“Mine,” Gilgamesh replied proudly, pointing the blade at Adrian so he could see its perfect straightness head-on. “What you are looking at is the ultimate pinnacle of sorcery. A divine weapon forged by human hands.”
“Okay, but don’t you already have plenty of divine weapons?” Adrian asked, taking great care not to look at the Sword of Ishtar on Bex’s hip.
“All except the Blade of Wrath,” Gilgamesh acknowledged, smiling at Bex, who growled inside the prison of his magic. “But although I did manage to make use of all of them eventually, they were never truly mine. My mortal soul simply could not unlock the full potential of weapons made for the gods’ divine creations. But a good engineer never accepts defeat gracefully. I knew how the weapons were made because Enki had described the process to me in detail back when I was his student. Not being a god myself, I was unable to duplicate his exact method, so I began to experiment. I made good progress in the beginning, but none of the materials I had access to were strong enough to withstand the forging process. Even sin iron fell apart when exposed to the raw powers of creation. I was starting to think the whole idea was hopeless, and then I found you.”
He waved his sword at Adrian, who winced.
“I told you when we talked in your forest that sin iron has always been an incomplete creation. To balance its formulation and bring out its true potential, I needed sins collected by all nine of Ishtar’s demons, and I only had access to eight. Seven, really, because while the sleeping pride demons were stilltechnicallyable to collect sin, the power it should have contained was missing, a void just like their shattered queen.
“For eons, this flaw held back my progress,” the king continued bitterly. “Even if I brought the Coward Queen under my control, I had no solution to the Pride problem. It was the wall I could not climb, and then I heard about your miraculous work with the Bonfire Queen.”
He stretched out his arms to his son, causing Adrian to tilt back farther in his chair. If Gilgamesh noticed the rejection, though, it didn’t bother him.
“You performed even better than I could have hoped,” he said warmly. “When you repaired the Queen of Pride’s horns, all the sin I’d used the sleeping void demons to collect over the years suddenly became viable again. Even though you defied me and put Pride’s crown back on the queen’s head rather than in my hands, I still had what I needed. Between the reactivated sins of Pride and all the Wrath I was able to squeeze out of the starving demons of Limbo, I was finally able to forge all nine sins into one perfectly balanced alloy that, when mixed with quintessence and my own command over the magic of Heaven, became one perfect sword.”
He showed off the weapon again, but Adrian’s patience with his father’s drama was at an end.
“Butwhat do you need that swordfor?” he demanded. “What are you going to do with it? Kill the gods again?”
“That would truly be impossible,” Gilgamesh said. “If Enki’s forge was capable of making weapons that could killthe gods for good, they’d have all murdered each other long ago. Even if I could destroy them permanently, I wouldn’t, for without the gods, where would I get my quintessence?”
Adrian went still as he realized what his father was saying. “You mean all that liquid quintessence…” He stopped to swallow. “The white stuff you drowned my forest in…”
“Was the blood of the gods,” Gilgamesh finished impatiently. “Where did you think I was getting it from? Even I can’t make magic out of nothing.”
Adrian had never given it much thought, which was stupid in hindsight. Of course quintessence had to come from somewhere, and as the most powerful beings in existence, the gods were the obvious choice, but… “If all your magic comes from gods’ blood, how did you defeat them the first time?”
“By tricking them into giving it to me,” Gilgamesh replied with a smug look. “I was their treasured pupil, remember? All of my requests were treated as innocent curiosity, which was one of the traits the gods wanted to encourage. Even when I asked Anu for a cup of his blood to use in an experiment, he never suspected anything was amiss until my first words of sorcery became a spear in his back. This caused more of his divine blood to spill, giving me everything I needed to push the attack all the way to the end.”
Adrian wasn’t surprised by that story in the slightest. But if his father wasn’t about to carry his betrayal to its logical end and plunge his new sword into a bunch of divine hearts, then he was stumped.
“It’s all right,” Gilgamesh assured him. “True genius often looks like madness from the outside. That’s why, even though it cost me my other sons, I’m glad you made it up here, Adrian. It’d besucha tragedy if I was forced to perform my life’s greatest accomplishment without an audience. I was starting to worry it’d just be me and them.”
“‘Them’?” Adrian repeated with a frown. “Who’s—”
Gilgamesh swept his hand through the air before Adrian could finish. Not the one holding his new sword.Thatstayed at his side, but his empty left hand cut through the empty space in front of him like a saber.
Magic followed the motion in a surge, making Adrian gasp. Even though Gilgamesh had already explained exactly how he did sorcery back in Malik’s study, it was still shocking to see someone throw around that much power so casually. Gilgamesh hadn’t said a single word. He simply waved his arm, and the black dunes of sin-iron dust that filled the chain desert were blown away, revealing the industrialized horror beneath.
Adrian recoiled in shock. When he’d first stuck his head through the portal into this place, he’d suspected something bigger was buried under the dunes. He’d assumed it was the Anchors at the time, or at least the manifestation of the concept of the Anchors as they existed inside this pocket reality. Now, though, Adrian realized he’d been grossly incorrect. Thereweregiant sin-iron structures hidden beneath the black shavings, but they weren’t weights attached to the ends of chains. What Adrian saw when Gilgamesh’s magic blew the black desert away were coffins.
Miles and miles of matte-black sin-iron coffins stretched as far as he could see to the horizon. They’d been lined up head to foot in an orderly grid, but it still took several seconds for Adrian’s brain to accept howbigthe coffins were. They looked like black metal boxes at this distance, but each coffin was actually the size of a three-story building, and the ones closest to the rocky outcropping where Gilgamesh had set up shop were bigger still. The real shocker, however, was the tanks.
Each coffin had a black spigot at its foot that fed into a sin-iron pipe. These pipes ran down into an array of storage vessels that looked like water tanks. The setup reminded Adrian of thebuckets used to collect sap from a grove of tapped maple trees. The liquid he could see through the tanks’ tiny windows was even thick like syrup, but it shone as white as moonlight.
That pure, soft, glittering radiance was the hallmark of liquid quintessence, but the sheer volume being collected was difficult for Adrian to comprehend. It just didn’t seem possible that bodies—even the giant bodies of gods—could produce so much blood, though Adrian would’ve bet his witch hat that the insides of those coffins were filled with spikes just like the queens’ had been down in the Lowest Hells. It was the only way those tanks could be collecting so much white blood, but knowing how it worked didn’t make the sight any less horrifying. Even Bex, whose opinion of the gods had done a complete one-eighty during the time Adrian had known her, was visibly shaken by the grim industrial efficiency of it all. Gilgamesh, however, looked delighted.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” he said, his blue-gray eyes gleaming with pride as he swept his scarred hand once more over the abomination his sorcery had revealed. “The divine tyrants who once sought to reshape our species into docile sheep, transformed into fuel for humanity’s advancement. Truly, there could be no more fitting end to the saga of the gods’ hubris.”
“If this is the end, then why are we here?” Adrian asked in a shaking voice. “It looks like you’ve already got the situation on lockdown.”
“The lockdown is precisely the problem,” his father explained patiently. “Don’t you see it? All of these gods”—he waved his hand again over the coffin-filled landscape—“are trapped in a vicious cycle. They can’t die because they’re immortal, but they’re too afraid to come back to life because they know I’ll just strike them down again. My backstabbing was the closest to true death most of them had come, and the experiencetraumatized them so deeply that they all collectively decided to wait for my life to end rather than risk going through it a second time. Naturally, I was fine with this plan, except for the part where it doesn’t work because ofthat.”
He pointed his new sword at the giant chained wheel filling the sky above them.
“The Wheel of Reincarnation is not a natural cycle,” he said gravely. “The gods created it to catch the souls of their beloved humans as they died so that our entire species could be ‘tumbled like rocks in the river’ until we met their definition of perfection. To control the souls of an entire planet, the gods had to make a systemsobig that they also ended up trapped inside it. Since the wheel only turned the souls of the dead, however, the immortal gods assumed that would never be a problem for them.”
“And then you came along,” Adrian said.
