Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (29 page)

“Did you do that?” Nissa asked Sorin.

Sorin shook his head.

Nissa did not look at the loose pile of bones and skin. Instead she looked down at the square hole in the ground and the stone that had covered it for so long. “What was this place?” she asked.

“A hiding place,” Anowon said. “I knew of this barrow. We have them in all areas of Zendikar. Many are joined with tunnels, as this one is. We entered at a location over there.” He pointed.

Just then Mudheel came clambering out of the hole. He bent over and pulled Smara out. The kor did not notice Shir’s body. In fact, she almost stepped on the vampire’s now gelatinous thigh as she made her bumbling way to a small mostly buried hedron. Mudheel tilted his head as he stared at Shir’s body, as though he was having trouble figuring out what exactly it was.

“It is called a body, you turnip.” Sorin said to Mudheel.

“A turnip?” Mudheel said, looking from Sorin to the pile of body.

Nissa let her eyes linger on the goblin.

Sorin handed Nissa her staff. “Ghet was the one who insisted on tracking you,” Sorin said. “I would have left you, you know. You must know that?”

“I know that,” Nissa said. “You have a mission.”

“Yes,” Sorin said. “A mission.” He took out a comb and began brushing his hair.
Has that comb been with Sorin the whole time?
Nissa wondered.

“I know those mountains,” Anowon continued, still staring at the extremely jagged red peaks. “The Eye of Ugin lies there in that part of the Teeth.”

“That is true,” Mudheel said. The goblin had received a cut across his forehead in the battle, and the tip of his ear hung at an angle. Both wounds he had dressed with a mud poultice. “Affa lies at the base.”

“Before he died, the vampire Shir—” Nissa began.

“—He is not dead,” Anowon interrupted. He spoke with his back turned, as he looked out at the high mountains. “I know of this vampire Shir. He unincorporated. He dropped his body. He is from an old family. His line was made of a famous Bloodchief and has the funds to hire dementia summoners to dream him back into blood.”

Nissa shook her head. She was rarely pleased to learn anything new about vampires. Such knowledge tended to keep her up at night.

“Before the autumn of his flesh, this creature Shir spoke of the Mortifier,” Nissa said.

Anowon turned. Sorin raised an eyebrow.

“Mortifier?” Sorin said. “What did they want with this Mortifier?”

Nissa shrugged. “They did not say why they were looking for him. But I had the feeling that their main purpose was to find and destroy brood lineage, and finding this Mortifier was a coincidence.”

“They were attacking brood?” Anowon said.

“That is what I think,” Nissa said. “But neither vampire spoke much, except to taunt.”

“So they were not specifically tracking the Mortifier?” asked Anowon.

“It seemed they stumbled upon us.” Nissa said. She watched Anowon’s face for a tell—something that would show her that he was the Mortifier, as she suspected him to be. The Mortifier was a vampire, after all. A vampire.

But Anowon’s facial features did not vary or appear agitated. He simply nodded when Nissa told him about the vampires. Then he turned back to the mountains.

“The Mortifier,” he said.

Anowon was far ahead when they began to walk through the clumps of grass toward the thin lines of smoke drifting sideways from Affa at the base to the aerie peaks. They kicked through the grass all the rest of that day. That night they slept where they fell on the hard ground, with no food and not even a fire.

They rose before dawn and stopped to lick the dew off the blades of grass and their weapons. The sky to the east was a dull gray when they started walking again. They moved across the high grasslands, and midday found them with their cloaks thrown over their heads to protect them from the high-altitude sun which Nissa could feel as a weight on her skin. Clouds passed close overhead, carried on the constant wind.

In the late afternoon, the ground began to jump and jitter. The air seemed to pull in on Nissa. The tiny flask of water she kept around her neck boiled, and tremendous crack appeared in the earth. Moments later, lava shot into the air and pulled into a massive ball that quickly cooled to black, at which point plants began to grow all over it. It happened in a matter of minutes. Soon the floating ball was engulfed with greenery.

Nissa had fallen next to Anowon. They stood when the Roil was over and the cooling ball of magma floated in the air blasting heat. Nissa looked sideways at Anowon.

“Thank you for getting me from the vampires,” she said.

Anowon nodded. “You did the same for me in the tower of the elves. We vampires drink blood, but
some of us have honor, if it suits us. I gain from your presence, which is why you are still here.”

“How do you gain?”

“You are effective against the brood,” Anowon said. “Perhaps you will be the same against the Eldrazi themselves.”

Nissa changed her grip on her staff. “Eldrazi?” she said. “You mean the ones that are still imprisoned? How would we fight them?”

“If we woke them from their slumber?”

“But we are traveling to the Eye of Ugin for Sorin to strengthen the spell of containment on the Eldrazi tomb. If they escape, it will be red slaughter.”

“That is what
he
told us.”

“And you do not believe him?”

“There are other places out … there,” Anowon said, waving a hand at the sky, referring to other planes. “Since we talked I have become suspicious. This Sorin is from another plane, and he wants to keep the brood and their masters here?” Anowon stamped his foot on the ground. “Why? Why does he not keep them somewhere else?”

Nissa opened her mouth and then closed it. The vampire had put voice to a question she had been wondering herself. “I do not know why he wants them kept here,” she said.

“None of us do,” Anowon said, casting a sidelong glance at Sorin.

“What do you propose we do?” Nissa said.

“Freeing the Eldrazi,” Anowon said. “Let them go … back out there.” Once again he waved his hand at the sky. “Have you noticed how the Roil has grown in severity lately, since the brood escaped?”

“I do not know when they escaped.”

“I was there. It was three moons ago.”

Nissa thought back. It did seem as though the Roil had increased. But that could just be her remembering incorrectly.

“And, according to what I’ve read, the Roil was not always on Zendikar. Ancient texts first speak of the Roil only
after
the Eldrazi disappeared,” Anowon said, pointing at Sorin. “After that one imprisoned them. And I know from my research that the hedrons did not appear until after the Eldrazi disappeared off the face of Zendikar. There were no hedrons on Zendikar when the Eldrazi walked its surface.”

“Well,” Nissa said. “What are they?”

Anowon threw up his hands. “Whatever they are, they clearly have something to do with keeping the Eldrazi asleep … with channeling energy. Many of the strange phenomena of Zendikar occur around them, have you noticed?”

“That seems true,” Nissa said.

“And did you notice the inscription on that building the brood were building? The one in the hedron field near the ocean?”

Nissa remembered that they had taken the brood by surprise and left none alive. But as for the building itself, she could not bring any of the inscriptions into her mind’s eye. She shook her head.

“The inscriptions were made by the brood copying the ancient Eldrazi style of decoration,” Anowon said. “Just as the markings on the hedrons are copies. The only original markings are on the palaces and crypts and various other buildings that once housed the ancients.”

“The hedron were not made by the Eldrazi?” Nissa said.

Anowon pointed at her and nodded somberly.

When Nissa looked, Sorin was looking out over the distance singing a song under his breath.

Nissa took a deep breath. Hedrons or not, the Mortifier was a vampire, and there was only one vampire in their group. “Did
you
ever meet the Eldrazi?” she asked Anowon. “The titans I mean?”

Anowon looked at her. “How would I have? They died long before I was made.” The vampire narrowed his eyes at Nissa. “Why do you ask me this?”

“I would not blame you,” Nissa said. “Every vampire I have ever met is a beast, except you. I can see where you might have tired of your own. I am sure you had your reasons.”

Anowon kept staring at her with a confused look on his white face. “What are you talking about?” Anowon said.

“The Mortifier,” Nissa said. She squeezed the staff in her right hand, glad to have been given it by Sorin when they rescued her from the vampires and the nulls. With the tiniest twist, she could have the stem sword out.

“You must be he,” she said. “The Mortifier.”

It was many moments before Anowon spoke. He stood glaring at Nissa.

“Let me not mislead you. I would break my teeth off before I helped the Eldrazi in any way whatsoever,” he said, a snarl in the back of his throat. “And I would never enslave my own people. Never. I am as much
a beast
as those weaklings with the null. More so.” With that Anowon turned and stomped away. He stopped for a second to look up at the plants hanging off the cooling magma ball, then stooped under it and began walking to the smoke fires of Affa.

Anowon passed Mudheel, who was relieving himself as he gazed at Affa, moving his body to make
glyphs in the powdery soil. Smara was sitting on the ground to the side of Mudheel, stroking her crystal in her lap.

“Why does he stomp away so?” Mudheel yelled over his shoulder.

Nissa watched Anowon go. If he was not the Mortifier, then that left … She turned to where Sorin was tending his hair with his comb, still intact after their many encounters. He carefully swept his long, white hair back and tied a piece of leather around it. He did not have the vestigial horns at his shoulders and elbows.
A vampire?
she thought. Sorin was too tall. He had no tattoos.
When does he feed?
His hair was not black, like the hair of every other vampire she had ever seen.
A vampire?
Nissa felt like drawing her stem sword and trying to strike Sorin down where he stood.
A vampire?
But instead she turned and walked toward Affa as she considered her best course of action.

A
ffa lay in the distance. They walked without stopping until the tents of the herders and smalltime relic seekers began to appear. The tents of the stonecutters—those that eked out a living selling shards and chips from hedron stones—were the shabbiest, amounting to little more than hides stretched over the ribs of undra stompers. The goblins among the stonecutters preferred to sleep in burrows with hides thrown over the entry hole.

Anowon disappeared shortly after encountering the outlying tents. Nissa knew what the vampire was looking for, but she tried not to think about it. Luckily it was past dark when they straggled past the first bonfire, so Nissa doubted Anowon would be detected as he hunted.

Nissa watched Sorin as they walked. At first he appeared to be unaffected by the presence of edible creatures. But soon they passed the tents of the cutters and relic seekers and entered Affa proper, and the amount of life increased. Soon there were humans, merfolk, goblins, elves, and even other vampires moving around the cookfires in the dark. Nissa thought she could hear Sorin’s breathing quicken. If he was as hungry for blood as she was for a drink
of water, then she had best take the others and leave him to his unutterable desires.

The center of Affa was more built up than Nissa would have guessed. More than just a tent city, it had permanent stone-and-mortar buildings with steep roofs of slate and weathervanes of wrought dragons. The streets were cobbled with intricate designs. The steep mountain peaks stood out in stark contrast against the light brown clay shingles. A small, turreted keep hunched in the middle of town, surrounded by semi-permanent stalls built of wood and manned by merchants selling all manner of wares.
Where did they get the wood?
Nissa wondered. She had not seen a forest in leagues.

Braziers burned on the street corners, and when Nissa exhaled she was surprised to see her breath outlined in the chilly mountain air.

Nissa turned to Sorin, only to find him gone. Only the shadows around the various braziers remained. Smara muttered behind her as they walked. Nissa turned and caught the goblin Mudheel looking at her in a curious way.
Even the goblin knew about Sorin
, she thought.

Had Sorin been sneaking off the whole time?
she wondered. She had spent so much time watching Anowon for the slightest glimmer of aggression directed at her that Sorin could have supped on her blood twenty times over, if he had had the interest.

Smara’s muttering behind became louder as they walked.

“May I ask how long we will be walking tonight?” Mudheel said with more than a bit of acid in his voice.

Nissa turned. The goblin was carrying Smara over his shoulders, and she struggled on the goblin’s back. As Nissa watched, the kor kicked her legs out and generally writhed.