Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Dante
“Thieves and liars prosper in this hell of a city. Sanctuary is no longer what its name suggests. It is a paradise for the wicked, a haven for the damned. They cry out to their gods and turn their backs to them in the same breath. The Geist did not abandon us. We abandoned the Geist.”
Kleio didn't ask me to keep his secret. He didn’t even make a request to keep the knowledge he'd imparted to me to myself. But I did.
Days later, I hadn’t quite come to terms with everything my mentor had told me nor his reasons for doing so.
My head was spinning with the understanding that the gods I'd worshiped my whole life weren’t gods at all, that there was something even greater than their wrath to fear, and that this battle between good and evil had been raging for centuries.
All while we were hidden safely and ignorantly away in our walled city, fighting over scraps of the world the Geist had left us.
There were things in motion, plots and plans I didn’t dare attempt to guess at, that I would never be able to understand.
Cosmo might have. Even my mother may have been able to grasp the enormity of all I'd learned. But I was just a young man, raised to be a Victor, trained to be a warrior. I’d never been given the tools to know how to think for myself, how to reason out the political fallout and strategic warfare I now understood we faced.
Even Kleio didn't seem to know which side he fell on, didn't seem to believe good and evil to be as obvious of a choice as he formerly thought.
That was evidenced by the fact that he knew about Adrian, what she was capable of, and was still protecting her from them. Why?
And for how long?
Adrian was alive. That was another bombshell which had left me laying in bed, staring up at my ceiling in a daze most nights.
Try as I might, I simply couldn’t come to terms with what I'd done. I hadn’t killed her but I thought I had and, what’s more, I'd been willing to.
I hadn't wanted to, but I'd done it anyway.
Even though it hurt. Even though it was a knife driven straight into my own heart, I'd been the one to plunge it in.
I let my love bleed out of me and failed her when it mattered most. Just as I'd always done. Just as I was always destined to do.
No matter what might happen, I would never be able to set the guilt of what I'd done aside. What would my mother have said about that? Would she have said it was strength to make that choice? Or would she have considered me a coward just as she'd always believed my father to be?
“Get your head in the ring, Viper,” Castor snarled suddenly.
I blinked back to reality to find my blade knocked into the sand at my feet, grinning warrior prowling around me victoriously.
I knelt to retrieve my weapon as my opponent reset himself for another onslaught.
Castor just crossed his arms, frowning at me with obvious displeasure.
I tried to maintain my stance, my balance, but my heart wasn’t in it and my opponent knocked my spear away once more in a matter of blows.
I knelt to retrieve it again but heard Castor’s whip-sharp voice behind me before I could.
“That’s enough,” he snapped. “Off to the barracks, Salim.”
My opponent bowed quickly before hastening off to snicker with a group of his fellow soldiers who'd been lingering nearby to watch our sparring. Castor paid them no mind, striding toward me instead.
“What’s with you today?” he asked, voice low, as I retrieved my weapon and knocked the sand from it off on my pants.
“Nothing,” I replied but then added, when it was clear Castor didn't believe me, “I was up late last night practicing phasing with Kleio.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. My mentor had been working me tirelessly to lengthen the time I could de-materialize before my strength gave out and I flickered back into existence.
I could almost manage a minute now, but that clearly wasn’t anywhere near where Kleio expected me to be.
He hadn't made any attempts to hide his disappointment each time I failed to meet his expectations, but we hadn’t spoken of the revelations he'd imparted to me, either.
With Kleio, once a thing was done, it was done.
There was no need to rehash what had happened or even to recall it.
We both knew what had been said. That was enough.
“A warrior must be able to maintain his strength through various bouts of training. We call this endurance, Viper, and it's just as important as skill,” Castor was saying now, unimpressed and perhaps unconvinced by my explanation. “You know this.”
“Yes, I know,” I admitted, trying to keep annoyance from my tone as I turned to place the spear back on the weapon’s rack.
“Is this about the scouting mission?” Castor asked then and I could hardly stand the sympathy in his tone as my eyes snapped up to meet his.
“No.”
“I know it was your first trip out and it went to shit. None of us has faced anything like that. Losing a Geist…”
“I’m fine.”
I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to remember the sight of the arrow protruding from the neck of the human boy with a loving mother, proud brother, and dogged mentor.
I didn’t want to think about my fellow warrior who'd deserted us or the ferocity with which Captain Valin had fought the riders or the way it had felt to watch a god die. And now, to know the truth about the Geist, it was almost more than I could bear. Knowing those men, these men, had given and were giving their lives to a cause they knew nothing about was simply too much. Even Castor, standing before me as strong and solid as ever, had been lied to and didn’t even know it.
My jaw clenched and I tried to step past him.
“Don’t let the anger eat away at you,” Castor grunted, slamming a fist into my shoulder to hold me at bay.
“If you need to talk to somebody, talk. If you need to drink, drink. If you need to hit something, hit me. But don't walk away from this without facing it, Viper. You’ll never be the same if you do.”
It wasn’t bad advice, but I pushed him aside anyway.
In an army camp within the city of Pavos, there weren’t many places one could be alone and that was all I desired at the moment.
Some peace and quiet to sort through my thoughts and gain a deeper understanding of the possible implications of everything I'd been told.
I needed time to make some decisions, to determine if I was even in a position to be able to make those decisions.
Adrian was still out there, somewhere. Kleio knew where.
Someone needed to warn her of the danger she was in.
Was I that someone? Did I deserve to be? Did I even want to be?
I'd faced the Zver, the physical embodiment of what the Geist called the Darkness, and I'd barely survived the encounter each time.
The beasts were wild and violent. They tore out throats with their venomous fangs, they clawed through flesh as easily as one might tear through cloth, and they hunted anyone who dared to pass through the perimeter of Pavos.
They'd tried to kill me. They had killed the humans and the Geist I'd been traveling with.
And whatever power was within them was within Adrian as well.
It was almost impossible to believe. And yet, that’s what Kleio had been freed from prison after hundreds of years to find out, that's what kept Deimos and his council suspicious of me and my very presence here. Did I have any right to volunteer my assistance, my protection, to a power the gods themselves feared? Did I have any right to risk releasing an evil so great it had sent near-deities scrambling out of another world into this one? Kleio’s words came back to me, hauntingly familiar.
You know Adrian, Dante. Better than anyone else in the world. Do you think she’s evil?
I didn't. I'd known the answer right away, the moment he'd asked the question, but now, having had the time to truly consider it, I was even more certain of my answer. Sure, she was brash and belligerent and had no issue being blasphemous if the mood struck her. But she wasn’t evil.
She'd joined the Trials because of a promise she'd made her Culled best friend.
She'd stayed in them to raise the status of her family.
She'd risked everything to save her brother and the accused murderer he harbored.
She'd promised away her future to save me from mine.
And she fought. Every damn step of the way, she'd fought for both of us, for Sanctuary.
If I compared that to the actions of the Geist, the way they deified themselves, the way they Culled whoever they deemed too much of a threat with no regard for their friends and families, the way they were content to watch us nip and snatch at each other’s throats and simply gazed at it all with some dark amusement, it was hard to convince myself that, when it came to good and evil, my gods were on the side of good.
Not if it meant Adrian was evil. It simply didn't make sense.
“Viper,” someone said.
I glanced up to find Valin walking toward me.
I frowned, considering turning away from him.
I wasn’t in the mood to be remonstrated by Castor and I certainly wasn’t in the mood to be scolded by my Captain either.
But I couldn’t ignore him. For his station, for his reputation, it wouldn’t go well for me if I did.
And I had Kleio’s secrets to keep now. I couldn’t draw attention to myself if I wanted to get away with what I knew.
“Castor said you left your training early,” he spoke, his tone accusatory as he approached.
“I needed a break,” I informed him, though I knew such a statement wasn’t acceptable here. “I didn’t sleep much last night with Kleio’s lessons and I couldn’t focus on sparring.”
Valin frowned at my weak excuse. I couldn’t find it in me to care.