The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (332 page)

She was breathing hard; no one said anything. Finally Jace looked up at the sky, gold eyes gleaming in his dirt-smudged face. “We’d better get moving—the sun’s going down, and
besides, someone might have heard us.” They stripped the gear from the bodies, silently and quickly. There was something sickening about the work, something that hadn’t seemed quite so horrible when Simon had described the strategy but that now seemed very horrible. She had killed—demons and Forsaken; she would have killed Sebastian, if she had been able to do it without harming Jace. But there was something grim and butcher-like about stripping the clothes from the dead bodies of Shadowhunters, even those Marked with the runes of death and Hell. She couldn’t stop herself from looking at the face of one of the dead Shadowhunters, a man with brown hair, and wondering if he could be Julian’s father.

She put on the gear jacket and trousers of the smaller of the women, but they were still too big. Some quick work with her knife shortened the sleeves and hems, and her weapons belt held the pants up. There wasn’t much Alec could do: He’d wound up with the largest of the Shadowhunters’ jackets, and it bulked on him. Simon’s sleeves were too short and tight; he cut the seams at the shoulders to allow himself more movement. Jace and Isabelle both managed to wind up with clothes that fit them, though Isabelle’s were spotted with drying blood. Jace managed to look handsome in the dark red, which was nothing short of annoying.

They hid the bodies behind the rock cairn and started their way back up the hill. Jace had been right, the sun
was
going down, bathing the realm in the colors of fire and blood. They fell into step with one another as they drew closer and closer to the great silhouette of the Dark Gard.

The upward slope suddenly leveled out, and they were there, on a plateau in front of the fortress. It was like looking at
one photo negative overlapping another. Clary could see in her mind’s eye the Gard as it was in her world, the hill covered in trees and greenery, the gardens surrounding the keep, the glow of witchlight illuminating the whole place. The sun shining down on it during the day, and the stars at night.

Here the top of the hill was barren and swept with wind cold enough to cut through the material of Clary’s stolen jacket. The horizon was a red line like a slit throat. Everything was bathed in that bloody light, from the crowd of Endarkened who milled around the plateau, to the Dark Gard itself. Now that they were close, they could see the wall that surrounded it, and the sturdy gates.

“You’d better pull your hood up,” Jace said from behind her, taking hold of the item in question and drawing it up and over her head. “Your hair’s recognizable.”

“To the Endarkened?” said Simon, who looked incredibly strange to Clary in his red gear. She had
never
imagined Simon in gear.

“To Sebastian,” said Jace shortly, and drew his own hood up. They had taken their weapons out: Isabelle’s whip gleamed in the red light, and Alec’s bow was in his hands. Jace was looking toward the Dark Gard. Clary almost expected him to say something, to make a speech, to mark the occasion. He didn’t. She could see the sharp angle of his cheekbones under the hood of the gear, the tight set of his jaw. He was ready. They all were.

“We go to the gates,” he said, and moved forward.

Clary felt cold all over—battle-coldness, keeping her spine straight, her breath even. The dirt here was different, she noticed almost distantly. Unlike the rest of the sand of the desert world, it had been churned by the passage of feet. A red-clad
warrior passed her then, a brown-skinned man, tall and muscular. He paid no attention to them. He appeared to be walking a beat, as were several of the rest of the Endarkened, a sort of assigned path back and forth. A white woman with graying hair was a few feet behind him. Clary felt her muscles tighten—
Amatis?
—but as she passed closer, it was clear that her face was not familiar. Clary thought she felt the woman’s eyes on them, just the same, and was relieved when they passed out of her sight.

The Gard was looming up in front of them now, the gates massive and made of iron. They were carved with a pattern of a hand holding a weapon—an orb-tipped
skeptron
. It was clear the gates had been subjected to years of desecration. Their surfaces were chipped and scarred, splashed here and there with ichor and what looked disturbingly like dried human blood.

Clary stepped up to place her stele against the gates, ready with an Open rune already in her head—but the gates swung wide at her touch. She cast a surprised look back at the others. Jace was chewing his lip; she raised a questioning eyebrow at him, but he only shrugged, as if to say:
We go forward. What else can we do?

They went. Past the gates was a bridge over a narrow ravine. Darkness roiled at the bottom of the chasm, thicker than fog or smoke. Isabelle crossed first, with her whip, and Alec took up the rear, facing behind them with his bow and arrow. As they went over the bridge in single file, Clary chanced a glance downward into the crevasse, and nearly flinched back—the darkness had limbs, long and hooked like spider’s legs, and what looked like gleaming yellow eyes.

“
Don’t
look,” Jace said in a low voice, and Clary snapped her eyes back to Isabelle’s whip, gold and gleaming ahead of them. It lit the darkness so that when they arrived at the front doors of the keep, Jace was able to find the latch easily, and to swing the door open.

It opened on darkness. They all looked at one another, a brief paralysis none of them could break. Clary found she was staring at the others, trying to memorize them; Simon’s brown eyes, the curve of Jace’s collarbone under the red jacket, the arch of Alec’s eyebrow, Isabelle’s worried frown.

Stop,
she told herself.
This isn’t the end. You’ll see them again.

She glanced behind her. Past the bridge were the gates, wide open, and past that were the Endarkened, standing motionless. Clary had the sense they were watching too, everything caught in stillness in this one breathless moment before the fall.

Now.
She stepped forward, into the darkness; she heard Jace say her name, very low, almost a whisper, and then she was over the threshold, and light was all around her, blinding in its suddenness. She heard the murmur of the others as they took their places at her side, and then the cold rush of air as the door slammed shut behind them.

She raised her eyes. They were standing in an enormous entryway, the size of the inside of the Accords Hall. A massive double spiral stone staircase led upward, twisting and winding, two sets of stairs that interwove with each other but never met. Each was lined on either side by a stone balustrade, and Sebastian was leaning against one of the near balustrades, smiling down at them.

It was a positively feral smile: delighted and anticipatory. He wore spotless scarlet gear, and his hair shone like iron. He
shook his head. “Clary, Clary,” he said. “I really thought you were much smarter than this.”

Clary cleared her throat. It felt clotted from dust, and from fear. Her skin was buzzing as if she’d swallowed adrenaline. “Smarter than what?” she said, and nearly winced at the echo of her own voice, bouncing off the bare stone walls. There were no tapestries, no paintings, nothing to soften the harshness.

Though she didn’t know what else she would have expected from a demon world. Of course there was no art.

“We are here,” she said. “Inside your fortress. There are five of us, and one of you.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Am I supposed to look surprised?” He twisted his face up into a mocking grimace of false astonishment that made Clary’s gut twist. “Who could
believe
it?” he said mockingly. “I mean, never mind that obviously I found out from the Queen that you’d come here, but since you’ve arrived, you’ve set an enormous fire, tried to steal a demon-protected artifact—I mean you’ve done everything other than put up an enormous flashing arrow pointing directly to your location.” He sighed. “I’ve always known most of you were terribly stupid. Even Jace, well, you’re pretty but not too bright, are you? Maybe if Valentine had had a few more years with you—but no, probably not even then. The Herondales have always been a family more prized for their jawlines than their intelligence. As for the Lightwoods, the less said the better. Generations of idiots. But Clary—”

“You forgot me,” Simon said.

Sebastian dragged his gaze over to Simon, as if he were distasteful. “You do keep turning up like a bad penny,” he said. “Tedious little vampire. I killed the one who made you, did you
know that? I thought vampires were supposed to feel that sort of thing, but you seem indifferent. Terribly callous.”

Clary felt Simon stiffen minutely beside her, remembered him in the cave, doubling over as if he were in pain. Saying he felt as if someone had stuck a knife in his chest.

“Raphael,” Simon whispered; beside him Alec had paled markedly.

“What about the others?” he demanded in a rough voice. “Magnus—Luke—”

“Our mother,” Clary said. “Surely even you wouldn’t hurt her.”

Sebastian’s smirk turned brittle. “She’s not
my
mother,” he said, and then shrugged with a sort of exaggerated exasperation. “She’s alive,” he said. “As for the warlock and the werewolf, I couldn’t say. I haven’t checked on them in a while. The warlock wasn’t looking so well the last time I saw him,” he added. “I don’t think this dimension’s been good for him. He might be dead by now. But you really can’t expect me to have foreseen
that
.”

Alec lifted his bow in a single swift motion. “Foresee this,” he said, and let an arrow fly.

It shot straight toward Sebastian—who moved like lightning, plucking the arrow out of the air, fingers closing around it as it vibrated in his grasp. Clary heard Isabelle’s sudden intake of breath, felt the rush of blood and dread in her own veins.

Sebastian pointed the sharp end of the arrow toward Alec as if he were a teacher wielding a ruler, and made a clucking noise of disapproval. “Naughty,” he said. “Try to harm me here in my own stronghold, will you, at the heart of my power? As I said, you’re a fool. You all are fools.” He made a sudden gesture,
a twist of the wrist, and the arrow snapped, the sound like a gunshot.

The double doors at both ends of the entryway flew open, and demons poured in.

Clary had expected it, had braced herself, but there was no real bracing oneself for something like this. She had seen demons, quantities of them, and yet as the flood poured in from both sides—spider-creatures with fat, poisonous bodies; skinless humanoid monsters dripping blood; things with talons and teeth and claws, massive praying mantises with jaws that dropped open as if unhinged—her skin felt as if it wanted to crawl away from her body. She forced herself still, her hand on Heosphoros, and looked up at her brother.

He met her gaze with his own dark one, and she remembered the boy in her vision, the one with green eyes like hers. She saw a furrow appear between his eyes.

He raised his hand; snapped his fingers. “Stop,” he said.

The demons froze, midmotion, on either side of Clary and the others. She could hear Jace’s harsh breathing, felt him press his fingers against the hand she was holding behind her back. A silent signal. The others were rigid, surrounding her.

“My sister,” Sebastian said. “Don’t hurt her. Bring her to me here. Kill the others.” He narrowed his eyes at Jace. “If you can.”

The demons surged forward. Isabelle’s necklace pulsed like a strobe light, sending out blazing tongues of red and gold, and in the fiery light Clary saw the others turn to hold the demons off.

It was her chance. She spun and darted toward the wall, feeling the Agility rune on her arm burn as she launched herself up, caught at the rough stone with her left hand, and
swung forward, slamming the tip of her stele into the granite as if it were an axe going into tree bark. She felt the stone shudder: small fissures appeared, but she clung on grimly, dragging her stele across the wall’s surface, swift and slashing. She felt the grind and drag of it distantly. Everything seemed to have receded, even the screech and crash of fighting behind her, the stink and howl of demons. She could only feel the power of the familiar runes echoing through her as she drew, and drew, and drew—

Something seized her ankle and yanked. A bolt of pain shot up her leg; she glanced down and saw a ropy tentacle wrapped around her boot, dragging her down. It was attached to a demon that looked like a massive molting parrot with tentacles exploding out from where its wings should have been. She clung on harder to the wall, whipping her stele back and forth, the rock shivering as the black lines ate into the stone.

The pressure on her ankle increased. With a cry Clary let go, her stele falling as she tumbled, hitting the ground hard. She gasped and rolled to the side just as an arrow flew past her head and sank deep into the grasping demon’s flesh. She whipped her head up and saw Alec, reaching back for another arrow, just as the runes on the wall behind her blazed up like a map of heavenly fire. Jace was beside Alec, his sword in his hand, his eyes fixed on Clary.

She nodded, minutely.
Do it.

The demon that had been holding her roared; the tentacle loosed its grasp, and Clary staggered up and to her feet. She hadn’t been able to draw a rectangular doorway, so the entrance scrawled on the wall was blazing in a ragged circle, like the opening to a tunnel. Within the blaze she could see the shimmer
of the Portal—it rippled like silver water.

Jace hurtled by her and threw himself into it. She caught a brief glimpse of what was beyond—the blasted Accords Hall, the statue of Jonathan Shadowhunter—before she flung herself forward, pressing her hand to the Portal, keeping it open so that Sebastian couldn’t close it. Jace needed only a few seconds—

She could hear Sebastian behind her, screaming in a language she didn’t know. The stench of demons was all around; she heard a hiss and a rattle and turned to see a Ravener scuttling toward her, its scorpion tail raised. She flinched back, just as it fell apart into two pieces, Isabelle’s metal whip scissoring down to slice it in half. Stinking ichor flooded across the floor; Simon grabbed Clary and dragged her back, just as the Portal swelled with a sudden, incredible light and Jace came through it.