The Quest for Karn som-1 Read online

  The Quest for Karn

  ( Scars of Mirrodin - 1 )

  Robert B.Wintermute

  Robert B.Wintermute

  The Quest for Karn

  Finest of all the things I have left is the light of the sun,

  Next to that the brilliant stars and the face of the moon, Cucumbers in their season, too, and apples and pears.

  (trans. Bernard Knox) — Praxilla of Sicyon

  Chapter 1

  They scuffed over a small rise from the south, with the blinding rays of the Sky Tyrant in their eyes and the heat of the other four suns burning at their backs. Underfoot, the hills themselves creaked and popped as their metal sides expanded in the hot morning sunlight. Venser of Urborg pulled off his helmet and surveyed the rusted horizon before casting a wary eye at the two beings walking ahead of him. One towered over the other and both dragged their feet over the tarnished hill.

  “I would have come on my own if you’d only asked,” Venser said.

  The large one stopped and turned. In the almost blinding light of the five suns the iron spikes growing from his shoulders looked dull and tired. But not his teeth, as a sly smile spread over his face.

  “Would you really have come, artificer?”

  “Venser is my name.”

  The muscular vulshok shrugged as if to show just what he thought of a name like Venser.

  “And yes, I would have come,” Venser said.

  “Well, this is my world and my people,” Koth the vulshok grunted, bringing his foot down on the metal floor. “I do not have the luxury of pleasantries.” He looked out over the jagged razor of mountains jutting against the horizon. “We should arrive at my village by nightfall,” he said. “Be ready for meat and drink served by those with fire in their veins. We will find the one who will know what has become of the situation.”

  Venser watched the vulshok walk away.

  “I can hardly wait,” he said.

  As the rest of the day passed, the suns switched places in the sky and a far range of dun-colored, symmetrical mountains grew closer. Their chipped tips of jagged metal thrust at uniform angles, and the round clouds that massed around their serrated tops reflected the rosy brilliance of lava in the valleys below. The vulshok stopped walking.

  “Why have we stopped?” Venser asked. “We should keep walking. I haven’t had enough walking.”

  The third companion turned away and Venser thought he heard a stifled laugh from under her hood.

  “Kuldotha, the great mother of thunder and fire nears,” Koth said.

  “What? In there?” Venser said, pointing to the valleys between the lumbering mountains.

  The vulshok turned slowly to look at the young artificer. “You have fear in your heart?” Koth said. It was more of a statement than a question, but Venser held Koth’s gaze.

  “No,” Venser said. “I was simply saying that canyons are perfect for ambush.”

  “And you are a leader now, as well as a prodigy?” Koth said. “Elspeth, what do you think?”

  The other figure raised her hands and pulled down her hood.

  “I think he is right,” she said, adjusting the greatsword strapped at her hip. “You brought him here against his will. The least you can do is listen to him,” she said.

  “Well,” Koth said, flustered. “There is no other way to Kuldotha but through the canyons of the Oxidda Chain.”

  Elspeth squinted at the near mountains.

  “That is true,” Venser said.

  “How would you know truth in the Oxidda Chain?”

  “I have been to this plane of yours.” Venser slipped his helmet back on his sweaty head. Through its eye slit he watched as Koth scowled at him. “A clockwork planet,” the artificer said. “Karn brought me here.” He stopped short. The geomancer was watching him intently and when Venser did not continue speaking, Koth’s eyes widened.

  “Karn?” Koth said.

  “An old friend,” Venser said, looking away.

  Koth’s mouth tightened. “I know nobody by that name,” Koth said.

  “Do you know every being on Mirrodin?” Venser said, still looking away. He showed an uncharacteristic tightness around his eyes and mouth. Koth’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “We are here to see if the stories I have heard are true,” Koth said. “If they are, we will fight. This is why we brought you here. You will perform.”

  A wry smile appeared on Venser’s face. “You do your world no good by threatening those you wish to recruit. You attack me, suffocate me, and expect me to do as you instruct. You are mad if you-”

  A squeaking sound was blowing on the wind, and Venser cocked his head to the side taking the sound in. How far, three leagues or just over the next hill? It was hard to judge distance in this steely place … without vegetation sound could echo and travel great distances unobstructed. But Koth appeared not to have heard the sound. He was absolutely red in the face and taking shallow breaths as he stared at Venser.

  “Are you well?” Venser said.

  “It is you who will follow me and do what I suggest on my plane.”

  “I think it may be time to separate the boys from the women,” Elspeth interrupted, her own head cocked, listening to the sound that had caught Venser’s attention.

  Venser followed the white-clad woman’s gaze. Far off, over the heat-bent air, a form was clearly visible. As they watched, it lumbered and jerked closer on four sprawled legs. As they watched, the thing suddenly came to an abrupt stop and its legs pulled into the main body. A tube came out of the top and turned until it was pointed at the three of them. No sooner than the tube had pointed at them, the creature hopped to its feet again and began scurrying toward them at an alarming speed. They watched it come.

  “Is it a machine?” Elspeth said.

  “A biomechanical entity, I would think,” Venser said.

  “A biomechanical entity,” Koth said in a mocking tone.

  “What do you think it is?” Venser said.

  “You are both fools,” Koth said. “It is an artifact creature.”

  “A biomechanical entity, as I said.”

  The leveler sped over the dun-colored hill toward them. As it came nearer they could gauge its size better: larger than an average human and double as wide, with a dome-shaped turret on its top that spun with large, spiked metal balls affixed on chains. Its old, jagged metal sides squeaked as it glided across the space between them on small legs.

  Venser stepped forward and took a deep breath. When he exhaled, the beds of his fingernails glowed a dull blue. Elspeth drew her sword and Koth fell into a squat. The creature shot directly at Venser, who was farther to the side than the others. Venser put out his hand. As fast as it was moving, the machine came to an abrupt and jarring stop at Venser’s touch, and the balls spinning around its turreted top jerked free and spun away to clatter over the metal hill. The machine stood still.

  “Well, let’s take a look,” Venser said.

  He rapped twice on the side of the creature and the rivets holding one of its panels in place popped free. Venser whispered a word under his breath and the panel snapped to his palm as though magnetized. He placed the panel carefully at his feet. Then, to Elspeth’s surprise, he pushed his head into the hole and began taking deep breaths.

  Koth glanced at Elspeth. Venser suddenly jerked his head out of the hole.

  “Fascinating and good.”

  “What is fascinating?” Koth said.

  “This creature, of course. It has never had any synaptic taint …,” Venser said.

  Elspeth slipped her blade back in its sheath.

  “That is good news,” Koth said.

  Venser waited. “That means no taint of, uh, infection
.”

  “Superior,” Elspeth said. “One machine we don’t have to send to the scrap heap.”

  She sounded confident and angry, Venser thought, but there was something else in her tone-some slight tremble in the upper ranges that did not sound confident in the slightest.

  Koth knocked carefully on the artifact’s thick side.

  “What do we do with this?”

  “We will leave it and my spell will eventually wear off and this marvel will continue on its way.”

  “Why not dismantle it now so we do not have to fight it later?” Koth said.

  “Because it has done nothing to us,” Venser said.

  “Except try to destroy us.”

  “Let us keep walking,” Elspeth said, ignoring them both. “This heat tires me greatly.”

  They kept walking. Soon the mountains they’d seen in the distance were upon them. Their dull iron sides shot up at right angles never seen in nature … at least never seen in any kind of nature that Venser had spent time in.

  “The Oxidda Chain,” Koth said reverently.

  The Chain seemed to be composed of corroded, notched slab iron run through with winding conduit tubing. Dark caves and holes abounded in the tight valleys between the peaks. Unaccountably, walkways of metal welded to the sides of the mountains wound away through the valleys. Venser smelled oxidation in the air and something else … rotting meat maybe. Nothing moved. No tree limbs stirred in the hot breeze. There were no birds. No sand blew around the cornice of a hill. The view appeared as still and remote as a painted picture.

  They pieced their way through the jagged debris that had corroded and rolled off the higher peaks and came to rest deep in the valley. Eventually they reached the base of one of the raised walkways and clambered up its side. The walkway’s metal gangplanks were buffed to a dull sheen, but many were oxidized through and derelict.

  “Enough of this,” Koth said. He put his two sizable hands before him and made a seizing motion, as if to grab one of the huge iron boulders lying in the bed of the valley. To Venser’s momentary shock, three of the chunks rose off the ground and floated toward them, guided by Koth’s glowing hands. The chunks stopped, one in front of each of the Planeswalkers. Koth stepped on his, and soon Elspeth and Venser were on theirs. Koth’s boulder began to float out over the valley floor, a bit higher than the stature of a man. Venser was next. When it was Elspeth’s turn, she shot her arms out to her sides to steady herself as her chunk glided forward.

  The heat seemed to increase as they moved deeper and between the riven spires of the Oxidda Chain. There was no noise save the wind skittering the loose metal flakes along the valley floor.

  Koth had to maintain a lifting motion as the slabs flew. For a moment Venser considered teasing the geomancer for the pose, but then thought better of it and looked out over the raw landscape. He thought about how it had appeared when he visited all that time ago. The same. Just as harsh and, to his eyes, unforgiving. He remembered Karn’s pride in Mirrodin. He would go into great detail explaining how many days it had taken him to create a certain ridge, or sculpt a peak with just the right sheer. As Venser looked around at the tortured aspect of the Oxidda Chain’s brown and orange mountains, he wondered … where the creator of Mirrodin was. Where was Karn?

  “Where are the living things?” Elspeth said.

  “I too would have expected to have encountered a border patrol by this point,” Koth said.

  “Perhaps the situation on this plane is not as dire as we had thought?” Elspeth said.

  “Do any of these suns ever set?” Venser said, gazing upward at a low red sun. “I mean, one falls and another rises, and so on and so on.”

  Koth glanced up at the sky. “They pull into alignment, and then fall. This will happen soon and quickly-and by that time we should be in the safety of my village.”

  “Why?” Venser said.

  “It is not safe to wander through the Chain at night. The dangers of falling into something sharp or striking metal is enough.”

  “But there are creatures, as well?”

  “Oh yes, there are many creatures.”

  Venser let the comment hang in the air before turning to Elspeth.

  “What is Bant like, fair knight?” Venser said to Elspeth, with only the barest lilt of jest in his voice.

  The corner of Elspeth’s mouth turned down.

  “It was beautiful,” she said.

  “But there is sadness, now. Is there not?” Venser said.

  Elspeth was looking down the canyon. She did not shift her gaze at Venser’s words.

  “There used to be only honor, bravery, and perfection,” Elspeth said. “In my dreams it is still as it was, and people serve for the greater good.”

  Koth let out a gruff laugh. “Service?” he said. “I have never heard something so …” he stopped and turned to Elspeth, who was staring at him intently. “I have never heard of anything so … foolish. The strong lead. The weak follow or die.”

  “Foolish?” Venser said. “Strength comes in all forms. Sometimes working together is the only way to achieve an end. You may be required to cooperate to save your precious Mirrodin, by the end.”

  Koth growled at Venser before gliding away on his rock.

  The suns lined up in the sky as Koth said they would. They fell in a line toward the craggy horizon. Their light was almost extinguished by the time the village came into view. Sunset found them floating above a high precipice looking down on the quiet village.

  “It is too still,” Koth muttered. How could a village that had been bustling when he left Mirrodin be completely still now? Where are the fires?

  The suns sank still farther in the sky. It would be dark soon. Almost all the light had drained from the sky, and their view would be in question.

  Except for the wind, the silence that lay on them as they floated through the village was unbroken and total. They glided along the road that passed between a rough huddle of huts made of rolled-up lengths of metal hammered into tubes. Some of the tubes were wide and some were narrow enough to fit only a body. Elspeth noticed some structures composed of rolls piled together into triangles. There were metal mesh curtains that acted as doors, but most curtains were thrown back to reveal the darkness within the tubes. Many of the curtains whipped and snapped in the wind.

  They stopped above the well that marked the center of the village. An iron bucket that acted as the village dipper creaked on a chain in the wind.

  “This is a warm reception,” Venser said. “Are vulshok homecomings always so lively? If so, I have to make a point of attending more of them. They remind me of home on Dominaria.”

  But nobody laughed. Even Elspeth did not chuckle. The white warrior had droplets of sweat on her top lip, Venser noticed. Her right hand, resting in what she undoubtedly hoped was a casual pose on her sword hilt, was clenched in a fist.

  Koth closed his eyes. Lines began to glow red along his ribs until his whole body was as an ember might be. His eyes popped open suddenly, as red as the tracer lines on his body.

  “Be ready,” he said.

  Elspeth, at least, was ready. She drew her sword in a clatter of steel, her eyes wide. “I smell something strange,” she said.

  Venser smelled it as well. It could be anything, but he knew what it was just as he knew a million compounds from their smells alone. One could not be an artificer without knowing the smell of things. How could you tell old oil from new or solid metal from corruption without smell? No, he knew corruption when he smelled it, and called deeply to siphon mana from the lines he could feel pulsing deep under the metal surface of the plane. Oh, there was mana in this place. Much mana. Hopefully we will not need it. Hopefully we will find Karn easily and leave Mirrodin to its own devices.

  “Something is watching us from the huts,” the geomancer said.

  From behind them came the sound of metal scraping metal, coupled with a low moan. The scraping sounded like many fingernails dragged across flaking iron. It h
ad been some time since the hairs on Venser’s back stood, and he was not altogether happy to be visited by that feeling again. “I think we should move,” he said.

  “Yes,” Koth said. “I think that is a good idea.” Venser and Koth’s slabs moved forward.

  But Elspeth did not move. She had put one of her feet on the iron ground. Her wide eyes slowly narrowed.

  “Elspeth? This is the time now to find my friend on the outskirts of the village. He will be able to tell us what is happening here.”

  “The knights of Bant do not flee, ever.”

  “Of course they don’t,” Venser said. “Nobody would ever ask you to do that. To flee. Koth here is suggesting we visit his friend.”

  Koth nodded.

  “Do not patronize me, artificer.”

  “How do we know there are enemies out there?” Venser said. “And if they were, don’t you think our position here is not the best? Strategically, I mean. We are as vulnerable as plucked pullets, and whatever is making that noise has many in its party.” You only just kidnapped me here. I can’t die yet, he added to himself.

  Elspeth blinked.

  “Yes, this is low ground. Let’s repair to a better position,” she said, taking her foot off the ground and putting it back on the slab, which floated to catch up with the other two.

  “A wise choice,” Venser said, when she was floating next to him. If she’d waited more than a second longer he would have snapped a submission spell on her.

  They moved very quickly after Koth who led them over more tube huts.

  The scrabbling sound they had heard earlier continued behind them. Elspeth was reminded of another time she had heard a similar sound: fleeing a certain prison as a child. When she had run, the beasts had screeched and clawed at their own bars. She remembered the smell of them in that moment and brought her gloved hand up to pinch her nose as she floated along on the slab.

  Koth moved them over the land. They saw not a single living thing, except a strange mechanical bird which alighted on the ground and turned its one good eye to stare at them as they passed. Soon the huts became fewer and fewer, and they were away from the village. Elspeth sheathed her sword.