The Infernal Devices 01 - Clockwork Angel (44 page)

There was no chance for Tessa to say anything in response, for he had turned and run down the steps to join Will, who was as motionless as a statue, his face upturned, at the foot of the steps. His hands, sheathed in black gloves, were in fists at his sides, Tessa thought. But perhaps it was a trick of the light, for when Jem reached him and touched him on the shoulder, he turned with a laugh, and without another look at Tessa, he swung himself up into the driver’s seat, Jem following him. He cracked the whip, and the carriage rattled through the gate, which slammed shut behind it as if pushed by invisible hands. Tessa heard the lock catch, a hard click in the silence, and then
the sound of church bells ringing somewhere in the city.

Sophie and Agatha were waiting in the entryway for Tessa when she came back inside; Agatha was saying something to Sophie, but Sophie didn’t appear to be listening. She looked over at Tessa as she came in, and something about the way she looked, for a moment, reminded Tessa of the way Will had looked at her in the courtyard. But that was ridiculous; there were no two people in the world more unalike than Sophie and Will.

Tessa stepped aside as Agatha went to close the great, heavy double doors. She had just pushed them shut, panting slightly, when the knob of the leftmost door, untouched, began to turn.

Sophie frowned. “They can’t be back so soon, can they?”

Agatha gazed down, perplexed, at the turning knob, her hands still braced against the door—then stood back as the doors swung wide before her.

A figure stood on the doorstep, backlit by the light outside. For a moment all Tessa could tell was that he was tall and clad in a frayed jacket. Agatha, her head tipping back as she gazed upward, said in a startled voice, “Oh, my Lor’—”

The figure moved. Light flashed on metal; Agatha screamed and staggered. She seemed to be trying to back away from the stranger, but something was preventing her.

“Dear God in Heaven,” Sophie whispered.
“What is that?”

For a moment Tessa saw the whole scene frozen, as if it were a painting—the open door, the clockwork automaton, the one with the stripped bare hands, still in the same worn gray jacket. And still, dear God, with Jem’s blood on its hands, dried red-black on the dull gray flesh, and the strips of copper showing through where the skin had been scraped or pulled away.
One bloodstained hand gripped Agatha’s wrist; clamped in the other was a long, thin knife. Tessa moved forward, but it was already too late. The creature swung the blade with blinding speed, and buried it in Agatha’s chest.

Agatha choked, her hands going to the blade. The creature stood, ragged and terrifying and unmoving as she clawed at the knife hilt; then, with appalling swiftness, it yanked the blade back, letting her crumple to the ground. Nor did the automaton remain to watch her fall, but turned and walked back out the door through which it had come.

Galvanized, Sophie screamed “Agatha!” and ran to her side. Tessa dashed to the door. The clockwork creature was walking down the steps, into the empty courtyard. She stared after it. What on earth had it come for, and why was it leaving now? But there was no time to dwell on that. She reached for the rope of the summoning bell and pulled it, hard. As the sound clanged through the building, she slammed the door shut, dropping the lock bar into place, then turned to help Sophie.

Together they managed to lift Agatha and half-carry, half-drag her across the room, where they fell to their knees beside her. Sophie, ripping strips of fabric from her white apron and pressing them over Agatha’s wound, said in a tone of wild panic, “I don’t understand, miss. Nothing should be able to touch that door—none but one with Shadowhunter blood should be able to turn the doorknob.”

But he had Shadowhunter blood,
Tessa thought with a sudden horror. Jem’s blood, staining its metal hands like paint. Could that be why it had bent over Jem that night after the bridge? Could that be why it had fled, once it had gotten what
it wanted—his blood? And didn’t that mean it could come back whenever it wanted?

She began to rise to her feet, but it was already too late. The bar that held the door closed cracked with a noise like a gunshot, and tumbled to the ground in two pieces. Sophie looked up and screamed again, though she didn’t move away from Agatha as the door burst open, a window onto the night.

The steps of the Institute were no longer empty; they were teeming, but not with people. Clockwork monsters swarmed up them, their movements jerky, their faces blank and staring. They were not quite like the ones Tessa had seen before. Some looked as though they had been put together so hastily that they had no faces at all, just smooth ovals of metal patched here and there with uneven bits of human skin. Even more horrible, quite a few of them had bits of machinery in place of arms or legs. One automaton had a scythe where his arm ought to have been; another sported a saw that stuck out of the hanging sleeve of his shirt like a parody of a real arm.

Tessa rose and flung herself against the open door, trying to heave it shut. It was heavy, and seemed to move agonizingly slowly. Behind her, Sophie was screaming, helplessly, over and over; Agatha was horribly silent. With a ragged gasp Tessa pushed at the door one more time—

And jerked her hands back as the door was torn out of her grasp, ripped from its hinges like a handful of weeds ripped out of the earth. She fell back as the automaton who had seized the door flung it aside and heaved itself forward, its metal feet clanking against the stone as it lurched over the threshold—followed by another and then another of its mechanical brethren,
at least a dozen of them, advancing toward Tessa with their monstrous arms outstretched.

By the time Will and Jem reached the mansion in Highgate, the moon had begun to rise. Highgate was on a hill in the north part of London, commanding an excellent view of the city below, pale under the moon’s light, which turned the fog and coal smoke that hung over the city into a silvery cloud.
A dream city,
Will thought,
floating in the air.
A bit of poetry hung at the edges of his mind, something about the terrible wonder of London, but his nerves were tight with the jangling tension of impending battle, and he could not remember the words.

The house was a great Georgian pile, set in abundant parkland. A high brick wall ran around it, the slanting dark mansard roof just visible above it from the street. A shiver of cold passed over Will as they drew near it, but he was unsurprised to feel such a thing in Highgate. They were near what Londoners called the Gravel Pit Woods at the city’s edge, where thousands of bodies had been dumped during the Great Plague. Lacking a proper burial, their angry shades haunted the neighborhood even now, and Will had been sent up here more than once, thanks to their activities.

A black metal gate set into the mansion’s wall kept out intruders, but Jem’s Open rune made short work of the lock. After leaving the carriage just inside the gate, the two Shadowhunters found themselves on the curving drive that led up to the house’s front entrance. The path was weed-ridden and overgrown, and the gardens stretched out around it, dotted with crumbling outbuildings and the blackened stumps of dead trees.

Jem turned to Will, eyes feverish. “Shall we get on with it?”

Will drew a seraph blade from his belt. “
Israfel
,” he whispered, and the weapon blazed up like a fork of contained lightning. Seraph blades burned so brightly that Will always expected them to give off heat, but their blades were ice cold to the touch. He remembered Tessa telling him that Hell was cold, and he fought back the odd urge to smile at the memory. They’d been running for their lives, she ought to have been terrified, and there she had been, telling him about the
Inferno
in precise American tones.

“Indeed,” he said to Jem. “It’s time.”

They ascended the front steps and tried the doors. Though Will had expected them to be locked, they were open, and gave way at the touch with a resonant creaking. He and Jem edged inside the house, the light of their seraph blades illuminating the way.

They found themselves in a grand foyer. The arched windows behind them had probably once been magnificent. Now they alternated whole panes with broken ones. Through the spiderwebbing cracks in the glass, a view of the tangled and overgrown parkland beyond was visible. The marble underfoot was cracked and broken, weeds growing up through it as they had been growing through the stones of the drive. Before Will and Jem, a great curving staircase swept upward, toward the shadowy first floor.

“This can’t be right,” Jem whispered. “It’s as if no one’s been here in fifty years.”

Barely had he finished speaking when a sound rose on the night air, a sound that lifted the hairs on Will’s neck and made the Marks on his shoulders burn. It was singing—but not pleasant
singing. It was a voice capable of reaching notes no human voice could reach. Overhead, the chandelier’s crystal pendants rattled like wineglasses set to vibrating at the touch of a finger.

“
Someone’s
here,” Will muttered back. Without another word he and Jem turned so that their backs were to each other. Jem faced the open front doorway; Will, the vast curving stairs.

Something appeared at the head of the stairs. At first Will saw only an alternating pattern of black and white, a shadow that moved. As it drifted downward, the singing sound grew louder, and the hairs on Will’s neck prickled more. Sweat dampened the hair at his temples and ran down the small of his back, despite the chill air.

She was halfway down the stairs before he recognized her—Mrs. Dark, her long, bony body clad in a sort of nun’s habit, a shapeless dark robe that fell from her neck to her feet. A lightless lantern swung from one clawed hand. She was alone—though not quite, Will realized as she paused on the landing, for the thing she was clutching in her hand was not a lantern after all. It was her sister’s severed head.

“By the Angel,” Will whispered. “Jem, look.”

Jem looked, and swore too. Mrs. Black’s head dangled from a plait of gray hair, which Mrs. Dark clutched as if it were a priceless artifact. The head’s eyes were open, and perfectly white, like boiled eggs. Its mouth hung open too, a line of dried black blood threading from one corner of the lips.

Mrs. Dark stopped her song and giggled, like a schoolgirl. “Naughty, naughty,” she said. “Breaking into my house like this. Bad little Shadowhunters.”

“I thought,” Jem said under his breath, “that the other sister was alive.”

“Maybe this one brought her sister back to life and then chopped her head off again?” Will muttered. “Seems a lot of work for no real gain, but then …”

“Murdering Nephilim,” Mrs. Dark snarled, fixing her gaze on Will. “Not content with killing my sister once, are you? You must return and prevent me even from giving her a second life. Do you know—have you any idea—what it’s like to be entirely
alone
?”

“More than you can ever imagine,” Will said tightly, and saw Jem glance at him sideways, puzzled.
Stupid
, Will thought.
I shouldn’t say such things.

Mrs. Dark swayed on her feet. “You are mortal. You are alone for a moment of time, a single breath of the universe. I am alone forever.” She clutched the head to her tightly. “What difference does it make to you? Surely there are darker crimes in London that more urgently require the attention of the Shadowhunters than my poor attempts to bring back my sister.”

Will’s gaze met Jem’s. The other boy shrugged. Clearly he was as confused as Will was. “It’s true that necromancy is against the Law,” Jem said, “but so is binding demon energies. And that does require our attention, quite urgently.”

Mrs. Dark stared at them. “Binding demon energies?”

“There is no point in pretending. We know your plans exactly,” said Will. “We know of the automatons, the binding spell, your service to the Magister—whom the rest of our Enclave is, right now, tracking to his hiding place. By tonight’s end he will be utterly erased. There is no one for you to call on, nowhere for you to hide.”

At that, Mrs. Dark paled markedly. “The Magister?” she whispered. “You have found the Magister? But how …”

“That’s right,” Will said. “De Quincey escaped us once, but not this time. We know where he is, and—”

But his words were drowned out—by laughter. Mrs. Dark was bent over the staircase railing, howling with mirth. Will and Jem stared in confusion as she straightened up. Blackish tears of hilarity streaked her face. “De Quincey, the Magister!” she cried. “That poncing, preening vampire! Oh, what a joke! You fools, you stupid little fools!”

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,

One task more declin’d, one more foot-path untrod,

One more devil’s-triumph and sorrow for angels,

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!

—Robert Browning, “The Lost Leader”

Tessa staggered back from the door. Behind her, Sophie was frozen, kneeling over Agatha, her hands pressed to the older woman’s chest. Blood soaked through the pitiful cloth bandage under her fingers; Agatha had gone a horrible putty color and was making a noise like a teakettle boiling. When she saw the clockwork automatons, her eyes widened and she tried to push Sophie away with her bloody hands, but Sophie, still screaming, clung tenaciously to the older woman, refusing to move.

“Sophie!” There was a clatter of footsteps on the stairs, and Thomas burst into the entryway, his face very white. In his hand he gripped the massive sword Tessa had seen him holding earlier. With him was Jessamine, parasol in hand. Behind her was Nathaniel, looking absolutely terrified. “What on earth—?”

Thomas broke off, staring from Sophie, Tessa, and Agatha to the door and back again. The automatons had come to a halt. They stood in a line just inside the doorway, as still as puppets whose strings were no longer being pulled. Their blank faces stared straight ahead.