basin. Crystals poked out of the ground with their tips touching.
The elf commander started walking, and the others followed. They walked along the dusty basin until it was deep dark and the various night birds had arrived and were swooping around above their heads, snatching the singing gnats and piercer midges out of the air.
Anowon tripped, and one of the elves delivered a kick to the vampire s forehead that knocked him sprawling. The vampire rose and began walking again. The elf next to Nissa chuckled.
Then Nissa noticed something strange. The elf that had kicked Anowon was glowing. She looked closer. His veins were glowing. She looked at the other elves. Not all of them had veins that glowed, but many of them did. Some of their eyeballs also glowed.
Nissa turned to the elf that had kicked Anowon. His face was a spider web of glowing veins. Why do you glow? Nissa asked.
The elf put his hand over his mouth. A moment later the ground began to shake.
The shaking became violent. The vial of water around Nissa s neck began to boil telling her that the Roil was occurring. She threw herself on the ground, wishing more than ever for her staff.
A moment later the ground split open like ripe fruit. Amid the dramatic shaking, Nissa could see the orange glow of magma in the crack. She attempted to roll away from the fissure but only succeeded in bouncing back and hitting her head hard on the ground. For a moment Nissa lost consciousness, and when she woke a column of writhing magma was streaming upward out of the crack in the ground. It cooled to black rock almost immediately. In the next moment Nissa saw shoots peeking out of the basalt. Soon the spar was covered with the dense green fuzz of growing plants as the ground continued to shake. The plants grew until they covered the column.