Chain of Iron (Volume 2) (The Last Hours) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cassandra Clare is the author of the #1 New York Times, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestselling Shadowhunter Chronicles. She is also the coauthor of the bestselling fantasy series Magisterium with Holly Black. The Shadowhunter Chronicles have been adapted as both a major motion picture and a television series. Her books have more than fifty million copies in print worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Cassandra lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and three fearsome cats. Visit her at CassandraClare.com. Learn more about the world of the Shadowhunters at Shadowhunters.com.

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Chapter 1: The Bright Web

1 THE BRIGHT WEB

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,

And, subtly of herself contemplative,

Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,

Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

The rose and poppy are her flower; for where

Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent

And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Body’s Beauty”

A smoky winter fog had settled atop the city of London, reaching its pale tendrils across the streets, wreathing the buildings in dull tinsel. It cast a gray pallor over ruined trees as Lucie Herondale drove her carriage up the long, neglected drive toward Chiswick House, its roof rising from the fog like the top of a Himalayan peak above clouds.

With a kiss on the nose and a blanket over his withers, she left her horse, Balios, at the foot of the front steps and set off through the remains of the terraced garden. She passed the cracked and ruined statues of Virgil and Sophocles, now overgrown by long tendrils of vines, their limbs broken off and lying among the weeds. Other statues were partially hidden by overhanging trees and unpruned hedges, as if they were being devoured by the dense foliage.

Picking her way over a toppled rose arbor, Lucie finally reached the old brick shed in the garden. Its roof was long since gone; Lucie felt a bit as if she’d come across an abandoned shepherd’s hut on the moors. A thin finger of gray smoke was even rising from within. If this were The Beautiful Cordelia, a mad but handsome duke would come staggering across the heath, but nothing ever happened as it did in books.

All around the shed she could see small mounds of earth where over the past four months, she and Grace had buried the unsuccessful results of their experimentation—the unfortunate bodies of fallen birds or cat-slain rats and mice that they had tried over and over to bring back to life.

Nothing had worked yet. And Grace didn’t even know all of it. She remained unaware of Lucie’s power to command the dead. She did not know that Lucie had tried ordering the small bodies to come back to life, had tried reaching within them to catch at something she could draw into the world of the living. But it had never worked. Whatever part of them Lucie might have been able to command had fled with their deaths.

She had mentioned none of that to Grace.

Lucie gave a philosophic shrug and went up to the massive wooden slab of a door—she did sometimes question what the point was of having a door on a building that didn’t have any roof—and tapped a coded pattern: one two, one two.

Instantly she heard someone crossing the floor and turning the bolt, and the door swung open. Grace Blackthorn stood in the doorway, her face set and serious. Even in the foggy weather, her hair, loose around her shoulders, glinted silvery bright. “You’ve come,” she said, sounding more surprised than pleased.

“I said I would.” Lucie pushed past Grace. The shed had a single room inside with a floor of packed earth, now partly frozen.

A table had been pushed against the wall under the Blackthorn family sword, which hung from coarsely forged iron hooks. On the table a makeshift laboratory had been constructed: there were rows of alembics and glass bottles, a mortar and pestle, and dozens of test tubes. An assortment of packets and tins took up the rest of the table, some lying open, others emptied and collected in a pile.

Next to the table was a fire that had been laid directly on the ground, the source of the smoke escaping from the missing roof. The fire was unnaturally silent, emanating not from wood logs but from a mound of stones, its greenish flames licking greedily upward as though seeking to consume the iron cauldron suspended from a hook above it. The cauldron held a simmering black brew that smelled earthy and chemical at the same time.

Lucie approached a second, larger table slowly. On it rested a coffin. Through its glass lid she could see Jesse, exactly as he’d appeared when they were last together—white shirt, black hair lying soft against the nape of his neck. His eyelids were pale half-moons.

She had not confined herself to birds and bats and mice. She had tried commanding Jesse to come back to life too, though she had been able to do it only during the short periods when Grace had gone to fetch something and left her alone with Jesse’s body. She had fared even worse with that than she had with the animals. Jesse was not empty, as the animals were—she could feel something inside him: a life, a force, a soul. But whatever it was, it was anchored in the space between life and death, and she could not shift it. Even trying made her feel ill and weak, as if she were doing something wrong.

“I wasn’t sure if you were still coming,” Grace said crossly. “I’ve been waiting forever. Did you get the thorn-apple?”

Lucie reached in her pocket for the tiny packet. “It was hard to get away. And I can’t stay long. I’m meeting Cordelia tonight.”

Grace took the packet and tore it open. “Because the wedding’s tomorrow? But what’s it got to do with you?”

Lucie looked at Grace hard, but the other girl seemed genuinely not to understand. Often Grace didn’t seem to grasp why people did things if the answer was because that’s how friends behave or because that’s what you do for someone you’re fond of. “I’m Cordelia’s suggenes,” she said. “I walk her down the aisle, but I also provide help and support before the ceremony. Tonight I’m going out with her to—”

Whoosh. Grace had upended the packet into the cauldron. A flash of flame licked toward the ceiling, then a puff of smoke. It smelled of vinegar. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m sure Cordelia is not fond of me.”

“I’m not going to discuss Cordelia with you,” said Lucie, coughing a little.

“Well, I wouldn’t like me, if I were her,” said Grace. “But we don’t have to discuss anything. I didn’t ask you here for chitchat.”

She gazed down at the cauldron. Fog and smoke collided together in the little room, surrounding Grace with a nebulous halo. Lucie rubbed her own gloved hands together, her heart beating quickly as Grace began to speak: “Hic mortui vivunt. Igni ferroque, ex silentio, ex animo. Ex silentio, ex animo! Resurget!”

As Grace chanted, the concoction began to boil more rapidly, the flames beginning to hiss, rising higher and higher, reaching the cauldron. A bit of the mixture bubbled over the side of the cauldron, splattering onto the ground. Lucie instinctively jumped back as green stalks burst out of the ground, growing stems and leaves and buds as they shot up almost as high as her knees.

“It’s working!” she gasped. “It’s really working!”

A quick spasm of delight passed over Grace’s normally expressionless face. She started toward the coffin, and Jesse—

As quickly as they had sprung up, the blooms withered and dropped from the stems. It was like seeing time itself speed faster. Lucie watched helplessly as the leaves fell away, and the stalks dried...