Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (27 page)

Nissa looked at the turn he was talking about. “He’s right,” she said. “It’s the perfect place for an ambush.”

“We must leave the wagon here and travel rougher,” Anowon said. “If we can.”

“Are you going to tell us what you know?” Nissa said.

“No,” Anowon said.

“Why?” Nissa asked.

“Because I might be wrong,” the vampire replied.

“Vampires
are
wily trackers,” Sorin said.

Nissa could not be sure if he was saying that Anowon was a good tracker, or that they were being tracked well by other vampires. She turned to check Sorin’s expression, but it did not reveal his true meaning. The possibility that vampires were tracking them made her skin tingle with fear and excitement. Vampires were one of the two creatures she actually enjoyed killing.

“Are we being tracked by vampires, or is Anowon a good tracker?” Nissa said.

“Yes,” Sorin said. “We will see just how good a tracker our pale friend is.”

Nissa shook her head.
A straight answer would be nice just once. Just once
.

The group left the wagon and started on foot. They moved slowly over the boulders, staying away from possible ambush sites. They avoided blind angles, swinging wide around corners so as not to be surprised. Before they left the tank they drank as much water as they could, wishing very much that they had not thrown away their skins on the flat plain.

But by dusk they were thirsty. They had just moved up a steep alluvial fan of loose rock, a hard scramble but one with no blind spots, no possibility of ambush, when Anowon stopped suddenly.

“There is something ahead,” he hissed.

“Where?” Nissa said.

“There,” Sorin said, without pointing. “At the base of that rock formation that looks like a cascade of blood.”

Nissa saw where he meant. In front of an undulated red stone formation was what looked like a statue of a very tall, stout human with no face. What struck Nissa was the fact that the statue was not constructed of red stone … It was light brown, almost a mud color.

“It is a statue,” Nissa said.

“It moved,” Anowon said.

Nissa looked back at the strange statue. It did have a face of sorts: its nose was a hole, as were its eyes and mouth. She noticed that rock cairns were piled up on either side of it. She watched the statue for long enough that her knees started to sting as she squatted in the loose rock. She was just about to stand when the statue moved.

“I saw it too,” Sorin said.

The goblin was standing very still with one of its large ears cocked up and a worried expression on its face.

Nissa took a long, slow look around. The Teeth of Akoum were different from any other mountains she had ever seen. The steep sides of the high foothills were strangely bare and featured steep faces of rounded, almost bubble-shaped rock. There was no soil to speak of, only rock crushed to various degrees. Natural rock bridges formed by the wind joined canyon walls. Fingers of rock jutted high in the air, topped sometimes with boulders that floated and bobbed above their tips.

Clear crystals shot through everything, making walking difficult in the daytime, where rays of heat
were concentrated through the crystals and had to be avoided if one wanted to keep from being badly singed.

Nissa’s green lands were very far away indeed, she felt. But when she closed her eyes, she could sense the roots that extended out of the bottom of her feet and led all the way back to her forests.

They could not be taken by surprise on the wide fan, where a high canyon above deposited all the small debris carried by runoff from the high peaks. Nissa knew if the party left the scree fan they would leave the protection of the open and again enter into the maze of boulder ways, where every turn could be an ambush. They had to continue up the fan, and that meant passing the statue.

Sorin had been watching her. “You go first,” he said. “I’ll cover your flank. Ghet, go with her.”

“You are too kind,” Nissa said.

“Think nothing of it,” Sorin replied, chuckling.

Nissa walked forward, her staff at her side. There was no point in sneaking. If something was following them, it had clearly watched their progress. It must have figured out that their way would bottleneck at the strange outcropping.

On closer inspection the statue appeared to be made of clay, which struck her as odd. Odder still was its position; it was standing with its arms out straight on each side. The cairns of stone that she had struggled to see clearly from farther down the fan now turned out to be the sides of a rock window. Like the rock bridges, the windows were formed by the wind blowing away a middle portion of the red stone. The statue stood arms wide in the middle of this.

They neared the statue and stopped. It was covered with symbols and decorative etchings.

“Third-reign Eldrazi,” Anowon said, without hesitation. “See the tentacle flourishes at the corners of those boxes?”

“What is it?” Nissa asked.

Anowon shrugged. “That is script on its forehead. It says, ‘mover.’”

“Mover?” Nissa said.

They stood staring at the statue. A rock tumbled ahead. “I have the strangest feeling,” Anowon said, stepping away from the strange statue. “That something moves ever closer.”

W
hat is this?” the goblin said, looking at the statue.

“We were hoping you knew,” Nissa said.

The goblin stared at the statue. It brought the finger from its right hand up and inserted it into its own nostril and began digging. “Interesting,” Mudheel said.

“It was a golem slave, I’d wager,” Anowon said. He spoke with his eyes on the surrounding boulders.

“Ghet,” Sorin said. “I’ll hear none of your learned descent today. Let us remember that we have long way to go and still no water to wet that treasonous tongue. There are vampires, apparently, tracking us—though Ghet here has known that for days and not seen fit to tell the rest of us.”

Anowon pulled his white hood off his head and scanned the boulders huddled at the edges of the scree fan. “Let us travel,” he said.

They clattered upward through the loose scree. Behind them they could see the tumbled boulders and the far off flats at the feet of the mountains. Nissa kicked free a small boulder, and it rolled, bounced, and clattered away into the larger boulders, echoing off the hills around.

Reaching the top of the fan, they moved through
a slot in the rock and into a shallow cayon, dark and silent. Their footfalls echoed as they walked, and the valley began to shut them in. Soon the low sheer walls were close enough that they could not walk three abreast.

Anowon stopped them. To avoid waylay they climbed up and out.

As they pieced their way through the boulders, night was upon them. The moon rose and cast a pale light that turned every shadow deeply black. On a large outcropping of rock they came upon a guard tower of clear Eldrazi origin, tumbled and broken, with many of its blocks miraculously piled one upon the other in tall columns.

“We must stop,” Nissa said, panting with the effort of the climb. “Let us take our rest in that guard tower.”

Ahead, the goblin piloting their path stopped. It dropped into a squat, and its eyes darted from boulder to boulder.

“What is it, Mudheel?” Nissa asked.

“There is something there,” it replied.

Nissa looked to where the goblin pointed. The pale light from the moon laid silver swaths of light between the boulders. Something glinted in the shadows. Many somethings.

“Fly,” Nissa whispered, and she started running to the tower. She heard footfalls following behind, but her mind was not on the others. She twisted her staff and drew her stem sword as she ran. She heard the clatter as Sorin drew his sword. She was the first to the tower’s crumbled stone ladder, which she scaled in three bounds.

The goblin was the next up, then Sorin and Anowon, and Smara running for the first time on her own.

Nissa’s eyes were on the boulder field behind them. From the shadows many forms emerged and started to run. They were thin and dressed in all manner of rags and fragments of armor. Their skin was as white as the moon above their heads, and their long, emaciated shanks showed the fine outline of the bones under their withered skin.

But what made Nissa’s breath catch in her throat were their faces. They ran out of the shadows and into the moonlight, and Nissa saw that they had neither eyes nor noses. Instead, a perfectly flat piece of skin covered the front of their face. Only a round, lipless mouth remained filled with sharp yellow teeth.

The creatures ran recklessly. The front-most creature tripped on a rock and fell into a sharp boulder, gashing its arm and head open so that a huge flap of skin flopped at the side of its head. Still, there was no blood that Nissa could see. The creature staggered to its feet and started running again, its mouth open in a dry scream.

“Not nulls,” Anowon said. “Anything but nulls.”

Nissa could hear the tension in his voice. She’d seen nulls before in the jungles of Bala Ged, but never so many. Nulls. They were what remained after a vampire drained a creature to an inch of its life but did not kill it. What remained was a mindless husk.

There were so many of them. Nissa lost count at thirty, before Sorin stepped forward with his sword drawn.

“My rot talk has no effect on the undead,” he said.

Nissa settled the soles of her feet on the rock. She reawakened the roots of her body, and felt the energy of the forest slither across the wastes and mountains. Then the charge shot through the roots that extended from her brow and connected her with the green
growing places she knew well: the Turntimber Forest of the Tajuru and the fetid jungles of Bala Ged.

She thought of trolls. Forest trolls with bug eyes and mossy hair and thick arms like tree trunks. She felt the energy dripping off her fingertips and pulling to a place in front of her where it distilled into two trolls holding long blood briar branches for weapons.

She did not need to point to the nulls who were almost at the base of the tower. The trolls hobbled on their knuckles down the side of the tower and into the frenzied host. Nissa heard fingernails scratching on rock behind her, and when she turned there were six nulls struggling over the back edge of the tower. Sorin swept past, bringing his great sword down and splitting one from the crown of its head to its chest. The creature fell bloodlessly to the side. Nissa whipped her stem sword out and snapped another’s head off.

“Stop!” Anowon commanded in a booming voice.

The air seemed to drag as the remaining four nulls at the tower stopped in their tracks. One had a dented metal plate strapped over the top of its face where its nose and eyes should have been. They lowered their hands with their long, curling fingernails, closed their mouths, and waited.

Anowon pointed down at the other nulls, who were fighting the trolls. The trolls swung their arms out, sweeping up nulls in wide swathes. “Attack!” Anowon commanded.

Without a moment’s hesitation the four nulls turned and threw themselves off the edge of the tower. The three that rose from the boulder below ran at their brethren and began tearing flesh and limbs.

“They are easily controlled by other vampires,” Anowon said. “But only in small numbers. This force is no small number.”

“Something must be controlling them,” Nissa said.

Below, the forest trolls were swinging at nulls with all their might. The many gashes they had received from the vampire zombies had begun to regenerate closed. But Nissa did not worry about the cuts that covered her trolls. Hers was another fear, soon borne out. For every null that the trolls mowed down, four more seemed to clamber onto the dead one’s back. Soon mounds of nulls surrounded each troll, and when the piles were high enough, the remaining creatures simply surged up and over the trolls. They clawed the trolls’ eyes out and snaked their long arms down the trolls’ throats to yank out handfuls of whatever they could clutch. The trolls regenerated, but not fast enough. Some of the nulls scrambled over the trolls’ thrashing forms and charged at the tower.

Below, the last forest troll fell atop a pile of ruined null.

A primal yell came from Anowon’s throat as he launched himself into the horde. Nissa was momentarily awed by the attack. As she watched, Anowon drove his long fingers into the nearest null, tearing out hunks of flesh. With his hands wrist-deep in one null he turned, and with a quick snap bit deep into another’s neck and tore most of its throat out with the jerk of his chin. He freed his hands and mouth, sidestepped another null’s clumsy swing, and countered by shoving his hands through the creature. His mouth began tearing chunks out. When that null fell, Anowon hopped up and spun to do it all again with a new null. A chill ran down Nissa’s spine. It was one of the most savage attacks she had ever witnessed.

Nissa snapped her staff back together and raised it. Only about half of the nulls were incapacitated, and the rest would clearly not stop until they were playing
in their blood. Nissa raised her staff above her head, feeling the power rise in her like the sap rising in a spring tree. She moved her mind to the one creature she knew could destroy all of the creatures. She only hoped it would take a mortal wound before it got to her and the rest. Soon the rough outline of an Onduan baloth appeared in her mind.