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Chapter 28
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
“This really isn’t the safest place to be at night,” said Lillith as she peered nervously into the dark of Hell’s night from the Cathedral balcony on which she and Buffy were standing.“Good, then you have a reason to play straight with me so we don’t have to drag this out,” said Buffy coldly.
“Just what the hell crawled up your skirt, anyway?” asked the Elder Power.
“I want to know if Lucifer was telling me the truth. Have I been helping the bad guys all along? Is this all some big game set up by Flynn and his crowd?”
Lillith looked at her and said nothing for a few moments, then said, “It isn’t a game. Being a Slayer is a test, but that doesn’t mean it’s without purpose or that it isn’t necessary. As for helping the bad guys, you aren’t Lucifer’s servant. You never were. Don’t let him try to make you think you are. But has your work as a Slayer been a benefit to him? Yes. Sending demons back to Hell where they belong is one of the few things which both sides consider a boon.”
“So what am I, Lillith? What has my life been all about if I’m not fighting for either good or evil? What’s the point of it all? Just to be some skip tracer of supernatural bail-jumpers?” asked Buffy angrily.
“Don’t ever think that you haven’t been doing good as a Slayer,” said Lillith. “The world would have fallen into darkness and horror many times if not for you. Just because Lucifer inadvertently benefited by getting some of his wayward children back under control doesn’t mean you weren’t a force for good.”
After a couple of seconds of silence, Buffy said, “He wanted me to look inside, to the part of you in me. He didn’t think I’d like what I found there.”
“And did you?”
“I haven’t looked. I want you to tell me first. What will I find there?”
“You’ll find that life is complicated. Big deal. No great secret there. You’ll make wrong turns, backtrack, get turned around now and then. That’s life. You deal with it and move on. But start obsessing about every decision, second guessing yourself at every turn, then you’ll get hopelessly lost and you might never find yourself again. That’s what he wanted you to do. To get lost in the maze, to start doubting everything you’ve ever done, to start doubting yourself. That’s when you’re vulnerable to him, the time when he can promise you a way out and you’ll take it. He’s good at it, supremely accomplished at playing some post-modern Prometheus bearing light to the lost and ignorant,” said Lillith.
“But he was right too, in some ways.”
“He always is. The deception is always more easily sold when wrapped in the truth,” said Lillith. “But in the end, he isn’t nearly as smart as he wants you to think. Just look at this mess. A Singularity. What a fool.”
“You and Lucifer seem to have more than a little bad blood between you,” said Buffy.
Lillith shrugged. “That was a long time ago.”
“Maybe, but you two obviously haven’t kissed and made up.”
“War tends to open deep wounds that never truly heal, Buffy. You of all people should know that.”
“War? What are we talking about here?”
Lillith was quiet for a moment, looking off into the twilight and gathering her thoughts. Then she said, “You remember the story Giles once told you about how demons preceded Mankind on your world, and how they were driven out?”
Buffy nodded.
“Well, it’s not too wildly inaccurate as myths go, but it’s not the whole truth, not by a long shot. Except for the Elemental Abstract’s involvement, what happened on your world was far from unique. It was just another local skirmish in an ongoing and much wider war that started eons before and that involved not only other worlds, but other planes in the multiverse as well — Flynn’s, mine, Lucifer’s, just to name a few. The first few hundred thousand years of that war shook the multiverse to its very foundations, and when it was over Lucifer was exiled here along with his followers and allies. This was the domain of the First Ones at that time, the worst place we knew of. Everything else since, the demon wars on Earth and elsewhere, the Eternal War, innumerable other battles large and small, they are all aftershocks of that original cataclysmic conflict. So you see, Lucifer and I are old, old nemeses. He’s killed friends of mine and I’ve killed friends of his. There’s not a whole lot of love lost.”
“You’re planning on killing him, aren’t you?” asked Buffy.
A look of surprise crossed Lillith’s face.
“It’s a lot harder for you to hide anything from me since the enjoinment, Lillith.”
“I’m planning on kicking the Abstract’s butt out of this place, Buffy. Lucifer’s death would be nice addition to the body count, but first things first. I don’t even know if we can defeat the Abstract.”
“As long as you know where our priorities are,” warned Buffy. “The Abstract is the primary target. I don’t care if Lucifer gets his ticket punched along the way, but that is not a main consideration.”
“Don’t patronize me, little girl. You may be one hundred and seven years old, but I’ve got a lot of eons on you. I’m perfectly capable of appreciating what kind of threat the Abstract represents. I fought against it way back when, remember? Of course we didn’t have Singularities back then …”
Buffy noticed Lillith’s sudden, intense look as the Elder Power studied the towering Abstract.
“What is it, Lillith?”
“We can defeat that thing,” said Lillith softly.
“The Abstract?”
Lillith nodded. “It’s so simple. So perfectly obvious.”
“Not to me,” said Buffy.
The Elder Power continued on as if she hadn’t heard. “If we use the compression wavefront initiators of a Singularity, but we use them to compress the Abstract into a point mass … yes, that would force it out of here and … where? Let’s see …”
She took out a pad of paper from her backpack and began to make notations on it with a pencil.
“Let’s see, assuming the compression doesn’t cause an elastic rebound, it should result in the spawning of a positive curvature child continuum …”
“A mini-universe?” asked Buffy.
“Spot on,” said Lillith. “A tightly bound region of spacetime. Which is exactly where it was to begin with before Lucifer’s Singularity opened the door for it.”
“You’re sure?”
Lillith shrugged. “No, not really. Confident, but not certain. If that’s not good enough, well, what can I say? We can sit here and hope Flynn and his cronies ride in on white horses to save the day, or we can just give the hell up, pack our bags and say our goodbyes.”
“I’m the proactive type. This sounds like a plan,” said Buffy.
“There’s just one problem.”
Buffy raised an eyebrow. “Which would be?”
“Which would be that we can’t be here when my little halftime show kicks off, because sister, there isn’t going to be much left of this place afterward.”
* * *
“Pike’s been looking for you. The techs have some questions about the refit of one of the helos,” said Aston to Erin. After a lot of searching, he’d found her standing alone at Firebase Majestic’s perimeter fence, staring through the razor-wire topped links at the wind-blown dust of the desert.
“I’ll be along in a little while,” she said, never turning to look at him.
Aston drew up beside her.
“I’ve seen that look before,” he said.
She glanced at him briefly, then looked back out at the desert. “No you haven’t. You haven’t known me that long.”
“No, but I did know another Slayer once, and a most remarkable Dark Hunter before her. And I saw that look on both of them many times. It’s the look of someone who feels responsible for something she can’t stop, the look of someone who blames herself for not being able to do the impossible.”
This time when she looked at him, she held his gaze and didn’t turn away.
“It’s not going to be enough, Mick. Nothing I gave these people is going to make any difference. It’s a complicated story, but suffice it to say I’m able to run the odds on this, and they haven’t improved any by our arrival here. I was sent here partly to help these people win, and it’s not going to happen. There’s something I’m missing, something I’m doing wrong or will do wrong that is going to cost this world everything. I’ve been trying to keep up my game face for Xandra and the others, but inside I can’t shake the feeling that because of me this world is going to die, and I don’t know how to change that outcome.”
“You change it by doing your best and not second guessing yourself every step of the way.”
“I could do my best and still fail, you know,” said Erin.
“That’s a risk we all take every time we decide to pick up stake or sword or rifle and go out into the cold and the dark to fight evil,” said Aston as he lit a cigarette. He looked out at the mountains that bordered the valley. “I don’t have any cute little answers for you — nothing honest, anyway. I think you’d see right through them. Just remember that the universe didn’t choose to make you a Slayer by accident. There was a reason. You might not see it, but it’s there, and it makes you special. All the Slayers are special. And that means that once they’re involved in something, all the odds in the world go right out the window.”
He turned back to her and winked. “Besides, I have no interest at all in dying anytime soon, so you can bloody well plan on us winning this little war of Pike’s. Don’t go by the odds when I’m involved, either.”
Erin smiled. “Thanks, Mick. You should have been a motivational speaker instead of a commando.”
Aston shook his head. “I don’t think so. Motivational speakers rarely get to blow anything up, and after all, life without large explosions on a regular basis isn’t really living, now is it?”
* * *
The architecture of Dys’ armory was almost identical to that of the Sanctuary above it, which was not surprising since it apparently was just a continuation of the same cylindrical shaft. The decor was decidedly darker and more utilitarian though, with the galleries hewn without embellishment from the rough stone walls and bordered with rusting iron railings. Along the walls hung tens of thousands of conventional arms — spears, swords, pikes, axes, all the customary accoutrements of Hell’s largely medieval style of warfare.
It was in the center of the chamber where things started to get interesting. The space where Lucifer was situated in the Sanctuary above them was here occupied by a circular black tower easily five hundred feet tall — as high as the armory chamber itself. The surface at first glance appeared perfectly smooth, but as Buffy played her Mag Lite over it, she could just barely discern the faint outlines of myriad panels, possibly doors.
“That’s where they keep all the really cool toys,” said Lillith.
“Like the initiators?” asked Xander.
“Like the initiators, shear cannons, Akarnite PKE disrupters, disjunction generators, wide-spectrum spell nullifiers, every sort of species of magical stave, wand, or armor you care to name, and various and sundry other wizardly widgets and gadgets far too numerous and diverse to enumerate here.”
“If they had all this stuff, how come they never used it to attack Earth? The demons I fought always seemed to fight as if they were stuck in the Dark Ages,” said Buffy.
“This stuff is extremely valuable, Buffy,” said Lillith. “It takes time and rare skills and treasure to manufacture. Run of the mill demons, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. The archdemons kept their magical arsenals to protect against other archdemons and the like. They weren’t about to squander it on an offensive against you humans. In fact, until the nineteenth century you really didn’t have the weapons technology to make any of this necessary. It was reserved for emergencies.”
“It doesn’t seem to have done them much good this time,” observed Elisa.
“No, it sure doesn’t,” Lillith agreed. “In fact, judging by how much materiel is left, their downfall must have been swift. They must have realized early that nothing short of a Singularity held much chance of defeating the really powerful First Ones. Not even an Akarnite PKE disrupter would faze a Joergenson’s entity.”
“I’ll have to take your word on that,” said Buffy as they approached the base of the central tower.
They circled it until Lillith found a panel that was a slightly glossier black than the surrounding material. She touched her hand to it and symbols materialized within, seemingly hovering about two inches behind the surface. Her fingers danced over the panel, calling up other strange glyphs and arcane diagrams.
She seemed to find what she was looking for and sent five symbols skittering to the side of the display, where they turned from a fiery orange to a bright cerulean.
About three hundred feet above them, five adjacent panels slid aside soundlessly to reveal shadowed recesses. From within, five tall, curved, narrow objects that looked more like identical pieces of abstract sculpture than weapons emerged to hover in space.
They began to float gently downward.
“Null gravity field,” said Lillith. “A misnomer, really. I mean, mass curves spacetime here in Hell just as it does everywhere else, but since this is a flat plane we’re on and not a spherical planet, what keeps you from floating away is something rather different …”
“Maybe the physics lecture could wait until we’re back home,” said Buffy.
The objects came to a rest on the stone floor a little over a yard away from them, and Lillith immediately set about inspecting them. To Buffy, they looked a little bit like six-foot tall metallic tusks standing upright.
“Those are the initiators, I take it?” asked Angel.
“Don’t look like much, do they?” she asked. “Hard to believe that these things can rip a hole in the fabric of time and space if you’re not careful.”
She pressed something near the top of each initiator and the devices turned from a dull metallic black to a hypnotic, ever shifting swirl of dark twining within dark.
“You didn’t turn them on, did you?” asked Buffy.
“Just activated their phase transponders. They’re not armed yet, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Lillith.
“So, we set these up around the Abstract and then what? Run real fast?” asked Xander.
“No. We put them on a timer. That’s the next stop on the tour — Dys’ Situation Room, to borrow a term from your human military. Come on.”
Lillith led them to one of the room’s exits and along a short, arched hallway that terminated in a perfectly smooth door of luminescent emerald the color of sunlight filtering through the greenery of an enchanted grotto.
“Shoot. Figures they’d have one of these bad boys blocking the way,” said Lillith.
“Sledge time?” asked Xander.
“You really like that sledge, don’t you?” Lillith asked. “No, that won’t do us any good. I can see already that this hasn’t degraded like the Covenant Seals. The sledge works great on enchanted stonework, but it won’t even scratch this stuff.”
“What is it?” asked Elisa.
“Technically speaking, it’s a doped adamantite crystal lattice, and before I get any comments from the peanut gallery about controlled substances, when I say doped I mean that the molecular properties have been altered by the addition of other elements to make it retain a spell pattern longer. They’d call it ‘alchemy’ down here, but it’s nothing any good materials engineer wouldn’t understand.”
“Yeah, I think I saw something about that on Mr. Wizard once,” Spike interjected.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure it was Beakman’s World,” said Xander.
“How do we get through it?” asked Angel, all business as usual despite the fact that Buffy thought he looked decidedly less severe and dour now that he appeared to be somewhere in his late twenties again. Come to think of it, Xander also seemed well on his way to looking like a few decades of hard miles were disappearing. Even the scar on his cheek was almost gone. Whatever was going on, Buffy suspected Flynn had no small role in it, but now wasn’t the time to get into a cat fight with Lillith over it.
She returned her attention to more immediate concerns as Lillith answered Angel’s question.
“It’s keyed to the etheric resonance frequencies of the capo diablos that ran this city — kind of the magical equivalent of a fingerprint. The only way through is for me to fool it into thinking I’m Lucifer or one of his Lieutenants by modifying my ether signature to match theirs.”
“Sounds difficult,” said Buffy.
“With the right technology, it would be a snap,” said Lillith. “GHOST could pick this lock in a couple of seconds by digitally sampling Lucifer’s ether signature. But fortunately for us, this thing was designed to ward away demons and First Ones while I, mortal flesh aside, am an Elder Power. I may not be GHOST, but I can still pick a magical lock with the best of them. The nice thing about locks that go for cleverness over brute force is that if you’re smarter than the lock, you’ve got it made.”
“Are you done with the ‘Why Lillith Rules’ paid advertisement?” asked Xander. “’Cause I’d really like to see inside this thing.”
Lillith smirked. “You know, Xander my boy, I could almost go for you if you weren’t such an inferior species. Now stand aside everyone. Let the master work in peace.”
The Elder Power ran her hands over the adamantite portal and closed her eyes. She smiled.
“Oh, my. Such complexity and nuance. Such subtle strength. Almost orgasmic, I’d say. Oooh,” she said.
“Is it getting hot in here?” Xander asked. Buffy shot him a warning look and he said defensively, “Hey, I was just asking.”
“Shhh,” said Lillith rapturously. “I’m involved in a very profound relationship with this ward. I’d appreciate some quiet from the unwashed.”
A few minutes later, Lillith said, “Oh, yeah. That’s the stuff. Yeah. Give it to me. You know what I want. Come on. That’s right. Just a little more. A little more. Oh, that’s it. YES!”
With that, the emerald door disappeared into a gentle incandescent rain that slowly winked into blackness like the dying embers of a fireworks display.
Lillith turned to Xander. “Was it good for you?”
“Umm … can I plead the Fifth on that?” he asked.
Buffy just shook her head. There were many times in her life where she really wondered if the universe was just one giant lunatic asylum. She was now quite certain that it was.
The Situation Room, as Lillith called it, was a domed chamber two hundred feet across that had been hewn out of the rock. In the center was a raised dais surrounded by eight marble spheres of different colors set atop thin columns that rose to about chest level for an average-sized human. A few feet further out from the circle of spheres was a ring of jet black panels, ten in all and raked at a slight angle so that Buffy’s immediate impression was that they were some sort of displays or control panels.
It was dark inside the chamber, with the only light other than their flashlights coming from small, dim, magical lighting set around the base of the dais. They cast a warm, almost meditative pool of soft radiance in the center of the room.
“Please turn your flashlights off, ladies and gents, or what I’m going to show you won’t look nearly as impressive,” said Lillith.
She crossed to the dais and passed her hand over one of the spheres. Immediately, the dome and walls began to shimmer with pulsing and entwining light and shadows. The shimmering became more ordered and resolved itself into something recognizable …
…and then they were standing outside the Cathedral Fortress, looking out over the vast desolate plains beyond the city walls and at the towering darkness of the Elemental Abstract.
It took Buffy a moment for her mind to become convinced that they weren’t actually outside, but still within the Situation Room, looking at an eerily perfect three-dimensional image of the exterior world.
“Oh, wow,” said Xander.
“Now that would give Nintendo a run for its money,” Spike added.
“It’s amazing,” said Elisa.
Lillith smiled. “Yeah, it really is. Too bad we don’t have time to go exploring with it. I’d love to take you to the Fire Sea of Taran’Dor, or the crystal spires of Ogathgarde, or the breathtaking, snow-capped Sigurd Mountains of the Septentrion, or any one of a hundred places to show you that for all the horror and sadness and violence of this damned plane, there is rugged and majestic beauty to be had here, too, that it is not the place but the things that live in it that make it terrible. But it would take me too long to figure out the coordinates for this thing, and we don’t have time. Sad, isn’t it? Oh, well. Such is life.”
For a few moments, the Elder Power seemed pensive and sad, then she moved to one of the large obsidian panels and waved her hand over it. As she did so, silver fire traced its way across the surface, delineating blazing runes and glyphs. As the patterns formed, the two-dimensional surface seemed to take on infinite depth, so that the serpentine symbols appeared suspended within a vast void.
“Demons sure go in for the dramatic, don’t they?” observed Xander.
“This is an abstracted representation of a metaphysical variant of a Weyl tensor transform,” said Lillith as she began to trace along various glyphs. As she did so, geometric patterns began to form within the depths of the panel.
“I was going to say that,” said Xander. “I just didn’t want to show off.”
Lillith continued as if he’d never spoken. “This thing is preset with the parameters for a normal Singularity. But this is a far from a normal case. I need to reconfigure some of the wavefront characteristics to compensate.”
“You know what you’re doing? Because I sure don’t, and I’ve been studying this sort of thing for decades,” said Buffy.
Lillith smirked. “You do learn a thing or two after a few hundred million years, Buffy. Give it time.”
“Time is one thing I’m not sure we have,” said Buffy.
“‘They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there — and all the time they’ll get there anyway’,” quoted Lillith as she continued to work.
“Huh?” asked Buffy.
“In other words, enjoy the ride, Buff. ’Cause it’s all gonna end up in the same place for all of us sooner or later.”
Something in what Lillith said resonated in Buffy, stuck a chord deep down inside that sent a revelatory vibration through her in a transforming instant of altered perception, of raised consciousness, of distant and seething phantoms of the mind that, long imprisoned, suddenly saw light and life and broke free of the imprisonment of destiny and duty and responsibility. “All the time they’ll get there anyway.” And it was true, for all of them, everyone, be they human or demon or Elder Power. Entropy would claim them all in its course, and then they would be gone, and the only thing that made the journey worth all the trouble was the stops and the people along the way, not the destination, for that was the same for everyone.
There was something elusive buried in that truth, something about who and what she was and what she was meant to be, but that wispy revelation refused to cohere and make itself tangible to her, and before she could grasp hold of it, Lillith spoke and ruined it, and it was all gone, lost in the nothingness of a universal infinite, lost somewhere within her, out of reach, maddening. But it didn’t matter, not at all, because all the time, she’d get there anyway. It was just a matter of time.
“Before we leave the city I’ll set the timer with just enough time so we can emplace the initiators and make it to a scheduled wormhole opening. I think we’ll stay in the armory tonight. It’s warded almost as well as the Sanctuary itself. It’s far too dangerous to travel at night with the First Ones roaming around out there. If you thought the ones in the day were bad, you haven’t seen anything. We’ll place the initiators first thing in the morning,” said Lillith.
“Are you sure we have that kind of time?” asked Buffy.
The Elder Power ran her hand over one of the marble spheres again. Immediately, the too-realistic view of the Abstract shifted to a false color representation as symbols flashed in columns alongside it.
“This is a P.K.E. phase synchronization profile. What it shows is that the Abstract’s still out of phase relative to this plane. The symbols you see indicate that the re-synchronization curve has remained constant. That’s not unexpected if you know the physics behind it, so we know precisely when the Abstract will be sufficiently synched to this plane to make a successful transit. By my calculations, we have fourteen hours and twelve minutes. But we’re not going to wait that long.”
“How long until dawn?” asked Angel.
“Hard to say for sure. This isn’t a planet, so there’s no rotational period. Night and day are really somewhat illusory things here, and with all the changes to Hell, the periodicity could have changed. But I think we’ve got about seven hours. Time enough to try to get some shuteye. We all should try to be as rested as possible. You need to be alert out in the wilderness.”
Lillith activated another marble sphere and the view changed once again. This time it was as if they were suspended a thousand feet above the ground.
“Thanks for the warning, Lillith,” snapped Xander, who had clutched at a panel for support. He wasn’t the only one, either.
“Oh, right. You humans and the height thing. I don’t have a problem with heights,” she answered. “It’s a bit silly anyway. You’re still standing on a solid stone floor.”
“You would make a really pathetic therapist, you know that?” asked Spike.
Lillith shrugged and pointed toward the city that sprawled out beneath them.
“It’ll be about a five minute jaunt on the Patrol Vehicles to get to the Abstract from here. I’m giving us twenty minutes to emplace the initiators. It’s another forty five minutes from there to our Crossover Zone. If everything works like clockwork, we’ll have fifteen minutes between the scheduled opening of the wormhole back home and the activation of the initiators,” she said.
“Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?” asked Angel.
“I’m with Lillith on this one,” said Buffy. “We can’t give the Abstract any more time than necessary to figure out what we’re up to. And the more time we let go by, the more chance there is of something else going wrong — Chaos Storms, damage by Ether Phages, who knows what else. We just have to count on Willow. She’s never let us down before. I’m betting she’ll pull through this time, too.”
“Then we’re agreed?” asked Lillith.
The Elder Power looked from one to another as they all nodded, sometimes a little grudgingly.
She smiled. “Great! Because I’m hungry. Let’s go get some chow.”