At least it was good and dark. As expected of a path made for warlocks, the switchback stairs let out right onto one of the elevated walkways that allowed the overseers to patrol the flooded floor without getting their feet wet. This meant the way forward was teeming with warlocks, but between the constant haze of smoke and the terrible light from the torches reflecting off the dirty water, no one gave their ragtag group a second glance. Anyone who did get in their way quickly got back out of it once Lys gave them the stink eye.
Bex didn’t know if that was because they were impersonating someone important or if her lust demon was just that scary, but being able to move forward without being stopped was an enormous relief. There were more guards than she’d expected after the complete nonresponse to theirmurderous entrance earlier, but nowhere near the number that would actually be needed to police so many demons.
Clearly, Gilgamesh had gotten comfortable with the idea that the Hells slaves wouldn’t rebel. That was a weakness Bex would absolutely be exploiting the moment she got her sword and fire back. First, though, they had to get out of here.
She wasn’t entirely sure how that was happening, to be honest. Lys was striding down the boardwalk like they owned it, but that was just how warlocks walked. Bex couldn’t see any actual destination, just more torches and demons kneeling miserably in filthy water. There were no buildings, no brightly lit areas, nothing that looked like an office or an elevator or anything that might get them closer to Heaven. She was starting to get really worried when a giant shape suddenly emerged from the pervasive wall of smoke.
It was a tower. A shining white, cylindrical tower the size of a skyscraper. Its golden doors were even with the metal walkways, but its base was set flush against the cavern’s floor, and its top went all the way to the ceiling. It looked like a white rod someone had driven straight through the middle of the Middle Hells, and inside of its smooth, completely soot-free white walls was an entire office building’s worth of warlocks. Bex could see them moving through the tower’s glass windows, and Lys sucked in a breath.
“There’s our exit,” they murmured, letting go of Bex’s collar to dig the white paper out of their pocket. “Everyone play it cool. I’ll do the talking.”
That was always the plan, but Iggs suddenly looked like a bug had crawled into his fake armor. “Canyou do the talking?” he whispered frantically. “I just realized, you killed your guy before he could get a word out. Do you even know what his voice sounds like?”
“Yes, because all warlocks sound like assholes,” Lys hissed back. “Nowshut up. Demon guards don’t talk. Just look at Kirok.”
Kirok was being the ideal of a silent war demon servant. His face looked so detached that Bex hardly recognized it, and his walk was the stiff gait of someone just going through the motions. It was a spectacular performance that Iggs couldn’t possibly copy, but he still tried his best. Bex leaned hard into her role as well, hunching her shoulders to make herself look as small and beaten down as possible—something that was depressingly easy now that her horns were gone—as she scrambled after Lys’s warlock toward the tower’s entrance.
As they got closer, Bex finally saw where all the sin was going. She hadn’t noticed them in the dark, but there were actually several black pipes running up the side of the blindingly white tower. Most of them seemed to be for river water, but the biggest, squarest one opened into a giant bin where all the runners she’d seen earlier were dumping their buckets of sin.
There was already a huge pile of black muddy-looking sin sitting at the bottom along with four tall demons with shovels who were mucking it out like a stable full of manure. They shoveled the sin into big metal troughs that were constantly being lifted on a conveyor into the pipe above, presumably for delivery to the forges in the Hell of War.
It was a simple system, but the amount they were moving was pretty incredible. The sin scrapings Bex had seen the demons wiping off their palms into the buckets had been tiny, but put it all together and the combined output was staggering. No wonder Heaven used sin iron for everything it did. They were making it quite literally by the bucketload.
Yet again, the idea of her people being worked to death and their sacred duty abused so Gilgamesh could have his toxic infrastructure was enough to make Bex see red, but what got herhardest were the demons who carried the sin in. She’d noticed them darting around collecting the buckets earlier, but now that she was closer, Bex saw that almost all of them were children. Skeletally thin, hollow-eyed children being forced to dump what were essentially buckets of food into a bin to be smelted down.
That pile of black mud might look unappetizing to Bex, but to demons who weren’t queens fueled by the fires of life, sinwasfood. This place was full of food, and the demons weren’t allowed to touch a crumb of it. She could see the hunger in the children’s eyes as they emptied their buckets, but even though the food was right there, right in reach without a single warlock in sight to guard it, not a single one of the runners tried to swipe a handful.
Bex couldn’t imagine fear strong enough to keep a starving child from reaching for food, but she hated it. She hated this whole ugly place where her people—Ishtar’s precious creations—were treated like sin-making machines. They slaved in silence, starved in fear, and worked until they died in an ugly, dark cavern that smelled of smoke and death.
And shehatedit.
“I know,” Lys whispered, reaching back to stop the growl Bex hadn’t realized she was making. “I feel the same, but we have to keep it together. We’re almost in.”
As always, Lys was right. They were on the final elevated boardwalk that led to the tower’s golden doors, which were properly lit for once with bright, sorcerous lanterns instead of smoky torches. That didn’t bode well for their costumes, but Lys didn’t hesitate. They just strode straight ahead, marching right up to the pair of war demons guarding the door like they meant to walk straight through them.
“You two,” they announced in a sharp, annoyed voice that, even if it wasn’t how the dead warlock actually sounded, matched Lys’s stolen body perfectly. “Out of the way.”
That probably would’ve worked on the kids they’d faced before, but these were mature soldiers with four arms and an apparently unflappable demeanor. Their faces stayed as still as actual bronze statues behind their golden visors, though Bex still swore she heard the taller one sigh.
“Writs are required for access, sir.”
Lys went deathly silent for a moment, then they dug into the white robes with the huff of a pompous man doing something he thought was excessively unnecessary. It was flawlessly acted, proof yet again that Lys was the best at what they did. The petty display of annoyance also kept the war demons’ eyes on them instead of Bex, Iggs, and Kirok, who were all much less good at this. Fortunately, the war demons didn’t even seem to suspect them. They mostly just looked bored, watching in long-suffering silence as Lys retrieved the gilt-edged, cuneiform-covered paper they’d taken from the dead warlock earlier, placed their thumb strategically over the bloodstained corner, and then shoved it at the taller war demon’s face.
“There,” they said impatiently. “Now open the damn door before I name you into doing it by way of a pirouette.”
Bex held her breath as the war demon looked over the paper clutched in Lys’s transformed hand. It must actually have been what he was looking for, though, because the guard stepped out of the way at once, opening the golden door and bowing his horns to Lys without another word.
“Finally,” Lys snapped as they stomped through. Bex was about to follow when one of the war demons reached out and grabbed her by the arm.
“Sir?”
“What?” Lys snarled, whirling around only to go still when they saw the demon holding Bex.
“There seems to be something wrong with your slave’s collar,” the guard explained quickly at Lys’s blistering look. “Would you like us to check her?”
“No, I would not,” Lys replied, pulling their warlock to his full height, which was nowhere near tall enough to look down on a war demon but still got the point across. “I wouldlikeyou to shut up and stop wasting my time. You’re both one word away from a write-up, so if you don’t want to go back to the forges, I suggest you learn your place.”
A write-up sounded like a pretty mild threat to Bex, but the war demon let go of her arm the moment Lys mentioned it, snapping back to his post like a spring.
