The Lost Book of the White (The Eldest Curses #2) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,90
demons ignored him completely. In a short time he had vanished behind their milling crowds.
“Okay,” said Magnus, drawing White Impermanence. “I’ll keep the flying demons off us.”
“Where to?” said Clary.
“Someplace safer than here,” said Jace. “Stay together.”
Together the four of them advanced toward the bridge. At the front, Alec and Jace used their weapons to hold off the demons that got in their way; behind, Magnus blasted anything in the air, and Clary held off the demons that tried to flank them.
It reminded Alec of the classical warfare he’d studied—hoplites, squeezed together for protection, making their way through a hail of arrows. It was agonizingly slow going. Ten minutes of fighting brought them onto the iron bridge, but to Alec it looked like the bridge itself would be another hour to cross, stretching off into the indefinite distance. Next to him, Jace struck out with the spear again and again, his face a mask of sweat and ichor. Alec was sure he looked no better.
Once they were fully on the bridge, the demons changed their strategy. This wasn’t like the earlier fight; the demons were crowded so thickly that they could barely maneuver themselves, and they quickly realized that rather than trying to break past the Shadowhunters’ blades and Magnus’s lightning, they would accomplish their aim just as well by forcing them off the edge of the bridge.
“What happens if we fall?” said Clary.
“Remember what Tian said,” Jace said. “At the bottom of Diyu is the city of Shanghai, reversed. Whatever that means.”
Alec exchanged a look with Magnus, who nodded.
Jace caught their look. “We’re jumping off, aren’t we?”
“I can protect us from the fall,” Magnus said.
“But what about the landing?” Clary said.
“If I only jumped when I knew where I was going to land,” Magnus said, “I would never jump at all.”
And with that he flung himself over the side of the bridge.
“Are we really doing this?” Jace said to Clary.
Clary hesitated, then nodded firmly. “I trust Magnus.”
The two of them, and Alec right after, threw themselves after Magnus. Alec fell backward, watching the bridge recede into the distance, fading into the starless ink of the sky. As he fell he could not help thinking of Tian’s face, his expression cryptic, as he had walked away from fellow Shadowhunters who had trusted him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Certain Falling
THEY FELL.
At first they tumbled out of control, and Alec wondered what would happen if any of them drifted into one of the walls of the pit. The sensation of free fall was terrifying at first, the sense of gravity abandoning him, the anticipation of an ending, a violent collision that never came.
And after a few minutes, he found, he sort of became used to it.
It helped that Magnus righted himself first, and then used some magic to gather the four of them, to keep them upright and close enough to talk to one another. And once the bridge was gone from sight, and the path they had been walking, and even the demons, fading into the gray nothing of the background, it was just the four of them, gently falling through the soundless air. Clary’s red hair waved gently around her face. Magnus’s hands were raised, glowing red, and Alec felt the sensation of nothing under his feet, the illusion of not moving at all as any visual reference disappeared.
“I’ve made some weird calls in my time,” Jace mused, “but spending ten minutes in free fall from one unknown place in a hell dimension to a different unknown place in a hell dimension is pretty reckless even for me.”
“Don’t feel bad,” said Magnus. “It wasn’t really your decision.”
Clary tugged on a lock of her hair and watched thoughtfully as it floated back up into the air. “I think it’s kind of cool.”
They both looked at Alec. Alec looked down—although with the lack of features around them, it was hard to keep up and down straight. Far away, in the direction they were falling, outlines glowed dimly. Were they growing larger, closer? It was hard to tell.
Clary and Jace were still waiting for him to speak. “We all made the decision,” he said. “We didn’t have enough information or enough time. We went with our instincts.”
“And what if we’re wrong?” said Jace.
“We’ll deal with that then,” said Alec.
“Even once we land,” put in Magnus, “we won’t really know if we made the right call or not. We’ll probably never know if we made the optimal move.”
“Sometimes you just go,” Alec said. “You know that.”