Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Oscar barked as if he’d discovered the rune himself. Anna joined Ari at the tree, looking dusty but pleased. “Oh, well done, Ari,” she said, drawing her stele from her belt. “Now, Unseen runes are used to hide and conceal.…”

With a look of fierce concentration, Anna struck a line through the rune, obliterating it. A sort of shimmer seemed to pass over the tree, and the roots began to move beneath the ground, twisting and curling aside until a black gap opened at the base of the trunk. It looked like the entrance to a cave.

Ari got down on her knees, the ground icy-cold even through the thick material of her gear. She peered into the gap, but it was utterly dark within. Even when she took out her witchlight and illuminated it, the shadows were almost too thick to pierce; leaning in as far as she could, she glimpsed the faint outline of steps leading down. Stone steps, with faint runes carved into them, half worn away by time.

She wriggled out from under the tree and threw her head back to look up at Anna. “This has to be it,” she said. “The entrance to the Silent City.”

Anna knelt down and reached for Oscar. He snuffled at her hands as she tucked a piece of paper into his collar. “Good boy, Oscar,” she said. “Back to the Institute with you. Tell them we found it. Go on, now,” she said, and went to open the courtyard gate. Oscar trotted out bravely and set off down Cheapside at a loping pace.

Anna hurried back to Ari. “It’s getting darker,” she said. “We ought to hurry. Do you want to go first?”

Ari found that she did. The hole at the base of the trunk was narrow and oddly shaped. She had to flip over onto her stomach and wriggle backward through the gap, sliding a little before her knees met the uneven surface of the stone steps. She scrambled down them backward, on her hands and knees, until she hit a level floor.

She stood up, her witchlight held high. Above her, Anna was making her way down the stairs, managing to make crawling backward look elegant. Ari turned around slowly, shining her light into every corner. She stood in the center of a stone room, dusty but clean, with a floor made of overlapping flagstones. When she glanced up, she saw a vaulted ceiling that soared above her, studded with semiprecious stones, each one carved with a single, shining rune.

They were inside the Silent City.



* * *



Alastair had made it most of the way to meet Grace and Jesse when the explosion went off. He was pleased to note that he barely reacted. With the events of the past few weeks, a small explosion in Grosvenor Square hardly rated more than a raised eyebrow. Besides, it was quite a small explosion—just a short burst of flame in the air a few yards ahead of him, and then the smoke that remained as it went out, and in the middle of the smoke, a piece of paper.

He lunged forward to grab it before the wind whipped it away. There were Shadowhunter runes all around its edge, most of whose meanings he couldn’t remember offhand. But in the middle of the page was a note in a slightly crabbed hand:

If you are reading this, this is the first Fire-Message that has been sent with success. It has been written by Grace Blackthorn and invented by Christopher Lightwood.

He blinked at the paper for a moment, as though expecting it to disappear, or explode again, or turn out to be a hallucination.

“By the Angel,” he muttered to himself, “they did it. They actually went and did it.”

Still staring at the paper, he crossed Grosvenor Square toward the Consul’s house, and as he approached saw Jesse—wild-haired and wild-eyed—burst from the door and run down the front steps.

“Did you get it?” he shouted. “Did you get it? The message? Did it arrive?”

Triumphantly, Alastair raised the fire-message over his head. “It worked,” he said. “It bloody well worked.”

“It was Grace who figured it out,” said Jesse. “Adding a communication rune to the stele before writing the message—that was it. Can you believe it was something so simple?”

“I can believe anything at the moment,” Alastair said. And madly, insanely, under the crackling black sky of possessed London, they grinned at each other as if neither of them had ever been more delighted in their lives.





32 WHATEVER GODS MAY BE




Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

—William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”



It was near dark by the time Lucie and Cordelia reached the outskirts of Idumea.

They had struggled to the top of a hill of shale and jagged rock, the sun a low red disc hovering at the horizon. Cordelia could not help but watch Lucie worriedly out of the corner of her eye. She had thought Lucie’s blood tie to Belial might help her here, but the opposite seemed true. Lucie was clearly suffering as if she were dragging a great weight behind her with every step. A whole dead world.

It didn’t help that they’d been mostly silent since they’d left Carbas’s court behind them. Cordelia wished she could go back and punch that awful blue demon in the face. He had put distance between her and Lucie at the worst possible time. Just when their friendship was recovering—

“Look,” Lucie said. She had paused at the top of the hill and was gazing down. “It’s Idumea.”

Cordelia hurried to join her. The shale fell away sharply below them. Beyond it, bathed in the glow of the bloody sun, was a plain studded with boulders. At the edge of the plain the city of Idumea spread out, a gargantuan dark ruin. She had expected to see the remains of streets and houses, but almost everything had collapsed into rubble. Here and there they could spot the fallen demon towers: tree trunks of adamas, reflecting the dull red sun. Ringing the city were the ruins of the walls that had formed its perimeter.

Like their own Alicante, the city was built around a hillside, the upper part of which was half-hidden by lowering black clouds. Still, Cordelia could make out the shape of a massive fortress at the top, circled by a stone wall, its towers silhouetted against the sky.

“Idumea,” she murmured. “James and Matthew are right there—”

They exchanged a quick look, full of the remembrance of Lilith’s warning: You cannot travel at night—you will have to seek shelter once the moons rise, or die in the dark.

“We could run,” Lucie murmured. “If we could make it to the city, perhaps we could travel in the shelter of the rubble—”

Cordelia shook her head immediately. “No.”