Clockwork Princess
Page 40

Balios.
Will reached up, blindly scrabbling for his horse's mane. The demon sprang up from the mud and leaped for him, blade flashing, just as Balios bolted forward, Will swinging himself up and over onto the horse's back. They plunged down the cobblestone street together, Will crouched down low on Balios, the wind tearing through his hair and drying the wetness on his face-whether it was blood or tears, he didn't know.
Tessa sat on the floor of her room in Mortmain's stronghold, staring numbly into the fire.
The flames played over her hands, the blue dress she wore. Both were stained with blood. She did not know how it had happened; the skin at her wrist was ragged, and she had some memory of an automaton seizing her there, tearing her skin with its sharp metal fingers as she tried to break away.
She could not rid her mind of the images that dominated it-the memories of the destruction of the village in the valley. She had been taken there blindfolded, carried by automatons, before being unceremoniously dumped onto an outcropping of gray rock with a view directly down into the town.
"Watch," Mortmain had said, not looking at her, only gloating. "Watch, Miss Gray, and then speak to me of redemption."
Tessa had stood prisoned, an automaton holding her from behind, a hand over her mouth, Mortmain murmuring softly under his breath the things he would do to her if she dared to look away from the village. She had watched helplessly as the automatons had marched into the town, cutting down innocent men and women in the streets. The moon had risen tinged red as the clockwork army had methodically set fire to house after house, slaughtering the families as they poured forth in confusion and terror.
And Mortmain had laughed.
"You see now," he had said. "These creatures, these creations, they are capable of thought and reason and strategy. Like humans. And yet they are indestructible. Look, there, at that fool with the rifle."
Tessa had not wanted to look, but she had had no choice. She had watched, dry-eyed and grim, as a distant figure had raised a rifle to defend himself. The blasts had knocked some of the automatons back but had not disabled them. They had kept coming at him, knocking his rifle from his hand, pushing him down into the street.
And then they had torn him apart.
"Demons," Mortmain had murmured. "They are savage and they love to destroy."
"Please," Tessa had choked. "Please, no more, no more. I shall do whatever you desire, but please, spare the village."
Mortmain had chuckled dryly. "Clockwork creatures have no hearts, Miss Gray," he'd said. "They do not have mercy, any more than fire or water do. You might as well beg a flood or a forest fire to cease its destruction."
"I am not begging them," she'd said. From the corner of her eye, she'd thought she'd seen a black horse pounding through the streets of the village, a rider on its back. Someone escaping the carnage, she'd prayed. "I am begging you."
He'd turned his cold eyes on her, and they'd been as empty as the sky. "There is no mercy in my heart either. You appealed, tiresomely, to my better self earlier. I brought you here to show you the futility of such action. I have no better self to appeal to; it was burned away years ago."
"But I have done what you asked," she'd said desperately. "There is no need for this, not for me-"
"It is not for you," he'd said, flicking his gaze away from her. "The automatons had to be tested before they were sent into battle. That is simple science. They have intelligence now. Strategy. Nothing can stand before them."
"They will turn on you, then."
"They will not. Their lives are linked to mine. If I die, so are they destroyed. They must protect me to endure." His look had been cold and faraway. "Enough. I brought you here to show you that I am what I am, and you will accept it. Your clockwork angel protects your life, but the lives of other innocents are in my hands-in your hands. Do not test me, and there will not be a second such village. I wish to hear no more tiresome protests."
Your clockwork angel protects your life. She put her hand on it now, feeling the familiar ticking beneath her fingers. She closed her eyes, but terrible images lived behind her eyelids. She saw in her mind the Nephilim driven before the automatons as the villagers had been, Jem torn apart by clockwork monsters, Will stabbed through with metal blades, Henry and Charlotte burning ...
Her hand tightened savagely around the angel, and she tore it from her throat, casting it to the uneven rock floor just as a log fell in the fire, sending up a spitting column of red sparks. In their illumination she saw the palm of her left hand, saw the faint scar of the burn she had given herself the day she had told Will she was engaged to Jem.
As it had then, her hand went to the fireplace poker. She lifted it, feeling its weight in her hand. The fire had climbed higher. She saw the world through a golden haze as she raised the poker and brought it down on the clockwork angel.
Iron though the poker was, it burst into metallic powder, a cloud of shining filaments that sifted to the floor, dusting the surface of the clockwork angel, which lay, untouched and undamaged, on the ground before her knees.
And then the angel began to shift and change. Its wings trembled, and its closed eyelids opened on bits of whitish quartz. From them poured thin beams of whitish light. Like in paintings of the star over Bethlehem, the light rose and rose, radiating spikes of light. Slowly it began to coalesce into a shape-the form of an angel.
It was a shimmering blur of light so bright, it was difficult to look at directly. Tessa could see, through the light, the faint outline of something like a man. She could see eyes that were without iris or pupil-inset bits of crystal that gleamed in the firelight. The angel's wings were broad, spreading out from its shoulders, each feather tipped with gleaming metal. Its hands were folded over the hilt of a graceful sword.
Its blank shining eyes rested on her. Why do you try to destroy me? Its voice was sweet, echoing in her mind like music. I protect you.
She thought of Jem suddenly, propped on his bed of pillows, his face pale and gleaming. There is more to life than living. "It is not you I seek to destroy, but myself."
But why would you do that? Life is a gift.
"I seek to do right," she said. "In keeping me alive you are allowing great evil to exist."
Evil. The musical voice was thoughtful. I have been so long in my clockwork prison that I have forgotten good and evil.
"Clockwork prison?" Tessa whispered. "But how can an angel be prisoned?"
It was John Thaddeus Shade who imprisoned me. He caught my soul inside a spell and trapped it within this mechanical body.
"Like the Pyxis," Tessa said. "Only entrapping an angel instead of a demon."
I am an angel of the divine, said the angel, hovering before her. I am brother to the Sijil, Kurabi, and the Zurah, the Fravashis and Dakinis.
"And-is this your true form? Is this what you look like?"
You see here only a fraction of what I am. In my true form I am deadly glory. Mine was the freedom of Heaven, before I was trapped and bound to you.
"I am sorry," she whispered.
You are not the one to blame. You did not imprison me. Our spirits are bound, it is true, but even as I protected you in the womb, I knew you were blameless.
"My guardian angel."
Few can claim a single angel who guards them. But you can.
"I don't want to claim you," Tessa said. "I want to die on my own terms, not be forced to live on Mortmain's."
I cannot let you die. The angel's voice was full of grief. Tessa was reminded of Jem's violin, playing out the music of his heart. It is my mandate.
Tessa raised her head. The firelight struck through the angel like sunlight through crystal, casting a radiance of color against the walls of the cave. This was no foul contraption; this was goodness, twisted and bent to Mortmain's will, but in its nature divine. "When you were an angel," she said, "what was your name?"
My name, said the angel, was Ithuriel.
"Ithuriel," Tessa whispered, and held out her hand to the angel, as if she could reach him, comfort him somehow. But her fingers met only empty air. The angel shimmered and faded, leaving behind only a glow, a starburst of light against the inside of her eyelids.
A wave of cold struck Tessa, and she jerked upright, her eyes flying open. She was half-lying on the cold stone floor in front of the nearly dead fire. The room was dark, barely lit by the reddish embers in the grate. The poker was where it had been before. Her hand flew to her throat-and found the clockwork angel there.
A dream. Tessa's heart fell. It had all been a dream. There was no angel to bathe her in its light. There was only this cold room, the encroaching darkness, and the clockwork angel steadily ticking down the minutes to the end of everything in the world.
Will stood atop Cadair Idris, the reins of his horse in his hand.
As he had ridden toward Dolgellau, he had seen the massive wall of Cadair Idris towering above the Mawddach estuary, and the breath had gone out of him in a gasp-he was here. He had climbed this mountain before, as a child, with his father, and those memories stayed with him as he left the Dinas Mawddwy road and pounded toward the mountain on the back of Balios, who seemed still to be fleeing the flames of the village they had left behind them. They had continued through a weedy tarn-the silvery sea could be seen in one direction, and the peak of Snowdon in the other-up to the Nant Cadair valley. The village of Dolgellau below, sparkling with occasional light, made a pretty picture, but Will was not admiring the view. The Night Vision rune he had given himself allowed him to track the footsteps of the clockwork creatures. There were enough of them that the ground was torn where they had walked down the mountain, and he followed with a pounding heart the path of ruination toward the peak of the mountain.
Their tracks led up past a tumble of massive boulders Will remembered were called the moraine. They formed a partial wall that protected Cwm Cau, a small valley atop the mountain in whose heart rested Llyn Cau, a clear glacial lake. The tracks of the clockwork army led from the edge of the lake-
And vanished.
Will stood, looking down at the cold, clear waters. In the daylight, he recalled, this view was magnificent: Llyn Cau pure blue, surrounded by green grass, and the sun touching the razor-sharp edges of Mynydd Pencoed, the cliffs surrounding the lake. He felt a million miles from London.
The reflection of the moon gleamed up at him from the water. He sighed. The water lapped gently at the edge of the lake, but it could not erase the marks of the automatons' tracks. It was clear where they had come from. He reached back and patted Balios's neck.
"Wait for me here," he said. "And if I do not return, take yourself back to the Institute. They will be glad to see you again, old boy."
The horse whickered gently and bit at his sleeve, but Will only drew in his breath and waded into Llyn Cau. The cold liquid lapped up over his boots and hit his trousers, soaking through to freeze his skin. He gasped with the shock of it.
"Wet again," he said glumly, and plunged forward into the icy waters of the lake. They seemed to pull him in, like quicksand-he barely had time to gasp in a breath before the freezing water dragged him down into darkness.
To: Charlotte Branwell
From: Consul Wayland
Mrs. Branwell,
You are relieved of your position as head of the Institute. I could speak of my disappointment with you, or the broken faith that exists between us now. But words, in the face of a betrayal of the magnitude of that which you have offered me, are futile. On my arrival in London tomorrow, I will expect you and your husband to have already departed the Institute and removed your belongings. Failure to comply with this request will be met with the harshest penalties available under the Law.
Josiah Wayland, Consul of the Clave
Chapter 19 To Lie and Burn
Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through,
Though I am damned for it we two will lie
And burn.
-Charlotte Mew, "In Nunhead Cemetery"
It was dark for only moments. The icy water sucked Will down, and then he was falling-he curled in on himself just as the ground rose up to slam into him, knocking the breath from his body.
He choked and rolled over onto his stomach, pulling himself to a kneeling position, his hair and clothes streaming water. He reached for his witchlight, then dropped his hand; he didn't want to illuminate anything if that might call attention to him. The Night Vision rune would have to do.
It was enough to show him that he was in a rocky cavern. If he looked above him, he could see the swirling waters of the lake, held in abeyance as if by glass, and a blurred bit of moonlight. Tunnels led off the cavern, with no markings to show where they might lead. He rose to his feet and blindly chose the leftmost tunnel, moving carefully ahead into the shadowy darkness.
The tunnels were wide, with smooth floors that showed no mark where the clockwork creatures might have passed. The sides were rough volcanic rock. He remembered climbing Cadair Idris with his father, years ago. There were many legends about the mountain: that it had been a chair for a giant, who had sat upon it and regarded the stars; that King Arthur and his knights slept beneath the hill, waiting for the time when Britain would awake and need them again; that anyone who spent the night on the mountainside would awake a poet or a madman.
If only it was known, Will thought as he turned through the curve of a tunnel and emerged into a larger cave, how strange the truth of the matter was.
The cave was wide, opening out to a greater space at the far end of the room, where a dim light gleamed. Here and there Will caught a silvery glint that he thought was water running in streams down the black walls, but on closer examination it turned out to be veins of crystalline quartz.
Will moved toward the dim light. He found that his heart was beating rapidly inside his chest, and he tried to breathe steadily to quell it. He knew what was speeding his pulse. Tessa. If Mortmain had her, then she was here-close. Somewhere in this honeycomb of tunnels he might find her.
He heard Jem's voice in his head, as if his parabatai stood at his side, advising him. He had always said that Will rushed toward the end of a mission rather than proceeding in a measured manner, and that one must look at the next step on the path ahead, rather than the mountain in the distance, or one would never reach one's goal. Will closed his eyes for a moment. He knew that Jem was right, but it was hard to remember, when the goal that he sought was the girl that he loved.
He opened his eyes and moved toward the dim light at the far end of the cavern. The ground beneath him was smooth, without rocks or pebbles, and veined like marble. The light ahead flared up-and Will came to a dead stop, only his years of Shadowhunter training keeping him from tumbling forward to his death.