City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)(58)

Jace laughed and dropped his hand. “I was only allowed to read what I was assigned,” he said. “Some of the shelves had books on them I wasn’t even allowed to touch.” He indicated a row of books, higher up, bound in matching brown leather. “I read one of them once, when I was about six, just to see what the fuss was about. It turned out to be a journal my father was keeping. About me. Notes about ‘my son, Jonathan Christopher.’ He whipped me with a belt when he found out I’d read it. Actually, it was the first time I even knew I had a middle name.”

A sudden ache of hatred for her father went through Clary. “Well, Valentine’s not here now.”

“Clary …” Jace began, a warning note in his voice, but she’d already reached up and yanked one of the books out from the forbidden shelf, knocking it to the ground. It made a satisfying thump. “Clary!”

“Oh, come on.” She did it again, knocking another book down, and then another. Dust puffed up from their pages as they hit the floor. “You try.”

Jace looked at her for a moment, and then a half smile teased the corner of his mouth. Reaching up, he swept his arm along the shelf, knocking the rest of the books to the ground with a loud crash. He laughed—and then broke off, lifting his head, like a cat pricking up its ears at a distant sound. “Do you hear that?”

Hear what? Clary was about to ask, and stopped herself. There was a sound, getting louder now—a high-pitched whirring and grinding, like the sound of machinery coming to life. The sound seemed to be coming from inside the wall. She took an involuntary step back just as the stones in front of them slid back with a groaning, rusty scream. An opening gaped behind the stones—a sort of doorway, roughly hacked out of the wall.

Beyond the doorway was a set of stairs, leading down into darkness.





9

THIS GUILTY BLOOD


“I DON’T REMEMBER THERE EVEN BEING A CELLAR HERE,” Jace said, staring past Clary at the gaping hole in the wall. He raised the witchlight, and its glow bounced off the downward-leading tunnel. The walls were black and slick, made of a smooth dark stone Clary didn’t recognize. The steps gleamed as if they were damp. A strange smell drifted up through the opening: dank, musty, with a weird metallic tinge that set her nerves on edge.

“What do you think could be down there?”

“I don’t know.” Jace moved toward the stairs; he put a foot on the top step, testing it, and then shrugged as if he’d made up his mind. He began to make his way down the steps, moving carefully. Partway down he turned and looked up at Clary. “Are you coming? You can wait up here for me if you want to.”

She glanced around the empty library, then shivered and hurried after him.

The stairs spiraled down in tighter and tighter circles, as if they were making their way through the inside of a huge conch shell. The smell grew stronger as they reached the bottom, and the steps widened out into a large square room whose stone walls were streaked with the marks of damp—and other, darker stains. The floor was scrawled with markings: a jumble of pentagrams and runes, with white stones scattered here and there.

Jace took a step forward and something crunched under his feet. He and Clary looked down at the same time. “Bones,” Clary whispered. Not white stones after all, but bones of all shapes and sizes, scattered across the floor. “What was he doing down here?”

The witchlight burned in Jace’s hand, casting its eerie glow over the room. “Experiments,” Jace said in a dry, tense tone. “The Seelie Queen said—”

“What kind of bones are these?” Clary’s voice rose. “Are they animal bones?”

“No.” Jace kicked a pile of bones with his feet, scattering them. “Not all of them.”

Clary’s chest felt tight. “I think we should go back.”

Instead Jace raised the witchlight in his hand. It blazed out, brightly and then more brightly, lighting the air with a harsh white brilliance. The far corners of the room sprang into focus. Three of them were empty. The fourth was blocked with a hanging cloth. There was something behind the cloth, a humped shape—

“Jace,” Clary whispered. “What is that?”

He didn’t reply. There was a seraph blade in his free hand, suddenly; Clary didn’t know when he’d drawn it, but it shone in the witchlight like a blade of ice.

“Jace, don’t,” said Clary, but it was too late—he strode forward and twitched the cloth aside with the tip of the blade, then seized it and jerked it down. It fell in a blossoming cloud of dust.

Jace staggered back, the witchlight falling from his grasp. As the blazing light fell, Clary caught a single glimpse of his face: It was a white mask of horror. Clary snatched the witchlight up before it could go dark and raised it high, desperate to see what could have shocked Jace—unshockable Jace—so badly.

At first all she saw was the shape of a man—a man wrapped in a dirty white rag, crouched on the floor. Manacles circled his wrists and ankles, attached to thick metal staples driven into the stone floor. How can he be alive? Clary thought in horror, and bile rose up in her throat. The rune-stone shook in her hand, and light danced in patches over the prisoner: She saw emaciated arms and legs, scarred all over with the marks of countless tortures. The skull of a face turned toward her, black empty sockets where the eyes should have been—and then there was a dry rustle, and she saw that what she had thought was a white rag were wings, white wings rising up behind his back in two pure white crescents, the only pure things in this filthy room.