The Lost Book of the White (The Eldest Curses #2) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,76

started down them.

“Thanks for coming by,” Elyaas said cheerfully. As Alec passed him, he added, “So you’re the famous Alec. Hmm.”

“What?” Alec snapped.

“Nothing,” said Elyaas. “I just thought you’d be better-looking, that’s all.”

Alec blinked at him. Behind him, Jace stifled a laugh.

“When I heard how he talked about you, I thought, this guy has to have a ton of tentacles. Hundreds of tentacles! But look at you.” He shook his head sadly. “None at all.”

Alec walked on without further comment.

As they descended the stairs, they could hear Elyaas’s wet voice fading in the distance:

“How would you rate your welcome experience today? Very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, a little satisfied, a little dissatisfied, somewhat…”

* * *

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE stairs was a stone archway leading into a second building much like the first. The archway was three times Alec’s height, and its supports were leaning against one another alarmingly. Blocking the way were the remains of two collapsed stone pillars, elaborately carved but now piled in a jumble of hunks of rock, like a gigantic child had been playing with blocks and had failed to put them away.

Magnus seemed ready to magic the stones out of the way, but Alec stopped him. “Let’s just climb over them,” he suggested, and Magnus agreed, though he gave Alec a strange look. Jace had already begun scrambling over the rocks, and the others followed.

The Second Court was in much worse shape than the First. Or maybe it had been more cluttered to begin with. There was a lot more furniture, some carved of stone, some of wood, all shattered and broken—desks, chairs, tables. There were broken tablets and ledgers, rolls of yellowed parchment abandoned in the dirt. Alec picked his way carefully around the detritus and reached down to pick up a cracked slab of wood with the remains of red and gold paint on it. It might have depicted a face, once.

“It’s a battlefield,” Jace said, looking around with a practiced eye; Alec thought he was probably right. Here and there abandoned weapons lay—swords, spears, and broken bows—and at the back of the large open courtroom was another table like the one Elyaas had sat behind, but this one was cleaved neatly in two. Five open doors led in various directions out of the room, in addition to the one they’d come from.

The only fully intact object in the room was an oil painting of a young woman in white, hanging on a wall near the broken desk. It had been painted in watercolor, with delicate brushstrokes. The woman was beautiful, Alec thought, and her brightness seemed out of place in these darkened ruins. The painting was marred only by a tear in the canvas across the woman’s cheek, a scar that would never fade.

Magnus came to stand next to Alec and look at the painting, and as he did, the woman’s face turned within the painting to look at them. Her eyes were empty and white.

“Ack! Evil painting!” Clary jumped back.

The woman’s head rolled eerily on her shoulders within the painting, and when she spoke, it was with a voice like the crackling of dry kindling.

“Welcome, lost souls,” she said. Alec thought perhaps she would say something about how lonely she had been, but she said only, “Here is where your path will be chosen, and you will pass through the ghost gate to your suffering.”

“Great news,” muttered Jace.

“Take heart,” the woman told him, with a smile that revealed long, needlelike teeth. “When your anguish equals the pain you caused in life, you will be released back into the cycle of living and death. I advise you to face your tribulations with courage. You cannot avoid them, so you may as well go to them with your face raised up.”

None of them said anything, and she went on, “All I will require is the standard toll for passage.”

“The standard toll?” said Alec.

“Yes,” said the woman. “Yuanbao are traditional, but these days we also accept the new paper money.”

Magnus groaned. “I assume,” said Alec, “you don’t have any cash on you.”

“I have the change from when I bought some faerie tea cakes earlier,” Clary said, fishing around in her jeans pocket. “Oh, never mind, it’s turned into leaves.”

“We don’t have any money,” Magnus told the painting, “but you see—”

“If you lack payment, you can traverse the Ice Caverns to the Bank of Sorrows,” the woman began.

“We’re not going to have any money in the bank of Hell,” Magnus explained. “We’re not dead, you