Clockwork Princess (37 page)

“I wouldn’t bother,” said a cold, familiar voice from the door. “The configuration stretches all the way across the cave, from wall to wall, from roof to ceiling. You are completely immured behind it.”

Tessa had been stretching upward; at that, she dropped to her feet and backed up a step.

Mortmain.

He was exactly as she recalled him. A wiry man, not tall, with a weathered face and a neatly clipped beard. Extraordinarily ordinary, save for his eyes, as cold and gray as a winter snowstorm. He wore a dove-colored suit, not overly formal, the sort of thing a gentleman might wear to an afternoon at the club. His shoes were polished to a high shine.

Tessa said nothing, only drew the black dressing gown closer about her. It was voluminous, and concealed her whole body, but without the underpinnings of chemise and corset, stockings and bustle, she felt naked and exposed.

“Do not panic yourself,” Mortmain went on. “You cannot reach me through the wall, but neither can I reach you. Not without dissolving the spell itself, and that would take time.” He paused. “I wished for you to feel safer.”

“If you wished me to be safe, you would have left me at the Institute.” Tessa’s tone was bone-chillingly cold.

Mortmain said nothing to that, only cocked his head and squinted at her, like a sailor squinting at the horizon. “My condolences on the death of your brother. I never meant for that to happen.”

Tessa felt her mouth twist into a terrible shape. It had been two months since Nate had died in her arms, but she had not forgotten, or forgiven. “I don’t want your pity. Or your good wishes. You made him a tool of yours, and then he died. It was your fault, as surely as if you had shot him in the street.”

“I suppose it would avail little to point out that he was the one who sought me out.”

“He was just a
boy
,” Tessa said. She wanted to sink to her knees, wanted to pound against the invisible barrier with her fists, but she held herself upright and cold. “He was not even twenty.”

Mortmain slid his hands into his pockets. “Do you know what it was like for me, when I was a boy?” he said, in as calm a tone as if he had been seated beside her at a dinner party and forced to make conversation.

Tessa thought of the images she had seen in Aloysius Starkweather’s mind.

The man was tall, broad-shouldered—and as green-skinned as a lizard. His hair was black. The child he held by the hand, by contrast, seemed as normal as a child could be—small, chubby-fisted, pink-skinned
.

Tessa knew the man’s name, because Starkweather knew it
.

John Shade
.

Shade hoisted the child up onto his shoulders as through the door of the house spilled a number of odd-looking metal creatures, like a child’s jointed dolls, but human-size, and with skin made of shining metal. The creatures were featureless. Though, oddly, they wore clothes—the rough workman’s coveralls of a Yorkshire farmer on some, and on others plain muslin dresses. The automatons joined hands and began to sway as if they were at a country dance. The child laughed and clapped his hands
.

“Look well on this, my son,” said the green-skinned man, “for one day I shall rule a clockwork kingdom of such beings, and you shall be its prince.”

“I know your adoptive parents were warlocks,” she said. “I know that they cared for you. I know that your father invented the clockwork creatures with which you are so enamored.”

“And you know what happened to them.”

—a room torn apart, cogs and cams and gears and ripped metal everywhere, fluid leaking as black as blood, and the green-skinned man and blue-haired woman lying dead among the ruins—

Tessa looked away.

“Let me tell you about my childhood,” Mortmain said. “Adoptive parents, you call them, but they were as much my parents as any amount of blood could make them. They raised me up with care and love, just as yours did you.” He gestured toward the fireplace, and Tessa realized with a dull shock that the portraits that hung on either side were portraits of her own parents: her fair-haired mother, and her thoughtful-looking father with his brown eyes and tie askew. “And then they were killed by Shadowhunters. My father wanted to create these beautiful automatons, these
clockwork creatures
, as you call them. They would be the greatest machines ever invented, he dreamed, and they would protect Downworlders against the Shadowhunters who routinely murdered and stole from them. You saw the spoils in Starkweather’s Institute.” He spat the last words. “You saw pieces of my parents. He kept my mother’s blood in a jar.”

And the remains of warlocks. Mummified taloned hands, like Mrs. Black’s. A stripped skull, utterly de-fleshed, human-looking save that it had tusks instead of teeth. Vials of sludgy-looking blood
.

Tessa swallowed.
My mother’s blood in a jar
. She could not say she did not understand his rage. And yet—she thought of Jem, his parents dying in front of him, his own life destroyed, and yet he had never sought revenge. “Yes, that was horrible,” Tessa said. “But it does not excuse the things you’ve done.”

A flicker of something deep in his eyes: rage, quickly tamped down. “Let me tell you what I’ve done,” he said. “I have created an army. An army that, once the final piece of the puzzle is in place, will be invincible.”

“And the final piece of the puzzle—”

“Is you,” said Mortmain.

“You say that over and over, and yet you refuse to explain it,” Tessa said. “You demand my cooperation and yet you tell me nothing. You have me imprisoned here, sir, but you cannot force my speech with you, or my willingness if I choose not to give it—”

“You are half-Shadowhunter, half-demon,” Mortmain said. “That is the first thing you should know.”

Tessa, already half-turned away from him, froze. “That is not possible. The offspring of Shadowhunters and demons are stillborn.”

“Yes, they are,” he said. “They are. The blood of a Shadowhunter, the runes on the body of a Shadowhunter, are death to a warlock child in the womb. But
your mother was not Marked
.”

“My mother was not a Shadowhunter!” Tessa looked wildly to the portrait of Elizabeth Gray over the fireplace. “Or are you saying she lied to my father, lied to everyone all her life—”

“She did not know,” said Mortmain. “The Shadowhunters did not know it. There was no one to tell her. My father built your clockwork angel, you know. It was meant to be a gift for my mother. It contains within it a bit of the spirit of an angel, a rare thing, something he had carried with him since the Crusades. The mechanism itself was meant to be tuned to her life, so that every time her life was threatened the angel would intervene to protect her. However, my father never had a chance to finish it. He was murdered first.” Mortmain began to pace. “My parents were not singled out for murder, of course. Starkweather and his kind delighted in slaughtering Downworlders—they grew rich off the spoils—and would take the slightest excuse to bring violence against them. For that he was hated by the Downworlder community. It was the faeries of the countryside who helped me escape when my parents were killed, and who hid me until the Shadowhunters stopped looking for me.” He took a shuddering breath. “Years later, when they decided to have their revenge, I helped them. Institutes are protected against the ingress of Downworlders, but not against mundanes, and not, of course, against automatons.”

He smiled a terrible smile.

“It was I, with the help of one of my father’s inventions, who crept into the York Institute and switched the baby in the crib there for one of mundane descent. Starkweather’s granddaughter, Adele.”

“Adele,” Tessa whispered. “I saw a portrait of her.”
A very young girl with long, fair hair, dressed in an old-fashioned child’s dress, a great ribbon surmounting her small head. Her face was thin and pale and sickly, but her eyes were bright
.

“She died when the first runes were put on her,” said Mortmain with relish. “Died screaming, as so many Downworlders had before at the hands of Shadowhunters. Now they had killed one they had come to love. A fitting retribution.”

Tessa stared at him in horror. How could anyone think that to die in agony was fitting retribution for an innocent child? She thought of Jem again, his hands gentle on his violin.

“Elizabeth, your mother, grew up not knowing she was a Shadowhunter. No runes were given to her. I followed her progress, of course, and when she married Richard Gray, I made sure I employed him. I believed that the lack of runes on your mother meant that she could conceive a child who was half-demon, half-Shadowhunter, and to test that theory I sent a demon to her in the shape of your father. She never knew the difference.”

Only the emptiness in Tessa’s stomach kept her from being sick. “You—did
what
—to my mother? A demon? I am half-demon?”

“He was a Greater Demon, if that comforts you. Most of them were angels once. He was fair enough in his own aspect.” Mortmain smirked. “Before your mother became pregnant, I had worked for years to finish my father’s clockwork angel. I finished it, and after you were conceived, tuned it to
your
life. My greatest invention.”

“But why would my mother be willing to wear it?”

“To save you,” said Mortmain. “Your mother realized that something was wrong when she became pregnant. To carry a warlock child is not like carrying a human child. I came to her then and gave her the clockwork angel. I told her that wearing it would save her child’s life. She believed me. I was not lying. You are immortal, girl, but you are not invulnerable. You can be killed. The angel is tuned to your life; it is
designed
to save you if you are dying. It may have saved you a hundred times before you were ever born, and it’s saved you since. Think of the times you have been close to death. Think of the way it intervened.”

Tessa thought back—the way her angel had flown at the automaton choking her, had fended off the blades of the creature that had attacked her near Ravenscar Manor, had kept her from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of the ravine. “But it did not save me from torture, nor injury.”

“No. For those are part of the human condition.”

“So is death,” said Tessa. “I am not human, and you let the Dark Sisters torture me. I could never forgive you for that. Even if you convinced me my brother’s death was his fault, that Thomas’s death was justified, that your hatred was reasonable, I could never forgive you for that.”

Mortmain lifted the box at his feet and upended it. There was a rattling crash as cogs fell from it—cogs and cams and gears, sheared-off bits of metal smeared with black fluid, and lastly, bouncing atop the rest of the rubbish like a child’s red rubber ball, a severed head.

Mrs. Black’s.

“I destroyed her,” he said. “For you. I wished to show you I am sincere, Miss Gray.”

“Sincere in what?” Tessa demanded. “Why did you do all this?
Why did you create me?
”

His lips twitched slightly; it was not a smile, not really. “For two purposes. The first is so that you could bear children.”

“But warlocks cannot …”

“No,” said Mortmain. “But you are no ordinary warlock. In you the blood of demons and the blood of angels has fought its own war in Heaven, and the angels have been victorious. You are not a Shadowhunter, but you are not a warlock, either. You are something new, something entirely other.
Shadowhunters
,” he spat. “All Shadowhunter and demon hybrids die, and the Nephilim are proud of it, glad that their blood will never be filthied, their lineage tainted by magic. But
you
. You can do magic. You can have children like any other woman. Not for some years yet, but when you reach your full maturity. The greatest warlocks alive have assured me of it. Together we will start a new race, with the Shadowhunters’ beauty and with no warlock mark. It will be a race that will break the Shadowhunters’ arrogance by replacing them on this earth.”

Tessa’s legs gave out. She slumped to the floor, her dressing gown pooling around her like black water. “You—you want to use me to
breed your children
?”

Now he did grin. “I am not a man without honor,” he said. “I offer you marriage. I always planned that.” He gestured at the pitiful pile of ragged metal and flesh that had been Mrs. Black. “If I can have your willing participation, I would prefer it. And I can promise I shall deal thus with all your enemies.”

My enemies
. She thought of Nate, his hand closing on hers as he died, bloody, in her lap. She thought of Jem again, the way he never railed against his fate but faced it down bravely; she thought of Charlotte, who wept over Jessamine’s death, though Jessie had betrayed her; and she thought of Will, who had laid down his heart for her and Jem to walk upon because he loved them more than he loved himself.

There was human goodness in the world, she thought—all caught up with desires and dreams, regrets and bitterness, resentments and powers, but it was there, and Mortmain would never see it.

“You will never understand,” she said. “You say that you build, that you invent, but I know an inventor—Henry Branwell—and you are nothing like him. He brings things to life; you just destroy. And now you bring me another dead demon, as if it were flowers rather than more death. You have no feelings, Mr. Mortmain, no empathy for anyone. If I had not known it before, it would have been made abundantly clear when you tried to use James Carstairs’s illness to force me to come here. Though he is dying because of you, he wouldn’t allow me to come—wouldn’t take your
yin fen
. That’s how
good
people behave.”

She saw the look on his face. Disappointment. It was only there for a moment, though, before it was wiped away with a shrewd look. “Wouldn’t allow you to come?” he said. “So I did not misjudge you; you would have done it. Would have come to me, here, out of love.”

“Not love for you.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “not for me,” and he drew from his pocket an object that Tessa recognized immediately.

She stared at the watch he held out to her, dangling on its gold chain. It was clearly unwound. The hands had long ago stopped spinning, the time seemingly frozen at midnight. The initials
J.T.S.
were carved on the back in elegant script
.