“Because you’re not Agatha’s son,” Leander replied from above. “The Witch of the Present’s resistance to both sin iron and quintessence are the two main reasons Gilgamesh accepted such an obvious enemy into his bed.” He made a disgusted sound. “They bred us for our traits like dogs.”
“Well, I’mextraordinarilyhappy that princes are immune to sin iron right now,” Adrian said as he held out his arms for Boston, who for once didn’t gripe as he jumped down and wiggled into the protected, sin-iron-free safety of his witch’s coat. “This whole thing would be impossible if we weren’t.”
“I wish I was immune,” Bex muttered, shaking her stinging hands. “My regeneration is keeping up with the damage, but it still feels horrible.” She looked over at her sister. “How’re you keeping up, Nemini?”
“I’m still in existence,” came the exhausted-sounding reply. “I know time is an illusion, but I’d still like to know when this particular experience will be over.”
“Me too,” Bex said, craning her neck back to glare at Leander again. “Hey, show-off! Why don’t you teleport up a few more rungs and see how much more of this we’ve got to climb?”
Leander rolled his mirrored eyes but did as she requested, vanishing with a mutter of sorcery only to reappear a few seconds later.
“That was fast,” Bex said. “Were you even able to see anything?”
“No, because I didn’t make it,” Leander explained tersely. “There’s something blocking the way above us.”
“What is it?” Adrian asked.
“If I knew that, I would have said,” Leander snapped, gazing at the darkness over his head, which looked exactly the same as all the other darkness they’d been climbing through for the last twenty minutes. “Unfortunately, just like all the other walls in here, I can’t see what’s in the way. The chain keeps going, but I can no longer push my body into the empty space between the links. It’s like the chains are passing into a place where I can’t go,”
“You mean like a barrier?” Adrian asked, pulling Bran off his back. “Let me see.”
Adrian’s broom must have definitely not been feeling well. Due to the small space, the witch had to hold him straight up and down like a pole. The odd arrangement shouldn’t have been an issue—Bex had seen Bran pull off way more complicated moves—but the broom seemed barely able to lift Adrian off his feet. It was more like a helium balloon making his body lighter, but Adrian still had to kick off the chains to actually reach the place where Leander was. He pulled it off eventually, but he only managed to get a few feet higher than his brother before Adrian suddenly stopped.
“Leander’s right!” he called back down a second later. “There’s something stopping me up here!”
“Can you break it?” Bex yelled back.
Adrian switched his arms, holding Bran in his left hand so he could give the blackness a goodthwackwith his right. When that didn’t seem to work, he climbed around to the other side of the chains and tried again. That must not have done anything either, though, because he floated back down again a few moments later.
“That’s as much as Bran can take,” he said as he landed on the chain right next to Bex. “I couldn’t figure out how to get past the blockage, but I did manage to get a good feel for its shape.”
“What shape?” Bex asked, sticking her leg out behind him so Adrian, who was only holding onto the chain with one arm, wouldn’t fall.
“It’s kind of like a rubber stopper,” he said, pointing at the seemingly infinite darkness over their heads. “The chains can pass through it, but everything else gets blocked, including us.” He frowned. “I probably should’ve expected something like this in hindsight. Gilgamesh has been obsessing about these chains for the last five thousand years. Of course he’d have something to keep people from just climbing straight up into his secrets, but I’m not sure how we’re going to get through.”
“We’ll just have to go around,” Leander said, leaning off the chain to run his fingers over the invisible walls beside them. “Gilgamesh has always been an orderly man. Even if this is a separate hidden space, it’s still probably close to where the actual chains come up.”
“That makes sense,” Adrian agreed, looking at the blue water glittering miles below. “I can’t imagine a place like this is cheap to maintain, and the most efficient path between two points is always a straight line. The barrier must also be expensive, or else he would’ve filled the whole pipe with it.” His face broke into a smile. “I bet that plug is the bottom of wherever we’re ultimately trying to go.”
“So all we have to do is bash through the ceiling and we’re there?” Bex asked, smiling back as she pulled out her sword. “That’s easy, then. Drox can cut through anything.”
“Let’s not be rash,” Leander said swiftly, putting up his hands. “I agree we’re likely close to our goal, but if you start slashing in a tight space with a sword that can ‘cut anything,’ you might slice through something critical and doom us all.”
“Then how doyouwant to do it?” Bex snapped as she pulled Drox back into his ring.
“By going out the same way we came in,” Leander replied with a superior look. “Unlike the Blade of Wrath, the Blade of Envy was built for this task. She’s also dulled by the loss of her prince, which means she shouldn’t be able to damage anything we don’t want her to. She’s basically a safety sword at this point,andshe happens to conveniently be already in our possession.”
“Not really,” Adrian said sheepishly. “I kind of left her behind.”
Leander whirled on him in a fury. “Why in the Hells would you dothat?”
“Because the whole point of doing this was not to get caught,” Adrian reminded him, giving the prince an exasperated look. “The princesses are all Gilgamesh’s spies. You can’t execute a sneak attack while carrying the enemy’s camera.”
Leander still looked livid, but Bex thought Adrian had been very forethoughtful.
“We don’t need the Blade of Envy,” she insisted. “We were just talking about how I’ve become the Swiss Army knife of demon powers. That means I should be able to do anything Envy could.”
“We were also discussing how you don’t know how to use your powers yet,” Leander reminded her tersely. “You also don’t know where you’re going. Envy’s power relies on knowledge to work because even she can’t be envious of a place she’s never heard of. You’re proposing to use a power you’ve never tried to go to a place you can’t even picture. How do you think that’s going to end up?”
