The Lost Book of the White

“It seems to be okay,” said Magnus.

“It does,” murmured Alec. Then he leaned forward to kiss Magnus.

Magnus kissed him back, expecting a simple good-night kiss, but instead Alec reached out and tangled his hands in Magnus’s wild hair, pulling him closer and deepening the kiss into something much stronger, something wild, almost ferocious.

Alec’s arm slipped down and wrapped around Magnus’s waist, pulling his boyfriend on top of him. Magnus growled low in his throat: the feel of Alec’s body stretched along his always made him wild. He kissed Alec deeply, reveling in the scrape of his stubble, the softness of his lips; Alec gasped and clutched at Magnus’s back, pulling him closer, as close as they could be.

Magnus paused. “How do you feel?” he said, his lips moving against Alec’s.

Alec thought. “Worried about you.”

“No,” said Magnus, rolling them both over, so Alec was on top of him. “I mean, how do you feel about this?”

He slid his hand down and did a thing he knew Alec liked.

“Ohhh,” said Alec. “Oh! Uh, I’m definitely interested in this. But still worried about you,” he added. His beautiful eyes looked directly into Magnus’s. “Just keep it in mind. You’re my heart, Magnus Bane. Stay unbroken, for me.”

“Noted,” said Magnus, doing the thing he knew Alec liked again, and put out the light.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Heibai Wuchang

IT WASN’T A BETRAYAL, MAGNUS told himself; not really. But he knew that he would never get a chance to do what he wanted to do, with the Shadowhunters along with him. He could probably have convinced them to let him and Alec go together, but… as much as he didn’t want to admit it, Alec would be a liability in this situation too, for what he had in mind.

And Alec would never let him go on his own.

Alec would be right, probably.

But Magnus knew what he was doing. At least, he thought he knew what he was doing.

Alec slept on in the pitch-black of the cathedral office. It had been perhaps five hours since they had fallen asleep, but when Magnus woke up, he had done so feeling energized, rested, ready to go.

He would go and come back before Alec even noticed, he told himself.

Magnus had always been good at seeing in the dark, and in the last few days his vision had become even keener. He needed no illumination to guide him as he dressed in the lightless room, careful to remain quiet as he strapped his shoulder harness on.

With a gesture, a darkened surface appeared before him, a shimmering mirror. In that dark glass, Magnus saw his own face. He saw the darkness writhing at his throat and in his eyes. The worst was the razor gleam of his teeth, the way they seemed to pull his face into an entirely new shape.

Magnus knew a mundane story about a witch’s mirror that had broken into pieces: when a piece lodged in a child’s heart, that heart would turn to ice. He could feel the magic of the thorn twisting in his chest, as if it were a key opening a door he’d tried to keep shut. He didn’t need to glance down at his hands to see the veins standing out in red and black, or the marks of chains growing stronger. He could feel the subtle, terrible alteration of his being as his blood itself changed.

He had to do something. This was something.

Before he left, he held out a hand and gestured toward himself. Slowly, without a sound, Black Impermanence rose into the air from where Alec had carefully laid it down next to him. Careful not to disturb Alec or even the blankets, Magnus turned the sword in the air and floated it toward him. He held his breath, but in a moment Fan Wujiu was in his hand. He waited to see if he would explode; the smiths hadn’t said anything about being worthy to wield both swords at once.

Nothing happened. Maybe the Alliance rune, he thought, made him able to wield Alec’s sword. Maybe the rules were slipperier than some faeries had let on. Maybe both. He started breathing again and carefully placed the Black Impermanence on his back, next to its twin.

At the door he turned and looked back at Alec. And at the top of the stairs to the nave, he looked for a long time at the breathing quiet of Xujiahui. They were in the depths of Hell, and this cathedral was only the shadow of something real. Nevertheless Magnus felt the hush of holiness, of faith like a light in the darkness. It pervaded the cavern of the church, even here a sanctuary. Perhaps their last sanctuary.

* * *

FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO, MAGNUS had had only one friend in the world: Ragnor Fell. Ragnor had taught him what it was to be a warlock: power, yes, the ability to twist space and time to your own ends, yes, but also loneliness, constant danger, a life of wandering. A warlock would never find a warm welcome, Ragnor told him. Even other Downworlders would not trust him. Shadowhunters could capture him, torture him, kill him with impunity. Vampires had clans and werewolves had packs and faeries had courts, but a warlock stood always alone.

There was a time when Magnus found himself in the city of Leonberg. Magnus did not like Leonberg. He had seen very little of the Holy Roman Empire, but based on his experience here, he was prepared to call it grossly overrated: the weather cold and damp, the food heavy and dull, the people suspicious and parochial. He had come at the request of a minor landholder who wanted Magnus to improve his crop yields and the fecundity of his pigs, for much more coin than such magic deserved. Magnus had executed the task in a matter of about fifteen minutes, and now sat drinking insipid beer in the garden of an insipid bar. This bar had a lovely view of Leonberg’s prison tower, which squatted like an angry troll under a gunmetal sky. He sighed, he drank, he dreamed of magic as yet unmade that would allow him to disappear from this place and reappear in a warm, cozy place, perhaps Paris, or somewhere in southern Italy.

His reverie was disrupted by a commotion from the direction of the prison. A group of men in local livery were dragging a disheveled woman out. They hustled her around the side of the prison and vanished from sight. As they did, Magnus noted that the woman was glamoured, and that under the glamour she had blue skin.

He sipped his beer. His hand shook. In his mind, Ragnor’s voice told him sternly that he should look out for himself, that he had nothing to gain from risking his own well-being for a stranger.

He sipped his beer again.

With an abrupt decisive movement, he slammed his glass down on the table, stood up, cursed loudly in Malay, French, and Arabic, and strode purposefully in the direction of the prison and the blue warlock.

Centuries later, he could still remember her screams as her hair caught fire. He broke into a run as he heard a man’s voice sternly proclaim that by the order of the Leonberg judiciary, the woman was guilty of witchcraft and cavorting with devils, and was therefore sentenced to be put to death by the flame.

There were a few locals there to gawk, but witch burning was no longer much of a novelty in these parts, and the day was unpleasant. Nobody got in Magnus’s way as he charged toward the bonfire, now spreading orange gouts of flame well above the blue warlock’s head. Nobody stopped him as he spoke words of magical protection, unsure whether they would even work, or as he braced a boot on the stacked crackling wood and vaulted up into the pyre.

His flesh may have been protected, but his clothes immediately caught fire. He shrugged off the discomfort and grasped hold of the ropes binding the woman, dissolving them with sparks of blue magic. The woman wheeled her gaze toward him and caught sight of his cat’s eyes. She had a look of terror mingled with surprise as he wrapped his arms around her and made to leap off the pyre.

“Hello,” he murmured in her ear. “When we hit the ground, please roll back and forth to put the flames out.”

Without waiting for her reply, he jumped, taking her with him. They thudded into the cold mud next to the bonfire. While it did put out the flames, by the time they stood up their clothes were blackened and falling off, a development Magnus had not anticipated. He could, of course, summon up new clothing, but these didn’t seem the sort of people in front of whom it was wise to do magic.

The soldiers overseeing the execution had been frozen in bewilderment so far, but now were recovering themselves and drawing their swords.

Magnus looked at the woman. “Now what?” he shouted over the roar of the fire and the exclamations of the crowd.

The woman goggled at him. “Now what?” she yelled. “This is your rescue!”

“I’ve never done this before!” he yelled back.

“How about we run?” the woman suggested. Magnus stared at her stupidly for a moment, and she shook her head. “Good God, I’ve been rescued by an idiot!” She turned toward the crowd and held out her hands, and billows of blue smoke emerged from her palms, spreading in thick clouds quickly. The soldiers’ yelling became more confused.

“Yes! Good idea!” Magnus said. The woman rolled her eyes and ran. Magnus followed, wondering how fast they could find shelter and whether that tailor in Venice would have enough of that brocade material to make him a replacement for his coat.

Ragnor caught up with them many hours later, at a tavern on the road to Tübingen. By that point they had found new clothes and Magnus had learned some things about the woman he’d rescued. Her name was Catarina Loss; she had come to Leonberg to treat an outbreak of plague; she had been caught laying glowing hands on a patient and had been immediately arrested as a witch. Leonberg, she explained, was just mad for witch burning.

“Everywhere in Europe is mad for witch burning,” Ragnor said, ill-tempered. He was angry at Magnus, but equally obviously liked Catarina, and the two of them had quickly fallen into as pleasant a rapport as Magnus had with either of them. Unfortunately, their favorite topic so far was how stupid Magnus had been for attempting the rescue.

“I saved your life!” he protested.

“And a very careful, understated saving it was,” Ragnor said. “How do you think I found you? Within minutes the whole area was buzzing with rumors of a vile magician swooping through the sky over Leonberg on a black cloud, flying through flame and carrying a foul witch out of the fire meant to sanctify her.”

“So we stay out of the Holy Roman Empire for a while.” Magnus shrugged, grinning. “I won’t miss it.”