Since the space reserved for the chains apparently took up the entirety of the palace’s ground floor, they ended up leaving through a side door that let out onto a balcony overlooking the White City. It would’ve been the perfect place for a fountain and a formal garden in a normal castle, but this was Gilgamesh’s tightly controlled land of the dead. Everything down to the paving stones was sealed tight and bone-dry without so much as a hint of greenery.
It was still a nice spot, though. Adrian hadn’t realized how desperately he’d missed being outdoors until he felt the gentle breeze on his skin and saw the blue sky overhead. Both were fake, of course, but it still felt good to get out of that damned mausoleum, especially when he noticed the dome of Heavenshifting toward the bright-blue velvet color that passed for night up here.
“How far is the entrance to the Hells?” he asked as the princess dragged him down the steps and across the enormous, white-paved courtyard toward the wall that separated Gilgamesh’s palace from the rest of the city.
“Not as far as the outer walls,” she replied. “But it’s not a short walk. The Hells are where the gods’ monsters are imprisoned. The Eternal King would’ve put it outside the city if he could have, but the guards need to be able to get to work, and the sin iron must still be shipped in, of course.”
She pointed across the courtyard at a line of stoic-looking war demons pushing several dozen carts stacked high with ingots of familiar, coal-black metal through the palace’s gate, and Adrian whistled.
“That looks like alotof sin iron,” he said, leaning in for a closer look. “Is that normal?”
“I… I’m not sure,” the princess admitted, lowering her head. “I’m as new here as you are, and the Crown Princess’s training didn’t include things like sin-iron production.” Her golden eyes slid back to the carts. “It does seem like a large amount, though.”
It was tonnage. Now that they were nearly to the gate themselves, Adrian could see that the train of war-demon-pulled carts extended all the way down the fancy white street ahead of them. There had to be two hundred of them just in this area alone, and they weren’t even close to the entrance to the Hells yet. The bricks of sin iron also looked even darker than Adrian remembered, though that could’ve been an optical illusion caused by the unnatural brightness of Heaven.
“What’s Gilgamesh doing with it all?” he asked as they passed the carts. “Building another Anchor?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know, my prince,” the princess answered. “But I’m sure your father will tell you all about it when you’re his new Crown Prince.”
Adrian didn’t know about that. From what he’d seen, Gilgamesh never explained anything to anyone unless he was getting something out of it. He’d been a font of information back when he was trying to bring Adrian over to his side, but the moment his youngest son was fully under his control, he’d run off to his own projects without so much as a goodbye.
Not that Adrian minded being neglected, but he still found the insincerity annoying. At the very least, he wished someone would tell him what his father was doing. He’d thought it was odd from the beginning that Gilgamesh had made such a big deal about the Queen of Pride’s horns only to completely ignore them the moment Adrian was locked in, but what was all this sin iron for? And why were the Anchors still locked? Bex’s rebellion had been defeated, so why was Heaven still acting like a castle under siege? What was the point of all this chaos?
Adrian didn’t know, and that made him more nervous than anything else because he hadn’t been lying when he’d told the princess his father was smart. If Gilgamesh was doing something that didn’t make sense, that just meant Adrian wasn’t seeing the whole picture yet. If he didn’t figure it out in time, Gilgamesh could blindside them again just like he’d done before, but it had been impossible to investigate from inside his locked room. This trip was his first chance to actually learn something, so Adrian kept his eyes and ears open as he followed the princess through the palace gate into Heaven’s White City.
It was a lot more confusing than he’d expected. The roads had looked so straight and orderly from his window, but once Adrian got down in them, the fact that every corner and building looked exactly the same turned navigation into a frustrating memory puzzle. Everywhere he looked, Adrian saw Heavenlydenizens in the same white robes sitting on nearly identical balconies or lounging in overly decorated living rooms filled with the same white furniture as every other house. Even the demons that served them were all dressed in the identical white uniforms, turning the entire city into a big white blur.
It was so different from what he’d expected. He’d thought this place would be a wonderland of dazzlingly beautiful mansions filled with five thousand years’ worth of hoarded treasures just like his father’s island, but every single house looked the same. Adrian knew Heaven was infamous for falling into trends, but this was ridiculous. How could a city full of immortal people with effectively infinite money end up with such boring, cookie-cutter houses?
It was so odd that eventually Adrian gave up all pretense and started peering through windows to see if the good stuff was just stashed farther in. Every room he managed to get a look into, though, had the same white walls, white furniture, and occasional gold accents. It all looked exactly like his own bedroom in the palace, but while it made sense for Gilgamesh’s base of power to have a unified style, the fact that the same look continued through every single house in the city was just creepy.Socreepy that, after ten blocks of it, Adrian felt compelled to ask.
“Why does everything look the same here?”
“Because unity is beautiful,” the princess answered, waving her hand at the elegant, white, three-story townhouse next to them that looked exactly the same as every other elegant, white, three-story townhouse on the street. “The Eternal King wants his people to dwell in beauty always. Also, white is the color of purity. If corruption of the gods were ever to resurface, having a pure, blank canvas makes it easy to spot and eradicate.”
Adrian rolled his eyes. He should’ve known it’d come back to the gods.EverythingGilgamesh did came back to the gods. He’d complained about the obsession himself back when he’dbeen pretending to be a loving father and not the world’s magical tyrant, but Adrian was only now beginning to understand just how much effort the king put into it. There was probably some palace official whose job it was to go through people’s houses and report any walls that weren’t white enough.
Again, howanyonecould call this place Heaven with a straight face was a mystery. This was the fancy part of town near the castle too. The buildings got even more samey as they moved on to the apartment blocks by the outer walls. The big, multi-unit structures were still well-appointed and stuffed with fancy furniture, but the fact that there were haves and have-nots even up here proved that everything Gilgamesh said about fairness and freeing humanity from the favoritism of the gods was bullshit, because he was doing the exact same thing. This wasn’t Heaven. It was a company town, a place where all the cronies and bootlickers showed off how important they were by having two more rooms full of identical white furniture than the guy down the street. The competitive conformity was so oppressive, it was actually a relief when the entrance to the Hells finally came into view.
“At last,” Adrian said with a smile. “I thought my brain was going to die.”
The princess gave him a skeptical look, which was warranted considering what they were walking toward.
The gateway to the Hells stood at the end of the street in front of them like a black monolith. It was made entirely from sin iron and shaped like a cube. Its walls were decorated with carvings of screaming demons being tormented, but its giant doors were dominated by a three-story-tall image of Gilgamesh dressed in full regalia with the crown of Anu on his head and the sword of Ishtar held ready in his hand to strike down any demon foolish enough to defy his authority.
Aside from that, there was nothing. Adrian didn’t know if it was for security reasons or if even Gilgamesh couldn’t find someone willing to live next to the Hells, but the black cube was surrounded by a hundred feet of empty paving on all sides. The only structures near it were four white obelisks capped with a golden ring containing a giant golden eyeball. They looked like bigger, freestanding versions of the golden eye that used to be in the wall at the entrance to the Anchor’s back end before Iggs had blown it up with grenades. The closest one actually spun around to watch Adrian and the princess, the interlocking rings of its golden pupil constricting with a metallicclick click clickas it zoomed in on them.
Other than the watching eyes, Adrian didn’t see any security, but he did see alotof demons. This was where the train of war demons pushing the sin-iron carts started. They were all coming out through a smaller door hidden inside the carving of Gilgamesh. When Adrian started toward it, though, the princess grabbed the sleeve of his black coat.
“You can’t go in yet, my prince,” she reminded him. “We have to wait for Prince Demetrios to escort us.”
Adrian sighed. He’d been hoping she’d forgotten that detail in her rush to get this finished, but he should’ve known better. Even the real Bex was a stickler when it came to following procedure, and while Adrian probably could’ve convinced her to at least go through the door with him, it didn’t seem wise to step out of line when the golden eyes were staring straight at him.
He looked around for a bench or something they could sit on while they waited since his legs still ached from climbing all those stairs, but there was nothing. Other than the eye-topped obelisks, the courtyard was completely empty. So, since he didn’t want to lean against the white apartment buildings like a loitering teen, Adrian locked his knees and reached into his pocket to check his finding spell.
It was still twitching like mad when he touched it. The charm had had time to fully cure by this point, the sap and fur merging together until it felt like he was touching an actual tiny cat with very rigid posture. If he wrapped his hand all the way around it, Adrian could feel the line running from the cat’s carved nose to his target, who was deep underground below him and several hundred feet to his left. She wasn’t walking anymore, but now that he was out of the palace, Adrian swore he could feel the rise and fall of her breathing through the cat’s hard ribs.
A dangerous bubble of hope swelled up inside his chest. He’d been moving so fast, he hadn’t stopped to think about what finding another queen might actually mean. If she was really as alive as his charm made it feel, then she had to be in a cell of some sort. He hadn’t thought Gilgamesh would be stupid enough to keep queens near their subjects, but the Hellshadbeen created to imprison demons, and this queen was hornless.
