Benedict smiled pleasantly.
The Inquisitor turned and looked at him in disbelief. “So you are saying,” he echoed, “that despite the fact that these Shadowhunters kil ed Nathaniel Gray—or were responsible for his death—our only link to Mortmain, despite the fact that once again they harbored a spy beneath their roof, despite the fact that they stil don’t know where Mortmain is, you would recommend Charlotte and Henry Branwel to run this Institute?”
“They may not know where Mortmain is,” said Benedict, “but they know who he is. As the great mundane military strategist Sun Tzu said in The A rt of War, ‘If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.’ We know now who Mortmain real y is —a mortal man, not a supernatural being; a man afraid of death; a man bent on revenge for what he considers the undeserved murder of his family.
Nor does he have compassion for Downworlders. He utilized werewolves to help him build his clockwork army swiftly, feeding them drugs to keep them working around the clock, knowing the drugs would kil the wolves and ensure their silence. Judging by the size of the warehouse he used and the number of workers he employed, his clockwork army wil be sizeable. And judging by his motivations and the years over which he has refined his strategies for revenge, he is a man who cannot be reasoned with, cannot be dissuaded, cannot be stopped. We must prepare for a war. And that we did not know before.”
The Inquisitor looked at Benedict, thin-lipped, as if he suspected that something untoward was going on but could not imagine what it might be.
“Prepare for a war? And how do you suggest we do that—building, of course, on al this supposedly valuable information the Branwel s have acquired?”
Benedict shrugged. “Wel , that of course wil be for the Council to decide over time. But Mortmain has tried to recruit powerful Downworlders such as Woolsey Scott and Camil e Belcourt to his cause. We may not know where he is, but we now know his ways, and we can trap him in that manner. Perhaps by al ying ourselves with some of Downworld’s more powerful leaders. Charlotte seems to have them al wel in hand, don’t you think?”
A faint laugh ran around the Council, but they were not laughing at Charlotte; they were smiling with Benedict. Gabriel was watching his father, his green eyes burning.
“And the spy in the Institute? Would you not cal that an example of her carelessness?” said the Inquisitor.
“Not at al ,” said Benedict. “She dealt with the matter swiftly and without compassion.” He smiled at Charlotte, a smile like a razor. “I retract my earlier statement about her softheartedness. Clearly she is as able to deal justice without pity as any man.”
Charlotte paled, but said nothing. Her smal hands were very stil on the Sword.
Consul Wayland sighed gustily. “I wish you had come to this conclusion a fortnight ago, Benedict, and saved us al this trouble.”
Benedict shrugged elegantly. “I thought she needed to be tested,” he said. “Fortunately, she has passed that test.”
Wayland shook his head. “Very wel . Let us vote on it.” He handed what looked like a cloudy glass vessel to the Inquisitor, who stepped down among the crowd and handed the vial to the woman sitting in the first chair of the first row. Tessa watched in fascination as she bent her head and whispered into the vial, then passed it to the man on her left.
As the vial made its way around the room, Tessa felt Jem slip his hands into hers. She jumped, though her voluminous skirts, she suspected, largely hid their hands. She laced her fingers through his slim, delicate ones and closed her eyes. I love him. I love him. I love him. And indeed, his touch made her shiver, though it also made her want to weep—with love, with confusion, with heartbreak, remembering the look on Wil ’s face when she had told him she and Jem were engaged, the happiness going out of him like a fire doused by rain.
Jem drew his hand out of hers to take the vial from Gideon on his other side. She heard him whisper, “Charlotte Branwel ,” before he passed the vial over her, to Henry on her other side. She looked at him, and he must have misconstrued the unhappiness in her eyes, because he smiled at her encouragingly. “It wil be al right,” he said. “They’l choose Charlotte.”
When the vial finished its travels, it was handed back to the Inquisitor, who presented it with a flourish to the Consul. The Consul took the vial and, placing it on the lectern before him, drew a rune on the glass with his stele.
The vial trembled, like a kettle on the boil. White smoke poured from its open neck—the col ected whispers of hundreds of Shadowhunters. They spel ed words out across the air.