“A finding charm of my own creation,” Boston explained as he nudged one of the seemingly random leaves slightly to the left with his paw. “Since Adrian and I are so closely connected, I was able to combine the strongest elements of all seven finding charm variations into one super spell that should cover every possible parameter. Observe.”
He grabbed the end of the twine circle in his teeth and pulled it, closing the noose around the pile of plant parts until they were tied together. It looked like a leaf-and-stick corsage at first, but as he kept pulling, the bundle changed shape until suddenly Bex was staring at a leaf-art miniature of Adrian.
“That’s incredible,” she said, getting down on her knees for a better view. “It looks just like him. You even got his hat.”
“It’s the best effigy I’ve ever made,” Boston informed her. “I crammed it with every personal element I could think of—Adrian’s hair, feathers from his pillow, samples of his handwriting, five drops of his blood from before it turned white, crumbs from the last piece of food he ate, theworks.” He thumped his tail proudly. “Not bad for someone with no opposable thumbs, eh?”
“You’re amazing,” Bex agreed, leaning even closer. “Can we talk to him through it?”
“No,” the cat said sadly. “A speaking spell requires an actual witch, not a moonlighting familiar. I still think I did a good job, though. He might not be able to talk, but my little Adrian knows exactly where his big brother is. See?”
He nudged the doll with his nose, and sure enough, the little effigy rose to its feet and pointed its fir-needle finger at the mountain above them.
“Wow,” Bex said, legitimately impressed. “Can he feel if we touch him?”
“It’s not a voodoo doll,” Boston snapped. “That’s a completely different spell. Mine is much more useful. All we have to do is follow where the effigy points, and he should lead us straight to the real thing.”
The little Adrian nodded and pointed even more vigorously at the base of the upside-down mountain above them, and Bex’s giddy heart began to sink.
“I guess that means he’s up in Heaven, huh?”
“More than likely,” Boston agreed, squinting his green eyes at his spell. “It looks like he’s moving, though, which is a good sign. If he’s got that much room to walk around, he’s probably not locked up in some Heavenly prison.”
Bex prayed to Ishtar that that was true. If Gilgamesh had been foolish enough to let his youngest son wander freely around the palace, then Bex was certain that Adrian was already up to his witch hat in escape plans. That was going to make rescuing himmucheasier, but they had to get to Heaven first, which meant it was time to get this plan on the road.
“All right,” Bex said, rising to her feet. “Let’s do this. Boston, can you keep yourself hidden?”
“Of course,” Boston replied with a huff as he tied the little leaf Adrian to Bran’s carved handle using the loop of twine that held him together. “What sort of cat do you think I am?”
“The best sort,” Bex assured him as she checked to make sure her fake horns were straight and the cut in the slave collar was still hidden behind her hair. When everything was exactly where she wanted it, Bex ordered the four war-demon kids to keep slacking out here in the sunlight and signaled her team tomove out, hanging back to let Lys’s warlock take point as they marched through the terrifying gates into Hell.
CHAPTER 4
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IT’D BEEN IMPOSSIBLE TOsee from out on the bright cliffside, but the tunnel that led into the Hells was just as horrible as the doors outside. Also absurdly enormous. The arched ceiling was twice the height of even the tallest transformed wrath demon, and the walls were so far apart that the five of them could’ve walked side by side with room to spare.
The proportions were absolutely ridiculous for what was essentially a connector tunnel, but the longer Bex thought about it, the more convinced she became that that was the point. This tunnel hadn’t been made to efficiently transport banished demons back to the Hells. It’d been designed to dominate and oppress, and by those measurements, it succeeded spectacularly.
Just like the doors leading in, every inch of the gigantic, black-stone walls was covered in carved reliefs of demons being punished. Some were being whipped by warlocks while others burned in giant fires. Sometimes they were shown being tied to posts and carved open while they were still alive; other times they were simply cut into pieces that the sobbing survivors were forced to sort into piles.
Each torture was uniquely horrible and rendered in stomach-churningly lifelike detail. Bex was just glad they were carvings and not paintings. If she’d had to see all that torture in color, she would’ve lost her lunch.
She was already losing her cool. Even if it was just art, the sight of all those demons being abused while Gilgamesh’s warlocks watched and laughed sent her fury into overdrive. If she’d still had her horns, her bonfire would be filling the tunnel right now. Thankfully for their stealth mission, Bex’s smoldering was purely emotional. She hadn’t produced so much as a candle flame since she’d lost her horns, and no matter how angry she felt, that didn’t change as they made their way to the doors at the awful tunnel’s end, which were carved in a giant depiction of Gilgamesh.
The symbolism was as subtle as a kick to the face. The Eternal King’s image was twenty times the size of the largest tortured demon. He had Anu’s crown on his head and Ishtar’s sword in his hands, and there were nine grotesque female figures with huge horns kneeling at his carved feet. That was blatantly false since Pride was broken and Wrath hadneverkneeled, but propaganda didn’t need to be accurate to work, and as much as Bex hated to admit it, itwasworking. Between the tunnel’s oppressively giant scale and the hopeless imagery, their whole group was quiet and downcast by the time Iggs and Kirok managed to push open the giant doors at the end.
Bex’s hand went instinctively for her weapon as the path opened, but there was nothing to grab. Slaves didn’t get weapons, so she’d moved the explosive short sword into her backpack. This left her with nothing to hold on to, so she focused on moving forward instead, walking practically on Lys’s heels as she stepped through the door into the most impressive cavern she’d ever seen.
Bex stopped short, her no-longer-glowing eyes going wide. From the little Lys had told her about their time in the Hells, she’d always imagined it as a big cave full of fire. That was technically what was in front of her right now, but she’d never realized it would be sobig.
They were standing on a ledge at the top of the outer wall of a circular cavern the size of a city. Not a small city, either. This thing was as big as downtown Seattle. Bex couldn’t even see the other side thanks to the haze of smoke from the giant fires that lit the place. They burned everywhere—in metal braziers that hung from the cavern’s arched stone ceiling, in troughs that ran along the walls, in big torch stands she could see burning like stars through the haze on the floor far below—everywhere. All that dancing orange light made it look like the entire cavern was on fire, but the air was cold, damp, and acrid with smoke, so much so that her entire crew started coughing the moment they opened the door.
Even Bex, who was used to fire, nearly hacked a lung out. She was still wiping the tears out of her eyes when she finally got enough usable air into her lungs to push past Iggs and look for her people. Given how many demons were supposed to live in the Hells, she’d thought they’d be everywhere, but Bex didn’t see anything but smoke-blackened rocks. As she looked harder, though, she slowly realized that the sooty, hunchbacked shapes below them weren’t stones. They were her people.
The sight made her stumble back. Bex had seen plenty of demons in rough shape before, but the ones she’d freed on Earth had been mostly house slaves and guards. It wasn’t uncommon for them to be beaten and malnourished, but they’d still always been recognizable. The figures moving below her now, though, looked more like dirty little shadows than Children of Ishtar. Bex couldn’t even tell what type of demons she was looking at, but there weretonsof them.
When she’d first stepped into the firelit cavern, Bex had assumed the walls here were stone like the ones she’d seen outside. As she stared down at the wretched demons, though, she realized all the cracks and crevices she’d thought were natural formations were actually buildings. The circular wallsof the giant cavern were honeycombed with thousands of tiny caves. They were stacked on top of each other like termite holes with no pipes or ventilation or safeties of any sort. The only paths connecting them were climbing routes made by cutting handholds into the stone, some of which went upside down in places. It was a basically vertical slave shantytown, and Bex wasn’t the only one who hated it.
