The Quest for Karn

Chapter 4

The experimentation room looked as it had before, with one exception. On the far wall as they entered was an area where the wet gut-works had been spread. A hole was revealed. Koth was squatting next to it with a smile on his face.

“Something is guiding us,” he said.

Venser stepped closer, and suddenly a shake caught him. He put his hand out to the wall, and it sunk into the wetness. Venser lurched sideways and fell to his knees, shaking over half his body. From experience he knew to wait. When enough time had passed, and Venser could open and close his fingers, he struggled to his feet. The others watched him wide-eyed.

“We will not speak of this,” Venser said. “It happens sometimes.”

“But why?” Elspeth said.

“It happens because of my foolishness. Because of a great mistake I made.”

They moved through the darkness, skidding their feet across the strangely smooth floor for a long time without the least sense of where they were going.

“Can we dare light?” Elspeth whispered.

Venser nodded.

It took Elspeth some moments to cull the mana she needed in that black place, but eventually her suit of armor began to glow slightly and they could see more of their surroundings.

“I hear its movements ahead,” Koth whispered. “This is the way.”

“It makes me nervous to follow something I’ve never met,” Venser said.

A loud hissing sound broke the stillness behind them. Elspeth dropped the charm on her armor, and the light blinked out. Shadows were moving in a passage in front of them.

The passageway opened into a very large cavern. An eerie green light filtered weakly to the edges of the large space. At the far end a group of beings stood, tapping on the wall with their knuckles or whatever they had that passed for knuckles. They were Phyrexians, yes, but somehow different. They moved with the jerky, sudden movements of the Phyrexians-had the same frantic speed and carelessness as they bumped into one another, seeking something in haste.

“Are they sick?” Elspeth said.

“Vampires,” Venser whispered. “Succumbing to phyresis.”

Elspeth nodded at that, and tried hard not to let Venser sense her disgust.

Standing a bit back was their leader. The first thing that struck Venser was the size of the being. Its body was a massive shell of flesh and metal, one substance wound into another, with jags of metal jutting off the carapace. Two huge, tipped claws hung on robust arms at its sides. And the head, the head looked tiny atop the mountainous torso. A black line of hair ran from the front forehead in a crest to the back.

“Keep looking,” the leader yelled.

Venser watched the leader very carefully-when he walked, his body jerked to the side and the head was momentarily sideways.

The creatures kept knocking on the walls and floor until at last one of the Phyrexian vampires found what they were looking for. They all bent around something on the floor, until the leader lumbered over. They moved out of the way and he looked down at the floor with eyes that glittered in the low light, even from where Venser was standing across the room.

“Pull it up,” he said.

“Yes, Master Geth,” one of the Phyrexians hissed.

It was a door, but one that had to be torn from the floor. Ragged, bloody flaps of skin hung around the door’s circumference when it was raised.

“Get moving,” Master Geth bellowed suddenly. “The silver one’s temper makes mine look pleasant. Move.”

The silver one, Venser thought. Was he making reference to the silver creeper they were following, or was it the silver golem Geth?

The Phyrexians dropped one at a time down the trap door. Geth kicked the last one, sending him careening through the hole. Before Geth stepped into the secret door, he looked around the room. Venser jerked his head back, but for a moment Geth’s eyes froze in his direction. Eventually he turned and hopped down the hole.

Venser and the others poked their heads around the corner, just in time to see a small silver form slip down the hole, after Geth.

Elspeth spoke first. “It seems that is our direction,” she said.

“Yes,” Venser said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Koth said. “And neither are you.” He turned to Elspeth. “Or you. You will stir up the enemy even more than you have already. Let us fight the force that just left the Vault. We must leave here and raise a warning.”

Elspeth looked from one to the other before speaking. “I think this is not the place to argue … especially loudly,” she said.

Venser and Koth stared at each other. The small space between them sparkled and cracked with mana.

“I have known the Phyrexians,” Elspeth continued. “And they are cruel beyond measure.” She paused to take in a deep, shaky breath. “I would like to kill each and every one of them, but the reality is that I cannot do that.” The white knight was shaking, Venser observed. Whether in anger or fear he could not be sure. But her hands were clenching and releasing as she talked.

“How did you escape them?” Koth said.

But Elspeth was clearly not listening. Her eyes were raised and she was looking off into the darkness, caught in the dream playing in her head.

“I was only a little girl,” she said. “And their experiments were …”

“Pointless,” Venser interjected. “I have read that they are always pointless. Only so those beings can feel like they are experimenting.”

Venser’s words drew Elspeth out of her thoughts a bit. Her eyes focused and she looked down at her hands. “Only to cause pain in as many ways as possible. And terror,” she said.

Koth said nothing. He looked at the patch of floor where Geth and his undead minions had pulled up the door.

“You saw our silver guide went down that hole,” Venser said.

Elspeth was not done though. “They seemed to especially hate skin. My skin and skin of the others in the cells around me. They would remove it and stitch it onto their own bodies, along with appendages. There was one of them, a smaller one, who did the stitching. It had a long needle attached to its right wrist. With this needle it sewed the swatches of skin over the others. The sewer. Sometimes the skin took and stayed on them,” she said.

“Should we be on our way?” Venser said, glancing uneasily at Elspeth.

The door had healed itself, and it lay without crease. They searched the floor and still could not find anything to grasp and pull. The walls of the cavern room were run with conduit and pillars of metal tubing, but the floors were generally smooth.

“Did they create it,” Elspeth mused. “And then make it disappear when finished?”

“It was open when that silver devil jumped down it,” Venser said. He ran his palm over the ground. Then he got down on his chest, put his cheek on the cold floor, and looked sideways at it. “That could be,” he said. “But when they found the door, there were no incantations said that I heard.” He looked up. “Did either of you hear anything?”

“No,” Koth said, but I have a better way. “The geomancer put his hands on the ground. “I’d step back,” he said, “if you value your boots.”

Soon his hands began to glow red as did the floor around them. The slits along his ribs pulsed like a magma core. The glow in the floor spread, and soon covered most of it. Pink light filled the cavern and they could smell the soles of their boots singeing. The heat was nearly unbearable to Venser.

“I see something,” Venser said, pointing.

One area of the floor was not the same color as the others. A perimeter of lighter color created the outline of a rectangle. At one end of the rectangle was a small divot of yet another shade of orange. Venser took a small knife from his boot. He bent down and carefully poked the tip of the knife through the loop hidden in the divot. “Got it,” Venser said.

Koth nodded and removed his palms from the floor.

Their boots were smoking as they waited for the metal to cool. When the ring was cool enough to grasp, Elspeth and Koth took hold and heaved. Nothing happened. Venser bent down and pulled as well, and slowly, very slowly, the door began to tear free from the metal floor. It was a sound that made Elspeth’s stomach turn-she’d heard it so many times when imprisoned by the Phyrexians-tearing flesh.

But they managed to open the passage. A foul smell wafted up the chute, and a ladder descended into darkness. Koth went first, his whole body glowing slightly as he moved. The walls of the chute seemed to be bored out as if by an immense drill. Under their feet a hard banging sound echoed up from deep below. After climbing for what seemed like hours, they saw a light. Every movement they made echoed, so none spoke but quickened their pace toward the light. Venser took deep breaths to keep from hurrying too much and perhaps slipping to his death. He was not overly predisposed to darkness. And after the long darkness of the chute, Venser would have welcomed a legion of Phyrexians as long as the hall they were in was well lighted.

The light was brighter underneath. Koth stopped when they were just about to climb into the room below. The banging noise was loud there, and the vulshok spoke in a normal volume. “Should we drop down and take them unawares? How many can there be? From what I saw they’re all on the surface.”

Next in line was Venser, but he said nothing. He was trying hard not to jump for the red light.

“Do you smell something familiar?” Elspeth asked.

“The reek is horrible, but not familiar,” Koth said. “Rot, I’d say. Rotting flesh.”

“Yes, that,” Elspeth said. “And … something sweet.”

“That is blood, unless I am mistaken,” Venser said.

“Blood,” Elspeth said.

The hot updraft blew past their faces. The pounding sound continued.

“Well,” Koth said. “I guess we should just drop down.”

“I’ll teleport down and then back,” Venser said.

“I cannot see any floor, my friends,” Elspeth said.

“I can appear and then disappear.”

When nobody said anything, Venser settled himself and took a series of deep breaths. He slapped himself on the cheek once and felt the mana in the lines he kept tethered to other places course blue like blood in the vein toward him. It rushed to his cheek and he took one final deep breath and held it. When he felt as if he would faint, he pushed in his mind and disappeared with a snap.

Elspeth counted one, two and then the artificer was back holding the ladder, gasping for air.

“Do you always hold your breath?” Elspeth said.

“No, but it helps for short ones.”

“What is down there?” Koth said.

Venser did not replay at first. “It is a bad place, that,” he said. “The enemy is there, working.”

“Are they?”

“Yes,” Venser said. “Very many of them, but lumbering ones. Fit for their work.”

“That pleases me,” Elspeth said.

“Nothing about this place pleases me,” Koth mumbled.

“… and there are some others that I could not identify. I was in the air only a moment. They are larger, I know that.”

“What makes the hammering sound?” Elspeth said.

“I will let you see that for yourselves. It would cause you to question what we are about to do.”

Koth looked up. “Jackass, you are not supposed to tell us that. You are supposed to tell us the hammering sound is nothing.”

“I was never good at lying.”

Koth shook his head.

“I will appear off to the side, and fight them from there,” Venser said.

“I will slay everything in that room,” Elspeth said through gritted teeth.

“Then keep in front of me, crazed one,” Koth said. “Actually you are both cracked.”

“You brought me here,” Venser reminded.

“To fight the Phyrexians, not track down an old comrade.”

“Right. Ready?” Venser said, he looked down at Koth and up at Elspeth, who nodded. The pounding continued, and something metal and large banged into a wall. “Go.”

Koth pushed off from the ladder rungs and fell feetfirst to the floor, which was farther down than he thought it would be. He stumbled back a bit, and Elspeth landed soundlessly next to him.

The scene laid out before them took their breath away. The walls were splattered and the floor was covered, as were the slablike tables, with a bright redness. So bright, in fact, that it looked like paint. There were many of the metal catafalques in the room. Each had a body on it in the process of being butchered. Next to the table more bodies were piled. The meat pulled and hacked off the bodies was thrown in a cart next to the table, as were the organs. Everything else lay glistening and white. There was no drain in the floor, so the carnage was ankle deep. The reek was enormous, like a wall that hit them in the face.

Each table had a Phyrexian butcher. A huge thing with no face to speak of-only an immense mouth of long teeth crammed one over the others. Each butcher had a notched iron blade where its right hand would have been, and a hacked, gashed, fingerless stump for its left. Done with the meat, each butcher loaded the bones onto a creaky cart and walked them to an immense crusher, which Elspeth took for a machine at first. The bones were thrown into a basin and the room-high Phyrexian raised its boulder of a fist and dropped it on the bones. Every eighth pound or so, it brushed the bits left into a large hole next to the basin.

The meat went into another hole, but samples were obviously taken by the butchers, who had blood and material smeared around their mouths and over their wet teeth.

Elspeth and Koth stood stunned in the middle of the room. Venser was off to the side near the pulverizing Phyrexian. So still were they that the Phyrexians did not notice them at first, as the butchers had no eyes. But they had noise holes, Venser saw.

It was the pulverizer that raised the alarm. Its eyes were set spiderlike on a tiny head fused onto the trunk of its immense body. It had a toothless mouth hole, which began bellowing, with what must have been its tongue flopping around in its mouth. Its crushing hand stopped, and all the butchers froze. Dripping blood from their work, and from the flaps of skin hanging cut from their left hands, they turned toward Elspeth and Koth. Venser was nearer the crushing beast, but he had not been detected.

One of the bodies next to Venser moved and moaned. The artificer backed up. The body groaned and extended a bruised hand. It was an elf, Venser saw, or had been. He backed up farther, until he bumped something. He turned, and towering over him was a butcher. But the creature was facing Elspeth and Koth, and had apparently not noticed him.

Venser brought the mana to him. He felt it sparking the air around him and seeping into his pores. He reached out to touch the Phyrexian, who froze stiff in place.

Suddenly the other Phyrexians were running at Koth and Elspeth. She had her sword out and it reflected the red glare of the place. Koth was positively red, with his fiery slits wide and the furnace of anger within him blazing in his eyes and at his fists. He struck the first Phyrexian, and that creature burst into flames and fell flailing off to the side. Koth ducked the swinging cleaver hand from a Phyrexian that had moved in from the back. Crouching, he planted one of his hands and swept the thing’s leg with his own. It fell with a loud thud. Then another was trampling it, swinging its own cleaver down on Koth’s head.

Elspeth cut a Phyrexian’s head from its body, but still it fought with black oil spouting out where its neck had been. She leveled an overhand smash on the body, cleaving the left arm off, but still it did not fall. Thrusts and hacks to the torso had little effects either. Her sword was there to block each blow, and soon the butcher’s cleaver was notched almost to its handle, and after another blow the pocked top of it fell off. The Phyrexian hunched its headless and armless body but still stood.

Elspeth took two steps back and lowered her blade. She took some deep breaths until her heartbeat slowed a bit. The opponent was disarmed. She could not normally attack a disarmed opponent, but the Phyrexian did not seem to know it was disarmed, and she cut it as it advanced, oil still bubbling out its neck and streaming down its body and arm.

Koth stepped between Elspeth and the Phyrexian and cast a column of fire from his hands, which ignited the hulking creature. Burning, it still charged. Koth waited until it was almost upon him, then he dropped to his hands and knees, and the lumbering beast fell over him and went sprawling. With only one arm, it had trouble getting up, and after a short while it stopped trying and burned.

Koth and Elspeth stood and turned to the other butchers. They had crowded into a loose circle around them. Venser was behind somewhere. Koth tapped Elspeth’s shoulder, and when she turned she saw even more butchers staring at them. Their stillness was unnerving. She tried counting them but stopped at sixty. And there were plenty more than that.

The Phyrexians began rocking. From leg to leg they rocked. Then they started making the frenzied, mad sounds Venser had heard before. He glanced around until he located the ladder they had descended. Another quick look yielded the hole where the Phyrexians threw down the meat. Behind it was the hole where the bones were dumped. Across from him Elspeth was still breathing hard from her fight. Koth was doing a bit better, but even the vulshok looked exhausted. Venser cast his eyes over the enemy, front to back. Ninety-three, not including the huge ones. Odds were against them, based on how much they had worked to slay only four.

“Bones or meat?” Venser said.

His head down as he caught his breath, Koth looked up and then back down. Elspeth understood immediately.

“I cannot retreat in this case,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Retreat?” Venser said. “Nobody’s asking for that. Retreat would be to the ladder we climbed down, right? We simply have to find our next path.”

By then Koth understood. “Meat is softer,” he said, between breaths.

“Very true,” Venser said. “We need to move over to our right, past the one with the dung slipping down its leg.”

Koth swallowed hard. “I see it.”

“Shall we?” Venser said.

They all waited for Elspeth to speak. When she said nothing, Venser started to move.

Luckily the Phyrexians had not moved forward, but continued to rock back and forth making their retching sounds. The moment the party moved they stopped rocking, put their heads down, and charged from all angles, their cleaver hands slashing.

“Go,” Venser yelled.

The Phyrexians converged on them when they were still a zanda beast’s-length from the meat hole. Elspeth rushed forth and she and her sword became a blur as the sword attacked from every angle at one time. Six Phyrexians fell with thousands of slices crisscrossing their wizened sinew and metal.

At the rear, Koth caught a downward chop from the first Phyrexian’s cleaver in a sticky pillow of fiery plasma, yanked the beast off balance, turned it, and threw it into the others. Venser teleported to the lip of the meat hole. It was so slopped with viscera that he almost lost his footing. It took him a second of flailing before he steadied himself. Then he turned and took three deep breaths of mana and blew out a thick cloud of shimmering air. Venser’s gusted breath enveloped the Phyrexians caught in the back near him and suddenly their sinews leaped off their bodies and began to dance a mad jig amidst the gore. So surprised were the butchers that they stopped to stare … and were cut down by Elspeth as she moved like a flashing blaze through them.

Still more butchers shoved and rocked in from the edges, running surprisingly fast in a convulsive frenzy to cleave the intruders’ skulls and, Venser assumed somehow, drink their brains.

They were a stone’s throw from the hole when the far wall quaked and a large portal in the shape of an iris diaphragm blossomed and out of the conduits and gutlike wetness of the hole stepped two massive Phyrexians. They were near the size of the Phyrexian machine that had been crushing bones with its one huge hand. But their hands, unlike most Phyrexians, had no sharp tipped fingers. Each hand was as large as their torso, and made of some metal wrapped with thick bands of sinew. The monstrous Phyrexians moved over the crowd of butchers, crushing them as they planted their knuckles on the floor and swung their bodies to catch up.

The smell of the place was already rot and old blood, but with these crushing creatures, the smell of singed hair joined the melange.

Elspeth stopped swinging her sword. She turned to Venser, but the artificer was not looking at the crushers or the butchers. His eyes were fixed on a place at the far end of the room.

“What is our plan with this large foe?” Elspeth yelled to her comrades. “Will we choose this point to continue on our path down that hole?”

The meat hole was within their reach. The few Phyrexians left that stood between them and the hole had stopped fighting to watch their huge cousins.

“I wonder,” Venser said, ignoring what Elspeth had said. “If that is what I think it is.”

Koth ran toward the hole. He reached down and seized a huge section of spinal vertebrae. He hurled the bone and it took the first Phyrexian in the eye and knocked it back and over. As the Phyrexian struggled to get up, Koth jumped on him and drove an ember-red hand down into the beast’s chest, stilling its efforts. Another Phyrexian charged forward and swung. Large gauntlets of metal snapped out of Koth’s forearms, which he raised as a shield. The Phyrexian’s cleaver bounced harmlessly off the growths.

Koth’s hands went black, and the seams where his fingers bent glowed a bright red. He dived forward and plunged both hands to the elbows into the Phyrexian’s body, instantaneously melting through the thing’s metal framework of supports and bone shards. As he ducked the Phyrexian’s swings, Koth lifted it off its feet and hurled it into the other butchers who had begun to advance.

The path was clear to the meat hole.

“Let’s go,” Koth said.

But Venser was not moving. In a moment the crushers would be upon them. Even Elspeth had begun to walk toward the hole.

“Oh, artificer, sir,” Koth said. “You coming?”

At that moment Venser blinked out of existence to teleport to the bottom of the pit. Shrugging, Koth ran to the hole. The ground shook as the crushers advanced. They were just behind him, by the feel of it. Koth could smell their grim knuckles.

Elspeth was the first one down. Koth looked before he jumped. Darkness. The first crusher stopped and pulled back its huge fist for a punch that would surely have driven Koth back and into the metal wall. He jumped. The cushion of wind at the front of the punch whizzed past his head as he fell down into darkness.