The Quest for Karn

Then they felt it. The ground began to shake slightly. The filthy water began to ripple. Soon small waves were coursing its banks. The mountain above them began to groan. Venser sunk as deep as he could in the black water. Everything about his being said fly. But he mastered himself and did not move. The banging became rhythmic and strong, like a battering ram on the door of a castle, and then it turned to a deafening thunder. The ground trembled.

And the Phyrexians came. First one stumbled through a hole in the mountain and stood blinking in the open air. Then another came from another hole. A third appeared from yet another hole. More came after them. Soon a steady line of bulky, toothy beings of skeletal angularity with long tooth-crammed mouths were streaming out of each entrance. Then the flow increased again. Phyrexians were crawling out of the holes, one over the other, clawing forward. It stayed that way for a time, with the entrances pressing out shadowy, hairless beings like material through a sausage press. Some survived, and those stood outside screaming their guttural choking cries into the green murk, while other Phyrexians fell upon their wounded brethren in a mad feast.

“Is that all there are?” Koth murmured. “They are not a large force.”

But there were more. Soon the cave entrances split at the corners and still larger amounts of Phyrexians came pouring out. Larger and larger beings emerged: twisted trolls with long bony faces, tiny eyes and huge mouths sheltering long teeth. They swatted other Phyrexians out of the way. Hulking great soldiers made of tattered metal and raw flesh with tiny, stitched together skulls lurched from the bowels with long fingers of glittering metal. Behind them a vast array of strikers that the companions had seen earlier, with heads formed into the notched tip of a spear, and broken, gnashed teeth chipped and bleeding black. At the head of the mass swaggered a herald with a grim standard held aloft: its own small head impaled on a spike. Wispy scouts hopped from head to head, and behind them all tumbled wave upon wave of massive brutes as large as three men with claws as long as legs, which they swung as they walked, laying open their own kind and themselves in the mayhem.

“We must get closer,” Venser hissed.

Koth turned and stared at the artificer.

Venser leaned forward in the water, so his stomach scraped the bottom of the slough. The artificer walked himself with his hands along the slough. Reluctantly, the others followed. Soon they were close enough to the menagerie to smell the filthy reek wafting from their rot and rust in their moist folds. And the sound. They made the oddest creaking as they walked. It was an ominous sound that Elspeth remembered well. The sounds and the smells brought back such memories that she could not make herself move along the slough to join the others. As soon as she did, by touching her sword, she wished she had not. The closer she got to the Phyrexians, the more she felt again like a little girl, held captive in their oubliette.

The gross, twisted expressions that played across the Phyrexian faces were what affected her most. For something with half-sentience, at best, Elspeth thought, that leer was unnerving. It spoke of all manner of callousness … of slyness and cruelty. Of extreme, painful carelessness coupled with playful curiosity. She put her head under the filthy slough water and held it there until she thought she would burst.

When she raised her head the others were gone. She spied them sheltering in a raw divot where they must have crawled from the slough. They were not farther than two lengths of a human body, but she would not follow, not with them on the move.

She realized too late that she had risen to her knees to look for the others. That, coupled with her soiled white garb, made her easy to see. A single, garbled cry went up from a marching Phyrexian, and Elspeth fell back into the water. She walked herself backward along the slough and behind a slight turn, and dropped lower in the water.

A moment later the beast appeared. A brute trooper, as luck would have it, with tiny, glittering eyes set close together in a head stitched more than once it appeared. Layer upon layer of armor crisscrossed every part of its body so it squeaked as it fell remarkably fast to its knees next to the water. It smelled the slough and bit at the water until it ran out between its transparent teeth.

Another, rougher cry went up and the trooper stood and dashed back to the ranks. Elspeth rested her head against the metal bank and took deep breaths until her heart stopped feeling like it might beat up and out of her throat. When her breathing was normal, she carefully tore off her white tunic, so her tarnished armor showed.

And so it was. By later in the day the flow of Phyrexians had not lessened in the least, but the light from the suns had changed. Shadows appeared, and Elspeth was able to crawl to the divot the others were sheltering in.

“… An invasion,” Koth was saying.

Venser nodded.

“I am not going into the camp of the enemy. Our numbers aren’t enough. Our battle is in the hills with the others, snapping off parts of the main force. This is how a smaller force …”

“I know how to fight a large force,” Venser said, cutting off the geomancer. “But you cannot hope to save your plane with that technique. Not with a foe like this.”

Elspeth agreed with Venser. But, to be fair, she was not altogether sure that any technique could save Mirrodin after the display of numbers and strength she was seeing.

Venser continued. “Only Karn has even the smallest chance of setting this straight.” Now the artificer looked directly at Koth to speak. “Your people and all the beings of this plane will fall to this force. This number is larger than any I have ever heard of. They must have been spawning under the surface for years.

Koth squinted back the way they had come. The entrance Elspeth had hacked through the leaden side of the mountain was a small dark hole far behind. But in that moment Koth saw a shiny form standing in it.

“We should travel into the Vault through the room where Elspeth found us,” Koth said absently, his eyes still on the silver creature. He blinked and it was gone.

“Why?” Venser said.

“I have just seen the creature that was following us, I think. I saw it in the room when I first awoke also.” Koth pointed. “It is in the hole that Elspeth cut when she came for us.”

Venser turned to look, but the creature was gone.

Koth stood in a crouch and began moving back along the slough toward the hole. Venser watched him go.

“You who are such tight comrades?” Venser asked Elspeth.

Elspeth watched as the Phyrexians continued moving. There were fewer of them than before, she noted. “Not that such things are your business in the least,” Elspeth said. “But we met only days before he kidnapped you.”

“Where did you meet?”

“Fighting for coin in a pit.”

“You?”

She smiled. “Yes, me. I have need of coin as does anyone.”

“Did you win against the geomancer?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Elspeth said. “Does that surprise you?”

Venser shrugged. “A bit.”

“There are other parts of me that you may find shocking.”

“Such as?”

“I was imprisoned by the Phyrexians once.”

“How did you escape them?”

Elspeth looked back before speaking. “Through despicable means,” she said. “I am embarrassed to speak of it now. It was long ago.”

“You were a child?”

“Yes.”

“Children do not act despicably,” he said. “They are simply children doing childish things.”

Images flashed suddenly into Elspeth’s head, images of blood and intestines strung across a large room. The length of the intestines shocked her as a little girl, but still they strung them across the room when a new prisoner arrived. They inserted their sharp fingers into the belly and out came a line of intestine, which they drew out as thread from a spool. And she, she moved from cell to cell, relatively free, pointing out the ones who would die soon