Page 30 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)
She dragged him even faster after that, which was a real shame because they were now in what was clearly the public part of Gilgamesh’s palace.
Adrian had only seen the occasional servant upstairs, but these floors were packed with all manner of Heavenly denizens carrying all sorts of interesting things.
The princess dragged him past a treasury filled with chests packed with coins of quintessence, an enormous, brilliantly lit hall full of accountants scribbling in floating, gold-bound ledgers, and a library full of scrolls that kept magically appearing and disappearing.
So many secrets of Heaven were on display that Adrian’s eyes were getting tired from being so wide.
Many of the things he saw were stuff he’d never expected, like women wearing the white robes of Heaven.
He hadn’t realized Gilgamesh employed women since every sorcerer and warlock he’d ever met had been a man, but there were plenty of them up here.
Mostly in the libraries, but he also saw them counting quintessence with the assistance of greed demons dressed in the modest white robes of favored slaves.
“Why is all the quintessence piled up here?” he asked the princess when she dragged him past yet another overflowing treasury. “Do they make it in the palace?”
“Yes,” she said without missing a step. “One of the palace towers is entirely dedicated to manufacturing quintessence. They normally only move the chests down here when it’s time to ship them down the chains, but things have been backing up since the Anchors closed.”
Adrian’s ears picked up. “Are the chains close by?”
“Very close,” she said, pointing the gloved hand she wasn’t using to drag him at a large arched doorway that led to a wide staircase going down.
“The hall where all the chains come together is right below us. Since Anchors are the only reliable entrance to Heaven other than death, Gilgamesh built the chains directly into the foundation of his palace.”
“Sounds like a good way to control access.”
“He did it to keep us safe,” the princess corrected, pausing her breakneck pace to shoot him a chiding look. “The chains are the most obvious invasion path. If they ended in the White City, anyone could march up and all of Heaven could be put in danger.”
“I never meant to question the king’s judgment,” Adrian said quickly. Then he added. “Can we go see them?”
It took a champion effort to keep his voice casual.
Adrian was dying to see the place where all the chains connected, and what they connected to.
In the desert, he’d seen them physically wrapped around the Wheel of Reincarnation, but he still wasn’t sure if that had been real or not.
What he’d perceived as a black desert of sin-iron dust could’ve been a metaphorical representation to make abstract concepts like reincarnation easier to understand and manipulate.
There was no question that the chains he’d seen there had been much closer together than they actually were geographically, but that didn’t mean it was a total fake.
For all Adrian knew, the chains passed through the palace and kept going into the desert from there.
There was simply no way to know without investigating for himself, but the princess was already shaking her head.
“I’m sorry, my prince,” she said. “The chains are sealed behind the same edict that locked the Anchors. We can’t even enter the arrival room without Gilgamesh or Prince Hector’s permission.”
Adrian frowned. “Prince Hector?”
“The Prince of Envy,” she explained, turning away to pick up the pace again. “He’s the prince in charge of chain maintenance.”
Ah , Adrian thought as she dragged him behind her.
Hector must be the dirty prince he’d seen in the Boston Anchor, the one who’d heard his teleport and sounded the alarm.
Also the one who’d tried to kill him when he’d stuck his head through the sin-iron wall at the bottom of the Seattle Anchor while dressed as Yearling, the crow-pecked Anchor manager.
Not someone Adrian wanted to see again in either case, but he still looked longingly at the wide stairs as the princess dragged him away.
Since the space reserved for the chains apparently took up the entirety of the palace’s ground floor, they ended up leaving through a side door that let out onto a balcony overlooking the White City.
It would’ve been the perfect place for a fountain and a formal garden in a normal castle, but this was Gilgamesh’s tightly controlled land of the dead.
Everything down to the paving stones was sealed tight and bone-dry without so much as a hint of greenery.
It was still a nice spot, though. Adrian hadn’t realized how desperately he’d missed being outdoors until he felt the gentle breeze on his skin and saw the blue sky overhead.
Both were fake, of course, but it still felt good to get out of that damned mausoleum, especially when he noticed the dome of Heaven shifting toward the bright-blue velvet color that passed for night up here.
“How far is the entrance to the Hells?” he asked as the princess dragged him down the steps and across the enormous, white-paved courtyard toward the wall that separated Gilgamesh’s palace from the rest of the city.
“Not as far as the outer walls,” she replied. “But it’s not a short walk. The Hells are where the gods’ monsters are imprisoned. The Eternal King would’ve put it outside the city if he could have, but the guards need to be able to get to work, and the sin iron must still be shipped in, of course.”
She pointed across the courtyard at a line of stoic-looking war demons pushing several dozen carts stacked high with ingots of familiar, coal-black metal through the palace’s gate, and Adrian whistled.
“That looks like a lot of sin iron,” he said, leaning in for a closer look. “Is that normal?”
“I… I’m not sure,” the princess admitted, lowering her head. “I’m as new here as you are, and the Crown Princess’s training didn’t include things like sin-iron production.” Her golden eyes slid back to the carts. “It does seem like a large amount, though.”
It was tonnage. Now that they were nearly to the gate themselves, Adrian could see that the train of war-demon-pulled carts extended all the way down the fancy white street ahead of them.
There had to be two hundred of them just in this area alone, and they weren’t even close to the entrance to the Hells yet.
The bricks of sin iron also looked even darker than Adrian remembered, though that could’ve been an optical illusion caused by the unnatural brightness of Heaven.
“What’s Gilgamesh doing with it all?” he asked as they passed the carts. “Building another Anchor?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know, my prince,” the princess answered. “But I’m sure your father will tell you all about it when you’re his new Crown Prince.”
Adrian didn’t know about that. From what he’d seen, Gilgamesh never explained anything to anyone unless he was getting something out of it.
He’d been a font of information back when he was trying to bring Adrian over to his side, but the moment his youngest son was fully under his control, he’d run off to his own projects without so much as a goodbye.
Not that Adrian minded being neglected, but he still found the insincerity annoying.
At the very least, he wished someone would tell him what his father was doing.
He’d thought it was odd from the beginning that Gilgamesh had made such a big deal about the Queen of Pride’s horns only to completely ignore them the moment Adrian was locked in, but what was all this sin iron for?
And why were the Anchors still locked? Bex’s rebellion had been defeated, so why was Heaven still acting like a castle under siege? What was the point of all this chaos?
Adrian didn’t know, and that made him more nervous than anything else because he hadn’t been lying when he’d told the princess his father was smart.
If Gilgamesh was doing something that didn’t make sense, that just meant Adrian wasn’t seeing the whole picture yet.
If he didn’t figure it out in time, Gilgamesh could blindside them again just like he’d done before, but it had been impossible to investigate from inside his locked room.
This trip was his first chance to actually learn something, so Adrian kept his eyes and ears open as he followed the princess through the palace gate into Heaven’s White City.
It was a lot more confusing than he’d expected.
The roads had looked so straight and orderly from his window, but once Adrian got down in them, the fact that every corner and building looked exactly the same turned navigation into a frustrating memory puzzle.
Everywhere he looked, Adrian saw Heavenly denizens in the same white robes sitting on nearly identical balconies or lounging in overly decorated living rooms filled with the same white furniture as every other house.
Even the demons that served them were all dressed in the identical white uniforms, turning the entire city into a big white blur.
It was so different from what he’d expected.
He’d thought this place would be a wonderland of dazzlingly beautiful mansions filled with five thousand years’ worth of hoarded treasures just like his father’s island, but every single house looked the same.
Adrian knew Heaven was infamous for falling into trends, but this was ridiculous.
How could a city full of immortal people with effectively infinite money end up with such boring, cookie-cutter houses?