Page 16 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)

Chapter sixteen

The Threads

Fern barely slept that night, and though she would have liked to spend some of that time mapping out the passageways, she was too nervous to risk it. Vittoria had said Sarlet and the Sentinels had handled the creature, but it had still managed to hurt her in the first place; Fern simply had too much to do to afford being set back by an injury.

She tried to get some work done but was too restless and tired to focus. In the end, she sat by the window, where Inkwell slept on a small blue cushion on the windowsill. Placing herself as close to Inkwell as she could without disturbing him, Fern leaned her cheek against her folded arms and gazed outside.

A high moon shone through a thin veil of mist, casting a bone-white pallor over the towers and trees of Carthane. Everything was silent aside from the distant crackling of her fireplace and the wind murmuring outside the windows.

Fern’s mind worked through the recent events, filing them tidily away .

Lautric borrowing Sumbra books from Vittoria. Edmund offering Josefa an alliance, Josefa turning him down. The creature breaching one of the Gateways, the attack on Vittoria. Vasili Drei’s strange questions, his confident knowledge of Sumbra. Baudet blaming Lautric for what happened to Vittoria, his threat should she not survive.

And with those things, the others, too. Fern’s missing mentor. The muttered threat outside her door the night of her arrival. East Hemwick, the body and the ostary.

Related or not, those things were all linked to one another by Carthane, and through Carthane, to Fern.

Is this the legacy she would inherit, she wondered, when she succeeded in her candidacy? She had always thought of Carthane as its library, but that library did not exist in isolation. It was connected, like the threading network of veins, to all the parts of it Fern was coming to discover. Its Grand Archivists, its neighbouring town, its visitors. Its books and Gateways, the sea it crouched above.

By becoming part of Carthane, would Fern find herself connected to all those things, too?

The prospect was uneasy. Fern blinked at Inkwell, who sat so close to her without touching her. Inkwell was her closest companion, but she could only be close to him because there was only so close she could get to the little black creature. It was how she preferred her connections: always at an arm’s length, always remote enough that she could extricate herself from any relationship without pain.

Another lesson she had learned at St Jerome’s, and another lesson she would not soon forget.

Breakfast the following morning was tense. Everyone ate in silence. Emmeline and Edmund alone conversed, Emmeline reclining against the back of her chair while Edmund spread jam over her toast and spooned sugar into her coffee. Emmeline was pale—paler than normal, with her long hair a shock of red—and Fern wondered if she had overstretched herself trying to purge the poison from Vittoria’s blood the previous night.

When her brother handed her a slice of toast, she pushed his hand away. Edmund shook his head.

“Emmy. You must eat.”

“No. I feel nauseous.”

“I know,” her brother murmured. “I’m sorry. You should have let me do it instead of you.”

Emmeline gave her brother a curving, indolent smile. “But then you would feel ill, and I’m altogether too impatient to look after you.”

She reached for her brother’s face, brushed two fingers down his cheek, over his jaw. The expression in her eyes was one of such complete and utter adoration, it made Fern’s stomach drop to witness it.

She herself was not a naturally affectionate person, and though she valued honesty in all things, even love, she could not imagine ever looking at anyone the way Emmeline looked at her brother. Let alone so openly, in front of so many strangers.

But the twins did not seem remotely concerned about their surroundings. In fact, they seemed to not even be aware that they were not alone in the dining room. Edmund handed his sister the toast, which she ate reluctantly, and he kissed the back of her hand when she finished an entire slice.

This affectionate scene unfolded in stark contrast to the rest of the table. Josefa ate her breakfast stooped over her books. Dr Essouadi looked as though she had barely slept—no wonder. Baudet, in an ornate blue suit, had come only to fetch some food to bring to the recovering Vittoria. General Srivastav, normally so warm and friendly, seemed distracted and anxious as he finished his food, excusing himself and leaving the table without waiting for Dr Essouadi, which he normally did.

Vasili Drei, eschewing food, had taken his coffee with him in a paper cup. And as for Lautric, seemingly always last to rise, Fern left the dining room before he had even arrived.

She tried not to concern herself with the other candidates as she worked that day. She could tell Baudet was deeply concerned about Vittoria; she guessed he liked her rather more than as just an ally. Baudet disliked Lautric, despite working together. The twins cared deeply for one another; Josefa seemed keen to avoid both of them.

All Fern saw was the threads, the network of veins she had imagined the previous night, spreading between the candidates.

Those veins would only become thicker, stronger, until the candidates became inextricably tied to one another in a thorny tangle of love and hate. It would make the candidacy not only difficult but complicated. Personal .

It was not a mistake Fern would make. She would remain focused, level-headed, and above all things, professional .

Fern spent the day sunk into her work in a quiet corner of the Alchemy Wing, pausing only briefly for coffee at noon and a quick dinner. Before she even realised how much time had passed, the distant chiming of the midnight bell echoed through Carthane, startling her.

She stretched her arms, wriggling her fingers in the air, and glanced behind her. She caught a glimpse of gold brocade as General Srivastav hurried out, seemingly the last candidate to leave. In his wake, the Alchemy Wing was utterly silent; half the lamps had been extinguished.

Fern imagined Srivastav, like the other candidates, was not particularly keen to stay within the library too late after what had happened to Vittoria.

Although part of her was tempted to follow the general’s suit, she was engrossed in her reading and making good progress on her research. The book she was currently working through detailed notable uses of Blood Alchemy before its criminalisation. A collection of gory, sinister stories, abominable acts committed for the sake of power.

Like the case of the Isle of Erebus, the old prison which had been purchased by a rich alchemist. He had used the prisoners to conduct horrifying experiments designed to prolong his own existence. The prisoners suffered countless atrocities at his hands over several decades, until the Reformed Vatican finally intervened and shut it down.

Now, the Isle of Erebus was little more than a collection of crumbling ruins, but the alchemist himself had remained a respected member of the Guild of Alchemy until he died, facing no consequences for what he had done.

Or the case of House Morgraine, one of the oldest noble arcane families in France.

They had infamously used Blood Magic to fetter their servants to them, making them little more than bloodbound slaves, and had slowly expanded their reach, binding first their lieges to them, then their standing army, then their allies. This had allowed them to amass untold power and wealth, but their ambition had fatally led to the very demise of their house, and, eventually, to the banning of Blood Alchemy by law.

Though it turned Fern’s stomach to read the details of these stories, there was something perversely compelling about the tales, and she read on long after the midnight bell. She was determined to finish the book and complete her research on Blood Alchemy before turning in for the night.

A noise drifted towards her, low and keening, like a mournful cry.

Fern looked up, her heart missing a beat. Everything was silent. But she had heard something—hadn’t she?

She waited, head turned in the direction of the doorway. Nothing moved. Outside, the wind caressed the window, bringing with it the sound of the ocean, the deep rushing pulse of waves like a great heartbeat .

Fern turned back towards her book, but she could no longer concentrate on the words. Whether the sound had been real or not, the attack on Vittoria Orsini was—she could not ignore that . She checked her watch. Three o’clock in the morning. She had stayed up longer than she intended anyway.

She packed hastily and left. On her way back to the Mage Tower, she did not hear the strange, keening noise again. As she passed the entrance to the Gallery, the dark, magnetic pull of a distant Gateway tugged at her without insistence, and was easy enough to ignore this time, but she hastened her step. She remembered all too well the sight of Vittoria’s sea-foam green gown splattered with blood, and her own fear of Sumbral creatures still lingered within her.

She had just reached the entrance atrium when she heard another noise.

She froze.

The sound of heavy footsteps. Sentinels? Or something else?

Dipping behind one of the enormous pillars of dark marble, Fern let the shadows conceal her. The footsteps drew closer.

Her fear burst to life in her chest, a sensation like needles pricking her skin. What if something had slipped through a Gateway again? What if the Sentinels had failed to catch whatever had attacked Vittoria, or what if it had escaped?

Fern had only encountered one such creature once before, when she was a student. She’d been studying an ancient Gateway in the ruins of a French monastery—the same monastery where she’d found Inkwell. In the middle of the night, the entire expedition awoke, shocked with nausea, and a horrible sense of inversion, of the world being turned inside out.

At first, nobody had noticed that something had passed through the Gateway. Then there were screams. Fern, only twenty-two at the time, had gone in search of the expedition lead, a historian and a powerful mage, when she’d come face to face with the creature.

It was no larger than a dog, though it did not resemble anything Fern had ever seen in her life. A mass of black sinew, a writhing black aura that reeked like a pestilence. Within the wet mass of the body, a network of phosphorescent veins pulsing, oozing sallow melted light.

Above all, Fern remembered the gaping maw, with its rows of jagged teeth, the humming of its voice like a distorted grunt of pain, and its eyes, voids of darkness without end, without comprehension, without anything but pure, mindless malevolence.

Before Fern could even open her mouth to scream, before the creature could even move, the historian-mage appeared on the other side of the beast and sent a silver arrow whistling through the air.

It pierced the place between the creature’s eyes, sending it flying in a streak of shadow and phosphorescence, sinew and blood losing form before the creature could even hit the ground. It died without shape, a black, amorphous, repulsive nothing.

Seven years had passed since, but the memory of it still chilled the marrow in Fern’s bones.

Those creatures were not like Lautric henchmen, easily fought off. If she bumped into one now, Fern might not be as lucky as Vittoria. The best she could hope was to buy herself enough time for the Sentinels to alert Sarlet, so she pressed herself into the shadows behind the pillar and raked her mind for a defensive incantation.

The footsteps grew louder. Then a smell crept towards her. Not the stench she remembered from the monastery, but something different. Mud, frost, and an odd botanical smell, like caraway.

Finally a shadow, elongated and multiplied by the night gas lamps, slid into view. The figure drew closer. Fern thought suddenly of Oscar, of his warnings, and the dagger he had given her.

The dagger that was hidden in its safe place, where it would be utterly unable to keep her safe from whatever was lurking within Carthane.