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 thousandyears. 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.”
