Energy runes were all well and good, Clary thought exhaustedly as she reached the top of yet another rise of sand, but they didn’t begin to compete with a cup of coffee.

Magic continues to be thoroughly useless in this world.  No wonder people barely bother using it.

So the kids are all trudging along, except for Jace who keeps running  like he thinks a broken ankle is going to help him.  Clary interrupts to point out something on the horizon.  It’s the city that Simon saw the last night, and which Jace is already heading towards with his tracing “rune,” so why the fuck did we need to point out for a third time that they are headed towards something?  Oh, right, because padding.

Alec and Isabelle just behind him, moving fast, clambering over rock cairns, hopping small rivulets of molten slag.

It’s like the book thinks we’re in a video game where as long as you don’t touch the lava you’re safe.  Amazingly, even though they’ve complained ad nauseum about this place, there hasn’t been one single mention of heat to go along with all the viscous tar and molten slag.  They did, however, mention that they’ve only got a few bottles of water.  They should be suffering dreadfully from dehydration and heat injuries.

Jace was standing at the edge of a massive cliff that fell away before him like the edge of the Grand Canyon.

“He was standing on the edge of a cliff that was just like the edge of a cliff.”

You know, I almost miss the nonsensical similies of the first few books.  They weren’t good, but at least they weren’t half a step away from tautology.

At the bottom of the canyon is a ruined version of Alicante. Dun, dun, dun.

If this is the city they saw before and yet it’s at the bottom of a deep canyon, how did they see it on the horizon?  Is there another city off in the distance that’s more visible?

Back at the real/modern/whatever Alicante, Ex-Brother Zach and the other council members discuss the “fairies be bad” news that Emma and Julian brought them.

Oh, sorry, no, they first have to wax philosophical about the nature of families for a bit.  Because seeing Emma and Julian be concerned over the nature of their family relationship and the possibility of it being seen as lesser even though they consider it real doesn’t count unless someone comes by to explain it to you with pretty words.

Back to the plot.  Jia wants to confront the Seelie Queen but is advised against it, since knowing something when the queen doesn’t know you know it is advantageous.  Jia also has a letter from Tessa Grey and the other warlocks.  So of course she hands the letter off to the one person in the room who’s going to get mushy over it before reading it.  Because that just makes so much sense.  Apparently the warlocks have concluded that all the turned shadowhunters are technically dead and being reanimated by the cup, so this is basically just necromancy and there’s no point in trying to save them because their souls are literally not there anymore.

Well that’s just about the most inane option the book could have gone with.  All it does is make slaughtering the lot of them into a guilt-free action climax instead of anything even approaching a moral dilemma.  “Oh, noes, all of our friends and family are being forced to join the dark side!”  “Well, they’re already dead, so after we kill them again we can 100% blame the villain and not feel bad about it.”

Plus, I still can’t over this, but: the evil cup is supposed to be a literal inversion of the good cup.  Doing the exact same thing, just aligned to demons instead of angels.  What the fuck does the good cup do?  Do they give it to corpses to bring them back to life as shadowhunters?

Aw, shit, now I’ve got plotbunnies. 

They surmise that, since the evil dudes are just voodoo zombies, they can destroy the cup and re-kill all of them at once.  Zach has a plan.

The kids explore the alternate Alicante and finally come upon the Accords Hall, which has a giant pictographic history on the doors.  It’s a history that runs roughly parallel to that of the Shadowhunters on earth, except they didn’t ally with warlocks and fairies, and they didn’t have seraph blades.  Considering the fact that the ‘seraph blades’ have been pretty synonymous with ‘shiny knife,’ I don’t see how much of a difference this makes.  Hell, Clary is currently carrying around a sword with no more power than the power of sentimentality and sharp edges, and we spent a good chunk of the book on swords being awesome, so why were swords not awesome enough for these alternate people?

There’s some talk about exactly which demons are responsible for razing this place to the ground, which I doubt will amount to anything since so far a demon is a demon is a demon.  I mean, really, how much has the difference between them actually made so far?  Hell, we’ve only seen a handful of them at all thus far in the whole series.

“We didn’t go forward in time; we went sideways. This is a mirror dimension of our world. A place where history went slightly differently.” He hooked his thumbs into his belt and glanced around. “A world with no Shadowhunters.”

 “It’s like Planet of the Apes,” said Simon. “Except that was the future.”

So it’s like Planet of the Apes, except for the part where it’s not at all like Planet of the Apes?

I hate all of you.

There’s also repeated mentions of some weapon called a ‘skeptron’ that apparently still wasn’t enough to hold the demons back, and I’m sure that’ll be important later.

They go inside and find a statue of Jonathan Shadowhunter and a bunch of portentous writing.  The statue is holding a skeptron.  Huh, that turned important sooner than I thought it would.  Jace decides he wants the thing, but Simon warns him against taking it because it could be a trap.  He knows, because his gaming senses told him so.  *sigh*

The point is that when you’re playing D&D and your group comes across a heap of treasure, or a big sparkly gem, or a magical golden skull, you should never take it. It’s always a trap.”

Is that really a thing?  Because I’m used to console RP games where random drops of exactly the stuff you need conveniently appear right before the big boss battle.

Jace tries to get it anyway, and of course an alarm starts going off.  Then they get attacked by flying blob demons.

Ice had descended over Clary: the silent coldness of battle.

Ah, there’s the nonsense we’ve come to expect from these books.

Naturally, Isabelle is the one to get injured, because we still have yet to see an entire battle where Isabelle makes it to the end.  They can’t heal her before more demons show up, because her torn up leg is too bad for their useless magic to solve.  Don’t these guys go into battle all the time?  Like, for hundreds of years all the time?  And no one thought to make a magic that might actually handle the very threat they keep facing?

Clary makes a portal to take them to the cave where they spent the night, and they escape just in time.  Clary then tries to heal Isabelle with her super runes, but it still doesn’t work, likely because whatever bit her was poisonous. 

And then…Simon cuts his arm open and lets it bleed all over her leg wound, and somehow that fixes her?  No, I don’t know how, but that’s the end of the chapter so we’ll have to find out tomorrow.