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.
The landing was soft and wet. They lay in the dark, listening to the caterwauling screams echoing from the hole above them. When Elspeth struggled to her feet a voice broke the quiet.
“Be at ease,” the voice said. “We are many and you are few. Do not struggle or we will gut and leave you and the twisted ones will work through your skins. We need you as you need us to leave this dark place.”
“We are not leaving this dark place,” Venser said.
“Oh, you are leaving,” the voice said. “You are coming with us. Furthermore, you will like it very much. We will even take the vulshok, if he will agree not to run away.”
