Clockwork Princess (43 page)

Their tracks led up past a tumble of massive boulders Will remembered were called the moraine. They formed a partial wall that protected Cwm Cau, a small valley atop the mountain in whose heart rested Llyn Cau, a clear glacial lake. The tracks of the clockwork army led from the edge of the lake—

And vanished.

Will stood, looking down at the cold, clear waters. In the daylight, he recalled, this view was magnificent: Llyn Cau pure blue, surrounded by green grass, and the sun touching the razor-sharp edges of Mynydd Pencoed, the cliffs surrounding the lake. He felt a million miles from London.

The reflection of the moon gleamed up at him from the water. He sighed. The water lapped gently at the edge of the lake, but it could not erase the marks of the automatons’ tracks. It was clear where they had come from. He reached back and patted Balios’s neck.

“Wait for me here,” he said. “And if I do not return, take yourself back to the Institute. They will be glad to see you again, old boy.”

The horse whickered gently and bit at his sleeve, but Will only drew in his breath and waded into Llyn Cau. The cold liquid lapped up over his boots and hit his trousers, soaking through to freeze his skin. He gasped with the shock of it.

“Wet again,” he said glumly, and plunged forward into the icy waters of the lake. They seemed to pull him in, like quicksand—he barely had time to gasp in a breath before the freezing water dragged him down into darkness.

It was dark for only moments. The icy water sucked Will down, and then he was falling—he curled in on himself just as the ground rose up to slam into him, knocking the breath from his body.

He choked and rolled over onto his stomach, pulling himself to a kneeling position, his hair and clothes streaming water. He reached for his witchlight, then dropped his hand; he didn’t want to illuminate anything if that might call attention to him. The Night Vision rune would have to do.

It was enough to show him that he was in a rocky cavern. If he looked above him, he could see the swirling waters of the lake, held in abeyance as if by glass, and a blurred bit of moonlight. Tunnels led off the cavern, with no markings to show where they might lead. He rose to his feet and blindly chose the leftmost tunnel, moving carefully ahead into the shadowy darkness.

The tunnels were wide, with smooth floors that showed no mark where the clockwork creatures might have passed. The sides were rough volcanic rock. He remembered climbing Cadair Idris with his father, years ago. There were many legends about the mountain: that it had been a chair for a giant, who had sat upon it and regarded the stars; that King Arthur and his knights slept beneath the hill, waiting for the time when Britain would awake and need them again; that anyone who spent the night on the mountainside would awake a poet or a madman.

If only it was known, Will thought as he turned through the curve of a tunnel and emerged into a larger cave, how strange the truth of the matter was.

The cave was wide, opening out to a greater space at the far end of the room, where a dim light gleamed. Here and there Will caught a silvery glint that he thought was water running in streams down the black walls, but on closer examination it turned out to be veins of crystalline quartz.

Will moved toward the dim light. He found that his heart was beating rapidly inside his chest, and he tried to breathe steadily to quell it. He knew what was speeding his pulse. Tessa. If Mortmain had her, then she was here—close. Somewhere in this honeycomb of tunnels he might find her.

He heard Jem’s voice in his head, as if his
parabatai
stood at his side, advising him. He had always said that Will rushed toward the end of a mission rather than proceeding in a measured manner, and that one must look at the next step on the path ahead, rather than the mountain in the distance, or one would never reach one’s goal. Will closed his eyes for a moment. He knew that Jem was right, but it was hard to remember, when the goal that he sought was the girl that he loved.

He opened his eyes and moved toward the dim light at the far end of the cavern. The ground beneath him was smooth, without rocks or pebbles, and veined like marble. The light ahead flared up—and Will came to a dead stop, only his years of Shadowhunter training keeping him from tumbling forward to his death.

For the rock floor ended in a sheer drop. He was standing on an outcropping, looking down at a round amphitheater. It was full of automatons. They were silent, unmoving and still, like mechanical toys that had wound down. They were dressed, as those in the village had been, in scraps of military uniforms, lined up one by one, for all the world like life-size lead soldiers.

In the center of the room was a raised stone platform, and on the table lay another automaton, like a corpse on an autopsy table. Its head was bare metal, but there was pale human skin stretched taut over the rest of its body—and on that skin was inked runes.

As he stared, Will recognized them, one after another: Memory, Agility, Speed, Night Vision. They would never work, of course, not on a contraption made of metal and human skin. It might fool Shadowhunters from a distance, but …

But what if he used Shadowhunter skin?
a voice in Will’s mind whispered.
What could he create then? How mad is he, and when will he stop?
The thought, and the sight of the runes of Heaven inscribed on such a monstrous creature, twisted Will’s stomach; he jerked away from the edge of the outcropping and stumbled back, fetching up against a cold rock wall, his hands clammy with sweat.

He saw the village again in his mind, the dead bodies in the streets, heard the mechanical hiss of the clockwork demon as it spoke to him:

All these years you have driven us from this world with your runed blades. Now we have bodies that your weapons will not work on, and this world
will be ours.

Rage poured through Will like fire in his veins. He tore himself away from the wall and plunged headlong down a narrow tunnel, away from the cavern room. As he went, he thought he heard a sound behind him—a whirring, as if the mechanism of a great watch were starting up—but when he turned, he saw nothing, only the smooth walls of the cave, and the unmoving shadows.

The tunnel he was following narrowed as he walked, until eventually he was squeezing sideways past an outcropping of quartz-laden rock. If it narrowed further, he knew, he would have to turn around and go back to the cavern; the thought made him push himself forward with renewed vigor, and he slid forward, almost falling, as the passage suddenly opened into a wider corridor.

It was almost like a hallway at the Institute, only made all of smoothed stone, with torches at intervals set into metal brackets. Beside each torch was an arched door, also of stone. The first two stood open on empty dark rooms.

Beyond the third door was Tessa.

Will did not see her immediately when he walked into the room. The stone door swung partly shut behind him, but he found that he was not in darkness. There was a flickering light—the dimming flames of a blaze in a stone fireplace at the far end of the room. To his astonishment it was furnished like a room in an inn, with a bed and washstand, rugs on the ground, even curtains on the walls, though they hung over bare stone, not windows.

In front of the fire was a slim shadow, crouched on the ground. Will’s hand went automatically to the hilt of the dagger at his waist—and then the shadow turned, hair slipping over her shoulder, and he saw her face.

Tessa.

His hand fell away from the dagger as his heart lurched inside his chest with an impossible, painful force. He saw her expression change: curiosity, astonishment, disbelief. She rose to her feet, her skirts tumbling around her as she straightened, and he saw her hold her hand out.

“Will?” she said.

It was like a key turning the lock of a door, releasing him; he started forward. There had never been a greater distance than the distance that separated him from Tessa at that moment. It was a large room; at the moment, the distance between London and Cadair Idris seemed nothing to the distance across it. He felt a shudder, as of some sort of resistance, as he crossed the room. He saw Tessa hold out her hand, her mouth shaping words—and then she was in his arms, the breath half-knocked out of both of them as they collided with each other.

She was up on her toes, her arms around his shoulders, whispering his name: “Will, Will,
Will
—” He buried his face against her neck, where her thick hair curled; she smelled of smoke and violet water. He clutched her even more tightly as her fingers curled against the back of his collar, and they clung together. For just that moment the grief that had clenched him like an iron fist since Jem’s death seemed to relax and he could breathe.

He thought of the hell he had been in since he’d left London—the days of riding without stopping, the sleepless nights. Blood and loss and pain and fighting. All to bring him here. To Tessa.

“Will,” she said again, and he looked down into her tearstained face. There was a bruise across her cheekbone. Someone had hit her there, and his heart swelled with rage. He would find out who it was, and he would kill them. If it was Mortmain, he would kill him only after he had burned his monstrous laboratory to the ground, that the madman might see the ruin of all his creation—“Will,” Tessa said again, interrupting his thoughts. She sounded almost breathless. “Will, you
idiot
.”

His romantic notions came to a screeching halt like a hackney cab in traffic on Fleet Street. “I— What?”

“Oh, Will,” she said. Her lips were trembling; she looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. “Do you remember when you told me that the handsome young gentleman who came to rescue you was never wrong, not even if he said the sky was purple and made of hedgehogs?”

“The first time I ever saw you. Yes.”

“Oh, my Will.” She drew gently away from his embrace, smoothing a tangled lock of hair behind her ear. Her eyes remained fixed on his. “I cannot imagine how you came to find me, how difficult it must have been. It is incredible. But—do you really think Mortmain would leave me unguarded in a room with an open door?” She turned away and moved a few feet forward, then stopped abruptly. “Here,” she said, and raised her hand, spreading her fingers wide. “The air is as solid as a wall here. This is a prison, Will, and now you are in it alongside me.”

He moved to stand beside her, already knowing what he would find. He recalled the resistance he had felt as he crossed the room. The air rippled slightly when he touched it with his finger but was harder than a frozen lake. “I know this configuration,” he said. “The Clave uses a version of it sometimes.” His hand curled itself into a fist, and he slammed it against the solid air, hard enough to bruise the bones in his hand.
“Uffern gwaedlyd,”
he swore in Welsh. “All the bloody way across the country to get to you, and I can’t even do
this
right. The moment I saw you, all I could think of was running to you. By the Angel, Tessa—”

“Will!” She caught at his arm. “Don’t you
dare
apologize. Do you understand what it means to me that you are here? It is like a miracle or the direct intervention of Heaven, for I had been praying to see the faces of those I cared for again before I died.” She spoke simply, straightforwardly—it was one of the things he had always loved about Tessa, that she did not hide or dissemble, but spoke her mind without embellishment. “When I was in the Dark House, there was no one who cared enough to search for me. When you found me, it was an accident. But now—”

“Now I have condemned us both to the same fate,” he said in a low voice. He drew a dagger from his belt and drove it against the invisible wall before him. The runed silver blade of the dagger shattered, and Will cast the broken hilt aside and cursed again, under his breath.

Tessa put a light hand on his shoulder. “We are not condemned,” she said. “Surely you have not come by yourself, Will. Henry, or Jem, will find us. From the other side of the wall, we can be freed. I have seen how Mortmain does it, and …”

Will did not know what happened then. His expression must have changed at the mention of Jem’s name, for he saw some of the color leave her face. Her hand tightened on his arm.