He didn’t move as Shinyun approached. Quietly, he began to surround himself with wards. He could at least protect himself from another thorning.
“If you want to fight,” said Magnus lightly, “I’ll have to put you on my calendar. I can’t possibly do anything before I’ve eaten.”
“It needn’t come to that if you don’t do anything stupid,” she said. “I just want to talk.”
“If you want to talk,” said Magnus, “you’d better be ready to talk over breakfast.”
Shinyun drew herself up with dignity and said, “I am.” She brought out a plastic bag from within her purse. “Do you like ci fan?”
“I do,” said Magnus, eyeing the little parcels of glutinous rice. “I like them very much.”
A few minutes later found them seated on benches in the garden. It was a fine morning, sunny and breezy. The osmanthus flowers were blooming in Shanghai, and the wind brought their gentle scent, a little like peach or apricot. He chewed a mouthful of pork and pickled vegetables and felt a little better. Unfortunately, this reminded him that he was breakfasting with an unstable person, who had stabbed him the last time they’d met, with a weapon she currently had with her, and who, if Clary’s dream meant anything, might try to stab him again. On the other hand, at least he was pretty sure the breakfast was not poisoned.
Magnus popped another ci fan into his mouth and checked his protective wards. They were still in place. A charging rhino shouldn’t be able to get through them.
“How did you find me?” he asked around a mouthful. “I ask only out of professional curiosity.”
“We have been in Shanghai for months,” Shinyun said. “Obviously by now we’ve assembled a team of secret informants throughout the city.”
“Obviously,” murmured Magnus. If it turned out that he and his friends hadn’t been able to find Ragnor only because he was more successfully tracking them, he was going to be very annoyed. He hoped the others hadn’t encountered Ragnor on their way to the Institute or anything. On the other hand, he also hoped they didn’t come back before he figured out how to get rid of Shinyun. “So, uh—how’s your evil master? How are his evil plans going?”
“Sammael’s only counsel is his own,” said Shinyun. “I follow his lead without question. It’s very relaxing, actually.”
“So you don’t even know what he’s trying to do? Do you know why he wanted the Book of the White? Do you know why he wanted Ragnor?”
“Oh, that’s easy enough.” Shinyun took a bite. “He wanted Ragnor to find him a realm. And Ragnor did. A while ago. But by then he’d come to accept Sammael’s victory and became his willing minion.”
“His willing minion?” said Magnus, eyeing the Svefnthorn. “That doesn’t sound like the Ragnor Fell I know.”
“Sammael is not like other demons,” Shinyun said. She regarded Magnus thoughtfully. “You think I’m a fool, tying my fortunes to the Serpent of the Garden.”
“No, no,” Magnus protested. “Serpent of the Garden, he sounds very trustworthy.”
“It’s not a matter of trust,” Shinyun said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Okay,” said Magnus. “What are you doing?”
“Here on Earth,” Shinyun said, “power is a complicated, strange thing. Humans grant one another power; it’s exchanged, it’s gained and lost—it’s all very abstract. But out there—” She gestured above her.
“In the sky?” said Magnus.
“Out beyond our own world, in the worlds of demons and angels and whatever else is out there. Out there power is not some abstract piece of human culture. Power is power. What we here on Earth call magic is just power by another name, power wielded here in this realm.”
“And you want power,” Magnus said. Despite himself, he was a little interested. He had always known there were Princes of Hell and mad archangels out there, playing with humanity as if with a chessboard. This was like a peek into the gaming room.
“Power is all anybody can ever want,” said Shinyun. “Power is the ability to choose what happens, to will something and have it come to pass. Ideals humans talk about—having freedom, meting out justice—these are all just power by other names.”
“You’re wrong,” Magnus said, but gently. “And even if somewhere, out in some primordial abyss, you’d be right, it doesn’t matter. Because we live here on Earth, where power is complicated and interesting, instead of cosmic and boring.”
Shinyun bared her teeth, a strange sight given the blankness of her expression. “That may have been true of Earth once,” she said, “but then Sammael released cosmic, boring demons all over it, and Raziel released cosmic, boring Shadowhunters to fight them.” She shook her head. “Maybe you can’t understand. You were born to great heritage. You don’t know what it’s like to go through this world in weakness.”
Magnus laughed. “I was born to dirt-poor farmers in an oppressed imperial colony. I’m doing all right now, but—”
“Of course I’m not talking about your mundane parent,” hissed Shinyun. “I’m talking about Asmodeus.”
Reflexively, Magnus looked around; no one was looking at them. No one had tried to sit on their bench, either; glamours were useful that way.
“Any warlock,” Shinyun went on in a quieter but no less intense voice, “who thinks he is more similar to humans than he is to demons, that humans deserve his protection—that warlock is deluding himself. He is not a human. He is a demon gone native.”
“Look,” Magnus said, as she stared bug-eyed at him, “I get it. I get why you would try to find the biggest, baddest demon you can, and make him your protector. But you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to find any demons. You’re a warlock: you already wield magical power that humans couldn’t dream of. And you’re immortal! You’ve got it pretty good, Shinyun. You’re the only one who doesn’t know it. Settle down. Start a family! Adopt a kid, maybe.”
Shinyun said, “Living forever isn’t a power when your life is a tragedy.”
Magnus sighed. “Every warlock’s life starts as a tragedy. There are no love stories in any warlock’s origins. But you get to choose. You choose what kind of world you live in.”
“You don’t,” said Shinyun. “Fish eat smaller fish. Demons eat smaller demons.”
“That’s not all there is,” Magnus insisted. “Shinyun.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Why did you come to see me? It can’t have been to win this argument.”
Shinyun giggled, a disconcerting segue from her previous attitude. “I came to give you the present I promised you back in Brooklyn. And I wanted to win this argument. And now I can do both at the same time.”
She lunged, her hand a blur of motion; Magnus was already on his feet, his hand upraised, blue fire humming from his palm.
Something stabbed through and through him. He gasped.
He had been ready for Shinyun to thrust with the Svefnthorn, had been braced with magic to block her, but his wards shattered apart like glass as the Svefnthorn drove directly into the wound it had already made in his chest.
A spasm of magic, not quite pain and not quite pleasure, but overwhelming whatever its valence, drove Magnus to his knees. He looked down at the spike sticking out of his chest for the second time. He took a shuddering breath. “How—?”
Looming above him, Shinyun said, in a tone of both satisfaction and pity, “The thorn is already part of your magic, Magnus. Your magic cannot ward against itself.”
She twisted the thorn in his chest, like a key opening a lock.
“You cannot guard against the Svefnthorn.” She twisted it again before finally withdrawing it from his chest. There was no blood on the spike, but Magnus thought he saw it glitter with blue light as she returned it to its scabbard. “Don’t tell me you haven’t looked it up since I told you about it.”
“It’s from Norse mythology, and it puts people to sleep,” said Magnus. “Except obviously it’s somehow connected to Sammael, who isn’t part of Norse mythology, so no, I guess we h
ave only done the barest minimum research so far, now that I say it out loud.”
“Outside of mundane myth,” Shinyun said, “it has quite a history. My first task from Sammael was to recover it from its hiding place and attune it to my master. It was quite an adventure, actually. I faced many perils, and engaged in many small intrigues—”
“Please,” said Magnus, holding up his hand. “I don’t care.” He put his hand to his chest, felt the heat emanating from the wound. The node of magic in his chest continued to thump and beat like a second heart, stronger than before. It felt—well, actually, it felt pretty good.
Shinyun sat herself down next to Magnus where he knelt on the grass. She seemed quite calm. “You’ll come to understand,” she said, as though confiding a secret. “I thorned myself as soon as I was given permission to do so. I have never regretted it. Soon you’ll appreciate what I’ve done for you.”
“If I don’t,” said Magnus, “are you going to stab me again?”
Shinyun shook her head. She seemed excited, as though she’d had to wait a long time to tell Magnus something, and now she was finally getting to do so. “No,” she said. “Now you have a choice. Now you’ll choose to be struck again by the thorn.”
Magnus could tell that she desperately wanted him to ask what she meant. He refused to give her the satisfaction, and just waited silently while Shinyun watched him eagerly.
Finally she said, “Once you’ve tasted the thorn twice—”
“Please don’t say ‘tasted,’ ” said Magnus, put off.
“—you are connected to the power of my master. A third taste—”
“Please,” said Magnus.
Shinyun made an impatient gesture, but she said, “A third wound with the thorn will make you his entirely. He shall become the master of your will, and with your newfound gift, you will serve him.”
Magnus goggled at her. “Why would I ever do that?”
“Because,” she said, almost bouncing on her knees with glee, “if you aren’t wounded a third time, the thorn will burn you from the inside out. You’ll be consumed by its flame. Only by accepting Sammael into your heart can you avoid death.”
Magnus put his hand to his chest again, alarmed. “What?” he said. “So I have to accept Sammael into my heart literally? Or I die?”
“That’s how it works,” Shinyun said. “No magic can reverse the course of the thorn once it has burrowed into you.” She playfully pointed at Magnus’s chest. He slapped her finger away. “Soon enough,” she said, “you’ll realize this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“I would be very surprised,” said Magnus, forcing himself to stand up, “if it made it off the ‘worst things that have ever happened to me’ list. But I’ll keep you posted.” He took a deep breath around the wound and looked at Shinyun. “I thought you’d learn. We tried to help you, we really did.”
“And now I’m helping you,” she said. “The next time we meet, you’ll feel differently. I promise.”
“And when will that be?”
“The time is closer than you think. The time may be closer than even I think.” Shinyun was almost dancing, she was so pleased with herself.
“What does that mean?” Magnus yelled in exasperation. “Why are you so crazy?”
But a blood-red fog had appeared beneath Shinyun’s feet, and it swiftly swirled in a rising cloud to cover her completely. When it dissipated into the morning breeze, she was gone.
CHAPTER SIX Tian
IT WASN’T SOMETHING HE WOULD admit to anybody but his closest friends, but Alec kept a list in his head of the Institutes he most wanted to visit.
Obviously there were hundreds of Institutes that he would like to visit. This was just a simple top ten.
There was the Maui Institute, of course, where there were no external walls and little ceiling and, it was said, very minimal demon activity. The Amsterdam Institute, a huge invisible boat permanently anchored in the IJ. The Cluj Institute, a great stone castle jutting into the sky, high above the timberline in the Carpathian Mountains. And there was the Shanghai Institute.
Unlike any other Institute Alec could think of, Shanghai’s was in a place that had been well-known and sacred to mundanes long before the Shadowhunters were even created. Once the building had been part of Longhua Temple, a complex of Buddhist monasteries and shrines that had stood for almost two thousand years. The complex had been constantly worked on, repaired, and updated over the centuries, and early in their history the Shadowhunters had taken the opportunity to claim some of the unused grounds to make their home.
Walking with his friends through the warm, sunny morning, Alec stopped outside the temple complex to look at its most famous sight, the Longhua Pagoda, a tower of six roofs with upturned eaves, stacked around a crimson-and-ochre octagon that rose into the sky. Alec had seen pictures of it dozens of times. “I can’t believe I’m actually here,” he said out loud.
“You could have come anytime,” Isabelle noted from behind him. “We have Portals.”
“I just didn’t take the opportunity before,” said Alec. “I should visit some of the others on my list, when we get home.” The brief, disloyal thought, I should have visited these places before I had a kid, flitted through his mind, and he rejected it. It wasn’t like he and Magnus were going to have to fly in a commercial mundane airplane with Max. They could just carry him through a Portal. Assuming Portals didn’t continue going to the wrong places, or being infested with beetle demons.
The pagoda was beautiful, but the crush of mundane tourists suddenly felt oppressive. He turned away. “Let’s go.”
The Institute was made of the same brick as most of the other temple buildings, with the same upturned eaves and hexagonal windows. In a tower off its central axis was a copper bell, the twin of the one in the mundane bell tower close by. The bells had been a set, created to ward off demons, and while the mundanes rang theirs only occasionally, the Shadowhunters welcomed the dusk by tolling theirs. Alec wondered if he’d get to hear it. He was already thinking about how to find an excuse to return here before they left.
Going up the stairs to the massive double doors, he hesitated. Leaving Magnus behind had been a hard choice, but his boyfriend needed a break. Magnus dealt with the stress of adding parenthood to his existing life simply by sleeping less and pushing himself more. It was the least Alec could do to let him sleep in today. It was true that Magnus knew the Ke family, who ran the Institute, and no doubt he would join them soon, but Alec was sure the rest of them could handle going to a friendly Institute without assistance. They were all in gear, and wearing runes, so they’d be immediately recognizable.
He started back up the stairs but froze as one of the giant doors creaked loudly on its hinges, then swung open fully.
Alec was somewhat surprised to discover that behind the door was a very young man—perhaps eighteen, a few years younger than Alec himself—tall and wiry, with straight-cut black hair and dramatic eyebrows. He was wearing gear in a dark, shiny burgundy—the famous oxblood lacquer of the Shadowhunters of China, which went in and out of fashion every few generations. He reminded Alec of someone, but he couldn’t think who it was.
Clary raised her hand in greeting and began to speak, but the young man was looking at Alec.
“Are you Alec Lightwood?” he asked, in accentless English.
Alec raised his eyebrows in surprise.
Isabelle said, “Oh no, Alec’s famous now.”
The man turned to look at her. “And you must be Isabelle, his sister. Come,” he said, waving them inside. “All of you are expected.”
* * *
THE INSTITUTE FELT SURPRISINGLY EMPTY. There were only, it turned out, four Shadowhunters at home, the man explained: the rest were out “investigating the Portal situation.”
“Forgive me,” he said when they had all filed in and he had closed the door after them. “I don’t mean to be mysterious. I am Ke Yi Tian—you should call me Tian—and I was told t
o expect you. Alec and Isabelle Lightwood, as well as Clary Fairchild, Jace Herondale, and Simon Lovelace.”
“So Alec isn’t famous?” Isabelle sounded disappointed.
“Told by whom?” Jace said. He sounded guarded; Alec didn’t blame him.
“A member of my family,” Tian said. “No longer a Shadowhunter, but he continues to… keep an eye on those he considers persons of interest.”
“That’s not ominous at all,” muttered Simon.
“It’s not,” said Clary. “He means Brother Zachariah.”
“Former Brother Zachariah,” said Tian. He looked around at them and gestured to a door. “Shall we walk and talk in the peach orchard?”
They all looked at each other. Alec said, “Yes. Yes, that seems like it would be very nice.”
The peach orchard was a fine and pleasant space, well-shaded and equipped with small wooden tables and stools placed here and there for sitting. Tian led them to one, and Simon and Clary sat down, while the rest of them remained standing. “So are you here about the Portals?”
“Sort of,” said Alec. “What’s going on with the Portals, exactly?”
Tian looked surprised. “Portals are misbehaving all over the world. It only started a few days ago, but it’s quickly become a real mess. I assumed you’d know—didn’t you travel to Shanghai by Portal?”
“Yes,” said Clary, “and they were definitely… misbehaving. We assumed it was just us.”
“Everyone thought it was just them,” said Tian. “But it’s everyone. Portals go to the wrong place, or don’t open at all, or they’re full of demons. Everyone is out looking into it.”
“We think our mission might be indirectly related to the Portals somehow,” Alec said carefully, “but actually we’re in Shanghai to look for a couple of warlocks, one man and one woman. They stole a powerful spell book from New York recently, and we think they’re too dangerous to be allowed to keep it.”
The Lost Book of the White Page 9