Page 1 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)
Chapter one
The Librarian
Fern Sullivan was sitting in a private cabin on the train from Santico to New Copenhagen, a book in her hands, when the cabin lights went out in their golden fixtures.
The book was old, its red leather binding faded by time, its pages thin with use. A musty odour rose from it, and the text was illustrated with sinister, grotesque engravings.
There was only one copy of this book in the world, and Fern had just gone to great lengths to retrieve it. She placed the book back into its cloth wrapping, set it aside and stood. The cabin door slid open in a whisper, the sound swallowed by the rumbling of the train’s engines, and two men entered the cabin.
One wore a suit of dust-grey tweed, and the other was in black. In the shadow of the darkened cabin, their movements were slow and cautious, their faces solemn. Fern turned to the man in the grey suit and raised her hands in a pacifying gesture.
“Hector,” she said calmly. “Don’t do this. Turn back. ”
Hector Boussard’s eyes, the murky brown of ambergris, narrowed. He was a stout, proud man, and he did not like being addressed by his first name, but Fern had encountered him so many times in her line of duty that she now considered him something closer to a colleague than a stranger.
“Give me the book, Miss Sullivan, and this doesn’t have to be unpleasant.”
“The book belongs to the library of Vestersted, and that is where it shall return.”
“My employer paid good money for it,” Boussard said.
“Your master ought to know better than to waste his money on stolen goods.”
Boussard had not moved, but his companion, who had cropped hair and dark, darting eyes, stepped in her direction. He was new; he did not know her well enough. Fern disliked open confrontation, and more still she disliked having to defend herself—but she would do what she must to secure the book and bring it back to her library.
“Turn back,” she said to the men. “I won’t ask you again.”
The man in the black clothing turned to Boussard, who gave a curt nod. “ Vas-y .”
The black-clad man sprang forward first; he was young and quick. Fern sidestepped him and planted the point of her dagger into the pit of his arm. She thrust, and a strangled yell gurgled from him. He fell back hard.
The injury was not fatal, but the poison on her blade would ensure the man would stay down. Boussard was undeterred .
He darted past his fallen companion and grabbed Fern’s throat, opening his mouth in an incantation. She hated being touched, but her disgust was swept aside by the urgency of her situation; she could not let him finish his incantation.
Boussard, like her, was born with modest reserves of power—but the spells he knew, he knew well, and the lawfulness of his magic use was not a scruple that particularly concerned him. Swallowing back a wave of fear, Fern smashed the pommel of her dagger square into his Adam’s apple before the words could finish forming on his tongue.
He stumbled back, coughing. His fingers were still on her throat, but his grip had slackened. It was all she needed. Slamming aside his arms, she threw her fist into his face, the pommel of her dagger crunching into Boussard’s jaw. He lurched back with a grunt, then forward in a heavy step, arm lashing out. The back of his hand caught the side of Fern’s face with a dull smack; instead of reeling back, she fell into him, driving her arm up, thrusting her blade into Boussard’s side.
“Bitch!” he hissed, face livid with pain.
He fell back, his expression surprised as his legs buckled underneath him. Boussard was always surprised, no matter how many times their encounters ended this way. His hand rose to his side, gloved fingers fluttering over the pulse of red staining his suit, and then fell away limply. He grew slack and stopped moving.
Fern knelt by him, quickly patting his trouser pockets. Nothing. She checked the inside of his jacket—a card, which she pocketed. Finally, she retrieved the cloth-bound parcel from the green velvet seat, propping it under her arm as she crossed the cabin towards the doorway.
She paused, turning back to the man, and gave him a weary look. His mouth was wide, and his eyes were glassy as he stared up at her.
“I’m not a bitch,” she clarified. “I’m a librarian.”
Fern arrived in New Copenhagen a day behind schedule, just before sunrise. It had rained throughout the night, and the clouds stifled the light of dawn so that it was no more than a faint glow of ashen light rising on the horizon.
Outside the train station, the smell of New Copenhagen greeted her: wet stone, murky brine and fresh bread. She paused to take a deep breath and felt immediately soothed.
She checked her wristwatch: less than an hour until the start of her shift. She’d barely slept on the train after reporting the attack to the train constable, and she’d been forced to complete a flurry of paperwork to notify the Reformed Vatican of the incident. Not that much would come of it: Boussard’s employees were generous patrons of the church.
Now, there was no time to go home to sleep and change as she had intended to do with her spare day. In her three years at Vestersted Library, Fern had never arrived late for work; she had no intention of starting now .
She set off from the station and took her breakfast in her usual café, a quiet place two streets away from her library and facing the planetarium. Before leaving, she checked herself in the bathroom mirror. Despite travelling overnight, she’d taken the utmost care to maintain the tidiness of her appearance. Her blonde hair was tied back and pinned away from her face, her trousers and shirt were free of creases, and her grey mohair coat brushed clean of the merest speck of mud or dust.
Signs of tiredness marred her face—a dimness in her grey eyes, a low, dull flush in her cheeks—but that couldn’t be helped. She gave her reflection a little nod and left the bathroom.
It was five minutes to eight o’clock when she passed the line of columns outside Vestersted Library.
Sunlight fell through the entrance in three rectangles of light, turning the dark wood of the antique parquet a deep, gleaming amber. Fern greeted the guards with a wave, signed herself in and swept down the spiral staircase into the archival rooms.
She loved the silence of those chambers, a silence like consecration, as though books were as sacred as any relic. It was only now that she was here that she felt as though she’d succeeded in her mission.
She laid her parcel on a worktable, unwrapped the cloth binding, and took the book into her hands, brushing her fingers lightly over the title, which was almost faded now. Symbolism of In-Between Doors .
Arthur Sheldrake and Salman Schuster, its authors, spent their lives writing this book—travelling the world, visiting every known Sumbral Gateway, methodically recording the symbols marking each one. By law, every Gateway was required to be marked with indicative sigils, but the Reformed Vatican jealously kept the secret of these sigils.
It was rumoured that they had tried to stop Sheldrake and Schuster in their mission, and perhaps they had succeeded. Both men died under mysterious circumstances while travelling to the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya; their book was published posthumously. The Reformed Vatican had used the full extent of its power to prevent copies from being printed, and so only one copy of the book was in existence.
And finally, it was in her hands.
Fern flipped through the delicate pages. It was by sheer force of professionalism that she resisted taking the book home to read it before archiving it. Doing so would make her no better than any other book thief in the world.
She had waited a long time to get her hands on this book; now she would wait her turn just as any civilised scholar ought to.
With great care and reverence, she placed the book into the tray for registering, numbering and filing, and left the archival wing. With any luck, the the book would be processed by the end of the week, and Fern would finally be able to read the book she had spent almost a year hunting down.
It was one of the final two books she needed to read for her research.
The second of those books was further out of her reach than any black-market dealer in the world: it was in the Carthane Athenaeum.