CITY OF ASHES

“Hate is nothing when weighed against survival.” Valentine’s hand went to his belt, where the hilt of the Sword gleamed dully. “But don’t take my word for it. I told you there was something I wanted to show you. Here it is.”


He drew the Sword from its sheath and held it out to Jace. Jace had seen Maellartach before in the Bone City, hanging on the wall in the pavilion of the Speaking Stars. And he had seen the hilt of it protruding from Valentine’s shoulder sheath, but he’d never really examined it up close. The Angel’s Sword. It was a dark, heavy silver, glimmering with a dull sheen. Light seemed to move over and through it, as if it were made of water. In its hilt bloomed a fiery rose of light.

Jace spoke through his dry mouth. “Very nice.”

“I want you to hold it.” Valentine presented the Sword to his son, the way he’d always taught him, hilt first. The Sword seemed to shimmer blackly in the starlight.

Jace hesitated. “I don’t…”

“Take it.” Valentine pressed it into his hand.

The moment Jace’s fingers closed around the grip, a spear of light shot up the hilt of the Sword and down the core of it into the blade. He looked quickly to his father, but Valentine was expressionless.

A dark pain spread up Jace’s arm and through his chest. It wasn’t that the Sword was heavy; it wasn’t. It was that it seemed to want to pull him downward, to drag him through the ship, through the green ocean water, through the fragile crust of the earth itself. Jace felt as if the breath were being torn out of his lungs. He flung his head up and looked around—

And saw that the night had changed. A glimmering net of thin gold wires had been flung across the sky, and the stars shone down through it, bright as nail heads hammered into the darkness. Jace saw the curve of the world as it slipped away from him, and for a moment was struck by the beauty of it all. Then the night sky seemed to crack open like a glass and pouring through the shards came a horde of dark shapes, humped and twisted, gnarled and faceless, howling out a soundless scream that seared the inside of his mind. Icy wind burned him as six-legged horses hurtled past, their hooves striking bloody sparks from the deck of the ship. The things that rode them were indescribable. Overhead eyeless, leathery-winged creatures circled, screeching and dripping a venomous green slime.

Jace bent over the railing, retching uncontrollably, the Sword still gripped in his hand. Below him the water churned with demons like a poisonous stew. He saw spiny creatures with bloody saucerlike eyes struggling as they were dragged under by boiling masses of slippery black tentacles. A mermaid caught in the grip of a ten-legged water spider screamed hopelessly as it sank its fangs into her thrashing tail, its red eyes glittering like beads of blood.

The Sword fell from Jace’s hand and clattered to the deck. Abruptly the sound and spectacle were gone and the night was silent. He hung tightly to the railing, staring down at the sea below in disbelief. It was empty, its surface ruffled only by wind.

“What was that?” Jace whispered. His throat felt rough, as if it had been scraped with sandpaper. He looked wildly at his father, who had bent to retrieve the Soul-Sword from the deck where Jace had dropped it. “Are those the demons you’ve already called?”

“No.” Valentine slid Maellartach into its sheath. “Those are the demons that have been drawn to the edges of this world by the Sword. I brought my ship to this place because the wards are thin here. What you saw is my army, waiting on the other side of the wards—waiting for me to call them to my side.” His eyes were grave. “Do you still think the Clave won’t capitulate?”

Jace closed his eyes and said, “Not all of them—not the Lightwoods—”

“You could convince them. If you stand with me, I swear no harm will come to them.”

The darkness behind Jace’s eyes began to turn red. He had been imagining the ashes of Valentine’s old house, the blackened bones of the grandparents he’d never met. Now he saw other faces. Alec’s. Isabelle’s. Max’s. Clary’s.

“I’ve done so much to hurt them already,” he whispered. “Nothing else must happen to any of them. Nothing.”

“Of course. I understand.” And Jace realized, to his astonishment, that Valentine did understand, that somehow he saw what no one else seemed to be able to understand. “You think it is your fault, all the harm that has befallen your friends, your family.”

“It is my fault.”

“You’re right. It is.” At that, Jace looked up in absolute astonishment. Surprise at being agreed with battled with horror and relief in equal measures.

“Is it?”

“The harm is not deliberate, of course. But you are like me. We poison and destroy everything we love. There is a reason for that.”

“What reason?”

Valentine glanced up at the sky. “We are meant for a higher purpose, you and I. The distractions of the world are just that, distractions. If we allow ourselves to be turned aside from our course by them, we are duly punished.”