Page 15 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

She’d thought they’d have to climb down one of the terrifying handhold paths the slaves had cut to access their vertical housing, but Lys led them to a switchback staircase a few feet down the ridge patch that Bex hadn’t noticed in the gloom.

She supposed it made sense that the warlocks would have their own way down, but it still pissed her off that they’d carved this for themselves while forcing the slaves to climb slick handholds up a sheer cliff with no rope just to go to bed.

She was still growling about the completely unnecessary cruelty of it all when they finally got low enough to see the floor through the smoke.

That stopped her short. She’d seen the torches glittering on the giant floor through the smoke, so she’d already guessed it was big, open, and flat, but this was the first time Bex realized it was flooded.

The entire bottom of the city-sized cavern was covered in a foot of dark, sluggishly-flowing water with demons kneeling in it.

They were chained together in long rows, doing something with their hands in the water while warlocks flanked by war-demon guards observed them from dry, elevated metal walkways.

Bex was squinting through the smoke to try to see more when Iggs saved her the effort by just asking.

“What are they doing?”

“Making sin iron,” Lys replied without taking their eyes off the treacherously steep stairs. “It’s the only thing we do down here.”

Bex blinked in surprise. She’d always known sin iron was in the Hells, but she’d never thought about how.

Now that she was seeing the process with her own eyes, it looked remarkably like what Ishtar’s demons had always been made to do.

That dark water must be from the Rivers of Death she’d seen flowing into the Hells’ base, and the kneeling slaves were cleaning the sin out of it.

Back in the Riverlands, they would’ve drunk the water and removed the sins out that way.

Here, though, they did it with their hands, waving their fingers through the dirty flow until their palms were coated in black sin residue.

When their hands were full, they then turned and scraped the black gunk into a metal bucket shared by multiple slaves in the same area.

These buckets were then collected by yet another slave, who ran it through the water toward the cavern’s center.

The smoke was too thick for Bex to see where they were taking it yet, but she could guess.

The sin-collecting slaves were a mixed bag of Lust, Fear, Greed, Sorrow, Envy, and Hate demons, but they all dumped their sins into the same buckets.

That fit the definition of sin iron—which was famously the amalgamation of all humanity’s evils—to a T.

The buckets were almost certainly being taken to a kiln where their contents would be fired and pressed into actual sin-iron ingots.

That would also help explain the thick smoke in this place.

When she asked Lys about it, though, Kirok was the one who answered.

“There is no forging on this floor,” he explained authoritatively.

“Sin collected from the Middle and Lower Hells is sent to the Upper Hells for processing. War demons are the only ones trusted enough to handle such work and hearty enough to survive it. The fumes from the processing of sin iron are quite toxic. Softer demons like Lust would perish if they attempted to forge it.”

“Soft, huh?” Lys growled, but Bex cut them off.

“What else do the war demons make?”

“Everything,” Kirok replied. “We forge all the metals used in Heaven and the materials that make the Anchors.”

“They also make the chains that hold us down and the war constructs that guard us,” Lys added bitterly. “And war demons wonder why the rest of us hate them.”

“We do not wonder,” Kirok said angrily. “We know exactly why we are despised, but what other demons fail to understand is that we are victims of this just as much as you are. Do you think we like choking on toxic fumes in Gilgamesh’s factories and being forced to hurt our fellow demons?”

“Some of you seem to,” Lys said as they squared their warlock’s shoulders. “But we can argue about how I’m right later. We’re about to hit the slave floor, so shut up and get in character.”

Kirok growled deep in his chest, but thankfully for their mission—and his life expectancy given the obedience poison Adrian’s mother had painted on his skin—he did as he was told.

Bex got into her role as well, trailing behind Lys’s warlock with her fake horns lowered as far as they would go.

This made it much harder to walk down the final flight of neck-breakingly-steep stairs, but the rubber was about to hit the road on their disguises, and Bex was determined not to be the one who screwed up and got them killed.

At least it was good and dark. As expected of a path made for warlocks, the switchback stairs let out right onto one of the elevated walkways that allowed the overseers to patrol the flooded floor without getting their feet wet.

This meant the way forward was teeming with warlocks, but between the constant haze of smoke and the terrible light from the torches reflecting off the dirty water, no one gave their ragtag group a second glance.

Anyone who did get in their way quickly got back out of it once Lys gave them the stink eye.

Bex didn’t know if that was because they were impersonating someone important or if her lust demon was just that scary, but being able to move forward without being stopped was an enormous relief.

There were more guards than she’d expected after the complete nonresponse to their murderous entrance earlier, but nowhere near the number that would actually be needed to police so many demons.

Clearly, Gilgamesh had gotten comfortable with the idea that the Hells slaves wouldn’t rebel. That was a weakness Bex would absolutely be exploiting the moment she got her sword and fire back. First, though, they had to get out of here.

She wasn’t entirely sure how that was happening, to be honest. Lys was striding down the boardwalk like they owned it, but that was just how warlocks walked.

Bex couldn’t see any actual destination, just more torches and demons kneeling miserably in filthy water.

There were no buildings, no brightly lit areas, nothing that looked like an office or an elevator or anything that might get them closer to Heaven.

She was starting to get really worried when a giant shape suddenly emerged from the pervasive wall of smoke.

It was a tower. A shining white, cylindrical tower the size of a skyscraper.

Its golden doors were even with the metal walkways, but its base was set flush against the cavern’s floor, and its top went all the way to the ceiling.

It looked like a white rod someone had driven straight through the middle of the Middle Hells, and inside of its smooth, completely soot-free white walls was an entire office building’s worth of warlocks.

Bex could see them moving through the tower’s glass windows, and Lys sucked in a breath.

“There’s our exit,” they murmured, letting go of Bex’s collar to dig the white paper out of their pocket. “Everyone play it cool. I’ll do the talking.”

That was always the plan, but Iggs suddenly looked like a bug had crawled into his fake armor. “ Can you do the talking?” he whispered frantically. “I just realized, you killed your guy before he could get a word out. Do you even know what his voice sounds like?”

“Yes, because all warlocks sound like assholes,” Lys hissed back. “Now shut up . Demon guards don’t talk. Just look at Kirok.”

Kirok was being the ideal of a silent war demon servant.

His face looked so detached that Bex hardly recognized it, and his walk was the stiff gait of someone just going through the motions.

It was a spectacular performance that Iggs couldn’t possibly copy, but he still tried his best. Bex leaned hard into her role as well, hunching her shoulders to make herself look as small and beaten down as possible—something that was depressingly easy now that her horns were gone—as she scrambled after Lys’s warlock toward the tower’s entrance.

As they got closer, Bex finally saw where all the sin was going.

She hadn’t noticed them in the dark, but there were actually several black pipes running up the side of the blindingly white tower.

Most of them seemed to be for river water, but the biggest, squarest one opened into a giant bin where all the runners she’d seen earlier were dumping their buckets of sin.

There was already a huge pile of black muddy-looking sin sitting at the bottom along with four tall demons with shovels who were mucking it out like a stable full of manure.

They shoveled the sin into big metal troughs that were constantly being lifted on a conveyor into the pipe above, presumably for delivery to the forges in the Hell of War.

It was a simple system, but the amount they were moving was pretty incredible.

The sin scrapings Bex had seen the demons wiping off their palms into the buckets had been tiny, but put it all together and the combined output was staggering.

No wonder Heaven used sin iron for everything it did.

They were making it quite literally by the bucketload.

Yet again, the idea of her people being worked to death and their sacred duty abused so Gilgamesh could have his toxic infrastructure was enough to make Bex see red, but what got her hardest were the demons who carried the sin in.

She’d noticed them darting around collecting the buckets earlier, but now that she was closer, Bex saw that almost all of them were children.

Skeletally thin, hollow-eyed children being forced to dump what were essentially buckets of food into a bin to be smelted down.