“You should’ve been talking tome,” Lys snapped. “The wing team is tying off the net as we speak. That means Desh and Iggs’s attack group will be running up here any second. You weresupposedto be up here finding all the guards they needed to subdue before we start evacuating the noncombatants, so why haven’t you called in?”
“Because I haven’t found anyone who qualifies as a threat yet,” Nemini replied, reaching out to point at something over Lys’s shoulder.
Lys whirled around with the sin-iron dagger ready in their hand. There was nothing to stab, though, because Nemini was right. About twenty feet behind them, well away from the giant hole Iggs’s explosives had just put in the floor, a large crowd of war demons was kneeling with their hands raised. There were two other figures lying in the water at their feet: a Heavenly warlock with a red stain on his white robes and a war demon wearing the ornate golden armor of a trusted guard. That last one was still kicking, squirming beneath the weight of the towering female who was holding him down. She ducked her horns when she saw Lys staring, planting both her bronze knees on the struggling guard’s back so she could lift all four of her arms in surrender.
“Are you servants of the True Queen?” she asked.
“I serve the Queen of Wrath, Ishtar’s Sword and last champion of Paradise,” Lys replied proudly, flipping their dagger into a knife-fighter’s grip to get the most leverage out of their one remaining good arm. But while those should have been the fightingest of fighting words, the war demon just nodded like Lys had answered correctly.
“What are you doing?” the guard on the ground bellowed when he saw the woman’s head move. “Their queen is a traitor! We were ordered to stand guard and protect Gilgamesh’s Hells! The Queen of War will kill you for this!”
“She’s going to do that no matter how we act,” the female war demon said, reaching down to remove the guard’s helmet so she could cuff him on the head. “But I for one am tired of guarding my own prison, and I’m sick to death of taking orders from this trash.” She kicked the bloody warlock with her hoofed foot. “That explosion just killed the human who’s been our tormentor for a century, which means the servants of Wrath have already done more for us than our queen ever has. I’m not going to repay such kindness with the treachery our queen has made us famous for.”
“Then you’re a traitor as well!” the guard yelled, thrashing on the wet ground. “The queen will make you crawl on your belly like a worm!”
“So, no different than normal, then,” the woman replied with a chuckle, kicking the guard in the face to shut him up before turning back to Lys and Nemini.
“Our queen has forbidden us from aiding you,” she explained as she lowered her horns again. “But she didn’t explicitly order us to attack, so until she comes down here to say otherwise, neither I nor any of mine will get in your way. You can rest your wounded there.” She pointed at one of the metal walkways the warlocks had used to move above the flooded slave floor before Iggs had punched a hole and let all the water out. “We’ve got plenty of space since Gilgamesh ordered everyone but the old and weak into the forges.”
“Thank you,” Lys said cautiously, lowering their sin-iron knife. When the old woman didn’t move and no other war demons leaped out of the shadows to take advantage of the distraction, Lys reached up to tap their comm.
“Ramp’s in position,” they reported, glancing at the line of winged demons standing with their arms up to signal that their chains were secured. “No hostiles, so come on up.”
“Wait, no hostiles?” Iggs’s astonished voice replied in their ear. “Isn’t the Hell of War hostile by definition?”
“They’re still children of the Riverlands,” Lys said, glancing at the scowling face of the old war-demon woman with a smile. “If they don’t want any, I’m not going to bring it. Bex would want us to get along, so stop stalling and get our people up here before they’re forced to swim.”
That wasn’t entirely a joke. Thanks to the waves kicked up by the falling ceiling, the floodwaters were already sloshing over the last bit of high ground left in the Middle Hells. The top of the cliffs was narrow, too, which had forced the enormous crowd of evacuating demons to spread out into a miles-long line. Combine that with the fact that almost everyone was moving slower than normal due to sin-toxin overdose, and they were in a pretty terrible situation, but Lys was determined not to fail. Bex had sacrificed herself to buy them this chance. Lys was going to get her demons to safety even if they had to fly every single one of them up here on their own wings.
“Do you want me to go check on her?” Nemini offered.
Lys shook their head. “I haven’t become such a bad soldier that I’m going to ignore a direct order from my queen,” they said as they slid the sin-iron dagger back into its sheath below their wing. “You’re your own queen now, so I guess you can do what you want, but I’m going to stay and do the job Bex entrusted to me.”
“Are you sure?” Nemini asked, tilting her snake-covered head. “It sounds like a scary fight.”
It did. Now that Nemini mentioned it, Lys could hear crashes echoing through the Upper Hells. It sounded like someone was being slammed into a wall over and over again.As always, Lys’s brain went straight to Bex. Not the queen she’d grown into, but the bright-eyed little girl who used to ride on their shoulders and listen intently while Lys did their best to teach her everything a queen should know. Lys’s instinct had always been to gut anyone who hurt their little firespark, but part of being in the Queen of Wrath’s service was learning to let those feelings go.
“My queen gave me a job,” Lys repeated as they turned away from the horrible sounds. “I already let my personal feelings get in her way once. I won’t do it again. I will have faith and see my duty through. That way, when Bex survives, as Iknowshe will, I’ll be able to hold my head high and tell her I succeeded in my charge.”
Those were old, familiar words. Lys had said different versions of that exact same speech dozens of times over Bex’s last four lives, usually to Nemini. It was probably wrong to say them to her again now that she was herself a queen, but that didn’t stop Lys from doing it or Nemini from nodding at the end the same way she always did.
“I’ll go help Iggs with the evacuation, then,” she said. “You stay here and make sure the net doesn’t slip.”
“Will do,” Lys promised as Nemini disappeared, leaving Lys standing alone at the top of the chain ramp the demons of the Hells had woven out of their own bonds. The bottom half was already full of freed slaves sprinting toward safety with Iggs leading the charge.
Lys grinned when they saw him. They leaped into the air next, waving their flashlight and shouting at the top of their lungs for everyone to get up the ramp and move immediately to the back so they wouldn’t clog the way for the people behind them.
And far in the distance, through the acrid smoke of the War Hell’s ever-burning forges, the roar of the queens’ fight grew louder.
CHAPTER 19
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BEX HAD NEVER BURNEDso hot in her life.
She’d burned bigger plenty of times, including just a few hours ago when she’d incinerated the princess who stole her hand. Those infernos were always terrifying, but this was different, because this time, Bex was in control. She wasn’t a raging bonfire blindly consuming everything she touched. These flames burned clean, powered by a righteous fury that had sparked on behalf of someone else. They were untainted by fear, doubt, grief, or even her own anger, and they burned hot enough to ignite the air itself.
The flames were especially unkind to the Queen of War, painting her in a harsh, white light that made the pits in her corroded body look even deeper than they were. Her mismatched eyes reflected the glare like miniature suns, turning her scarred bronze face into an exaggerated mask as the queen’s split lips pulled into a hateful smile.
