again.
“I am not overly fond of heights,” she said.
“I can’t tell,” Venser said.
Koth did another flip and giggled.
“I think the problem here will not be falling too fast,” Venser said. “But rather too slowly. We have to get to Karn before the Phyrexians control the whole plane. It might be too late by that point.”
Elspeth closed her eyes and stepped off … and floated. Venser followed her. Without a sound the guide followed.
Elspeth floated lazily downward, with her white tunic billowing around her. It felt wonderful and she did not ever want to stop.
“I don’t know,” Venser said.
Elspeth stared at Venser. “Did you just listen to the thoughts in my head?”
“Of course not,” Venser said.
They floated slowly downward for very long. Soon they were tired of floating and lay motionless in the air. Venser watched as cavelike openings passed in the blue light of his wisps.
“How far will we go?” Koth said.
“Do you have a suggestion?”
Koth shrugged and floated away.
Chapter 15
Venser might have fallen asleep. Sometimes he heard strange sounds, and once even music, hypnotic and repeating. At another point it was screams-hundreds of beings screaming all at one time. Still they floated. Elspeth woke, fell asleep, and woke again. Cave openings passed in the blue shadows. At one, Koth insisted that they leave the shaft, and using his hands he brought himself close to the cave mouth. But after seeing something in the cave he became very quiet and did not mention leaving again.
It was hard to know how deep they were in Mirrodin. Venser had stopped caring. Eventually the guide floated up next to Venser and pointed. “It will have to be there,” he said.
Koth paddled up beside him, as did Elspeth. A cave was passing, dark and small. No more than a tube hole.
“Why that one?”
“We are as deep as we should go,” Venser said.
“I for one am ready to leave this place,” Elspeth said. “It feels as death might. This is a sensation I am not overly interested in.”
Koth grunted. “I agree with the white one.”
“Yes,” Venser said. “Death no, squeezing down this tube, yes.”
Venser paddled to the hole. It took longer than he had thought it would, and by the time he was near his arms were tired. The side of the shaft moved past faster than he’d expected.
“Are you all ready?” Venser said. “The side here is moving fast. We’ll have to not miss the hole or I don’t know how you’ll follow. Who wants to go first?”
“I will,” Elspeth said. “I have no fear of this hole … as long as it leads me to more Phyrexians to slaughter.” She stroked closer to the wall of the shaft, which really was moving past at a fairly quick clip. Koth stroked over so he was above Elspeth, and touching the wall as he slipped downward. Venser aligned behind them both.
Elspeth caught the hole’s rim and amidst her clattering armor, she thrust into it as deep as her mid-section. She struggled for a moment as the current of the shaft caught her legs and pulled them downward. Then she was wriggling through with only her feet extending out of the hole. Then her feet were gone.
Koth did not have quite so easy a time. He could not dive as deeply into the hole. And for a desperate couple of moments, he was grasping the inside of the tube while his waist and lower body dangled out and were pulled down. The geomancer heated his hands until his fingers sunk into the wall of the tube as though it were warm butter. With a good handhold, he was able to haul himself up and into the hole. The metal walls of the hole were still hot as Venser threaded into it. He burned the palm of his right hand and cursed under his breath as he scraped his right knee on one of the five rough divots Koth’s fingers had made in the cooling metal.
The tube they found themselves in was very tight indeed. Koth had to fight a growing impulse to push outward. There was no light and any attempt at light, Venser knew, would only illuminate the area between each of them and not pass ahead. So they crawled. The tube seemed to stay fairly level and the crawling was not especially difficult. Then they started to slide a bit. At first nobody was sure if they were sliding down or up. Venser concluded that the tube was angling downward, but he could not really tell.
They turned a tight corner and Venser heard a
It continued, the downward slide, until suddenly they shot out of the slide and into the air. Venser knew only that there was darkness one moment and light the next, coupled with the feeling of falling. He was able to see the floor for one split second before the plummet. He breathed the mana stream extending from his head into him and a moment later he felt the familiar explosion in his skull and teleported, appearing in a squat on the level floor.
Koth, Elspeth, and the guide did not have as easy a time. The white warrior executed a flip and went skittering across the shiny floor on her rump. Koth tucked his shoulder and hit the ground with the tremendous clatter of metal on metal. He left a long scrape in the floor.
“That could have gone better,” Koth said, testing the rotation of his shoulder in its joint as he stood.
The guide stood and bent his neck side to side.
Elspeth was sitting on the floor, legs splayed. She was staring at the room they had jettisoned into. Other tubes met in the room and at the far end others left in the same way. But in the middle was another huge room. The metal walls, roof, and floor were shiny. The light came in organic patches that clung in irregular shapes to the walls.
Off to the right a round, human-height door woven with bars was visible. There was movement in the room- reflections on the walls shifted and moved, as though something were inside the room moving fast, casting its reflection. Venser squinted, but saw nothing.
To the left, a huge square set of meat steps extended up in a series of turns that ended at a set of what look suspiciously like a wooden gallows. There were pieces of metal hammered together unevenly and at odd angles. A single chain hung unmoving from the edge of the hammered-together structure.
A warm wind stirred their sweat-soaked hair. Venser took off his helmet.
Venser had not at first realized just how large the room was. As he looked, its walls seemed to stretch far, far away. Yet another larger room. He could see lines of smoke in the distance as if a brush fire were burning. But what was there to burn down in these metallic bowels?
More movement along the walls near the door … Venser turned in time to see a circular crease appear in the wall. Another crease appeared down the middle of the circle. All the creases split open and from its epicenter stepped Phyrexians, one after another.
Something had been moving in the barred portal to the right of the newly formed hole, but when the Phyrexians stepped out, all movement ceased. Then whatever was in the barred room started thrashing and clicking, as if the room on the other side of the barred portal was full of giant insects all clicking together in a maddening frenzy.
What stepped out of the round portal was even more shocking. A line of ten thin beings stood before the door. Each of the beings stood in exactly the same way. Each looked at the party with its white, porcelain face cocked to the right. Eyes that were no more than dark holes bored into the face stared with neither lid nor iris. Their mouths were nothing more than expressionless notches. Their bodies were an exterior, shell-like white porcelain. But underneath the filth- and oil-smeared ceramic the creatures were composed of barbed, dim gristle.
