City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)(46)

“Sebastian’s expecting exactly this response,” Jace said desperately. “If he’s come with only twenty warriors, then there’s a reason, and he’ll have backup—”

“He can’t have backup!” Robert’s voice rose. “You cannot open a Portal to the Adamant Citadel unless the Iron Sisters allow it. They’re allowing us, but Sebastian must have come over land. Sebastian didn’t expect us to be watching for him at the Citadel. He knows we know he can’t be tracked; he doubtless thought we were watching only Institutes. This is a gift—”

“Sebastian doesn’t give gifts!” Jace shouted. “You’re being blind!”

“We are not blind!” Robert roared. “You may be frightened of him, Jace, but he is just a boy; he is not the most brilliant military mind ever to exist! He fought you at the Burren, and he lost!”

Robert turned and wheeled away, striding toward Jia. Jace looked as if he had been slapped. Clary doubted anyone had ever accused him of being frightened before.

He turned to look at her. The movement of Shadowhunters toward the Portal had slowed; Jia was waving people away. Jace touched the shortsword at Clary’s hip. “I’m going through,” he said.

“They won’t let you,” Clary said.

“They don’t need to let me.” Under the red-and-gold lights of the towers, Jace’s face looked as if it had been cut out of marble. Behind him Clary could see more Shadowhunters coming up the hill. They were chatting among themselves as if this were any ordinary fight, any situation that could be handled by sending fifty or so Nephilim to the place of attack. They hadn’t been at the Burren. They hadn’t seen. They didn’t know. Clary met Jace’s eyes with hers.

She could see the lines of tension on his face, deepening the angles of his cheekbones, setting his jaw. “The question is,” he said, “is there any chance you’d agree to stay here?”

“You know there’s not,” she said.

He took a shuddering breath. “Right. Clary, this could be dangerous, really dangerous—” She could hear people murmuring around them, excited voices, rising against the night on puffs of exhaled air, people chattering that the Consul and Council had been meeting to discuss the London attack just as Sebastian popped into sudden existence on the tracking map, that he had only been there a short time and with few reinforcements, that they had a real chance to stop him, that he had been foiled in London and would be again—

“I love you,” she said. “But don’t try to stop me.”

Jace reached to take her hand. “All right,” he said. “Then we run, together. Toward the Portal.”

“We run,” she agreed, and they did.





7

CLASH BY NIGHT


The volcanic plain spread out like a pale moonscape before Jace, reaching to a line of distant mountains, black against the horizon. White snow dusted the ground: thick in some places; crisp, thin ice in others. Deadly sharp rocks sliced through the ice and snow, along with the bare branches of hedges and frozen moss.

The moon was behind clouds, the velvet dark sky pricked here and there with stars, dulled by a sheen of cloud. Light blazed up all around them, though, from seraph blades—and, Jace saw as his eyes adjusted, light from what looked like a bonfire burning in the distance.

The Portal had deposited Jace and Clary a few feet from each other, in the snow. They were side by side now, Clary very silent, her coppery hair dusted with white flakes. All around them were cries and shouts, the sound of seraph blades being ignited, the murmur of the names of angels.

“Stay close to me,” Jace murmured as he and Clary neared the top of the ridge. He had caught up a longsword from the pile by the Portal just before leaping in, Jia’s cry of dismay following them through the shrieking winds. Jace had half-expected her or Robert to follow them through, but instead the Portal had closed up immediately after them, like a door slamming shut.

The unfamiliar blade was heavy in Jace’s hand. He preferred to use his left arm, but the sword had a right-handed grip. The weapon was dented around the sides, as if it had seen quite a few battles. He wished he had one of his own weapons in his hand—

It appeared all at once, rising up in front of them like a fish breaking the surface of water with a sudden silver glint. Jace had seen the Adamant Citadel before only in pictures. Carved out of the same stuff as seraph blades, the Citadel glowed against the night sky like a star; it was what Jace had mistaken for the light of a bonfire. A circular wall of adamas ringed it, with no opening in the wall except a single gate, formed of two huge blades plunged into the ground at angles, like an open pair of scissors.

All around the Citadel the volcanic ground stretched away, black and white like a chessboard—half volcanic rock and half snow. Jace felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. It was like being at the Burren again, though he remembered that only the way one might remember a dream: Sebastian’s dark Nephilim, in their red gear, and the Nephilim of the Clave, in black, blade to blade, the sparks of battle rising into the night, and then the fire of Glorious, wiping out all that had gone before.

The earth of the Burren had been dark, but now Sebastian’s warriors stood out like drops of blood against the white ground. They were waiting, red under the light of the stars, their dark blades in their hands. They stood between the Nephilim who had come through the Portal, and the gates of the Adamant Citadel. Though the Endarkened were at a distance, and though Jace could not see any of their faces clearly, he could somehow feel them smiling.