Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (7 page)

“I dreamed of an angel with a halo running across its eye line,” he said, his eyes moving between Anowon and Sorin. “With a pulsing, tentacled heart in its hand.”

Sorin smiled uncertainly.

“Ahhh,” Khalled said. He reached out and touched the vial of water he had given Nissa, which she kept on a lanyard around her neck. “You still possess this. Wonderful.”

“It is always my companion,” Nissa said.

“That one,” Khalled said, pointing at Anowon, “is a vampire.”

“He is bound, Khalled.”

The ancient merfolk shuffled closer. “What do you have hanging from your belt?” he asked Anowon.

Anowon moved his eyes from the books to the merfolk. He looked down at the metal cylinders hanging from his belt.

“Are those text imprinters?” Khalled asked. “For clay?”

Anowon nodded. The merfolk leaned over and took one of the cylinders in his hand and looked closely at it. After a minute, he let the cylinder go, and it bounced against Anowon’s thigh.

Khalled straightened and looked at Anowon. “An archaeophile?” Khalled asked with an inflection to his voice that said he approved. “How do you come here?”

“He was—” Sorin started.

“—I was not speaking to you, friend,” Khalled said.

Sorin’s smile disappeared.

Khalled put his iridescent green eyes back on Anowon.

“I was enslaved by the Eldrazi brood lineage,” Anowon replied, “and brought on their forage raids into the Turntimber Forest.”

Nissa spoke. “MossCrack is no more. The Tajuru home tree was attacked, and Speaker Sutina is buried.”

Khalled blinked like he’d been slapped. He looked up at the ceiling of the tent where the bugs buzzed and tittered.

“They attacked here some days ago,” he said. “Many have fled. Some were killed.”

“Yet you stay?”

“The Turntimber is not yet mapped,” Khalled said. “And with the increasing Roil, it becomes ever more difficult.”

“But surely, my friend, you would rather travel back to Tazeem,” Nissa pressed. “To your lighthouse?”

“Yes, I can see where you might think that. But no.” Khalled said, sighing. “Speaker Sutina. She was an unusual elf. I’ve told you what I knew about her and that kraken?”

“Yes,” Nissa said. “But Khalled, these two need to get to the Teeth of Akoum. It is found on—”

“I know where the Teeth of Akoum are, dear child.”

“Would you have a map?”

“I might,” Khalled said. He looked at Sorin for a while. “What is it worth to you, and why do you want
to go to that place? It is dangerous, and these creatures, these brood as you call them, are everywhere. I have received a speaking hawk from The Lighthouse at Sea Gate telling news of great hordes in the lands to the west.”

The news seemed to trouble Sorin. He pursed his lips. “I have my own reasons, old map maker,” he said. “But maybe I can make it worth your time.” He put his hand into his jerkin, and it came out holding something.

Nissa watched him open his hand. A small black ball, the size of an acorn, rolled in his palm.

How?
Nissa thought, leaning closer for a better look.
That wasn’t in his pockets when I went through them this morning. There was nothing in those pockets. Where did he get it?

“What is that?” Khalled asked. One of the beetles landed on his hand. He stroked it gently, and it glowed brighter.

“It is magic from far away.”

“How far away?”

“Far.”

The Jah-creed merfolk eyed the ball in Sorin’s palm.

Sorin pushed it toward him. “It
sees
. Would you like to see what it sees?”

“No,” Khalled said, after a long pause. “This smells dark to me. And as much as I love the dark, it tends to have too large an allure for me.”

Sorin’s hand closed over the ball. His faced showed no emotion, but Nissa could smell his metallic embarrassment in the air.

Perhaps Khalled could too, for he shuffled forward. “These two will have their map, Nissa. But why do you help them?”

“Sorin saved my life,” she said.

“Twice,” Sorin said.

“Twice,” Nissa said.

Khalled nodded and turned to Anowon. “You will make me copies of your books. That is payment for the map”—Khalled turned—“Raspin!” he called. “Oh Raspin?”

A young human boy poked his head into the tent.

“Would you fetch clay? You will find it in the supply tent in the box marked ‘Glyphs.’”

The boy pulled his head out.

“And Raspin?”

The boy put his head back in.

“Check with Margen and find out if we’ve spotted the enemy today in the west.”

Khalled turned back to the group. “We see them almost daily. But they seem to be passing around us. They are odd. First they seem brutes, but then sometimes they do things with extreme forethought. Like the ambushes they have caught us in.”

Sorin said nothing, but Nissa knew he possessed secrets of the brood that he had yet to reveal. “They’re like ants,” Nissa said. “It’s like they talk with their tentacles like ants do with their antennae.”

Khalled nodded as he thought about this. Then nodded. His eyes turned to Anowon. “You say these are the Eldrazi of myth? These are the ones who build the palaces and places of power … the ones who were put down in the uprising?”

Anowon glanced at Sorin, who was smirking again.

“I am not sure,” Anowon continued. “I know they came from the Eye of Ugin, which in some of the research I have done is associated with the last resting place of the ancient ones.”

“What family do you hail from?” Khalled said.

Anowon looked at the merfolk for an extra heart beat before replying. “My family was Ghet. I have been formally cast out.”

Khalled raised his eyebrows. He turned and walked to one of his packed and drooping bookshelves. He drew out a slim but wide book and opened it. As they all watched, he licked his finger and began turning pages. “Ah … Ghet.” He was quiet as he read.

Sorin yawned.

“Yes,” Khalled said as he read. “An old family, but of minor designation. Disciplined in past conflicts.” Khalled looked up. “Your seat is not in Guul Draz?”

“Malakir.”

“The most marginalized of the vampire families there.”

Anowon said nothing.

The boy arrived with the clay. He threw aside the flap and walked in teetering under the weight of an entire block. He staggered over to a table and dumped the block on it. “The tentacle creatures have been seen massing at the northern gap,” he reported.

Anowon began unwrapping the block with his bound hands. As Nissa watched, he tore a corner of the reddish clay off and began kneading it flat on the table. When it was smooth and of a thickness that seemed to be sufficient, he unclipped one of the metal cylinders from his belt. Carefully, with his hands pressing down, he rolled the metal over the sheet of clay and imprinted what the cylinder contained.

“What is written on these tablets?” Khalled said.

“These are all records of my research and findings. Mostly about the Eldrazi.”

“What language are they written in?”

“Ancient Vampire,” Anowon said. “But there are no maps.”

“Alas, one makes do.”

“Khalled, they will need provisions,” Nissa said. “But I have decided that I will stay here in the
Turntimber. My promise was to bring them here. With your map they have no other use for me. Let them be gone.”

The merfolk wasted no time. “Raspin,” he said, “bring provisions and gear.”

“We
do
have a use for you,” Sorin said, a smirk on his long face as he glanced at Anowon. “The Ghet here is no scout. And his combat facility leaves something to be desired. Also, he smells like a beast.”

Khalled watched Anowon make the next imprint. “I would warn Nissa about you, vampire, but I would be more worried for your well-being should you anger her.”

Anowon said nothing. But as they watched, he made imprints of each of his cylinders and lay the tablets out on the table to dry. He was finishing the last when Raspin entered, staggering under the weight of a large pack with shoulder straps.

“Excellent, Raspin,” Khalled said. He handed Nissa a horn stopped at each end with a tree-bark plug. “This map should get you to Akoum. This location of the Eye of Ugin is unknown to me. But the vampire book-maker says he knows the way.”

Nissa turned and handed the map to Sorin, who accepted it with obvious misgivings. “And I will stay here, in the Turntimber,” Nissa said. “The Tajuru borders have been defended, and my place is back at the Home Tree.”

Khalled took Nissa’s arm and led her a couple of steps away.

“Lately my dreams have been filled with ill tidings,” Khalled said. “I have deep misgivings about this brood. The birds I have received bear strange news of whole towns destroyed, castles crushed. Many of the birds themselves arrive on the edge of death.”

“There could be many explanations.”

The merfolk was quiet for a time. “Quite.” Khalled said at last. He pointed at a large, flat table top of rough rock standing in the corner. The table legs were the huge femur bones of some extinct creature.

“Let me show you my fear,” Khalled said. He snapped his fingers, and wisps of what looked like blue smoke wafted around the top of the table. Slowly the wisps formed into terrain and land features. Nissa recognized the continents of Ondu and Akoum separated by a great undulating sea. There was the Puzzle Tower, the Knuckle of Forgotten Ones, and the dense swath of the Turntimber Forest. The Makindi Trench gaped through the land like a wound begging for suture.

As Nissa watched, a pool of dark dots spread out of a mountain range she could only assume was the Teeth of Akoum. The dots spread in all directions and soon covered the land. Soon the blue wisps began to disappear, leaving only the black. As she watched, the Turntimber began to disappear in chunks, like the bites from a sopfruit, until the forest was no more.

“Have you seen the wild linnestrop?” Khalled asked.

Nissa felt her lip curl at the mention of the plant. “Of course.”

“And where is it from, originally?”

“Not from the Turntimber,” Nissa said. “Yet here it grows, choking out the plants that have lived within these green boundaries for time immemorial.”

“And have you heard of the simeon plant? Do you hate it as much?”

“No. That plant lives together with the others. You can heal with it and—”

“Yet it is also not native to the Turntimber.”

“You are right. It is a stranger.”

“Like me,” Khalled said. “Like you.”

Nissa looked up from the terrain phantasm on the table top. “I suppose,” she said.

“I have a strong fear in my hearts that these brood are of a sort with the linnestrop.”

Nissa watched the merfolk snap his fingers again, and the wisps on the table dissipated.

“I believe the Turntimber and all Zendikar beg for help,” Khalled said. “You, my sweet friend, are a leader of elves. The power of Zendikar is yours but I fear it will wither under the tentacles of this new addition.”

Nissa nodded. She remembered the day she had first returned from her planeswalk to the faraway plane where densely packed beings had stepped on each other’s feet and tried to kill each other. She had returned to the forest and sat for days watching the slow bloom of an incisor orchid’s flower bud. It took three days for the bud to open, but when it finally did, its smell glowing purple stamens brought her to tears. The idea that such a flower would cease to be …

“You must travel with this menagerie,” Khalled said as he swept his hand toward Sorin and Anowon. “To the Eye of Ugin. Zendikar begs you.”

Sorin watched. He and Anowon were standing near the entrance to the tent. Anowon was strapping the pack Raspin had brought onto his own back.

Nissa looked around the tent and took a deep breath. Where was her tribe now? Either the Joraga or the Tajuru? Where were they to help her with this burden? No, she would not do it for either of her tribes. She would not embark on such trip for the tribe that had cast her out, or the one that hated her. She would make the journey for Zendikar. And for Nissa Revine.

“I will do as you suggest, my friend,” Nissa said.

Khalled smiled, showing his strange, small teeth. “Well then, keep vigilant around that one.”

“The book maker?”

“No, the other,” Khalled said. “He is also …”

At that moment a horn blew outside. Nissa looked at Khalled. “Change of the guard. Nothing to be concerned with,” Khalled said.

“Let this be our time to depart,” Sorin said.

Nissa turned back to Khalled. The merfolk nodded. “Thank you,” Nissa said to Khalled, placing her hand above her heart and bowing.

Khalled held a necklace out to her. “A pathway stone for your journey,” he said. “Keep it well. It was cut off the Puzzle Tower itself.”

“I thank you, my friend,” Nissa replied.

“Remember what I said,” Khalled said. “And remember that vampires live on blood.”

T
hey left Graypelt with night falling. Three stones’ pitch away from the last tent, the mesa fell away, and the land became vertical. They made a fireless camp near a trail that wound down the mesa’s edge in a zig-zag of switchbacks, leading finally to the dark at the bottom of the canyon. In the starlight, the river at the bottom of the gulch appeared a long, gray scar.