Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (21 page)

Anowon threw down a tooth, which began to glow. The combers were a mixed group—some goblins, some humans, two world-gift kor … even an elf—a Tajuru-splinter by how he wore his quiver—with a dire look in his eye. Nissa put her stem sword back into the staff and stepped forward. “Come,” she said to the combers, gesturing next to the tooth. “Sit here.”

When they were seated under the eyes of Anowon and Sorin, Nissa went around and collected the knives. Each knife was different, clearly salvaged. One of them was even made of flint. She took the knives to the water and threw them in.

“Those took a long time to collect,” the head man said.

“They will still be there when you return for them later,” Nissa said.

“Are we your prisoners now?” the human asked.

“No,” Sorin said. “You are now our guides. At least until we get to the top of that cliff. At that point we will decide if you have been helpful. If you have not, we will let our vampire drain your veins. I must say, you do look tasty.”

The human looked at the sand between his feet and did not speak again.

As soon as the sun broke on the eastern horizon, they rose, stiff with cold, and proceeded to the cliff.

“How long will this take?” Sorin said.

“All day,” the human replied. In the sunlight Nissa could see that he was a short man with every inch of exposed skin covered with puckered white scars. A scraggly beard clung to his chin, as did remnants of armor to his wiry body.

He began strapping his harness to one of the ropes
they had descended the night before. Nissa took the rope in her hand, feeling its odd, firm texture.

“What is this made of?” she asked.

“Dulam beast hide,” the man replied, taking out a coil of thick rope and deftly looping it to his harness and then to the rope. “The crystal has trouble cutting it,” he said before pulling himself up, catching each foot in one of the loops he had tied to the harness. He pulled so the loop cinched around each foot, raised one of them, and stepped up. The rope caught and raised him up one step. He repeated the action with his other foot, and soon he was ascending the rope as though it was a ladder.

“Stop,” Sorin said. “Wait there. We would not want you getting up to the top and alerting whatever associates you have up there to our presence.”

Three of the combers stayed on the beach while Nissa, Sorin, Anowon, and Smara ascended. The combers strapped them in and tied their foot loop tethers. Smara’s goblins, both of them, looked at one another and simply climbed Smara’s rope without harness or tether.

Nissa looked down at the beach after she had been climbing for a couple of hours. The three remaining combers were sanding at the base of the cliff, eyeing the ship tipped on its side.

Soon Nissa was too high to look down; the clouds obscured her view, and the wind blew so hard that it caused the rope to bow and snap against the crystals. But the rope did not break, unlike the sleeve of her jerkin, which sliced easily when she grazed a crystal halfway up the cliff.

The crystals were everywhere as they climbed. Sorin managed to cut his hand, and the blood fell in rivulets, only to be blown away in the wind. When the comber climbing near her saw Sorin’s blood blowing
away he made a certain whistle and pointed to Sorin. The head man stopped and looked down.

“You must bind your gash,” the man said. “Certain animals can smell blood on the wind.” He closed his mouth and turned back to climbing. Nissa noticed that all of the combers doubled their pace. Nissa doubled hers also, and soon they were above the misty fog and in the bright sun. The ocean below was a blurry outline.

And still they climbed, Nissa becoming more confident with the ingenious rope system. At midday the combers stopped on a small ledge, the flat side of a crystal that had had its sides chipped and dulled enough that it did not cut them. They sat on the shelf with their feet dangling over the edge and drank water sloshing in canteens made from the exoskeletons of large beetles. There was no food—there had not been any for more than three days, and Nissa’s stomach had stopped hurting. She did not even miss it.

They attained the top of the cliff by late afternoon. Sorin poked the top of his head over the edge and seeing no sign of movement, scrambled up. The dulam hide ropes were tied to huge crystals that had first been wrapped with more layers of hide as thick as Nissa’s finger.

When they were all up and resting in the strange, wavy shadows created behind the crystals, Sorin looked over at Anowon. The vampire had closed his eyes again and was kneeling on the hard rock, moving his fingers soundlessly over the writing on one of his metal cylinders. The combers sat opposite Anowon, pretending not to notice him.

“So,” Sorin said to the combers. “You were not totally unhelpful.”

“We traveled down to help you,” the head man said. “We never meant you any harm.”

“Um,” Sorin said, and then turned. “Ghet?”

Anowon opened one eye.

“Ghet, do you know the way from here to the Teeth of Akoum?”

The vampire’s eye moved to the head man and stayed there. “Not precisely,” Anowon said.

Sorin addressed the head comber. “You will come with us and act as a guide. You will bring another …” Sorin turned to Anowon and asked, “Two?”

Anowon nodded.

Sorin turned back to the comber. “Bring two of your associates,” he continued. “One of them might be eaten by the end. I feel I must tell you.”

“And if we refuse?” the comber said. He spoke very calmly, without fear or uncertainty. Nissa found she liked him for that.

“If you refuse, then we will destroy all of you,” Sorin said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Anowon. “And he will turn you into nulls.”

They spent that night at the top of the cliff, protected from the nearly continuous wind by a huge crystal lying on its side. In the morning two of the beach combers had gone, and the others got together to decide which of them would accompany the party.

The head man volunteered, as did a merfolk who Nissa had not seen at first. The rest of the combers said hasty goodbyes and left, disappearing into the rocks. Sorin and Nissa noticed how brief their parting words had been.

“If I were you,” Sorin said, turning to the two remaining combers, “I would have told my associates to meet us somewhere up the trail. Maybe a loose
boulder could be pushed. Maybe there is a certain ledge or hole only you people know about. No?”

The two combers stood looking down at their shabby sandals made of what Nissa took to be dulam hide stitched to other, older pieces of the same hide. Their shins and knees were wrapped with the same material.

“Is that what you were talking about before they left?” Sorin asked.

“No,” the headman said. He stood up tall. Nissa thought he really was a fine specimen of a human, despite his thick, black beard. Growing a beard was an ability human males seemed to relish, for most of the human males she had seen displayed some type of one. The head man’s beard was long enough that it touched his chest. “You have my word,” he said. “We spoke of no such thing.”

Smara muttered to herself off behind a crystal. One of the goblins cooed at her. Sorin narrowed his eyes at the head man.

“You are an interesting human,” Sorin said. “I feel there is more to you than meets the eye.”

The head man said nothing.

“Perhaps it is the first blood,” Sorin said as he squatted before the head man, as one might with a child. “Your people were some of the first in this place. You and the kor. Now the vampires,” Sorin said, brushing his hand in the direction of Anowon. “They are relative newcomers. The merfolk too.”

He was speaking in the same tone he had used to tell Nissa of the Eldrazi titans, still buried in the rock. What Sorin had not told her was why he knew all of this about old Zendikar. Could he have been on Zendikar in the first place, to see the old races and know about the vampires of old? And how old would that make him? she wondered.

Without bothering to reply, the head man turned and slowly began to walk, with the merfolk who had also volunteered following close behind. They stopped and shouldered the supplies that the other combers had left.

Nissa pulled on the pack that Khalled had prepared for her in Graypelt. Sorin brushed off his hands and walked behind Nissa. Smara tripped after them, with a goblin fore and aft as she walked. Anowon followed last, turning a metal cylinder and running his fingers over it as he walked.

They walked up a series of small rises until they stopped at the top of the last one. Stretched out before them was Akoum. Below lay a rick of hedrons of all sizes jumbled together, with most being many times larger than any Nissa had ever seen. A mist sat low on the land, obscuring the ground, but in many of the cracks of the hedrons, Nissa could see the faint pink glow of molten rock. Scattered among the fields were crystals, some of them as large as the hedrons. They fit so close together, there was hardly a space between them. Broken bits of hedron stones floated above the larger hedrons.

“How do we move through
that?”
said Nissa.

“There is a way,” the head man said. He looked until he saw what he wanted. The group made their way over to where the constitutent parts of a shattered large hedron were floating just above the ground. The head man took a bit of dulam rope and fashioned it into a lasso. He waved them to a larger chunk of the hedron, and carefully they climbed onto it and clung as it bobbed.

Then the head man scaled the chunk of hedron. He stood atop it and swung the lasso until its loop went around a nearby tip of a hedron. Then the head man
pulled. At first nothing happened. Then slowly the rock began to move. When it moved past the hedron he’d lassoed, the head man yanked the loop off and swung the lasso onto another hedron and pulled again. Their hedron moved a bit faster. Soon they were floating at a walking pace over the hedrons in the fields.

“We dare go no faster,” the man said. “Some of these stones are higher than others, and we may need to slow to dodge one of them.”

“How long does this rock field continue?” Nissa asked.

The man turned to her and blinked.

They traveled in such a way for three days. Another of the goblins disappeared in that time, as did the merfolk who had come with the head man. Anowon made no pretense. He shrugged when Nissa found the goblin’s left sandal hanging near the edge of the hedron.

The head man had already shared the meager tack he had. He looked at Nissa and pointed ahead.

“The land changes ahead and there should be game,” he said.

Nissa looked. There seemed to be no end to the hedron and crystal fields. The horizon was dotted with more floating hedrons. She knew she could rig a snare or some form of trap if they could only find a place where living things could be found. She glanced at the head man again. “He said the terrain is about to change,” she said to the others.

Anowon, who was nearby, looked past her at the head man pulling on the rope looped around his chest and arms.

“The man is Eldrazi feed,” Anowon said.

Nissa did not know what to say.

Anowon continued. “His people were the feed of the Eldrazi.”

“I thought they did not eat like we eat?”

“True,” Anowon said. “They live on pure mana. But they had my people collect energy by feeding, and then tapped us.”

“Why?”

“Our blood condenses mana,” Anowon said. Nissa edged closer a bit, as much as she dared. “Our blood is a sort of distillate of the mana from every victim. The Eldrazi beasts kept us for that sole purpose.”

“And the hooks?” Nissa said, pushing her luck, she knew.

But the vampire smiled faintly, something Nissa had almost never seen him do. He looked down at the hooks that extended from his elbow.

“For labor. They could strap us into their harnesses all day, let us feed, and then tap us all night,” Anowon said. “The arrangement was wonderful … for them.”

“You said
was,”
Nissa said. “But the brood do the same thing. That is how we found you in the Turntimber.”

“But they were copying their masters. They did not know how to strap us in. I virtually had to show them.”

“How did you know?”

The vampire looked out over the hedrons. “Some memories are kept alive, by the Bloodchiefs.”

Bloodchiefs were the very old vampires. “You were created by a Bloodchief?” Nissa said. Anowon was of that lineage, of course—not your normal shadow creeper.

“Yes,” Anowon said. “My Bloodchief was an original slave. She told me about the hooks. She told me about The Mortifier, the first vampire who sold his
own kind to the Eldrazi as slaves.” Anowon looked out at the hedrons. Nissa looked down.

The sun crossed the sky, and by late afternoon the hedrons had started to become less frequent as the land split into deep canyons. The trenches radiated away on all sides and echoed with strange calls.

E
ach canyon was almost a league wide and many more deep, and composed of dark gray rocks covered with crags. The canyons were not empty, however. The tops of vast pillars formed a patchwork level with the top of the canyon. Branches from vines and trees climbing up and around the pillars filled the spaces between them with dense growth. The top of each pillar was covered with grass or rock, and raw crystals protruded through some.