Page 46 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)
Chapter forty-six
The Tower
That night, after she’d left Baudet in the capable hands of Dr Essouadi and then checked on Inkwell, Fern made her way back to the Astronomy Tower. She was certain she would find answers there. Part of her hoped she might even find the missing candidates, even those the Grand Archivists told them had left Carthane.
And perhaps it was wishful thinking, and perhaps Fern was merely desperate to right whatever wrongs she sensed had happened in the course of the candidacy, but once she reached the door at the end of the tunnel, she mustered all her strength to cast the spell.
The first attempt was strong; the ward shivered but held. Inside Fern, every nerve was a scream, every pain receptor begging for respite. Fern had no choice but to carry on. She cast the spell again and again until she lost track of time. After a while, all she knew was the incantation, the pain, the fire, and the trembling ward behind the door. She felt it shake and marvelled at how easily it withstood the flame that seemed to flail her alive every time she held it .
But with each incantation, she drew deeper within herself. She thought of Josefa’s frightened voice in the darkness, and the scream in the Arboretum, and Baudet’s empty eyes when Vittoria had disappeared, and Edmund’s wrath, which would need answering sooner or later.
She reached deep into her reserves and pulled with all her might. And each time, she withstood the pain longer; her flames grew brighter.
She blasted the ward until it glowed a violent purple, revolting against the assault. Fern’s hands and fingers were raw with pain, as though the flesh had been burnt off and the living tissue underneath it was exposed. The pain of her injured arm from the night she’d discovered the ward seemed a long-forgotten discomfort now, swallowed by the agony of the fire.
Her vision swam and she paused to breathe, to still herself. She sensed she was reaching the bottom of the well within her, and there was only so much left for her to use. This was it—all she had left.
This was it.
She began the incantation anew, calling out the ancient words, her voice hoarse to the point of breaking. She pooled the fire and commanded it to obey her, slamming the force of her pain inwards like battlements, caging the fire.
And then she threw her arms forward and blasted the ward. Crimson flames burst from her hands, drawing a guttural scream of pain from her.
The wall of the ward shuddered and shimmered, turning purple before cracking .
It was what Fern had been waiting for. She drew, and drew deep. She felt her powers stretch and snap, frittered away by the force of the spell. Still, she drew, until the fire was clawing at the ward, ripping into it, tearing it to shreds. At the edges of her power, Wild Magic called, a tempting, replete pool of power. Fern, for a mad moment, considered it.
The ward flickered, glimmered, disappeared.
Fern’s vision went black. As it did, she thought she heard a scream, and it sounded like her mother. But her mother was dead, and had died a long time ago, and Fern was all alone, the way she had been most of her life, all alone as she went pitching through the air and crumbling to the ground.
Fern came to, her face pressed against stone. She blinked. Every part of her body throbbed, her insides smouldered with leftover pain. Her injured arm ached, sending wave after wave of pain crashing into her. It was what had tugged her awake.
With a grunt of exertion, she dragged herself upright. Her bones felt sore and hollow, as though the marrow had been scraped out. She had dug too deep into her source of energy; she dared not think about the damage she had potentially done.
Teetering to her feet at the bottom of the steps, she looked up at the door.
The ward was gone, giving way to a ravenous darkness that seemed to absorb any light that dared touch it. Fern’s stomach clenched, her pulse throbbing in her neck. She was more afraid than she had imagined she would be. The encroaching darkness and the smell of blood, thick and pungent, turned her stomach.
Whatever was in the Astronomy Tower could not be good. But there was only one way for her to go, and that was through the jaw of the doorways and into the mouth of darkness awaiting her.
She pulled the dagger free from its sheath.
The handle of bone and gold was comfortingly solid in her fist just as it had been earlier—a reminder of Oscar, an unexpected anchor to her past life, to the quiet security of the existence she had left behind.
Step by slow step, Fern ascended the stairs and crossed the doorway into the Astronomy Tower.
It took her a moment to adjust to the darkness. She was in a large, circular room, narrow windows casting blades of sickly light across the floor. Little by little, she made out details: furniture shoved back against the wall, tables stacked high with books, translucent tatters of cobweb dangling between the corners of bookcases.
The more her eyes adjusted to the light, the more obvious it became to Fern that there was no sign of collapsed rock or structural damage, which she had expected. The collapse that had killed her parents must have been repaired, a long time ago, it seemed. She swallowed back a wave of discomfort and nausea. Her mouth and throat were full of the stench of blood. Another smell, too: the wild, sharp tang of frost and the smell of dirt or rot.
Fern grasped her dagger so hard her hand ached.
Tracing the wall with the tip of her blade, she stepped cautiously around the room until the tip of her shoes hit stone. A step. She peered at the darkness awaiting her.
A staircase.
She climbed the spiral cautiously. The next floor was the same. Tables and chairs stacked back against the shelf-covered walls, books piled high on floors and tables. Still, there was no sign of the collapse which had killed her parents.
Level after level, Fern made her way up the Astronomy Tower and stopped after a few floors, glancing around at the circular chamber.
More books. What were they doing here?
She stepped closer to a window, lifting books to the faint ray of light cast by the distant moon. Heavy leather-bound tomes, their covers blank. No titles, no author names.
She opened one book, flipping through page after page of nigh-illegible scribblings. Incantations? But where had they come from? Why were they left here, discarded, unnamed, and unarchived?
An icy wind slid past her, yanking a sudden shudder out of her. A draft swept the room, engulfing itself towards the staircase. It was coming from further up the tower.
By that point, Fern was certain the tower was empty. She hadn’t heard so much as a whisper since passing the doorway far below. A dull, heavy silence reigned. And the higher up Fern went, the stronger the smell from earlier.
Blood, rot, something else.
Something here was wrong .
Fern could not explain what, not even to herself. The darkness was hungry, and the smell of blood seemed both fresh and old all at once. Fern could not help the sense that something terrible had happened here. The rooms, apart from being untidy and hastily rearranged, were clean, free of blood. So where was the smell coming from?
It was carried on the icy draught, which was coming from the top of the tower.
She couldn’t be far now. She climbed on.
Fern finally arrived in a large, circular room topped with a dome of glass. The top of the tower. There was no astronomical equipment, no desk, no chair, no book. Instead, in the centre of the room, was a Gateway.
It was an unregistered Gateway. No symbol of any kind was carved into the rough-hewn stone of its archway. Under Sumbral Laws, all Gateways were marked with a symbol and entered into a register; this was a new Gateway, probably made illegally. A dangerous Gateway, pouring forth malice and darkness—a hungry, grasping darkness.
Fern’s stomach clenched. She heaved, swallowing back a wave of nausea.
In front of the Gateway was a splatter of blood. A splatter of blood so enormous, so violent that it had slashed across the length of the room on all sides. It stained the walls all the way up across the glass of the domed ceiling, turning the moonlight crimson.