“Is that where they made demons live?” Iggs asked in a deadly voice. “Thoseholes?”
“The lucky ones live in holes,” Lys replied in a tight, hard voice that didn’t match the sneering face of the warlock they were impersonating. “I’ll have you know that a spot on the wall is premium property. The less fortunate sleep five to a bunk in the slave barracks on the ground level.”
“You’re kidding,” Iggs said.
“I wish I was,” Lys replied with a mirthless smile. “Welcome to the Middle Hells.”
“Middle Hells?” Bex repeated, confused. “I thought this was the Hell of Lust. Shouldn’t that be where you were banished to?”
“This is the Hell of Lust,” Lys said, waving the warlock’s arm at the giant space in front of them. “Or at least it used to be. This cavern was originally five separate caves. As the demon population grew, though, Gilgamesh decided that maintaining five individual Hells for the most commonly requested demon slaves after War was inefficient, so he combined our prisons into one giant cave and dubbed it the Middle Hells.”
“That sounds even less efficient,” Iggs argued. “Wasn’t he worried about rebellion?”
“No,” Lys said bitterly, “because the demons down here don’t rebel. We can’t when all our necks are bound with slave bandsandsin-iron collarsandwe’re forced to work sixteen hours a day on just enough food to keep us from actually dying.”They crossed the warlock’s arms over their chest. “There’s a reason so many demons volunteer to be slaves on Earth.”
Bex could see it. Again, she’d seen plenty of abused slaves, but even the worst warlock slave quarters hadn’t been this bleak. She could barely see the demons climbing over the walls below them through the grime, but the ones she could make out looked like skeletons with horns.
“How many demons are here?” she asked.
“Who knows?” Lys replied with a shrug. “It’s not like Gilgamesh posts his census data, but it’s a lot. The Middle Hells combined the Hells of Lust, Fear, Sorrow, Hate, Envy, and Greed. Hate’s not terribly popular for obvious reasons, but the rest are all considered useful slaves, so the warlocks make sure to keep our populations high.”
They frowned, tapping the blunt chin of their stolen face. “I’d estimate there’s around five hundred thousand demons in the Middle Hells at any given time. That number can dip if there’s been a famine or a plague recently, but it looks pretty full right now.”
It lookedhorrible. Bex still hadn’t caught a glimpse of the cavern’s floor through the haze of choking smoke, but she wasn’t holding out hope that it’d be better than the walls. Nothing about this place was acceptable, and the longer she looked at it, the more she wanted to burn it down.
“Let’s get going,” she growled. “Before I do something that blows the mission.”
Lys didn’t look like they’d mind that, but they followed their queen’s command, leading Bex by the collar as befit the slave she was pretending to be, with Kirok and Iggs, their two “guards,” following close behind. Nemini was probably close as well. As usual, though, Bex couldn’t spot her. She couldn’t see Boston or Bran either, which felt like a good sign. If half theirparty was so good at hiding that they didn’t even need disguises, maybe they could pull this off after all.
She’d thought they’d have to climb down one of the terrifying handhold paths the slaves had cut to access their vertical housing, but Lys led them to a switchback staircase a few feet down the ridge patch that Bex hadn’t noticed in the gloom. She supposed it made sense that the warlocks would have their own way down, but it still pissed her off that they’d carved this for themselves while forcing the slaves to climb slick handholds up a sheer cliff with no rope just to go to bed. She was still growling about the completely unnecessary cruelty of it all when they finally got low enough to see the floor through the smoke.
That stopped her short. She’d seen the torches glittering on the giant floor through the smoke, so she’d already guessed it was big, open, and flat, but this was the first time Bex realized it was flooded. The entire bottom of the city-sized cavern was covered in a foot of dark, sluggishly-flowing water with demons kneeling in it. They were chained together in long rows, doing something with their hands in the water while warlocks flanked by war-demon guards observed them from dry, elevated metal walkways. Bex was squinting through the smoke to try to see more when Iggs saved her the effort by just asking.
“What are they doing?”
“Making sin iron,” Lys replied without taking their eyes off the treacherously steep stairs. “It’s the only thing we do down here.”
Bex blinked in surprise. She’d always known sin iron was in the Hells, but she’d never thought about how. Now that she was seeing the process with her own eyes, it looked remarkably like what Ishtar’s demons had always been made to do. That dark water must be from the Rivers of Death she’d seen flowing into the Hells’ base, and the kneeling slaves were cleaning the sin out of it.
Back in the Riverlands, they would’ve drunk the water and removed the sins out that way. Here, though, they did it with their hands, waving their fingers through the dirty flow until their palms were coated in black sin residue. When their hands were full, they then turned and scraped the black gunk into a metal bucket shared by multiple slaves in the same area. These buckets were then collected by yet another slave, who ran it through the water toward the cavern’s center.
The smoke was too thick for Bex to see where they were taking it yet, but she could guess. The sin-collecting slaves were a mixed bag of Lust, Fear, Greed, Sorrow, Envy, and Hate demons, but they all dumped their sins into the same buckets. That fit the definition of sin iron—which was famously the amalgamation of all humanity’s evils—to a T. The buckets were almost certainly being taken to a kiln where their contents would be fired and pressed into actual sin-iron ingots. That would also help explain the thick smoke in this place. When she asked Lys about it, though, Kirok was the one who answered.
“There is no forging on this floor,” he explained authoritatively. “Sin collected from the Middle and Lower Hells is sent to the Upper Hells for processing. War demons are the only ones trusted enough to handle such work and hearty enough to survive it. The fumes from the processing of sin iron are quite toxic. Softer demons like Lust would perish if they attempted to forge it.”
“Soft, huh?” Lys growled, but Bex cut them off.
“What else do the war demons make?”
“Everything,” Kirok replied. “We forge all the metals used in Heaven and the materials that make the Anchors.”
“They also make the chains that hold us down and the war constructs that guard us,” Lys added bitterly. “And war demons wonder why the rest of us hate them.”
“We do not wonder,” Kirok said angrily. “We know exactly why we are despised, but what other demons fail to understand is that we are victims of this just as much as you are. Do you think welikechoking on toxic fumes in Gilgamesh’s factories and being forced to hurt our fellow demons?”
“Some of you seem to,” Lys said as they squared their warlock’s shoulders. “But we can argue about how I’m right later. We’re about to hit the slave floor, so shut up and get in character.”
Kirok growled deep in his chest, but thankfully for their mission—and his life expectancy given the obedience poison Adrian’s mother had painted on his skin—he did as he was told. Bex got into her role as well, trailing behind Lys’s warlock with her fake horns lowered as far as they would go. This made it much harder to walk down the final flight of neck-breakingly-steep stairs, but the rubber was about to hit the road on their disguises, and Bex was determined not to be the one who screwed up and got them killed.
