Page 19 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
That was the biggest throw of this entire plan.
If the princess refused the bait and decided that ninety-nine percent completion was good enough to call Gilgamesh in right now, Adrian would have to break the horns again to save himself.
The real Bex probably would’ve decided what was here was good enough, but the princess was a servant of Gilgamesh, and no Heavenly stooge Adrian had met would dare present their king with anything less than what he’d asked for.
He was betting she’d rather gamble on her ability to control him than present an unfinished crown to her king, and sure enough, after just thirty seconds of grinding her golden gears or whatever it was princesses did to make decisions, she nodded.
“I’ll take you to find it,” she said. “Where do you need to go?”
Adrian took his cat out again and made a show of checking, but he already knew. The Queen of Pride had been moving constantly since he’d found her, but she’d always been at the same depth, and there was only one thing Adrian knew of which lay below the Holy City.
“I’m afraid it’s in the Hells,” he said apologetically.
“The Hells?” she repeated, shocked. “I can’t take you there! Your father would never—”
“Father doesn’t have to know,” Adrian said, flashing her a conspiratorial smile.
“We’re a prince and princess of Heaven working for the glory of our king.
Surely we don’t need to ask permission like schoolchildren just to go down a level or two, especially since we’re doing it for him.
He’s the one who entrusted this job to us.
We can’t be running to him with every little thing.
You didn’t go bothering him for permission for all the leaves and deathly water I needed. ”
“Because those things were already available in Heaven,” the princess insisted, looking more nervous than ever.
“The Hells are different. They’re restricted and dangerous .
You still haven’t been granted permission to use me as your sword, which means you’d be undefended.
Even for this, I couldn’t possibly take you down there without permission. ”
“Then we’ll get permission,” Adrian said, switching tactics. “The Crown Prince manages Heaven and the Hells, right? We’ll just ask him to let us go. That way we won’t have to interrupt Gilgamesh’s important work.”
The princess still didn’t look happy, but she must’ve feared bothering the Crown Prince a lot less than she did Gilgamesh, because she didn’t say no immediately, and Adrian went for the kill.
“It would mean the world to me if you did this,” he said as he reached out to brush his fingers against her cold, smooth cheek.
“This is the last hurdle between us and the end of this war. Gilgamesh made it very clear when he spoke to me in my forest that these horns are the final piece he needs to complete his great vision. If we bring them to him, he’ll reward us with his favor, which means we’ll be the top prince and princess in Heaven. ”
He reached down to grab her hand. The right one that was actually Bex’s with the heavy lump of Drox’s ring clearly visible under the thin white glove.
“We’ll be in a league of our own,” he promised, lifting her gloved fingers to his lips. “I won’t have any more work distracting me. It’ll be just me and you basking forever in the light of Gilgamesh’s glory. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
That was the rankest lie Adrian had ever told.
Just getting the words out made him feel like he’d taken a bite out of a rotting skunk, but the princess’s face was lit up brighter than he’d seen it since she first came into his bedroom a week ago.
Her joy was so sincere, and so like the real Bex’s, it made him feel like a heel before she grabbed him in another of those crushing hugs.
“Oh, Adrian, yes!” she cried, almost breaking his ribs in her joy.
“We’ll go to the Crown Prince right now and ask.
He’ll be mad we didn’t make an appointment, but Gilgamesh told everyone your work was top priority, so I’m sure he’ll say yes!
” She rose up on her toes to pepper his face with hard, cold kisses.
“We’ll move fast and be done before anything bad can happen, and then we’ll go to the top of the tower and present the crown to Gilgamesh in person.
Oh, my prince, he’ll be so happy with us! ”
It was a sign of how brainwashed she was that the princess sounded giddier about making Gilgamesh happy than about being happy herself, but Adrian wasn’t complaining.
He was too busy trying not to flinch as she kissed his cheeks twenty more times before tugging him toward the hallway door, which was when he realized they she meant right now right now.
“Wait!” he cried, pulling out of her embrace. “Let me grab the horns.”
The dazzling joy fell off her face. “Why? Isn’t it safer to leave them here?”
“But not faster,” he said as he hefted the Queen of Pride’s enormous crown off the table and started carefully wiggling it into the largest of his coat’s enchanted pockets.
“If I leave them here, we’ll have to come all the way back up.
If I keep them with me, though, there’s a good chance I can replace the lost piece the moment I find what I need.
That way we’ll be able to go straight to Gilgamesh without wasting time. ”
“The Eternal King does hate waste,” she agreed, breaking into a smile again. “Good thinking, my love!”
Adrian was so relieved he was getting what he wanted without a fight that he didn’t even wince at the endearment.
He just crammed the horns into his coat.
It took a bit of doing because the horns were such an odd shape, but these were the same pockets he used to haul groceries, and eventually he fit them in.
This left one side of his coat much heavier than the other, but the horns themselves were completely hidden under the enchantments, leaving his coat hanging straight to his knees like normal.
When Adrian was certain they couldn’t be seen from the outside, he straightened his witch hat and marched to the door, following the clack of the princess’s ivory feet out of his prison workroom into the grand golden corridor beyond.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He’d never admit it out loud, but Adrian found the walk to the Crown Prince’s office absolutely fascinating.
He’d been through here once before when his father had first escorted him to his room, but that was right after Bex had lost her horns and he’d given himself up to save her, so he hadn’t exactly been in a state to appreciate the architecture.
After a week of being confined to just two rooms, though, Adrian was chomping at the bit to see more of Gilgamesh’s famous palace.
He tried to make himself be good and do recon—noting the positions of staircases, exits, potential hiding places, and so on—but his curiosity was so overloaded that he ended up looking at everything, gawking like a tourist as he followed the princess through the white-and-gold labyrinth that was the Fortress of the Highest Heaven.
Gilgamesh’s palace consisted of multiple towers rising from a single base.
It reminded him of the river trees that sometimes had multiple trunks sprouting from one stump, except these towers clustered instead of spreading out, and there was nothing organic about them.
Every hallway they walked down had a marble floor polished to a mirror shine, walls covered in gold leaf, and an arched ceiling lined with magically-glowing crystal chandeliers.
The combined effect made Malik’s art-filled mansion feel like a rustic hut in the wilderness.
At least on his father’s private island there’d been plants and water and wind.
This place was entirely artificial from the too-smooth polished floor to the unnaturally white light that streamed through the perfectly clear crystal windows.
Even the scale felt unnatural. Every doorway they passed was oversized, every hallway palatial, and the stairs— so damn many stairs rising in elegant, gigantic spirals through white-stone towers that seemed to go up for miles.
It was oddly deserted as well. Adrian had seen the throngs of silent human servants who brought his food and tidied his bedroom, so he’d assumed there must be a large number of people working here, but every grand hallway and staircase they walked down was empty.
Princesses were pretty scary, so maybe everyone had just cleared out ahead of them, but it really looked like the entire tower was uninhabited.
At least the view was nice. The Crown Prince’s office was much higher than Adrian’s workshop.
To get there, the princess led them down the spiral stairs of Adrian’s tower, across a delicate white connector bridge, and then up another, much larger tower that seemed to belong entirely to Gilgamesh’s eldest son.
There were other people here, mostly scribes, but they all fled the second they spotted Adrian’s princess, clearing the stairs to give Adrian an unobstructed view of the White City far below.
It was the best look he’d had since standing on the balcony with his father that first night.
From this high up, he could see entire circle of the capital’s walls, though not what lay beyond them.
He did see the slagged-gold carcasses of the lion cannons Bex had melted during her fight last week, which made him smug, but the rest of the city was untouched.
It lay around the base of the palace like a glittering blanket of new snow cut through with perfectly straight roads that actually seemed to have people on them.
They looked like ants from way up here, but the city traffic was still the most normal-looking thing Adrian had seen since coming to Heaven.