That had been a whole thing, but Bex had put her foot down. Thanks to their fight with the Prince of Hate in the Hells, Lys still had a giant bleeding wound through their shoulder. They’d also stayed up to manage the camp while Bex slept, which meant they’d been awake for two days straight.
Putting Lys on the bench for the final assault was a sorry way to repay such devotion, but between the constant blood loss, the lack of lust to feed on, and the sleep deprivation, Lys was looking even worse than the demons they’d rescued from the Hells. Taking them into a battle in that condition was just asking for them to get killed, so Bex had ordered Lys to stay behind and coordinate the evacuation instead. A critically important job that Lys absolutely did not want.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” they groaned over the black plastic comm in Bex’s ear. “This is the final assault on Gilgamesh. You can’t leave me out!”
“A battle is fought on many fronts,” Bex replied sagely as she followed Iggs’s scout team into the silent streets beyond the mossy edge of Adrian’s forest. “The only reason we’re able to have this conversation right now is because you remembered to charge the comms. You’ve always been our ace when it comes to logistics, and getting our people out of the line of fire is arguably the most important job of this entire operation. If I don’t save my demons, what am I even fighting for?”
“Don’t feed me that ‘wise leader’ crap,” Lys snarled. “I’m the one who taught you all that stuff! I knowwhyyou’re not bringing me along. I just hate it. I’ve been fighting at your side for centuries, but when our big moment finally arrives, I get left behind with the witches!”
“What are the Blackwoods doing, by the way?” Bex asked.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m serious,” Bex insisted. “I thought they came to fight, but we’re the only ones out here.”
Lys sighed at the obvious distraction, but they’d been a soldier for too long to ignore something as important as troop position.
“So far as I can tell, the witches are all still up in the big tree,” they reported. “They’ve been arriving in a steady stream since the rootway opened, but other than the support teams distributing bottled sin, I haven’t seen so much as a stray cat in the last twenty minutes. Even the Morrigan’s vanished.”
That didn’t sound good. Now that they were out of the tree cover, Bex could see there were even more war constructs and lion cannons on the palace battlements than she’d initially estimated. Both were bad news for her army of mostly unarmored infantry. She’d been counting on the Morrigan’s big fat target to draw some of that fire, but Heaven’s blue sky was empty.
“Do you think they’re going to be coming out of their tree anytime soon?” she asked nervously.
“Not sure,” Lys replied, followed by a glugging sound that Bexreallyhoped meant Lys was finally drinking one of the witches’ bottles of liquid sin. “They’re up to something, though. I can feel the magic rising like the wind before a thunderstorm.”
That was a relief to hear, though Bex was all too aware that feeling magic didn’t mean it would arrive in a timely fashion. Witchcraft was an infamously slow art, and Bex’s army was coming up on the palace fast. Adrian had a comm of his own, so she supposed she could’ve just radioed him and asked, but she didn’t want to interrupt anything important and risk pushing the schedule back even further.
“The Blackwoods always come through,” she said, as much for herself as for Lys. “Let’s just focus on our own job. The palaceis probably going to start firing soon. I’ll do my best to stop the lion cannons, but I want you to keep our people as deep in the big tree’s shadow as possible in case any shots get through.”
“You’re using Adrian’s heart tree as a bomb shelter?” Lys whistled. “That’s harsh.”
“That’s war,” Bex said grimly. “We don’t have enough advantages to waste any. We’ll make use of what we’ve got and focus on getting our wounded out of harm’s way. The fewer targets we give the enemy, the less we’ll have to worry about.”
“I’ll get on it, then,” Lys said grudgingly. “Ishtar guide your sword, my queen.”
It was the same blessing Lys always gave her before battle, but the familiar words made Bex wince. Not counting Drox, who shared her head, Adrian and Nemini were the only ones she’d told about what had happened with Ishtar. She’d thought about telling the others, but revealing the ugly truth of the goddess who’d been worshiped as the mother of their race for eons right before the biggest battle of their lives felt like a terrible tactical decision.
Honestly, Bex didn’t even know if she’deverspread the truth wider than she already had. What good would it do for someone like Lys, who’d been a devoted follower of Ishtar all their life, to know that their goddess didn’t even consider them worth saving? That useless knowledge would bring only pain, so Bex kept her mouth shut and focused on the fight in front of her.
It was going to be a tough one. Just like when she and Adrian had first poked their heads out of the Hells, Gilgamesh’s capital was silent as a tomb. Now that they’d left the neon-green grass and bubbling water of Adrian’s forest, the armed column of demons was the only thing moving in the entire city. The architecture got fancier as they got closer to the palace, but otherwise everything was the same monotonous white, marredonly by the occasional hunk of blackened debris from the destroyed tower.
Bex smiled every time she caught sight of one. The rubble was a good reminder that Gilgamesh’s fortress wasn’t as perfect and unassailable as it appeared. As they marched into the final ring of buildings surrounding the palace, she spotted the top half of the tower she’d chopped lying to the left of the road they were walking down. There were no crushed buildings directly in their path, but the blocks west of their position had all been flattened.
The sight was enough to make Bex grin. She kept her eyes on the gap she’d made in the skyline as they marched closer, moving from the middle portion of the city into the even fancier neighborhood that seemed to be reserved for Gilgamesh’s most favored sycophants. Finally, when the white mansions had grown so tall and ornate that it felt like they were walking through a marble canyon, Bex spotted the entrance to the palace itself.
It was separated from the residential buildings by a white wall that wasmuch smaller than the one surrounding the city, but still annoyingly tall at twenty feet. The ornate golden gate was already open, so they didn’t have to worry about bashing their way in. But the wall combined with the tall buildings on either side meant that Bex’s entire army had been channeled into a long line, the front of which was now in perfect shot from the palace’s battlements.
The whole setup was clearly designed to be a killing jar, but no arrows were raining down on their heads yet. Nothing had fired, actually, which made no sense. They were so close now that Bex could see the bowstrings in the golden constructs’ articulated hands, but not a single metal soldier was moving. The lion cannons’ mouths were closed as well. If Bex hadn’t caught glimpses of movement through the tower windows, she could almost have believed the palace was as empty as the city.
The whole thing reeked of a trap, and Bex held up her fist. The stop spread through the marching army like a slow wave. Once everyone had come to a halt, she turned and waved for Leander to come and join her at the front.
The prince tromped up the line. Bex had barely seen him since they’d left the Hells, but Adrian must’ve said something, because the normally bossy son of Gilgamesh had been oddly obedient since Adrian had dropped him off before flying up to join his coven. He hadn’t argued with any of her orders, but from the way he kept constantly looking over his shoulder, Bex could tell Leander’s heart was no longer in the fight.
“Hey,” she said, snapping her fingers in his face when the prince glanced back at the giant tree for what had to be the millionth time. “I need you to focus. What’s going on in there?”
She pointed at the silent castle, and Leander turned around with a sigh, using his hands to shield his mirrored eyes from the glare as he scanned the white battlements.
“Looks like the standard palace defenses,” he reported a few moments later. “Though it is strange that we were able to get this close.”
