“I can’t,” Leander said, shaking his head. “Only divine creations can cut sin iron once it’s been forged. It has to be you.”
“Are you crazy?” Bex cried, holding up her flaming hand. “I’m a blowtorch, and those coffins don’t have room for error. If I melt my way in, I’ll cook them.”
“If the daughters of Ishtar could be destroyed by mere flames, my father wouldn’t have needed to lock them down here,” the prince argued. “Have faith in your mother’s work and burn. Just do it quick. We’re running out of time.”
Bex didn’t need him to tell her that. She could hear the slosh of the waves breaking against the Seven Walls. The water outside had to be up to her neck by now. If they were going to get everyone and get out before the flood covered the door and trapped them, she needed to get a move on, but the coffins looked sohard.
Bex reached out to brush her burning fingers against their shiny black surface, wishing for the millionth time that Drox was awake. Her sword could’ve sliced the sin-iron coffins open in an instant, but his ring was still silent on her finger. That left brute force, so Bex closed her eyes and focused on getting mad.
It didn’t take her long. Just thinking about the black boxes Gilgamesh had sealed her family inside had Bex’s fire roaring like a jet engine in seconds, but the flood he’d sent to drown her people was what stomped her pedal to the floor. The thought of her people lying exhausted on the ground as the deadly water poured in, the thought of Nemini’s people swimming for their lives after five thousand years of torment, the thought of all the demons upstairs fighting so hard for their freedom only to be locked in and drowned like rats. Every crime was a log on her fire, stoking Bex into an inferno so intense that the last of the water left inside the walls turned to steam, leaving the sludgy layer of sin mud dry as an old desert under her boots.
When she was as hot as she could get without risking tipping over the edge and burning out of control again, Bex slammed her glowing fist into the black tomb closest to her. Thesin-iron sarcophagus rang like a bell when she struck it, rattling her bones and acidifying the breath in her lungs with the reek of molten sin. Within seconds, it was nearly impossible to breathe, but Bex didn’t stop. She just kept pounding, slamming her fist into the sin iron over and over until, with asnapthat echoed through the flooded Hell, the heated metal broke under her hand, and the black prison cracked open like an egg.
Bex leaped back immediately, clutching her white-hot fist to her chest so she wouldn’t accidentally burn whoever was inside, but the body she’d been hoping for didn’t fall out into her arms. It couldn’t, because while the outside of the coffin had been as smooth as a river stone, the interior was lined with hundreds of swordlike sin-iron spikes. It looked like the inside of an Iron Maiden, and pinned on those spikes like a butcher bird’s victim was a body.
A woman’s hornless, handless body covered in black blood.
“Sister,” Bex whispered as she stumbled forward. “Sister!”
She reached out desperately, but Leander beat her to it. He rushed the broken coffin, ignoring the spikes that stabbed his unprotected arms as he dug his hands under the woman’s body and yanked it free. Her face was so damaged that Bex couldn’t make out her features, but she still recognized her on the same instinctive level she’d recognized every daughter of Ishtar except Nemini. Unlike Nemini, though, this queen’s name wasn’t shattered. Bex might even be able to remember it once her sister’s face was healed enough to recognize. Ishtar’s gift of regeneration was already pulling her broken features back together when Leander unceremoniously dumped her body on the ground.
“What are you doing?” Bex roared, darting to grab the queen before she hit the filthy floor. “That’s my sister!”
“It’s not Mara,” the prince said, looking wild-eyed at the eight other coffins. “Do the next one. Quickly!”
Bex bared her teeth and clutched her sister’s body to her burning chest. She was still trying to find somewhere to put her where her wounds wouldn’t touch the filthy sin on the floor when Adrian’s hands came down from above.
“I’ll take her,” he said, lying down on the top of the wall so he could hold his arms out to Bex. “Go ahead and do the others. We’re running out of time.”
The urgency in his voice snapped Bex out of her protective trance. She handed her sister’s body to Adrian at once, pushing her up from below while the witch hauled her to the top of the wall. The moment she was sure he wouldn’t drop her, Bex let go and moved to the next sin-iron tomb that Leander was impatiently tapping his finger against.
It took less time to crack the second one now that she knew what she was doing, but not by much. Even when she was burning her hottest, the sin iron was hard, thick, and pure. It also didn’t crack cleanly every time. Sometimes she had to melt her hand all the way through and pull the prison apart piece by piece, which took a while. There was also the problem that not every tomb was full. Since she, Nemini, and the Queen of War still had their original bodies, three of the caskets were empty, but it was impossible to tell which ones until she broke them open. They were all filled with spikes, though, and the more Bex thought about that, the less sense it made.
“Why do you think Gilgamesh did this?” she asked Adrian when he reached down to take the third body that wasn’t Mara’s from Bex’s arms. “Does he just enjoy their suffering?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Adrian said as he carefully accepted the bloody queen. “Gilgamesh considers demons beneath him. He hates the gods, but I can’t imagine him buildingsomething this expensive just to torture a bunch of already defeated queens.”
He looked at the next coffin Leander was pressing his ear against. “I bet this is just the most efficient way to keep them under control. Ishtar’s daughters are famously hard to kill, but being stabbed full of sin-iron spikes would immobilize anyone. Add in the void demons pulling their minds into the abyss and you have a simple and effective prison. Trademark Gilgamesh.”
“You don’t have to sound so impressed,” Bex muttered, calling her fire back to her fists to get cracking on the next coffin.
The water started coming in again before she finished. By the time Bex’s fist finally punched through to the center where the spikes were, the sin-polluted slime was pouring over the top of Leander’s protective walls in sheets. That sarcophagus turned out to be empty, so Bex moved on to the next one, sloshing over to it through the now knee-deep water while Leander paced frantically beside her.
“Hurry,” he begged. “Hurry.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Bex growled, turning the water around her to steam as she slammed her fist into the tomb’s shiny black surface.
At least she knew this would be the last. They’d already hit the three empties, and there was only one sarcophagus left. Now that the flood was coming over the walls in buckets, though, fear was starting to eat at the edges of Bex’s rage. If the water was high enough to overcome Leander’s Seven Walled City, it also had to be almost to the top of the doors out. They were very,veryclose to getting trapped down here, but Bex was so close to being finished. Just one more inch and—
“There!” she cried as her fist went through to the spike-filled pocket. The coffin didn’t crack like the others, but she was still able to wedge her arm inside, bracing her leg against thewall to pry the black tomb open like a bear trap, revealing the bloody prize inside.
“Mara,” Leander whispered, his voice cracking. “Mara!”
Her face was as damaged as all the others, so Bex couldn’t say if she looked like the princess from the bridge or not. Leander had already eliminated all the others, though, so there was only one queen left that she could be. Sure enough, when the prince clutched her body to his chest, Bex saw a bloody strand of the long, straight, black hair she vaguely remembered falling around Mara’s smiling face. Ithadto be her, and now that the job was done, they had to get out.
“Come on!” Adrian yelled from where he was floating on his broom above the now completely-flooded edge of the stone rings. “We have to go!”
Bex didn’t wait to be told twice. Leander had already Fifty Steps of the Pilgrim’ed himself up with Mara’s body in his arms. Bex would’ve blasted herself after him, but thanks to the water pouring in over the top, the cylinder of the innermost wall was now flooded up to the center of her chest. It couldn’t douse her magical fire, but it was a lot harder to trigger the gas-expansion explosion she used to move herself around.
