Cordelia decided in that moment that if she didn’t, she would carry Lucie up the hill herself. They had come too far, and Lucie had pushed herself too hard, for Cordelia to abandon her now.
Lucie looked pale, strained, smudged with dirt. The encounter with the cursed ghosts seemed to have stretched her even thinner: her eyes looked huge in her face, and her expression was tight with pain. But when Cordelia glanced up the hill, a question in her eyes, Lucie only nodded and started up the uneven, zigzag path that led to the top.
The hill was steeper than it looked at first, and the terrain much rougher. It had been a long time since the path had been tended to, and petrified tree roots bulged through the dry scree that covered the hillside. Low stone cairns dotted the edges of the path. Markers of graves long forgotten? Had this been the last stand of the Nephilim in this world? Had they died protecting their fortress? Cordelia could only guess.
As they rose up the hill, the clouds thinned, and she could see what seemed like all of Edom laid out before her; she could see the plains where she and Lucie had taken shelter, and even the long line of the Wall of Kadesh in the distance. She wondered if it had once been a border with another country; she wondered what had happened to the Forest of Brocelind, with its deep wooded dells and faerie groves. She wondered, as the black clouds fell away below them, if Lilith had lied and they would find no way back to their own world from here.
She wondered where Belial was. In fact, not just Belial, but the demons who must surely serve him. She kept her hand on Cortana, but all was silent: only the sounds of the wind and Lucie’s ragged breathing accompanied their ascent.
At last the slope began to level out and they could catch their breath. Before them, black in the red glow of the sun, rose the high walls that encircled the fortress. A pair of massive gates was set into them.
“There aren’t even any guards,” Cordelia said as they approached the gates together. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Lucie was silent. She was staring at the gates with an odd look on her face. They were a dark mirror of the Gard gates in Alicante, gold and iron carved with swirling runes, though these were not the runes from the Gray Book, but a demonic language, ancient and disquieting. Stone statues of angels—decapitated and acid-eaten, only their spreading wings giving a hint of what they’d once been—stood watch at either side of the gates.
The gates had no handles, nothing to grasp. Cordelia put her hand against one—the metal was icy cold—and pushed; it was like pushing against a massive boulder. Nothing happened. “No guards,” she said again. “But no way to get in, either.” She tipped her head back. “Maybe we can try to climb the walls—”
“Let me,” Lucie said quietly. She stepped past Cordelia. “I saw this in a vision,” she said, sounding very unlike herself. “I think—it was Belial that I saw. And I heard him speak.”
She laid a dusty hand against the gate’s surface. “Kaal ssha ktar,” she said.
The words sounded like stone scraping against metal. Cordelia shuddered—and stared incredulously as the gates swung open noiselessly. Beyond them she could see a moat, filled with black, oily water, and a bridge that crossed it, leading directly into the fortress.
Before them lay the heart of Lilith’s palace.
* * *
After a very long minute and a half of listening to the Watchers tromp past their hiding spot, the marching had receded into the distance and silence had returned. Cautiously Ari poked her head out from the alcove and gestured to Anna.
“Where do you think they’re going? The Watchers, I mean,” Anna said.
Ari bit her lip. “I don’t know, but I can’t help but fear we’re running out of time.”
They walked on. And on. It was very hard to tell how much time was passing, as the corridor extended in either direction for as far as they could see now, disappearing to vanishing points ahead and behind. Ari was peering back over her shoulder, hoping they hadn’t been meant to turn where they had seen the Watchers, when Anna let out a quickly muffled yelp of recognition. “Look!”
Ari hurried to join her and looked where she was pointing. There, leading off the corridor, was a pair of barred gates wrought in gold; they hung half-open, darkness visible beyond them. These, she knew, must be the gates through which Tatiana Blackthorn had let Belial and his army pass from the Iron Tombs into the Silent City.
“Who could do such a thing?” Ari whispered. She glanced over at Anna. “Do you think anyone will be there? Waiting for us?”
Anna didn’t answer, only strode through the doorway. Ari followed her.
They had been passing through caverns of inhuman scale since they arrived, so another one did not have quite the same impact as the first had. Even so, the sheer scale of the Iron Tombs intimidated her. She supposed that a thousand years of Silent Brothers and Iron Sisters added up to a very large number of tombs. Whose inhabitants, she reminded herself, were now rampaging around London.
Before them was a tiled floor, easily a hundred yards in each direction, describing a huge circular chamber. Around the perimeter, dozens of stone staircases were set into the walls; these led to landings, and then more staircases, a riot of staircases stretching above them, crossing one another, forming a kind of massive, vaulted ceiling where the stairs were absent. On each of the landings, at least the ones they could see, were stone tables—no. Sarcophagi. Even from here on the ground, Ari could see that the lids had been disturbed, thrown off entirely or at least shifted from their places.
It was not as dark as it had seemed from outside. The walls were lined with witchlights, all the way up, casting everything in a gentle blue glow. The witchlights were placed regularly, but the intersecting, apparently random placement of all the staircases made them shimmer down from above like a field of stars. It was almost impossible to tell how high the staircases rose, as they disappeared into a ceiling that could have been the sky.
They crossed the crypt, the tapping of their shoes echoing through the cavernous space. The center was empty, but the floor, Ari realized, was a huge mosaic whose image she could not initially understand. She studied it as she crossed it, and realized eventually that it was of an Iron Sister and a Silent Brother, and an angel rising over them.
At the end of the mosaic was a long double staircase rising straight ahead of them to a simple door set in the wall. The way out, Ari thought. It had to be; it was large enough, and there were no other doors in sight except the ones they had entered through.
“Well,” said Anna, and Ari realized she was nervous. “Shall we?”
“We shall,” said Ari properly. She reached out and took Anna’s hand in hers, as if to lead her to a dance floor. “We’ll go together.”
The actual opening of the door, once they reached it, was a bit of an anticlimax after all the buildup. There was a large iron key in the door, and, after another glance at Ari, Anna turned it and simply pushed the door open.
On the other side was the night sky, and a rocky volcanic plain, and silence.
Into the silence, Anna called, “Hello?”
No sound came.
They looked at one another in horror, and Ari felt a terrible fatigue. No fire-messages, it seemed. No Shadowhunter army to meet them.