City of Heavenly Fire

If you are leaving the Basilias, understand that it is against the advice of the Brothers that you do so.

“Right,” Jace said, pulling on his second gauntlet and flexing his fingers. “You’ve made that pretty clear.”

Brother Enoch loomed over him, glowering, as Jace bent down with slow precision to do up the laces on his boots. He was sitting on the edge of the infirmary bed, one of a line of white-sheeted cots that ran the length of the long room. Many of the other cots were taken up with Shadowhunter warriors, recovering from the battle at the Citadel. Silent Brothers moved among the beds like ghostly nurses. The air smelled of herbs and strange poultices.

You should take another night to rest, at least. Your body is spent, and the heavenly fire still burns within you.

Finished with his boots, Jace looked up. The arched ceiling above was painted with an interlaced design of healing runes in silver and blue. He’d been staring up at it for what felt like weeks, though he knew it had been only a night. The Silent Brothers, keeping all visitors away, had hovered over him with healing runes and poultices. They had also run tests on him, taking blood, hair, even eyelashes—touching him with a series of blades pressed to his skin: gold, silver, steel, rowan wood. He felt fine. He had a strong feeling that keeping him in the Basilias was more about studying the heavenly fire than it was about healing him.

“I want to see Brother Zachariah,” he said.

He is well. You need not worry yourself about him.

“I want to see him,” he said. “I nearly killed him at the Citadel—”

That was not you. That was the heavenly fire. And it did anything but harm him.

Jace blinked at the odd choice of words. “He said when I met him that he believes that a debt is owed the Herondales. I’m a Herondale. He’d want to see me.”

And then you intend to depart the Basilias?

Jace stood up. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t need to be in the infirmary. Surely you could be using your resources more fruitfully on the actually wounded.” He caught his jacket off a hook by the bed. “Look, you can either bring me to Brother Zachariah or I can wander around yelling for him until he turns up.”

You are a great deal of trouble, Jace Herondale.

“So I’ve been told,” Jace said.

There were arched windows between the beds; they cast wide spokes of light across the marble floor. The day was beginning to dim: Jace had woken in the early afternoon, with a Silent Brother by his bed. He’d jerked upright, demanding to know where Clary was, as recollections of the night before poured through him: he recalled the pain when Sebastian had stabbed him, recalled the fire blazing up the blade, recalled Zachariah burning. Clary’s arms around him, her hair falling down around them both, the cessation of pain that had come with darkness. And then—nothing.

After the Brothers had reassured him that Clary was all right, safe at Amatis’s, he’d asked after Zachariah, whether the fire had harmed him, but had received only irritatingly vague answers.

Now he followed Enoch out of the infirmary hall and into a narrower, white-plastered corridor. Doors opened off the corridor. As they passed one, Jace caught a quick glimpse of a writhing body tied to a bed, and heard the sound of screaming and cursing. A Silent Brother stood over a thrashing man dressed in the remnants of red gear. Blood spattered the white wall behind them.

Amalric Kriegsmesser, said Brother Enoch without turning his head. One of Sebastian’s Endarkened. As you know, we have been attempting to reverse the spell of the Infernal Cup.

Jace swallowed. There didn’t seem anything to say. He had seen the ritual of the Infernal Cup performed. In his heart of hearts he didn’t believe the spell could be reversed. It created too fundamental a change. But then neither had he ever imagined that a Silent Brother could be as human as Brother Zachariah had always seemed. Was that why he was so determined to see him? He remembered what Clary had told him Brother Zachariah had said once, when she’d asked him if he’d ever loved anyone enough to die for them:

Two people. There are memories that time does not erase. Ask your friend Magnus Bane, if you do not believe me. Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.

There had been something about those words, something that spoke of a sorrow and a sort of memory that Jace did not associate with the Brothers. They had been a presence in his life since he was ten: pale silent statues who brought healing, who kept secrets, who did not love or desire or grow or die but only were. But Brother Zachariah was different.

We are here. Brother Enoch had paused in front of an unremarkable white-painted door. He lifted a broad hand and knocked. There was a sound from inside, as of a chair scraping back, and then a male voice: