Zendikar_ In The Teeth Of Akoum Part 20

"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 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 c.o.c.ked 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 pa.s.sing 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."

What 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.

"Will they not ..." Sorin began. She heard him grunt, and the next moment he was falling over the edge of the tower. Nissa received a blow from behind that knocked her forward and against a crumbled rampart. Darkness came abruptly, and she remembered no more.

She woke to a rhythmic jostling. Something was running as it carried her. Her eyes hurt, so she didn't open them. A sharp jab of pain spread through her head with every footfall, and she felt as though she were being torn apart. When she cried out, the running stopped, and she was thrown down on the hard ground. When Nissa regained consciousness, she opened her eyes and found that something was pulled over her face to keep her from seeing. A moment later the hood was yanked off, and the bright sunlight stabbed into her eyes, causing even more pain.

Nissa forced herself to make note of her surroundings. She was still in the high foothills, that much was obvious-there were some small plants eking from a fissure.

A blurry figure approached. Nissa shook her head so the figure came into view, and soon wished she had not. A female vampire bent so her head was almost touching noses with Nissa. Her breath, rank with the smell of blood, was all over Nissa's face. A lip curled back to show one stout incisor, pointed and white.

"It moves," the vampire announced. "What a shame. I was hoping for a broken spine." The female vampire pulled a pink tongue over her white teeth. "Easy meat."

Nissa looked past the female vampire. About eight nulls stood around them, their mouths gaping and drool running down their chins. Nissa noticed that many of the null had ruined limbs that dragged, or gashes and other signs that they had been in the brutal battle Nissa and the others had given.

"You will rue the day you survived that fray, meatling," the vampire said. "Rue the day."

"It is you who will regret," Nissa said under her breath.

"It speaks?" the vampire said. "Insolent animal?"

The vampire backed up and turned, s.n.a.t.c.hing a long, obsidian-tipped bampha stick from the hands of a skeletal null. She was dressed in tight leather with her head shaved around the side, front and back so that only a swath of black hair grew in tangles. Her skin was as pale as a null's, and she was almost as thin.

But as she took the bampha stick and swung it, she appeared to be the lithest thing Nissa had ever seen. She executed a complex hand over hand spinning attack that took a split second to execute and concluded with the obsidian tip coming to an abrupt halt an inch from Nissa's right eyeball.

Nissa could no more have dodged the attack as she could have flown on golden wings. But when the female vampire looked down, Nissa had slipped the top of her foot around behind the heel of the vampire's foot. Nissa lifted her other foot and pushed on the knee. With the vampire's heel caught on the top of Nissa's foot, the force of Nissa's push transferred to the upper body, and the vampire pitched backwards. She fell on her back, dropping the bampha.

Nissa did not have her staff, but even without it she was able to call down the mana and channel it into her mind where the outline of a giant Onduan python had formed. The huge coiled serpent snapped into being next to the female vampire and opened its mouth.

A second vampire appeared by the serpent and touched its scaly side. Immediately the animal shook and dropped its head. A moment later its head raised, a pale glow emanating from its eyes, and its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth.

The second vampire turned to Nissa. "Thank you, elf," the vampire said. "We need more bodies in our troop after you and your a.s.sociates had your ways with us."

He turned to the female vampire, who picked herself up and s.n.a.t.c.hed her stick off the rocks.

"Biss," the male vampire said. "Would you scout ahead for us?"

Biss bowed and left, casting a hard look at Nissa before departing.

"We have been tracking your progress for days," the male vampire said, turning to Nissa. "And her hatred of the Mortifier is very great indeed. As is mine." The vampire raised one hand and snapped his fingers.

Behind the vampire, the zombie python began to writhe, knocking one of the nulls against a rock with its huge coils. Then it lay still. The male vampire looked at Nissa and shrugged.

"What can I say? I love to kill things," he said. "Plus, it would have been another mouth to feed."

"Why am I still alive, blood slave?" Nissa said. They had called vampires that when she'd been younger and in the jungles, mostly because vampires hated the name. But the vampire only smiled.

"A good question," the vampire said. "And you may call me Shir."

Shir must have sensed Nissa's disappointment that the name she called him had not angered him. His smile widened so that Nissa thought for a moment that he would lean over and bite her. Every yellowed tooth in his mouth showed as he spoke.

"I would expect names such as that from one who travels with the Mortifier."

"What is this Mortifier Mortifier you speak of, blood slave?" Nissa said. "Or are you as dim as the rest of your kind?" you speak of, blood slave?" Nissa said. "Or are you as dim as the rest of your kind?"

The vampire studied her face for a moment. "Could it be that this elf is not aware of whom she travels with?" he said. "Perhaps she does not know what the Mortifier is?"

They stopped only briefly. At Shir's orders, the nulls seized Nissa and ran with her bound on its shoulders. The nulls ran like they were being chased with Biss and Shir at the front and back.

At several points Nissa had to pull into herself, into the forest within, to avoid the pain of the thrall's sharp shoulder blades impacting her ribs, and to avoid the mineral smell of its breath in her face.

They ran all day and most of the night for two days, and by the second day they had pa.s.sed through the foothills and onto a wide plateau surrounded by the jagged aeries of the Teeth of Akoum.