That was a properly paranoid way to view things. If Drox had been awake, he would’ve been proud. Bex, however, rejected the idea the moment it entered her head. She’d seen Kirok’s face when he talked about the betrayal the war demons had been forced to participate in at the Anchor and heard the hatred in his voice just now when he’d talked about the war demons being slaves. He was as angry as the rest of them. Bex could feel the righteous fury of his wrath from three feet away, and that more than anything made up her mind.
“Welcome to the distraction team,” she said, holding out her still-flaming hand.
Kirok shook it without hesitation and moved aside for Adrian, who’d been waiting nervously just behind him.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take a quick break first?” the witch asked Bex as he stepped up next to the war demon. “We’ve still got a few minutes before we hit the time limit, and you’ve been burning nonstop since you got here.”
“I’m fine,” Bex insisted, tilting her head toward the dark ceiling outside the tower’s busted windows. “This whole place is caked in centuries of anger. There’s even more fuel for me to burn here than there was in Limbo. Honestly, the real struggle is not flaming out of control again.”
Adrian’s scowl deepened. “Is that a risk?”
“Not anymore,” Bex promised, turning back to the tunnel. “I’m no longer fighting desperately. I’ve got a goal to ground me now, and the war demons don’t deserve to be burned. They’re victims of Gilgamesh just like the rest of us, and I’ve got to make sure that they get free too.” She smiled. “The Bonfire of Ishtar does not burn her own people.”
That last part was spoken directly at Kirok, who lowered his horns in reply. It looked physically difficult, lowering his horns before a queen that wasn’t his when his own was so close, but he persevered, holding the bow rigidly in place as Bex reached up to tap the comm in her ear.
“How’s it looking?”
“We’re ready when you are,” Iggs’s voice came back. There was a long pause, and then, “Are yousureyou still want to—”
“Yes,” Bex said, marching back into the oven-hot tunnel of melted sin iron until she was standing in front of the half-inch thin wall of metal she’d left at the very end.
There was another long pause before Iggs switched to Riverlander. “Ishtar guide your sword, my queen.”
“May she guide yours as well,” Bex replied in the same language, holding her fire ready as Iggs began shouting orders at the others.
“This is it!” his voice bellowed over the little speaker in her ear. “We’re about to blow, so everyone stand clear of the blast area! Trigger teams, get ready to hit your buttons on my mark!”
There was a flurry of shouting, and then Iggs’s voice came through again at a volume pitched for Bex’s ears. “On your signal.”
Bex glanced over her shoulder to make sure Adrian and Kirok were behind her. When she saw them waiting at the tunnel’s entrance, she turned back around and pressed her burning hand against the final barrier.
“Do it.”
“Go!” Iggs shouted.
Anything else he could’ve said was lost in a thunderous cascade of explosions. Bex felt the entire Hell shaking under her feet, but she was already blasting herself forward, stoking her fire as hot as it would go as she smashed through the final wall to burst out of the blocked stairwell into a second, totally different tower.
It looked like she’d just tunneled into the bottom of a fortress. The stairs she’d been following kept going up in a spiral, but where the Lower Hells had been just an empty stairwell and the Middle Hells had looked more like an office building, the tower of the Upper Hells was a citadel with all its fortifications pointing inward.
The staircase still spiraled up the outside, but there were metal gates that could be swung out every ten feet to block it, and the open column in the middle was ringed with galleries where archers could fire down from cover. Add in the open floor at the bottom, and the whole thing was basically a killing jar. And manning all those battlements, packed together shoulder-to-giant-shoulder like gleaming bronze sardines, was an army of enormous, sandy-horned, four-armed war demons.
The sight was intimidating enough that even Bex stepped back a pace. She’d never seen so many war demons packed into one place before. The fortress wasn’t actually well lit, but the few torches there were reflected off all of their bronze bodies so brightly that the entire tower gleamed with light. It wassobright,sooverwhelming, Bex didn’t even notice that every one of those soldiers had an arrow aimed at her heart until she heard the creak of all their bowstrings pulling back as one.
It was the most weapons Bex had had pointed at her since her fight in the sky over the White City. Unlike Gilgamesh’s golden constructs, though, these were not mindless sorcerous automatons firing on a predetermined system. They were actual soldiers, the only tribe of Ishtar’s children bred for war. They were alsomuchcloser than the constructs had been. If they opened fire at this range, there was no way she could burn all the arrows before they hit. She was wondering why they hadn’t just shot her yet when she heard the familiarclackof carved feet walking over stone.
Bex’s head snapped up like a bobber on a string. It wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but her heart still stuttered when she saw the Princess of War descending the spiral stairs. Gilgamesh must’ve fixed her fake body, because the corroded, four-armed queen once again looked like a fragile, two-armed ivory statue. Her face looked even lovelier now than it had been when she’d come down with her lion to destroy the Anchor Market, but there was more malice in her mismatched eyes than on all the faces of her soldiers put together as she pointed at Bex and said,
“Kill her.”
There were no horns carved into the princess’s lovely white hair, but that didn’t seem to matter. She might have looked like a delicate porcelain doll, but the voice that spilledfrom her lips was a queen’s. It rang with Ishtar’s ancient authority, and the moment the war demons heard it, every soldier in the tower released their bows, filling the air with the scream of arrows. Bex was pushing her fire into an inferno in the hopes of at least burning a couple of them, when a tall black blur shot in front of her.
“Stop!” the Princess of War shouted.
That order seemed way too late, but—to Bex’s shock—the whistle of the arrows cut off like a switch. The arrows themselves clattered harmlessly to the floor a second later, leaving Bex gaping before she understood. This was War’s power. Just as Bex had full control over the fires of Wrath, the Princess of War—or, more specifically, the queen hiding inside her—had total dominion over her army’s weapons. Not only was she able to stop arrows in mid-flight, she could even order them back into her soldiers’ quivers, which was what she did next. Bex actually felt her magic tucking the spent arrows away, cleaning the battlefield until no evidence was left that a single shot had ever been fired at the youngest Prince of Gilgamesh, who was suddenly standing in front of Bex like a shield.
“Adrian!” Bex hissed, her heart pounding as she realized what had almost happened, how close he’d come to death. “What are youdoing?”
“Helping you like I said,” Adrian replied as he spread his arms wider. “Don’t worry. She can’t hurt me.”
