"Neither mortal nor Exalted? Buffy Summers, you amuse me." The little man in bright colors sat on the lead tile and handed Buffy a cup of what surely had to be tea, from the scent. The taste was sharp, almost bitter, but her palate had broadened lately. "Iarwain has few who visit, nor can he get out and wander. Only one is prisoned tighter, Sacheverell, who never wakens." Blech. Never mind, wrong palate. Wait...

"Sacheverell? The Yozi? But then are you-?" Atonal pipes rang in her ears.

"This is my hell nor am I free. Still, tis Calibration and some few of my jouten have leave enough to step outdoors. Tom was master; none could catchhim, till they slew the River-Daughter." Iarwainsipped his tea casually as if all this was a matter of no concern now. "Then they found poor Tom a-mourning, caught him there and broke his wings. Now he lies in wretched pain, while through the tow'rs she blows in silence, ghost of what she used to be."

Buffy stood and walked to the edge of the tiles. She could have sworn she'd fallen only a few yards, but the round platform with its square tiles floated in emptiness miles away from the web of brass catwalks and basalt islands. "I hope you're not trying to trap me here. I don't take well to-"

"Only Iarwain is bound here. Buffy, she is free to go. Yet perhaps the sweetest Slayer might consent to entertain him." The little man-she still could not say what it was about his face she couldn't look at-held out a plate of cookies. How had he come up so close to her? "Ancient and Firstborn I am, and all things my eyes have seen. Sacheverell remembers nothing; only now is real to him. If he wakened even Tom would find himself constrained at once. Thus by Iarwain's truth must All-Seer remain in slumber."

Buffy took a cookie, and the plate was empty. "You sound almost like you want something from me." The cookie tasted like air. Not nothing-air. She hadn't realized air had a taste. "Not that you're being all that coherently splainy."

"Tom speaks in no riddles, Buffy. Your own head is too constrained. Let Iarwain open it, as your overself has done." The little man caught her head between his hands and forced her to look into his eyes.

He had no eyes. He had no face. She had no face. She had no thoughts.

Chapter 68-Surely Some Revelation

Buffy woke slowly with a strange taste in her mouth. It should have been a bad taste, but she hadn't tasted anything bad since she started eating stone and metal and...pretty much anything she wanted. "Nnngh. Cordy I'm tryin' to rest."

"I thought you didn't sleep any more." Cordelia shook her again. "I know you don't have any meetings or proclamations scheduled but it's almost noon and this is ridiculous."

Buffy pushed herself up. "I'm...I feel like I learned...I dunno, something." Letters of fire flared behind her eyes as if etched in her skull. I will defend the people who depend on me. Well, she meant to, but written in fire inside her?

"Whatever. Your shapeshifting demon...girlfriends?...they're worried about you because you were apparently supposed to have some kind of orgy last night." Cordelia gave the entire concept a smirk big enough to scare...well, startle...the Kukla. "You didn't show up and boink them. Or let them boink you, I'm not too clear."

"Blunt as ever. See how you manage if you ever get to be Exalted." Buffy was about to conclude that Cordy was out of luck on that front; arriving the first time had torn Fate and freed up Exaltations, but aside from Tara there hadn't been any in months.

"If it turns me into some kind of bisexual slut I..." Cordelia hesitated. "I don't want to be one." The last bit exuded the most pseudo-confidence that had ever pseudoed.

"Careful what you wish for," Buffy said with a wink. "Every once in a while one swears to celibacy. It's all very epic. Can you imagine Faith sworn to celibacy?"

Cordelia went decidedly green, and not with envy. "Well...anyway...you should go tell your friends you're all right and that you haven't gone all ooky-demony."

Buffy couldn't resist. She nodded casually and, instead of rising, dropped to all fours in radeken-guise. Half-panther, half-dragon, she paced to the door and glanced over her shoulder. "I'll let them know."

This was supposed to be an illusion. There were no texts about it, no ancient lore; it seemed that Buffy had stumbled onto something entirely new. The demonic form she was wearing felt real and disturbingly natural and...and animalistic. Radeken were predators, smart but not remotely intellectual.

Speak for yourself, Buffysummers.

Oh, can it, Sineya. Just enjoy being out in the open. You love it when I'm you.

You are always me. Always have been me.

Buffy flexed the wings that grew from her back. If this was an illusion, it was Matrix-quality. Her wings ached to lift her into the air, but the corridors weren't roomy enough for that. Nor was it a great idea to go flying outside. This was her city, but the servants gave her a wide berth and they knew who she was. Ordinary citizens-bar her neomah, who would also recognize her-would like a loose radeken even less.

"Buffy? Is that you?" Buffy came to a halt in the crossing corridor and let Giles catch up to her. He wasn't the biggest fan of Sineya himself. She'd tried to kill him, after all. "Iron Siaka asked me to tell you she was leaving."

Buffy curled her neck back. "Leaving? But-"

"A nation called Chaya is going to war, she said." Giles frowned, shook his head, scratched her on the shoulder, and shook his head again. "She claimed it was impossible but didn't say why."

"The Chayans always go mad just before Calibration," Scarlet Whisper said, emerging into the hall. "It should be winding-Rupert? Is this Buffy?"

"It's me," Buffy snarled. "I'm no more dangerous than usual."

"The madness should be about done with by now. When they're sane, they're extremely peaceful. I can't imagine what could change that." Whisper shuddered. "The Chayans are...different."

"Iron Siaka said that the Chayan god, Xochichem, had appeared in Yu-Shan behaving strangely perhaps a week ago." Giles consulted with a sheaf of notes he'd taken. "Though for a city god, Xochichem is quite odd already. Not in any way humanoid. I'm not sure what about his behavior was strange."

"Chayans strongly discourage Exalted from staying in their lands," Whisper said. "I wouldn't expect most means of controlling the people to work. But perhaps if someone has gotten to their gods...?"

"Control the gods, control the nation? But can we do that?" Buffy hadn't dealt with gods much-at least, if she had she'd thought they were demons.

"Absolutely," Whisper said, nodding vigorously. "Even Dragon-Blooded could strong-arm gods into doing their bidding if they felt they needed to put in the effort."

"Then the relevant questions are why and who," Giles said. "How do we find that out?"

"We'll find out when they attack," Buffy growled. "It won't be my problem, though. They're too far from here."

The streets of Thorns grew filthier every day. Outside the Aspir Haven and Shroudvaunt districts, no one was paid any longer to sweep them. In some places, foul corpses lay about where they had fallen when the magick sustaining them fell; such minor creations were of no consequence to the Mask of Winters. There were always more bodies.

Geran Devon scurried from refuse pile to refuse pile, darting as quickly as possible whenever the baying hungry ghosts paused to sniff. Their gazes would be pointed down, and if it were him they smelled he would have been dead already anyway.

This was no random arrest of minor criminals. This was the Mask of Winter's parody of the Wyld Hunt. Hungry ghosts swarmed Legacy, sweeping vagrants from the streets for some new corpse construct-a brace of spine chains, perhaps. When they had enough, they would leave, and there were plenty of vagrants left in the old town. Every month there were more, as houses rotted and businesses failed for lack of wares.

Devon had set up traps throughout his territory, but they were zombie traps. They might catch the occasional ghost, maybe even kill one with luck, but the hungries were far too alert to be fooled by his camouflage in any numbers. He just had to run.

Devon took off like a shot for the decaying manor up ahead. Once it had belonged to a wealthy merchant. The hungry patrols didn't enter large houses till they fell to ruins, not unless they saw someone in rags darting inside. The last pile of junk was yards away, though, so he had to hustle. He timed it just right; the door didn't even bang, and then he was out of-

"Boy."

It was a whisper on the wind. Devon struck out blindly with his belt knife but found nothing. Ghosts with the spare essence to dematerialize were more dangerous than just about any necrotech beast not built for heavy combat; you couldn't scratch them, but they could stab you.

"Foolish boy. Don't even know I'm here to help. Perhaps I should leave you to the beasts." The voice had no visible source, no direction; it seemed to emanate from the air all around him. "I am not a ghost."

"What are you? A god? A demon? Why can't-? Never mind, if you're here to help me then please, help." Neither would necessarily be visible or tangible here; the shadowland didn't affect them.

"She would've taken you with her, you know. If you'd tried. Trained you. You turned her down."

"What, that crazy lady? This isn't helping me! I don't stick my neck out, whatever you are." Devon glared in every direction, searching for some trace of the speaker, but saw only rot and dust. The only clue was a faint buzzing quality to the voice. "Life isn't like my stories."

"Ah, but it could be. There were the sunlit heroes once, those who fenced reality against things like these. Or their once-loyal, now treacherous elemental hounds. Even now those could pull down the Mask if they came in numbers. They have before. You wrote the tales of these things. You could write again. You could tell your autobiography, even."

Devon choked back a laugh. "You want to possess me and make me Anathema." He'd grown up on those tales: the false heroes, the demons who'd tricked people into depending on them...and then betrayed the world.

"Yes," the demon whirred. "Is that a difficulty?"

A hungry snuffled at the window. But they never-! "No," Devon said hastily. "I want to live. What do I gotta do?"

"Hold still," was all the voice said. The buzzing sound rose up in his ears as an invisible swarm whirled around him.

And began to eat.

"Buffy."

"Cyan. We've got to stop meeting like this." Buffy wearily opened her eyes. She'd been on the platform with...a man with no face.

"At least it's your mansion this time," Cyan said with some amusement. She accepted a glass that seemed to float in midair and handed it to Buffy. "Your servants are most hospitable."

Buffy sat up and took the glass. "Is that...what servant?"

"A krimenus. They're composed of many thousands of insectile hands, all of which can compress themselves into a tiny shell. Has to do with Elsewhere, no doubt; the principles never interested me much." She accepted another glass, this one with a more colorful fluid, and sipped from it.

Buffy took a drink from her glass. It was simple water. "Did I miss the party?"

Cyan laughed, a delicate tinkliing sound this time. "You survive an encounter with a jouten of Oramus, mind apparently intact, and you worry about being present to welcome a new Infernal? Well, I suppose the Perfect is a critical acquisition, and he'll be under your authority, Buffy sa Buffy."

Buffy narrowed her eyes slightly and drank more water. "Sa?"

"Eh, you should start naming your avatars so we can distinguish them. Sa is normally used for demon souls, but in private some of us have begun to use it for splinter-avatars like yourself. Don't let the Unquestionable hear it, not yet, anyway. They'll think you're putting on airs."

Buffy tried not to squirm at that. It was one thing getting used to the idea that she was not entirely human and that it was okay. But the root of that worry-that she was becoming more like the Yozis-still bothered her. Or like Gaia and Autochthon, she reminded herself. Tara had pointed that out. It made her different; that was all.

"How much do we change?" she asked. "In my dreams, and sometimes when I'm awake, people tell me I don't even know what I am or what's coming. That I haven't even started yet. You did, even, when we first met. But I'm one of the longest-lived Slayers in my world, ever. So...what are we?"

Cyan sat there for a moment sipping her water. "To tell the truth...I don't know. The ancient Exalts created whole new lands, sometimes complete with people, from essentially nothing. They spoke and nations obeyed. No army...no mortal army, that is...could stand against them. The Lunars could take any shape, even becoming mountains...or behemoths. Even the Dragon-Blooded could wrack the world with storms and quakes and waves. But there were no Green Sun Princes, then. For some reason, your age as an Exalt is about the same as ours-no Infernal is newer than five years ago. I don't know what we'll become when we come of age. I'm not sure anyone does."

Buffy sighed and swallowed her water in one gulp. "I guess I'm out of luck."

Cyan shrugged back. "It's time we got moving. I can tell you this: the Exalted could command the gods, and the lesser demons. But all they could do with the Yozis was lock them away. We might be able to defeat them, but we will never be like them, not really."

"Y'know," Buffy said, "I think it's for the best."

"I can tell you for certain sure, there's never been a match like this in all of history! Welcome to the arena! Welcome to the first ever gladiatorial combat featuring our Despot, Buffy Summers!"

The crowd roared like a wounded tyrant lizard. They had those here, actual tyrannosaurs. Not around Gem, though, and Buffy wasn't sure if that was good luck or bad. She wondered how she'd match up against one these days.

The arena was a dusty coliseum, vaguely Roman in overall design but partly carved from a crater wall and the rest constructed out of adobe brick. Gold-rush style shops lined the upper limit of the ring and its middle height, so that she felt as if she were in a pistol duel on a gigantic scale. That was a vaguely unnerving thought; she'd never dealt with guns if she could avoid it.

"And in this corner..." She could see the announcer, if not clearly, shouting from a carefully-chosen position high up the wall, a man whose coloration resembled Whisper's description of the Perfect, which she had finally recognized as an aboriginal Australian look. Of course they would exist here, in the deep desert of the South. Creation had every racial type Earth did and some it didn't. "...we have a...Lintha? Lintha Ung...Het Dukanta. Well, Mister Dukanta, if you're really a Lintha pirate you've come one helluva long way to compete with the Despot, I can tell you that. No worries, we can all assure you the Despot doesn't discriminate against Lintha...or Wyld mutants either, for whatever that's worth to you."

Buffy could see why the announcer thought she was up against a mutant. "Dukanta" was tall and lean, with white hair, vaguely greenish skin, and red eyes. His forehead rose high above his brows-not quite like that Hulk villain, but enough that she thought of him. What was that guy called again? This guy, though, this guy she'd heard described. He was Lintha Ng Hut Dukantha, an akuma who worked for Kimbery, who'd been involved in creating the Green Sun Princes in the first place. He'd lost in some early testing against the just-created Infernals, but not by much; he was old and ungodly powerful, pun definitely intended. He was also bound to serve Kimbery absolutely...so what was he really here for?

"So...without further ado...the fight of the Age...begins!" Trumpets blared and firedust flares shot up into the sky.

Best to take this seriously. Kimbery was in trouble with the rest of the Reclamation. She might be trying to get back in their good graces...but probably not. Buffy shot toward Dukantha at top speed, faintly regretting not having finally tried out that hearthstone last night. As it was, she fanned out her hair, coated her body in brass, and bared a pair of fangs that'd make a vampire envious.

She hadn't closed half the distance when Dukantha hit her with a green bolt of energy that left her choking on two lungfuls of water. Before she could respond to that, he was closing on her, daiklaive up and ready to swing at her neck. Not good.

The daiklaive clanged off her neck in a shower of brilliant sparks. Still coughing water out of her lungs, Buffy seized Dukantha's arms in long coils of her hair. He began slashing at it at once, of course, but it gave her a moment to readapt her lungs. No more of that. "Give my regards to Jabba," she said lightly, wrapping a third coil around his neck.

"Jabba?" Dukantha wondered, but the next moment his sword sliced him loose, hacking through her metallic hair with basically no resistance. "Profaner of Kimbery's gifts, I am come at the Great Mother's direction to destroy you and free your Exaltstion so that another may serve her better."

"Been tried," Buffy pointed out. He was doing a number on her hair! She took a brief moment to concentrate. "Here I thought you wanted to congratulate me on the new mansion." Her eyes opened, flaring green, just as a burning sword clanged off her armored skin. She swelled larger with knotted muscle. "You insult She-Hulk's sense of style. She-Hulk smash!"

Buffy didn't have her hands all the way up for a punch when Dukantha drove his heel into her gut and sent her hurtling across the arena.

Giles swore as Buffy went flying. In spite of all the changes she'd gone through since being stranded here, he was still her Watcher, it seemed. Buffy struck the ground twice and rolled another few feet, but she got back up for more.

She was still his Slayer, too.

Buffy rubbed a trickle of blood from her lip. Even through all that armor, Dukantha had managed to split it. What the devil was he? With a snarl, Buffy charged back into the fight, actually loping on her knuckles like an ape. What had this place-?

No, he reminded himself sternly. Not this place. This was and always had been what she was. What every Slayer had been. Buffy expressed it more fully and that was all. Legends such as those told of Saghani Grozny, who had served the Mongol khans, Semiramis the Sorceress-Slayer, and Meghan McCuil...all true. And most of them by far, Slayers the Council had reached late or not at all.

Had the Council held them back from their destiny? Or protected the world from them?

Buffy spun like a dervish and pummeled Dukantha with dozens of blows. Perhaps, he admitted...perhaps both.

The crowd no longer roared. The noise had become so nearly continuous that it throbbed like an engine.

Buffy's fighting prowess was just that, though-combat skill, if expressed in some unusual ways. She charged with unnatural speed; she gave and took blows that could have felled a rhino. Even her new transformations rarely did more than enhance that.

Dukantha did more. Bolts of green fire and watery energy leapt from his hands and sword. Buffy could dodge such blasts, or take them without flinching, but she had nothing to match them. Sooner or later, the Lintha would wear her down.

Giles had read of the akuma's exploits in the libraries of Yu-Shan. More, he could see Dukantha's killing intent with every blow he landed. The Lintha was not here to compete; he was here to kill, using the contest to disguise his purpose. Only, if Buffy could not defeat him-and it was clear that Dukantha's power was greater-what help could an aging Watcher provide?

Giles' hand went to his belt pouch, the one with a single dart coated in Cruciamentum toxin. Buffy had ordered him not to use it unless the world was at stake; it risked destabilizing the balance of power here. Even if it meant watching her die.

Giles held still, one hand inside the pouch.

"Where are we?" Buffy asked Cyan. "What kind of place is this?" Every few feet they passed another sarcophagus, with designs ranging from a simple blackwood coffin marked with a pentagram to a metal hexagon with elaborately-carved islands, clouds, and waves.

"A shortcut," Cyan said unhelpfully.

So far as Buffy could see, the tunnel went on forever in either direction, even though she knew they'd entered at one end. "Don't see how this is a shortcut to anywhere," she muttered.

"This is the Deeper Well," Cyan grumbled back. "It's not used much because it's also part of Sacheverelli. Most of his souls sleep here, even some entire races of First Circles. No one wants any of these beings disturbed."

"You say Sacheverelli," Buffy said with a frown. "Everyone else-"

"Thank you so much for calling attention to my accent," Cyan complained before falling silent, her mouth compressed into a thin line.

"Are these all Sacheverell's souls?" Buffy asked after fifteen minutes had passed in uncomfortable silence. "An awful lot of these are one-of-a-kind."

"Not all," Cyan said impatiently. "There are other sleeping souls here, most Second-Circle. One or two other Third-Circles are supposed to be here, but no one knows whose or which. That way there's much less risk of them being murdered in their sleep and changing their owner. Sacheverelli's own fetich is in here somewhere, but it's carefully hidden. The few of his souls who remain awake want to stay themselves, I suppose. Here," she said at last, coming to an ummuhan.

"You've got to be kidding me," Buffy grumbled.

"Fastest way back to the Conventicle," Cyan said, and laughed. She stepped up to the seated demon and let it devour her.

Buffy released a long, slightly whiny sigh. "Travel by port-a-potty. I'll never understand how it caught on."

Devon felt his body being pieced slowly back together, fragment by agonizing fragment. His eyes could see bits of himself being fetched from inside a tiny, transparent shell, though it looked empty. An hour passed, maybe more. The tiny hand-creatures settled into his ears, his nose, his pores. He could feel them, not so much on him as part of himself. A thin swarm of them buzzed around him at his command.

"I see you're awake," said the young blonde in the fancy dress. "I hoped you'd do better than me, but here we are irregardless."

"What happened?" Devon asked, his voice shaking a little.

"You were Exalted," she said patiently, "called as a Slayer. I'm Buffy Summers...your Watcher."

Buffy wasn't sure how much more of this she could take.

No, seriously: she genuinely was having trouble estimating how much more of a beating Dukantha could inflict on her before she dropped. She was covered in bruises and cuts. Her face was a mass of pain, and her clothes had-yet again-been reduced to a few rags hanging from her armored body. Most of the damage was invisible beneath the quickly-regenerating brass, and pain, like exhaustion, was no longer something that could drag her down into unconsciousness.

Which was convenient when you were trying to keep going so you could save the world, but not so much when you were only supposed to be fighting a bout and you had lost track of how much more it would take to kill you.

For whatever it was worth, the fight was taking its toll on Dukantha, too. He was covered in bloody wounds, and his aura was flaring far more brightly than hers. The other Exalt was, at base, a Dragon-Blood, and while he was old as hell he didn't seem to have spent all that much time learning combat magic. Just...more than Buffy thought she was going to be able to handle.

Every so often he'd unleash a truly devastating attack, and Buffy would stand firm and let it rebound off her in a spray of blinding sparks. Those seemed to have done him the most harm, if she was honest with herself. She'd been overconfident. She'd beaten enemies of Dukantha's caliber before, maybe worse, but she'd been able to retreat to the library or the Magic Box and look up a weakness to exploit. Here she was stuck going ninety rounds with Prince Namor, and she didn't think he'd respect a surrender or follow the rules if she had the ref call a halt.

Dukantha's fires battered at her again, spraying molten brass, and she felt her body shift into a form it hadn't taken before. She was perhaps ten feet tall, which was nothing new, but a great jointed tail sprouted above her butt, arcing up, forward, and down till a stinger glinted in her peripheral vision. The crowd noise, which had grown quiet eventually as their auras made people ill, surged again.

"Nice," Buffy said wearily. "Looks like I'm the Scorpion Queen." She was long past caring what she looked like. If it made Dukantha stop hitting her and preferably fall unconscious, she'd be willing to sprout a monkey's head from her butt. Hopefully it'd go away, but she'd put up with it no matter what. And if she was honest with herself? The scorpion tail was kinda cool.

Buffy thrashed it forward at Dukantha in five lightning-fast strikes. Two missed, two were blocked by his blade. The fifth connected, pumping venom into his arm, but the Lintha shrugged and ripped himself free. For all she could see he was completely immune.

Buffy's vision went double, and for a moment she thought she'd sprouted a second head again. No...she was feeling distinctly woozy. That was a very bad sign. She couldn't be KO'd. She might be dying, but most likely he had poisoned her. She hadn't even noticed when he'd done it.

Buffy stumbled, staggered, and sank to one knee. Weakly she signaled to the referee to stop the match. She was out. She was done.

Dukantha, as she'd expected, didn't care. He didn't even act as if he saw. The akuma lowered his blade, burning with green fire, and rammed it into her guts.