Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Ari bit her lip. “I don’t know, but I can’t help but fear we’re running out of time.”


They walked on. And on. It was very hard to tell how much time was passing, as the corridor extended in either direction for as far as they could see now, disappearing to vanishing points ahead and behind. Ari was peering back over her shoulder, hoping they hadn’t been meant to turn where they had seen the Watchers, when Anna let out a quickly muffled yelp of recognition. “Look!”

Ari hurried to join her and looked where she was pointing. There, leading off the corridor, was a pair of barred gates wrought in gold; they hung half-open, darkness visible beyond them. These, she knew, must be the gates through which Tatiana Blackthorn had let Belial and his army pass from the Iron Tombs into the Silent City.

“Who could do such a thing?” Ari whispered. She glanced over at Anna. “Do you think anyone will be there? Waiting for us?”

Anna didn’t answer, only strode through the doorway. Ari followed her.

They had been passing through caverns of inhuman scale since they arrived, so another one did not have quite the same impact as the first had. Even so, the sheer scale of the Iron Tombs intimidated her. She supposed that a thousand years of Silent Brothers and Iron Sisters added up to a very large number of tombs. Whose inhabitants, she reminded herself, were now rampaging around London.

Before them was a tiled floor, easily a hundred yards in each direction, describing a huge circular chamber. Around the perimeter, dozens of stone staircases were set into the walls; these led to landings, and then more staircases, a riot of staircases stretching above them, crossing one another, forming a kind of massive, vaulted ceiling where the stairs were absent. On each of the landings, at least the ones they could see, were stone tables—no. Sarcophagi. Even from here on the ground, Ari could see that the lids had been disturbed, thrown off entirely or at least shifted from their places.

It was not as dark as it had seemed from outside. The walls were lined with witchlights, all the way up, casting everything in a gentle blue glow. The witchlights were placed regularly, but the intersecting, apparently random placement of all the staircases made them shimmer down from above like a field of stars. It was almost impossible to tell how high the staircases rose, as they disappeared into a ceiling that could have been the sky.

They crossed the crypt, the tapping of their shoes echoing through the cavernous space. The center was empty, but the floor, Ari realized, was a huge mosaic whose image she could not initially understand. She studied it as she crossed it, and realized eventually that it was of an Iron Sister and a Silent Brother, and an angel rising over them.

At the end of the mosaic was a long double staircase rising straight ahead of them to a simple door set in the wall. The way out, Ari thought. It had to be; it was large enough, and there were no other doors in sight except the ones they had entered through.

“Well,” said Anna, and Ari realized she was nervous. “Shall we?”

“We shall,” said Ari properly. She reached out and took Anna’s hand in hers, as if to lead her to a dance floor. “We’ll go together.”

The actual opening of the door, once they reached it, was a bit of an anticlimax after all the buildup. There was a large iron key in the door, and, after another glance at Ari, Anna turned it and simply pushed the door open.

On the other side was the night sky, and a rocky volcanic plain, and silence.

Into the silence, Anna called, “Hello?”

No sound came.

They looked at one another in horror, and Ari felt a terrible fatigue. No fire-messages, it seemed. No Shadowhunter army to meet them.

Anna took a long, deep breath. “It’s good to breathe clean air, at least.”

“And,” said Ari, “it’s good we had a backup plan.”

“Yes, but it’s an exhausting one,” Anna said, eyeing the rocky terrain rolling away from where they stood. “How long do you think it will take to get to the Adamant Citadel?”

But then Ari’s eye was caught by a flash of light on the horizon. She looked, and the light became a steady glow.

“Is that a… Portal?” Anna said, as though saying it out loud would cause it not to be so.

As they watched, a line of figures appeared, carrying lamps that gave out their own glow. Like fireflies they danced across the lava plain, but then they grew closer, and the Shadowhunters had come, and Grace and Jesse had made fire-messages work, and perhaps there was still such a thing as hope in the world.

Anna put her arms above her head and waved. “Here! We’re here!”

As they got closer, Ari could see their faces. She recognized Gideon and Sophie and Eugenia Lightwood, Piers Wentworth and Rosamund and Thoby, but most were strangers, not members of the London Enclave but Shadowhunters from elsewhere who had come to fight. She couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed, but it was a rather silly fantasy, she thought, to have imagined that they would be met by the families she knew best.

And then she froze, as she saw her mother.

Her mother was in battle gear, her gray-brown hair swept up in a practical plait at the back of her neck, a weapons belt around her waist. Ari couldn’t remember the last time Flora Bridgestock had actually put on gear.

As though she knew her daughter was looking at her, Flora’s gaze came to rest directly on Ari, and they locked eyes. For a moment, Flora seemed expressionless, and Ari felt a terrible anxiety go through her.

And then, slowly, Flora smiled. There was hope in that smile, and pain and sorrow. She reached out her hand—not commandingly, but hopefully, as if to say, Come here, please, and Ari went to join her.



* * *



Cordelia and Lucie hurried across the bridge, the black water in the moat below surging and swirling as if something were alive inside it. It was nothing Cordelia wanted to look at too closely, though, and besides, she was more worried about demons pouring out of the fortress, ready to attack.

But the place was quiet. At first glance, as they ducked into the vast entryway, the fortress appeared abandoned. Dust blew across the bare stone floors. Spiderwebs—far too large and thick for Cordelia’s peace of mind—coated the ceiling and hung from the corners. A double spiral staircase, beautifully constructed, soared to the second floor, but there was no motion or sound from above, any more than there was around them.

“I don’t know what I expected,” said Lucie, looking perplexed, “but it wasn’t this. Where’s the throne of skulls? The decapitated Lilith statues? The tapestries with Belial’s face on them?”

“This place feels utterly dead.” Cordelia felt sick to her stomach. “Lilith and Filomena both said Belial had taken it over, that he was using it, but what if Lilith was lying? Or if they were just—wrong?”

“We won’t know until we search,” Lucie said, with grim determination.

They headed up the curving stairs—it was two sets of spiral staircases, weaving in and out of each other, never touching—until they reached the second floor. Here there was a long stone corridor; they followed it carefully, weapons at the ready, but it was just as empty as the entryway. At the corridor’s end were a pair of metal doors. Cordelia looked at Lucie, who shrugged and pushed one of them open.

Inside was another large room, semicircular in shape, with a floor of marble, badly cracked. There was a kind of bare stone platform rising against one of the walls; behind it were two huge windows. One gazed out over the bleak plains of Edom. The second was a Portal.

The surface of it swirled and danced with color, like oil on the surface of water. Through that movement, Cordelia could see what was unmistakably London. A London whose skies were gray and black, the clouds overhead riven with heat lightning. In the foreground, a bridge over a dark river; beyond it, a Gothic structure rising against the sky, a familiar clock tower—

“It’s Westminster Bridge,” said Lucie, in surprise. “And the Houses of Parliament.”

Cordelia blinked. “Why would Belial want to go there?”

“I don’t know, but—look at this.” Cordelia glanced over and saw Lucie on her tiptoes, examining a heavy iron lever that emerged from the wall just to the left of the doors. Thick chains rose from it, disappearing into the ceiling.

“Don’t—” Cordelia started, but it was already too late; Lucie had pulled the lever down. The chain began to move; they could hear it grinding in the walls and ceilings.