Epilogue
Ksenia
Pavos was busy this time of day. As the midday sun rose hot on the horizon, citizens of the city rose with it to do their business.
They strode about with their ancient heads held high.
Women in shining jewels and vibrant dresses sat by spraying fountains to cool their hot skin.
Men in embellished tunics and weapons that were more accessory than anything else bowed their heads together in discussion at every corner.
There were no children. That was one factor which always reminded me that Pavos was no ordinary city.
Despite the busy marketplaces and lively squares lining the shining palace, enormous marble buildings, and perfectly manicured landscaping, if one knew where to look and how to recognize the oddity in the details, it was clear.
This was no mortal city. This was a city of the gods.
Or so they called themselves.
I avoided the markets, the fountains, the squares.
It wasn’t a good time for a spy from the outside to be meandering around within the city walls, but I hadn’t been given a choice.
Deimos had called a meeting of the council, and since that was such a rarity, the man I served had dictated that I be present.
Leo needed to know what was happening in Pavos, what had sent the Geist into such a disarray these past few months.
Something is happening, Nia. I need to know what.
It wasn’t an order. Given the way I’d come into his service, I imagined he knew that I’d never been good at following them.
I only followed the commands of the people I respected.
He was one of them, though I’d never tell him that.
I trusted his decisions far more than I trusted those of his father.
That, I believed, would create some conflict down the road, but there was no sense in crossing that bridge before we came to it.
I’d reached the main street, the one which led directly to the palace and the attached council chambers.
Apparently, we hadn’t been the only ones who’d received the news that Deimos had called the council.
As council meetings were open to the public, they tended to draw a crowd but never one as large as this.
Still hundreds of feet away from the public entrance, we were stopped.
All of us standing in an enormous mass of private citizens standing on tiptoes and craning their graceful necks for a look at what was holding us up.
What it was, apparently, was a simple lack of available space within the public viewing hall.
Rearranging my ridiculous skirts for enhanced mobility, I slid sideways and out of the growing throng who were muttering in their irritation, chattering excitedly about whatever they expected to find inside.
It made me uneasy, being around so many of them at once.
Thankfully, my natural height and complexion made it easy enough to blend in amongst them, so long as I wore the proper disguise and no one looked too closely.
But with every moment I spent within a crowd of bored, waiting civilians, it became more and more likely I would be recognized for what I was.
And what I was, was certainly not one of them.
I searched for the side street I knew was nearby.
No one would be traveling that way today since they all seemed to be headed for the one and only entrance to the council chambers.
But I hadn’t gained the title of best spy in the kingdom without learning a few tricks over the year and a half I’d been slipping into the city unnoticed.
The palace had servants’ passages, remnants of the days in which they enslaved my people to serve their own.
They hadn’t been used for that purpose for thousands of years, and if it were up to me, I’d ensure they never were again.
They seemed to have been entirely forgotten, lost to time as so many things were.
Oppressors were always the first to forget their oppression.
I slipped into one of the passageways from a small canal that ran to the river.
It was for sewage and smelled atrocious, but I would prefer even that to standing among them for even a moment more.
So I held my breath and slipped inside, sliding through the narrow passageway with my back against the wall.
When I reached the end of the canal, the passage broadened to a hall, and I stepped away from the foul-smelling water and into the warmth of the palace underbelly.
I looked down at the ridiculous purple satin gown which had been commissioned for my purpose and sighed.
The hem was covered in excrement. I reached up and unzipped myself, letting the fabric fall and pool around my feet.
I stepped out of the dress, adjusting my skin-tight black, kevlar and cotton blended jumpsuit.
I pulled at the long sleeves with a smile.
It won’t save your life, but it’ll give you a few more seconds.
That was what Roman had told me when I’d first tried it on. I’d loved it right away.
I kicked the satin dress aside and strode down the hall toward the council chambers. Leonid wouldn’t like it. In fact, he would be incredibly annoyed, but I’d need a new dress after this. There was no salvaging that one.
I found the council chambers easily enough.
I knew the passageways well. Whenever I doubted that I was going in the right direction, I paused and followed the noise onward.
By my estimation, the hall was nearly filled to the brim.
Many of those who’d been waiting outside had made it in and were crammed together on the viewing balconies overlooking the main hall from all sides.
I peered through a grate in the ceiling to watch the proceedings from below.
“Are the two of you not the sole administrators of the Office of Verdunn Administration?” Deimos’s cold, cruel voice echoed throughout the chamber.
I shivered. No matter how many times I’d heard the leader of the Geist speak, I would never get used to that voice.
Its frigid, distant, emotionless tone chilled me to my core.
I couldn’t describe it, the effect it had on me.
I could only attribute it to their great power, blame it on the magic in their veins that flowed outwardly from their very existence.
Some legends said they used to glow so brightly, we humans could hardly bear to look at them. If that were true, I wondered if their light had dimmed because of the atrocities they’d committed. Or maybe that particular legend had never been true at all. It was always so hard to tell with legends.
I stood up straighter, craning my neck for a better look, and peered out at the hall above.
Deimos sat upon his throne, an enormous chair made of gold brighter than the sun. It was blinding. I imagined that was the point and, perhaps, where that legend had come from originally. Maybe it wasn’t their greatness which blinded us but their wealthy possessions.
To his left sat his beautiful sister, Callidora, prim and proper as always.
Her long, curling golden hair, a precise match to her brother’s, cascaded down her shoulders to rest about her waist. Her enormous sapphire eyes glinted like jewels in the light of the elegant hall.
Her hands were folded demurely in her lap, and she watched her brother with an expression of warm affection.
To his right sat Ivo, Deimos’s current most trusted man and perhaps the most dangerous in Pavos, save Deimos himself. His brow was permanently furrowed, his jaw constantly clenched, as though he were always on the very edge, moments from flying into an incredible rage.
Eight more Geist sat on either side of Callidora and Ivo, members of the Council, their beady little eyes trained on two more of their kind who stood twenty yards from the platform, wringing their hands together and shifting nervously on their feet.
They weren’t as beautiful as Deimos and Callidora, though no one was.
They didn’t have the appearance of being carved straight from the most elegant marble.
They were lesser Geist, lowly and insignificant, their blood no doubt tainted in some way or another over the millennia they’d lived among us.
No wonder they’d been assigned to the Office of Verdunn Administration.
“Sir D-Deimos, Your Magnificence,” the first one stuttered. I craned my neck to see him better. He was small and round, pudgy at the stomach, with an upturned nose and freckles. He looked like a rat, a beady eyed little rat. “If we’d known such a spectacle were possible—”
“Why didn’t you know?” Deimos interrupted, that cold voice turning so icy, the air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
He narrowed his eyes, jaw tensed, and leaned forward, steepling his fingers at his chin.
“Am I not correct in presuming that the Office of Verdunn Administration is the department created for and entrusted with the oversight of Sanctuary?”
“Y-yes, Your Magnificence, but we didn’t, well, we haven’t—”
“It’s been a thousand years,” the other man blurted, turning red in the face the moment he spoke aloud as if surprised by his own boldness.
He was the opposite of his companion. Tall and lanky with pale skin and sunken cheeks, he resembled a weasel.
“We can’t possibly be expected to have known something like this—something that we haven’t seen in a millennia—could possibly, somehow, return. ”
“Can’t you?” Deimos snapped. He rose slowly, his elaborate golden robes pooling on the ground in front of him.
“Well, if not the Office of Verdunn Administration, than who, Tolis? Who shall I hold responsible for the fact that an unexpected blast of dark magic has shattered the ninth Trial dome, and no one can tell me which of the Verdunn did it?”
I covered my mouth with my hands to keep from gasping.
“We told you about the anomaly,” Tolis whispered. His companion turned to him in warning, eyes wide.
“Excuse me?” Deimos asked, stepping forward. “Would you care to repeat that?”
“I just—I didn’t mean any disrespect, Your Magnificence. It’s just that we, well, we told you about the anomaly when the Viper and the Third Ringer entered their first Trial and we drew their blood. We told you that something was off with one of the samples.”
“Which one?”
“I—what?”
“Which sample?” Deimos hissed through gritted teeth. Something about the way in which he had asked the question seemed to indicate he already knew the answer.
Tolis hung his head in shame. “We don’t know, Sire.”
“Why not?”
“Because the samples weren’t labelled. We—we failed our tasks in that case. We haven’t had an anomaly in over a thousand years. If we would have known it would lead to something like this—”
“But you didn’t know. So you didn’t do the most basic requirements of your job, and now I have a pair of candidates, one of which is capable of a power we haven’t seen in a millennia, a power we thought long ago extinguished, and my Office of Verdunn Administration can’t even tell me which one it is.
You have left this council, and all of Pavos, vulnerable to a very dangerous force. ”
“Your Magnificence—” the first Administrator tried, stepping forward, but Deimos threw up a hand, and both of them dropped roughly to their knees.
Tolis hissed in pain, eyes wrinkling as he closed them against the ache.
“Take them away,” Deimos ordered. He turned from the administrators as a handful of guards emerged and clapped them in irons.
“It could be the boy,” Callidora said serenely as her brother approached his throne once more. “In which case, we’ll know soon anyway. Now that you’ve released Kleio—”
“Or it could be the girl,” Ivo interrupted, his face a stoic mask of frustration. “In which case, we can’t retrieve her.”
“I don’t care for people telling me what I can and can’t do. You know this, Ivo.”
“But she’s—”
“Valin!”
The nearest guard stepped forward. He was just as I remembered him. An enormous, hulking brute with bulging muscles and a black eyepatch over his ruined left eye.
“Bring Kleio to my chambers. I wish to brief him on what is expected of him in working with the boy.”
Valin nodded and strode away.
“You’re truly releasing him?” Callidora asked in awe, tears glistening on her cheeks as she stared up at her brother with a smile on her lips.
Deimos smiled gently back at her and lowered a hand to cup her chin.
“Conditionally,” he told her after a moment, then strode after Valin.
With the Council meeting adjourned, Callidora sauntered off with her court of ladies through a side door that led to the royal residences. Ivo fell into conversation with a few of the council members around him. The rest filed out.
I considered going after Deimos, seeing how far I could follow him along the passageways, but I didn’t know the more interior ones well enough to risk getting lost within them.
This news was far too important. It needed to get back to my people quickly.
I turned back down the hall I’d come from and followed the smell of sewage back to the canal.
Leo was right, I thought with a grin, something is happening in Pavos.
Deimos’s words echoed in my mind as I made my way through the sewage tunnel and out of the palace.
A pair of candidates, one of which is capable of a power we haven’t seen in a millennia, a power we thought long ago extinguished…
You have left this council, and all of Pavos, vulnerable to a very dangerous force.
Feeling a bit more energetic than I had upon my entry into the city, I sidestepped along the outer walls until I saw the crack in the wall of light which shielded the city. With one final glance back over my shoulder, I slipped through into the desolate wasteland beyond.
The moment I exited Pavos, the air changed.
That crisp breeze the Geist had magicked into existence to serve their paradise was gone.
The lush greenery they’d somehow managed to cultivate in this desert over centuries was nowhere to be found.
Only hard, cracked earth beneath my feet and a blazing sun awaited me on the other side. The air was suffocating.
I took deep, practiced breaths to reorient myself with the outside, before opening my eyes again and looking around.
Phantom would be waiting for me nearby. I raised my fingers to my lips and let out a long, shrill whistle.
The great flapping of enormous white wings whipped my hair about, and the Zver landed gracefully before me, padding forward on strong, scaly paws.
I approached and swung myself onto Phantom’s back.
She was a swift flyer and a brutal fighter, but even she hated being so close to the Geist city. It made her uneasy, restless.
I knew the feeling.
I leaned forward and whispered the command, “Vol,” and we took to the sky.