At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.
’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
—William Wordsworth, “The Reverie of Poor Susan”
“Are you sure?” said Alastair, unable to hide the doubt in his voice.
“We’re sure,” Anna said. She, Ari, and Alastair stood in the entryway of the Institute. They were all in gear. They had taken just enough time for Anna to pack a small haversack in which she had placed maps, a few flasks of drinking water, and a packet of Jacob’s Biscuits.
“But he’s just a dog,” Alastair objected.
With a deeply offended look, Oscar went to sit on Ari’s feet. “Oscar is not just a dog,” she said, reaching down to scratch the retriever’s head. “He is a member of our team. Without him, we would have had to go through the York Gate.”
“Oscar is the least of our problems,” Anna said. “We have to locate the site of a church that burned down hundreds of years ago, and hope to discover a lost entrance to the Silent City. Oscar’s task is simple by comparison.”
Oscar barked. Alastair sighed. “I hope the hound gets a medal from the Clave after this. Though he’d probably prefer a soup bone.”
“Who wouldn’t?” said Ari, lifting one of Oscar’s ears and letting it flop back down. “Isn’t that right, best puppy pup?”
Anna raised an eyebrow. “I think Ari misses Winston,” she said. “Alastair, you’ll need to tell Grace and Jesse—”
“To send fire-messages instructing the Enclave to meet you at the entrance to the Iron Tombs. I know,” Alastair said. “You do realize they haven’t sent a successful message yet, to the Enclave or anyone else.”
“I know,” Anna said. “And if we reach the Iron Tombs and there’s no one there, we’ll know they’ve failed. We’ll start out toward the Adamant Citadel. Once we’re there, we can at least start getting messages to the Clave, and we’ll bring back as many Shadowhunters as we can, as soon as we can.” She did her best to sound as if it would be all right either way; the truth was that she was praying to the Angel that Christopher’s pet project could be made to work.
“Are you sure you want to go now?” Alastair said. “The Silent City could be crawling with Watchers. Thomas and I would go with you—”
“Thomas needs rest,” Anna said firmly. “And we have no time to waste. Every moment we are not taking action is one in which Belial could be breaking down James’s resolve, or enacting some other horrible plan. Besides—you can’t leave Jesse and Grace alone here. They will need you, especially traveling back and forth to Grosvenor Square—”
“I just feel that we’re disappearing one by one, vanishing from London,” Alastair said. He looked oddly vulnerable; Anna suspected he had been more worried about Thomas than he had let on.
“If we succeed,” Anna said, “then we will return in force. And if it doesn’t work, it won’t be this excursion to the Silent City that makes the difference.”
“If we stick together—”
“Alastair,” Anna said, and then, “You’ve surprised me, you know. I used to think you were an uncaring cad. And not in the entertaining, novelish way, but in the selfish, everyday kind of way.”
“I hope this is the part where you explain you’ve changed your mind,” Alastair muttered.
Ari hid a smile behind her hand.
“I started to think better of you when you helped Thomas, after he was arrested. And now, well—there isn’t anyone I’d rather be stuck at the end of the world with.” Anna put out her hand. After a moment, with a look of bemusement, Alastair shook it. “I’m glad that you’ll be here, looking after London,” she added. “We’ll see you soon.”
Alastair seemed surprised into speechlessness. Which was all right, as far as Anna was concerned; she’d said what she wanted to say. She and Ari descended the Institute steps, Oscar frolicking at their heels.
Anna was aware that Alastair was watching them go, but she didn’t turn back to look at him. There had been too many goodbyes lately; she didn’t need another.
“You are right,” Matthew said, after a long silence. “I don’t like your plan.” He was still leaning against James’s chest, though he’d stopped shivering. “I don’t suppose you have a different, less dangerous one.”
“We haven’t much in the way of other choices,” said James. “Belial rules here; this dead land does his bidding. He wants me to wish to join with him, but he is losing patience; if I simply allow it, even reluctantly, he will accept that as what he can get. He has planned too much, worked too hard, to give up now.”
“He will think you’ve given up. Embraced despair.”
“Good,” said James. “He will assume my great weakness has finally caught up with me: that I care too much, or at all, about other people. To him, that is humiliating frailty. He will not imagine a plan behind it.”
Matthew looked back at him. He had begun to shiver again and was plucking restlessly at the fabric of the coat slung over him with his fingers, like a typhus patient. “Belial has sought possession of your body all this time. Why not do this before? Why wait until now?”
“Two reasons. One, I need him to believe I am desperate. And two, I am terrified. The idea of doing this frightens me more than anything else, and yet—”
Matthew jerked in James’s arms. His whole body seemed to tighten, rigid as a plank, before he went limp, gasping.
James gripped his hand tightly. When Matthew had caught his breath, he said, “Kit said—seizures.”
And heart failure, James thought, feeling sick, but he did not say the words aloud. “I should get you more water.”
“James, no—don’t—” Matthew clawed at James’s wrist before his eyes rolled up and his body began to jerk again. Swift, uncoordinated movements like a puppet being pulled too hard by its strings.
Panic bloomed in James’s chest. Kit had been clear: people could die from this. That Matthew would need a fortnight to physically stop drinking, and it had been nowhere near a fortnight. Matthew could die, he thought, die right there in his arms, and they would be split apart. Divided in half. Never again would James have his parabatai—the infuriating, ridiculous, generous, devoted, exasperating other half of his soul.
With a shaking hand, James yanked his stele from his pocket. He caught hold of Matthew’s flailing arm, held it still. Set the tip of the stele to his skin and drew a healing rune.
It flashed and faded, like a sputtering match. James knew, rationally: runes didn’t work here. But he didn’t stop. He could hear Jem’s voice in his head. Soft, steady. You must build a fortress of control around yourself. You must come to know this power, so that you may master it.
He drew a second iratze. It, too, vanished. Then a third, and then a fourth, and he began to lose count as he scrawled over and over on Matthew’s skin, willing his mind to concentrate on holding the iratze there, on keeping it from vanishing, on somehow forcing it to work.
Remember you are the language of angels, he thought, drawing yet another rune. Remember there is no place in the universe you do not have some power.
He waited for the rune to vanish. Instead it lingered. Not for more than a minute, perhaps, but as James stared, it remained, fading very slowly, on Matthew’s arm.
Matthew had stopped jerking and trembling in James’s grasp. As the healing rune faded slowly, James flew into action: he drew another, and then another and another, starting a new one each time the previous one dwindled.
Matthew was no longer shaking. He was taking deep, steady breaths, looking down in incredulity at his arm, where a crisscrossing map of healing runes—some new, some fading—covered his forearm. “Jamie bach,” he said. “You can’t do this all night.”
“Watch me,” James said grimly, and braced himself against the wall so that he could keep drawing for as long as it took.
Grace and Jesse had found a bag of miniature explosives in the laboratory and had amused themselves for nearly an hour by setting several of them off in the fireplace. They worked like fireworks, though rather than setting them alight, one tapped them with a stele and then tossed them a distance away, where they would sound a loud crack before exploding.
It was nice to laugh with Jesse a little bit, even if the laughter was really half exhaustion. It was astonishing what one could get used to: dodging Watchers and slinking through abandoned houses. Broken glass and turned-over carriages in the streets. On every face, a blank stare. No worse, perhaps, than living under the roof of Tatiana Blackthorn for eight years.
What Grace couldn’t get used to was her sense of utter frustration. She had all of Christopher’s notes, and her own as well. In her time in the Silent City, she had felt on the verge of a breakthrough, as if the solution to the problem with fire-messages was at the tips of her fingers. Hers and Christopher’s.
But now… With Jesse’s help, she had tried everything she could think of—swapping out ingredients, changing out the runes. Nothing worked. They had not even achieved the level of success Christopher had in managing to send half-burned, illegible messages.
It was the one thing she should have been able to contribute, she thought. She and Jesse had given up on the explosives and were instead staring at a piece of rune-covered vellum spread out on the worktable. The one good thing she could have done, the one way she could have helped after doing so much harm. But it seemed even that would be denied to her.
“How can we tell if it’s working?” Jesse said, eyeing the vellum on the table. “What’s it supposed to do, exactly?”
In a clear sign of rejection by the universe, the scroll of vellum let off a cough of smoke before exploding with a bang, flying backward off the table, and landing on the floor between them, where it continued to burn, not consuming the vellum.
“Not that,” Grace said.
She went to fetch the fireplace tongs leaning against the far corner of the room. These she used to retrieve the vellum—still burning—and deposit it into the fireplace.
“Look on the bright side,” said Jesse. “You’ve invented… ever-burning vellum. Christopher would be proud. He loved when things didn’t stop burning.”
“Christopher,” Grace said, “would have finished this already. Christopher was a scientist. I like science. Those are two very different things.” She stared down at the burning vellum. It was rather pretty, edged in white flame like lacework. “It’s ironic. Belial never asked Mother to kill Christopher. Never thought about him at all. But in murdering him, she may have ensured Belial’s success.”
The words were not enough. She threw her pencil across the room, where it clattered unsatisfactorily against a file cabinet.
Jesse raised an eyebrow. Grace wasn’t given to outbursts. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten anything?” he said.
Grace blinked. She couldn’t recall.
“I thought so. I’ll search through the pantry, all right? Hoping for biscuits, willing to make do with tinned beans.” He was already headed upstairs. Grace knew he was trying to give her a moment to gather herself, but she could only scrub tiredly at her aching eyes: Jesse wasn’t the problem. The problem was Christopher. She needed Christopher.
She laid her hand against the pitted, discolored wood of the worktable. How many of these blotches had Christopher made? Cutting, burning, spilling acid. Years of work, marked out here in scars, the way the lives of Shadowhunters were marked out in the pale memories of old runes on their skins.
Something flickered at the back of her mind. Something about runes. Runes and fire-messages.
Christopher would have known.
“Christopher,” she said softly, running the tips of her fingers over a long knife-cut in the wooden surface of the table. “I know you’re gone. And yet I feel you everywhere. In every beaker, every sample… every strange method of organization I run across… I see you everywhere, and I only wish I could have told you—that I care about you, Christopher. And I did not think that kind of feeling to be real. I thought it was a conceit of novels and plays, that one could… could want the happiness of another beyond even their own, beyond anything else. I wish I had understood it more when you were… when you were still alive.”
The silence of the laboratory seemed to echo all around her. She closed her eyes.
“Maybe you are here, though,” she said. “Maybe you’re keeping an eye on this place. I know Lucie said you were gone, but—how could you keep away? How could you not be curious beyond even the pull of death to see what happens? So if you are here… please. I’m so close, with the fire-messages. I’ve gone beyond where you were, but I haven’t found the solution yet. I need your help. The world needs your help. Please.”
Something touched her shoulder. A light touch, as if a butterfly had landed there. She stiffened, but something told her not to open her eyes.
“Grace.” A soft voice, unmistakable.
She sucked in her breath. “Oh—Christopher—”
“Don’t turn around,” he said. “Or look at me. I am only a very little bit here, Grace. It is taking all my strength for you to hear me. I cannot also make myself seen.”
Don’t turn around. She thought of Orpheus in the Greek tales, who had been forbidden from turning to look behind him at his dead wife as he escorted her from the underworld. He had failed, and lost her. Grace had always thought he was silly—surely it could not be that difficult simply not to turn around and look at someone.
But it was. She felt the ache inside her like pain, the loss of Christopher. Who had understood her, and not judged her.
“I thought,” she whispered, “ghosts could only return if they had unfinished business. Are the fire-messages yours?”
“I think,” he said, “that you are my unfinished business.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t need my help to solve this,” said Christopher, and she could see him, behind her eyelids, looking at her with his funny quizzical smile, his eyes such a dark violet behind his spectacles. “You only need to believe that you can solve it. And you can. You are a natural scientist, Grace, and a solver of puzzles. All you have to do is silence the voice in your head that says you aren’t good enough, don’t know enough. I have faith in you.”
“I think you are the only one who does,” Grace said.
“That’s not true. Jesse believes in you. In fact, all of them believe in you. They have left this task in your hands, Grace. Because they believe you can do it. It is only up to you to believe it too.”
Behind her eyelids, now, she saw not Christopher, but the notes he had given her—his observations, his equations, his questions. His handwriting scrolling across the darkness, and then her own notes, intertwining with his, and Christopher believed in her. And Jesse, Jesse believed in her. And just because her mother had never thought she was worth anything didn’t mean her mother had been right.
“It’s not the runes,” she said, almost opening her eyes with the shock of the realization. “It’s not the chemicals, either. It’s the steles.”
“I knew you could do it.” She heard the smile in his voice. “And you’ve invented ever-burning vellum. Splendid work, Grace.”
Something brushed against her temple, tucking her hair behind her ear. A ghostly touch, a goodbye. A moment later, she knew he was gone.
She opened her eyes, turning to look behind her. There was nothing there, yet the wave of despair she had expected did not crash over her. Christopher was not there, but the memory of him was like a presence—and more than that, a new feeling, something blossoming under her rib cage, something that made her push aside the papers in front of her and reach for her stele, ready to get to work.
Something that she imagined felt very like the beginning of believing in herself.
The walk through London was uneventful; Anna and Ari had to duck down an alley at one point to skirt a Watcher, but otherwise the streets were mostly empty, save for the now-expected blank-faced mundanes. As they passed a shadowy doorway, Ari glanced to the side and saw a goat-faced demon crouched in the shadows, holding four human infants. Each one was suckling at a scaled breast. Ari fought back the urge to retch.
“Don’t look,” said Anna. “It won’t do any good.”
Concentrate on the mission, Ari told herself. On the Silent City. On the end of all this.
St. Peter Westcheap had been utterly destroyed in the Great Fire. Ari had been worried it would have been built over with shops or houses, but they were in luck. At the corner of Cheapside and Wood Street was a small paved area, surrounded by a low iron railing—a piece of the old churchyard, most likely.
They went in through the gate. From the center of the courtyard rose a massive tree, its bare branches forming a sort of canopy over the few old graves that remained, their surfaces too worn to read. Benches had been placed at various intervals, their slatted wooden seats rubbed mostly away by years of rain and snow.
As Oscar bounded through the frozen bushes, Anna went to examine the old gravestones. Ari, however, found herself drawn to the tree in the courtyard’s center. It was a black mulberry; they were not native to Britain but had been brought over by the Romans, before there had ever been Shadowhunters. The bark was not black at all, but a sort of orangey-brown, and as Ari leaned in closer, she saw a pattern slashed into it. A familiar pattern.
An Unseen rune. “Anna!” she called.
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.