“If you two are finished chatting,” the prince said, tapping his foot irritably on the broom’s beak.
“Right,” Bex said, dropping into a crouch. “Let’s go.”
Adrian nodded and tapped his foot on Bran’s back. The broom surged forward the second he gave the signal, shooting over Nemini’s head like a raven-beaked arrow into the rapidly filling cavern of the darkest, lowest Hell.
CHAPTER 16
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SINCE BEX HAD PUTout her bonfire to avoid confusing the Pride demons desperately swimming toward Nemini, they were soon flying in the dark. Leander immediately summoned the blue flames he’d used to light their way before in the Founders’ Tunnels, but his sorcery barely penetrated the deep blackness of the flooded cavern. It wasn’t the all-consuming void Bex had fallen through a few hours ago, but the walls and ceiling of the cavern were still caked in eons of black, built-up sin, and the water was even darker. The flood was so filthy that it struggled to reflect light, leaving them flying over a choppy darkness that looked more like soot than liquid.
“This is dangerous,” Bex muttered, squinting through the inky void. “I’m normally great in the dark, but I can’t see past Bran’s beak right now. How do we know we’re not about to fly into a wall?”
“Because Father wouldn’t hide them by a wall,” Leander replied, holding his blue flames with one hand while he clutched the pointing princess hand Adrian had made for him in the other. “Turn two degrees to the right.”
Bex couldn’t see Adrian’s face through the pitch-blackness, but she still knew he was scowling as he steered his broom in the direction Leander demanded.
“You know, it wouldn’t kill you to say pleas—"
“There!” Leander cried, throwing out his blue-flame-wreathed hand. “Seven Walled City!”
A huge splash sounded through the darkness ahead of them, forcing Adrian to yank his broom to a stop before they crashed. He made it just in time, landing Bran’s raven on the top of one of the giant stone rings Bex remembered from her fight with Leander on the chain. The prince had already vaulted off, his body vanishing instantly into the sucking dark.
“Light!” he yelled impatiently.
“I don’t take orders from princes,” Bex snapped, peering over the edge of the broom to try to get an idea of where they were. She thought it was near the back of the Hell, but they’d been flying blind through the dark, so who could really say? The bonfire she’d given Nemini was just a tiny star in the distance, though, and she didn’t hear any demons splashing through the water.
Bex hoped that was because they’d all swum to safety already and not because they’d drowned. Whatever the reason, there didn’t seem to be any demons who might get confused in the immediate vicinity, so Bex took a chance and lit herself up, filling the flooded cavern with warm, brilliant light.
The sight waiting for her when she could see again was both exactly and nothing like she’d expected. She’d been right—theywerealmost at the back of the cavern—but it was much farther away than she’d anticipated. The Hell of Pride actually narrowed to a point back here, meaning they really would’ve flown into a wall if they’d gone even slightly off course. Bex didn’t see any horned bodies floating in the water, which was a huge relief, but she also didn’t see what Leander had stopped them for. There were no landmarks, no monuments, no entrance to a hidden prison. It looked like the prince had cast his seven giant walls in the middle of nowhere for nothing.
“Hey,” she said, looking at Leander, who was standing on top of the innermost stone circle. “Are yousurethis is—”
“Yes,” he snapped, holding up the princess’s pointing hand. “Even without my brother’s witchcraft, I’m close enough to feel the sorcery now.” He turned to squint at Bex through the glaring firelight. “How much water can you evaporate?”
“I don’t know,” Bex said, hopping over the tops of the walls like stepping stones to join him. “I’ve never tested. I can melt sin iron, though, so probably a—”
“Do it,” he ordered, moving down the circle to stand next to Adrian, who was busy talking to his wet and obviously miserable broom in a calm, soothing voice.
She shot the prince a nasty look, but now wasn’t the time to harp on his attitude. The water was rising higher as she watched, so Bex shoved her personal anger to the back burner and got to work, blasting the water trapped inside of the innermost ring of the Seven Walled City with the hottest fire she could produce.
The resulting steam explosion almost blasted her into the ceiling. She managed to avoid a crash at the last second, kicking off the black stone to land back on the spell’s outermost wall instead. When she was sure she wouldn’t pitch over into the now very deep-looking lake on the other side, Bex hopped back across the tops of the walls to see what she’d uncovered.
The inside of Leander’s final stone ring was only ten feet across. Between the heat of her flames and the force of the steam explosion, Bex had managed to remove most of the water, revealing nine dark objects arranged in a circle. It looked a bit like the ring of standing stones Adrian had set up in front of his cottage, except these weren’t boulders. They were perfectly smooth, rectangular pillars with a weird hump at the top. Each one was taller than Leander and metallic-sounding when the prince jumped down to bang on one with his fist. It wasn’t until he started feeling the sides, though, that Bex realized the pillarswere shaped like sarcophagi. Nine black tombs standing on their ends, facing each other in a silent circle.
“Great Forest,” muttered Adrian as he looked up from his broom at last. “Are those—”
“They’re what we’re here for,” Leander said as he moved frantically from coffin to coffin. “Queen of Wrath, help me!”
Bex jumped down at once, wincing when she landed in the ankle-deep sin sludge that was left at the bottom. It felt like she was walking through acidic oil-spill mud, and that was with her boots on. Leander must’ve had it ten times worse with his bare feet, but the prince didn’t even seem to notice. He was too busy pressing his hands against the closest coffin, speaking words of sorcery so fast that Bex’s mediocre command of Sumerian couldn’t possibly keep up.
Whatever he was saying, it didn’t seem to be working. Now that Bex was in front of them, she could see that the coffins were made of smooth-polished sin iron. There was nothing carved into their faces, no names or inscriptions or even warnings. They also had no hinges or latches, not even a seam. If the finding spell Adrian had made out of the Princess of Hate’s hand hadn’t been pointing directly at one of them, Bex would’ve sworn they were standing in a ring of nine solid lumps.
“We know which one Hate’s in, at least,” Adrian observed from the wall above. “But how do they open?”
“They were never made to,” Leander said, panting from all the sorcery that hadn’t worked. “These were supposed to be eternal tombs, which means we’ll have to break them.”
“You’d better do it,” Bex said, stepping back. “Without my sword, I’m not exactly a precision tool.”
