Harmony had been sitting in front of the console for three hours now.
So, this was Silur's tomb-or rather, the Underworld reflection of Silur's tomb. Shoat saw a massive wall of rusted iron that stretched as far as the eye could see, and a single holographic console with a completely unfamiliar interface. Harmony had puzzled out the system in a matter of minmutes, at least as far as the interface was concerned, but they'd been standing around while she fiddled with it ever since.
"Friend!" Santangelo shouted in frustration. At least she was still in good humor. Shoat wanted to go kill something.
"Already tried that," Harmony said. "Assuming this tomb works like the original, the passcode will combine a sensible command with a random element. That's how Silur believed magic worked. Like, the world was an arbitrary set of symbols and all you had to do was use the right syntax and shuffle them."
Gwen frowned. "Hey, can I see your phone?" There was no service down here, but Harmony had somehow patched the cell phone into the interface to decipher the symbols it used. "I just remember this story where the guy forgets a passcode because it's so arbitrary, and all he remembers is the category it belongs to." She hunted through a series of menus until she found what she was looking for.
"Are you serious?" Harm asked flatly.
"Story had to come from somewhere, right?"
Harmony shrugged and keyed it in. The iron surface rumbled, groaned...and split open to reveal a passageway coated in red dust.
"Open sesame," Gwen said.
Chapter 76-Conqueror Worm
The corridor stretched on and on, echoing their footsteps, dusting them lightly with the red dust of ancient rust. No doors. No turnings. After a while they stopped to let Harmony examine the walls. No hidden circuit patterns or concealed breaks. Santangelo tried too, cranking up her senses, and also found nothing.
"This isn't right," Shoat said after they resumed walking. "Abyssals don't grow."
Harmony began checking their height against the walls and low ceiling, but Shoat shook her head. "Not like that. Grow older, I mean. Grow up."
"Your clothes are getting tight," Gwen agreed. "It's a good thing we all brought extra, I guess, but what's happening?"
"I have an idea!" Harmony piped up. "Gimme a minute to work it out!" And she plopped down on the floor again. "We've come...would you say a hundred yards?"
"About that," Santangelo said.
"Shoat, go another hundred yards and come back. You should be-"
"I'll be fine," Shoat grumbled. "Don't patronize me." After about fifty yards, she yelled back, "Ouch!", but quickly added, "Growth spurt."
"What's going on?" Gwen asked.
"Hypersphere," Harm said. "The hall is following part of the surface of a four-dimensional sphere. Time doesn't have to be the fourth dimension but it can be. I think we're traveling through time, our personal time I mean."
"I still shouldn't be getting older," Shoat called back.
"I think this...test or trap or whatever is calibrated to send us through our lives in the same time and distance," Harmony said thoughtfully. "That compensates for the difference in our life spans. I don't understand why yet." She held up her compact and studied her face. "Got a fine line or two."
"You're biologically nineteen!" Santangelo said. "Give me that!" She examined herself carefully. "Damn it. Well...do we keep going?"
"I'm trying to calculate the circumference of the hypersphere in years of average lifespan," Harmony said unhelpfully.
"Why?" Shoat wanted to know as she returned.
"Because it's the difference between making it all the way around and dying of old age or disappearing." Harm's voice was absolutely flat. "It'll help tell us if this is a test or a trap and what kind." Her face scrunched up. "I'm so low on energy I'm having trouble keeping my brain juiced up," she sighed.
Santangelo stepped up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. "Let me see if I can help. It's a Terrestrial thing."
"Ooh! Ooh! That's good!" Harmony typed faster. "Thanks bunches! I love it, Maria! Keep doing it!"
Santangelo shot an irritated look at Gwen and sighed.
"We're supposed to be prepping for the Pyleans' arrival," Lilah said with a glare.
"We are," Helen said, "but this may indicate a glitch. It originated in the vicinity of the Deeper Well."
Lilah sighed and pressed "Play". The video began with gentle instrumentals and crooning...and a pan across the devastated hellscape that had once been the Demon City.
"I'm waking up...to ash and dust. I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust." Vines of brass and iron sprouted from the rubble and lifted it gently skyward. Basalt tree trunks propped up walls. "I'm breathing in...the chemicals."
"Catchy," Lilah said as the metal and stone plants began to erupt in Earth cities as well. "What's the band called?"
"No record of them," Helen said. "No name given in the video." Nightmare demons cavorted through the cities, which morphed and restructured themselves on impossible geometric lines.
Lilah winced. "Makes me see things behind my eyes. Are you getting that?"
"Yes. I couldn't watch it all. So I skipped to the end. May I?"
"No sense in being driven stark raving bonkers," Lilah said, and cut to the last twenty seconds.
"I'm radioactive, radioactive." As a green sun passed the yellow one, the camera panned past the tree of the Deeper Well, which twisted and transmuted into a squat basalt tower as a field of roses sprang up around it. Words appeared on the screen.
"'My death is only the beginning.' Huh. That line is getting old," Lilah remarked. "Who's using it now?"
"Sacheverell," Helen said. "Like all the Old Ones, he has a few surviving forms that were once human. The Deeper Well is one. He's as alive as the others."
"Any sign of change at the tree?" Lilah asked Mara, who shook her head.
"Not so far. But Lilah, this is...there hasn't been a new copy of the Broken-Winged Crane in millennia. The original was thought to have been written long ago and that was the end of it. It failed. Yet here it is again."
"What does it mean?"
Mara shrugged. "I'm as much in the dark as you."
Shoat would have been done by now if the others would cooperate. Unfortunately, while the hypersphere time thingie didn't affect knowledge, it did seem to do a number on your emotional maturity. Hormones, probably.
They'd all spent some time creaking along, stopping to rest every five minutes-god that was awful; she never wanted to be old again. Then they'd gotten younger again, bottoming out in infancy so that Shoat had had to carry them until they could crawl again. Harmony had been the worst, whining and crying and trying to go the wrong way whenever she was put down. Shoat couldn't be honest and still complain. In another hundred yards, give or take a few, the others would be carrying her, and she'd probably be just as much of a brat. Santangelo had made a terrifying teenager.
"Hold up," Harmony said. "Something's not right here." She was the youngest right now, at five, and they were extra-lucky she could still think like a Twilight. "That section of the hall's irregular. I think it's got a door but I hafta check it." Her lisp had almost faded, thankfully.
"Hang on," Gwen said. She was seven. At least Shoat's spare clothes halfway fit her. "If we leave the corridor at this point what happens to us?"
"We stay this age until we come back thith way," Harmony said. "It can't really hurt us unleth we hafta reach something high."
"Are you sure? And what if we don't come back this way?" Santangelo was the oldest at all of nine. "I'm not looking forward to repeating puberty as a Dragon-Blood."
"If we don't we'll end up shunted into an alternate timeline," Harmony said in a confident tone. "Probably one where we're supposed to be thethe ages. It better let us come back this way."
"I can't just leave the path," Shoat protested. "I'm two."
"If we don't," Harmony reminded her, "we just come back to where we went in."
Shoat burst into tears as Harmony examined the irregular spot. "Got a pattern here. Five groups of three. Ok...here we go. It doesn't quite go all the way around." Her fingers slid into nigh-invisible depressions in the metal, which groaned and screeched as it rotated around the hidden circle. A door recessed into the wall and slid away.
Santangelo picked Shoat up. Shoat knew she shouldn't be wailing and shrieking, but couldn't stop herself. Being stuck at twelve was bad enough; she couldn't end up trapped as a two-year-old. She clutched futilely at the threshold as Santangelo stepped through-
-and staggered at the shift in weight as Shoat reverted to being a tween. Shoat gasped for a moment and caught her breath, then wiped her eyes. "Sorry, guys...you made the right call, but, damn, that was scary."
"If Harm had gotten her figures right you'd have known what to expect," Gwen grumbled as she, too, returned to her proper age.
"It wasn't a math thing," Harmony said unhappily. "I had to guess based on principles and I was wrong. Sorry, ladies."
"It's done," Shoat said. "We're out. We need to figure out the next problem."
Harm frowned at the display station on the wall. "That's easy, looks like." But her voice was strained. "One of us has to die."
Amy telekinetically hoisted Spike up the elevator shaft. "I don't think Robin even knows he's doing it," she said.
"He knows," Spike insisted. "I killed his mum."
"Well, I'm the only one not affected," Amy said as she helped him over the threshold, "and talking hasn't worked so far."
"Then you'd better start using your new witchy powers," Spike warned. "If Buffy can mind-control people, you sure as hell can."
"I can," Amy confirmed. It was something she wasn't supposed to do. All the good guys told her that. Naturally, the evil vampire disagreed.
"Then do it before they make a dust pile of me," Spike said. "Somebody's got to counter him."
Of course. This was different. She wasn't bending anyone to her will, just freeing them from someone else's. "We need to get them together, as many as we can handle. Ideally I want to do this in one casting."
"Do what in one casting?" Kate asked, bitterly disappointed. "Why're you protecting him?" The others began to crowd into the room-Faith, Robin, Angel, Lorne...
Amy took a deep breath. Windblown sand roared in her ears. "Because Robin's already used his mind-trick on you. Spike's no saint, but he's on our side. I swear he's an asset right now, not a threat."
For a long moment the sandstorm winds rose to a howl. The others shook their heads, but only Robin's motion was a denial. The rest of them were clearing their minds. Even Angel, who gave Spike an annoyed glare, turned and seized Robin by the wrists.
"We need better mental blocks," Amy said. "Lilah was one thing, but if Robin can zap us without even meaning to, we've got problems."
"Think you might want to listen to the witch," Spike said. Angel snorted. Robin rolled his eyes.
Oz nodded. "We'd better-"
Another face emerged out of the crowd as Oz spoke, shoving Robin and Oz aside with startled exclamations, a young, sandy-haired man who drove a dagger into Angel's heart. He pulled it out, licking the blood clean even as he stabbed a wooden stake back into the wound.
Faith's hand passed through Angel's body as he disintegrated, thrusting her own knife at the boy, but he slipped aside like a greased pig. Angel was spinning about even as he died as if hoping to see his killer's face, and Spike, surprisingly, was trying to grab and bite. Kate lunged at him, too, and it was she who managed to clamp her hands on his arm even as he began trying to shrink back into a fly or whatever he'd been hiding as. With a snarl, he head-butted her in the face, but Kate had dealt with that plenty of times before. She slammed him to the floor, wrists behind his back.
"You have the right to remain silent," she began reflexively. Why was he laughing so hard?
"Looks like it worked," Gwen said doubtfully as the hatch opened. Shoat lolled lifelessly in Harmony's arms.
"Actually I'm pretty sure it's broken," Harmony disagreed, carrying Shoat's body across the threshold. She began tickling the dead girl, who promptly woke up with a start, laughing uncontrollably.
"Not seeing where you're getting that," Santangelo said, looking around the vast empty grey sphere of a room.
"I think it's meant to mimic the trials of the Void," Harmony said. "The people who built it wanted anyone who reached the Mantle to, like, go through the same tests as anyone else. Except I've already been through the trials and you guys haven't. So I'm springing them for you and you're not learning anything. We've seen Infliction, where we were supposed to have to kill someone to not get trapped and either Memory or Stasis...where we were supposed to maybe be stuck aging and unaging over and over again for a while."
"So that's not really broken," Gwen said, "we just aren't a good fit."
"Eventually we'll get to the sacrifice part, that I would have to do to reach the next Circle by myself if I could, uh, reach the next Circle by myself." She touseled Shoat's hair. "Not sure what that'll be."
"What's this one supposed to be?" Santangelo asked. She walked a little way out across the sphere. "Gravity's the same no matter where I stand," she said.
"Door!" Shoat pointed out a hatch marring the smooth surface of the floor-or ceiling-directly across from them. She struck out for it immediately, likewise finding no difficulty walking on the sloping surface, and the others followed.
Just one problem. "The room's getting bigger," Santangelo said after a few minutes. "This is gonna take a while."
"Kinda think it's a space-time thing," Harmony suggested. "Maybe it won't take any longer outside than it would've."
"Sure hope not," Gwen grumbled.
Insidious tendrils curled from Amy's forehead and sliced at Kate's thoughts. Kate gritted her teeth and fought, but the intangible energies continued to eat away at her strength.
Then, without any additional conscious effort on her part, the moon disc flared to life on Kate's brow, and the tendrils lost their hold...only to score a gouge across her forehead instead. "What the hell?"
"Sorry," Amy muttered. "Look, my big psychic attack works differently, okay? It changes physical force into mental force. When you broke that effect it just hurt you. I'm not the best person for this."
"Why not just use your spell?" Kate sighed and sat down.
"It's energy-expensive. It'd slow the training down a heck of a lot." Amy pulled out a spellbook. "I have been studying this alternative, but it'll take me a long time to master and it won't protect you from other stuff. I can make it so whenever Robin tries to talk about Spike being evil his words turn into...bugs or something."
"Won't do a thing if Lilah tries to trick us again." Kate grumbled.
"Nope. Or anyone else. But I've been trying not to learn any new mind control powers," Amy sighed. "I found this one by accident trying not to hurt Oz."
Kate sagged down into her chair. "Damn it, I hate to be in the position of telling you to get off the wagon."
"You could do it instead," Amy suggested. "Nobody worries about you losing control, and you've got some limited powers already. Sure, you mostly counter Lilah and do things like prevent riots, but that's cause you don't need the wagon to begin with."
"Said Frodo to Galadriel," Kate mused. "But maybe you're right, and we're short on options. I'll try. But you know I've never much cared how people think of me."
"And that's why you got kicked off the force," Amy countered.
Kate ground her teeth, but she didn't bother disagreeing. "Go patrol with your girlfriend. I'll work on my best Queen of California act."
Harmony dragged her way up to the hatch. There hadn't been any obstacles, just a long, grinding journey across the ever-growing sphere. Or maybe they'd been shrinking. Or time had been slowing. It was all relative.
"I think that was meant for Melancholy and Stasis," she sighed as she sagged next to the exit.
"Well, we got real challenges this time then," Shoat said, favoring her left leg a bit.
"That just leaves the sacrifice," Santangelo said, eyeing the door.
"And it has to be done by slow decay," Harmony agreed, "so don't ask me how it's gonna work or how long it's gonna take. We could totally be here for months."
"We won't last for months," Gwen warned. "We've gone through most of our rations. Even if you Exalted don't need to eat, I will."
"We all need to eat," Shoat said. "Unless somebody's sprouted new powers while I wasn't looking. Get the hatch open."
Harmony popped the hatch-the code was totally an absurdly-easy Fibonacci variant-and peered down into the darkness. "Sphere," she reported, "just big enough for us all to fit in this time. Blinkenlightzen. And...not sure what that pattern is."
"What's this got to do with a sacrifice?" Santangelo wanted to know.
Harmony shook her head. "You got me."
Sam stretched herself like a cat. "I knew we'd figure it out eventually. How many days has it been since we slept?"
"Three," Riley said, bouncing a little on the mattress. "And that's just a beginning. You'll still get tired, though, so don't overdo it."
"I don't guess you got anywhere with Lilah," Sam wondered. "I know I can't have you all to myself these days, but there are still people I'd just as soon not share you with."
"We...had sex," Riley said, as neutrally as he could. "She was good in bed. She said I was boring but at least I was hung. As far as I know I agreed to it, so there's that. But she completely refused to release any more Exaltations. If she can take them back without us dropping dead, she will, and if not for the bad publicity she might not care if we did."
"We've got to try breaking and entering," Sam mused. "Maybe Faith can help us out?"
"Worth a try," Riley agreed. "Do I need to get into her pants too?"
Sam rubbed his shoulders. "No need. I know there's been...trouble between you."
"Eh...not really," Riley said. "I don't appreciate what she did, but as far as I knew she was Buffy. I can deal. Honestly there are people on the squad I'd rather trade for her if I could."
"Petersen?"
Riley chuckled. "She's off-putting, but I know where I stand with her. I was thinking of the Thweatt twins."
"I promise they don't normally do that," Sam said with a wry grin and a wink. "That was one time, their first chance to get knocked up by you, and they were...well, honestly they were pretty much gone. They've kept their hands off each other since."
"I'd hope so," Riley said faintly. "Some fantasies should stay fantasies."
"Does that include our third sixty-nine of the day?" Sam asked, grinning like a cat. Who'd gotten into the cream, no doubt.
"Not hardly. You're on, soldier."
"...so the sum of the squares of y and z is always equal to the square of x," Harmony said. "The whole thing reduces to a trigonometry problem, which means that the sequence of reincarnations theoretically should, like...repeat forever. But it doesn't, so the theorem is false."
"I...didn't follow that at all," Santangelo said. "I'm not sure what this has to do with any sacrifice, either."
"So maybe I was wrong about the whole thing," Harmony said, and punched the second button. The hatch popped open, revealing yet another sphere, this one with five other hatches.
"Do you know where we're going?" Gwen asked. "Because this reminds me of a weird horror movie."
"To the center," Harmony said confidently. "It's easier than it looks, I swear."
"It better be," Shoat said, "because if it's not, I swear I'll haunt you after this thing eats us alive."
Harmony shrugged and pulled herself through the hatch. "Hakuna matata!"