Scars of Mirrodin: The Quest for Karn

by Robert Wintermute

“Say something next time you are to appear, young artificer.”

  Before Venser could reply another whizzing cut the air and he put out his hand, a blue miasma appearing around it from which only his fingers poked. The metal form flying toward them slowed and began to waver in its path, until it floated lazily past and bumbled away into the dimness.

  “You should see what it’s seeing it its mind’s eye,” Venser said, nodding as the small dartlike creature moved past them. It was long and thin, with a beak pursed to a sharp needle as long as a man’s arm. Fluid dripped from that sharpened tip. A finlike appendage extended out its back. “We look like tall reeds to it, and it hungers for our flesh.”

  Venser leaned close for a look, and at that moment was pierced by another dart flying from behind. The pain was instantaneous and searing. So much so that Venser found he could not concentrate enough to teleport away, and a moment later felt the world fade into blackness.

  When he opened his eyes again, the land of Mirrodin was moving slowly past and the heat around his face was as if he were standing near a blast furnace. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again he was slumped against the metal side of a small cave. The metal burned his back, but he could not stand, could not make his limbs cooperate with his brain’s commands. The best he could manage was to slip over and fall on his side. He closed his eyes again.

  When he opened his eyes for the third time he was floating again, bobbing as the land fell away behind. He found he could raise his hand and he did so. He scratched his matted hair and spoke.

  “Where is my helmet?” he said.

  “He lives,” Koth said. Koth turned to Venser, who he had strapped to his back.

  “Well,” Venser croaked. “I feel just wonderful.”

  He felt so bad that when Koth untied him from his pack, Venser cried out. Moving his limbs felt like the worst pain imaginable. As if they were being ripped free from their joints. Koth stood him on his feet.

  “There is nothing wrong with you,” Koth added. “Stinger mechs like the one that found your neck offer paralysis serum, but movement does away with its effects.”

  Venser nodded painfully.

  “So move,” Koth commanded.

  He took one excruciating step, and then another. It felt as though sand had found its crafty way into his joints. But soon the pain lessened and after an hour of walking in circles it felt only as though he were walking on fractured bones. Koth threw Venser his helmet and he greedily slipped it on. The familiar smell of his hair was in it and he relaxed a bit.

  “Where are we?” Venser said.

  Koth stepped dramatically back and extended one arm.

  “Your body they will harvest,” Elspeth said to Vadi, her bowl of cold soup long forgotten. “They may even keep you alive for a time, letting you heal, occasionally taking strips of your flesh and sinew for fuel or musculature. You’ll begin to recognize your own body parts stretched and fused into the skeletons of your captors.

  The vulshok watched Elspeth without expression.

  In her mind Elspeth watched helplessly as three Phyrexians lifted a human in their meat-hook hands. The screaming … the screaming.

  “But your mind will be left to its own sad devices. They don’t understand the mind or its needs. Your mind will fall away, or you will scream yourself to insanity. Be ready for this. This is the harvest you shall reap.”

  Vadi looked at her suspiciously. “How do you know?”

  “I know,” Elspeth said. “Because I survived them.”

  The vulshok’s hand went out, but instead of touching Elspeth in consolation she took the hefty handle of a battle spear lying propped against the low table.

  “I do not have their infection, if you think that,” Elspeth added, noticing how the Vulshok held her spear.

  “You are not auriok. You are a troublemaker and liar like that upstart Koth. Speak now or I will lay you low.” The vulshok kicked her stool back and brought the head of her greatspear up so it hovered at Elspeth’s throat. “You are a spy for the Hammer tribe. Speak doomsayer!”

  “I wish I had a confession for you,” Elspeth said. She looked down at the sharp tip of the spear. She scooted her chair forward toward the spear tip. “Knowing what I know about our mutual enemy, I wish you would end my days now.”

  Vadi lowered the spear, the scowl still on her face. “You are no auriok. You’re no spy. You are none of these things. You are something much worse.” The vulshok spat a dry splotch at Elspeth’s feet. “You are a coward.”

  “You do not know what I know.”

  “You say you left your friends. You say they are better off without you. You say there is a great enemy. You say, say, say. All talk. All words. And words are wind.”

  “They are better off not depending on me,” Elspeth said.

  “So you will hide, is that it?”

  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.

  “What does this air do to us?” he said.

  Koth was squatting out of the hot winds, sitting back on his haunches and poking absently at the ground with a long sliver of iron. “It turns us into nim.” He said. “If we stay long enough.”

  Suddenly Venser cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”

  A roaring echoed off the mountain.

  Aware that the vulshok was watching him, Venser hardened his face into an expression he hoped conveyed a sense of command. Truth be told, he had not felt in command at all lately. With the vulshok constantly undermining him, and the uncertainty of the mission they had kidnapped him to accomplish, Venser was not altogether sure any of them would make it off of this fascinating plane. He had already resigned himself to die before he could planeswalk away, spreading the spawn of phyresis to other places. As he looked out over the vista, he wondered if the others had the same commitment.

  The green necrogen gas suddenly swirled around in a dense shroud. Through the mist, coming over the rise, the outline of a monstrosity materialized. A huge, vicious-looking Phyrexian lumbered into view. Roughly snake shaped but with bare ribs and articulated metal cabling, the smell of rotting flesh preceded it, and long appendages ending in sharp spikes swung as it loped forward. Its eyeless head turned toward them.

  “We are close now,” Koth said. “Let us destroy this beast and be done with it.”

  As the creature had not detected them yet, Venser and Koth lay sheltered in a raw divot next to a slough and awaited its arrival. When the beast had moved between them the Planeswalkers attacked. But it was stunningly fast, and snapped around in an instant, extending an appendage Venser had not seen from its belly. The segmented limb shot at Venser’s head, knocking him out of the aura of blue he had wound around his head.

  Koth wasted no time in extending his arm and shooting a column of rock from his forearm in a loose stream. The Phyrexian knocked the javelin of rock aside and in the same motion swiped Koth off his feet and into an outcropping.

  It was Koth who woke first. Blinking in the low light, he struggled to remember the events that had brought him there. He appeared to be lying on a table. The unconscious form of Venser was on a similar table next to his. The vulshok turned to move, only to realize that he was bound at the wrists and ankles.

  The room around him was lit only in faint patches and from unseen sources, but what he could see did not fill him with joy. The walls were made entirely of many coils of fleshy tubes and dull metal pipes held flat by webs of pale sinew.

  Koth began pulling at his restraints. He turned his face so he could see the thick metal shackles. Well constructed, they did not budge. Out of the corner of his eye he suddenly made out a strange shape, small and human in form, but perfectly smooth and silver, as if made entirely from the most perfect chrome. The figure was squatting in the corner, regarding him with the utmost calm. When the creature had Koth’s attention, it stood and beckoned him with one hand before squeezing between some pipes and disappearing.

  Koth had no time to think about the strange creature. Around him, the horrible walls dripped with black oil and the ceiling appeared to be held up with curved columns constructed of the twisted bodies of vaguely familiar, yet unknown creatures. Dark fangs and exposed ribs intermeshed with die-cast iron plates and shards of whitest bone.

  Koth closed his eyes. He pulled the power from the earth into him. Smoke rose from hi
s head, his fists balled, and his craggy forearms began to animate. Sharp spurs stabbed outward, shearing the shackles. He sat up and yanked on the shackles binding his ankles until they gave way with a tremendous snap.

  He was free.

  “Venser!” Koth said. He was off his table and shaking the artificer in a moment. “Venser!” The artificer could teleport out of his restraints, Koth knew, if he could just wake him.

  But he would not wake.

  A clank cut the air behind him: the sound of something banging metal against metal, and he knew something was there, that something was coming. Koth cast his eyes around for a place to hide. The walls seemed to be almost alive—the intestinelike pipe work glistened green-black in the low light. He did not relish the idea of hiding in the wetness of the pipes, but he was able to spread open a void in them and in the next instant he slid within.

  From between the pipes, Koth watched as a section of the wall on the far side of the room split. Two Phyrexians stepped into the room. One of them had huge, gruesome meat hooks for hands, which it held up before it as it stumbled toward Venser. The other smaller Phyrexian had dozens of small arms, each ending in a filthy, bent syringe. Both of the experimenters’ bodies were nothing more than metal skeletons wound around and through with fleshy swaths. Their too-small or too-large limbs gave them an unsettling, off balance appearance that made Koth want to gag. Or maybe it was the wall, which was dripping on his neck as he watched the Phyrexians approach Venser who lay strapped to a table.

  They walked around Koth’s empty table, seeming to make no note of its vacancy, and stopped to look down at Venser. Suddenly a space in the ceiling opened above Venser. A metal arm girded with pink muscles extended downward. A mouth apparatus with spines surrounding it hung at the end of the appendage. Ichor dripped over Venser’s chest as the device centered itself on his neck. As Koth watched, the device opened like a nightmarish flower.

  Koth felt the anger rush up like a geyser from his feet. And by the time the energy reached his shoulders he knew he would be absolutely unable to control it. The power reached his forehead and he exploded out of the wall, sending fléchettes of the pipes and metal substructure shooting out at the Phyrexians.