“Good,” Lys growled, giving the guard a final long glare before snapping the warlock’s fingers in Bex’s face. “Let’s go.”
Bex obeyed at once, scuttling behind Lys with her face parallel to the ground both because that was what an actual terrified slave would do and because it kept the headband with her fake horns out of the guards’ line of sight. Iggs and Kirok tromped in right behind her, which was scary in its own way since the gaps in their ill-fitting armor were a lot more obvious in the bright white light of the tower. They were also all carrying bags, which Bex realized belatedly wasn’t something people did here.
Yet again, shereallywished they’d had more time to put into their costumes, but there was nothing to be done about it now. They were already walking into the brightly lit tower’s main floor, which was set up like an airport security checkpoint. The whole thing was one big circular room with a long table in the middle where an important-looking warlock was sitting. Behind him was the entrance to a grand spiral staircase that went up the center of the tower like a corkscrew. The spiral was open in the middle, giving Bex a view of what had to be thirty floors of white-robed warlocks working at desks, talking by windows,or managing huge racks of spare chains. The quiet murmur of conversation and shuffling papers even sounded like an office, but while it was obvious that this was the stairway to Heaven they’d been looking for, Bex didn’t see any stairs going down.
That was odd. She’d heard Kirok mention the Lower Hells earlier, but while this was clearly the main stairwell, there seemed to be no way to get to the lower floors. Bex supposed that didn’t really matter since they were going up, not down, but it still seemed strange. She was wondering if there was another staircase hidden somewhere else when Lys’s warlock came to a sudden stop.
Bex followed suit immediately, slamming her boots into the ground six inches behind the heels of Lys’s shapeshifted white boots. When Lys didn’t start moving againanddidn’t say anything, Bex lifted her eyes off the floor she’d been studying—both because it was strange and because she couldn’t look at anything else while pretending to be a meek, downtrodden slave—to see a man coming down the spiral stairs.
A young-looking man in golden armor with olive skin, dark curling hair, and gleaming, mirrored eyes.
“Shit,” Iggs whispered before Lys frantically waved him back into character.
Bex didn’t see the point. That was obviously a prince, which meant they were screwed. The warlock at the security table was already leaping out of his chair to greet him. Lys took advantage of the lapse to whirl around and start marching everyone back out the way they’d come. They’d almost made it to the door when Bex glanced over her shoulder to make sure the prince hadn’t spotted them and saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks.
The unknown prince was still busy talking to the security warlock, but he was close enough for Bex to see the black chain dangling from his golden gauntlet. It looked like a sin-iron dogleash, and at the end of it was an all-white woman with a black cage wrapped around her carved ivory head.
The sight sent a shiver down Bex’s spine. She’d never heard of a restrained princess before. Aside from the square of blue silk that had been draped over the Princess of Sorrow’s shoulders, she’d never seen one wear anything other than the clothes Gilgamesh had carved onto their bodies. But while Sorrow had seemed to treasure her blue shawl, this princess looked like a muzzled dog.
In addition to the cage over her face, there was a thick sin-iron collar around her neck where the prince’s leash attached, along with manacles at her wrists and ankles that were chained together to inhibit her movement. That was why she’d lagged behind her prince on the stairs, but Bex didn’t understand the point. With the exception of War, who was crazy in her own way, every princess she’d ever met had been a slavishly loyal sycophant who’d happily die for their prince. Bex didn’t know what this one had done to deserve the prison treatment, but the disconnect gave her hope. If this princesswasn’ta brainwashed Gilgamesh fangirl, maybe she would help them.
This wild optimism was still running away with her when the princess turned her caged head and met Bex’s eyes. The moment their gazes locked, Bex knew that she’d been wrong. This princess hadn’t been chained to keep her loyal. The restraints were there because she was insane.
Her eyes were so wide they looked like two golden balls rattling inside a carved white skull, and her face—which should have been lovely—was a flat, expressionless mask. All of Gilgamesh’s princesses were doll-like, but this was the first one Bex had seen that actually felt like an inanimate object. Her blank face and jerky, hobbled movements were so deep in the Uncanny Valley that just looking at her sent shivers running all over Bex’s body, but the true terror came from her eyes.They were still huge and unfocused, but the interlocking golden rings that made up her eyeballs were spinning like wheels about to come off their tracks. They were turning so fast that Bex could actually hear the high-pitched squeal of the gold grinding against itself like the world’s most expensive cement saw. This went on for a full five seconds, and then, all at once, the princess’s hard, emotionless face split into a jaw-unhinging grin behind her sin-iron cage.
The moment Bex saw it happen, she knew. She didn’t knowhow.She was a nameless, hornless shadow with a literal void inside her. She should’ve been as invisible as Nemini, but the moment the princess smiled at her, Bexknewshe’d been recognized. Maybe the princess remembered Rebexa’s face from the old days, or maybe it was just a lingering echo of the instinct that allowed Bex to recognize her sisters even after they’d been reduced to severed hands.
Whatever it was, Bex didn’t want to stick around for it. She grabbed the back of Lys’s robes and booked it, shooting past Iggs and Kirok to kick open the tower exit so hard, she knocked both of the war-demon guards outside into the water.
“What are you doing?” Lys shrieked as Bex dragged them back onto the elevated walkway. “The prince isright there!”
“He’s about to be right on top of us,” Bex hissed, looking over her shoulder to make sure Iggs and Kirok were following. “His princess already spotted me. We have to lose them fast, or we’re dead. Nowrun!”
She yelled the last word as hard as she could, but her order was still drowned out by the horrific, predatory screech as the chained princess exploded through the golden door behind them. The sudden motion must’ve snatched her chain right out of the prince’s hand, because Bex saw him stumble in surprise before the gold door slammed shut again, trapping them outside with the mad princess.
“Oh Hells,” Lys muttered, jerking out of Bex’s grasp to start running on their own power. “Which one is that?”
“No idea,” Bex said, running faster. “But she recognized me for sure.”
“That is suchbullshit!” Iggs cried as he darted ahead to take point. “I can’t even tell what you are anymore, and you’re myqueen! How is some psycho-looking princess we’ve never met able to recognize you when I can’t?”
“Forget about that,” Lys snapped, looking around at the slave floor as it flew by. “Where’s Nemini? She’s supposed to be scouting ahead to warn us about crap like this!”
Almost as if she’d been waiting for her cue, there was a crash behind them, followed by the mad princess’s hawklike scream. When Bex looked over her shoulder, the chained princess was down with Nemini on her back. That was usually a fight-ender, but Nemini’s normally emotionless face looked as freaked out as Bex felt. She let go of the princess a second later, vanishing into the smoky dark only to instantly reappear on the walkway in front of Iggs.
“We have to get off the main path,” the void demon ordered, grabbing a very startled Iggs by the arm and dragging him off the walkway into the water where the slaves were working. “This way. Boston’s preparing a diversion.”
“Good work,” Bex said, following them off the edge with a gasp of relief. She’d completely forgotten about Adrian’s cat and broom in the chaos, but she wasn’t surprised to hear they already had something prepared. Boston wasalwaysprepared. Sure enough, a few seconds after Nemini mentioned his name, a mist began to boil up from the water at their feet. It rose around them like a wall of smoke, making the demon slaves—who’d been frantically trying to get out of their way—yelp in surprise.
It was the first sound Bex had heard them make, but she didn’t have time to reassure them. She was already charging intothe fog, following Nemini’s dark shape through the water, which was only calf-deep but bitingly cold. The chill soaked through her boots and turned her feet numb in an instant, but Bex shook it off and kept running, leaping over the rows of kneeling slaves like hurdles as she, Lys, Iggs, and Kirok ran in a zigzag pattern that would hopefully get them lost in the fog.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” Lys said angrily as they shed their warlock disguise and returned to their true, winged form. “I’m going to fly up and check where we are.”
“Don’t go too high,” Bex ordered.
The magical fog was so thick that she couldn’t even see Lys nod, only hear the beat of their wings as they flew up into the air only to dart right back down again.
“Oh yeah, she’s still following,” they said in a shaky voice as they swooped in to glide beside Bex.
