Herstolenhand.
“Give it back!” she screamed, leaping on the princess with her knife raised over her head like the villain in a slasher flick.
Despite her blind rage, or maybe because of it, it was a good swing. Bex hit the white statue square in the chest, but unlike the original, this Rebexa was made of carved bone, not flesh and blood. Even when she stabbed with all her might, all Bex managed was to break the tip off her steel knife. The golden-eyed princess didn’t flinch. She just grabbed Bex’s knife hand with her carved one and peeled her fingers back, forcing the actual Queen of Wrath to drop her broken weapon in the murky water between their feet.
Bex didn’t care. “Give me back my sword, you fake!” she screamed in the princess’s face. “Drox ismyweapon! You haveno right!”
“I have every right,” the princess snarled back, twisting Bex’s arm until she cried out in pain. “I’mRebexa now, loyal servant of the true king and beloved consort to Prince Adrian!”
“You’re a puppet!” Bex yelled, thrashing like an eel in a desperate attempt to free her arm, which the princess was about to twist out of its socket. “Gilgamesh only made you so he could steal my Blade of Wrath, but Drox willneverbe yours, and Adrian doesn’t give a shit about you!”
“Don’t speak of things you know nothing about,” the princess ordered as she hooked her other arm around Bex’s neck to stop her thrashing. “Rebexa the Bonfire is the property of Heaven now. Everything that gave you worth—your name, your crown, your sword, your prince—belongs to Gilgamesh, and he gave them all to me. That makesmethe Queen of Wrath, but I didn’t want that prison sentence. Who’d choose to live their life chained to a bunch of dirty, helpless slaves if they had any other option?”
She tightened the arm she’d wrapped around Bex’s throat, lifting the actual queen off her feet and turning her around to face the closest knot of terrified demons huddling at the end of their chain.
“Look how they cower,” the princess sneered. “And to think these were once Ishtar’s creations, the famous army of the Riverlands. Now they’re just a bunch of dirty, snivelingbeasts.” She kicked her carved foot, slinging a grimy wave of freezing black water across the hunkered demons.
“Is this what you died all those times for?” she shouted, kicking again. “Thesecowards? Thistrash? They’re not even real living creatures! They’re pond scum, bottom-feeders bred to eat the sin out of Ishtar’s precious rivers. You only fought for them because the gods gave you no other choice, but Gilgamesh setmefree.”
She stopped twisting Bex’s arm and whirled her around, using her sorcerous body’s superior strength to grab the flesh-and-blood version by the throat and hoist her up until Bex’s combat boots were kicking an inch above the black water.
“My blessed king removed the burden of Ishtar’s endless labor from my shoulders,” the princess said in a grateful voice. “He’s done more for me in one week than your ‘divine’ mother has for you in a hundred and ninety-eight lifetimes! Thanks to the benevolence of Gilgamesh, I have no more shackles, no more endless duty. I’m free to live asIchoose. Free to serve the brilliant Prince Adrian, whom Gilgamesh honors above all his other sons! Free to live my days in peace and splendor! I’m the happy ending the ever-loyal Rebexadeserved, while you’re just the scraps of meat she left behind.”
The princess flashed a twisted version of Bex’s own smile. “That’s why you can’t stand the sight of me,” she said, pulling Bex closer. “I’m the incarnation of everything you always secretly wanted to be: unburdened, responsible for nothing, free to put the desires of my own heart first. I live in an eternal Heaven and answer to only two men, while you’re forced to belly-crawl through the Hells in the doomed service of thousands. You have always and will always be a tragedy, Ashes of Rebexa, but I’m not you. I’mbetter, yet another work of the gods perfected by Gilgamesh’s brilliance.” Her smile grew sweeter. “You should praise him for his benevolence.”
“I’llneverpraise him!” Bex snarled, digging her five remaining fingers into the hand the princess was using to holdher throat, but not to pry it off. The whole time the princess had been spewing her pompous propaganda, Bex had been going for the lump of Drox’s ring under the princess’s glove. She could feel the familiar smoothness of his black metal band like a promise under the silk, but no matter how hard Bex called out to him in her mind, she got only silence. His ring wasn’t even warm under the fabric because the princess had no body heat. She was just an ivory statue, a literal mouthpiece carved by Gilgamesh to spout his self-servingbullshit. Bex was dead certain about that last part, too, because there was no other way something containing a piece of her would ever spew suchcrap.
Realizing that made Bex feel a lot better about the other princesses she’d destroyed, but it did nothing to help her current situation. She’d been counting on her sword to even the power imbalance, but whatever Gilgamesh had done to make Drox sit quietly on the princess’s stolen finger made him deaf to Bex’s calls. He probably couldn’t even see her since divine weapons only recognized demons by their names, and Bex didn’t have one of those right now. That made her as invisible to Drox as Nemini had always been, but what was she going to do? The princess might be a carved doll in a stupid dress, but she was still stronger, faster, tougher, heavier, and in possession of two working hands.
That put her miles above Bex’s present state, but what else was new? Up until this last summer, Bex had always been the underdog, and she still knew how to fight like one. She’d been focusing on getting Drox, but he wasn’t responding and she was almost out of air, so Bex switched tactics and hooked her boot behind the princess’s knees instead. She swung her body weight back at the same time, using her foot like a lever to force the princess off-balance and drop them both back into the water.
They landed with Bex on the bottom yet again, but she was ready for it this time. The moment they splashed into thefreezing river, Bex’s hand dropped to the floor to start searching for a chain.
There had to be one. The sin production floor had been a grid of demons chained together into work gangs when she’d walked through earlier. The slaves the princess had just been disparaging were still cowering only a few feet away, so the chain that tied them to the ground had to be—
Yes!
A rush of victory shot through Bex’s body as her fingers closed around something heavy and metal and fixed to the ground. It was hard to feel the actual links through all the slimy, built-up sin grime, but ithadto be a chain.
Sure enough, when Bex yanked her arm out of the murky water, a black chain was clutched in her fist. It was just a piece of the larger tether that locked the closest line of slaves in position, but there was still enough slack for Bex to reach her arms around the princess like she was giving her a hug. She slammed the stump of her right arm into the back of the statue’s head, throwing Gilgamesh’s weapon off-balance while her still-working left hand looped the slimy black chain around the princess’s neck.
The moment the noose was in place, Bex yanked it tight. The princess pulled back with a shriek, lifting Bex off the ground with her as she tried to rip the chain off, but Bex didn’t let go. She just planted her boots against the princess’s stomach and pulled, using her whole body to keep the chain too tight for the princess to dig her fingers under.
That worked for a solid five seconds before the princess realized what was going on and stopped tugging on the chain to slam her fist into Bex instead. She hit the true queen hard in the stomach, knocking her out of her brace. She stomped on her arm next, grinding her carved white foot with its gold-embossed sandal into Bex’s wrist to force her hand open and make her letgo. The slimy black chain was still looped around the princess’s neck, but its hold was getting looser and looser as Bex’s grip began to slip. She was about to lose it altogether when the chain suddenly pulled tight again.
It wasn’t Bex’s doing. She’d been working with the part of the chain that was attached to the floor, which was now falling limp as her broken fingers finally lost their grip. The pressure keeping the princess in a choke hold came from the other side of the line where the slaves who had been shivering in the dark were now on their feet, pulling at the chain that bound them together with all their might.
Like all the slaves Bex had seen down here, they were thin and exhausted-looking, but there were a lot of them. When they pulled on the chain together, their combined force was enough to lift the kicking princess off the ground. She was thrashing her feet in the water as she grabbed at her noose, but the chain was slick with sin from so many years under the river. No matter which way her fingers bent, she couldn’t seem to get a grip on the slippery links, and Bex saw her chance.
“Keep going!” she yelled, grabbing her end of the chain again with her still-healing hand. “Pull!”
The demons were already on it. The moment Bex shouted, they moved as one, using the combined weight of their bodies to yank the slimy chain until the princess was dragged off her feet. This meant Bex couldn’t keep pulling without risking a kick to the head, but it was fine. The end of the chain that wasn’t attached to the slaves was locked into the Hells’ stone floor by a sin-iron bolt tough enough to hold down a whole string of raging demons. Even a princess wasn’t strong enough to pull it out, especially when her smooth-carved ivory feet kept slipping in the muck that covered the bottom of the slave floor. No matter how hard she thrashed, so long as the slaves kept the line pulledtight, the princess couldn’t get enough leverage to stand back up, and that gave Bex an idea.
“Keep it up!” she yelled as she dropped to her knees, scraping her fingers through the muck at the bottom of the flooded floor for something she could use. Eventually, her hand came up with a foot-long bar of metal scrap. It looked like a piece of the warlocks’ elevated walkways that had fallen off centuries ago, but it could’ve been Excalibur from the way Bex whooped. Clutching her new weapon like a spear, she ran back around to the side of the princess the slaves were pulling on and shoved the scrap metal through the spot where the chain noose crossed over itself. When it was good and tangled in the links, Bex turned the black bar like a crank, using the improved grip it gave to twist the chain loop around the princess’s neck even tighter.
The fake Bex screamed as the slimy black metal dug even harder into her carved throat. They couldn’t actually choke her out since carved idols didn’t need to breathe, but every material had a breaking point. Since the slaves’ chains were made from the same sin iron Gilgamesh used to bind the Wheel of Reincarnation, Bex was betting the princess would snap first, and sure enough, her throat was already starting to splinter.
By the time Bex turned her scrap metal bar five times, everything from the bottom of the princess’s white chin to the tops of her graceful shoulders was covered in spidering, hair-thin cracks. She was screaming loud enough to make Bex’s ears bleed, a real trick for somebody who had no lungs, but no matter how hard she thrashed, she couldn’t escape. Every time she got a hand on Bex, the queen kicked it away and cranked her improvised winch again, twisting the sin-iron chain noose tighter and tighter, smaller and smaller until, with the gunshot sound of breaking porcelain, the princess’s white neck shattered.
