“Right. Ready?” Venser said, he looked down at Koth and up at Elspeth, who nodded. The pounding continued, and something metal and large banged into a wall. “Go.”
Koth pushed off from the ladder rungs and fell feetfirst to the floor, which was farther down than he thought it would be. He stumbled back a bit, and Elspeth landed soundlessly next to him.
The scene laid out before them took their breath away. The walls were splattered and the floor was covered, as were the slablike tables, with a bright redness. So bright, in fact, that it looked like paint. There were many of the metal catafalques in the room. Each had a body on it in the process of being butchered. Next to the table more bodies were piled. The meat pulled and hacked off the bodies was thrown in a cart next to the table, as were the organs. Everything else lay glistening and white. There was no drain in the floor, so the carnage was ankle deep. The reek was enormous, like a wall that hit them in the face.
Each table had a Phyrexian butcher. A huge thing with no face to speak of-only an immense mouth of long teeth crammed one over the others. Each butcher had a notched iron blade where its right hand would have been, and a hacked, gashed, fingerless stump for its left. Done with the meat, each butcher loaded the bones onto a creaky cart and walked them to an immense crusher, which Elspeth took for a machine at first. The bones were thrown into a basin and the room-high Phyrexian raised its boulder of a fist and dropped it on the bones. Every eighth pound or so, it brushed the bits left into a large hole next to the basin.
The meat went into another hole, but samples were obviously taken by the butchers, who had blood and material smeared around their mouths and over their wet teeth.
Elspeth and Koth stood stunned in the middle of the room. Venser was off to the side near the pulverizing Phyrexian. So still were they that the Phyrexians did not notice them at first, as the butchers had no eyes. But they had noise holes, Venser saw.
It was the pulverizer that raised the alarm. Its eyes were set spiderlike on a tiny head fused onto the trunk of its immense body. It had a toothless mouth hole, which began bellowing, with what must have been its tongue flopping around in its mouth. Its crushing hand stopped, and all the butchers froze. Dripping blood from their work, and from the flaps of skin hanging cut from their left hands, they turned toward Elspeth and Koth. Venser was nearer the crushing beast, but he had not been detected.
One of the bodies next to Venser moved and moaned. The artificer backed up. The body groaned and extended a bruised hand. It was an elf, Venser saw, or had been. He backed up farther, until he bumped something. He turned, and towering over him was a butcher. But the creature was facing Elspeth and Koth, and had apparently not noticed him.
Venser brought the mana to him. He felt it sparking the air around him and seeping into his pores. He reached out to touch the Phyrexian, who froze stiff in place.
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.
