The Lost Book of the White (The Eldest Curses #2) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,121

though conveying a wonderful secret, “I figured it out. I can use their souls and make them fight some demons, and use that power. It won’t be a lot, nothing like what Diyu must have produced in its prime. But enough to make the Portal I want.”

“You still can’t pass through to Earth,” said Ragnor. “The Taxiarch’s wardings are intact—”

Sammael grinned merrily. “The Portal isn’t for me,” he said. “It’s for Diyu.”

“What?” said Alec. It was all he could come up with in the moment.

Sammael rubbed his hands together. “That’s right. I’ll need the energy of all your friends’ souls to open a Portal the size of all Shanghai.” He did a little dance in the air. “I’m a genius. I seriously am. There wasn’t enough energy in Diyu to break the Taxiarch’s wardings, right? So I started to think: Where can a guy get a big burst of evil energy like that? I was collecting all this information from Tian about enemy forces and where they’re headquartered and all of that business and then I realized, hey, I’m Sammael. I’m the Master of Portals! I can send anything through a Portal. So blam! Shanghai gone in an instant, and Diyu in its place. Or at least a chunk of Diyu the size of Shanghai.” He laughed. “Think about it! A whole human city swallowed up by a demon city. Absolutely guaranteed to provide me enough energy to break through the wards.”

“Can he do that?” Magnus said to Ragnor. “Swallow up the whole city?”

Ragnor looked ill. “He’s certainly going to try.”

“Please don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” sniffed Sammael. “It’s very impolite.”

“He’s also going to torture our friends. That’s part of ‘trying’!” Alec said to Magnus. “Magnus, send me down there—”

“No,” Sammael said sharply. “If I wanted any of you down there with them, I would have sent you down there with them. We have unfinished business,” he said to Magnus. “Thorny business. But,” he added with a wink, “is there any other kind?”

There was a loud noise, and Alec felt a rush of wind on his face. The lake of fire, the ruins of the cathedral, the rest of Shanghai’s shadow surrounding the sinkhole, all went black, and for the second time in Diyu, Alec fell through nothing, toward nothing, surrounded by nothing.

* * *

THIS TIME HE FELL FOR only a few seconds, and when he stopped, he didn’t land, really. He was floating in the air above the ruins of Xujiahui Cathedral, then he was falling, and then he was standing somewhere else.

He looked around. Magnus was here, and Ragnor, and—looking a little puzzled—Shinyun. And Sammael, of course, who had thankfully returned to human size.

As abandoned and broken-down as the rest of Diyu was, this place seemed to have been forgotten entirely. It had the silence of a tomb that had been sealed for thousands of years and was never intended to be opened again. In a realm of abandoned chasms, Alec knew, felt in his body, that this was the deepest and most lonesome.

Up close, Shinyun really was looking very spidery, Alec thought—her limbs elongated and multiply jointed, her face narrowed, sharpened. Her lack of expression was always uncanny, but now that her movements seemed less human, it gave her the look of an alien creature studying them, trying to decide whether to crush them. Her lambent eyes peered at them in the dark, her head tilting back and forth like a snake examining its prey.

Not that Magnus was looking much better. His eyes were larger than normal and seemed to glow of their own accord. The chains that bound him were starkly clear on his arms, and the spiked circles harsh on his palms. He seemed elongated too, in almost serpentine fashion, taller and skinnier than he’d been.

It was remarkable, Alec thought, that Ragnor was by far the most human-seeming person here other than himself, and he had actual horns on his head.

Alec had no further time for observations, because Shinyun starting yelling. “The Svefnthorn cried out!” she called into the echo of the vast empty space they found themselves in. “It told me—it has been insulted. Disrespected. Injured.” Her gaze found Ragnor, who gazed at her with loathing. “Ragnor. Why would you do this? Why would you reject the greatest of gifts?”

“If I recall,” Ragnor said, as if the effort to speak was almost too much for him, “I turned down your gift, and it was given to me anyway, without my consent.