CHAPTER 16 #3
He did sound much louder than usual. Everything did.
When Ishtar’s sword was in her hand, the whole world felt brighter and more alive.
Her body felt stronger, her senses sharper, which was insane, since she’d already gotten an upgrade when she grew her new horns.
Bex had been hoping to score a weapon sharp enough to cut through whatever Gilgamesh was plotting, not to mention the cultural rightness of taking back Ishtar’s blade, but it felt like she’d gotten more than she’d bargained for.
Too much more. The new sensations were rapidly overloading her. Even Drox was starting to shake, his ring clamping down on her finger in distress until Bex forced her hand open again, sending Ishtar’s black sword clattering to the golden floor.
Maybe we should work up to it in phases.
“Yeah,” Bex agreed, undoing the belt sheath from Crown Prince Alexander’s waist and wrapping it around her own.
When she’d made a safe holding place, she picked up the sword again, using her shirt hem this time.
The extra layer of fabric didn’t do much, but it took the edge off long enough for Bex to get the sword into its scabbard.
She was pulling the belt tight on her waist so it wouldn’t slide around when Adrian gave an excited shout.
“Found it!” he cried, tapping the raven-carved head of Bran’s broomstick against a piece of gold wall about twenty feet away from the throne.
“Good job,” Bex said, hurrying to his side. “How do you know that’s the right spot, though? It doesn’t look any different from the rest of the wall.”
“There’s no obvious sign,” Adrian admitted, returning his broom to its sling on his back so he could tap his fingers against what looked like just another carved section of the intricate gold depiction of ancient Uruk.
“But the important thing to remember about Gilgamesh is that he considers himself an artist. Why else would a king so famous for being thrifty bother making his creations beautiful? His princesses and palaces and the golden armor he puts on his sons would all still work if they weren’t decorated, but they are.
Dramatically so, because Gilgamesh values both beauty and symbolism.
That’s why his throne room is covered in a relief of his old kingdom instead of celestial lions or even no carvings at all.
Even at the pinnacle of Heaven, he’s still presenting himself as a human king, and as a human, this was the place that was most important to him. ”
Adrian tapped his finger on the market square depicted in the gold relief, but Bex still didn’t understand. “What’s so special about that spot?”
“Because this is where Gilgamesh began his war with the gods,” Adrian explained.
“It’s the same place he chose to show me when he turned me into a prince, the road where his best friend, Enkidu, was killed by the original Queen of Wrath.
” He pressed his finger even harder against the carefully worked gold.
“This is the place that, in Gilgamesh’s mind, justifies everything he does.
Of course he’d hide his door behind it. It’s literally the heart of his entire philosophy. ”
“It’s also the point directly next to where we came out of the chains before,” added Nemini, who’d been listening silently the whole time. “I don’t know if that matters for a hidden space, but if there is a connection, it lines up.”
“Sounds good to me,” Bex said, turning her new belt so the sheathed length of Ishtar’s sword wouldn’t bang against her legs. “How do we get it open?”
“That’s the part I’m less sure about,” Adrian admitted, taking off his witch hat to push his hair, which had gotten quite shaggy, out of his eyes.
“We could try Envy’s power again, but I suspect that won’t work since you already tried to go straight to Gilgamesh and failed.
I also doubt there’s a physical hidden door because I’ve already tapped all over the wall, and I can’t hear any difference in density. ”
“Maybe there never was a door since Gilgamesh teleports everywhere,” Bex suggested.
“But the chains don’t,” Adrian said. “Even if Gilgamesh teleported all the sin iron directly to his workshop, the chains still need an uninterrupted path from Earth to the Wheel. That’s what got us up here in the first place, but if the hole was too narrow to climb through, that just means…”
His voice trailed off as he looked over his head, and then his face split into a smile. He ran over to Leander next. Bex thought he was just checking on his downed brother, but when Adrian returned, both of his hands were covered in princely white blood.
“I know, I know,” he said at Bex’s horrified look. “But it doesn’t make sense that Gilgamesh’s final chamber wouldn’t be sealed with sorcery, and this is the only quintessence I’ve got at the moment.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to use it!” Boston hissed, arching his back. “You told me we were done with this!”
“Almost,” Adrian said, pressing his bloody palms onto the carving, which was how Bex noticed that the golden edges of the buildings in that spot were slightly rounded, almost as if someone laid their hands in that exact position often.
“Here we go,” Adrian whispered, focusing on the point between his thumbs where a large bearded man, the only human Bex had seen in the entire carving, was depicted walking through the square. “Open.”
That didn’t sound like any sorcery Bex had ever heard. The word wasn’t even in ancient Sumerian, but it still worked like a charm. The moment Adrian spoke the command, the wall he’d pressed his hands against vanished, revealing a hallway lined with old brown stone leading farther in.
“There,” Adrian said, shaking his hands, which were now perfectly clean. Every bit of blood had been consumed by the spell, leaving his palms soft and scrubbed when he reached for Bex.
“Shall we go have a look?”
She took his offered hand in her shaking one, leaving the gleaming throne room behind as she, Boston, and Nemini followed Adrian into what Bex desperately hoped was the final room of Gilgamesh’s palace.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Adrian’s heart was thumping beneath his tree as he led Bex down the stone tunnel, which was so old and worn that it looked like it belonged beneath a pyramid.
The blocks that formed the walls were huge and covered in cuneiform markings, but not the clean, fancy kind found on Gilgamesh’s modern infrastructure.
This was cuneiform like you saw in museums, true ancient writing.
“Do you know what it says?” he asked over his shoulder.
Bex shook her head. Fortunately, Nemini was old enough to read anything.
“It’s a poem,” she reported, her yellow eyes moving in circles as she read the writing carved into the walls, floor, and ceiling.
“The first section recounts Gilgamesh’s life and heroic deeds.
The second is a record of the war, though it’s mostly a recounting of the crimes of the gods that led to their defeat. ”
“Gotta give him points for consistency,” Bex muttered. “How far do you think this tunnel goes?”
She moved closer to Adrian as she spoke, walking with her arms pulled in to keep them as far from the walls as possible, though she could also have been avoiding touching the new sword she wore on her hip.
Adrian had seen her pick it up because he watched her more than he was comfortable admitting, but while scoring the Sword of Ishtar seemed like it should be the victory of a lifetime, Bex acted like she was carrying a cursed object.
Considering how strained her relationship with her mother was at the moment, Adrian supposed that made sense. He was dying to ask Bex about it, but he didn’t want to poke a sore spot, so he answered her question instead.
“There’s no way to know how long it is except to walk down it,” he said, picking up the pace. “We’re in the most Gilgamesh-y of all Gilgamesh’s private spaces now. Whatever’s in here, it was built for his purposes alone, so I guess we’ll arrive when he wants us to.”
“Or we’ll be trapped forever,” Bex muttered.
“He won’t do that,” Adrian told her confidently. “He’ll come down to gloat, if nothing else, and then you can hit him. I’m much more interested in why Gilgamesh chose a tunnel. He’s always been more of a grand-decorative-spaces sort of…”
His voice trailed off as the ancient hallway they’d been following suddenly ended in a large stone chamber exactly like the one he’d just said was Gilgamesh’s style.
There was no gold, but the arched walls were covered in beautiful carvings of lions, trees, and fountains.
It looked like a naturally occurring cathedral, if such a thing existed, and sitting at the far end was a beautiful waist-high stone basin filled with glowing blue water and lined with eight pairs of horns, plus an empty spot for one more.
“I don’t believe it,” Adrian breathed. “Is that—?”
He didn’t get to finish, because Bex had already run past him. She sprinted down the middle of the beautifully carved cavern and grabbed the closest set of horns, which also happened to be the most familiar.
“That bastard,” she snarled, clutching the pair of two-foot-long, spear-sharp, black-ridged horns to her chest. “These are mine!”
“They’re all here,” Nemini said, appearing next to her sister between one blink and the next. “Those are Sorrow’s. Those are Greed’s. Even War’s horns are here.”
“This must be where Gilgamesh has been hiding them,” Adrian said as he ran over. “But why did he leave them unguarded like this?”
“They weren’t unguarded,” Bex argued. “Did you not see the fight I was just in?”
“I know, I know,” Adrian said, looking around nervously. “But I still expected a trap of some sort. Gilgamesh is famous for being suspicious.”
“He’s also famous for discarding things he no longer needs,” Nemini said quietly, looking up at the pale light that shone down through the holes in the elegantly carved ceiling above them.