“Better than hanging off a poison chain at a dead end,” Bex snapped as she started hauling herself up the links again. “You’re making this way too complicated. There’s a wall between us and where we want to be, so I’ll break it down. Easy-peasy.”
“Of all the blockheaded notions,” Leander muttered. “You can’t just bash your way through everything!”
“Why not?” Bex asked, climbing faster. “That’s how we’ve won everything so far.”
“I suppose one should never underestimate the power of brute force and ignorance,” Leander muttered as he teleported beside her. “Justpleasedon’t hit it too hard. I don’t think the Prince of Envy was lying when he said the chains are exceptionally fragile at the moment. If you crack them by accident and end up resurrecting the gods, this will all be for nothing.”
“I’ll be careful,” Bex said, flashing him a fanged smile. “Though if you want to make yourself useful, you could go up there and find me a good spot to hit.”
Leander gave her a scalding look, but he did as she asked, teleporting up to the place where the chains all came together in a final black twist. Bex still couldn’t see the barrier he and Adrian had been talking about, but she hadn’t been able to see any of the walls in this place. Sure enough, when she finally made it up to the spot where Leander was waiting, her towering new horns bumped against an invisible barrier that felt even harder than the walls around it.
“Okay,” she muttered, pressing her hands against the invisible surface. “Let’s give this a try.”
It’s thick,her sword warned.I could still cut through it, but the rude prince has a point about the chains. If we hit as hard as we need to get through, there’s a good chance we’ll damage something we don’t mean to.
“What about the walls?” Bex asked, moving her hand off the vertical invisible barrier to the horizontal one beside it. “Are they an easier target?”
Significantly,Drox said.But you’ll still want to use Envy’s power.
“Sure. Can you tell me how to do that?”
No, because it’s not mine,her sword replied bitterly.I didn’t get a manual either. You’re just going to have to use it and see.
Bex swore under her breath. Blind was her least favorite way to fly. She was tempted to use Drox anyway despite the risk, but shereallydidn’t want to cut a chain and bring Ishtar back by accident just because she was uncomfortable. The wall felt thinner than the ceiling, and Leander had already said they should be very close, so Bex decided to give Envy’s power a go.
Decision made, she closed her eyes and pressed her fingers firmly against the invisible barrier. It felt just as hard as every other time she’d bumped it, but Bex forced herself to stop thinking about how difficult it was going to be and approach the problem like a queen. Adifferentqueen, which was the really tricky part. As Queen of Wrath, Bex normally just burned anything that got in her way, but stopping the bull with Pride’s power had forced her to be prideful. By that logic, accessing Envy’s abilities probably required her to be jealous of something.
That was going to be a problem. Bex was legitimately proud of many of the things she’d accomplished, but she didn’t envy Gilgamesh in the slightest. She loathed him, which felt like the opposite. If Bex had learned anything from her own powers, though, it was that a queen’s abilities largely depended on mindset. The reason Nemini couldn’t use her power despite getting her horns back was because she was no longer capable of feeling superior to others, not because she wasn’t a queen. Likewise, the reason Bex didn’t feel a damn thing stirring inside her now wasn’t because she lacked Envy’s power but because she couldn’t even imagine being envious of Gilgamesh.Thatwas the factor that needed to change, so Bex squeezed her eyes even tighter and focused on the things she didn’t normally like to think about.
She thought about how hard she’d had it through all her lives, how much she’d struggled. She thought about all the times she’d died in vain or worse, gotten others killed. She thought about how bitter she’d felt back when she’d thought she’d already wasted this life and that the only thing her current incarnation was good for was building up a stockpile of deathly water so the next Bex could have a better start.
She thought about all the bitter, horrible, depressing things Drox usually scolded her for dwelling on, and then Bex thought about Gilgamesh. She thought about how he got to do whatever he wanted while his sons and minions did all the work. She thought about how he had a private island all to himself while she’d spent the last seven years scrounging to be able to provide her demons with a Winnebago. How he and his people lived in luxury while her demons slaved for their scraps.
Even Adrian had liked Malik so much that he’d lied to her. Gilgamesh was charming, rich, and brilliant—the man the gods had adored before he’d beaten them and continued to respect even after they were dead. Ishtar herself had been head over heels in love with him while Bex, her own daughter, was treated as merely a useful tool. Gilgamesh wasn’t even part of the mortal world anymore, but all of creation still seemed to revolve around the precious Eternal King, and Bex wassickof it. Why couldn’t she be the one with the power to give her people whatever they wanted? Why didn’t she have a private island hidden from the world’s troubles where she could relax with Adrian? She’d certainly worked hard enough to deserve it, but her efforts always fell flat while Gilgamesh seemed to succeed without even trying. It just wasn’t fair.
As soon as that awful feeling festered inside her chest, the invisible wall Bex was pressing her hands against began to crack. She leaned into the pressure at once, taking all the toxic jealousy she’d just cooked up and feeding it into… not a fire, exactly. Envydidn’t burn like Wrath. It was more like a vise that was forever squeezing tighter, a pit that only sucked you deeper the more you thought about it.
It definitely wasn’t the sin she’d been born to burn, but that didn’t mean it didn’t need to be destroyed, because the deeper she sank into Envy’s power, the more Bex hated it. She didn’t want to be jealous of Gilgamesh’s sad, self-serving life. She wanted to be happy with her own, to make abetterworld than his selfish dreams could envision. Gilgamesh’s power to change the world was what she was actually envious of, and the moment Bex embraced that, the invisible barrier shattered under her fingers.
It felt like breaking through a metal plate. The wall right next to the ceiling had fractured like glass. To get through it, though, Bex had to peel each shard back like a piece of metal sheeting. This feeling turned out to be even more accurate than she’d initially realized when Bex poked her head through the hole to discover she’d just broken through the solid-gold floor of the most glittery, most ostentatious room she’d ever laid eyes on.
It reminded Bex of the famous circular theater Shakespeare had built for his plays. Like that building, this room was several stories tall, perfectly cylindrical, and big enough to hold several hundred people. Unlike the medieval Globe Theatre, however, this room was entirely covered in gold.
Not gold leaf either. The floor she’d just broken through was a four-inch-thick plate, and the curving walls were just as bad. The gold on them was so thick it looked wrinkled, though after a few blinks, Bex realized that wasn’t because the soft, pure gold was collapsing under its own weight. It was because the entire room was covered in a carving.
The details were hard to see, since everything was the same shiny, metallic color, but after several seconds of staring, Bex was able to make out the image of a city. It was done inthe same realistic style as the stone carvings of demons being tortured that she’d cringed at in the Hells, except this art was shimmering and beautiful. The carving spanned the entire room, covering the multistory walls in a glittering panoramic image of an ancient walled city seen from a single high point. Not until she’d gawked at it for several seconds, though, did Bex realize she’d seen this view before.
The color was obviously different, and the gold was much, much brighter than the dark cavern, but that was definitely the ancient city of Uruk. She’d seen a destroyed version of this exact view from the steps of the palace on the central hill. She was still gaping at it in wonder when Adrian wiggled his way in beside her.
“What is this place?” he asked, opening his coat so Boston could get a look as well. “An art gallery?”
“Going by the glare, it’s probably the throne room,” Leander called from behind them.
Bexdidsee a throne, now that he mentioned it. Everything was so glittery she hadn’t noticed it at first, but the section of the circular room farthest from where she’d come up had a giant golden dais leading up to an ornate throne made of—what else?—solid gold.
“Couldn’t he think of anything else to use?” Bex grumbled as she hauled herself onto the shiny, slippery gold floor. “I thought Gilgamesh was supposed to havegoodtaste.”
“Throne rooms are always displays of a king’s wealth and power,” Adrian said as he scrambled after her. “This is a bit much, though.”
