“The war is coming,” said Tian, “no matter what I do. The fight between Sammael and the world. And he will find the Shadowhunters divided, scattered, broken on the lies and secrets they keep from one another. They will either fall—and the world will fall—or they will succeed, and the world will be saved. But at least I will be safe, and Jinfeng with me.”
“That’s his girlfriend,” stage-whispered Sammael.
“We know,” Clary said.
“And if we win?” demanded Jace. “The Clave is just going to take you back? A traitor who supported their enemy?”
“I like to think of myself as more than just an enemy,” Sammael said thoughtfully. “An archenemy at the very least. Perhaps even a nemesis?”
Tian looked stubborn. “I would hope for the Clave’s mercy. I would never hope for Sammael’s.”
“My God,” Clary said. “I think that’s the most selfish thing I’ve heard in my life.”
“Please,” murmured Sammael, “not the G-word.” Clary rolled her eyes.
“I’ve known your family for many generations now,” Magnus said quietly. “The Ke family have always been among the most honorable, generous, noble Shadowhunters I have known. They would be very disappointed in you, Tian. Jem would be very disappointed in you.”
Tian looked up at Magnus, and for the first time Alec saw a glint of defiance in his eye. “But it’s noble to sacrifice for love, isn’t it? I’ve been taught my whole life that that is noble. To sacrifice everything.” He looked at Alec. “That is what I have done. Sacrificed everything for love.”
Alec didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have to speak, though, as Magnus said, loudly, “That… is bullshit, Ke Yi Tian.”
Tian looked taken aback. Even Sammael looked a little taken aback.
Magnus’s magic flared, red and roiling and furious, shining from his chest and from his hands. He didn’t cast any spell, though, just advanced on Tian, a chemical fire raging in his gold-green eyes.
“You are not just some mundane,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “You are a Shadowhunter. You have a duty. A responsibility. You have a high and holy purpose, do you understand me?”
He paused like he was waiting for an answer. Tian opened his mouth after a moment, and Magnus immediately spoke again.
“You are the protector,” he said, “of our world. Ordained by the Angel. Instilled with his fire. Given the gifts of Heaven!” He grabbed Tian’s arm and glared into his eyes. “I know Shadowhunters, Tian. I’ve known them for centuries. I’ve seen them at their best, and at their worst. But I’ve known others, too, Downworlders, mundanes, and if there is one thing that Shadowhunters must understand, it is that they are not like other people.
“They love, they build, they covet wealth—when there is time. When the duty—the solemn duty, the only duty, the barrier dividing the living creatures of Earth from oblivion at the hands of literal, actual pure evil—”
Sammael waved jauntily.
“—allows them to. All love is important. Your love is important. And for some people, their love can be the single most important thing, more important than even the whole world.
“But not for Shadowhunters. Because keeping the whole world safe is not everyone’s reason for being, but it absolutely is yours.”
The flare of magic faded. Magnus lowered his head.
Tian stood silently. He did not reply.
“Yeah,” agreed Clary faintly from behind Alec.
Alec, however, was staring at Magnus. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said. To his own ears he sounded stupefied. “I assumed you thought the whole holy warrior business was just silliness.”
“Even I think it’s just silliness sometimes,” offered Jace, “and I’ve literally had evil burned out of my body with heavenly fire.”
Magnus’s expression softened. He stepped back toward Alec, as though he had only just realized how far he had advanced toward Tian and Sammael. “I try not to take things too seriously,” he said to Alec. “You know that. The world is an absurd place, and to take it too seriously would be to let it win. And I still stand by that philosophy. Most of the time. But most of the time,” he added, “I am not standing in front of the actual Father of Demons, in actual Hell.”
“Don’t forget Devourer of Worlds,” Sammael said. “That one is my favorite. I mean, who doesn’t like devouring things? Right?”
Magnus turned to Sammael, one finger raised, and for a moment Alec thought, By the Angel—Magnus is really going to start telling off Sammael, the Serpent of the Garden. He was still overwhelmed. For one thing, it was quite galvanizing to hear your boyfriend deliver a stirring defense of your importance and righteousness. For another, he was having a difficult time thinking of an occasion when Magnus had been hotter.
Sammael shrugged. “Anyway, have fun wandering aimlessly around Diyu until you starve to death. Not the way I’d choose to go, but it’s your life. Magnus, come with me.”
“You have to know,” Alec said, “that there’s no way we’re letting you take him.”
Sammael let out a long groan. “Why do you have to do everything the hard way?” He waved his hand in the general direction of the iron bridge beyond, and in front of it, a circular Portal swirled open. Demons—Ala, Xiangliu, Baigujing—began to emerge from it.
He turned to Tian. “When they’re done with the rest, bring Magnus to me. I’ve got things to do.” He shook his head as if the whole experience had fatigued him, and vanished with a small popping noise.
For a moment, Alec and his friends stared at Tian. Nobody had anything to say.
Magnus, thankfully, broke the silence. “I know we all have a lot of feelings right now—”
“There’s no way you can get through that whole demon army,” Tian said. He sounded weary. “Diyu is home to such an infinitude of demons—and Sammael can command them all.”
“Then we make for the bridge,” Jace said after a moment. “We can’t defeat them, but maybe we can break through them. And then on the staircase they’ll be squeezed into a smaller space, and only a few will be able to attack at a time.”
“Except for the flying ones,” Alec pointed out.
“You have a better idea?”
Alec did not.
Clary turned to Tian. “Are you going to try to stop us?” The words were a challenge. Alec was reminded, not for the first time, that in her own way Clary could be as fierce as Jace.
Tian shook his head. “If I stay here, the demons will just devour me anyway. They can’t tell the difference. Besides, I have to go find Shinyun and pass along my master’s message.”
“Great master you’ve got there,” said Alec. Tian didn’t reply. He gave them a long look and then walked away, moving quickly and purposefully, cutting across the scorched wasteland. The demons ignored him completely. In a short time he had vanished behind their milling crowds.
“Okay,” said Magnus, drawing White Impermanence. “I’ll keep the flying demons off us.”
“Where to?” said Clary.
“Someplace safer than here,” said Jace. “Stay together.”
Together the four of them advanced toward the bridge. At the front, Alec and Jace used their weapons to hold off the demons that got in their way; behind, Magnus blasted anything in the air, and Clary held off the demons that tried to flank them.
It reminded Alec of the classical warfare he’d studied—hoplites, squeezed together for protection, making their way through a hail of arrows. It was agonizingly slow going. Ten minutes of fighting brought them onto the iron bridge, but to Alec it looked like the bridge itself would be another hour to cross, stretching off into the indefinite distance. Next to him, Jace struck out with the spear again and again, his face a mask of sweat and ichor. Alec was sure he looked no better.
Once they were fully on the bridge, the demons changed their strategy. This wasn’t like the earlier fight; the demons were crowded so thickly that they could barely maneuver themselves, and they quickl
y realized that rather than trying to break past the Shadowhunters’ blades and Magnus’s lightning, they would accomplish their aim just as well by forcing them off the edge of the bridge.
“What happens if we fall?” said Clary.
“Remember what Tian said,” Jace said. “At the bottom of Diyu is the city of Shanghai, reversed. Whatever that means.”
Alec exchanged a look with Magnus, who nodded.
Jace caught their look. “We’re jumping off, aren’t we?”
“I can protect us from the fall,” Magnus said.
“But what about the landing?” Clary said.
“If I only jumped when I knew where I was going to land,” Magnus said, “I would never jump at all.”
And with that he flung himself over the side of the bridge.
“Are we really doing this?” Jace said to Clary.
Clary hesitated, then nodded firmly. “I trust Magnus.”
The two of them, and Alec right after, threw themselves after Magnus. Alec fell backward, watching the bridge recede into the distance, fading into the starless ink of the sky. As he fell he could not help thinking of Tian’s face, his expression cryptic, as he had walked away from fellow Shadowhunters who had trusted him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Certain Falling
THEY FELL.
At first they tumbled out of control, and Alec wondered what would happen if any of them drifted into one of the walls of the pit. The sensation of free fall was terrifying at first, the sense of gravity abandoning him, the anticipation of an ending, a violent collision that never came.
And after a few minutes, he found, he sort of became used to it.
It helped that Magnus righted himself first, and then used some magic to gather the four of them, to keep them upright and close enough to talk to one another. And once the bridge was gone from sight, and the path they had been walking, and even the demons, fading into the gray nothing of the background, it was just the four of them, gently falling through the soundless air. Clary’s red hair waved gently around her face. Magnus’s hands were raised, glowing red, and Alec felt the sensation of nothing under his feet, the illusion of not moving at all as any visual reference disappeared.
“I’ve made some weird calls in my time,” Jace mused, “but spending ten minutes in free fall from one unknown place in a hell dimension to a different unknown place in a hell dimension is pretty reckless even for me.”
“Don’t feel bad,” said Magnus. “It wasn’t really your decision.”
Clary tugged on a lock of her hair and watched thoughtfully as it floated back up into the air. “I think it’s kind of cool.”
They both looked at Alec. Alec looked down—although with the lack of features around them, it was hard to keep up and down straight. Far away, in the direction they were falling, outlines glowed dimly. Were they growing larger, closer? It was hard to tell.
Clary and Jace were still waiting for him to speak. “We all made the decision,” he said. “We didn’t have enough information or enough time. We went with our instincts.”
“And what if we’re wrong?” said Jace.
“We’ll deal with that then,” said Alec.
“Even once we land,” put in Magnus, “we won’t really know if we made the right call or not. We’ll probably never know if we made the optimal move.”
“Sometimes you just go,” Alec said. “You know that.”
Jace hesitated. It was a strange thing to see on his face, Alec thought, Jace who was always so confident, who went through the world without hesitating or doubting himself. “But that can get people hurt.”
“You do crazy, rash things all the time!” Alec protested.
Jace shook his head. “Yeah, but that’s just risking me,” he said. “I can risk my safety. It’s different to risk other people.” He was looking at Clary.
Clary said, “Jace, do you really think when you risk your own safety, that has no effect on anybody else? On me?”
“On your parabatai?” Alec agreed.
“On everyone else who has to deal with the consequences?” Magnus grumbled.
“You’re one to talk,” Jace said.
“Speaking of decision-making,” Magnus said brightly, “where are we trying to land, exactly? If those shapes below are Reverse Shanghai, we’ll reach them soon enough.”
“There must be some place in Shanghai we can go to. In Reverse Shanghai, I mean,” said Clary.
“The Institute?” said Jace.
“The church,” Alec said, remembering. “Xujiahui Cathedral. Tian pointed it out to us when we were on our way to the Market.”
“Maybe it was a trick,” Jace said, his eyes narrowing.
“You’re suggesting,” said Clary dryly, “that Tian knew that we were going to be in free fall, in Diyu, trying to decide what part of Reverse Shanghai we should try to crash-land into, and he pointed out the cathedral so that we would fall into his trap of trying to crash-land into it instead of somewhere else.”
Jace hesitated. “I mean, when you put it like that, it does seem a little complicated.”
Magnus was moving one hand around below him and looked like he was concentrating. “Saint Ignatius is actually a great choice,” he said, “because it’s so distinctive. Easy to spot from the air.”
“Can you find it?” said Alec.
“Well, there’s something down there with two big Gothic towers,” Magnus said. “That’s probably it.”
“You think there’ll be a weapons cache there, like in the real one?” Jace said.
“Reverse weapons,” suggested Clary. “You stab someone with them and they feel better.”
“Magnus,” Alec said, “are you growing a tail?”
“Not on purpose,” said Magnus, but he looked uneasy. Alec had been mostly leaving him alone, letting him sustain the magic keeping them safe without distraction, but now he took a closer look, and the odd inhuman features that had come along with the Svefnthorn seemed more prominent. Maybe it was an illusion, the odd angle he was looking from, the way their bodies were stretched by being in free fall… but Magnus’s eyes, luminous and acid green, looked bigger than normal. His ears, too, looked a little pointed, like a cat’s, and when he opened his mouth, Alec was sure his canine teeth had become longer and sharper.
Magnus looked at him, his brow furrowed in concern, but didn’t say anything further.
“Maybe try not to wield too much of your magic,” Alec said hesitantly.
“Maybe after we’ve landed safely?” Jace said, a little frantically.
“Alec,” Magnus said. “If it all goes wrong… if I…”
“Don’t think about it now,” said Alec. “Get us to the ground. We’ll take things as they come.”
* * *
MAGNUS CONTINUED TO SCAN BELOW him, looking for the cathedral. He felt magic surge within him when after a minute or two he located it, and he began to slowly surround Alec and Jace and Clary and himself with a protective haze, a bubble that would lower them safely to the black towers waiting below.
His eyes drooped. His vision blurred. Expending a lot of magic was always tiring, but this was something well beyond the usual. The sound of his friends became muffled as he dissociated from the endless free fall, from the void around them. Every particle of his magic he poured into the spell radiating from his hands, protecting, preserving. His mind fell away, and though he remained conscious, and his hands kept up the magic safeguarding them all, Magnus dreamed.
He was home. Home in Brooklyn, in his apartment, just the way they’d left it to come to Shanghai. He was in their bedroom, but he couldn’t remember what he’d come in for. On the bed, the maps that they’d used to try to Track Ragnor were still laid out across the rumpled blankets.
I should pick those up, he thought, and reached out to grab them, but then jerked his hand back and held it up to examine it. He wasn’t doing any magic, but his hand was glowing brightly anyway. Too brightly: almost too much to look at without hurting his eyes. He squin
ted and saw that within the dazzling glow, his hand was strange, elongated. It was something like a bird’s, with fingers too long for any human and black talons curling wickedly from their ends.
Unsure what to do, Magnus left the bedroom. He had trouble passing through the open doorway and bumped his head somehow, and when he reached up to check, he could feel horns emerging from his forehead, or maybe more than horns, maybe antlers. He knew without seeing them that they were bone white, like Ragnor’s, and sharp. He felt for his chest and looked down, trying to see if the thorn wound was there. He couldn’t tell; the light radiating from his hand was too bright. Maybe he needed a mirror.
He ducked and went into the hallway, and as he passed Max’s room, he looked inside. Alec was there, putting clothes on Max. He looked up at Magnus, and Magnus expected him to cry out in alarm, but he didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. “Okay,” he said to Max, “arms up!” and Max amenably stuck his arms straight up in the air like he was celebrating a victory. Alec pulled the T-shirt over Max’s arms and head and tugged it down. “Wow, great, that’s really helpful,” Alec said. “Thanks!”
“Wow!” Max repeated—he was in that phase where he tried to repeat most of what his parents said—and grinned at Magnus. Magnus went to wave his fingers at Max and then paused, remembering the glow, the talons.
Instead he just said, “Hey, blue, what’s new?”
“Boo,” Max said.
“You want to eat?” Alec said. Max nodded, and Magnus watched the little nubs of Max’s horns go up and down. Horns just like his. No. He didn’t have horns. But he did have horns. Like Ragnor. But Ragnor was dead, wasn’t he?
“Magnus,” said Alec, “could you grab his cereal bowl and his sippy cup? They’re in the dishwasher.”
“Sure.” Magnus padded down to the kitchen. Why were they still living here when he could barely fit his antlers through the hallway? There was a good reason, but for the moment he couldn’t remember it.
The Lost Book of the White Page 23