The Lost Book of the White by Cassandra Clare
CHAPTER NINETEENThe Endless Way
BY HIS NATURE, ALEC DIDN’Tlike acting on hunches. He liked to study a situation, make a plan, and execute the plan. It got him teased by Jace, by Isabelle, who both believed in jumping off a cliff and somehow sewing a parachute on the way down. They acted on instinct, and usually it turned out all right. But Alec didn’t have the same kind of faith in his own instincts. He believed in gathering intelligence, doing research, being prepared. (To be fair, Isabelle and Jace also believed in those things; they just believed other people should do them, because they were boring.)
This was a fine strategy for most Shadowhunting missions, but sometimes it all fell apart. Sometimes there was a no-win situation, where your only choice appeared to be between dying one way and dying a different way.
Diyu, and Sammael, and Shinyun had all confounded Alec’s ability to organize and plan. Shinyun’s motivations were so confused and contradictory that Alec was sure she herself didn’t understand them. Diyu was a surreal ruin. And Sammael acted as though it was all just a distracting game, as though nothing they did could have any meaningful effect.
For this whole mission they’d been working on hunches, mostly Magnus’s hunches. A hunch that Peng Fang would know something about the warlocks in the Market. A hunch that the cathedral would be in Diyu and would be safe. A hunch that the Heibai Wuchang could be used to save Ragnor.
So Alec had acted on an intuition of his own and asked Magnus if they could use the Alliance rune.
Now, faced with the choice of losing Magnus in one fashion or losing him in another, he acted, plunging the Svefnthorn into his own heart. He only had time to register the surprise on Shinyun’s face before everything exploded.
Crimson light burst, so intense it whited out Alec’s vision. He felt a harsh, burning energy pour into him, caustic and alien in his chest. He could feel his runes heating up, as if by friction, as if abraded by the demonic magic of the thorn, like a meteor falling through the upper atmosphere. All except the Alliance rune, which sizzled on his arm. The power of Sammael and the power of Raziel battled within his own body, but he could feel the Alliance rune absorbing the friction, smoothing it, teaching the different magics to cooperate.
Alec’s vision was beginning to clear. He could see the desolate black space of Avici, the tableau of Shinyun, Sammael, Magnus, all watching him, Magnus’s face a mask of horror.
I’m alive,Alec realized. He was a little surprised.
Shinyun jerked the thorn back. She looked nearly as horrified as Magnus, as the thorn slid free of Alec’s body. It was painless. There was no blood on the thorn, and when Alec glanced down, he saw no mark on himself to show where it had pierced him.
Shinyun had staggered back. She held the Svefnthorn out in front of her, staring: it glowed red, like iron heated in fire, and with some astonishment Alec saw that the thorn’s glow was visible to him in Magnus and Shinyun, too. In each of their chests hung a miniature star, a fireball made of magic, spinning madly behind the wounds the thorn had made. Shinyun’s fireball was somewhat larger than Magnus’s, but more importantly, a thick rope of magic extended out of Shinyun’s wound, terminating in the middle of Sammael’s own chest. Magnus had no such rope connecting him to Sammael—presumably because he had not suffered the third strike from the thorn.
Alec shivered; he could feel the magic leaving his body, his Alliance rune cooling. He had to act before it was gone completely. Still kneeling, he flung his hand out toward Magnus and called the thorn’s power to him.
It was like trying to restrain a wild horse. The fireball in Magnus jerked, leaped, shook. Beyond the realm of conscious thought, Alec reached out to it. Soothed it. Coaxed it. And with a gentle motion, he tore it from the tendrils of Magnus’s own magic that held it in place, the magic he knew, blue and cool and beloved. He reached, and the fireball left Magnus’s body.
As soon as it was freed, it expanded in size, becoming the only illuminating star in Avici’s sky. It spun above them all, a fireball several feet wide, crackling with power. Alec could feel its instability, its desire to find a new resting place. It yearned to be within his own chest, but without another wound from the Svefnthorn, it would find no purchase in him. So for a moment it spun freely, and for a moment all of them present only stared.
Sammael recovered first, of course. He had taken his hand off Magnus’s shoulder and was looking up at the orb. Magnus remained on his knees. “Excellent!” Sammael said, laughing. “Great work. I love an unexpected turn, don’t you?” He seemed to address this question to Ragnor, who didn’t lift his head to acknowledge any of what was going on. Sammael squinted up at the orb. “Shinyun, if you could be a dear and grab that thing and bring it to me, we can get on with our plans.”
Shinyun was also watching the orb. She didn’t respond.
“Hello?” Sammael said after a moment. “Shinyun Jung? My loyal lieutenant? Get the orb?”
When Shinyun turned around, she wasn’t looking at Sammael. She was looking at Magnus. Staring at him, white-hot hatred in her eyes.
“I will never understand you,” she said, in a quiet tremor that suggested she was barely keeping herself from a complete meltdown. “Never have I seen someone so determined to throw away their birthright. We are warlocks, Magnus Bane. We are the children of Lilith.”
Alec tried to ignore the frothing magic boiling through his body and focus on Magnus. He could feel the rotating sphere of magic above them. Magnus had been looking at it, a little dazed, but now his attention was on Shinyun as she stalked toward him, her wings out and twitching dangerously.
“The power of the thorn is the greatest gift that a warlock can receive,” she said through gritted teeth. “It is the power of our father—our actual father, Magnus, not just the demon that made us individually—the one without whom our race would not exist at all. I found that power. I offered you that power. Despite all you did, despite your rejection of Asmodeus… you showed me mercy. And this is how I repaid you.”
Her voice broke with anguish. “And this is how you repay me?”
“Shinyun,” Sammael said, a hint of alarm creeping into his jovial voice. “I get that you and Magnus have some unresolved stuff, but really, he’s irrelevant to the larger plan.”
Magnus looked over at Sammael. “Well, that hurts a little.”
Sammael threw up his hands and affected a bewildered look. “I didn’t even know you existed. I mean, once I understood that you were Asmodeus’s eldest curse and already had two thorns in you, well, I wasn’t about to just ignore the possibility of your service.”
“So I wasn’t part of your plans… at all?” Magnus said, incredulous. “But you went after my oldest friend… and the warlock who tried to drag me into Asmodeus’s control three years ago.”
“You’ll forgive me,” said Sammael, “if I think of Ragnor Fell as ‘the most knowledgeable expert alive on the subject of dimensional magic’ first, and your ‘oldest friend’ second. As for Shinyun, she came to me.”
Magnus looked helplessly over at Ragnor, who shrugged.
Shaking his head, Sammael said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but not everything is about you, Magnus. As for you, Shinyun,” he said, reaching out toward the orb, “I’m very disappointed in you—”
“Everybody shut up!” Shinyun yelled, and even Sammael seemed startled. The orb had been drifting toward Sammael’s open hand; Shinyun suddenly shot up from the ground, her new wings flapping, and caught the orb out of the air as if it were a basketball.
Sammael said, “Shinyun,” sternly this time.
She cast one wild glance at him, then thrust her hand forward, punching through the surface of the orb. At once it emitted a high-pitched shriek and began to deflate like a balloon. Alec slapped his hands over his ears and realized, no, not deflating. The six-pointed wound over Shinyun’s heart was absorbing the magic, drawing it in like a deep inhale. As they all watched, the orb grew smaller and more oblong until, with a popping noise, the entirety of it disappeared into Shinyun.
“Uh-oh,” muttered Sammael.
Shinyun hovered motionless where the magic had been, glowing with crimson fire. After a moment, she began to emit a strange shaking sound. After another moment, she threw back her head and Alec realized: she was laughing. A dreadful laugh, a cackle of rage and mockery.
Her face began to crack.
Lines appeared, spreading from her mouth into her cheeks, fissures opening around her eyes and on her forehead and down her chin. The planes of her face began to separate, and Alec felt his stomach drop. Shinyun’s features separated, broke, snapped like something behind the mask of her face was punching its way out.
With a great roar of triumph, inhuman and ancient, she burst, in a shattering of limbs and lines and eyes and wings and teeth…
Her eyes were now twice the size they had been, and Shinyun herself twice the height. Her limbs spread like a great water insect’s, and her wings, now a dark blood-red, flapped slowly behind her. Her face, no longer frozen in place by the arbitrary maledictions of the warlock mark, twisted in glee. Her teeth were bright and sharp, with a pair of fangs, like a tarantula’s. At her back was a long, whiplike tail, and at the end of the tail, a nasty-looking iron barb. The Svefnthorn itself.
Alec watched in horrified fascination. Shinyun had become the thing she loved most—a demon. A Greater Demon, Alec was sure.
She screamed that unearthly scream again, and the ground of Avici began to shake below their feet.
“Shinyun!” Sammael called. “Marvelous new look! I think maybe we’ve gotten a little off task, though. If you’ll just come down and we can decide what to do with—”
In a flash of motion Shinyun was hovering above Sammael and Magnus, her tail flicking dangerously back and forth.
“I thought you were the ultimate power,” she said to Sammael. Her voice was still recognizably her own, though it was slashed through with high-pitched scratches and a kind of skittering that Alec realized was her breathing. “But you aren’t.”
Sammael looked offended. “If you know of a demon more powerful than me, feel free to let me know so I may pay him homage.”
“You may be the greatest of the Princes of Hell,” Shinyun spat, “but you’re so much weaker than I realized. You’re as dependent on others as these idiot humans.” She gestured with a clawed hand at the others. “You’re dependent on Diyu. You’re dependent on souls being tormented to give you power. You’re dependent on me.”
“If you’ve decided that Sammael, of all people, is not powerful enough for you…” Magnus shook his head. “You’re one hard-to-please lady, you know that?”
“Apparently, of all the beings here,” Shinyun said, “I’m the only one who understands true power. True power is to depend on no one, on nothing. If I cannot trust anyone else to rule over me, then I will rule myself. And I will rule alone.”
With that, she circled upward, away from them. She opened her mouth and exhaled a wide cone of crimson light into the dark. When the glare cleared, it formed a Portal, the surface a silver mirror whose destination Alec couldn’t make out. With a last scream, Shinyun flew through the Portal, which closed around her, and was gone.
The ground was rumbling even harder now. Alec noticed that at some point he’d fallen and was crouched on the ground. Magnus was making his way over to join him, moving carefully on the suddenly uneven terrain.
Sammael looked around with some disappointment. “Well, that’s it for Diyu, I guess. She’s going to bring the whole place down around us.” He sighed. “That’s how the cookie crumbles, I suppose.”
Magnus had reached Alec. He was helping him up. Alec was only dimly aware. The whole world was shaking around him, shaking and wobbling. Or possibly he was shaking and wobbling?
He looked up to see that Sammael had come over to join them for some reason. “Magnus, I’m sorry we aren’t going to be working together. And I’m sorry you both are going to die in the deepest pit in Diyu when miles and miles of underground city and courts and temples come crashing down on top of you.” He frowned. “Come to think of it, I have no idea what’ll happen to humans if they die in a dimension for the already dead. Well, whatever awaits you, good luck with your future endeavors. If you turn out to have any.”
“You’re just leaving?” Alec said.
Sammael looked surprised. “Did I not make that clear? I have to go find another realm.” He shrugged and added, almost to himself, “What an unusual several days it’s been.”
Then, blipping out as though he’d never been there, he was gone.
THE MOMENT SAMMAEL VANISHED, MAGNUSdropped to his knees beside Alec. He pulled Alec toward him almost violently, pressing his hand over Alec’s chest, pushing aside the collar of Alec’s shirt so he could reach the place the thorn had pierced him and run his fingers over it.
There was no wound, no indication that anything had happened to Alec at all, and most of his runes seemed normal. The Alliance rune, however, had disappeared entirely.
Magnus continued stroking Alec’s chest where the thorn had entered, until Alec, with effort, said, “Not here, my love. Ragnor is watching us.”
A sound broke from Magnus’s chest, half laugh and half sob. He grasped Alec’s hair in one hand and showered kisses all over his face, crying and laughing at once. Alec’s eyes were open, and reflected in that midnight blue, Magnus saw a gleam of gold. His own eyes, watching Alec in return.
“That was very brave, what you did,” Magnus said. “Also completely reckless.”
Alec smiled weakly. “I’ve been working on being more brave and reckless. I found a really great example to follow.”
“We can’t both be brave and reckless,” Magnus said. “Who will watch out for us?”
“Eventually, Max, I hope,” said Alec with a grin.
“If you two have a moment.” Ragnor’s voice came drifting through the void. “Do you think you could stop mooning over each other and get me out of this cage?”
Alec’s look of love suddenly turned to alarm. “Magnus. The others. The Hell of the Pit of Fire.”
Magnus jumped up. “It never ends, does it,” he said. He ran over to Ragnor, who was sitting grumpily cross-legged on the ground, tapping impatiently at the bars of his prison.
Magnus reached for his magic, and he felt a woozy disorientation, like missing the last step on a staircase. There was an emptiness in his chest, and while he knew that the thorn’s power had come from a terrible enemy, the enemy of all humans, he understood why Shinyun had clung to it, had allowed herself to be warmed and comforted by it. It wasn’t love, but if you didn’t know the difference, it might have felt like love.
With a few gestures he shattered the bars of Ragnor’s cage and helped him to his feet. Ragnor looked at Magnus for a minute, then turned to look past him and said, “That was very stupid.”
Alec was making his way over to them, a little slow but walking steadily. When he got close, Magnus put his arm around his waist. “Maybe I need to make more thorough introductions here.” He cleared his throat. “Ragnor, this is Alec Lightwood, my boyfriend and co-parent. He just saved my life and, by extension, yours. Alec, this is Ragnor Fell. He is a terrible jerk to everybody, even when he’s not under the mind control of a Prince of Hell.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Alec said.
“I haven’t heard about anything for years, except creepy evil plans to rule the world,” Ragnor said, “but now that I’m back from that, I expect Magnus will bore me to tears with stories from my absence.” He looked at Alec again. “How did you survive the thorning? Anyone who wasn’t a warlock should have died from the overflow of demonic magic. And there aren’t any warlocks who are Shadowhunters, except—” He peered suspiciously at Alec. “You aren’t Tessa Gray in disguise, are you? This isn’t some elaborate prank you’ve been playing on poor Magnus? If it is, Tessa, you and I are going to have words.”
“Of course not!” Alec said, offended.
Ragnor squinted even harder at him. Magnus sighed. “I’ve been in the same room with both of them, Ragnor. He’s definitely not Tessa.”
“Then how—”
“Later,” said Magnus. Only then did he fully grasp how much Ragnor had missed, and how much more he needed to be told. The Alliance rune. The Mortal War. The Dark War! And smaller, more personal things. Malcolm Fade was the High Warlock of Los Angeles. Catarina was still in New York, for now.
One thing at a time. “Ragnor,” he said, “can you get us to the Hell of the Pit of Fire, where the other Shadowhunters are? We need to try to save them.”
Ragnor shook his head. “I’m sure it’s too late,” he said. “But I’ll open the Portal and we’ll see. At least we can take whatever’s left of them back to Earth.”
Alec looked stricken. Magnus patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t take it too seriously,” he said. “Ragnor’s just like that.”
Ragnor twiddled his fingers, the extra joint on each of them making his movements intricate and alien even to Magnus. Within a moment a door opened in the nothingness of Avici, through which orange flames leaped against black rock. It seemed to be quaking in the same way Avici was.
Magnus looked to Alec. “Are you ready to fight again?”
“Not really,” Alec said, drawing his seraph blade from his belt. “But here we go.”
“Right.” Magnus charged through, and Alec followed close behind.
They emerged onto a rocky platform suspended high above the lava pools below. A stone staircase led down to more platforms and the rest of the labyrinthine landscape. Magnus was not happy to note that nothing was visibly keeping their platform in the air, and the earthquake that was rumbling through Diyu was even stronger here.
“Okay,” said Alec. “Let’s save our friends.”
“Or what’s left of your friends,” Ragnor muttered. “Wait. Where are your friends?”
They seemed to be scattered. Far below them, on a fairly broad plain, Simon, Clary, and Tian were fighting some of Diyu’s various demons. Separated from them and somewhat elevated was Isabelle, and even higher, on a separate platform, was Jace.
Alec looked puzzled. “What’s going on?”
“Well, Jace’s foot was broken, so I guess they found a safe place for him,” offered Magnus.
“And why is Isabelle by herself?” Exhausted by magic he might have been, but Alec still jogged down the staircase ahead of them, weapon at the ready.
Ragnor gave Magnus a look. “You’re not going to jog, are you?”
Magnus raised one eyebrow. “In these shoes?”
They descended the staircase, and the one after that, with the decorum appropriate to warlocks who had defeated a Prince of Hell that day. Or at least, they had been in the same place as a Prince of Hell, and they had made him leave first.
By the time they reached Jace, Alec had clearly already exchanged some words with him and looked much less concerned.
“So you haven’t all been devoured yet, I see,” said Ragnor.
“No, they’ve got it all under control,” Alec said, excited. He gestured at Jace. “Tell them!”
Jace looked at him sideways. “I was about to. We’ve got it all under control,” he went on. “I can’t really fight right now, so Clary helped me up here so we could see as much of the battlefield as possible, since the paths are so irregular and confusing. But then we noticed that the demons had the same problem we did. They could really only get to us on a set number of paths, and three people could cover two paths each.”
Magnus raised his eyebrows.
“So Simon, Tian, and Clary went down there to do that. We put Isabelle on the middle platform because she’s the only one whose weapon has any reach, so she can handle the occasional flying dude.”
Alec seemed near tears. “I’m very proud of you,” he said to Jace. “You actually made a plan.”
“I’m good at plans!” Jace said.
“You are, actually, good at plans,” Magnus said. “It’s just usually you’re yelling them behind you as you sprint toward danger.”
“But you used your sumptuous brain and you’re all okay!” Alec said, thumping Jace on the shoulder. He looked over at Ragnor. “Take that, pessimism guy!”
Ragnor furrowed his brow. “Well, obviously I’m glad everyone is still alive.”
“I should mention,” said Jace, “the ground started shaking a little while ago.”
“That would be Shinyun,” said Magnus. “It’s a long story. Also, luckily for you I brought the world’s leading expert in dimensional magic, and he’s going to Portal us right on out of here.”
Ragnor gave Magnus a sour look. “I suppose I am, but I’m going to need your help.”
“Great news,” said Magnus, and he jumped off the platform. He floated slowly down to the plain, waving at Isabelle as he passed.
“Magnus!” said Clary, lopping the head off one of the Baigujing skeletons. “Good to see you!”
“I’m going to say something,” Simon said in Clary’s direction, “and I don’t want you to get mad.”
Clary let out a long, beleaguered breath. “Go ahead. I guess you’ve earned it.”
“Magnus,” Simon said with a smirk. “Nice of you to drop in.”
Clary sighed again.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” said Magnus. “The good news is I’m here to Portal us back to Earth. The bad news is that I need Ragnor’s help, and he’s taking the stairs all the way down.”
Ragnor, indeed, was strolling down the staircase at a leisurely pace. As Magnus watched, Jace overtook him, which was impressive given that he was walking with a crutch.
The demon horde was beginning to flag, it seemed. New demons appeared from the Portals less and less frequently, and both Jace and Isabelle joined their friends to mop up what remained. Perhaps the demons had noticed Diyu’s imminent collapse and fled for their lives; perhaps once Sammael and Shinyun were gone they had no reason to obey their orders.
Eventually, Ragnor deigned to join them. He and Magnus quickly worked together to set up a Portal; it occurred to Magnus how very much he’d missed working with Ragnor.
And when the Portal opened, he was relieved to see it glow a familiar, cheering blue.