The Quest for Karn

Chapter 14

The door Venser exited was massive-easily as large as seven humans standing feet on heads-and it stank of rotting flesh. Stinking or not, it was tiny in comparison to the space it opened into. They were on a ledge that looked over an absolutely massive cavern of metal. Colossal columns of metallic material stood at its center and long tendrils attached each to the other like rope to a pole. Sometimes many tendrils met at a huge chunk. The chunks were easily as large as rooms.

“What is that?” Venser said, his voice echoing away across the enormous space.

“Don’t know,” Koth said. “Don’t have any idea.”

“How large would you say this cavern is?” Venser said.

Elspeth shrugged. “Leagues,” she said. “Perhaps larger.”

“And yet these columns continue. Look there, that column seems to have grown into the metal of the wall. I wonder if it keeps its shape under the metal? I wonder if the strands do?”

They all looked to the guide, who stood back a bit. He looked back at them.

“The center of Mirrodin is solid,” Koth said. “We vulshok know this. It is the heart of our ore. We explore and use our geomancy to delve with sound through the core.”

“This does not appear solid,” Venser said.

“How can we ever know the truth of this situation?” Elspeth said. “We waste time surmising.”

“This place is Phyrexian corruption,” Koth said. Clearly disgusted, he turned away from the view.

But Venser did not turn away. “Very strange,” he said. “Very strange.”

“Where do we go?” Koth said.

“There. This trail before us leads that way … to where that strand is melted and its inner tube is exposed,” the guide said, pointing.

“We walk into one of those strands? I think not,” Koth said.

“It is through these that one moves around the core of Mirrodin.”

“How do you know?” Elspeth said.

“I know,” the guide said, his face expressionless.

“It makes sense,” Venser said.

“How does that make sense?”

“Well,” Venser said. “Do you see how the top of that column is dark and crumbling? It is clearly dead. Yet below it the metal is greenish and healthy.”

Koth nodded slowly, as if he knew what he was about to hear would be as ridiculous as the artificer himself.

“It seems that whatever flows up along that column can’t go up any longer. Up is plugged by that dark, dead-looking material. It must go sideways. Sideways is those tendrils. They are of different lengths. What if they are of different ages as well?”

Koth shook his head as he listened.

Venser did not seem to notice. He kept speaking. “What if those tendrils are caused by whatever is traveling up along the column? Perhaps when enough of those tendrils come together and connect with another column, they form a layer. A new layer under the crust.”

Koth was narrowing his eyes as he gazed across the vast expanse before them. “A crazy idea, I’ll give you that. I don’t believe a word of it. And how would you explain that?” Koth pointed.

It took some time for Venser to spot what he was looking at. The vastness of the cavern was all made of metal of one sort or another. There were inclusions of dark ore and marbles of lighter metal. But as his eyes moved over the calico of colors, they stopped on a flash. He looked closer. The flash came from what appeared to be a golden bubble. It clung to the wall near the column half-melted into the metal wall.

“What is that?” Koth said, gloat in his voice.

“I don’t know,” Venser said. “But we can get to it to find out. If we travel to that tendril and walk through it we should come out near the column, very near that bubble. It appears to be older than the column, which has grown around it, as you can see.”

“Yes,” Koth said, reluctantly.

Venser stood up straight and looked right to left. “Yes, right.”

Venser nodded. Koth looked down at his feet. There were many drips in the vast expanse. Some sounded closer than others. There was also the sound of movement … of rusted movement and metal banging into metal. But there were no Phyrexian cries.

The guide was already walking ahead. Elspeth walked along the precipice after the guide. The precipice continued until a small lip appeared and the path they were walking on began to sink as the lip rose. They walked until, had they been on the surface, the suns would have moved significantly in the sky. At that point they were walking in a half tube. A small trickle of water appeared running down the middle of the curved path.

“Where does the water come from?” Elspeth said.

Venser remembered the rain above, and the holes it ran down. At the time he wondered where the holes led. Now he knew. “The surface has holes and the rain runs into them.”

Elspeth nodded and wiped her mouth.

“I could have told you that,” Koth said.

“Noted,” Elspeth said.

Koth pulled his cracked lips into a smile. “When do we begin walking down the tendril, artificer?” Koth said.

“Unless I’m wrong,” Venser said, “we’re on it right now.”

The path had become wider as they walked. It was curved and as wide as ten men lying lengthwise. The lips at the edges were as high as Koth’s chest. To the right was a solid wall that had a smooth surface of cooled ore. Far ahead their path seemed to disappear into a hole that extended half in the wall.

“We travel through the wall for a short time and come back out again,” Venser said. “But we won’t see that we are out of the wall, because the tube will be complete. From the point ahead, we will walk about a league. Then we should be at the golden bubble we saw.”

Koth stared blankly at Venser, who moved his eyes to Elspeth.

“How will we know when we are near the bubble?” Elspeth asked.

Venser gestured grandly at Koth. “We have a geomancer, who is familiar with alloy and true metals. He will begin to taste the gold in the air.”

Koth looked doubtfully at the artificer. “There is no smell in the dark of a tube.”

“Of course there is,” Venser said. “Let us have light and we’ll have a look.”

Venser raised his finger, and the glowing blue wisps crept from it and twirled into the air.

“Guess I’ll be able to see the gold inclusions in the native metal,” Koth grumbled.

They walked the rest of the distance in silence. They stopped where the path came together overhead and peered into the darkness.

“If I were Phyrexian I would lay a trap here,” Elspeth said.

Their guide was squatting and staring ahead. He was very still for some time. Then he stood. “There is no Phyrexian there,” he said.

Venser sent his wisps into the hole. Soon it was bright within. The tunnel was strangely uncluttered and smooth. Venser leaned close and could see the grow lines on the side of it. The lines reminded him of those he’d seen on shells near the ocean. “I don’t know how long it took the tube to grow this distance, but I can’t think it happened slowly.”

“Why?” Elspeth said.

“Neither the old nor the new sections show any oxidation,” Venser said. “But the very old parts, like just here, they show discoloration.” The artificer walked a distance farther and pointed. “These happened a good time ago. Without knowing what type of metal this is, I cannot tell how long it takes to oxidize.”

They entered the hole. Venser went first and Koth came second. Elspeth drew her sword and its glow cast light enough for all to walk. They walked until the air in the tube became oppressive and close. Venser could feel the heat in the tube collecting around his face. Sweat trailed down his neck and forehead. His sleeves were wet by the time he stopped.

“Koth,” he said. “What do you smell?”

“Rust,” Koth said. “And metal.”

“Do you smell gold?”

“No,” he said. “And you know I cannot sniff out metals like a dog, don’t you?”

“How does gold smell?” Elspeth said.

“Sweet, sort of,” Venser said. “Would you mind melting us an escape, Koth?”

The geomancer scrambled over to where Venser pointed. The roof of the small passage was low and twice already Koth had hit his head.

But he did not straighten as he placed his hands on the warm metal of the tube. Soon it began glowing and then it disappeared from around his hands. The dark void of the vast chamber was visible. Koth moved his hands to another part of the metal. Soon there was a rough opening.

“Not there,” Koth said. He moved his hands down and did the same thing. The second hole revealed not the darkness of the cavern, but a bright shine. Koth cleared the edges so the hole was large enough for him to crawl through. The guide stood by the hole and waited as Elspeth and Venser crawled through.

The room they crawled into was large and made out of a golden metal. It shined, and by some power there was light enough to fill the entire room. Cracked orbs floated in the dusty air. At one side of the room was a very large throne of tiny gears and machine works. The walls were covered with crackling images that moved. Blurred moving images of the surface of Mirrodin. Some of the walls were dark. Most were dark. Another panel showed an absolutely vast horde of torn and twisted phyrexianized soldiers with huge metal claws and limbs of snaking metal intertwined with what appeared to be pulsing pink nerve clusters wound into tubes. There were hundreds of them, thousands, all marching across the bleak terrain.

“This must be part of the Panopticon,” Venser said. “Destroyed at the green sun’s ascent. I read about it.”

“What did you just say?” Elspeth said.

“Memnarch, the Father of Machines, the annals on Dominaria say. He had an observation room. This might be where the Father of Machines looked through the eyes of his spies.”

They heard a shuffling sound and spun on their heels. Three forms charged out from behind the throne. They were huffing, with black oil dripping in globs from their mouths and eyes. Their mouths were huge and tooth crammed and their eyes were tiny. Their bodies were covered with runes. In places, the runic metal was peeling away to show the duller metal underneath. Their claws were huge and of pocked, greenish metal. And they wasted not a moment in their attack. They scrambled forward, swinging their claws.

Koth jumped to evade the first troll’s savage cross swing. He stepped in and seized the arm, which went red and fell from the Phyrexian’s body. It all happened quickly, but not quickly enough. The other troll swung at Koth from the side and connected with his chest, sending him flailing, his chest cut wide. The blood came but Venser did not have time to watch before the foe was on him. A second later he blinked away and appeared behind the Phyrexians. Venser rushed forward with the words of power playing on his lips. He took a breath, and with his hands glowing he plunged them up to the elbow through the metal back of the nearest Phyrexian. The mechanized insides of the creature felt odd and alien to his fingers. But he found the metallic organs and conduits and twisted. He took a strong handful and yanked. The creature threw its arms up and then convulsed. It realized what was happening and turned, pulling Venser around like a rag doll. But before the creature could fully turn, it went limp and tumbled into its compatriot, knocking it over. Elspeth was there with her sword to end the Phyrexian’s frenzied stirrings. All three lay dead a moment later.

“Those were trolls,” Koth said, pushing his toe into one of the still bodies.

“Where did they come from?” Venser said.

“They were lying down behind the throne,” Koth said. “I think they wait until prey becomes available.”

Elspeth had a queer look on her face. Venser looked for a wound, a tear in her white robe, but saw nothing. “What is it?” he said.

“I may have discovered something,” Elspeth said.

“Yes?”

“That beast did not notice me until I moved.”

“What do you mean?” Koth said.

“I froze next to you both, and that Phyrexian did not attack me initially. When I drew my weapon I was attacked.”

Venser thought back. He had not noticed that behavior. On Dominaria during the wars against the Phyrexians, they had moved quickly no matter what you did. But that was a different place. Mirrodin’s Phyrexians were different than those he’d observed in other places. That was to be expected, because phyresis incorporated differently. Certain groups took to infection very easily, he suspected. It’s the ones that didn’t take to infection that they needed to find.

“So, you didn’t move and the buggies didn’t bother you?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“This is possible,” Venser said. “I suspect.”

“I don’t want to wait and have one of them tear out my innards because I didn’t move.”

“Well no,” Elspeth said. “And I have not noticed it with the others we encountered.”

“Wouldn’t say you hung back much with those,” Koth said.

“That is true.”

Venser was staring at one of the panels on the wall, the one with all the moving Phyrexians. As he watched, they crammed together surging to move, seething.

“This room amazes me,” Venser said simply. “I can imagine all of these panels showing a different view.”

“Where are they going?” Elspeth said about the clustered Phyrexians on the screen.

“Maybe nowhere,” Venser said.

“Why do they always move?”

“Phyresis affects the nervous system. It fuses all the natural jumps of the body, making the creature very fast, but unable to fully turn off the pulses. When the stimulus comes, the body of a Phyrexian is unable to dissipate it. The charge causes movement, always.”

“Not good at ambushes, at least.”

“I wouldn’t say that. They can be quiet and they can go into a catatonic state,” Venser said. “But these states are difficult to wake from, and they are groggy for a time.”

Elspeth put her sword in its sheath. “Well, they are not so much to deal with here.”

“We have mostly encountered small guard or workers,” the guide called into the room. “Their strength is in numbers and speed. Do not feel your skills are greater than theirs. We want to avoid a direct fight, as we would be quickly overwhelmed and destroyed.”

Elspeth looked doubtful. “I have fought these beasts before. I know how they work.”

“Obviously not, if you just figured out that freezing causes them to not see you.”

“And you knew this?”

“Yes,” the guide said. “Their sight is bad. But most times it is not possible to freeze indefinitely.”

“What did we find out coming into this golden room?” Koth interjected.

“That this is older than the columns and their tendrils,” Venser said. “Can’t you see that? It’s clear.”

“Clear to you,” Koth said. “But far from clear.”

“This room is intact from the inside,” Venser said. “From the outside the tendril had grown around it. To me it means that the tendril is newer. Yes?”

Koth nodded. “Maybe. Or maybe the golden metal this room is made of has bitten deep into the tendril? It could be a special alloy.”

Venser stared at Koth a couple of seconds before bobbing his head. “Yes. That is also possible.”

“Thank you,” Koth said.

“But I do not think it is the case,” Venser said.

“Clearly, you don’t.”

Venser looked around the room. He sucked in his cheeks as he thought. “Right,” he said at last. “Should we be on our way?” He did not wait for a response, but walked over to the hole Koth had made and crawled out into the tendril-tube.

The guide led them left and proceeded down the tube in a slightly hunched gait.

They moved through the tunnel until it became thicker. Soon it became high, and then higher still. Then the passage widened into another vast cavern. They made their way down, along the crumbly ore until a floor of sorts became apparent. It was riddled with boulders and dusts of many colors, and even a couple of partial skeletons in various degrees of decomposition. Leagues passed under their feet as they walked along the bottom of the cavern, and then even the bottom of the cavern fell away suddenly. A circular hole so wide across they could not see the other side was thrust up. The bottom was similarly cloaked in darkness. Koth picked up a chunk of slag from the floor of the cavern.

“Do not think of throwing that over the side,” Elspeth warned.

Koth threw the chunk into the air and caught it easily. “Wouldn’t think of it,” he said.

In the blue light from Venser’s wisp, the air looked ghostly and distorted. Venser put his hand out over the hole. “Do you feel anything?” he asked.

The others put their hands out.

“I feel the wind,” Elspeth said.

“I feel heat,” Koth said. “And something else.”

Koth turned his hand over and then back.

“I feel mana, I think,” Koth said. “My hand is tingling. My nose hairs are tickling.”

“I feel that too,” Venser said. He looked up. The hole continued upward for a short time before stopping in a mass of slag and blacked char. The slag that stopped the top of the huge chute appeared different than the dull metal of the surrounding cavern.

“Let me see that chunk of yours,” Venser said, holding out his hand to Koth.

Koth placed the chunk of metal in Venser’s gloved hand. The artificer held the piece out above his foot and dropped it. The chunk should have fallen and crushed his toe, but instead it fell only a short distance before slowing down to float like a feather.

“Well,” Venser said. “That is strange, but it seems to be in our favor.”

“How’s that?” Koth said. He reached out and poked the rock, which spun sideways and then continued its lazy fall.

The guide watched all of this. “I do not know of this chute. If we go this way it is into the unknown.”

Elspeth shifted her weight from one thick leg to the other.

“It will allow us to travel down the shaft,” Venser said. “Otherwise it might have been a dangerous climb.”

“My way has a climb,” the guide said.

Elspeth stared at the guide as though he were mad. “A climb?” she said. “I am not in favor of that path then.”

Koth coughed. “You want us to go down that sheer hole?”

“As you can see,” Venser said. “We will float. It will be fast and safe.”

Elspeth opened her mouth but waited a moment before speaking. “That is not the point,” she said. “It is a hole.”

“Yes,” Koth said, pointing at Elspeth. “What she said.”

“This is a stroke of luck,” Venser said. “I think this shaft goes very deep. Almost to the mana core of this metal place. It’s little more than a conduit.”

“It is possible,” the guide said.

“But a blocked conduit,” Elspeth said, pointing upward at the slag plug.

“Exactly,” Venser said. “It seems it once vented, but is now plugged. That is why the mana concentration is so great. Koth can feel it and so can I. It is so dense that the normal force of matter seems interrupted, I would guess.”

“If we float down how do we know there are passages like this one branching off from the stem?” It was Elspeth who spoke.

“We don’t,” Venser said. “But it would stand to reason that …”

“This is foolishness,” Koth said.

“I agree,” said Elspeth. “We could fall forever.”

“This branch is here,” Venser said. “We saw others branching off from the column. There must be other branches.”

“But we have no reason to believe that they are hollow,” Koth said.

Venser took off his helmet. “Have you ever read the Chronicles of Arrival? It has some good thoughts on the uncertainness of life. One of its revelations is this: ‘No one has promised us a tomorrow.’ ”

Koth pushed his chest out. “Are you accusing me of cravenness?”

“Not at all,” Venser said. “I’m accusing you of bad logic … and that’s worse.”

“I’ll give you logic,” Koth said. A large flame leaped from his right fist. Venser was near the edge of the huge shaft. Koth reached out with his huge flaming hand and tried to seize Venser’s shoulder. The artificer whispered a word and appeared with a sudden strobe of light behind Koth. With one finger Venser pushed the geomancer, who tripped forward and fell headfirst over the edge of the shaft. As he fell his whole body sputtered and burst into flame and the slits along his ribs yawned wide and red. But Koth did not fall far before his body seemed to stop in midair. Then he began to fall as slowly as a leaf falling from a tree in fall. His breeches bagged up as he executed a flip.

“This is amazing,” Koth yelled.

Elspeth looked back along the tube they had just traveled. “Hush, dolt,” she said.

Venser turned to her. “You are next, my lady,” Venser said. He slipped his helmet back on and smiled at her. A strange sight, Elspeth thought. A man in a helmet smiling at her. Men in helmets were usually trying to kill her. “I do not think this is wise,” she said, stepping to the edge. She undid the buckle holding her sword around her waist. Then she slipped the belt over her shoulder and fastened the buckle again. She stepped to the edge and then back again.

“I am not overly fond of heights,” she said.

“I can’t tell,” Venser said.

Koth did another flip and giggled.

“I think the problem here will not be falling too fast,” Venser said. “But rather too slowly. We have to get to Karn before the Phyrexians control the whole plane. It might be too late by that point.”

Elspeth closed her eyes and stepped off … and floated. Venser followed her. Without a sound the guide followed.

Elspeth floated lazily downward, with her white tunic billowing around her. It felt wonderful and she did not ever want to stop. If there are other columns will they also have this feature?

“I don’t know,” Venser said.

Elspeth stared at Venser. “Did you just listen to the thoughts in my head?”

“Of course not,” Venser said.

They floated slowly downward for very long. Soon they were tired of floating and lay motionless in the air. Venser watched as cavelike openings passed in the blue light of his wisps.

“How far will we go?” Koth said.

“Do you have a suggestion?”

Koth shrugged and floated away.