---

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part V

Cordelia had made note of the route to her “audience” with Roxeim, marking down and cataloguing what she saw on the way, and she did the same as she followed him now. She was making a map in her mind; by now, after months of work on various subjects, her concentration was more than adequate for the task. Everything new brought her a possibility previously unavailable, and she hoarded each increase in her store with a greed she allowed no one to see.

She was shown now into a garden, a riotous profusion of greenery and blooms. How it flourished indoors, with no nourishment from the sun, was a mystery she didn’t bother to consider; she simply breathed in the heavy, life-laden odors of nectar and humus and chlorophyll, felt the humidity begin to bead on her forehead, and looked around her with pleasure and wonder. All the same, her words were tart. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’ve brought in Sheena of the Jungle to teach me how to swing from a vine and commune with nature.”

“Your flippancy is unattractive and displeasing,” Roxeim said to her, irritation sharpening his tone. “It is also inaccurate. This is to be your newest place of instruction, yes, but this environment is not pertinent to what you will learn; it is merely the preference of its resident. She maintains that it helps her to achieve the proper spiritual balance.” He turned away. “When you are done here, return to your quarters. I will see you again when I choose.”

He left her, and Cordelia stood among the lush growth, waiting. So, Mister High-and-Mighty wasn’t immune to a bit of Cordy-patented snark. It was information to be remembered; not, perhaps, meaningful in itself, but part of what might become a pattern. Meanwhile, there was the matter of 1) where she was, 2) who she was to meet, 3) what she was to learn, and 4) what she might learn that wasn’t on the formal curriculum. Sheena or no Sheena, her world was once again about to get bigger.

Of course, that wasn’t happening while she just stood where she was.

She was about to set off in search of her new instructor, whoever that might be, when a voice came through the shaded greenery around her: “I am here.” She moved in that direction, and within moments came into sight of the speaker. It was a young woman (non-surprise Number One; can you spell “harem fantasies”?) with long, dark hair (non-surprise Number Two), flowing with loose soft curls and bound with a brightly-patterned scarf that had been folded into a three-inch width and tied in a band from the top of her head to a point behind her neck. She wore no makeup — Cordelia’s judgment there was unerring — but her eyelashes were kohl-dark and her lips just a hint more red than was the normal shade; her earrings were actual rings, gold but very small, barely enough circle to clear the lobes. She wore a short-sleeved peasant blouse, adjusted in a way that left her shoulders bare, and a long, wide skirt in the same pattern and material. No shoes.

“Welcome,” she said, her voice low and rich. “You come seeking enlightenment.” There was no trace of accent, but something told Cordelia that English had not been her first language.

“Are you gonna start calling me grasshopper?” Cordelia asked. “Because I’ve had some bad experiences with bug people; I don’t really feel like being compared to one.”

The woman smiled. “No,” she said. “You already have a name.”

“Uh-huh,” Cordelia said. “Do you?”

The woman stirred in the chair where she sat; it was unpainted bamboo wicker, one of a pair, and a small wicker table rested in front of it. “I no longer use my full name; it is … unpleasantly evocative of my enforced presence here. For our purposes, I am simply Kari.”

“Fine. All kinds of fluffy wonderful, in fact.” Cordelia sat, uninvited, in the second chair. “So is the Jungle Room here supposed to be some kind of spiritual backdrop for whatever you’ll be teaching me? Or is this just where you like to kick back and relax?”

“This garden functions as my living quarters,” Kari told her. “I sleep here, dine here, bathe here. I do not leave it unless I must.”

“Okay,” Cordelia said. She was not going to ask about the woman’s toilet arrangements. “What are you, some kind of Greenpeace pilgrim?”

“I am a prisoner,” Kari replied. “I fashioned this abode as a haven, so that I might keep my sanity.”

Cordelia nodded. “And how’s that working out for you?”

Instead of answering, the other woman studied Cordelia unhurriedly, dwelling on every feature, with particular attention to her hands and eyes. “Yes,” she said at length. “You are indeed ready.”

“And once again, I feel a big ‘ohm-m-m’ coming on,” Cordelia said.

“I will not attempt to guide you to spiritual insights,” Kari said. “There is too much turmoil in my own spirit. But I will teach you mental disciplines. How you use them is yours to choose.”

“What kind of disciplines?” Cordelia wanted to know. “And how can they be used?”

“Breathing,” Kari said. “Meditation. Some of the foundations already will be familiar to you, from the yoga practices Samantha has shown you. You will learn to find a pool of calm within yourself. When you can achieve that state at will … There is much that can perhaps be discerned by one whose mind is perfectly clear.”

Cordelia sat back in the chair. “I’m not even going to pretend that this makes sense. I’ve been taught how to fight, shoot, build and disarm and set off bombs, pick locks, slide past alarms and motion detectors, everything a cat burglar/saboteur/assassin could ever want to know. And now it gets capped off by a course in intense navel-gazing. What’s up with that?”

“I have said what I will teach you,” Kari clarified. “That is not, however, what I was tasked to do.”

“Say huh?” Cordelia said.

“Our patron’s intent was that I help you to develop your perceptions of mystical forces. I do not have the skills necessary to do this. So I will teach you what I can, in the time that has been assigned me, and we will judge the results as they make themselves known.”

This was definitely a new wrinkle. “He ordered you to do something you can’t do? You’re one of the dream team that’s prepping me for the big get-back-my-life-and-incidentally-help-him-out mission that’s supposed to be the reason for the massive suckage that is my recent existence, and you can’t teach me the thing you’ve been assigned to teach me? That’s the kind of intelligent planning that totally isn’t.”

“Before I was brought to this place, I had certain abilities,” Kari said by way of explanation. “Some He has suppressed, to prevent resistance; some have been nullified by the nature of this separate reality; some have faded as I lost hold of the threads connecting me to my people. I have told him this, but He does not choose to recognize it, so He gives me a part to play which I cannot fulfill. We will do what we can do. More than this is beyond me.”

“Navel-gazing,” Cordelia said again. “This is not giving me warm-wriggly-puppy feelings.”

“But you will do it,” Kari observed. “It is not in your nature to shirk a challenge.”

That drew a pfft! from Cordelia. “You really do not know me.”

“More than you might expect,” Kari said. “Though much is beyond me now, I still have some small trace of the Sight. May I see your palm?”

Without enthusiasm, Cordelia held out her hand. “Reading the future from skin creases,” she said. “That is so lame.”

“We seek meaning in patterns,” Kari said. “The patterns are arbitrary and of little consequence; it is in the perception and the interpretation that meaning makes itself known.”

“Ohm-m-mm,” Cordelia said by way of reply.

The two women sat in silence while Kari studied Cordelia’s hand. “As I expected, a great deal is masked,” she said. “It would seem that part of your destiny is to have forces interfere with that destiny, which of course clouds the glass. But there will be moments when you can choose; and upon some of those choices, much will revolve.”

“Right, ’cause there’s nothing at all vague about that.” Cordelia started to withdraw her hand. “If you’re done —”

Kari held it fast. “There is one thing more.”

“Tall, dark stranger?” Cordelia said. “We’ve met. I was underwhelmed.”

“Not a prediction,” Kari replied. “A promise. A warning. A riddle. I do not understand it, but I see it clearly.” She looked to Cordelia. “Death is your gift.”

“ ‘Death is my gift’,” Cordelia repeated. “So … is there a return policy?”

*                *               *

It was like 3D ratio changes. Though this had hardly been her focus, Cordelia had seen the principle explained in one of her math classes, back at SHS, and been intrigued by it.

Take a one-inch square. That’s what you have: a one-inch square, one square inch.

Double its linear dimensions, so that it now measures two inches to a side. Two square inches? Nope; that two-inch square contains four one-inch squares, making it four square inches. Double it again, it’s a four-inch square containing sixteen square inches. Every time you double the size, you square the volume.

Now make it a cube. A one-inch cube contains one cubic inch. But a two-inch cube — 2"×2"×2" — is eight cubic inches, and a four-inch cube holds sixty-four cubic inches. For three dimensions, when the linear measurements are doubled, the volume is cubed. Each increase is multiplicative (exponential, actually) rather than just increments of addition.

Cordelia’s world had been reduced to dimensions of her and one other person. Then Mandy had been added, expanding it substantially. Then Sam, and her field of existence was sixteen times greater. Now Kari, and Roxeim, and her knowledge and the area in which she could move and grow felt enormous.

Because it wasn’t simply numbers of people. The addition of Sam had given her much greater range than had her introduction to Mandy; more individuals meant more personalities, more interactions and interrelations, and more different ways she could tie separate sets of knowledge together. Firearms and grappling training from Sam had interlaced with hand-to-hand and edged/impact weapons training from Lynn to give her a wider appreciation of individual combat than either of them alone could have provided. By the same token, what she had learned from Mandy about explosives handling and electronics just seemed to click! with Sam’s lessons in the tactical use of claymore mines, and she suspected that she could have shown both women a wrinkle or two that hadn’t occurred to them.

Now, in her meditative times with Kari, Cordelia found other linkages making themselves known to her. The “inner pool of calm” that Kari was teaching her to find, coupled with the yoga practices she had already instituted under Sam’s tutelage, steadied and relaxed her concentration, broadened her awareness and understanding. She was sensitive to nuances that would have escaped her before … and here, nuance was everything.

Likewise, her physical skills benefited. She shot straighter, quicker; she fought with alert serenity; she could take in a circuit board or wiring diagram at a glance, and complete or reconfigure the connections with sure, unhurried deftness.

And — though this didn’t show, and Cordelia exercised care to ensure that it remained unseen — her continuing growth in various aspects of combative arts lent an added dimension to her mental discipline that went well beyond calming herself.

Kari taught her the techniques, explained the focusing imagery, led her in the routines, and sometimes seemed to join her in a … not communion, exactly, more a synchronization of concentration and relaxation. The two women would sit facing one another in the interior garden, immobile in a modified lotus position, fingertips touching: breathing in concert, unspeaking, unseeing, following the path to nothing that opened them to all. Or Kari would have her follow the branching traceries on the surface of a leaf, or submerge herself in the scent of blossoms, or let herself become one with the sound of water trickling from the outlets of some intricate, hidden irrigation system.

Sometimes she said things.

She would drop words like small pebbles into the surface of Cordelia’s consciousness, where they should be neither heard nor deflected. The aim was that they should slide through without making a ripple, gradually merging with her to be integrated into the totality of her understanding, there to be considered or disregarded, as she chose, upon her return from that vault of timeless unbeing. This was far more difficult than it sounded — to be untouched by something without shutting it out, to receive and incorporate it without noticing it — and made more so by the nature of the statements Kari would use to test the waters.

“Truth has no dominion over him.”

“The heart always is hidden, especially from itself.”

“You are the aim. You will be the end. You are death and deliverance; your fate will free you, in chains you will never escape.”

“Seek the inner spark. The light is to be found in the spark.”

“Do not trust. Embrace all; accept nothing.”

Fortune-cookie axioms, lines from the Magic 8-Ball; but in Cordelia’s open, uncritical state, they could be deeply unsettling. While Kari looked Central European, she seemed to have (or have acquired) a thoroughly Asiatic fatalism. Certainly the things she was teaching Cordelia were more like Zen mysticism than like anything else that suggested itself for comparison.

Cordelia learned, and considered, and kept her own counsel.

*                *               *

Where her new association with Kari increased the scope of possibilities in ways she couldn’t have anticipated, and would have had difficulty describing, Cordelia was not at all sure how to categorize the time she now found herself spending with Roxeim. He was the power here, he had held himself aloof for weeks or months; now he had made himself known, had explained his fundamental reason for taking and holding her, and begun to bring her into his company once or twice a week. This should have been a priceless opportunity … but Cordelia was suspicious of appearances, even more suspicious of her captor, and unwilling to take anything for granted.

Truth has no dominion over him, Kari had said. And Do not trust. Embrace all, accept nothing. Cordelia was not overly prone to trust anyhow, and further disinclined to lower her guard to someone who had rescued her (if that part could be believed) solely in order to imprison her; the warning from her psychic tutor was hardly necessary, but still not to be forgotten. Roxeim seemed to want to take her into his confidence, now that they were nearing his goal, or perhaps wished to reassure himself of her approval and cooperation. To Cordelia’s mind, if he wanted something from her, that might be an indication that she shouldn’t be giving it to him; while, at the same time, not openly refusing to do so.

Sometimes they met for meals, usually spreads of various delicacies that didn’t always suit Cordelia’s tastes. (Escargot she liked, and caviar of the proper pedigree; pâté de foie gras she could take or leave; calamari, sure, with the right sauce. Rocky Mountain oysters, overrated. Fugu, just plain dumb. Boiled sheep’s eyes, forget it.) Sometimes it was music, of bewildering origins and vintages; sometimes (speaking of vintages) it was wine, which she sampled carefully in light of the training regimen still ongoing. Sometimes he had works of art for her to examine: many exquisite, some incomprehensible, a few that she found familiar. (One in particular: she had never seen it before, but it had to be a Vermeer; and another — also a painting — that captured the play of light as only Watteau had ever done.) They ate from dishes of beaten gold and translucent china, sipped from bubble-thin crystal and thick flasks of a glass so blue as to be almost luminous. He seemed determined, in a casual, offhand way, to impress her; and, even more, to learn about her, to get a deeper sense of what was to be found in her.

He didn’t have a chance. Cordelia had been playing a role for a third of her life, and polished it to an impermeable gloss. She accepted his overtures as if they were a deference to which she was both accustomed and entitled; she responded to his showcase of possessions with a careless superficial interest that betrayed no flicker of awe or excitement. More and more it was coming to seem that her good opinion was important to him; and so, rather than withhold it, she granted him a measure of it, with a reserve that made it clear she was far from won.

“I chose you well,” he told her when she had shrugged acceptance of his latest offering, an orchestral rendition of such heart-rending power and pathos that it raised gooseflesh on her arms. (How he stored and played the music, she couldn’t say; there was no evidence either of high-fidelity stereo equipment or of magical means of reproduction, he simply got what he wished when he wished it.) “You meet hardships without flinching, like a champion, but are equally unmoved by luxury. The more I see, the more certain I become of your fated success in our common venture.”

“I was always strong,” she replied evenly. “You put an edge on it, but the steel was there already.”

Please, pretentious much? But he ate it up; apparently megalomaniacs didn’t respect you unless you were equally egotistical.

Garbage, he had said. Property. Poor material. Forgotten. He might not remember, but she kept those words always at the forefront of her attention. His goals might or might not be what he claimed; hers were diamond-hard in their invariance.

To be free, owned and controlled by no one.

To be recognized, accorded the respect that she deserved.

And to have a suitable reckoning of anyone who had attempted to make her less.

*                *               *

Cordelia wondered sometimes what Kari told Roxeim about their sessions, her progress. Probably the truth. It wasn’t that Cordelia considered the other woman to be incapable of deception; in her current situation she wasn’t about to make that assumption of anyone. It just seemed to her that Kari, in her adjustment to being a prisoner, had reached a level of indifference regarding her own fate that would make it somehow satisfying to report that it was just as she had said before: her abilities had become so stunted that she had nothing to teach Cordelia, so they just passed the time in meditation.

The funny part was, that wasn’t the whole truth at all.

Her first inquiry to Mandy about locks, so long ago now, had been a none-too-subtle ploy at acquiring skills that might allow her to escape her imprisonment; or even simply to reduce it, being able to move and explore beyond the boundaries set for her. This was before she had come to understand that her current sphere of existence was — until she might contrive passage elsewhere — her only refuge in an infinity of emptiness. More to the point, it was before she had realized, on accompanying Lynn to Sam’s quarters, that the doors which had been barred to her were opening, not to a key or a code, but to an approved person, and that the approval had been extended to include her in each expansion of her still-circumscribed movements. This wasn’t mechanical or even electronic security; the doors were sealed by some form of magic, and no lock-picking skills would avail her against that.

Except …

Though Kari was guiding her only in the forms of expanded awareness accessible to purely human senses, the limits of such senses were perhaps not so narrow as might be supposed. Cordelia could not detect or recognize or analyze mystical energies, not directly; but as she became more and more fully conscious of the self within her and the world around her, the very limits of that consciousness came to have unexpected meaning.

One afternoon with Kari, after more than an hour in a deep trance state, Cordelia made the soft transition back to normal thought and understanding. She stretched, opened her eyes and looked around … and stopped, her expression sharpening even as her gaze lost focus, questing with the inward eye.

“Yes,” Kari said.

The word brought Cordelia back to her. “There’s something here,” she said to her instructor. “Something that’s … that isn’t …”

“You and I are of one material,” Kari told her. “The plants, the water and air, they all are woven of that same fabric. You have come to know and accept this; and today, for the first time, you feel it truly, enough to be aware also of the other.”

“Other,” Cordelia repeated, a little vaguely.

“He is other,” Kari went on. “His realm is other. Those objects that He brings here become gradually suffused with it, and persons as well, though more slowly. I was going mad, feeling myself inexorably permeated by that force and absorbed into it. It is only here, surrounded by life and growth and the flourishing of a nature that did not originate here, that I can retain the vestiges of what I was.”

“So what I’m feeling,” Cordelia said, considering the words as she spoke them, “what’s … out there … is the thing that’s not made of the same stuff as you and me?”

Kari smiled. “Not quite. To a mind not schooled in such things, the traces are far more subtle. What you sense is the pattern I wove into the green around us, using the last of the energies left to me, to make this place a haven. You have seen my handiwork, done in the final moments that I was still more than a … navel gazer.”

A haven. A … shield, of some kind? Remembering the few minutes Roxeim had left her alone in the chambers of their first full audience, just before bringing her to these gardens, Cordelia said, “You’ve shut him out. He can’t see in here, reach into here, can he?”

“He could,” Kari said. “But not without rending it beyond repair. He allows it to remain because it sustains me, and I am still of some small use to him. So long as He respects the barrier I set, we are unseen and untouched here. Our actions are secret, our voices private, and our will … remains our own.”

That last was not at all a welcome thought; it sounded a whole lot like she was referring to mind control. “My ‘will’ has never belonged to anybody but me,” Cordelia asserted, with a shade more tartness than necessary. “Here, there, wherever, I’m the one calling the shots inside my own head.” Except for the Bezoar incident … No, squash that.

Kari’s expression was one that Cordelia had felt many times around her own face: it was what you put on to keep anyone from seeing that you weren’t letting them see what you were thinking. “Then you have been fortunate,” she said simply.

Back in her rooms, unwilling just yet to consider the implications of that final exchange, Cordelia thought instead about this sudden addition to her awareness. The other of which Kari had spoken, the barrier she claimed to have created … Cordelia hadn’t so much sensed that as realized the presence of something she couldn’t sense, a “presence of absence”. She didn’t think Kari quite understood what had happened; as a mystic, she tended to think in terms of mysticism.

Cordelia was more practical than that.

She looked at the door that opened out into the corridor. It was a door. She closed her eyes, calmed her breathing, allowed her awareness to relax and open.

Nope. Still a door.

She kept herself centered, her concentration diffused, and went out into the corridor. The hall lighting was on — she had never seen it extinguished — but the other women seemed to follow the same sleep-wake cycle she did, so she could hope they had retired to their own quarters. Roxeim’s habits were as unknown, and therefore unpredictable, as his nature; he could be anywhere, doing anything, could be aware of everything that moved within these walls. The fact of Kari’s self-protective barrier seemed to imply the latter. If that was so, then it might be that he didn’t keep his feelers out every minute of every day. She just had to gamble; the alternative was to do nothing, and when you stopped taking chances because of threats that might be there, you were most of the way to beaten.

Softly as a ghost, she moved through the empty halls toward the workshop where she practiced with Mandy. Her mental detachment served two purposes: with luck, it would keep her below the activation threshold of any psychic sensors Roxeim had in place, and it allowed her to assess the doors she passed. By the time she reached the workshop, her first intuition had been confirmed; she selected a few simple tools and moved on in the direction of the areas Roxeim frequented.

She had been right about passage through the various doors being allowed or denied by magical means … but the magic, the trace of person-recognition that made it work, touched only the locks. Magic didn’t lock the doors, it told the locks when to close. And the locks themselves she could easily manage with what she had brought from the workshop.

Danger increased as she neared the suites where she had met with Roxeim. There was no way to avoid it, so the task was how to deal with it. Within the lowest depths of consciousness that she still allowed to operate, Cordelia formulated a rationale to explain her movements if she were caught: she was testing herself against the inner defenses, on the assumption that success against Roxeim’s watchers and wards would mean that she was ready to face the forces protecting her doppelgänger in the outside world. Yeah, she could sell that.

She wanted the chamber to which he had first summoned her; she had already decided that if she couldn’t find it directly, she would backtrace the route they had followed from there to Kari’s garden. It wasn’t necessary. The room was just as she remembered it; she could even pick out the spot where she had sat while Roxeim went (presumably) to arrange her introduction to Kari. That memory — that he had found it necessary to communicate with the woman by some direct, physical means — encouraged Cordelia’s hope that her own ‘shields’ would protect her from his notice.

The small chest, too, was just where she had left it. Cordelia knelt before it, composing herself yet further and allowing the refinement of her senses to respond to and note every facet of the forces contained therein. Yes, it was definitely there, a seething coil of otherness that revealed itself by its very opacity. When she had learned all she could from that remove, she took the etched artifact from its silk covering and held it as she had before: totally open, unresisting, to the elements of its influence.

She gave it five minutes, then rewrapped the artifact and returned it to the chest. She had reached the limits of her discernment where the object was concerned, and no new forces had surged forth from within her. This thought had lain in the background for weeks, awaiting the opportunity she had at last created for herself; now it had been realized, explored, and yielded no profit.

Well, those were the breaks.

Back in her rooms, Cordelia meditated further, imprinting what she had learned into that core of her mind which would consider those things while she slept. Then she prepared herself for bed. She checked herself for disappointment; there was none. She had taken a step, and there were other paths still to explore.

Seek the inner spark, Kari had said during one of their sessions. The light is to be found in the spark. Cordelia had hoped that, with the growth she had undergone since her first exposure, Roxeim’s enhancement lattice might activate that spark. Apparently not.

So, maybe the ‘inner spark’ was something else. Cordelia had learned herself, had learned all she could of her surroundings. Maybe it was time to start actively learning about the other women here; what kind of inner spark they possessed.
 

|    Next Part     |    Previous Part    |    Chapter Index     |