The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (286 page)

“Let us go through,” Jace said to Robert. All in gear and wrapped in the gray of the Inquisitor, Robert Lightwood reminded Clary of the hard, rocky side of a cliff: craggy and unmovable.

Robert shook his head. “There’s no need,” he said. “Sebastian has attempted a sneak attack. He has only twenty or thirty Endarkened warriors with him. There are enough warriors for the job without us sending our children through.”

“I am
not a child
,” Jace said savagely. Clary wondered what Robert thought when he looked at the boy he had adopted—if Robert saw Jace’s father in Jace’s face, or still searched for remnants of Michael Wayland that weren’t there. Jace scanned Robert Lightwood’s expression, suspicion darkening his gold eyes. “What are you doing? There’s something you don’t want me to know.”

Robert’s face set into hard lines. At that moment a blonde woman in gear brushed by Clary, speaking excitedly to her companion: “. . . told us that we can try to capture the Endarkened, bring them back here. See if they can be cured. Which means maybe they can save Jason.”

Clary looked daggers at Robert. “You’re not. You’re
not
letting people whose relatives were taken in the attacks go through. You’re not telling them the Endarkened can be saved.”

Robert gave her a grim look. “We don’t know that they can’t be.”

“
We
know,” Clary said. “They can’t be saved! They’re not who they were! They’re not
human
. But when these soldiers see the faces of people they know, they’ll hesitate, they’ll
want
it to not be true—”

“And they’ll be slaughtered,” Jace said bleakly. “Robert. You have to stop this.”

Robert was shaking his head. “This is the will of the Clave. This is what they want to see done.”

“Then why even send them through?” Jace demanded. “Why not just stay here and stab fifty of our own people to death? Save the time?”

“Don’t you dare joke,” Robert snapped.

“I wasn’t joking—”

“And don’t you tell me
fifty
Nephilim can’t defeat
twenty
Endarkened warriors.” Shadowhunters were beginning to go through the Portal, guided by Jia. Clary felt a tickle of panic run down her spine. Jia was letting through only those who were completely outfitted in gear, but quite a few were very young or very old, and many had come unarmed and were
simply seizing up weapons from the pile provided by the armory, before passing through.

“Sebastian’s expecting exactly this response,” Jace said desperately. “If he’s come with only twenty warriors, then there’s a reason, and he’ll have backup—”

“He can’t have backup!” Robert’s voice rose. “You cannot open a Portal to the Adamant Citadel unless the Iron Sisters allow it. They’re allowing us, but Sebastian must have come over land. Sebastian didn’t expect us to be watching for him at the Citadel. He knows we know he can’t be tracked; he doubtless thought we were watching only Institutes. This is a gift—”

“Sebastian doesn’t give gifts!” Jace shouted. “You’re being blind!”

“We are not blind!” Robert roared. “You may be frightened of him, Jace, but he is just a boy; he is not the most brilliant military mind ever to exist! He fought you at the Burren,
and he lost
!”

Robert turned and wheeled away, striding toward Jia. Jace looked as if he had been slapped. Clary doubted anyone had ever accused him of being frightened before.

He turned to look at her. The movement of Shadowhunters toward the Portal had slowed; Jia was waving people away. Jace touched the shortsword at Clary’s hip. “I’m going through,” he said.

“They won’t let you,” Clary said.

“They don’t need to
let
me.” Under the red-and-gold lights of the towers, Jace’s face looked as if it had been cut out of marble. Behind him Clary could see more Shadowhunters coming up the hill. They were chatting among themselves as if this were any ordinary fight, any situation that could be handled by
sending fifty or so Nephilim to the place of attack. They hadn’t been at the Burren. They hadn’t seen. They didn’t
know
. Clary met Jace’s eyes with hers.

She could see the lines of tension on his face, deepening the angles of his cheekbones, setting his jaw. “The question is,” he said, “is there any chance
you’d
agree to stay here?”

“You know there’s not,” she said.

He took a shuddering breath. “Right. Clary, this could be dangerous, really dangerous—” She could hear people murmuring around them, excited voices, rising against the night on puffs of exhaled air, people chattering that the Consul and Council had been meeting to discuss the London attack just as Sebastian popped into sudden existence on the tracking map, that he had only been there a short time and with few reinforcements, that they had a real chance to stop him, that he had been foiled in London and would be again—

“I love you,” she said. “But don’t try to stop me.”

Jace reached to take her hand. “All right,” he said. “Then we run, together. Toward the Portal.”

“We run,” she agreed, and they did.

The volcanic plain spread out
like a pale moonscape before Jace, reaching to a line of distant mountains, black against the horizon. White snow dusted the ground: thick in some places; crisp, thin ice in others. Deadly sharp rocks sliced through the ice and snow, along with the bare branches of hedges and frozen moss.

The moon was behind clouds, the velvet dark sky pricked here and there with stars, dulled by a sheen of cloud. Light blazed up all around them, though, from seraph blades—and, Jace saw as his eyes adjusted, light from what looked like a bonfire burning in the distance.

The Portal had deposited Jace and Clary a few feet from each other, in the snow. They were side by side now, Clary very
silent, her coppery hair dusted with white flakes. All around them were cries and shouts, the sound of seraph blades being ignited, the murmur of the names of angels.

“Stay close to me,” Jace murmured as he and Clary neared the top of the ridge. He had caught up a longsword from the pile by the Portal just before leaping in, Jia’s cry of dismay following them through the shrieking winds. Jace had half-expected her or Robert to follow them through, but instead the Portal had closed up immediately after them, like a door slamming shut.

The unfamiliar blade was heavy in Jace’s hand. He preferred to use his left arm, but the sword had a right-handed grip. The weapon was dented around the sides, as if it had seen quite a few battles. He wished he had one of his own weapons in his hand—

It appeared all at once, rising up in front of them like a fish breaking the surface of water with a sudden silver glint. Jace had seen the Adamant Citadel before only in pictures. Carved out of the same stuff as seraph blades, the Citadel glowed against the night sky like a star; it was what Jace had mistaken for the light of a bonfire. A circular wall of
adamas
ringed it, with no opening in the wall except a single gate, formed of two huge blades plunged into the ground at angles, like an open pair of scissors.

All around the Citadel the volcanic ground stretched away, black and white like a chessboard—half volcanic rock and half snow. Jace felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. It was like being at the Burren again, though he remembered that only the way one might remember a dream: Sebastian’s dark Nephilim, in their red gear, and the Nephilim of the Clave, in black, blade to blade, the sparks of battle rising into the night, and then the fire of Glorious, wiping out all that had gone before.

The earth of the Burren had been dark, but now Sebastian’s warriors stood out like drops of blood against the white ground. They were waiting, red under the light of the stars, their dark blades in their hands. They stood between the Nephilim who had come through the Portal, and the gates of the Adamant Citadel. Though the Endarkened were at a distance, and though Jace could not see any of their faces clearly, he could somehow
feel
them smiling.

And he could feel too the unease in the Nephilim around him, the Shadowhunters who had come through the Portal so confident, so ready for battle. They stood and looked down at the Endarkened, and Jace could feel the hesitation in their bravado. At last—too late—they felt it: the alienness, the difference of the Endarkened. These were not Shadowhunters who had temporarily strayed from the path. They were not Shadowhunters at all.

“Where is he?” Clary whispered. Her breath was white in the cold. “Where’s Sebastian?”

Jace shook his head; many of the red-geared Shadowhunters had their hoods up, and their faces were invisible. Sebastian could have been any one of them.

“And the Iron Sisters?” Clary searched the plain with her gaze. The only white was snow. There was no sign of the Sisters in their robes, familiar from many
Codex
illustrations.

“They’ll stay inside the Citadel,” Jace said. “They have to protect what’s inside it. The arsenal. Presumably that’s what Sebastian’s here for—the weapons. The Sisters will have surrounded the interior armory with their bodies. If he manages to get through the gates, or his Endarkened do, the Sisters will destroy the Citadel before they let him have it.” His voice was grim.

“But if Sebastian knows that, if he knows what the Sisters will do—” Clary began.

A scream cut the night like a knife. Jace started forward before realizing the scream was coming from behind them. Jace whirled to see a man in worn gear go down with the blade of a Dark Shadowhunter in his chest. It was the man who had called out to Clary in Alicante, before they had reached the Gard.

The Dark Shadowhunter whirled, grinning. There was a cry from the Nephilim, and the blonde woman Clary had heard speaking excitedly at the Gard stepped forward. “Jason!” she cried, and Clary realized she was speaking to the Endarkened warrior, a thickset man with the same blonde hair she had. “Jason, please.” Her voice trembled as she moved forward, stretching out her hand to the Endarkened, who drew another blade from his belt, looking at her expectantly.

“Please,
no
,” Clary said. “Don’t—don’t go near him—”

But the blonde woman was only a step away from the Dark Shadowhunter. “Jason,” she whispered. “You’re my brother. You’re one of us, a Nephilim. You don’t have to do this—Sebastian can’t force you. Please—” She looked around, desperate. “Come with us. They’re working on a cure; we’ll fix you—”

Jason laughed. His blade flashed out, a sideways slash. The blonde Shadowhunter’s head fell. Blood fanned out, black against the white snow, as her body slumped to the ground. Someone was screaming over and over, hysterically, and then someone else cried out and gestured wildly behind them.

Jace looked up and saw a line of Endarkened advancing
from behind, from the direction of the closed Portal. Their blades flashed out in the moonlight. The Nephilim began to stumble down the ridge, but it was no longer an orderly progression—there was panic among them; Jace could feel it, like the taste of blood on the wind. “Hammer and anvil!” he shouted, hoping they would understand. He seized Clary with his free hand and yanked her back, away from the headless body on the ground. “It’s a trap,” he shouted at her over the noise of the fighting. “Get to a wall, somewhere you can make a Portal! Get us out of here!”

Her green eyes widened. He wanted to grab her, kiss her, cling on to her, protect her, but the fighter in him knew he had brought her into this life. Encouraged her. Trained her. When he saw the understanding in her eyes, he nodded and let her go.

Clary pulled away from his grip, sliding past an Endarkened warrior who was facing off against a staff-wielding Silent Brother in bloody parchment robes. Her boots skidded on the snow as she darted toward the Citadel. The crowd swallowed her up just as an Endarkened warrior drew his weapon free and lunged for Jace.

Like all Endarkened Shadowhunters, his motions were blindingly swift, almost feral. As he rose up with his blade, he seemed to blot out the moon. And Jace’s blood rose up too, shooting like fire through his veins as his awareness narrowed: There was nothing else in the world, only this moment, only the weapon in his hand. He leaped toward the Dark Shadowhunter, his sword outstretched.

Clary bent to retrieve Heosphoros from where it had fallen in the snow. The blade was smeared with blood, the blood of a
Dark Shadowhunter who was even now darting away from her, flinging himself back into the battle churning on the plain.

It had happened now a half dozen times. Clary would attack, attempt to engage one of the Endarkened in a fight, and they would drop their weapons, back away, turn from her as if she were a ghost, and hurry away. The first time or two she had wondered if they were afraid of Heosphoros, confused by a blade that looked so much like Sebastian’s. She suspected something else now. Sebastian had probably told them not to touch her or hurt her, and they were obeying.

It made her want to scream. She knew she should fling herself after them when they ran, end them with a blade to the back, or a slice to the throat, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. They still
looked
like Nephilim, human enough. Their blood ran red onto the snow. It still felt like cowardice to attack someone who could not attack back.