“I’m afraid that ship has already sailed,” Leander replied, pointing up through the broken tower at the enemy.
Iggs peeked back over the ledge with a curse. He already knew the Hells prince was back on his feet, a totally unfair move for someone who’d just had a knife put through his jugular, but there was more going on with him now than just ignoring deadly damage. The prince Iggs saw when he followed Leander’s pointing was noticeably larger now than he’d been when Lys attacked.
That wasn’t just a trick of perception. The prince’s height had visibly increased, and his chest had gotten so much wider that gaps were starting to open where the pieces of his armor came together. The overlapping golden scales that formed his breastplate started popping off as Iggs watched, revealing giant veins throbbing beneath his olive skin.
Whatever he was doing must’ve hurt because the prince was groaning deep in his throat, but the weird growth didn’t stop. He’d already doubled in size by the time Iggs turned to Leander and asked, “What in the Hells is going on?”
“It’s got nothing to do with the Hells,” Leander replied, never taking his eyes off his expanding brother. “It’s his weapon. The Princess of Hate is a double-edged sword. She’s the most unstable of all the Blades of Gilgamesh, but she’s also the most difficult to deal with, because every wound she takes makes her stronger. That same power extends to her prince, which is why the Prince of Hate is usually a forward-facing combat position. The more you hurt him, the stronger and bigger he becomes.”
“That sounds pretty hateful,” Iggs agreed, shoving the half-empty minigun back into his bag. “So how do we stop him?”
“I’m not sure we can anymore,” Leander said, looking more nervous than Iggs had ever seen a prince get. “The Blade of Hate requires a certain level of abuse to activate, which is why I was focusing on attacks that pushed back rather than maimed. I’d hoped to neutralize the princess before that idiot got brave enough to grab her, but it seems the damage from your companion’s surprise attack pushed him over the line.” He pressed his already thin lips tighter. “In this state, it might not be possible to stop them without the Queen of Wrath’s assistance.”
“Then we’d better find a way to make it possible,” Iggs said, grabbing a bandage roll from his kit to tie Lys, who’d mercifully passed out at some point during this conversation, to his back. “Bex is busy with her own problems right now, but thatdoesn’t mean we’re off the hook. Our queen gave us a duty: keep the prince busy so Desh’s group can get the keys and Boston can rescue Adrian. If killing him is too hard, we’ll make do with stalling. So long as we keep him off of everyone else until the tower is secure, we still win.”
“That’s a very loose definition,” Leander said sourly. “But I don’t have a better plan, so how do you propose that we advance?”
It was pretty surreal having the prince who’d kicked his ass asking him for tactical advice, but Iggs had learned to be a soldier the hard way, and he rolled with the curveball like the seasoned professional his queen expected him to be.
“Our first priority is to get him away from the others,” he said as he dug into Solomon’s Armory. “So let’s try kiting him down the stairs.”
The prince scowled in confusion. “Kiting?”
“It means baiting the enemy into chasing us without running so fast that we lose him,” Iggs explained quickly. “If we do it right, we might be able to trick him into following us all the way back to that Hell where you were trapped.”
Leander scowled harder. “Won’t that get us trapped as well?”
“Yeah, but it’s better than dying,” Iggs said as he felt his way through the knapsack’s expansive selection of military hardware. “If you’ve got a better idea, say it quick. I don’t know how long it takes your ugly brother to hulk out, but he’s gotta be nearly done with—”
Like he’d been listening for his cue, the Prince of Hate chose that moment to finish his gross metamorphosis. He looked more like a transformed wrath demon than a human now, but his scream rang with hatred instead of anger as he ripped the last bits of broken golden armor off his giant body and flung them at his enemy.
Iggs ducked the busted golden chest plate easily, which was how he didn’t see the sword coming in behind it. The white Blade of Hate wasn’t bloated like her prince, but something must’ve changed for her as well, because she was flying like a mad hornet. She whipped at the end of her chain like a kite in high wind, shooting up to the end of her tether only to immediately slam back down like a wrecking ball. Each hit left a crater the size of Iggs, but, by a miracle of Ishtar, he managed to dodge every time, running down the giant spiral staircase toward the Lowest Hells with Lys’s still-bleeding body lashed to his back and Leander hot on his heels.
The light got dimmer quickly as they descended. By the time they passed the tunnel where they’d come in, Iggs could barely see two steps ahead. The sword was still destroying everything she hit, but the crashes seemed to be getting farther behind them. Iggs was starting to think they might have to slow down to keep the enemy baited when something enormous slammed into his back.
It felt like he’d been hit by a falling tree. For a breathless second, Iggs was certain he was dead and simply didn’t know it yet, but no white sword exploded through the front of his chest. He didn’t even see any black blood on his shirt other than what Lys had already dumped there. He was still trying to figure out what in the world had hit him when he heard Leander’s voice yelling beside him, and then the last of the light cut out.
“That should buy us some time,” Leander panted, summoning the sorcerous blue fire he’d used earlier to examine something that looked like, but couldn’t actually be, a giant steel umbrella. It covered their heads like a pavilion, but the strangest thing was that its edges connected to walls. Big stone ones that muffled the sound of the Sword of Hate bashing against the outside. Together with the steel umbrella, the walls formed apillbox that completely surrounded the stairs where Iggs and Leander were standing, sealing them off from attack.
“Don’t look so worried,” Leander chided, patting Iggs on the shoulder. “We’re inside the protection of my Seven Walled City. Even the Coward Queen going at full burn took a while to chew through these walls. Did I get the Emphatics of Steel Skin on you in time?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Iggs said as he pushed himself back up, “but considering I’m not dead, I’m going with ‘yes.’ So what’s your plan now that we’re in here?”
The prince’s gaunt face grew grim in the eerie blue light. “I don’t have one,” he admitted. “Walls only delay problems, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I thought we were outrunning them adequately, but then the prince threw his sword. I would have put a protection up earlier, but I didn’t realize Hate’s chain was long enough to go across the center of the stairwell until her blade was practically in your back.” His frown deepened. “If they can attack us from so far away, I don’t think the kiting plan is going to work.”
“In that case,” said Iggs, taking the Armory of Solomon’s knapsack off his shoulder so he could dig through it properly, “it’s time to move to Plan B.”
“Don’t say that like you actually have a Plan B,” Leander snapped. “This whole mission has fallen apart! I gave us a decent chance when it was four on one against the princess, but the fully manifested Prince of Hateandhis sword against the two of us? While carrying an injured demon?” He shook his head so hard that his hair—which had the same dark curls as Adrian’s—flew. “It’s impossible. There is literally no way left for us to win.”
“Not with that attitude,” Iggs said, struggling to picture exactly what he wanted as he shoved his hands deeper into the endless magical arsenal. “But you’re on our team now, and the number one rule of running with Bex is that we don’t quit. IfPlan A isn’t working, we move on to Plans B and C. We’ll go through the whole damn alphabet as many times as we have to until we find what we need, but we don’t give up while we’ve still got people in the field. That’s howmyqueen does things.”
“With respect,” Leander said through gritted teeth, “your queen has been synonymous with pointless, stubborn stupidity since before I was born. Even Mara, who loved her best, called the Queen of Wrath a bullheaded fool.”
“So what?” Iggs snapped, grinning as Solomon’s Armory finally got the picture and coughed up four large bricks of silver-gray, plasticky-looking clay. “Fools are the ones who come up with all the brilliant solutions that sensible people who knew better can’t imagine. Also,with respect, you Heavenly blowhards have never been much good at stopping us, so unless you’ve got something constructive to add, I’d thank you to kindly shut up and let me work.”
Prince Leander looked mortally offended. To Iggs’s great surprise, though, he did as he was told, leaning silently against the fortifications he’d conjured out of thin air while Iggs cut the gray clay into pieces with his combat knife. When all four blocks were diced, Iggs worked the moldable pieces into putty before sticking them on the wall of the pillbox, covering the curved stone from top to bottom until the inside of the bunker looked like a gray version of a mud dauber’s nest.
“What is that?” Leander asked when his curiosity finally overpowered his stuck-up prince-ness. “Some kind of witchcraft?”
