"So what's on the menu?"
Sage of the Depths rippled with shadows and color. Laughter. "You may eat what you like. Trust your instincts. We hunt not for meat, though, but for Heart's Blood. We will obtain you a smaller form, that you may more easily go in and out of the habitats of men. Ask what you will."
"Um, well, any advice on what to pick up?"
"Small things are mostly good for infiltration, and you will do little of that underwater. There will be times, but save for later. Undersea, swimming predators are best. Sharks, great whales, and us, of course. But you may also want a selection of smaller, harder-to-spot carnivores."
"Sea snake?"
"A clever choice, Unblooded. Dangerous, yet able to fit into small places. And if you find the right one you can even go on land, a bit. I suppose you will likely wish to return there at some point. Later, you will want to choose some transitional forms. Turtles. Flying fish. So that you can travel where you like. But that is for the future."
And not a word of this was, well...words. Their bodies shimmered through colors and shades and patterns as fast as thought.
"Once you have a new shape, I will take you to the city-shoal below and we will see to your tattoos."
A blank whiteness. "What tattoos?"
Silver patterns flickered into life across the Sage's body and vanished again. "I keep them hidden as they interfere with talk. Over the long years after the Usurpation, when we fled into chaos, our Exaltations broke. Our castes no longer hold steady across the course of the month unless fixed with moonsilver, and we risk becoming monsters of mutable form. It is your choice to refuse the tattooing if you wish, but I will not hide my displeasure, or teach you further. You will have to find another."
"I always wanted to get some sweet tattoos. Never got the chance. I guess this is it." It sounded like sense to her, but that probably meant he wasn't telling her something or nobody would refuse.
"Then let us find a sea snake. I will show how you must stalk it, and when you have consumed its Heart's Blood I will find you again. Never fear; I can feel you from fathoms away."
"Let's get going." What was this 'city-shoal below'? She couldn't ask names. It would just have to wait its turn.
"Trekking across the desert again. Oh joy." The grain fields had slowly given way to patches of smaller crops. Only tomatoes remained now, and those were growing more and more scattered.
"Are we having fun yet, Spike?" Buffy just shook her head at him. "This is why you shouldn't have come after me. At least I understand why the others did. You, not so much."
"What, an' stay with Harmony? Yeah, luv, that was definitely my first choice on how to spend my time after you vanished." He kept scratching under his face wraps; she supposed they were itchy.
"I'll have to find you guys veils or something. Honestly, I'm a little surprised Harmony didn't join in, the size of the group you sent after me."
"You sound like you don't appreciate us coming to rescue you, luv."
"I'm glad you cared enough to come. I'm worried that I'm going to end up taking care of all of you instead of the other way round. This place is dangerous enough that I barely survived my first week."
"Well, excuse me for not having the thing that there are only seven hundred of in the universe or the thing you have to inherit from parents who don't live in our world! All I get to be is a bloody vampire!" Spike stalked away, swearing under his breath.
She kept walking. What else was there to do?
The first thing he needed was a blade, and something bigger than the pocketknife he'd carried with him from Sunnydale. Xander carefully pried tiny screws out of the recording device. The electronics-if that's what they were-were a useless mass, but they weren't what interested him. The panel didn't want to come off, and that was okay; he bent it until it broke, leaving a sharp, ragged edge.
Next step: cut down the palm trees. With a herring. Okay, with a makeshift saw. It could definitely have been worse. His hands should have been torn and bleeding by this point, but with a cautious grip he managed to take down the trees one by one in a matter of hours.
Lunch break. Hack open the coconuts. By this time he had gone through a couple more saw blades, but there were more available and the work was nearing completion. Coconut milk. Coconut meat. Tasty at first, leaning toward sickly sweet by the time he finished eating. And then he began to saw away at the fronds.
Not the ideal cords for binding logs together. Nor were the logs ideal raft material, but at least he didn't have to use corpses as flotation devices like in Watchmen. Good thing, too, since he didn't have any. He also didn't have a sail, or anything small enough to use as an effective paddle. By the time he shoved himself away from the island, kicking with his feet, he knew that his odds of surviving this ordeal should have dropped to roughly zero. But then, he should never have succeeded in making the raft in the first place. "Don't tell me the odds," he muttered under his breath, and kept paddling.
Xander knew-what California kid didn't?-that you didn't drink seawater; that way lay dehydration and a quick death. By the end of the day, though, when he'd tired of kicking the raft forward and had curled up atop it, he'd been out in the blazing sun for hours on end, hours without rest, and quick death was starting to look pretty good. He cupped his hand over the side and took a sip.
It was no Mountain Dew, that was for sure. Soon, he knew, the thirst would return with a vengeance as the salt drove water out of his body. Soon. After, you know, an hour. Or two. Or five. Or eight.
The sun was rising over the waves, and he was awake, not dead of thirst. His stomach growled. His skin was taking on a nice bronzy hue, which he was starting to realize was probably not going to turn into skin cancer in a few years, nor was he getting burned. He peeled off his shirt, tied the sleeves and neck into knots, and dipped it into the water like a net. The fish who swam into it must have been terribly confused, to cram themselves into such a tiny space that way.
There was nothing to start a fire with but the raft. He held the projector lens from Shaia's message device in the air and focused sunlight onto the first fish to stop flopping. It was a good lens. The fish seared slowly under the beam of light it made. By noon he was messily eating roast fish and tossing the entrails overboard.
None of this seemed particularly plausible. GIven that it was happening, though, Xander began to think he might actually make it to land alive.
Perhaps an hour later, fins rose out of the water and began to circle.
Finally the sun set, and Angel peeled the sand-crusted cloth from his face. They were miles away from nowhere, but they had a clear road to follow, so there was some hope that they would reach Paragon in one piece.
"Feeling better?" Cordy asked him as they made their way off the side of the road. There was nowhere to camp here but in the dunes. No one had signaled any alarms going off, though-no mystical intuitions from Willow, no visions for Cordy, nothing new from Buffy. That left making the best of a rough night.
"It's good to be out of the sun," Angel told her. Too few people seemed to realize that being out in the sun, even protected, was a good way to make a vampire sick and weak. He was becoming used to it, as much as possible, and Spike had apparently been determined to run around Sunnydale in increasingly scant protection, so there was that.
"You don' t think we're on a wild goose chase, do you?" Cordelia waved her hands out over the dunes. "I mean, sure, this is a road and it goes somewhere, but Buffy seems to be flying by the seat of her pants."
"Can any of us do better? She's at least had a little time to sit down and study this place." Cordy's eyebrows rose into her hairline at the word "study" applied to Buffy. "I wouldn't discount her Slayer powers, either." Angel had always seen that Buffy had a superb tactical mind and intuition, qualities that Giles had seemed determined to overlook as part of the Slayer package. He'd presumed that had to do with the conceit that the Watchers got to give orders to their charges.
"Probably not," Cordy acknowledged. "I just wish the Powers would send me a vision of what to do, though. How are we ever going to get out of this place?"
"The same way we got home from Pylea. We keep looking until we find the information we need. Maybe it'll be in a book, or maybe we'll have to be scientists and study the world, but if we can get here, surely we can leave."
Cordelia started to sigh, but turned it into nervous laughter. "I'm just tired of camping out with no camping equipment, you know? We're going to wake up with sand all in our clothes and hair and everything. We might as well just bury ourselves in-"
Sand fountained everywhere as pale figures burst from the dunes. Looked as if someone had already taken Cordelia's idea and run with it. Most of them wore loincloths, if that much, and carried only bone daggers. To him, at least, they were no threat.
"What the hell," Cordelia wailed. "Why didn't I see this coming?"
Buffy pulled out a dagger of her own, one she must have acquired in town. It was little more than a belt knife with a poorly sharpened blade, though Buffy held it with a quiet menace that might have matched a scythe.
"There will be no fighting tonight," intoned a woman's voice. The last of the folk to emerge from the sand, though as pale as the rest, wore red clothing that resembled a stripper's parody of a nun's habit. (In truth, though, Angel was not so sure it wasn't legitimate religious garb here.) "Stand down, my people."
"But-!" one of the men protested. Like the rest, his skin was as pallid as moonlight.
The priestess, or whatever she was, sidled her way over to that one. "By the decree of Cecelyne, we are here to give escort." She dug her nails into the man's shoulder. "Whoso disobeys, I will not lay a finger on, for it is not my place. Rather, they shall be turned over to she who is currently the apple of Malfeas' eye. Dread Sacheverell spoke of her, and now she has disrupted the Lap more than any servant of the Yozis in living memory. She is the Slayer of all those who hide from sunlight, and it is she who shall punish anyone who harms a hair on the head of the least slave." She turned a genuinely pleasant smile on Buffy, though Angel thought it might have hidden a touch of jealousy. "We are here because you, Slayer, are summoned to Malfeas this night. We will ensure the safety of your companions, as is demanded of me. You may know me as Sulumor."
Buffy gave her a wry grin. "Buffy Summers. Nice to meet ya. Interesting company you keep. How do I get to Malfeas?"
Sulumor shook her head ruefully. "Strange, the gaps Cyan left in your education. A single mote of Essence would illuminate the nearest path. This time, I will take you there."
Dawn, Giles, and Spike all spoke Buffy's name at once, each with an obvious objection. Angel thought to do the same, then halted at Buffy's frown. "Look, guys, I hate to leave you here, but this is something I can't put off. And Malfeas is a lot less safe than here."
"Can we trust these...people?" Gunn asked. "Or are they gonna turn on us the moment you're gone?"
"If she can order them in the name of the Yozis to obey, I'm inclined to think they'll do what she says. But they're ordinary people with a skin condition. If they do turn on you, you can take them." Buffy hugged Dawn. "You be careful. I really wish you hadn't come, Dawn, but there's nothing to be done now. Listen to Giles."
"You really don't have to do this." At the last moment Angel decided to argue the point, but Buffy shushed him.
"Depends on what you mean by 'have to'," she said. "I could stay, but it's the worst of multiple bad plans. I may as well find out what they want with me, especially if word on the street is that I'm causing trouble. Sulumor, you're up."
The priestess raised an eyebrow. "This is called Hell-Walker Technique, Buffy. It's simplest if I come with you." She set off toward the south, and Buffy followed. Angel scanned the Scoobies' faces; all of them still wanted to call her back.
Yet all were silent.
"So where's the gateway?" Buffy stared back at her friends as they watched her walk away. Dawn looked forlorn. Willow gave a wave, her face fixed in a false smile. Tara just furrowed her brow.
Angel couldn't look at her at all.
"There is no gateway. We walk into the desert. In five days, we encounter the walls of the Demon City. You truly know none of this?" Sulumor peered at her. "They say you are as unlike us as you are like, and as yet the Yozis have given you no introduction."
"I heard it. It's just hard to imagine. I guess it's no stranger than not being able to travel faster than light." She was leaving them behind and walking into hell.
"Why couldn't you travel faster than light? How odd." For all that Sulumor kept her nose in the air, her eyes kept studying Buffy's face, her responses. "You can trust them, you know. They worship me."
"Not the Yozis?" That seemed odd.
"As well as the Yozis. As an avatar of the Yozis. Or Cecelyne, at least. Have you gathered no worshippers?" From the sound of it, that was nearly as strange as not being able to outrace light.
"The Slayer-the only one, where I come from-is supposed to operate in secret. And to kill demons, not serve them. My Watcher always told me about how the Slayer-only one-killed off the Old Ones, the Primordials I guess, and freed humanity from them. But the modern world has forgotten about demons, and I'd be...a crazy girl, or even a murderer, if I worked in public."
"You have worshippers here. Have you noticed? You are an avatar of Malfeas, yourself." For all Sulumor's pride, it almost sounded as if she were trying to earn Buffy's approval with information! "How do you feel when you wake in the morning?"
Buffy jolted to a halt and stared. "Stronger, actually. More refreshed than I've been in years." That was from worship?
"You feel their prayers. They refresh your will. With more worshippers, with stronger faith, you would draw Essence from them as well. You poor child. How did you survive? Let me help you. I can spread word of you."
Buffy tried not to recoil and failed. "I just...made it one day at a time, I guess. I don't understand why you care so much."
"Because the Yozis favor you. If I aid you, I serve them all the better. Why else?"
Buffy gazed off into the distance, wondering if she could see the walls of Malfeas out there somewhere. "Were you raised to serve them?"
Sulumor shook her head. "My people are cursed by the Unconquered Sun. He hates us, we know not why. But we served Luna faithfully, and the wind spirits, and the Maidens, for all that they ever did to help us. Cecelyne promised to protect my people from the Sun's wrath. What can I do but trust her?"
"I'm...I'm sorry it's like that for you." What kind of lives had these people had to live? It sounded like being a vampire, only without the perks like the lack of conscience and the super-strength.
"I am Cecelyne's chosen, to rule the South in her name. So long as I work toward that end, she cares for me, and I use that to care for my people whether she does or not. What task have the Yozis-the Old Ones, if you prefer-set you?"
That left Buffy baffled. "Supposedly Sacheverell saw that I would free the Yozis. That's all I know."
Sulumor scowled. "Yes. But how? Do you build weapons? Lead armies? Fight with your own strengths? What goal? Do their Urges not drive you?"
"I..." Buffy shook her head. "The only task I was ever set was the one Slayers have been fulfilling for millennia in my world." Sulumor just waited expectantly, as if sure that must be it. "Each of us was the one girl in the world," Buffy quoted, "with the power to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. But why would any demon, even a Yozi, set us up to do that? It makes no sense."
Sulumor thought on that for a while, muttering to herself. "Cecelyne might. That is, not for the sake of fighting and killing them, but to regulate. To lay down a law. Over so many thousands of years, the mission might have been corrupted. Perhaps other commands, from other Yozis, might produce the same problem, in time."
Buffy almost said something about Telephone, but that would mean nothing to Sulumor. "You think I was meant to...to ipolice/i demons. To regulate what they do in the world."
"Does that not sound plausible to you? And then somehow, you fell into the hands of men who misled you about your purpose. You never violated it...only perverted the outcome."
Buffy kept her eyes on the ground. "I...I guess I don't know."
"I am pleased with you, Unblooded."
"Thanks." Fred hadn't been worried about anything but her ability to actually catch the prey. Everyone in her family hunted, and she'd learned to set an effective snare in Pylea. But sea snake venom was truly nasty, and she'd had to dance her tentacles about to avoid being bitten. Avoid it she had, though, and her beak had snipped out the snake's heart without a hitch.
"We go now to the city-shoal. Down. Very far down. There I will give you your tattoos. Then you will undergo your trials to determine what caste they will fix you into. I am a No Moon, and I would not be surprised if you will be as well, but that has yet to be seen."
Whatever this city-shoal was, it seemed to have settled into a deep-sea trench. Fred kept a sharp lookout for volcanic vents, and was rewarded with a good view of some tube worms and associated crabs. They didn't seem like ideal targets for hunting, though. No mobility to speak of for the worms, of course, and the rest were small but conspicuous.
At last it came into view, a massive squared-off thing like an aircraft carrier doubled in width, then multiplied over and over in size. Many graceful bubble-domes rose above the "flight deck", if that was what it had been, and at the center a great tower of such domes that might have been a command center, once.
She still didn't know this place's name. It must have had one, once; it was evident from the specifics of its shape-the wide deck, the narrow, half-hidden keel-that the city was meant to float on the ocean's surface. Whether it could ever be gotten there again was open to some question, of course, but from this altitude there was no way to see the damage.
For all that the city looked as if it had once been luxurious, as they sank past the central tower, Fred could see only dirty, miserable faces pressing against tiny portholes. "Is that-? Are they-?"
"Pay the Traitorspawn no mind. You have no doubt met their like on the surface. The Dragon-Blooded rose up and betrayed our kind, and for that they must suffer."
Fred hoped Sage of the Depths didn't notice when she slapped a tentacle pad to her face. Damn it! What was wrong with this world?
Xander had gone through the bag of provisions, but this seemed like a better choice. He gutted the last fish and added the entrails to the pile. Then he removed his pants and sliced as clean a pair of holes as he could at the end of the leg, down to the seam. He tied the other end of the pants around the log just behind the makeshift frond ropes and tossed a handful of fish guts ahead of the raft.
Instantly a shark lunged for the free food, and Xander tossed that leg of his pants at its fin. By this point he was barely even surprised when he caught it in one throw. The hole caught itself around the fin as the shark darted forward, dragging the raft with it. "Good girl," Xander called, feeling foolish, and tossed another glob of entrails ahead of the shark. "Keep going! Good, good!"
In a matter of minutes he was splashing his way forward, hurtling across the wavecaps. He still wasn't sure where he was going, but he was getting there a lot faster. Birds swooped down to investigate the fish guts, and he clubbed them with a block of circuitry and added them to the bait pile. Every so often he tossed the shark something and called out encouragement. A little voice in his head that generally represented the voice of reason had begun laughing at him. "Yeah, yeah, I know. You can't train a shark. I'm lying back there on the island hallucinating from thirst. Well, guess what?" He glanced back at the trail of foam he was leaving. "It's a cool hallucination, and I'm going to enjoy it while I can. So there."
"Do you have any interest in learning sorcery?" Sulumor persisted in trying to engage Buffy in conversation, perhaps just to pass the time. She insisted that no matter how fast or slow they walked, the trip to Malfeas would take exactly five days.
"I don't know that I've ever been any good at it," Buffy said ruefully. "I've cast a spell here and there, but mostly I've always left that sort of thing up to Willow. I can't seem to grasp the underlying principles of it." The only time she ever remembered really understanding what she was doing, she'd been mentally fused with Giles and Willow. And Xander, though that probably didn't have anything to do with it.
"Hmm." Sulumor tapped at her lips. "You must have been initiated, in some fashion or other. Still, I know of certain teachers who are employed to go through the barest rudiments of the five stations, so that someone who merely wants to cast a single spell can do so without excessive effort. Or perhaps the nature of initiation has changed in your world and time. We can always start over, if you like. Most of us eventually learn at least a little sorcery; it comes fairly easy to us, and only we and the Solars can learn its highest expression."
Buffy fell silent. She wasn't especially interested in learning Infernal magics, though the idea that she'd somehow been initiated without knowing made her curious how that worked. Cyan's friendliness clearly covered up ulterior motives; Buffy could sense the deceit in her, though she wouldn't go so far as to say the woman was malicious toward her. Sulumor, by contrast, seemed relatively genuine-yet somehow expected Buffy to overlook her demon-worship and ambitions of conquest. Perhaps she just thought Buffy shared those things with her.
She was persistent, Buffy had to give her that. Presently she tried another approach. "I had a thought on your Exaltations. Perhaps they were deliberately engineered by this 'Watchers' Council'. That could be the reason for the odd properties of your line of Slayers."
"Um...go on? I'm not sure I see what you're getting at."
"Some of you are raised by this Council, and others approached later in life, but they offer you a choice in either case. A choice between two great moral failings: dereliction of duty leading to the end of the world...or participation in an ongoing act of genocide." Sulumor raised her eyebrows. "Could it be they've simply devised a reliable method of attracting an Infernal Exaltation? Such a thing would be astonishing-even in the First Age, the Solars struggled to learn anything about how Exaltations functioned-but not impossible in principle."
Buffy eyed Sulumor askance and retreated still further into herself. She couldn't make herself see her activities as genocidal, but from an outsider's perspective, maybe it looked that way. Certainly she'd signed on briefly with the Initiative, with its demon prison camp, but the organization hadn't exactly welcomed her with open arms either.
Still, she considered what her immediate successors had been like: Kendra, simultaneously eager and coldly calculating, and then Faith, with her violent absence of morals. Was it possible that Sulumor was onto something? It couldn't be the whole story, she finally concluded; there was a gaping hole in the theory. There would have to have been times when the Council couldn't recruit a new Slayer, because the Exaltation would have gone to someone out of their scope entirely. No silver sands or crystal spheres had sparkled over the Soviet gulags, and Hitler had never glowed green during his speeches. There were too many human figures of horrific evil who surely should have gotten the lone Exaltation before any candidate the Watchers could field.
But did that mean the whole theory was bunk? Or just that there was some other controlling factor neither she nor Sulumor had any way of knowing about?
"Do you sense it yet, Dru?" Darla stood over the Seal of Danzalthar and began to drizzle blood onto it. She'd never seen the Seal when the Master had been imprisoned in this place, but he himself had claimed that the Hellmouth opened on many different realms of existence, changing over the years when no one occupied it.
Drusilla hugged herself tightly, but that meant little. The Seal itself was affecting her, for one thing, and then Dru's mannerisms were unpredictable under the best of circumstances. "They sing to me," though, was a better indicator. "They sing, but they can't dance. They're not allowed out to play anymore."
Finally the Seal decided it'd absorbed enough blood and folded itself open. Darla swung herself down into the pit below, expecting a vast cavern filled with fire or demons or both. All she found was a narrow shaft like a well. And at the bottom was...
A box. Though there was no sign of a lid. The little cube's outermost layer was solid as a diamond and might once have been as clear, but now it was crazed with tiny lines, like a neglected plastic window. Beneath that, a smaller black cube seemed to eat light, though it was coated with a filigree of metal that was somehow at once dull and sparkling.
"Fits the description they gave us," Darla said. "Though they made it sound like it's got three more layers in there. Guess they're under the jet black part."
"Three sixes," Drusilla crooned. "Three and six, they make nine, nine hundreds of them all cooped up inside. Except a few have flown the coop, the naughty things."
Darla lifted it easily. She felt nothing from it, herself. But it matched exactly with what the woman from Wolfram and Hart had described, and called by the odd name of "the Six-Metal Prison". "Next step, merry old England, where we make the Watchers' Council an offer it can't refuse."