CITY OF BONES

Those who die in battle are burned, their ashes used to make the marble arches that you see here. The blood and bone of demon slayers is itself a powerful protection against evil. Even in death, the Clave serves the cause.

How exhausting, Clary thought, to fight all your life and then be expected to continue that fight even when your life was over. At the edges of her vision she could see the square white vaults rising on either side of her in orderly rows of tombs, each door locked from the outside. She understood now why this was called the Silent City: Its only inhabitants were the mute Brothers and the dead they so zealously guarded.

They had reached another staircase leading down into more twilight; Jace thrust the torch ahead of him, streaking the walls with shadows. “We’re going to the second level, where the archives and the council rooms are,” he said, as if to reassure her.

“Where are the living quarters?” Clary asked, partly to be polite, partly out of a real curiosity. “Where do the Brothers sleep?”

Sleep?

The silent word hung in the darkness between them. Jace laughed, and the flame of the torch he held flickered. “You had to ask.”

At the foot of the stairs was another tunnel, which widened out at the end into a square pavilion, each corner of which was marked by a spire of carved bone. Torches burned in long onyx holders along the sides of the square, and the air smelled of ashes and smoke. In the center of the pavilion was a long table of black basalt veined in white. Behind the table, against the dark wall, hung an enormous silver sword, point down, its hilt carved in the shape of outspread wings. Seated at the table was a row of Silent Brothers, each wrapped and cowled in the same parchment-colored robes as Jeremiah.

Jeremiah wasted no time. We have arrived. Clarissa, stand before the Council.

Clary glanced at Jace, but he was blinking, clearly confused. Brother Jeremiah must have spoken only inside her head. She looked at the table, at the long row of silent figures muffled in their heavy robes. Alternating squares made up the pavilion floor: golden bronze and a darker red. Just in front of the table was a larger square, made of black marble and embossed with a parabolic design of silver stars.

Clary stepped into the center of the black square as if she were stepping in front of a firing squad. She raised her head. “All right,” she said. “Now what?”

The Brothers made a sound then, a sound that raised the hairs up all along Clary’s neck and the backs of her arms. It was a sound like a sigh or a groan. In unison they raised their hands and pushed their cowls back, baring their scarred faces and the pits of their empty eyes.

Though she had seen Brother Jeremiah’s uncovered face already, Clary’s stomach knotted. It was like looking at a row of skeletons, like one of those medieval woodcuts where the dead walked and talked and danced on the piled bodies of the living. Their stitched mouths seemed to grin at her.

The Council greets you, Clarissa Fray, she heard, and it was not just one silent voice inside her head but a dozen, some low and rough, some smooth and monotone, but all were demanding, insistent, pushing at the fragile barriers around her mind.

“Stop,” she said, and to her astonishment her voice came out firm and strong. The din inside her mind ceased as suddenly as a record that had stopped spinning. “You can go inside my head,” she said, “but only when I’m ready.”

If you do not want our help, there is no need for this. You are the one who asked for our assistance, after all.

“You want to know what’s in my mind, just like I do,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t be careful about it.”

The Brother who sat in the center seat templed his thin white fingers beneath his chin. It is an interesting puzzle, admittedly, he said, and the voice inside her mind was dry and neutral. But there is no need for the use of force, if you do not resist.

She gritted her teeth. She wanted to resist them, wanted to pry those intrusive voices out of her head. To stand by and allow such a violation of her most intimate, personal self—

But there was every chance that had already happened, she reminded herself. This was nothing more than the excavation of a past crime, the theft of her memory. If it worked, what had been taken from her would be restored. She closed her eyes.

“Go ahead,” she said.

The first contact came as a whisper inside her head, delicate as the brush of a falling leaf. State your name for the Council.

Clarissa Fray.

The first voice was joined by others. Who are you?