“You are leaving?”
“Oh, yes,” Tezzeret said. “I wanted only to give you this creature.”
More clatters sounded from the room. They sounded closer than before.
“But why?”
“I have my reasons for wanting the Phyrexian invasion to have to work hard. To perhaps encounter significant resistance.”
“Have you seen Karn?” Venser said. “We need to find Karn.”
Tezzeret nodded slowly, apparently thinking about the question Venser had just asked him. “Yes,” he said finally. “I have seen the silver golem.”
Venser waited. “Where is he?”
“He is in his throne room, of course,” Tezzeret said.
“Where?” Venser said.
“Deeper still. At the heart of this metal clockworks.”
At that moment there was a tremendous rattle in the cavern outside the experimentation room. The Phyrexians at the doorway rushed out, followed by Koth. Venser and Tezzeret were last.
The room outside the doorway was filled with Phyrexians of all shapes and sizes. Three creatures with white porcelain crusts for heads towered over the rest, four arms hanging at their sides. Tezzeret’s chrome Phyrexians were already tearing into some of the closest creatures. Koth was glowing red and mucking up to his elbows in the thorax of another beast that, as they watched, fell back, a gaping red hole in its chest.
Venser blinked and appeared on the shoulders of one of the bastions. He pulled mana to him and when it was prickling his fingertips, he spread the back of the creature’s porcelain shell and reached in. He was never sure what he was touching, what metal parts, in the Phyrexians, but he dissolved whatever it was. Eventually the creature took a staggered step forward, and then fell limp.
Venser blinked away and back to the doorway before he hit the ground. Tezzeret had not moved.
“Impressive,” he said.
“But we cannot fight that army,” Venser said. “We need a way out.”
Tezzeret sighed, and walked back into the experimentation room. The mouth in the far wall continued screaming. It was all Venser could do to not clap his hands over his ears. Elspeth was still kneeling and chanting, with her hands on the fleshling. The sound of the fray outside the doorway was a loud rumble.
Tezzeret touched the wall, and another mouth opened. The mouth had no teeth. Venser, strangely, found himself feeling uneasy at the prospect of being swallowed by a toothless mouth.
“I’m not altogether sure where this one goes,” Tezzeret said. “But in general the ones without teeth go upward. The larger the teeth the deeper the way goes. At least I’ve found that mostly to be true. Go to the furnace layer. That is over and up. The heat will tell you.”
“Thank you,” Venser said.
“No,” Tezzeret said. “You have helped me more than you know. I would not have helped you otherwise.”
A shriek from outside the doorway drew their attention.
“I will not remain around here to meet that,” Tezzeret said.
With that, Tezzeret touched the wall and an extremely long-toothed mouth opened wide. He turned and winked at Venser before stepping in. Venser couldn’t help but wonder if Tezzeret was at that moment traveling to Karn’s throne room. He almost asked if he could accompany him. But the moment passed and Tezzeret was gone. After a couple of seconds the mouth closed.
Elspeth stirred. “I cannot fully heal this wound,” she said. “It is too deep. I do not know if something vital was removed. The best I can do is close it so we can travel.”
“So she can move?”
“Not by herself. We will have to assist her.”
He nodded. “Well, that would be our mouth,” he said, pointing at the toothless maw.
Venser walked across the room and looked out at the cavern. More Phyrexians had arrived. Tezzeret’s chromes were still fighting hard, but their numbers were halved. As Venser watched, one of them received the huge ball arm from a huge Phyrexian on the top of its head. The head crushed down and the Phyrexian stopped moving and crumpled. Koth was as red as an ember, taking great, heaping handfuls of metal out of a Phyrexian three times his size. The metal went from molten to slag the moment it left the vulshok’s hand and fell clanking to the metal floor.
When the Phyrexian fell, Venser yelled and beckoned Koth, who followed. The heat that he gave off as he approached made Venser step back.
“We’re going now,” Venser said.
“What? With all this fun to be had?” Koth said.
But he followed. Elspeth helped the fleshling to her feet. With her arm over Elspeth’s shoulders, the white warrior led her to the mouth Venser had pointed out. The fleshling did not look good to Venser’s eyes. She was pale and drawn. Her hair was dirty and infested with something that matted the locks. Bugs, he could not stand bugs- especially the ones that lived on the human body. But Mirrodin would not have bugs. Mirrodin would have something like bugs, but infinitely worse. A small shiver ran down Venser’s spine as he stepped up to the toothless mouth, waiting.
Koth noticed the shiver, apparently, and interpreted it as disgust of the mouth. “Don’t like the look of this one myself,” he said.
Venser glanced at Koth before he understood. “Oh, yes, the etherium-arm creature said the ones without teeth lead upward.”
“Don’t know if I trust that one.”
“I know I do not,” Venser said, smiling.
Koth nodded. The walls buckled somehow and a sound even more terrible than the screaming mouth rent the air. A sound like shells crushed under foot. Or skulls. The whine and snap of metal breaking came from the next room, and then the clank of many feet rushing over metal.
“We go now,” Venser said. Just as he spoke the mouth began to close. Koth stepped forward and seized the lips and with some effort wrenched them wider. Elspeth and the fleshing stepped into the mouth.
“This will hurt,” Elspeth was telling the fleshling as they disappeared into the maw.
“You go,” Koth said, when Venser gestured for the vulshok to go.
“Go ahead.”
Just as a bleeding Phyrexian stuck its small head into the doorway leading to the cavern-
Venser jumped head first into the oral cavity.
The sensation was different with the toothless mouth. It was tighter and slower. Many times Venser felt his breath would not hold out as the throat carried him upward in the way a snake might move its prey down the length of it. He found he could breathe better if he brought his arm up and held the bend of it over his eyes, creating a small air pocket. It was not comfortable, nobody would ever say that, but at least he did not feel like he was drowning. At one point he stopped. For that terrible time Venser was sure the Phyrexian whose mouth they were in knew a way to force regurgitation. But that did not happen and eventually he started moving again. The turns were few and Venser was glad for that, as they squeezed his body even more. After what seemed like forever, he was spit out and lay panting on the floor. Elspeth and the fleshling were leaning against the wall. But the wall was strange and bending, and neither Elspeth nor the fleshling looked comfortable.
The room was small, almost tiny. If Venser had ever imagined what it would be like to be inside a stomach, that would have been what he imagined. It was roughly circular and soft all over. The hole they had all been spit from opened again and pushed out Koth, who lay panting in the goo that covered them all.
“It’s like being born again,” the vulshok said, when he had his breath. Venser could not help but chuckle. Elspeth smiled. The fleshling blinked.
Venser touched the wall. Nothing happened. There were no other doors, just the tiny room. It seemed to get smaller after Venser touched the wall. He went to another side and touched the wall again. A mouth opened. A mouth with teeth.
“Try the other wall,” Koth said.
Venser did, and a toothless mouth creased into existence.
