City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)(158)

The upward slope suddenly leveled out, and they were there, on a plateau in front of the fortress. It was like looking at one photo negative overlapping another. Clary could see in her mind’s eye the Gard as it was in her world, the hill covered in trees and greenery, the gardens surrounding the keep, the glow of witchlight illuminating the whole place. The sun shining down on it during the day, and the stars at night.

Here the top of the hill was barren and swept with wind cold enough to cut through the material of Clary’s stolen jacket. The horizon was a red line like a slit throat. Everything was bathed in that bloody light, from the crowd of Endarkened who milled around the plateau, to the Dark Gard itself. Now that they were close, they could see the wall that surrounded it, and the sturdy gates.

“You’d better pull your hood up,” Jace said from behind her, taking hold of the item in question and drawing it up and over her head. “Your hair’s recognizable.”

“To the Endarkened?” said Simon, who looked incredibly strange to Clary in his red gear. She had never imagined Simon in gear.

“To Sebastian,” said Jace shortly, and drew his own hood up. They had taken their weapons out: Isabelle’s whip gleamed in the red light, and Alec’s bow was in his hands. Jace was looking toward the Dark Gard. Clary almost expected him to say something, to make a speech, to mark the occasion. He didn’t. She could see the sharp angle of his cheekbones under the hood of the gear, the tight set of his jaw. He was ready. They all were.

“We go to the gates,” he said, and moved forward.

Clary felt cold all over—battle-coldness, keeping her spine straight, her breath even. The dirt here was different, she noticed almost distantly. Unlike the rest of the sand of the desert world, it had been churned by the passage of feet. A red-clad warrior passed her then, a brown-skinned man, tall and muscular. He paid no attention to them. He appeared to be walking a beat, as were several of the rest of the Endarkened, a sort of assigned path back and forth. A white woman with graying hair was a few feet behind him. Clary felt her muscles tighten—Amatis?—but as she passed closer, it was clear that her face was not familiar. Clary thought she felt the woman’s eyes on them, just the same, and was relieved when they passed out of her sight.

The Gard was looming up in front of them now, the gates massive and made of iron. They were carved with a pattern of a hand holding a weapon—an orb-tipped skeptron. It was clear the gates had been subjected to years of desecration. Their surfaces were chipped and scarred, splashed here and there with ichor and what looked disturbingly like dried human blood.

Clary stepped up to place her stele against the gates, ready with an Open rune already in her head—but the gates swung wide at her touch. She cast a surprised look back at the others. Jace was chewing his lip; she raised a questioning eyebrow at him, but he only shrugged, as if to say: We go forward. What else can we do?

They went. Past the gates was a bridge over a narrow ravine. Darkness roiled at the bottom of the chasm, thicker than fog or smoke. Isabelle crossed first, with her whip, and Alec took up the rear, facing behind them with his bow and arrow. As they went over the bridge in single file, Clary chanced a glance downward into the crevasse, and nearly flinched back—the darkness had limbs, long and hooked like spider’s legs, and what looked like gleaming yellow eyes.

“Don’t look,” Jace said in a low voice, and Clary snapped her eyes back to Isabelle’s whip, gold and gleaming ahead of them. It lit the darkness so that when they arrived at the front doors of the keep, Jace was able to find the latch easily, and to swing the door open.

It opened on darkness. They all looked at one another, a brief paralysis none of them could break. Clary found she was staring at the others, trying to memorize them; Simon’s brown eyes, the curve of Jace’s collarbone under the red jacket, the arch of Alec’s eyebrow, Isabelle’s worried frown.

Stop, she told herself. This isn’t the end. You’ll see them again.

She glanced behind her. Past the bridge were the gates, wide open, and past that were the Endarkened, standing motionless. Clary had the sense they were watching too, everything caught in stillness in this one breathless moment before the fall.

Now. She stepped forward, into the darkness; she heard Jace say her name, very low, almost a whisper, and then she was over the threshold, and light was all around her, blinding in its suddenness. She heard the murmur of the others as they took their places at her side, and then the cold rush of air as the door slammed shut behind them.

She raised her eyes. They were standing in an enormous entryway, the size of the inside of the Accords Hall. A massive double spiral stone staircase led upward, twisting and winding, two sets of stairs that interwove with each other but never met. Each was lined on either side by a stone balustrade, and Sebastian was leaning against one of the near balustrades, smiling down at them.

It was a positively feral smile: delighted and anticipatory. He wore spotless scarlet gear, and his hair shone like iron. He shook his head. “Clary, Clary,” he said. “I really thought you were much smarter than this.”

Clary cleared her throat. It felt clotted from dust, and from fear. Her skin was buzzing as if she’d swallowed adrenaline. “Smarter than what?” she said, and nearly winced at the echo of her own voice, bouncing off the bare stone walls. There were no tapestries, no paintings, nothing to soften the harshness.