Tear Down Heaven: Urban Fantasy Action with Witches and Demons, page 35
He smacked his hand against the glass tank.
“The princes aren’t just Gilgamesh’s backups,” he announced, grabbing Boston’s head and forcing him to look. “They’re his fuel tanks. This is how he’s able to cast so much magic despite having no quintessence in his own body. He’s using their bodies and blood instead.”
It all made sense now. Adrian had never seen sorcery on the scale Gilgamesh was throwing around. He’d assumed that was due to the experience difference between the master who’d invented the system and his students, but it still felt like too much. It’d taken all the quintessence in Adrian’s body to grow his new tree, but the magic Gilgamesh was doing now—endless teleportation, the complete reconstruction of his body, whatever that giant shadow before had been—was even bigger. Pulling off that many miracles back-to-back required more quintessence than any single person could hold, but Gilgamesh wasn’t doing it as a single person. He was fueling his magic using an entire array of princes, and now that Adrian knew that, he knew how to bring him down.
“Cover me,” he told Boston.
“Cover you with what?” the cat cried, digging his claws into Adrian’s coat as the witch dropped flat on the stone. “There’s no forest here!”
“There’s about to be,” Adrian promised as he pressed his entire body into the ground. “Just keep your eyes on the fight and bite me if something’s about to hit us. I’ll do the rest.”
Boston growled deep in his throat. Adrian hoped it was a growl of approval, because he’d already turned his attention inward, leaving the chaos of Heaven’s pinnacle behind to focus everything on his heart, which was still beating far below at the base of his new tree. Through its deep roots, he could feel the battle raging in the main Blackwood grove. Not enough to tell how the fight was going, but it made him feel terrible about asking for resources. He was about to go see if there was an outer grove he could pull from instead when the forest itself forced its way into his mind.
It felt like someone had shoved a handful of roots inside his skull. The Great Blackwood was famous for showing up where it was least expected, but Adrian had never felt it do anything like this before. It was almost like someone was using a spell to thrust the forest’s magic directly into his hands. Not that Adrian was complaining, since that was exactly what he needed, but the timing was too perfect not to be suspicious.
That thought survived only a few seconds before Adrian tossed it aside. Nothing was suspicious when your aunt could see the future, and the whole coven knew he’d come up here to finish Gilgamesh. If he actually managed to kill the Eternal King, the army attacking the main Blackwood would collapse on its own. That made Adrian’s tree the most important to the forest’s survival, and survival at any cost was the first rule of all living things. Look at it that way and it made complete sense why the Great Blackwood was suddenly pouring magic into him like a firehose into a bucket. The only question left was what to do with it all.
As a greedy Witch of the Present, that was Adrian’s favorite question to answer. He soaked the magic up as fast as the Blackwood fed it to him and used the power to send his forest surging to the sky. Not Heaven’s sky. That place was just another prison, same as the Hells. The true path to power followed the chains just like the Morrigan had said, so that was what Adrian did, growing his forest along the same black links they’d used to climb up here in the first place.
Just like during his experiments below the Seattle Anchor, the sin iron killed his plants almost instantaneously, but Adrian was no longer working with potted sprouts from a nursery. He had volume on his side now, and he used it mercilessly, burying the chains in vines, moss, and twisting roots until the layer of dead material was so thick that the chains’ poison could no longer reach the new growth that surged over it.
All that coverage took up a lot of room in the narrow, hidden tunnel, but the chains were sagging now that Gilgamesh had destroyed the Wheel they’d been made to hold. Several had already fallen out completely, making room for all the new branches and greenery Adrian was shoving into the hole. The wave of growth hit the ceiling Bex had punched through to reach the golden throne room like a landslide, but the forest didn’t have to go around like they had. It bashed its way straight through the plug at the top, breaking the magical base that supported the gods’ giant sin-iron tombs like roots cracking a foundation.
That was exactly what Adrian hoped would happen. But as he poured the Blackwood’s magic onto his forest like gasoline on a fire, he realized for the first time just how big this place was. His forest was spreading like every witch in the world was pushing it right along with him, but it still took a full twenty heartbeats before the first roots started poking over the edge of the rocky shelf Adrian was lying on.
Once the flood of life got going, though, it didn’t stop. The moment the roots broke through, the rest of the forest erupted into Gilgamesh’s black desert in an explosion of vibrant, violent green. Saplings and vines, flowers and weeds, even the upper branches of his fir tree pushed through the black sand like water welling through a cloth. Within seconds of the first root’s appearance, the entire stone outcropping was tilting like a caught kite in a canopy of green, but the real magic didn’t happen until Adrian reached up and pressed his fingers against the cool glass of the magical holding tank above him.
The moment he gave the signal, Adrian’s forest hit the wall of preserved princes like a tidal wave. Vines twisted around the golden filigree that held the tanks together until the metal snapped. Roots pushed the stacked coffins into skewed angles while bright-green algae blossomed inside the glass. No one element was enough by itself, but together they created a storm of entropy that even Gilgamesh’s precise engineering couldn’t stop. Adrian barely had time to scramble out of the way before the wall of tanks broke free of its bolts and crashed to the now moss-covered ground.
The tank directly next to Adrian shattered when it landed, smashing into a thousand pieces with the unmistakable sound of breaking crystal. All the glowing water poured out when it broke, dropping the prince who’d been floating inside. Adrian had already scrambled back to his feet by the time he landed, flinging his hands up to deal with whatever came next, but the wounded prince didn’t attack or even resume dying. Instead, he started to vanish, his flesh evaporating like ether exposed to air.
That was probably a mercy considering the horrific head wound he’d been sporting, but Adrian hadn’t expected his body to disappear like a puddle on a hot day. Gilgamesh had warned him that liquid quintessence was unstable, though, so maybe this was the natural result of keeping all that volatile magic inside a vessel that was no longer alive enough to contain it. Adrian was about to break the next toppled tank open to see if the princes evaporated every time when he heard the muffled clank of metal boots hitting the moss-covered stone behind him.
Sorcery slammed into his back a second later. The magic grabbed Adrian like a giant fist, hauling him off his feet and whirling him around to face his furious-looking father.
It was a sign of how angry Gilgamesh was that he didn’t bother with gloating or demands. He simply squeezed his golden-armored fist. The magic holding Adrian followed the motion, crushing his body like an apple in a cider press. He was seconds away from being squeezed into sausage when Bex appeared out of nowhere and crashed into Gilgamesh like a flaming meteor.
The crushing pressure vanished that same instant, dropping Adrian face-first into the moss as Bex and Gilgamesh brawled a few feet away. It was a testimony to the Bonfire Queen’s restraint that her roaring flames didn’t even burn the dew off his new forest’s delicate young leaves. Gilgamesh, on the other hand, was being roasted alive, and this time, he didn’t seem nonchalant about it. The smug smile was long gone from his face as he attacked the queen with his sword, fists, and legs in a desperate struggle to get out of her grasp and back to killing the forest. A fact that Bex realized much faster than Adrian did.
“Don’t stop!” she shouted as she sliced Drox’s black blade through Gilgamesh’s flailing arm. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!”
Adrian nodded and scrambled away, giving the queen and king plenty of room to brawl while he dug his fingers into the tangle of vines, brambles, and roots that hadn’t stopped growing even while he was being squeezed to death.
That was the best part of being a witch. Gilgamesh’s sorcery worked only when he told it to, but Adrian’s forest would keep spreading whether he was alive or dead. The tree roots had already wound themselves around the unbroken tanks, squeezing the glass like constrictors and working the lids off so the glowing water could spill out.
It took a while. The original tank Adrian had watched the prince evaporate from had shattered when it hit the ground, but they hadn’t gotten so lucky with the others. The gold-and-glass constructions looked delicate, but Gilgamesh’s craftsmanship was superb, and none of Adrian’s plants were supernaturally strong. It took them ages to pry open the well-made seams, but even nonmagical forests could reduce entire civilizations to rubble, given enough time, and with a desperate witch plus the full might of the Great Blackwood behind it, this small woodland was doing a century’s worth of work every second. It squeezed and pried and pulled and eroded and grew over until all the once-pristine enclosures looked like old, abandoned fishbowls left out in the sun.
The tanks started snapping like melting icicles after that. The air filled with the sound of breaking glass as the cloudy vessels shattered, exposing the princes inside to the air, where they vanished like mist on a summer morning. Gilgamesh’s fighting got more desperate with every son he lost, but while he’d blasted Bex away several times by this point, she always managed to get back on top.
She wasn’t even trying to stab him anymore. She’d actually dropped Ishtar’s sword on the moss to free both her hands for grappling and covered her flaming body in thick, gleaming scales that looked like a combination of Fear and War demon armor. The new plating still couldn’t stop Gilgamesh’s insanely sharp sword, but it added a ton to her weight, which helped pin the king down. Considering the magic Gilgamesh had been throwing around earlier, that still didn’t seem like it’d be enough. Then Adrian caught a glimpse of his father’s desperate face behind his lion helmet, and he understood.
Gilgamesh looked centuries older. The sleeping princes must’ve done more than just hold his magic and die in his stead, because every time one evaporated, the Eternal King looked closer to his actual age. His formerly robust frame had shriveled to a skeletal husk under the shell of his golden armor, and his skull was clearly visible under the sagging, paper-thin skin that now covered his face. His once-thick salt-and-pepper hair was now white and stringy where it hadn’t fallen out completely, and his sharp blue-gray eyes were cloudy with age.
He looked one rattling breath away from death, but he was still fighting like a madman, stabbing Bex’s armored back with glowing swords and summoning golden lions to roar their fire in her face. The only reason Adrian didn’t get vaporized by the splash damage was because he’d crawled up into the thicket that had formed around the shattered tanks, which Gilgamesh’s destructive magic never got close to no matter how desperate the king became.
Not that it mattered anymore. Only three tanks were left intact at this point, and they were already overgrown. Even if Gilgamesh blasted both Adrian and Bex to dust, the forest’s roots were dug in too deep to stop. The Blackwood’s will would be done whether a witch was there to help it or not, which made Adrian the smug one as he watched his father’s final struggle, holding his breath as he waited for the end.
It couldn’t be more than a few seconds away. But then, just before the twining roots crushed the final three tanks, Gilgamesh finally managed to kick Bex off him long enough to teleport.
He reappeared almost a thousand feet away, standing on the lip of one of the giant coffins that contained the gods’ bodies. Adrian hadn’t realized just how big the sin-iron boxes truly were until Gilgamesh was standing on top of one. It didn’t seem possible that any human, especially not one as decrepit as Gilgamesh had become, could affect something that enormous. But while the king’s body was so shriveled that his golden armor was falling off him like a discarded shell, his sword was still the divinely sharp blade that had cut the Wheel of Reincarnation from the sky. All he had to do was wave it at the coffin’s base, and the pipe that tapped the slain god’s quintessence—which looked tiny at this distance but was actually big enough to drive a car through—cut cleanly off the end, creating a waterfall of white magic that Gilgamesh toppled into gleefully.
“No!” Bex roared, making Adrian jump. He hadn’t noticed her land beside him in all the chaos, but the blast of her fire knocked him off his feet as she rocketed past and dove into the gushing river of gods’ blood after her ancient enemy.
CHAPTER 19
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BEX HIT THE WHITE WATERFALL of quintessence like a missile. She wasn’t thinking, wasn’t listening to the increasingly dire warnings Drox was yelling through her skull, wasn’t paying attention to anything except her burning need to finish this. Gilgamesh was almost defeated. She’d seen how shriveled Adrian’s attacks had made him, felt his weakening strength with her own hands. Just a little bit more and he’d be dead for good. If he reloaded on magic, though, the fight would start over from the beginning, and unlike the quintessence-fueled king, Bex didn’t have a second wind waiting to pick her up again.
If they were ever going to beat him, it had to be now, so she dove into the gushing quintessence without a second thought. She could still see Gilgamesh’s golden boots in front of her, but the moment her flaming body entered the river, the entire world changed.
It felt like she’d been dropped into Limbo, only instead of a big gray nothing, all she saw was white. Endless, formless, relentless white that poured through her eyeballs and into her skull, filling her mind with a light so bright it burned away her thoughts, leaving her empty. For one blissful second, she floated in nothingness, a nameless ripple floating in an endless sea of light. Then something inside her freshly emptied brain seized up, and a chorus of thoughts exploded where Bex’s own should have been.
So many voices were talking at once that it was impossible to tell what they were actually saying. Bex wasn’t even sure they were speaking a language she understood, but while the overlapping words sounded like gibberish, the feelings inside them were as plain as day. The voices were envious, fearful, hateful, and sad. They were lustful, warlike, greedy, and proud. Most of all, though, they were angry.
Their furious shouts ripped through Bex like spears, tearing her apart with the intensity of their rage. Their righteous, well-deserved wrath at being imprisoned, tortured, and bled for power at the pinnacle of what was once their kingdom. How dare that traitor show his face among them again? But he would pay. One of their best weapons had just fallen back into their possession. Ishtar’s Executioning Blade had returned. The only reason she wasn’t already swinging at their enemy was because too many divine hands were fighting for control. They squabbled like gulls over the right to wield her, and as the fighting consumed their attention, Bex finally managed to wrest back control.
“No!” she roared, driving back the blinding white ocean with a wave of red-hot fire. “I am not your sword anymore! I am Bex the Bonfire, sword of my people! I’m killing Gilgamesh for their sake, not yours! The demons of the Riverlands are slaves no more! We are through with you!”
Her defiant words echoed through the emptiness, and then a screech came back so loud it whited out her thoughts again. But when the hands returned to try to take advantage of her lapse, Bex flared her fire even brighter, burning them away with a river of her own wrath, because if there was anything worth being angry about, it was this bullshit. The gods had lost. They were nothing but disembodied voices howling in an empty white room, and they thought they could take her over? Make her fight their battles for the prize of being their fawning servant again?
Hells no! Bex was never bowing a damn centimeter to any of them ever again. She was building a new future where demons lowered their horns to no one. That was her burning purpose, the meaning behind her new name, and the moment Bex embraced it, all the grasping hands fled, leaving her floating alone in a pool of what felt like glowing white paint.
It was so thick that Bex could barely move her arms through it. She could still hear the voices howling, but the sound was in her ears now instead of her head, which made it easier to ignore. The bad part was that she still couldn’t see anything. She knew Gilgamesh had to be in front of her somewhere, but the liquid quintessence was as thick as glue and as bright as a spotlight. It was also still, more like a pool than a waterfall, which meant she must’ve fallen into the tank at the bottom of the sliced pipe.
That was bad. Her six horns had made her much stronger, but Bex still needed to breathe. She had to get back to the surface, but when she pushed her hands through the thick liquid to start swimming in the direction she was pretty sure was up, her grasping fingers bumped into something that felt an awful lot like a metal boot.
Bex couldn’t believe her luck. She forgot all about breathing and lurched forward, wrapping her arms around the two kicking legs that had to be Gilgamesh’s. She climbed his body next, working her way up his armored chest like a lemur climbing a golden tree. She didn’t have a plan other than to keep him from escaping, but when she reached up to grab his helmet, she felt the too-fast, almost-painless pressure of his impossibly sharp sword slicing through her left arm.
The moment she felt it, Bex knew the limb was gone. She could use her fire to regrow it, but she was too focused on the arm she still had as she frantically called Drox out of his ring. She still couldn’t see anything but blinding white sludge, but the overwhelming pain that was finally spreading through her severed shoulder painted a perfect picture of where the sword strike had come from. She only had a second before Gilgamesh moved on, so Bex ignored everything else and swung Drox in that direction, feeding him with her fire so her sword could launch the glowing whip he’d used to slice through Havok.
