Page 60 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

Lys snorted. “So he’s got child soldiers subjugating their fellow demons while the older ones slave in his forges? Sounds like typical Gilgamesh behavior to me.”

“Do you know what he’s using the forges to make?” Adrian asked as he pushed his way to the front.

General Kirok stiffened when he saw the witch’s mirrored eyes. When Bex made a go on motion with her hands, though, the war demon grudgingly continued.

“According to the soldiers I just spoke to, the Eternal King commanded them to throw out all the sin iron currently in production and restart the forging process over with all new material. That was a week ago, and he’s been working the entire Upper Hells around the clock ever since.

He’s even got war demons delivering the finished ingots to the palace by hand, which is highly unusual.

Unless Gilgamesh needs it shipped to Earth for an Anchor, sin iron is typically kept within the Hells. ”

“I saw them carting it through the streets of the Holy City earlier,” Adrian confirmed, tapping his wooden pinky finger worriedly against his chin.

“I didn’t see where in the palace they were taking it, but I bet if we follow the delivery line to the end, we’ll find Gilgamesh.

He likes to make the important things with his own hands. ”

Kirok’s shoulders had been getting stiffer the whole time Adrian was talking, but that last sentence was apparently the final straw. “How do you know so much about the Tyrant King?”

“Because Gilgamesh forced me to work for him as well,” Adrian replied matter-of-factly.

“He never told me the real reason why, though, and that’s a problem.

If we’re going to stop him, we need to know exactly what he’s working on before he unleashes it.

That’s why I’m being so nosy. I need to figure out why he wanted me to repair the Queen of Pride’s horns so badly and what that has to do with everything else. ”

Bex had just said she didn’t care how Nemini got her horns back, but that confession still threw her for a loop.

“Wait,” she said, whirling toward Adrian. “ Gilgamesh is the reason Pride’s crown was restored?”

“It’s what he kidnapped me to do,” Adrian told her with a nod.

“Like I mentioned downstairs, Gilgamesh told me he needs the crowns of all nine queens to finish his great work, but I still don’t know what that great work is .

Going by other things he’s said, my best guess is that he’s trying to solve an infrastructure problem involved with keeping the gods in their graves.

Other than using Wrath to make a better sin-iron chain, though, I don’t know what that could be. ”

Bex scowled. “Could he be making a better chain?”

“Possibly,” Adrian said. “But I don’t think that’s his endgame. He’s lied to me about almost everything, but I still get the impression that the Eternal King isn’t the sort who puts a bandage over a problem when he can solve the root cause.”

“He did force my wrath demons to collect sin until they died from overwork,” Bex agreed angrily. “He’s clearly in a hell of a hurry for something, but what? And why ? The gods have been dead for five thousand years. What could he possibly be in such a rush to—”

She cut off with a gasp when the floor of the Hells rumbled beneath her feet.

The crowd of demons around them started screaming a second later, falling to the ground and covering their heads against whatever disaster was sure to follow, but nothing came.

The ground kept rumbling, but no armies popped out to kill anyone, and eventually Bex got tired of waiting.

“Keep unlocking the people up here,” she ordered Kirok, whose face was looking ashen despite his shiny bronze complexion. “We’re going down to start evacuating Wrath and Pride.”

When the general nodded, Bex turned around to address the enormous crowd cowering on the floor.

“Don’t let Heaven’s rumbling scare you!” she yelled, bellowing as loudly as she could to make sure her voice reached all the way to the demons in the back.

“The plan hasn’t changed! We’re all still getting out of here, so I want everyone who’s capable of running to go out there and help the key teams. The rest of you clear the stairs so that the demons coming up from below have somewhere to go.

General Kirok and Desh are in charge of this floor until the Queen of Pride and I return. ”

As always, yelling orders at terrified people left a bad taste in Bex’s mouth, but it worked like a charm.

The moment the demons had something to focus on other than their fear, they leaped into action, running off into the dark to help Desh’s key team.

Kirok himself took over clearing the tower so the demons who were still downstairs would have room to evacuate, yelling at the war demons—who did look really young, now that Bex was staring at them—to get off their asses and start forming a perimeter.

“All right,” Bex said when everything was in motion. “Let’s get moving.”

“That was some fast work,” Adrian noted as the five of them started going down the stairs again, this time at a jog. “How did you get everyone to listen without horns?”

“Everyone always listens to Bex,” Lys said proudly, gripping Bran with both hands as the broom raven ramped up its speed. “But I think it’s time you told us exactly what role you’d been playing in all of this, O Great Prince of Gilgamesh.”

Adrian winced at the title. When Bex opened her mouth to tell Lys to lay off, though, he shook his head.

“They’re not wrong,” he said, fixing his eyes on the endless spiral of dark stairs ahead of them. “I am a prince with the white blood to prove it. I also repaired the Queen of Pride’s horns at Gilgamesh’s request, which I’m still not sure was the right thing to do.”

He glanced at Boston as he said that last part, but while the cat looked conflicted, Bex’s mind was already made up.

“Well, I’m sure it was right,” she said stubbornly.

“I know Gilgamesh is famously sneaky, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’d all be on our knees waiting for warlocks to put us in chains right now if you hadn’t fixed those horns and Nemini hadn’t put them on her head.

If something bad happens because of that, we’ll deal with it, but I’ll take being still alive, still together, and still in the fight over being cautious any day. ”

Adrian looked incredibly relieved to hear that, but Bex didn’t have time to enjoy his smile.

The mysterious shaking was getting stronger the deeper down they went, and there seemed to be a giant hole in the staircase ahead of them.

She could jump over it, but Adrian was going to have a hard time.

She was about to offer to carry him when the witch jumped onto his broom instead.

“Get on,” he said as Lys scrambled to make room. “This way will be faster.”

Bex could’ve gotten down by herself just fine, but she was loath to stop Adrian when he grabbed her hand and pulled her onto the broom next to him. Iggs hopped on as well, then Nemini, who reluctantly took a seat on the raven’s wing where her giant new horns wouldn’t poke anyone.

When they were all on board, Adrian put a hand on Boston to steady the cat against his shoulder and tapped his foot.

The transformed broom dropped at the signal, plunging them down the center of the stairwell so fast, Bex didn’t even notice they’d reached the bottom until Bran stopped hard enough to knock her off her feet.

Adrian still had a firm grip on her hand, so she didn’t actually go flying, but when Bex looked up to thank him, Adrian was staring ahead of them like he’d seen a ghost.

A second later, Bex saw why. The circular floor at the base of the Lowest Hells—which had been dry when they’d left a few minutes ago—was now covered in sludgy, black liquid.

The surface had an oily gleam when she called her flames to light up her hand, but while it smelled strongly of the deathly rivers, it moved like no water Bex had ever seen.

It looked like industrial waste, and while there was only a few inches covering the floor at the moment, Bex could see more oozing out of the seams of the sin-iron pipes that lined the walls.

It looked like the whole stairwell was weeping, but the sludge was dripping fastest around the doors that led to the Lowest Hells.

All the breath left Bex’s body. That black sludge was seeping into the Hell of Wrath. If the ground inside was already covered like the floor out here, then her people… her people…

“Bex, no !” Adrian yelled, grabbing her around the waist right before she leaped off the broom. “We don’t know what it is yet!”

“But my demons are in there!” Bex howled, throwing out her flaming arms. “That sludge is covering the floor, and they can’t move !”

Her scream was still echoing through the chamber when another frantic voice shouted back.

“Don’t touch it!” yelled Prince Leander from where he’d climbed the stairs to get away from the black flood covering the floor. “That’s Protocol Three!”

“What in the Hells is Protocol Three?” Bex screamed.

“It’s a failsafe,” the prince explained, waving frantically for Adrian to bring his broom over.

“In the event of a security breach catastrophic enough to make Gilgamesh declare the Hells irrecoverable, the Crown Prince has three protocols he can use to ensure Heaven’s survival.

Protocol Three causes the least structural damage but is the most deadly.

It triggers a backflow from the stagnation tanks, flooding the Hells from the bottom up with putrefied, concentrated sin. ”

“That’s not sin,” Bex insisted, stabbing her flaming finger at the sludgy water. “I’ve drunk from Ishtar’s rivers all my lives, and that is not the water of death.”