Cordelia recalled what happened next only in bits and pieces. She had gone to get dressed, feeling as numb as if she had fallen through Arctic ice into a black and frozen sea. When she emerged from the house to join her mother and brother in the carriage, she had been distantly surprised to find that James was beside her. He had been absolutely insistent on coming to the Silent City, though she had told him it wasn’t necessary. “Only family need go,” she told him, and he had said, “Daisy, I am family.”
In the carriage, he had murmured words of condolence in Persian: Ghame akharetoon basheh.
May this be your last sorrow.
Sona had wept steadily and silently all the way to Highgate Cemetery. Cordelia had half expected Alastair to react to Elias’s death with the blazing rage he often showed when he was hurt. Instead he seemed stiff and hollow, as if he were being propped up inside by wires. She could hear him, as if from a distance, saying all the correct things as they met Brother Enoch, who was waiting for them at the entrance to the Silent City.
Cordelia had felt a pang inside for Jem. If only he were not in the Spiral Labyrinth. If only he could be here for them: he was family, and Enoch was not. Did Jem even know? How long would it be before he was told that his uncle, the man who had slain his parents’ murderer, was dead?
There would be a funeral eventually, she supposed now, her eyes fixed on Brother Enoch’s witchlight torch, bobbing ahead of them. It would have to wait. Elias’s body would be studied and then preserved until the murderer had been caught: they would not burn it and destroy potential clues. Jem could be with them then, but she found she could not imagine the scene—the fields of Alicante, her father’s body on a pyre, the Consul speaking soothing words. It seemed like a horrific dream.
She felt James take her hand as they came into a stone square, the iron entrance of the Ossuarium rising up before them. Words were inscribed above the doors:
TACEANT COLLOQUIA. EFFUGIAT RISUS.
HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.
Let conversation stop. Let laughter cease. Here is the place where the dead delight to teach the living.
The doors opened before them, the ancient iron hinges groaning. Sona walked ahead, seemingly oblivious of everything but what was waiting inside the large, windowless room.
Inside the Ossuarium, walls of smooth white marble rose up to an arched ceiling high above them. The walls were bare save for a series of plain iron hooks from which various instruments of autopsy hung: shining scalpels, hammers, needles, and saws. Jars of viscous liquid lined a series of shelves; there were folded piles of white silk—bandages, Cordelia thought, before she realized: there was no reason to bandage the dead. The white silk strips were for binding the eyes of Shadowhunters before they were laid on the pyre to be burned. It was tradition.
At the center of the room was a row of high marble tables where the bodies of the deceased were laid out for examination. Here Amos Gladstone and Basil Pounceby had been brought to be examined, Cordelia thought, and Filomena as well. Only one table was occupied now. Cordelia told herself that lying there, draped in lengths of pristine white fabric, was what was left of her father, but she could not quite make herself believe it.
Shall we begin? asked Enoch, approaching the table.
“Yes,” said Sona. She stood close to Alastair, his arm around her for support, her hand on her rounded belly. Her eyes were wide and haunted, but when she spoke, her voice was clear. She kept her chin level as Enoch slowly drew back the long white sheets to reveal Elias’s body. He wore his old brown coat, the lapels peeled back to show a shabby white shirt beneath, stained heavily with blood. His skin was ashen, as if drained of blood: his hair and stubble looked dirty gray, like an old man’s.
“How did he die?” said Alastair, his gaze fixed on his father’s body. “Like the others?”
Yes. He was stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife. His wounds are identical to those we discovered on the bodies of Filomena di Angelo and Basil Pounceby.
Alastair stared stonily at Elias. Cordelia said, “Was it a fight? A battle between him and his attacker?”
His attacker approached from the front, as deduced from a study of his wounds. There is no sign that a fight took place. There were no weapons at the scene, and there is no evidence on the body to suggest that Elias Carstairs drew a weapon.
“He was probably too drunk,” Alastair muttered.
Perhaps. There was no kindness in Enoch’s voice, and also no cruelty. There was no emotion at all. Or perhaps he knew the person who attacked him. We see from wounds on his hands that he raised them to protect himself, but by then it was too late, as he had already received a mortal wound.