“However she got to it, that level of output doesn’t look sustainable,” Boston observed. “We should stop her before she hurts herself.”
“I don’t think we can,” Adrian said. “More importantly, I don’t think weshould. Look at that.”
He pointed ahead of them at the base of the tower where Bex had made her first stand. The room had been empty when they entered, a barren circle of stone designed to provide the archers above with a nice, clean kill box. Now, though, the bottom floor of the Hell of War’s tower was packed with war demons. They’d squeezed their bodies into every available inch, standing shoulder to shoulder like bronze bullets packed into a magazine. The only open spot was the place where Kirok had died.
Between the princess’s brutal execution and the curse that, oddly, looked like the work of Adrian’s mother, there wasn’t much of the former general left. What little there was, though, was surrounded by an honor guard of the biggest, meanest war demons Adrian had ever seen. They stood over Kirok’s fallen body like a fortress, watching in determined silence as the two queens fought on the stairs above them.
All the war demons were like that. Adrian wasn’t sure when the change had happened, but no one was panicking or scrambling for safety anymore. The entire army was just standing at the bottom of the tower like bronze statues, waiting to see who would triumph.
“I think we might be too not-demon to interfere with this,” Adrian said, clutching his familiar to his shoulder as he inched them back into the shelter of the melted tunnel. “Bex can handle herself. Let’s just stay here and wait for her to win.”
“Are you sure she will?” Boston whispered nervously.
“No,” Adrian confessed with a worried look at Bex’s swordless hands. Then his eyes moved to her opponent, and he smiled. “But the Queen of War’s the one who looks afraid.”
“Blackwood protect us,” his familiar muttered, curling into a ball on his witch’s shoulder as the daughters of Paradise’s most violent god crashed like comets above them.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
At the same moment, on the other side of the almost-entirely-flooded Middle Hells, Lys was flying harder than they’d ever flown in their life.
They’d been skeptical of Iggs’s plan the first time he described it, but the detonation had gone off without a hitch. The moment the trigger teams hit their buttons, the long lines of C-4 they’d pressed into the gouged stone had exploded with flashes of white light and a deafening crash. When Lys’s overloaded senses finally recovered, the dirty ceiling that used to be the only sky they’d known when they’d lived here as a child was falling. Building-sized chunks of stone were still crashing into the black floodwater that filled the gigantic bowl of the five combined Middle Hells when Iggs’s voice roared over the comm.
“Lys, you’re up!” he yelled through the speaker in Lys’s ear.
“On it,” Lys replied, gritting their teeth against the pain in their still-bleeding shoulder as they spread their wings and flew up through the hole Iggs’s explosives had just made for them.
“Ramp team!” they bellowed, waving the metal flashlight they’d taken from Bex’s backpack like a guiding torch through the still-falling dust. “Grab your chains, and let’s go!”
An answering cry rose from hundreds of throats as winged demons of every sort launched off the ridge path at the top of the cliffside slave towns, the only part of the Middle Hells that was still above water. Each of them was carrying a long rope of black chain. It was the same chain the warlocks had used to hold them down, but Desh’s team had reworked it, weaving the black chains together into a net big enough to cover the entire hole Iggs’s teams had just blasted in the ceiling. One end of the net was already bolted to the rock at the top of the cliff. The otherend was in the winged demons’ hands as they flew up, following the beam of Lys’s flashlight into the Hell above them.
Lys would’ve been carrying a chain, too, if the stupid prince hadn’t stuck his stupid sword through their stupid shoulder. Since their arm still couldn’t bear weight, they’d had to settle for being the torchbearer. This still put them out in front, though, which was exactly where Lys wanted to be. They’d waited their entire life for this moment. Nothing short of death was going to stop them from being on the frontline as they exploded through the haze of smoke and rock dust into the firelit darkness of the Hell of War.
Lys had seen the Upper Hells several times on their way to be sold to this or that warlock, but only from the inside of the fortified tower. They’d never seen beyond the stairwell’s walls into the actual Hell of War, which looked a lot shabbier than expected. Lys had always pictured the Upper Hells as a place where bootlicking war demons lived lavish lives as Heaven’s pampered guard dogs, but it didn’t look that different from the Hell they’d just left. It was still a big, dirty cavern with a flooded work floor covered in chains that were now dangling like ripped threads through the giant hole Iggs had just blown.
The dangling chains were all empty, thank Ishtar. Traitors or not, even Lys’s bloodlust didn’t extend to slaughtering other demons. Fortunately, it looked like Kirok had been right about the Upper Hells being overtaxed. There wasn’t a demon to be seen on the work floor, and the slave houses—another shantytown of shallow, depressing holes carved into cliffs just like the one in the Middle Hells below—were dark and quiet.
It wasallquiet. Lys had come up here ready to fight the bronze dogs of Gilgamesh, but everything they saw made the war demons look just as exploited and downtrodden as the slaves who lived below. They were still trying to wrap their headaround that when the wave of flying demons carrying chains caught up with them.
The deep roar of hundreds of beating wings knocked Lys out of their gawking. Just like their first Bex had taught them, Lys pushed all the questions out of their head and focused on the mission, ignoring the pain shooting across their back as they pumped their own wings harder to get back to the front of the pack.
“Lock your chains to the slave lines!” they yelled when they got there, pointing at the half of the sin-collection floor that wasn’t currently crumbling into the flooded Hell below. “Those bolts were made to hold war demons, so they should be strong enough for us. We’ve still got a big crowd to move, though, so make sure to tie your lines off at least three feet apart to spread the weight.Go! Go! Go!”
The horde of flying demons obeyed, darting away from Lys in a fan formation to attach their chains—and the metal net trailing behind them—to the bolts that were set deep in the Hell of War’s floor. When Lys was certain everyone was doing what they were supposed to, they landed in the ankle-deep waterfall pouring over the edge of the Upper Hells’ flooded slave floor and tapped their comm.
“Nemini?”
“Yes?”
The voice spoke in their ear and behind them at the same time, causing Lys to jump into the air before they realized what was happening.
“I’m starting to think you do that on purpose,” they growled, whirling around to land in front of Nemini.
The former void demon met the glare with her usual blank stare. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, right,” Lys said as they reached up to adjust the bloody bandage the panicked jump had just dislodged. “Playing dumb is unbefitting of a queen, you know.”
Nemini shrugged. “You wanted to talk to me?”
