Chain of Gold

“Sorry, Luce!” It was Christopher, clambering in through her window. He dropped to the floor and was followed a moment later by Thomas, who had a hole burned into the collar of his shirt and looked cross about it. “It was an experiment—method of sending messages using fire runes—”

Lucie looked skeptically at the charred spot on her desk where the message had sparked its last. It had landed on several manuscript pages of The Beautiful Cordelia, and they were now quite ruined. “Well, don’t experiment on me!” she said. “You’ve destroyed a very important scene in which Cordelia is romanced by a pirate king.”

“Piracy is unethical,” said Thomas.

“Not in this case,” said Lucie. “You see, the pirate king is secretly the son of an earl—”

Christopher and Thomas exchanged glances. “We really ought to go,” said Christopher, retrieving Lucie’s stele and handing it to her. “The Enclave meeting is about to start.”

They crept out of Lucie’s room and hurried to one of the empty storerooms on the second floor, above the library. It was Lucie’s father who had taught her how to draw this particular rune, so she did the honors as they all knelt in a loose circle on the floor: the rune was a large one, covering a good amount of space. When Lucie was done, she finished it off with a flourish and sat back.

The floor between their kneeling legs shimmered and went transparent. Lucie, Thomas, and Christopher were now looking down at the library below them as if through the lens of a telescope. They could see everyone gathered in the room very clearly, down to the colors of their eyes and the details of their clothes.

Extra rows of tables had been set up, and Shadowhunters filled the room. Lucie’s father and mother were there, of course, and her uncle Gabriel as well, seated toward the front of the room where Will stood, flanked by Inquisitor Bridgestock and a stiff-looking Charles Fairchild. Lucie could not help but wonder what their relationship had been like since Charles had ended his engagement to Ariadne.

Charles rapped sharply on one of the tables, making Lilian Highsmith jolt in her seat. “To order,” he said. “To order. My thanks to the members of the Enclave who could join us here. Though this information has not been made public, as of today there have been a total of six major attacks by an unknown type of demon on Nephilim in London. All except the attack at the Baybrooks’ residence took place in daylight.”

Lucie turned to Thomas and Christopher. “Six attacks?” she whispered. “I only know of three. Did you know of more?”

Thomas shook his head. “Even I did not know. I imagine the Enclave has become fearful of panicking people. If it makes you feel better, I think a lot of people didn’t know.”

Lucie looked back down. Many members of the Enclave seemed to be murmuring to each other in agitation. She could see her father standing with his arms crossed over his chest, a frozen expression on his face. He had not known.

“There are now twenty-five very sick Shadowhunters in the Silent City,” said Charles. “Due to the gravity of the situation, travel in and out of London has been suspended for the moment by the Clave.”

Lucie, Christopher, and Thomas exchanged startled looks. When had this happened? As a murmur swept through the crowd in the library, it seemed clear that many of the adults in attendance were equally surprised.

“What do you mean by ‘for the moment’?” called George Penhallow. “How long will we be forbidden to travel?”

Charles clasped his hands behind his back. “Indefinitely.”

The murmur in the room became a roar. “What of those in Idris?” called Ida Rosewain. “Will they be able to return? What of our families there?”

Bridgestock shook his head. “All Portal travel is suspended—”

“Good,” muttered Lilian Highsmith. “I’ve never trusted those newfangled inventions. I heard about a young man who went through a Portal with his parabatai and ended up with the other fellow’s leg attached to him.”

Bridgestock ignored this. “There will be no entering or exiting London, no passing beyond the warded boundaries of the city. Not for now.”

Lucie and Christopher looked at Thomas in dismay, but his mouth had only tightened into a sharp line. “Good,” he said. “My family will be safe in Idris.”

“Henry, though,” said Christopher in a worried voice. “He was to return and help us with the antidote.”

Lucie had not known that. She patted Christopher’s hand as comfortingly as she could. “The Silent Brothers are also looking for a cure,” she whispered. “It is not just you, Christopher. Besides, I have every confidence you could do it on your own.”

“And I will help you,” Thomas added, but Christopher only looked mournfully down at the scene unfolding below.

“What is the meaning of this? Why are we being imprisoned in London?” Martin Wentworth was shouting. He had risen to his feet. “Now is the time we need the Clave’s assistance—”

“It’s a quarantine, Martin,” said Will, in his steady voice. “Let the Inquisitor explain.”

But it was Charles who spoke. “All of you,” he said loudly. “You know that my—that Barbara Lightwood was stricken down by a demon attack. Poison flooded her system. She could not withstand it and died a few days ago.”

Thomas winced, and Martin Wentworth’s face turned from red to white as he clearly thought of his son, Piers.

Charles went on. “Oliver Hayward was with her when she died. In the last throes of her agony, not recognizing her friends and loved ones, she attacked him, scratching and hitting him.”

Lucie remembered the blood on Oliver’s hands, his cuffs. The library was silent. She could not bear to look at Thomas.

“As you may also know,” Charles went on, “the Hayward family runs the York Institute, and Oliver understandably wished to return home after losing his beloved.”

“As any upstanding young man might well do,” muttered Bridgestock.

Charles ignored this. “We received the news yesterday that Oliver had fallen ill. His scratches festered and he was overcome by the same symptoms that have claimed those here in London who have been attacked by these demons.” He paused. “Oliver died this morning.”

There was an audible gasp. Lucie felt sick.

Laurence Ashdown bolted to his feet. “But Hayward wasn’t attacked by a demon! Nor is the poison of demons contagious!”

“The poison causes an ailment,” said Will calmly. “It has been determined by the Silent Brothers that this ailment can be transmitted by bite or scratch. While it is not highly contagious, it is contagious nonetheless. Hence the quarantine.”

“Is that why all the sick were moved to the Silent City and are not being allowed visitors? Is that what’s going on?” demanded Wentworth.

Lucie was again startled: she had not known the sick were not to be visited. Thomas, noting her distress, whispered, “The injunction against visitors was handed down only this morning. Christopher and I heard Uncle Gabriel discussing it.”

“The Silent City is the right place for them to be,” said Charles. “The Brothers can take the best care of the afflicted, and no demon can enter the place.”

“So what is the Clave’s plan?” Ida Rosewain’s voice rose. “Is their intention to trap us in London—with demons carrying a poison disease we don’t know how to treat—so we all simply die?”

Even Bridgestock looked taken aback. It was Will who spoke.

“We are Shadowhunters,” he said. “We do not wait to be saved by others. We save ourselves. We here in London are as equipped as any member of the Clave to solve this problem, and it will be solved.”

Lucie felt a spark of warmth in her chest. Her father was a good leader. It was one of the things she loved about him. He knew when people needed to be calmed and encouraged. Charles, who wanted so badly to be a leader himself, knew only how to frighten and demand.

“Will is correct,” Charles said cautiously. “We have the assistance of the Silent Brothers, and I myself will be acting as Consul in my mother’s stead, since she cannot return from Idris.”

Charles glanced into the crowd and, for a moment, seemed to be looking directly at Alastair Carstairs. Odd that he was there, Lucie thought, but Sona was not. Though Alastair would certainly report on the state of things to his family.

Alastair returned Charles’s glance and looked away; Lucie sensed Thomas’s shoulder tense beside hers.

“We will be splitting into three groups,” said Bridgestock. “One group will be in charge of research, digging up everything in our libraries regarding whether anything like this has happened before—demon disease, demons that can exist in daylight, and so on. Group two will handle night patrols, and group three day patrols. Every Shadowhunter over the age of eighteen and under the age of fifty-five will be given an area of London to patrol.”

“I do not see why the demons would remain within the boundary of the city,” said Lilian Highsmith darkly. “We may be quarantined, but they are not.”

“We have not been abandoned,” said Will. “York, too, is under quarantine, though there have been no further cases of illness there yet, but the Shadowhunters of the Cornwall Institute as well as some Shadowhunters from Idris will be patrolling outside London, and patrols will be stepped up through all the British Isles. If the demons flee London, they will be caught.”

“These demons didn’t just appear out of thin air,” said Bridgestock. “They were summoned. We need to interrogate all the magic users in London in order to track down the culprit.”

“It’s not quite demons, is it?” Lucie whispered. “If it’s a Mandikhor, then it’s really just one demon. Maybe… Ought we to tell them?”

“Not at the moment,” said Thomas. “The last thing they need is us falling out of the ceiling to announce that we have a theory that it’s a demon that splits into parts.”