Chapter 3
Behind the vulshok loomed the tremendous mountain they had seen on the horizon. Green gas swathed it in the bright light. It appeared to be made of corroded lead.
But Venser stepped forward and brought his hands together in a surprisingly loud clap. Koth could see the shockwaves from the clap bend and distort the air, as hot gases escaping a vent, and he felt the metal in his body stiffen momentarily. Then Venser disappeared and reappeared at an outcropping not far away. He teleported back a moment later.
“Did you see it?” Venser said. “A small metal form, smooth and shiny? Does that description match anything you know?”
“Yes,” Koth said in a low voice.
Venser cocked his head at the vulshok.
“But not exactly,” Koth said. “It is probably a myr. They are harmless little things,” Koth pronounced. “I mean, they are generally harmless,” he said, sounding less sure.
“The question remains why is this small creature following us?”
Koth turned to Venser. “How do you know it is following us?”
“I have heard it,” Venser said. “In the outer dark last night.”
“So have I,” Koth admitted.
“I wonder,” Venser said, staring out to where he’d heard the creature.
“Enough of this,” Koth said. “Come, let us walk.”
By nightfall of the next day the mountains had begun to fall. Koth, grumbling, walked toward where the suns seemed to go when they fell from the sky. The smell of rot was what reached them first. It was a type of rot smell Venser had not experienced before: the putrefaction of metal and meat as if from a derelict slaughterhouse.
The deeper they got into the swamps the more the mountains started to cut free from one another and slide slowly into the dark murk of the Mephidross. Koth shook his head and said that the ore had destabilized … every day the swamp and its green, necrogen fog bit deeper into the Oxidda Chain. Venser stopped to investigate how that could happen. He looked closely at the way the oil of the swamp suffused the metal of the mountains, until the great hulks of the Oxidda took on a crumbly consistency.
At one point they witnessed a mountain sliding into the swamp. The ground shook and in its immenseness a slab from a mountain creaked and suddenly fell with a great crash. Liquid from the swamp rose up in a wall many times taller than a man, and the green haze enveloped the slab.
The land began to smooth. By the second day they gained the big sky and all that lurks in that high place. Koth’s eyes were always on the sky. Once he saw a dark dot moving across its open sweep. They stopped to watch, but the dot moved away.
Their boots sank deeper in the black ichor of the swamp. Caught in the lowest places, the sticky material reached to their ankles. They slept on whatever high ground they could find, and only when they were so exhausted that they could not lift their scum-covered feet. They slept where they fell, in fireless camps. In that way, they escaped detection for a time.
At the end of the second day they found a corpse of a sort laid out in a twisted pose that left it half in and half out of the murky water.
Venser turned to Koth. “Phyrexian?” Venser said.
“Nim,” Koth said solemnly.
The nim looked a bit different from the others they had fought near Koth’s village. It was more skeletal, for one. There was little or no meat left on its body, and the meat left was rotting off the shiny bones. Its forearm had simply rotted off, and only a stub at the elbow remained, with rags of flesh where the limb had once been. Its skull had fused onto its body and the teeth of the maw had fused and grown together into a tangled mass that looked like sharp antennae. Its limbs were longer than those of the other nims, as well.
“It walks partially on its hands,” Venser said, looking up from his investigation of the creature. The artificer’s eyes were shot through with red and he appeared aggravated, Koth thought. He watched his hand shake slightly. He’d seen him like that before over the last days, and the trembling always disappeared eventually. He decided to keep an eye on him.
“There is oil on it,” Koth pointed out.
“Yes,” Venser said absently. He stood and almost tripped.
“Are you wounded?” Koth said.
Venser smiled absently. “No, I haven’t been.” He looked first one way and then another. “I only need to sit down.”
He found a small boulder that was out of the swampy murk, and seated himself on it. From his left sleeve he drew a small bottle filled with turquoise-colored fluid. He uncorked the bottle and took a small sip. He carefully replaced the stopper and slipped the bottle back into his sleeve.
“What is that?” Koth said.
Venser swallowed the fluid in his mouth before turning to the vulshok with a small smile.
“Nothing,” he said.
Koth did not seem convinced. “Well, whatever it is there is not much of it left.”
“That is true,” Venser said, straightening the fabric of his sleeve over the pocket holding the small vial. “I did not have much time to pack for my journey to sunny Mirrodin.”
“What if you don’t get it?”
Venser stood.
“This is our way, I believe,” he said, and started walking.
“So, we’re done talking about whatever is in your sleeve?” Koth said.
Venser said nothing.
They moved through the wet of the Mephidross only in the daylight, and slept as little as possible. By the third day each of them was stumbling in their tracks and had to sleep. They did so under the other’s close guard. They encountered in their wanderings other nim lurching and sniffing, and mostly avoided them. Once Koth found a small enclave of the wretches and tore their parts loose from their bones, which he then wished aflame and left smoldering on a high place for the entire known world to see.
Soon they made out the ghostly shapes of distant hills in the green haze. As they neared, the hills became more pronounced and especially a hill in the middle of all the others. Its torturous aspect was clearly the focus of this derelict land, yet they made for it.
“The Vault of Whispers,” Koth said. They were stopped in a stinking dell very near the tower, and all around them the calls of creatures unknown clinked in the failing light. The tower itself loomed overhead.
“Has it always looked like this?” Venser said.
“Yes. Always,” Koth said. “That middle section has always been rotted out.”
“But what keeps it from toppling when the middle has a hole as it does?”
“That network of strings. They are lead. There is much lead in this place. The lead holds the halves together. That and the power of the Black Lacunae.”
“What is that?” Venser said.
“The Black Lacunae?” Koth said. “It is where the dark power under the surface of Mirrodin shoots upward as a geyser of water might. There was no stopping or slowing the flow at this place, and those that have given themselves to dark foolishness come to this place for power. We vulshok have a saying, ‘Steel is hard, but a fool’s head is harder.’ ”
Venser chuckled at that. He looked back at the lead and iron mountain that held the Vault, and the smile fell from his face. It really was an amazing thing to see. It seemed to be constructed of dull gray veins wrapped around struts of melted lead. The green gas that floated ominously out of the chimneys of the other mountains did not float as much out of the top of that mountain. Rather, a powerful dimness rose as heat waves might and moved up into the air before mushrooming out over all of the land. The top was corroded away to such a degree that only fingers of lead remained. The very air seemed to be breaking down the mountains, and despite himself Venser had to wonder what his own lungs looked like after breathing the air.
