Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (12 page)

“They used vampires, not giants.” It was Sorin who spoke. Nobody else spoke for a moment, at which point Anowon asked the question hanging on Nissa’s lips.

“How do you know that?” Anowon said.

“I know,” said Sorin. He looked back down the way they had come and grimaced. He was even paler than before. The droplets of sweat that had dotted his lip and forehead had grown into full sweat trails running down through the dust on his face. As Nissa watched, he unhitched his sword belt and slipped it over his shoulder before pulling the belt buckle tight again.
No jokes now
, Nissa thought and turned her attention back to the canyon.

“This is madness,” Sorin said. “We should be harnessed in for this kind of climb.”

“This is nothing compared to what we will encounter in Akoum,” Nissa said.

“I can hardly wait.”

Anowon scrambled up the trail in front of Nissa without the least hesitation. She noticed with approval that he always kept three of his limbs attached to the rock as he climbed. Something about the way his limbs moved reminded her of the Tajuru Hiba who had been killed by the brood in MossCrack. She pushed him out of her mind and kept walking.

The trail’s pitch was somewhere between steep and vertical. Not so steep that they needed rope works, but steep enough that one could easily peel off the face if one slipped. The way forward involved handholds, and they climbed until the sun fell in the sky.

Later the moon rose in the dark sky, and the trail showed a ghastly pale silver. From the dark shadows cast by the moonlight came the moaning of rock lizards hunched therein, and soon Nissa’s feet were staggering under her, and her numb hands fumbled over the rocks.

“We must stop,” she said.

Sorin’s breath hissed out from between his teeth as he climbed. Nissa could hear the tightness in his voice when he spoke. “Stop where?” he replied.

She leaned against the canyon wall and looked up. Even with the moon as bright as it was, the rock outcroppings obscured her view of the trail ahead. Nissa always found it impossible to gauge the height of a high place while actually climbing on it. The Joraga kept boards they could hang and sleep in. What she wouldn’t have done for one of those.

Smara and the goblins were the last to arrive, and they all climbed in almost utter silence. When they attained a small shelf, the goblins plopped down and began playing a game, it seemed, that involved slapping each other’s hands and then the rock trail. As Nissa watched, Smara took the corner of her robe and almost daintily dabbed the sweat from behind her ears and temples. She did not mutter or roll her eyes.

“Climbing suits her,” Nissa said, to nobody in particular.

“Do you see where the crystal resides?” Anowon said.

Nissa looked. The kor’s odd crystal was tucked into the waistband that bound her rags to her body.

“It is not in her hand,” Anowon said.

“Just so,” Nissa said. “It is not directly contacting her skin.”

A rock rolled down from above. Nissa followed its descent as it plummeted by them and far to the right.

“The trail might continue like this for a long time,” Nissa said. She leaned against the cool wall. A warm breeze rustled her hair. If she could just close her eyes … Sleep was about to take her when Anowon coughed.

“We must continue,” he said. She heard his metal cylinders clink off each other as he began climbing again. It took some effort, but Nissa leaned out from the wall and started climbing too. He was right. For one, they were as exposed as babies out here on the face. If a drake decided to sweep in for a snack, they would have little way to defend themselves. And the giants. Better to not wonder if the two giants were still shadowing them.

She listened for Sorin to begin climbing. Why had his destructive singing not worked on the giants?

She asked him.

“They must be composed,” he said, breathing hard as he climbed. “Must be composed of stone. I am only able to rot the living.”

Nissa turned back to climbing.
Rot the living
, she thought. She tried to speed up so Sorin was not so close behind her.

The first reddening of the sky found them still climbing, though slowly. Nissa found that if she stopped thinking about anything, her hands found their own handhold, and her progress was more satisfactory. Sorin must have found the same thing. The rhythm of his steps sounded more regular, and his breathing had steadied.

Farther down, the goblins followed behind Smara, pushing and heading her up the trail, making good progress. They lived in rocky crevices and could clearly move in high, precarious places easily.

They attained the lip of the mesa when the sun was low in the sky. Panting, Nissa clambered onto the grassy veldt. To the right, a river poured over the edge of the mesa and cascaded the heights into the dark mist of the canyon. Nissa crawled to the river and had a drink. Her hands were cut and raw, and she put them into the cold water and cried out with the sting. Soon Sorin and Anowon were at the river. Sorin put his whole head in. Anowon put only his lips in the clear water and sucked peacefully. After he was filled, he walked up the stream with his eyes on the stream bed as he walked.

“What are you looking for?” Nissa said.

“Signs.”

As she watched, he fell to his knees next to the water and plunged his hands into the rocks and pebbles at the bottom of the stream. His hands came out holding something.

“What is that?” Nissa asked. Her soreness made kneeling difficult, but she did it anyway.

The palms of Anowon’s hands were filled with many small pebbles and a couple of rocks. Something about the scratches on the rocks set her curiosity on edge, and she bent to look closer at a green one. Soon a brow became apparent. Then slit eyes. The rock was crudely carved into the likeness of a head with an expression of anger. She looked up at Anowon.

“Each is similarly carved,” he said.

She looked still closer at the pebbles in his hands. He was right—each of them, no matter how small,
was carved to look like an earless head. Some had tentacles for mouths and some did not.

She looked at Anowon again.

“I have heard of these streams near the Binding Circle,” he said. “All the streams around are filled thusly.”

Suddenly Nissa had the feeling she was being attacked … something was running toward her. But when she spun, the mesa behind her was covered only with dense grass that spread away into foothills. There was no enemy. Even in the slanted morning light she could see the gaps in the mountains where the ancient ones had sheared off the tops and put their magic in between so they rose and crashed down at irregular intervals. The foothills extended into blunt mountains capped with snow, and dark, purple rain clouds sat on the horizon. On either side of the stream, twin statues of grotesque, tentacled statues stood in massive repose. One was missing a head, and the other’s body was floating slightly above its pedestal.

She turned back to Anowon, bewildered.

“I feel it too,” he said. “We must be on guard.”

She nodded.

“Did you see it?” asked Anowon.

“No,” Nissa said.

Anowon pointed. It was no more than a dot at the base of the mountains: a palace. It was in a sunless lee of the mountains and clearly crumbled, but it had obviously once been huge.

“Is this the Binding Circle?” Nissa said to Anowon.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

The morning sun was bright and warm on her neck. Anowon went off to lie in the grass with the pebbles in his open palms. Sorin was already asleep, snoring
loudly. As she watched, Smara clambered over the edge of the Mesa, pushed forward by her goblins. She was muttering again, with her crystal firmly clamped in her right hand. But as soon as the goblins had situated her in the grass, she clutched her crystal to her chest and quieted a bit.

Nissa stretched out in the grass and felt her muscles loosen. She believed that vampires liked to cut their prey before feeding. Their teeth were not overly sharp. Anowon had no bladed tool.

A low rumbling sound drifted somewhere far off in the mountains. The floating parts of the statues next to the river cast long shadows. And Nissa fell asleep, without setting a watch.

N
issa awoke suddenly, shivering in the darkness, listening for whatever had woken her. But she was unable to hear anything except the gusting wind shaking the grass fronds around her. There were no stars or moon overhead, and Nissa could not hear Smara’s incessant babbling. Her staff was by her side, and she very slowly reached out and put her hand around its smooth shaft. She waited and listened, but nothing came and she drifted off again.

She next opened her eyes to bright daylight. Her staff was still clutched in her hand. She sat up. Smara was speaking somewhere, and the wind had disappeared, but not the feeling of foreboding. Anowon was sitting in the grass watching her, with his bound hands wrapped around his legs. Sorin was standing with his back to her, looking at the mountains. The goblins and Smara were grouped together near the river.

“Are you ready?” Sorin asked, turning. He looked surprisingly fit. His face was full as he smiled. “Anowon wanted to feed on you but I kept him from it …”

Nissa stood.

“But you have something in your blood, he tells me,” Sorin finished.

Nissa turned and adjusted the climbing harness she always wore.

“I take the Joraga tincture,” Nissa said. “Once a month.” She took Khalled’s map from the tube strapped to her belt.

“Where do you get
that?”
Sorin said. “Are you not a Tajuru, after all?”

Nissa stopped.
What did he say?
she thought. She bristled at the taunt. “Watch your tongue, human.”

Sorin laughed.

Still, Anowon watched her.

“I have fought many vampires in my time,” Nissa said. “And our tincture makes our blood poison to one. Now, if you are done?” She unrolled the map and considered its ink lines.
What had gotten into Sorin and Anowon? she wondered
.

“Did you sleep well?” Sorin asked.

She looked up from the map.

“One of Smara’s goblins is gone.” Sorin said.

She looked over at the group of goblins surrounding Smara. One, two, three … yes, there were only nine.

“Yes, and?” she said.

“We are wondering what happened to it,” Sorin said, a smug smile on his face as he turned to Anowon. “Aren’t we?”

She looked up in surprise. “Why would I have knowledge of this?”

Anowon didn’t move.

Nissa looked from one to the other of them. A smile tickled the corners of her lips as the joke dawned on her.

“I ate it,” Nissa said. “You have discovered me, human.” She looked back at the map. “More like the vampire did. He seems in a stupor.”

The lines of the map were clear enough showing the jagged run of the trench. The problem came in finding just what part of the trench they had been in when the giants had found them and, thus, where they had climbed out of the canyon. She could see the shaded area marked “Piston Mountains.” There was no sign of a palace on the map. A palace of that size should surely be there. Nissa looked up at the structure that had been sitting at the base of the mountains when they first topped the mesa.

But it was gone. From her distance, all that was evident was a huge crater where the palace had been. She located it far to the right floating in the air with the divot of earth it had been sitting on still underneath it. Even from far away she could see lines extending from the ground to the palace. This was Zendikar, and Nissa had seen plenty of floating objects in her life, including a whole lake suspended above the ground leaving a dry bed full of flopping fish. She’d seen fields of hedrons numbering in the hundreds floating and banging together. But the palace was different. And judging from the lines of ropes, there were living things in that castle.

“Something is wrong,” she said.

“You are coming to that realization just now?” Sorin said.

“She’s right,” said Anowon. He had come up behind her so silently that she jumped when he spoke. “The flood, the refugee kor, and now the Palace of Zemgora floating loose in the air.” Anowon’s voice was soft, as always, and Nissa found herself leaning in to hear more. “Did you notice how fresh the scars on those giants in the trench were? They were recently in a fight I fear they got the worst of.”

“That is true,” Nissa found herself saying. “The Roils lately have become more severe. That last one near Graypelt was so sudden that my spirit-water vial barely boiled.”

“It is the brood lineage,” Sorin said. “They are wroth and throwing Zendikar out of balance. They must be put back into the earth.”

Smara looked up from where she had been sitting. She rushed over to Sorin.

“The gift is in the loam,” she said. “The gift is in the loam.” Then she began talking in another language and soon was repeating the same words.

Anowon watched Smara closely, as did Sorin. At one point Anowon quickly drew a slip of parchment and a thin piece of charcoal out of an inner pocket and wrote something down on the slip.

Sorin smiled uncertainly as the kor’s words degraded into raving. Then he glanced at Nissa to see what she thought of Smara’s words. Nissa pretended not to notice Sorin’s look.
What is that one hiding?
she wondered, turning her attention back to the floating palace.
What is the ‘gift is in the loam?’