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 to the Phyrexians, who lacked simple common sense. She aided them. Even though they did not speak, they followed her for some reason, maybe because she had been there so long that they saw her as part of the prison and not a fun toy to be experimented upon. But she saw it all. Every horrible thing that can be done to a human.
“Children are children,” Venser said.
Elspeth blinked. If he only knew. Perhaps he should. It had been with her for so long, carried on her shoulders during all her travels so that, perhaps, with almost certain death approaching, she should relieve herself of the weight.
“When they became interested in me, I would divert their attention by pointing out better candidates to be experimented on. Sometimes women, even children. Old men. They all cried. They all wailed.” She felt like covering her ears from the wailing she heard when she closed her eyes to sleep at night, the same sound she heard first thing when she woke.
Words had escaped Venser. He opened his mouth to say something, only to close it again.
She could tell by his shocked expression that he was expecting another story-perhaps the story of the brave child helping the other prisoners, only to end up the subject of experimentation herself. Truth was, she managed to evade being cut or molested in any way. Countless others took that burden for her. And the children were the cries that stayed with her the longest.
Sound came back to Venser’s lips. “How did you escape?”
“I escaped,” she gulped. “By cutting open a large corpse and slipping inside and staying still in its reek until it was tossed into the rot heap. I was small and still the fit was tight.” She didn’t tell him that it took many days for the Phyrexians to move the corpse; they were not good housekeepers. She lay in the corpse for at least two days, but it could have been more. She was almost dead herself of thirst when she finally crawled out. But the smell never left her. It was always in her nose, waking her in the morning and turning her stomach and making it difficult to eat.
“But you survived,” Venser stammered. “You persevered. You were unbeaten.”
“Unbeaten,” Elspeth said hollowly.
