small city and it dragged its inhabitants on chains behind it.
Some were alive, Venser saw, and walking slowly with the chains clipped around their necks. They were mostly humans, and in various states of phyresis. All were armed with swords.
“Moriok,” Koth said. “Shadow-aligned humans.”
Many were motionless bodies being dragged behind. Some were no more than rotted corpses. Venser noticed with not a little bit of unease that many of them were missing their legs. The moving city was made of dull, jagged metal, pocked and wound with sinew and with a single head the size of a dragon propped on top of its amazing bulk. The head, though small, looked all around from deep set eyes. Beside the small eyes, the rest of the space on the head was dominated by a huge mouth of sharp teeth, dripping with bright red blood. Many clawed hands on thin arms hung over its side.
It lumbered to a stop before the companions, and a huge rooster tail of steam shot up into the air. What flesh the being once had was long ago turned to black and metallic Phyrexian armor.
One of the giant’s thin arms reached down and gave a chain a tug. The moriok attached to it struggled to stand, and when he could not, the Phyrexian lifted him by the chain as though a marionette. It dangled the struggling human into its open mouth. When the moriok’s legs were kicking the creature’s sharp teeth, the mouth closed with a snap. The moriok was without legs the next moment, screaming and flailing its arms as the blood and organs fell. The Phyrexian dropped the chain and chewed slowly as it regarded the companions.
“What’s the plan?” Koth whispered.
Venser shrugged. “The head?” he said.
“Can we gain entrance to his body?” Elspeth said.
Nobody replied. Steam shot out its back as the crusher slowly began its charge. It put its arms out and choked a cry. Creaking and whining as it started to move, the moriok stood straighter and pulled swords. Venser closed his eyes and took quick stock of his reserves of mana. Not good. He reached out with his mind to catch a fluttering tether. Once he caught one he yanked it straight and felt the cool flow of energy emptying into his skull. Elspeth drew her sword, and Koth closed his eyes and mouth and held his breath. A moment later his body and face were as red as the melted rock Venser had seen in the Oxidda Chain. The geomancer stepped into the path of the lumbering Phyrexian, whose legs were moving it, crablike, at a fairly brisk clip toward them with the moriok advancing before it.
The first moriok swung its sword at Koth. The blade of the sword caught on the vulshok’s suddenly red skin and melted before the moriok’s eyes. Koth reached out and burned his hand into the man’s chest and the moriok fell away screaming. Koth walked closer to the Phyrexian. The great beast did not stop, but merely swatted Koth to the side with one of his pitted arms. Koth flew far to the right.
Elspeth advanced and her sword flashed and blurred as she attacked at every angle imaginable. In no time a large area of the Phyrexian was covered with deep hacks. But the juggernaut let out a horrible chuckle that sounded like someone was being drowned, before attempting to bring one large claw down on Elspeth. The white knight stepped to the side to avoid the attack. She brought her sword across and caught the Phyrexian in the wrist, hacking its claw almost off. Three other arms swept down on Elspeth, knocking her away.
The Phyrexian raised one of its clawed hands and held it above Elspeth. But Koth was there when the hand fell. He pushed, and slowly his hot skin began melting through the hand. How will that help Elspeth? Venser found himself wondering. The hand will simply fall around Koth and crush her.
Venser breathed deeply through his nose and felt his will collecting in his throbbing brain and extending out and away.
He found the Phyrexian’s brain, such as it was, and followed it back until he was fairly certain he was in the motor function area, though it was hard to be sure as the being had once been a crusher. To be sure, Venser sent a reverse-impulse request through the brain. The Phyrexian crusher lurched backward, a bewildered look on its tiny face. The hand pulled away with the rest of the body.
“Well,” Koth said between breaths. “That could have gone better.”
The Phyrexian stopped moving backward and began advancing again. Some of the moriok dropped their swords and simply plodded next to the crusher. A couple just sat down and let the huge machine drag them. The crusher creaked as it approached.
“I do not know how to strike such a thing,” Elspeth said, inspecting the edge of her sword before carefully sheathing it.
Venser could see his compatriots were tired. How long had it been since they slept more than an hour? Their water input amounted to what pools they could find collected in rust-metal divots, dripped down from the surface. Their dry tack was virtually inedible. Venser himself could lie down right there on the hot floor and sleep for three days. What he did not think he could fight right then was a massive crushing machine that traveled with its meals shackled to it.
A cry caught Venser’s ear. He turned. Behind them stood an array of Phyrexians of various shapes and sizes, but all with bodies of twisted metal and stiffened veins. There were at least one hundred of them with their claws up and their frothing mouths opening and closing soundlessly. They collected around the crusher as the huge beast navigated itself forward.
“I don’t suppose,” Koth said, looking from the crusher to the new arrivals, “that you can teleport us all away? Even I would not mind a good teleport right now.”
“No,” Venser said. Even though he did not like to admit it, there was a certain feeling rising in his throat that was telling him to flee. He could. He could teleport out of the way and keep going, keep searching for Karn. He had not asked to come to the metal place. He would have come eventually, to be sure, but in his own time, and when he was properly provisioned and ready. His situation was madness. He cast his eyes around the vast cavern. Not one obstacle to hide behind for as far as he could see, which was not far when he had to peer between his fingers to see anything.
The crusher creaked and whined its dry joints as it began to move forward faster.
Venser took a quick breath and disappeared, only to snap into existence the next instant in front of the crusher. The Phyrexian was so surprised it stopped. The chained moriok took one look at the swirls and waves of blue whirling around Venser’s hands, and refused to move.
Venser swept a section of the Phyrexian’s riveted plate out of the way. The metal, pliable to the artificer’s mind, flowed in a graceful wave out of the path of his hand. Venser reached to his upper arms into the interior of the Phyrexian. He began rearranging. A moment later the crusher’s arm impacted his side and Venser slid out over the smooth floor. He skittered to a stop at the foot of a huge Phyrexian with thick legs and a shelflike chest, skeletal arms and a head as large as its fist. Before Venser could stand, the Phyrexian seized his skull in the palm of one claw and lifted him off the ground. The creature’s other hand was poised for a strike with two of its claw fingers extended to gouge into Venser’s eye sockets.
Venser brushed the hand aside, but as the fingers and palm dripped back into the wrist, the tips of other claws poked out of the wrist, and another hand grew before his eyes, literally. Soon there was another claw.
Then something exceedingly odd happened. All the metal on the Phyrexian began to arc upward, as though it were dripping upside down. The dark metal of it began to dance and wind, much to the creature’s amazement. Its exposed sinews and muscles looked strangely naked as its whole body began to tumble down without the metal’s support. The metal of the creature’s structure danced higher and higher in the air. The meat parts of the Phyrexian fell with a wet thump to the metal floor. But nobody was watching that. All eyes were on the metal, arcing up and down and side to side in graceful loops and peaks.
The metal turned colors as well-first red, then jet black, and then a bright, shimmering gold. Venser heard Koth’s sharp intake of breath when the metal went a glassy blue. It pulled together into a square shape and fell with a hard thump on the ground next to the crumpled Phyrexian the metal had come from, who looked at it with eyeballs bare and wobbly.
Then somebody was clapping. Venser turned to see a line of Phyrexians different than any he’d seen up to that point. They were twisted and small of head, with teeth coming out everywhere, and their metal parts were shiny. Their hands had small devices and long, sharp tools of chrome attached to them. And standing at the center of them was a human, or most of a human. A bright light shone at his right shoulder. Venser felt his breath catch in his throat as he recognized the metal floating in strips around that radiant shoulder. The strips extended in a fluid motion down an arm that ended in a long-fingered hand. An arm that glowed as much as the shoulder. A metal arm unlike any Venser had ever seen. And as Venser stared, his jaw slack, the being continued to clap.
