“We can’t stay here.”
“It’s not a bad place,” said one of the wizened elders from the Middle Hells. “Even abandoned, Heaven’s luxuries abound. We have soft beds to sleep on, rooms for privacy, clothes to wear, and wine to drink. Truly, this city is a paradise compared to where we were.”
“But we have no food,” Bex reminded him stiffly. “The Rivers of Death don’t flow up here, and there aren’t enough humans to pull sins out of directly. If we don’t get back to Earth or find something else to eat up here, we’re going to lose even more people.”
“Is there any way to clean the floodwaters?” asked Lys, who’d put on their neutral, genderless body for this meeting plus a big black coat to hide their still-bleeding shoulder. “That stuff’s so packed with sin it’s sludgy. There has to be some way to get it out.”
“There isn’t,” Desh insisted from the side table where Streya was playing with the jewels she’d found in one of the bedrooms. “Not only did the flood protocol dump in poison at the start, the whole Middle Hells cavern was coated in eons of toxic ash and grit. The water’s actually getting even more poisonous as it marinates.” He shook his pale head. “There maybe a way to clean it, but I don’t know what it is, and we don’t have time to figure it out. I’d much rather just abandon ship. This whole place is cursed so far as I’m concerned.”
“I agree with that,” Adrian said, moving his broom a little closer so he could join the conversation without yelling. “But getting out is going to be a challenge. While you were busy getting people out of the Hells, Boston and I flew over to take a look at the shield.”
“And?” Bex asked.
“And it’s impenetrable,” he replied with a shrug. “But we knew that already.”
“What my witch is trying to say is that the barrier is immune to sorcery,” Boston explained with a swish of his tail. “I still maintain that a strong enough blow from a different magical source could crack it. If we were in the Blackwood, for example, I’m certain we could beat our way through.”
“But we’re not in the Blackwood,” Adrian said in the exasperated voice of someone who’d already made that point many,manytimes. “We’re not on real land. We’re inside a magical construction where nothing grows, and I’ve still got a block inside my chest. I can’t even reach my heart, never mind my forest, and if I go through you again for something that big, I’ll kill you.”
“There are many difficulties,” Boston admitted. “But it’s hardlyimpenetrable. We just haven’t found the right mechanism yet.”
“Then we’d better get to finding it,” Bex said, interrupting Boston before he could draw Adrian into one of their hours-long technical arguments. “Just because nothing’s come out of the palace to kill us yet doesn’t mean we’re in the clear. Until we’ve got everybody safely back on Earth, this is still an active war zone. I want everyone to stay together at all times and keep an eye on anybody more injured than yourselves. When ourwindow comes, it’ll probably come quick, so sleep in shifts and be ready to move at a moment’s notice.”
“What kind of window are you expecting?” Iggs asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Bex admitted. “But I’m going to find one. I didn’t break Ishtar’s children out of the Hells just so we could starve to death while Gilgamesh laughs at us from his palace. We’re getting out of here, so stay close, stay safe, and stay together until I give the order to move.”
Despite the direness of their situation, that seemed to raise the demons’ spirits, especially the former slaves. The representatives from the Middle Hells all bowed at once and left to spread the queen’s word to all the other demons sleeping in the apartment blocks that surrounded the entrance to the Hells. If they’d spread out, they probably could’ve filled the entire city, but the demons were afraid of Heaven and preferred staying together. They’d packed themselves into the luxury apartments ten to a room, for which Bex was very glad. Protecting people was a lot easier when they were clumped together. She couldn’t protect them from their biggest threat, though, which was why, the moment everyone cleared off the roof except for her crew and Adrian, she called a huddle.
“Is there any way we can get to the chains that doesn’t involve going into Gilgamesh’s palace?” she asked as soon as they were all together.
“There’s gotta be,” Iggs said. “We saw the chains from the cliff where we got banished. If we can get to the edge of this place, I bet we could hop right off and walk our way down them to freedom.”
“It’s not going to be that easy,” Lys warned, their androgynous face pinched and frighteningly pale from the wound Bex knew was still bleeding under their coat. “You can’t see it right now because of the high walls, but the Holy City is famously surrounded by the Goddeath Wastes. In case youcouldn’t tell from the name, that’s not exactly a place you can just walk across.”
“I’d rather take my risks in a desert than starve here doing nothing,” Iggs argued. “We also won’t have to endure it for long. We saw the edge of Heaven above us when we landed in the Hells. It can’t bethatfar away.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Adrian said in a grim voice. “The barrier wasn’t the only thing Boston and I checked when we were flying around. We also went up on the walls to do a triangulation spell.”
“Surveying magic,” Boston explained at everyone’s blank looks. “Normally used for mapmaking.”
“It’s used for a lot more than that,” Adrian insisted. “The main Blackwood is huge and complicated. If you don’t get good at triangulating distance, you spend a lot of time being lost. Fortunately, the same calculations work whether you’re standing on a battlement or a tree. All we had to do was measure the height of the walls and apply some known distance charms to estimate roughly how far away the horizon was.”
“Except it didn’t work,” Boston finished irritably. “No matter how many times we did the math, the numbers always came back different.”
“How is that possible?” Bex asked.
“It’s possible because this place makes no damn sense!” Boston snarled, glaring at Heaven’s sunless blue sky. “I know everything up here’s a magical construction, but it’s not even internally consistent. So far as I can tell, this whole place is a patchwork of unrelated spatial architectures that have all been mashed together!”
“Okay,” Bex said slowly. “Now explain that to me like I’m not a witch.”
“It means we can’t use one known distance to as a base to calculate others,” Adrian translated. “Aside from the pointswhere they connect, the Holy City, the Hells, and the Goddeath Wastes are all separate conjured spaces that operate according to their own rules. That’s why the triangulation spell couldn’t tell us the distance to the horizon, because this city is not actually part of the land it appears to sit on.”
“That does explain how Gilgamesh was able to pilot his city through the void in order to bomb the Seattle Anchor,” Bex said thoughtfully. “If we did manage to get into the desert, though, do you think we could walk to the edge?”
“I don’t know,” Adrian said, biting his lip. “I’m not even sure Heavenhasedges now that we’re inside it. Given the lengths Gilgamesh has gone to so that he can control access, I suspect this place is actually a self-contained bubble in the same way Limbo was.”
“Which means we can’t just jump out,” Iggs finished with a heavy sigh. “Damn king thought of everything.”
