The Lost Book of the White

Human figures, distant and small, were tumbling end over end upward in the wind of Sammael’s windstorm, becoming visible to Alec as they cleared the walls of the cathedral. Sammael was gathering the Shadowhunters to him, he realized, drawing them up to join him in the fire-tinged sky. Jace, Clary, Simon, Isabelle, Tian… all of them identifiable more by the silhouettes they made with their weapons than anything else.

“We have to get to them,” Alec said.

“We may not have a choice,” said Magnus. And indeed, Alec felt the unpleasant hot wind lick at his body as well, wrap itself around his legs, tugging at him like insistent hands. “Hang on,” said Magnus, “I’m going to—”

The wind carried Alec up into the air, the horizon whirling around him in a dizzying rush. He had always wanted to be able to fly, but this was not at all how he’d imagined it. The currents of air swirled around him, spinning him like a top. He tried to reach for his seraph blade—it was thrust through his belt—but he couldn’t get a grip on the hilt.

Then movement stopped, and while it took Alec a moment to reorient, he realized that he hung suspended in the air. The wind continued to whip around him, but he at least was no longer at its mercy.

He looked around and realized that Magnus and Ragnor were still with him, or at least nearby. They also floated in the air; Magnus’s hands were raised, his arms tensed, and crimson-white light poured from the centers of his palms. In the distance, the other Shadowhunters still tumbled around and around like clothes in a dryer; Alec could tell it was taking all Magnus’s strength to maintain his and Alec’s stability.

Shinyun hovered nearby, watching but not engaging. Alec wondered why. Surely they were helpless. Surely if Sammael wanted them eliminated, now would be the time.…

He turned again to look at Magnus. His worry must have shown, because Magnus made a series of head movements that Alec interpreted as conveying that he was doing his best but that he couldn’t reach the others with his magic from here.

Sammael was drifting over toward them, his hands folded in a mockery of prayer. He seemed totally unaffected by the wind, presumably because he was causing it.

Stupid, Alec was thinking. Our plan was so stupid. Baiting Sammael into fighting them would have been a terrible idea. He may have looked like a mild-mannered mundane, he may have talked like a game show host, but he was—of course—a supremely powerful demon. They were outmatched, Alec thought, and only Sammael’s lack of interest in killing them had kept them alive so far. It was a chilling thought.

“Hey!” Sammael said with a wave, as he got closer to them. “How’s everybody doing over here?”

Before anyone could answer—not that Alec had any idea how to answer—Sammael looked at Ragnor and jerked back in an exaggerated performance of surprise.

“Holy cats!” he exclaimed. “The thorn’s gone. How did you pull off that little trick?” he said to Magnus. “Ragnor,” he went on, “didn’t we have some good times? Weren’t you looking forward to ruling the world with me? At least a little? Come on, you wanted to a little bit.”

Ragnor looked unimpressed. “You kept me in a cage and stabbed me several times. I was hardly a willing recruit.”

“To be fair,” said Sammael, “Shinyun kept you in the cage.”

He turned back to Magnus. “I hope you aren’t planning to try to remove the thorn from Shinyun, too.”

“I don’t think she wants it removed,” said Magnus.

Sammael laughed. “You said it, buddy. I wasn’t even going to thorn her, you know that? Did she tell you that? I thought, no way she could take it. But she insisted. Demanded it. Demanded from me, the greatest of all demons!”

“Second-greatest,” said Ragnor quietly.

The Prince of Hell narrowed his eyes. “Well. We don’t talk about him.” He looked over at Shinyun, hovering near the still-struggling Shadowhunters a short distance away. “You know,” he confided, “if I let her, she’d just kill all of them.”

Alec cleared his throat. “So why won’t you let her?”

“Oh!” said Sammael. “Because I came up with a plan. Just on the way over here, can you believe it? Popped right into my head.”

He waved his arm, and far below them, the ground began to shake. For a moment, Alec wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but then he began to grasp it. All around the cathedral’s walls, fissures were opening in the ground. The cathedral itself tilted and shifted dangerously, and then, with a great crash, its front half and back half fell into one another with a tremendous crash. Dust and smoke began to rise into the burning wind.

The cathedral didn’t have time to fully collapse. While its walls were still lurching toward one another, the entire stretch of land around the cathedral fell, as though into a sinkhole. A slab of stone the size of a city block came loose from the streets around it, and the cathedral groaned and swayed and fell into the hole.

With a dazed horror, Alec watched it fall, tumbling through a voidlike darkness. At the bottom of that void was a lake, red and black, like molten rock.

The cathedral smashed into the lake of fire with a boom that went on and on. Jace, Isabelle, and the others had stopped spinning: Alec could barely see them through the smoke, but they all seemed to be watching in silence as the church settled into its new position, halfway submerged in lava, one broken tower still jutting up at an angle like the hand of a drowning man.

Alec looked over at Sammael, who caught his eye and waggled his eyebrows. Alec looked farther over at Magnus, who continued to keep his hands up, holding the three of them—Alec, Ragnor, and Magnus—steady in the air.

Now that the billow of dust was beginning to spread and drift, Alec could see that the lake below was not as featureless as he’d first thought. Around the sinking cathedral were tall columns of stone that rose high above the lake’s surface, and here and there stone platforms connected by bridges and staircases. The cathedral had smashed through some of this infrastructure, but a lot of it remained, now modified by the slabs of brick and marble that were all that remained of the church.

“Behold,” said Sammael. “The Hell of the Pit of Fire. An elaborate labyrinth of tortures, where condemned souls try to maintain their footing on an ever-shifting tangle of connected platforms as they dip in and out of burning flames. I moved it under the cathedral here, just for funsies.”

Alec looked at the lake below him. Nothing appeared to be moving around the lake, except the slowly dissipating dust cloud from the cathedral’s impact. He looked back at Sammael.

“Well,” Sammael said, “it’s not operational now, obviously. It’s been closed for repairs for a hundred and fifty years, give or take. That’s the problem with Diyu. That’s the problem, Ragnor,” he snarled. “It’s supposed to generate all this demonic energy from the torment of souls, but the machinery is broken and the souls are gone, so none of it works!”

With those last words he brought his hand down in a violent gesture, and the distant silhouettes that were Alec’s friends went tumbling down, down, through the sinkhole, through the air, and came to a landing on top of the cathedral tower. Alec held his breath, but he didn’t even need to search inside himself for his connection to Jace to know it was intact: the Shadowhunters were clearly still alive, brought there safely by Sammael. They clung to the tower and scuttled around it; they were much too far away for Alec to tell what was happening.

Sammael giggled and waved his other hand. Down by the lake, far below, three Portals opened, and tiny figures began to emerge from them. Demons, he thought, by the way they moved. He exchanged an alarmed look with Magnus.

“You see,” Sammael said, as 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.