“I figured out everything,” Adrian said, clutching the dancing cat in his fist as he ran over to the workroom’s writing table to grab a piece of parchment. He scribbled out a long list using the table’s golden fountain pen, then turned and shoved the paper at the princess, who’d never stopped hovering behind him.
“I need you to get me these materials.”
“Of course,” the fake Bex said. “Helping you is why I’m here. When do you need all this by?”
“As soon as possible,” Adrian said, looking into her golden eyes as he flashed his most charming smile. “I think it’s time I took your advice and started acting like a prince. If you can gather all of that for me within the hour, I’ll have the Queen of Pride’s horns fixed before you know it, and then the two of us can take them to Gilgamesh together.”
He was choking on his own shamelessness by the time he finished, but it worked like a charm. In the space of those two sentences, his princess went from sullen and suspicious to smiling so wide he was worried that her face would crack.
“I’ll gather it all, my prince!” she cried, her golden eyes flicking back and forth as she read the list he’d given her. “Some of these are pretty restricted, but I’ll make the quartermasters hand them over. Wait for me while I find a servant!”
“I’ll be right here,” Adrian promised, tucking the still-dancing cat statue into his coat’s front pocket. “This is the start of a new leaf for us. I hope you’ll give it your all.”
It didn’t seem physically possible, but the princess’s smile got even bigger. She leaped forward next, crushing Adrian in a brutal hug before dashing out the door like a shot. The joy of finally getting the affection she craved must’ve addled her magically-programmed mind, because the princess actually left the door hanging open behind her.
It was the first time Adrian had seen her make a mistake like that, but he didn’t take advantage of it. Getting caught doing something suspicious now would undermine the act he’d just gagged himself to put on. He’d already made his move. Now he just had to play it through, so instead of bolting for the door she’d just left open, Adrian walked over to his breakfast tray and poured himself a cup of coffee from the gold carafe, fortifying his brain with caffeine for the massive puzzle of the queen’s shattered horns waiting on the table behind him.
And at the bottom of his pocket, the finding spell kept buzzing like a trapped hornet, its sharp-carved cat nose pointing like an arrow at a spot way, way down and far to the west, beyond the walls of the palace.
CHAPTER 3
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BEX HAD NEVER BEENto the Hells in this lifetime. She was pretty sure she’d never been inanylifetime because Gilgamesh had made them after he’d used Anu’s crown to banish her from Paradise. Drox would’ve been able to tell her for certain, but for once, Bex was glad to be alone in her head. She didn’t want anyone to know that she was actually kind of excited to finally see the place she’d fought against all her lives.
She didn’t want to insult Lys by looking eager, either, so Bex kept her face locked in a furious scowl throughout the entire banishment, which did feel uncomfortably like being dragged. It reminded her of the force that had pulled her out of Heaven after Enki’s death, except this time, instead of falling with a weight tied to her feet, Bex felt like she was being sucked down a drain.
They all were. She could feel her demons trembling around her as an inescapable force pulled them faster and faster through a yawning emptiness Bex recognized as the gap between worlds. Gilgamesh must have put his city back in its original position, because the journey was much longer than when she and Adrian had crossed it on his tree. She was starting to worry about oxygen when the sucking pressure suddenly spat them out.
The first thing Bex checked when they landed was her feet. They’d been planning this assault since the first day they’d arrived in the Blackwood, but while everyone else seemed confident that Anu’s banishment was tied to the name she’dlost when War tore off her horns, Bex had had her doubts. She definitely didn’t feel like Rebexa anymore with no fire, no sword, and no ability to even touch her empty forehead without brushing the void that still lurked like a pit trap deep inside her. Still, thinking something probably wouldn’t happen wasn’t the same as actually being safe. She’d helped plan every step of this assault, but Bex hadn’t knownfor certain that she wasn’t going to arrive in the Hells and fall straight back down to Earth until her new boots hit the ground and it didn’t crumble.
It took three solid breaths before the relief that she wasn’t falling subsided enough for Bex to actually raise her head and look around. When she finally managed it, what she saw was not what she’d imagined.
Humans always described Hell as a flaming pit that reeked of sulfur, but the place they’d landed on looked more like a mountain cliff. The ground that hadn’t broken beneath her combat boots was actually a wide stone ledge that looked over—not the terrifying void she’d ridden Adrian’s tree through or the infinitely dark riverbanks where Nemini had caught her after she’d fallen off the walls—but a very high-up version of the sight she’d seen when she’d first stepped onto the golden chain that used to tie the Seattle Anchor to Heaven.
It was beautiful. Thinking that made her feel like a traitor, but there was no denying it. Over the edge of the cliff where they’d landed was a deep blue sea dotted with hundreds of tiny green islands, each with a glittering golden chain that ran up into the air like a wire. But while those were obviously the Anchors, Bex couldn’t see where they attached. All the golden chains went past their position to vanish over the slope above them, which curved outward from where they were standing like a giant overhang.
The longer she stared at it, the more Bex felt that wasn’t right. The sweep of rock above their heads that blocked the skywasn’t an overhang or a cliff or some kind of rock formation. The entire mountain they were standing on wasupside down,with the broad base above their heads and peak way down below. The flat top—or bottom—must be the plain that Heaven sat on, which explained why all the chains went up there. But while she could see all the bridges to Heaven hanging above her like glittering golden contrails against the pale-blue sky, the Rivers of Death that usually flowed below them were nowhere to be seen. She was still looking for them when her ears picked up the distant sound of roaring water.
Following the sound took Bex closer to the cliff edge. Much closer than Iggs was comfortable with, given how he was hovering, but it worked. The moment her boots touched the lip of the stone ledge they were standing on, Bex saw the Rivers of Death glittering in the distance below.
Like everything else up here, they looked dazzling beautiful through the rosy lens of Gilgamesh’s Paradise. All that bright-blue water shining with souls was nothing at all like the terrifying freezing reality she’d fallen into, but they did still follow the chains. Or, rather, the chains followed them, rising together from the glittering ocean dotted with the circular islands of the Anchors far below. They climbed most of the distance as a pair but split apart just before they reached the downward-pointing peak of the upside-down mountain. As Bex had already noticed, the golden chains kept going up toward Heaven, but the rivers veered off just before they reached Heaven to pour into a dark hole near the top of the upside-down mountain like a waterfall in reverse.
It hurt her brain to watch. Water wasnotsupposed to move that way. No one must’ve told the rivers that, though, because they were gushing like floodwater in a thunderstorm. She was leaning farther out to see if she could get a look insidethe cave all that magical water was vanishing into when Lys grabbed her shoulder.
“Could youpleasestep away from the cliff edge?” they whispered, using their wings as a counterbalance to pull Bex back. “You’re going to make Iggs hyperventilate.”
Bex nodded and stepped away from the ledge at once.
“How real is all of this?” she asked, waving her hand at the dazzling archipelago of Anchors sparkling in the blinding white light that came from no sun she could see. “It feels like there’s actual rock under my feet, but I know the Rivers of Death don’t look like that, so is this all just an illusion?”
“No idea,” Lys said as they let go of Bex’s shoulder. “It’s looked like this for as long as I’ve been alive, but I know the mountain we’re standing on isn’t actually wide enough to hold all Nine Hells, and the flat area up topdefinitelyisn’t big enough to hold the entire White City plus the remains of the Riverlands.”
“So it’s fake,” Bex concluded.
Lys shrugged. “I don’t know if that matters when it comes to Gilgamesh. Limbo also makes no sense, but it was still real enough to imprison an entire race of demons.”
“I prefer to think of what we’re seeing as an interpretation,” Kirok offered from where he was standing next to Iggs far away from the cliff edge. “Gilgamesh rules it now, but this realm was originally created by and for the gods. It was never meant to make sense to mortal minds. That said, while the scale might not be accurate, most of the physical landmarks are as they appear. The Rivers of Death really do flow in through the bottom of the Hells, and Heaven truly is above us, which is why the chains keep going up.”
