The Lost Book of the White (The Eldest Curses #2) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,120
wants it removed,” said Magnus.
Sammael laughed. “You said it, buddy. I wasn’t even going to thorn her, you know that? Did she tell you that? I thought, no way she could take it. But she insisted. Demanded it. Demanded from me, the greatest of all demons!”
“Second-greatest,” said Ragnor quietly.
The Prince of Hell narrowed his eyes. “Well. We don’t talk about him.” He looked over at Shinyun, hovering near the still-struggling Shadowhunters a short distance away. “You know,” he confided, “if I let her, she’d just kill all of them.”
Alec cleared his throat. “So why won’t you let her?”
“Oh!” said Sammael. “Because I came up with a plan. Just on the way over here, can you believe it? Popped right into my head.”
He waved his arm, and far below them, the ground began to shake. For a moment, Alec wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but then he began to grasp it. All around the cathedral’s walls, fissures were opening in the ground. The cathedral itself tilted and shifted dangerously, and then, with a great crash, its front half and back half fell into one another with a tremendous crash. Dust and smoke began to rise into the burning wind.
The cathedral didn’t have time to fully collapse. While its walls were still lurching toward one another, the entire stretch of land around the cathedral fell, as though into a sinkhole. A slab of stone the size of a city block came loose from the streets around it, and the cathedral groaned and swayed and fell into the hole.
With a dazed horror, Alec watched it fall, tumbling through a voidlike darkness. At the bottom of that void was a lake, red and black, like molten rock.
The cathedral smashed into the lake of fire with a boom that went on and on. Jace, Isabelle, and the others had stopped spinning: Alec could barely see them through the smoke, but they all seemed to be watching in silence as the church settled into its new position, halfway submerged in lava, one broken tower still jutting up at an angle like the hand of a drowning man.
Alec looked over at Sammael, who caught his eye and waggled his eyebrows. Alec looked farther over at Magnus, who continued to keep his hands up, holding the three of them—Alec, Ragnor, and Magnus—steady in the air.
Now that the billow of dust was beginning to spread and drift, Alec could see that the lake below was not as featureless as he’d first thought. Around the sinking cathedral were tall columns of stone that rose high above the lake’s surface, and here and there stone platforms connected by bridges and staircases. The cathedral had smashed through some of this infrastructure, but a lot of it remained, now modified by the slabs of brick and marble that were all that remained of the church.
“Behold,” said Sammael. “The Hell of the Pit of Fire. An elaborate labyrinth of tortures, where condemned souls try to maintain their footing on an ever-shifting tangle of connected platforms as they dip in and out of burning flames. I moved it under the cathedral here, just for funsies.”
Alec looked at the lake below him. Nothing appeared to be moving around the lake, except the slowly dissipating dust cloud from the cathedral’s impact. He looked back at Sammael.
“Well,” Sammael said, “it’s not operational now, obviously. It’s been closed for repairs for a hundred and fifty years, give or take. That’s the problem with Diyu. That’s the problem, Ragnor,” he snarled. “It’s supposed to generate all this demonic energy from the torment of souls, but the machinery is broken and the souls are gone, so none of it works!”
With those last words he brought his hand down in a violent gesture, and the distant silhouettes that were Alec’s friends went tumbling down, down, through the sinkhole, through the air, and came to a landing on top of the cathedral tower. Alec held his breath, but he didn’t even need to search inside himself for his connection to Jace to know it was intact: the Shadowhunters were clearly still alive, brought there safely by Sammael. They clung to the tower and scuttled around it; they were much too far away for Alec to tell what was happening.
Sammael giggled and waved his other hand. Down by the lake, far below, three Portals opened, and tiny figures began to emerge from them. Demons, he thought, by the way they moved. He exchanged an alarmed look with Magnus.