“Then I’ll die,” said Magnus.
“You won’t,” said Ragnor with a sigh. “No one chooses to die, when there is a choice to live. You rationalize. You justify.”
Magnus said nothing. There had been a change in the dead air of Diyu. Where before all had been stillness and oppressive silence, now a slight wind had picked up. It blew faint white noise into the silence, and unpleasantly hot air in irregular gusts around Magnus’s face. Ragnor noticed it too, his head lifting when it started, but after a moment his eyes returned to the ground and he resumed walking.
“So,” Ragnor said, “Max.” He cleared his throat. “Your son.”
“He’s named after Alec’s brother,” Magnus said. “The one who was killed by Sebastian.”
Ragnor gave him a wry look. “Did you know, Sammael showed up in the first place because he was trying to reach Valentine Morgenstern’s son, Sebastian? Lilith suggested that Sammael seek him out. Said they had similar goals. Anyway, apparently Sebastian was dead well before Sammael could have found him. That would have been interesting.”
“ ‘Interesting’ is one way to describe it,” said Magnus. He paused. “Ragnor. One thing that happened, that you probably don’t know.” He just had to say it quickly. “Raphael… he died.”
Ragnor stopped walking, and Magnus stopped beside him. All around them blew the faint, dry wind of Diyu, smelling of iron and char.
“Valentine’s son, Sebastian,” Magnus said. “He, uh, he took over Edom.”
“Oh, I know,” Ragnor said, his eyebrows raised. “I didn’t hear the end of it. You think Sammael would be here if he could be in Edom? He loves it there. But—Raphael.”
Magnus took a deep breath. “Sebastian was holding us both prisoner. He ordered Raphael to kill me. Raphael refused. Sebastian killed him.” He looked at Ragnor, who appeared to be going through all the stages of grief at once, his expression flashing rapidly stunned surprise, sorrow, anger, thoughtfulness, and back. “He was paying back his debt to me, he said. For saving his life.”
Ragnor took a long breath and collected himself. “Every war has a body count,” he said bitterly. “And if you live long enough, you’ll see too many friends become part of that body count. Poor Raphael. I always liked him.”
“He always liked you,” said Magnus.
“I get the sense,” said Ragnor after a moment of silence from both of them, the roar of the hot wind of Diyu the only sound in the world, “that it is a good thing that Sammael wasn’t able to meet Sebastian.”
“I don’t know if they would have been able to collaborate,” Magnus said. “Neither of them are exactly good team players.”
“How did you come to adopt Max?”
“It’s a long story,” said Magnus, “which I will tell you in full once we are safely out of Hell.”
“Well, tell the short version,” Ragnor said impatiently. He began walking again, and Magnus followed.
“Another warlock baby abandoned,” said Magnus flatly. “Another horrified parent. They left a note that said, ‘Who could ever love it?’ ”
Ragnor snorted. “The oldest warlock story.”
“He was left at Shadowhunter Academy,” Magnus said. “I was a guest lecturer there. We ended up going home with Max.”
“Truly,” said Ragnor, “this is the culmination of your foolish dedication to rescuing people.”
Magnus gave him an incredulous look. “You’re one to talk.”
“Not that I’m not grateful,” Ragnor allowed.
“That’s not what I mean,” Magnus said. “I don’t mean now. I mean you’re one to talk because all those hundreds of years ago, you rescued me. You idiot.”
The wind was picking up and, worryingly, growing hotter. They walked along the darkened streets, past empty black shells of buildings Magnus couldn’t have identified—presumably, they corresponded to buildings in Shanghai, but here they resided in complete shadow and could barely be distinguished from the landscape around them.
Ragnor said gruffly, “Well, at least that’s one more warlock who will grow up with loving parents. Who know about Downworld.” Magnus knew that coming from Ragnor, this was effusive praise. “Pity about the Shadowhunter influence, though.”
“Hey,” said Magnus. “I was taught by the Silent Brothers, you know.”
“Yes, and look how that turned out,” said Ragnor.
Magnus was silent for a time and they walked. Even here in Hell, there was something companionable about walking alongside Ragnor, as he had done so many times before. Even with the thorn burning in his chest, even with no clear way back home.
“I’m going to marry Alec, you know,” he said after a while.
Ragnor raised his eyebrows. “When?”
“I don’t know. Not yet. The Shadowhunters wouldn’t acknowledge it, but we’re hoping that will change.”
“How would it change?” said Ragnor in a dismissive tone.
“Because we’ll change it,” said Magnus.
Ragnor shook his head. He looked weary. Magnus suspected that at some point, the full horror of what he had done would strike Ragnor. Right now he seemed insulated by shock. “Where you got your hopefulness, I have no idea. I certainly didn’t teach that to you.”
“When we can get married and have it recognized, then we’ll do it,” said Magnus. “Only then. When it’s legal for me to marry Alec. For Tian to marry Jinfeng.”
“For Shinyun to marry Sammael,” Ragnor said dryly, and Magnus choked a laugh, until they turned the next corner and the laugh was cut off.
Ahead of them stood St. Ignatius. It was blowing away.
Here, the hot wind they’d felt before was stronger. It danced around their heads, and, whipped into a frenzy, tore pieces of the cathedral loose and hurled them up into the empty sky. Huge chunks of marble and brick tore free, making a racket of grinding, crashing, and scraping noises. One of the two spires was gone, disappeared into the whirlwind. But what really worried Magnus was the roof.
The roof was missing—no, not missing. The roof was now in pieces, free-floating, huge boulders of tile and stone, as though some great creature had come and torn the church open, like a child unwrapping a present. The chunks of roof hung in the wind, suspended and drifting. It was hard to tell for sure, but if Magnus squinted, he thought he could see a human figure flying around the rocks, swooping and climbing.
Ragnor called, “Alec!” and Magnus looked back at the ground, where Alec, his Alec, was running full tilt toward them, soot on his face. He was yelling something, but Magnus couldn’t make it out.
Only as he got closer could he be understood. “The swords!” he was yelling. “We need the swords!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Avici
ALEC DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HAD become of his friends. He had been awoken by a tremendous sound, like an earthquake, and by the time he had made it up the stairs, the roof had been torn off the cathedral. Above him, against the inky black curtain of Diyu’s sky, two figures cavorted. One of them was Shinyun, who in addition to her elongated limbs had now sprouted a pair of broad insectile wings, iridescent and veined, like a dragonfly’s. She looped around the floating pieces of the cathedral’s roof, clearly enjoying herself.
The other figure was Sammael. He was hard to miss, as he was now easily three times the size he’d been on the iron bridge, floating above Shinyun and looking perfectly at home suspended in the air. He peered into the cathedral from above, occasionally pushing away rocks that drifted into his vision.
Alec had thought it would be unwise to run across the entire length of the cathedral, directly in view of Sammael, to reach his friends. He had to hope that they were seeking some kind of safety. But where was Magnus? He had departed voluntarily: his clothes and shoes were gone. But why had he taken Alec’s sword as well as his own?
The wind, though it was not too strong for him to resist, seemed to be harming the church, which was beginning to come apart in pieces. Alec had known he had to get out of the buildi
ng, skirting around to avoid being seen until he’d found a low enough opening in the rapidly decaying walls. He hurled himself through it in a forward roll, curled up to protect his head. He’d felt the hot, corrosive wind on him, and then he was clear.
The Alliance rune had burned on his arm, and he had felt Magnus’s presence, not far away. He could see Magnus’s glow in his mind, even through the dark and the wind. He ran toward that glow.
Now he had reached Magnus and, to his surprise, Ragnor, who looked subdued and embarrassed at the sight of Alec. For a moment Alec had worried that perhaps Magnus had been struck a third time by the thorn, that he was with Ragnor because, like Ragnor, he had been lost. But then, as he approached, Magnus and Ragnor began talking at the same time, and it was clear that Ragnor was out from under Sammael’s control, somehow.
Magnus explained quickly about the swords, that they had saved Ragnor, that they were now gone. When he finished, he hesitated and said, “Are you angry?”
“Of course I’m not angry that you used the swords to save Ragnor,” Alec said. “I’m a little angry that you didn’t tell me you were leaving and didn’t take me with you.”
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Magnus began, but Ragnor stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Domestic squabbles later,” he said sharply. “Look.” He tilted his chin toward the church.
Human figures, distant and small, were tumbling end over end upward in the wind of Sammael’s windstorm, becoming visible to Alec as they cleared the walls of the cathedral. Sammael was gathering the Shadowhunters to him, he realized, drawing them up to join him in the fire-tinged sky. Jace, Clary, Simon, Isabelle, Tian… all of them identifiable more by the silhouettes they made with their weapons than anything else.
“We have to get to them,” Alec said.
“We may not have a choice,” said Magnus. And indeed, Alec felt the unpleasant hot wind lick at his body as well, wrap itself around his legs, tugging at him like insistent hands. “Hang on,” said Magnus, “I’m going to—”
The wind carried Alec up into the air, the horizon whirling around him in a dizzying rush. He had always wanted to be able to fly, but this was not at all how he’d imagined it. The currents of air swirled around him, spinning him like a top. He tried to reach for his seraph blade—it was thrust through his belt—but he couldn’t get a grip on the hilt.
Then movement stopped, and while it took Alec a moment to reorient, he realized that he hung suspended in the air. The wind continued to whip around him, but he at least was no longer at its mercy.
He looked around and realized that Magnus and Ragnor were still with him, or at least nearby. They also floated in the air; Magnus’s hands were raised, his arms tensed, and crimson-white light poured from the centers of his palms. In the distance, the other Shadowhunters still tumbled around and around like clothes in a dryer; Alec could tell it was taking all Magnus’s strength to maintain his and Alec’s stability.
Shinyun hovered nearby, watching but not engaging. Alec wondered why. Surely they were helpless. Surely if Sammael wanted them eliminated, now would be the time.…
He turned again to look at Magnus. His worry must have shown, because Magnus made a series of head movements that Alec interpreted as conveying that he was doing his best but that he couldn’t reach the others with his magic from here.
Sammael was drifting over toward them, his hands folded in a mockery of prayer. He seemed totally unaffected by the wind, presumably because he was causing it.
Stupid, Alec was thinking. Our plan was so stupid. Baiting Sammael into fighting them would have been a terrible idea. He may have looked like a mild-mannered mundane, he may have talked like a game show host, but he was—of course—a supremely powerful demon. They were outmatched, Alec thought, and only Sammael’s lack of interest in killing them had kept them alive so far. It was a chilling thought.
“Hey!” Sammael said with a wave, as he got closer to them. “How’s everybody doing over here?”
Before anyone could answer—not that Alec had any idea how to answer—Sammael looked at Ragnor and jerked back in an exaggerated performance of surprise.
“Holy cats!” he exclaimed. “The thorn’s gone. How did you pull off that little trick?” he said to Magnus. “Ragnor,” he went on, “didn’t we have some good times? Weren’t you looking forward to ruling the world with me? At least a little? Come on, you wanted to a little bit.”
Ragnor looked unimpressed. “You kept me in a cage and stabbed me several times. I was hardly a willing recruit.”
“To be fair,” said Sammael, “Shinyun kept you in the cage.”
He turned back to Magnus. “I hope you aren’t planning to try to remove the thorn from Shinyun, too.”
“I don’t think she wants it removed,” said Magnus.
Sammael laughed. “You said it, buddy. I wasn’t even going to thorn her, you know that? Did she tell you that? I thought, no way she could take it. But she insisted. Demanded it. Demanded from me, the greatest of all demons!”
“Second-greatest,” said Ragnor quietly.
The Prince of Hell narrowed his eyes. “Well. We don’t talk about him.” He looked over at Shinyun, hovering near the still-struggling Shadowhunters a short distance away. “You know,” he confided, “if I let her, she’d just kill all of them.”
Alec cleared his throat. “So why won’t you let her?”
“Oh!” said Sammael. “Because I came up with a plan. Just on the way over here, can you believe it? Popped right into my head.”
He waved his arm, and far below them, the ground began to shake. For a moment, Alec wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but then he began to grasp it. All around the cathedral’s walls, fissures were opening in the ground. The cathedral itself tilted and shifted dangerously, and then, with a great crash, its front half and back half fell into one another with a tremendous crash. Dust and smoke began to rise into the burning wind.
The cathedral didn’t have time to fully collapse. While its walls were still lurching toward one another, the entire stretch of land around the cathedral fell, as though into a sinkhole. A slab of stone the size of a city block came loose from the streets around it, and the cathedral groaned and swayed and fell into the hole.
With a dazed horror, Alec watched it fall, tumbling through a voidlike darkness. At the bottom of that void was a lake, red and black, like molten rock.
The cathedral smashed into the lake of fire with a boom that went on and on. Jace, Isabelle, and the others had stopped spinning: Alec could barely see them through the smoke, but they all seemed to be watching in silence as the church settled into its new position, halfway submerged in lava, one broken tower still jutting up at an angle like the hand of a drowning man.
Alec looked over at Sammael, who caught his eye and waggled his eyebrows. Alec looked farther over at Magnus, who continued to keep his hands up, holding the three of them—Alec, Ragnor, and Magnus—steady in the air.
Now that the billow of dust was beginning to spread and drift, Alec could see that the lake below was not as featureless as he’d first thought. Around the sinking cathedral were tall columns of stone that rose high above the lake’s surface, and here and there stone platforms connected by bridges and staircases. The cathedral had smashed through some of this infrastructure, but a lot of it remained, now modified by the slabs of brick and marble that were all that remained of the church.
“Behold,” said Sammael. “The Hell of the Pit of Fire. An elaborate labyrinth of tortures, where condemned souls try to maintain their footing on an ever-shifting tangle of connected platforms as they dip in and out of burning flames. I moved it under the cathedral here, just for funsies.”
Alec looked at the lake below him. Nothing appeared to be moving around the lake, except the slowly dissipating dust cloud from the cathedral’s impact. He looked back at Sammael.
“Well,” Sammael said, “it’s not operational now, obviously. It’s been closed for repairs for a hundr
ed and fifty years, give or take. That’s the problem with Diyu. That’s the problem, Ragnor,” he snarled. “It’s supposed to generate all this demonic energy from the torment of souls, but the machinery is broken and the souls are gone, so none of it works!”
With those last words he brought his hand down in a violent gesture, and the distant silhouettes that were Alec’s friends went tumbling down, down, through the sinkhole, through the air, and came to a landing on top of the cathedral tower. Alec held his breath, but he didn’t even need to search inside himself for his connection to Jace to know it was intact: the Shadowhunters were clearly still alive, brought there safely by Sammael. They clung to the tower and scuttled around it; they were much too far away for Alec to tell what was happening.
Sammael giggled and waved his other hand. Down by the lake, far below, three Portals opened, and tiny figures began to emerge from them. Demons, he thought, by the way they moved. He exchanged an alarmed look with Magnus.
“You see,” Sammael said, as though conveying a wonderful secret, “I figured it out. I can use their souls and make them fight some demons, and use that power. It won’t be a lot, nothing like what Diyu must have produced in its prime. But enough to make the Portal I want.”
“You still can’t pass through to Earth,” said Ragnor. “The Taxiarch’s wardings are intact—”
Sammael grinned merrily. “The Portal isn’t for me,” he said. “It’s for Diyu.”
“What?” said Alec. It was all he could come up with in the moment.
Sammael rubbed his hands together. “That’s right. I’ll need the energy of all your friends’ souls to open a Portal the size of all Shanghai.” He did a little dance in the air. “I’m a genius. I seriously am. There wasn’t enough energy in Diyu to break the Taxiarch’s wardings, right? So I started to think: Where can a guy get a big burst of evil energy like that? I was collecting all this information from Tian about enemy forces and where they’re headquartered and all of that business and then I realized, hey, I’m Sammael. I’m the Master of Portals! I can send anything through a Portal. So blam! Shanghai gone in an instant, and Diyu in its place. Or at least a chunk of Diyu the size of Shanghai.” He laughed. “Think about it! A whole human city swallowed up by a demon city. Absolutely guaranteed to provide me enough energy to break through the wards.”
The Lost Book of the White Page 30