City of Bones
Page 22

“All your dead?” she said, half-wanting to ask him if his father was buried here, but he had already moved ahead, out of earshot. She hurried after him, not wanting to be alone with Brother Jeremiah in this spooky place. “I thought you said this was a library.”
There are many levels to the Silent City, interjected Jeremiah. And not all the dead are buried here. There is another ossuary in Idris, of course, much larger. But on this level are the mausoleums and the place of burning.
“The place of burning?”
Those who die in battle are burned, their ashes used to make the marble arches that you see here. The blood and bone of demon slayers is itself a powerful protection against evil. Even in death, the Clave serves the cause.
How exhausting, Clary thought, to fight all your life and then be expected to continue that fight even when your life was over. At the edges of her vision she could see the square white vaults rising on either side of her in orderly rows of tombs, each door locked from the outside. She understood now why this was called the Silent City: Its only inhabitants were the mute Brothers and the dead they so zealously guarded.
They had reached another staircase leading down into more twilight; Jace thrust the torch ahead of him, streaking the walls with shadows. “We’re going to the second level, where the archives and the council rooms are,” he said, as if to reassure her.
“Where are the living quarters?” Clary asked, partly to be polite, partly out of a real curiosity. “Where do the Brothers sleep?”
Sleep?
The silent word hung in the darkness between them. Jace laughed, and the flame of the torch he held flickered. “You had to ask.”
At the foot of the stairs was another tunnel, which widened out at the end into a square pavilion, each corner of which was marked by a spire of carved bone. Torches burned in long onyx holders along the sides of the square, and the air smelled of ashes and smoke. In the center of the pavilion was a long table of black basalt veined in white. Behind the table, against the dark wall, hung an enormous silver sword, point down, its hilt carved in the shape of outspread wings. Seated at the table was a row of Silent Brothers, each wrapped and cowled in the same parchment-colored robes as Jeremiah.
Jeremiah wasted no time. We have arrived. Clarissa, stand before the Council.
Clary glanced at Jace, but he was blinking, clearly confused. Brother Jeremiah must have spoken only inside her head. She looked at the table, at the long row of silent figures muffled in their heavy robes. Alternating squares made up the pavilion floor: golden bronze and a darker red. Just in front of the table was a larger square, made of black marble and embossed with a parabolic design of silver stars.
Clary stepped into the center of the black square as if she were stepping in front of a firing squad. She raised her head. “All right,” she said. “Now what?”
The Brothers made a sound then, a sound that raised the hairs up all along Clary’s neck and the backs of her arms. It was a sound like a sigh or a groan. In unison they raised their hands and pushed their cowls back, baring their scarred faces and the pits of their empty eyes.
Though she had seen Brother Jeremiah’s uncovered face already, Clary’s stomach knotted. It was like looking at a row of skeletons, like one of those medieval woodcuts where the dead walked and talked and danced on the piled bodies of the living. Their stitched mouths seemed to grin at her.
The Council greets you, Clarissa Fray, she heard, and it was not just one silent voice inside her head but a dozen, some low and rough, some smooth and monotone, but all were demanding, insistent, pushing at the fragile barriers around her mind.
“Stop,” she said, and to her astonishment her voice came out firm and strong. The din inside her mind ceased as suddenly as a record that had stopped spinning. “You can go inside my head,” she said, “but only when I’m ready.”
If you do not want our help, there is no need for this. You are the one who asked for our assistance, after all.
“You want to know what’s in my mind, just like I do,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t be careful about it.”
The Brother who sat in the center seat templed his thin white fingers beneath his chin. It is an interesting puzzle, admittedly, he said, and the voice inside her mind was dry and neutral. But there is no need for the use of force, if you do not resist.
She gritted her teeth. She wanted to resist them, wanted to pry those intrusive voices out of her head. To stand by and allow such a violation of her most intimate, personal self—
But there was every chance that had already happened, she reminded herself. This was nothing more than the excavation of a past crime, the theft of her memory. If it worked, what had been taken from her would be restored. She closed her eyes.
“Go ahead,” she said.
The first contact came as a whisper inside her head, delicate as the brush of a falling leaf. State your name for the Council.
Clarissa Fray.
The first voice was joined by others. Who are you?
I’m Clary. My mother is Jocelyn Fray. I live at 807 Berkeley Place in Brooklyn. I am fifteen years old. My father’s name was—
Her mind seemed to snap in on itself, like a rubber band, and she reeled soundlessly into a whirlwind of images cast against the insides of her closed eyelids. Her mother was hurrying her down a night-black street between piles of heaped and dirty snow. Then a lowering sky, gray and leaden, rows of black trees stripped bare. An empty square cut into the earth, a plain coffin lowered into it. Ashes to ashes. Jocelyn wrapped in her patchwork quilt, tears spilling down her cheeks, quickly closing a box and shoving it under a cushion as Clary came into the room. She saw the initials on the box again: J. C.
The images came faster now, like the pages of one of those books where the drawings seemed to move when you flipped them. Clary stood on top of a flight of stairs, looking down a narrow corridor, and there was Luke again, his green duffel bag at his feet. Jocelyn stood in front of him, shaking her head. “Why now, Lucian? I thought that you were dead …” Clary blinked; Luke looked different, almost a stranger, bearded, his hair long and tangled—and branches came down to block her view; she was in the park again, and green faeries, tiny as toothpicks, buzzed among the red flowers. She reached for one in delight, and her mother swung her up into her arms with a cry of terror. Then it was winter on the black street again, and they were hurrying, huddled under an umbrella, Jocelyn half-pushing and half-dragging Clary between the looming banks of snow. A granite doorway loomed up out of the falling whiteness; there were words carved above the door: THE MAGNIFICENT. Then she was standing inside an entryway that smelled of iron and melting snow. Her fingers were numb with cold. A hand under her chin directed her to look up, and she saw a row of words scrawled along the wall. Two words leaped out at her, burning into her eyes: MAGNUS BANE.
A sudden pain lanced through her right arm. She shrieked as the images fell away and she spun upward, breaking the surface of consciousness like a diver breaking up through a wave. There was something cold pressed against her cheek. She pried her eyes open and saw silver stars. She blinked twice before she realized that she was lying on the marble floor, her knees curled up to her chest. When she moved, hot pain shot up her arm.
She sat up gingerly. The skin over her left elbow was split and bleeding. She must have landed on it when she fell. There was blood on her shirt. She looked around, disoriented, and saw Jace looking at her, unmoving but very tense around the mouth.
Magnus Bane. The words meant something, but what? Before she could ask the question aloud, Jeremiah interrupted her.
The block inside your mind is stronger than we had anticipated, he said. It can be safely undone only by the one who put it there. For us to remove it would be to kill you.
She scrambled to her feet, cradling her injured arm. “But I don’t know who put it there. If I knew that, I wouldn’t have come here.”
The answer to that is woven into the thread of your thoughts, said Brother Jeremiah. In your waking dream you saw it written.
“Magnus Bane? But—that’s not even a name!”
It is enough. Brother Jeremiah got to his feet. As if this were a signal, the rest of the Brothers rose alongside him. They inclined their heads toward Jace, a gesture of silent acknowledgment, before they filed away among the pillars and were gone. Only Brother Jeremiah remained. He watched impassively as Jace hurried over to Clary.
“Is your arm all right? Let me see,” he demanded, seizing her wrist.
“Ouch! It’s fine. Don’t do that; you’re making it worse,” Clary said, trying to pull away.
“You bled on the Speaking Stars,” he said. Clary looked and saw that he was right: There was a smear of her blood on the white and silver marble. “I bet there’s a law somewhere about that.” He turned her arm over, more gently than she would have thought he was capable of. He caught his lower lip between his teeth and whistled; she glanced down and saw that a glove of blood covered her lower arm from the elbow to the wrist. The arm was throbbing, stiff, and painful.
“Is this when you start tearing strips off your T-shirt to bind up my wound?” she joked. She hated the sight of blood, especially her own.
“If you wanted me to rip my clothes off, you should have just asked.” He dug into his pocket and brought out his stele. “It would have been a lot less painful.”
Remembering the stinging sensation when the stele had touched her wrist, she braced herself, but all she felt as the glowing instrument glided lightly over her injury was a faint warmth. “There,” he said, straightening up. Clary flexed her arm in wonder—though the blood was still there, the wound was gone, as were the pain and stiffness. “And next time you’re planning to injure yourself to get my attention, just remember that a little sweet talk works wonders.”
Clary felt her mouth twitch into a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. And as he turned away, she added, “And thanks.”
He slid the stele into his back pocket without turning to look at her, but she thought she saw a certain gratification in the set of his shoulders. “Brother Jeremiah,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “you’ve been very quiet all this time. Surely you have some thoughts you’d like to share?”
I am charged with leading you from the Silent City, and that is all, said the archivist. Clary wondered if she were imagining it, or if there was actually a faintly affronted tone to his “voice.”
“We could always show ourselves out,” Jace suggested hopefully. “I’m sure I remember the way—”
The marvels of the Silent City are not for the eyes of the uninitiated, said Jeremiah, and he turned his back on them with a soundless swish of robes. This way.
When they emerged into the open, Clary took deep breaths of the thick morning air, relishing the city stench of smog, dirt, and humanity. Jace looked around thoughtfully. “It’s going to rain,” he said.
He was right, Clary thought, looking up at the iron-gray sky. “Are we taking a carriage back to the Institute?”
Jace looked from Brother Jeremiah, still as a statue, to the carriage, looming like a black shadow in the archway that led to the street. Then he broke into a grin.
“No way,” he said. “I hate those things. Let’s hail a cab.”
11
MAGNUS BANE
JACE LEANED FORWARD AND BANGED HIS HAND AGAINST THE partition separating them from the cab driver. “Turn left! Left! I said to take Broadway, you brain-dead moron!”
The taxi driver responded by jerking the wheel so hard to the left that Clary was thrown against Jace. She let out a yelp of resentment. “Why are we taking Broadway, anyway?”
“I’m starving,” Jace said. “And there’s nothing at home except leftover Chinese.” He took his phone out of his pocket and started dialing. “Alec! Wake up!” he shouted. Clary could hear an irritated buzzing on the other end. “Meet us at Taki’s. Breakfast. Yeah, you heard me. Breakfast. What? It’s only a few blocks away. Get going.”
He clicked off and shoved the phone into one of his many pockets as they pulled up to a curb. Handing the driver a wad of bills, Jace elbowed Clary out of the car. When he landed on the pavement behind her, he stretched like a cat and spread his arms wide. “Welcome to the greatest restaurant in New York.”
It didn’t look like much—a low brick building that sagged in the middle like a collapsed soufflé. A battered neon sign proclaiming the restaurant’s name hung sideways and was sputtering. Two men in long coats and tipped-forward felt hats slouched in front of the narrow doorway. There were no windows.
“It looks like a prison,” said Clary.
He pointed at her. “But in prison could you order a spaghetti fra diavolo that makes you want to kiss your fingers? I don’t think so.”
“I don’t want spaghetti. I want to know what a Magnus Bane is.”
“It’s not a what. It’s a who,” said Jace. “It’s a name.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“He’s a warlock,” said Jace in his most reasonable voice. “Only a warlock could have put a block in your mind like that. Or maybe one of the Silent Brothers, but clearly it wasn’t them.”
“Is he a warlock you’ve heard of?” demanded Clary, who was rapidly tiring of Jace’s reasonable voice.
“The name does sound familiar—”
“Hey!” It was Alec, looking like he’d rolled out of bed and pulled jeans on over his pajamas. His hair, unbrushed, stuck out wildly around his head. He loped toward them, eyes on Jace, ignoring Clary as usual. “Izzy’s on her way,” he said. “She’s bringing the mundane.”