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Chapter 19
The Valley of the Dead
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this,” said Buffy, contemplating the tableau of destruction that had greeted her, Angel, Xander and Lillith when they emerged from the incandescing whirlpool of the wormhole. Cordelia, Willow, and Grimes had remained behind to secure the wormhole, where it was somewhat less dangerous for Cordy and Willow.Before them lay the long trough of a dusty, narrow, windswept ravine. The ravine was choked with bodies. Demon bodies. Endoskeletal and exoskeletal remains lay twisted and broken in a bleak carpet of bone that seemed to stretch for miles.
“There must be tens of thousands of them,” said Angel.
“Hundreds of thousands, probably,” said Lillith. “They were running away from something and got trapped in here, it looks like. By a school of Ether Phages, would be my guess. There’s no flesh on the skeletons — they were picked clean.”
Buffy scanned the surrounding landscape with her field binoculars, searching for signs of Spike and Elisa. She switched from visible light to infrared mode, then back to visible. After several fruitless minutes, she lowered the glasses and shook her head. “I don’t get it. They couldn’t have gotten that far on foot.”
Lillith pointed toward the distance, to a low, roiling cloud that swept across the distant escarpments like a sandstorm. From within, vicious discharges of lightning illuminated the brown and black mass with reddish fire.
“Chaos storm. If they walked out of the wormhole into that, they could easily have gotten disoriented. Visibility is only a foot or so in one of those things. And it’s quite possible that the storm could have yanked the wormhole off-axis, too. This might not be where it came out when Elisa and Spike stepped through it.”
“Chaos storm? I was down here a long time, and I never heard of a ‘chaos storm’,” said Buffy.
“I told you things have changed,” said Lillith. “Chaos storms are a local distortion of probability. Very, very deadly. If the ether cyclone itself doesn’t kill you, the probability shear can meld you into a nearby rock formation, transport you anywhere in the plane, or just rip you quark from quark.”
“Bu you can survive one, right Lillith?” asked Buffy, feeling an icy tightness in her chest.
“Of course. You can survive Russian Roulette, too. I just wouldn’t make a habit of trying.”
“This isn’t helping us any,” said Angel. “Lillith, do you have any way you can track them?”
“Let’s see if I’ve got any of my magic back down here,” she said.
The Elder Power recited a complex incantation and extended her hand. As she completed the spell, a strange distortion emerged from her fingertips, like a visible compression wave. It tore through the air to impact a medium-sized boulder. The boulder shattered into stinging shards that clattered back to earth amid a cloud of rock dust.
Lillith smiled as she lowered her hand. “Sheee’s baaaack.”
“That’s just great, Lillith. I’m glad that you can beat up on rocks again. Now would you please see if you can find my daughter?” asked Buffy.
Lillith studied the landscape at length and frowned. “With some of my powers back, I should be able to pick up their etheric trail. I know you learned how to camouflage your etheric signature, Buffy, but I’m sure none of them can. Unfortunately, the chaos storm must have erased the trail, because I’m not sensing anything. Damn. If I wasn’t still constrained by physicality, I could find them in a heartbeat.”
“What if we work together?” asked Buffy.
Lillith looked at her, a puzzled expression on her face. “Huh?”
“I’m as sensitive to this place as any demon. You’ve shared my soul, which is supposed to link us across space and time, right?”
Lillith nodded and Buffy continued. “So is there some way we can link up, pool our resources?”
The Elder Power scratched her chin with a perfectly manicured nail as she thought about it.
“Maybe,” she said finally. “You can alter your etheric resonance down here to cloak your signature, I know that much. But if you were to bring your etheric harmonics into exact resonance with mine, we would in a sense become the sum of our respective parts, at least in a magical sense. It would have to be a very precise thing, though. Any deviation would only result in destructive interference at the interface of our etheric signatures. It’s certainly beyond our ability to pull off without some supporting spellcraft.”
“Do you understand a word of what she just said?” asked Xander.
Buffy nodded. “I think so. How could we do it, Lillith?”
“Well, we could join souls again, but that’s a rather tedious process involving a lot of magic and a couple of artifacts we don’t seem to have on hand at the moment,” said the Elder Power.
“That’s okay. I’d rather not go down that road with you again if I can avoid it. I’ve kind’ve been practicing safe-soul these days,” said Buffy.
“There’s another possibility. It’s called the Rite of Enjoinment, but it was never designed to mesh the likes of you with the likes of me. There could be a downside.”
“What kind of downside?”
“We could get lost in the astral plane and never find our way back to our bodies. But if it works, we will for the duration of the spell share an astral manifestation. We will be one entity, with the combined power, knowledge, and skills of both.”
“Sounds kind of kinky,” said Xander. “I like it.”
Buffy glared at him as Lillith continued. “There’s one more thing you need to be aware of. This enchantment is a variant of the sort of thing that allowed you to join with the Dark Hunter and gain the engrams of all its former hosts. If we go through with this, it will change us both forever. From that moment until the end our lives, you will be a part of me and I will be a part of you. We won’t be sharing a soul or memories, per se, but we will be part of one another on a profoundly fundamental level, and there’s nothing I know of that can undo that.”
The Slayer thought about it for a long moment, but there was never really any doubt. No doubt, no choice. Not where her daughter was concerned.
“Do it,” she said.
“Buffy …” Angel began to protest.
“No, Angel. I have to do this. You know that,” said Buffy.
Angel was silent for a moment, then nodded. “I know.”
She smiled at him reassuringly.
“I love you, you know. Whatever happens, remember that,” he added.
“I never had any doubts. None at all,” said the Slayer. Then she turned back to Lillith. “Okay. What now?”
“Now we get spiritual,” said the Elder Power, picking up a dry branch and scribing a large circle in the dust. “You know something, Buff? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
* * *
“A Cascade Reality compromise has been detected. Eighty-five point three-zero percent probability and rising. Convergence Node commonality, ninety-nine point six-seven percent,” said TACIT GHOST as very nearly all the holographic timelines flashed red from the same temporal coordinates forward.
Willow Six Five November was frozen in place before the status holos for a long moment, then the analytical part of her mind reasserted itself. She swore under her breath as she watched the chain of failing timelines. Something dark and evil and vastly powerful had broken through the N-Space manifold boundary in almost every charted reality. Or something probably would break through, to be more accurate. GHOST was merely reporting the statistical likelihood that this particular possible timeline would assert itself at the predicted Convergence Node.
But Willow Six Five November wasn’t about to let that happen.
“GHOST, designate Cascade Event as Event Zero and plot contingencies. What’s the Reality of Origin?”
“Reality of Origin for Event Zero positively identified as VRM designation Two Six Alpha,” said GHOST.
“Okay, we need some intelligence on the event chain for this,” she said to GHOST. “Do you have a spatial fix?”
“That’s not a simple question,” said GHOST.
“A little more detail, GHOST,” Willow admonished, casting a dark look out the windows toward the giant machine.
“Events Zero’s spatial origin is in the homeostatic dimensional space generically designated Alpha-Two.”
“You can say ‘Hell’, GHOST. I won’t be offended,” said Willow.
“As I was saying, that is the spatial origin. However, I have reliable indicators of a precursor event.”
Willow mulled that information over then made a decision.
“Let’s try to hit the precursor. Event Zero looks like a fixed attractor of unprecedented magnitude. Disrupting such a metastable event may be impossible. But it should be vulnerable if we can undo the precursor.”
“I concur with that analysis,” said GHOST. “However, an impact analysis on the precursor must be made.”
“Agreed. Send in reconnaissance drones at Event Zero plus and minus seventy-two hours, and do the same for the precursor. That ought to yield enough data for us to reconstruct a viable event chain. Program them to return to plus five minutes from my mark: three, two, one … mark.”
Willow opened a comm channel on her control board and said, “Attention please. This is an Action Alert Message. Summers Three Echo Foxtrot. Faith Six One Whiskey Kilo. Chase Niner Bravo. McKenna One Two Two Sierra Tango. You’re on deck. Briefing room in thirty.”
Did she just say “You’re on deck”? she asked herself. She was definitely spending too much time with Mac Sierra Tango. Too much of that old Dark Angels lingo of Elisa’s was rubbing off on her.
She cut the comm link and turned back to the status displays, where GHOST was displaying a dizzying quantity of probability projections, Schrödinger wave analyses and event models. Willow took a deep breath as the magnitude of the problem began to become more evident. Suddenly she felt centuries and light years away from Sunndydale High, from her home, from her Buffy and her Oz, from everything. So much had changed for her, and she felt very much alone.
A great time Flynn picked to go on a junket.
* * *
Lillith completed the final rune in the series of symbols that ran around the perimeter of the spirit circle and tossed the branch away. She entered the circle and knelt down within it. She looked up at Buffy.
“Buffy Summers, come on down,” she said in her best game-show host voice.
When Buffy was seated across from her in the circle, Lillith raised her hand, palm forward.
“Press your hand against mine. It will help get our bioelectrical patterns in synch for the enjoinment.”
Buffy complied and Lillith continued. “Okay. Now look into my eyes. Be in my eyes. Be one with my mind.”
“What is this, the Vulcan mind meld?” asked Xander from outside the circle.
“Shh!” hissed Lillith, fixing him with a look that would have been perfectly at home on a basilisk. She turned from Xander to Angel. “Both of you get lost. I can’t have any distractions or this could go very badly.”
When Angel hesitated, Buffy said, “I’ll be fine. You two go on.”
She watched them move grudgingly off to stand near a stone outcropping a few dozen meters away. From the glances they were exchanging, Buffy didn’t think either Xander or Angel had gotten a sudden case of the warm-and-fuzzies for each other in the last few minutes. She sighed and looked back at Lillith.
“Forget about them,” said Lillith. “They’re big boys. They don’t need momma to hold their hand. Now, look into my eyes, into my mind. Breathe deeply and regularly. Relax. Find that old power within you, the one you used to defeat me and the Abstract. Let it consume you. Try to become one with my thoughts, my spirit, my feelings. Become me as I become you.”
Buffy focused on Lillith’s deep green eyes, allowing them to become the focus of her universe, moving down into the twin pools of darkness at their center. At the same time, she felt a vast void open inside her, and in the center of that void, the old flame of a power she thought long gone. She’d not felt it burn in her since the nexuses were destroyed. She’d not felt it on the alternate earth, either. But she felt it again now, felt it growing hot within her and expanding to envelop her. Her body seemed to recede, to become a distant and unnecessary thing, then she felt herself plunging through an emerald and black void at breathtaking speed.
Suddenly, a harsh desert landscape rushed toward her from a vanishing point, snapping into sharp focus as if it had been brought close by a powerful zoom lens.
It wasn’t the wasteland where she had just been sitting, though. This was something and somewhere else. She stood with Lillith atop a tall mesa, and the sky seemed a strangely deep and electric shade of blue above wispy, scudding, brilliant white clouds. The landscape that lay below and around them was oddly sharp and distinct, as if being viewed through a too-strong pair of prescription glasses. Buffy blinked at the uncomfortable sensation.
“Welcome to our mind,” said Lillith from beside her. For some reason, her voice sounded as if it were coming from a deep well.
“Where are we?” asked Buffy.
“Nowhere. Everywhere,” said Lillith. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
Lillith took the Slayer’s hand and traced something in the air with her free hand. Fire blazed forth from the nothingness, the flaming sigil hanging suspended in space before them. Lillith recited an incantation in a low voice and suddenly the flaming glyph expanded and engulfed them.
But it wasn’t “them” anymore. Lillith was no longer a distinct entity. As the magical fire washed over her, Buffy could feel the Elder Power’s consciousness in her mind and could feel her own self within Lillith. The two mentalities twined and merged, indistinguishable, and then Buffy lost all sense of self.
Buffy/Lillith’s consciousness reached outward, probing, searching, and soon it found the faint thread of an etheric signature. She followed it over the blasted landscape, toward and through the dark, angry, boiling mass of the distant Chaos Storm. Lightning and chaos raged around her as she plunged through the storm’s depths untouched, and then she was through. And there in front of her sprawled a great walled city of black and somber stone and iron. Two figures were approaching it from some distance away — Spike and Elisa. Cade was nowhere to be seen.
The tableau seemed to flicker, for a fraction of an instant becoming a gray nothing, then a nightmare world of nameless and faceless phantasms, then a great and endless void before stabilizing into the landscape again. A bright ripple of fear slid across her mind and she knew she needed to return before she was lost forever between nowhere and nothing. She concentrated on returning to the mesa, picturing it in her mind’s eye and reconstructing it in every detail — the rough stone and loose gravel beneath her feet, the hot dry wind that scoured across its surface, the parched taste of the heat in the air. And then Buffy was back within herself, with Lillith standing beside her on the stone precipice.
“What a rush,” said the Elder Power, smiling at her.
Lillith let go of the Slayer’s hand and Buffy felt herself falling upward through darkness, through a sea of gold-flecked emerald …
She gasped and found herself back in the spirit circle. Lillith lowered her hand, breaking the physical connection.
“Damn, girl. You give good mind,” said Lillith.
Buffy was still too preoccupied with getting her senses back into order to come up with any sort of cutting riposte.
“Feel any different?” asked the Elder Power.
Buffy took a deep breath. “I feel … I don’t know … extended somehow. Like my mind isn’t entirely inside my head anymore. Maybe I’m just a little addled.”
“Nope. I feel it, too. We’re linked, kiddo. You and me, till death do us part.”
“Lovely. A marriage made in Hell,” grumbled Buffy, rising stiffly from her kneeling position. As Xander and Angel came up, she said simply, “I found Elisa and Spike and I think they’re safe for now, but we might need firepower. Let’s head back through the gate and see if Cade’s crew stocked any silver bullets or other firepower somewhere in the complex. If those guys were opening a door to this place, I don’t think they were expecting warm hugs and butterfly kisses.”
“Sound’s like you’re planning for a war,” said Xander.
Buffy’s look was cold. “If Hell wants another one of those, I’ll be more than happy to give it to them.”