Zendikar: In the Teeth of Akoum (28 page)

“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, snatching 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 associates had your ways with us.”

He turned to the female vampire, who picked herself up and snatched 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
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?”

T
hey 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 passed through the foothills and onto a wide plateau surrounded by the jagged aeries of the Teeth of Akoum.

If she had her staff she could slice them apart, but it had been left at the tower she guessed, most likely among the bodies of her dead comrades. At one of their short and infrequent rest stops, Nissa attempted to connect with her mana and summon a creature, but when she reached her mind out for the lines of power that connected her to her known places, she found herself too weak. Once she managed to summon a gravity spider, but Shir simply touched the animal, and it rotted before her eyes.

Nissa was neither fed nor given water and by the second day was passing in and out of visions of her
homeland of Bala Ged. She was near death when they stopped in the middle of the grasslands of the high plateau. The null threw her down in the sharp grass, and Biss stood taunting her. When Nissa did not reply to Biss’s ridiculous questions she received a kick in her already excruciatingly painful ribs.

“Null,” Biss would scream when Nissa rolled over to protect her face. “Roll her back over.”

The nulls were the only creatures treated worse than she. Two of them fell and could not get up on the two-day run, but the others kept running. Biss even laughed at the struggling wretches.

But when they stopped on the high grasslands of the plateau, Nissa knew it was no rest stop. Shir had been stopping frequently to look at the dirt. At one point he even took a pinch of the dry earth and put it on his tongue and tasted it. Then he put his hand over his eyes to protect them from the sun as he scanned the distance.

“There,” he said, pointing, and broke into a run.

One of the remaining nulls grabbed Nissa’s feet and began dragging her. When they reached the place where Shir and Biss stood waiting, they released her feet. She was scraped and bruised but also interested in what Shir was doing.

The male vampire fell onto his hands and knees and began touching the ground, feeling for something.

“Why are we running?” Nissa asked, but nobody said anything.

Nissa noticed some oddness in the grasses of the area as the vampires searched. Some looked a bit trampled, as though others had already been to that particular spot. And she saw signs in the dusty soil—signs that Biss and Shir were not bothering to examine, which meant they knew who had made the tracks.

Or thought they knew who had made the tracks. As
Nissa looked at the tracks the pulse of blood through her body began to speed up. Soon it was hammering at her temples, and it was all she could do not to smile. She looked around the great expanse and saw no forms in the distance.

“Why are we here?” Nissa repeated. “Why were we running?”

Shir looked up from his searching. There was sweat on his forehead and a sour look on his face. Somehow Nissa knew that the vampire did not like to have sweat on his face.

“Null,” he called. “Come here and look for a seam.”

The nulls fell to the ground and began scrabbling their long claws about in the dust.

Biss said something to Shir in the vampire tongue. Even though Nissa did not understand the language, the female vampire’s facial expression told Nissa that she was not convinced the null could find what they were looking for.

Nissa stood and began scanning the soil a body span away from the vampires and their nulls. Her elf eyes were good at finding patterns, and instead of looking at the soil, she looked at the patches of grass that blew sideways in the wind. Soon she was able to see a rough line where the grasses did not grow.

She saw the sign that had given her such hope again near the seam—footprints, and recently. Footprints she thought she recognized.

“The seam you seek is here, I believe,” Nissa said.

Biss looked up and sneered. Shir walked over to where Nissa had slumped back onto the ground, then to where Nissa pointed.

“Yes,” he said. “It is here. Nulls, to me.”

The nulls scrambled over and began feeling for the seam.

“Thank you, elf,” Shir said turning to Nissa. “For this your death will be quick. I will not leave you to Biss. I shall do it myself.”

“Why not kill me back at the tower?” Nissa backed up as the null got their fingers in the seam.

“We would have liked to, but your party escaped. We plan to use you as bait.”

“Who are you?” Nissa said.

“We are charged with fighting the Eldrazi brood lineage. When we came upon your band we saw an opportunity to kill or capture the Mortifier, who is perhaps the greatest Eldrazi sympathizer of all time.”

“How do you know this Mortifier?”

“We know. Vampire legend talks about him frequently,” Shir said. “He lives in infamy in our stories about slavery. He sold us into slavery to the Eldrazi, who utilized us as a food source, and when that was not diverting enough for them, as labor. They enjoyed greatly seeing how hard we could be worked until our bodies failed. The Eldrazi put us in chains all our lives.”

I would have put you in chains as well
, Nissa thought. But instead of speaking Nissa backed up, as the nulls heaved, and the outline of a stone became apparent in the loose soil. Soon they had the stone high enough that they could slide the heels of their hands under and push. The grasses that grew on the stone were planted in such a way that they did not slide off.

Biss smiled as the stone was raised. But the smile faded on his lips when the stone flew back and Anowon and Sorin burst out of the hole. Sorin had his sword out, and he and the vampire charged the stunned nulls, cutting down the remaining creatures in a matter of moments. Anowon swung hands with their sharp, claw-like fingers in savage arcs, tearing chunks out of the
nulls, his mouth set in an ugly sneer. He spun his body around pivoting first on one foot and then jumping onto another to generate the inertia for his sweeping attacks. He even used his slashing feet.

Finished with the nulls, Sorin and Anowon turned to the vampires. Anowon bent and yanked a bampha from one of the null’s hands. Biss was searching the ground, looking desperately for her own bampha, as Anowon lunged, driving the obsidian blade of his weapon firmly into her chest. The impact of his thrust knocked Biss off balance, and she took a series of steps backwards before falling still into the dust.

Shir sneered and made a grab for Nissa. But she had been expecting such a move and spun easily away. Anowon stepped forward. Shir hissed.

“This is all your doing, Mortifier,” Shir said to one of them, Nissa could not be sure which. “We were driven from our land because of you, and we have been fighting the Eldrazi fiends because of you. And you will die before this moon’s cycle has moved beyond the mountains.”

Shir took a deep breath and closed his eyes. In a moment the air around them turned cold, and with a shock of revulsion Nissa noticed the grass around Shir’s feet wither and die.
Why do they have to be so creepy?
Nissa thought as the vampire raised his arms. His skin began to hang off his body in patches, then without warning, the vampire’s body fell to pieces before Nissa’s eyes. First the arms hung so low that the attaching skin tore, and the arms fell. Then the legs buckled, and the corpse of Shir fell. When it hit the ground, its head bounced off the pebbles and rolled a short distance before stopping.

Nissa watched as the headless corpse withered to a bloodless husk. Sorin was not smiling for once.
Anowon was already looking away to the west at the tallest mountains. Their peaks were so sharp that they truly looked like an upheaval of red fangs.