Venser looked away, out to the darkness. She could see the evident disgust on his face. Still, there was a certain lightness building in her stomach. “I can tell you more,” she said.
Venser shook his head. “I have heard enough.” He turned back to the Phyrexians. They watched the revolting combination of decomposing metal and sinewy flesh of all shapes and sizes march from the holes. Elspeth found herself wondering where they all slept, and how. Were they able to talk to each other? Her time in one of their prisons had not left her with a strong impulse of find out more about the Phyrexians. They were the essence of cruelty, with a child’s desire to experiment and play.
She glanced away from Venser’s eyes at the Phyrexians. One tripped and fell and the one behind it stepped squarely on its head and laughed its chortling laugh. “It seems to me that their numbers are decreasing,” she said.
Venser peered back over the edge of the divot they were sheltering in. The dark smudge of the main body of the Phyrexians was spread out in the green haze filling the large valley.
“Are you ready?” Venser said. Without waiting for an answer, the artificer began crawling down the slough after Koth.
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.
