Page 6 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)

Chapter six

The Body

The morning was a bleak, grey thing, as wet and cold as one of the creatures swimming the murky depths of the sea. Fern awoke early, since sleep evaded her anyhow, and dressed in thick wools and sturdy boots. She had no intention of waiting idly in her room; too many questions needed answering.

Downstairs, she found the inn hall subdued and gloomy. The fire had dwindled in the great hearth, casting only the faintest breath of warmth into the wide chamber. An elderly man slept slumped in a chair close to the fire, his hands shoved in his pockets, and the young boy from the previous night emerged from the kitchens to bring Fern a cup of strong hot tea and two slices of dark bread.

Addie was nowhere to be seen. Fern suppressed a sigh of disappointment. She had hoped to draw more information out of the old woman.

Left to her own devices, and with nothing to do in East Hemwick but wait, Fern would simply have to investigate herself .

After her breakfast, Fern wrapped herself in her scarf and coat and left the inn. Outside, the mists were clearing, swept further inland by the harsh northern wind blowing in from the sea. The smell of salt and brine and smoke filled the air like an invisible presence, almost as tangible as the crooked buildings and their rot-devoured stilts. The streets, now washed grey and green by the weak morning light, were as empty as they had been the previous night.

Burying her chin and mouth in the woollen nest of her twice-wrapped scarf, Fern set off through the streets in the direction of the pier. There would be some life there, she was sure: fishermen and dockworkers and net-menders, people she could draw into conversation. It would be a start.

She was careful to steer clear of the church on her way. She hoped to avoid the ostary altogether if she could, and besides, she would rather not have to see the symbol of the Abyssal cross unless she had to.

She had slept under the cross until she turned eighteen, and the image it depicted—a tortured Jesus on the cross with the Sumbral eye opening in the centre of his chest—was both the subject of her many adolescent nightmares as well as an unwelcome gateway into memories she wished not to revisit.

Rain had begun to fall in a thin, steady drizzle by the time she arrived at the pier, misting Fern’s eyelashes, cheeks and lips. Even the rain tasted of salt.

The pier was busier than the rest of the town, just as she had guessed it would be, but the attention of the workers was already captured by an arrival other than her own. Drawing back underneath the shelter of a flat wooden bridge connecting the upper sections of the village, Fern turned towards the longest pier, where a magnificent ship had just moored.

It was a beautiful vessel with three vast sails and a steam engine, and it dwarfed even the largest of the fishing boats docked nearby. Despite the grandeur of the ship, only two figures emerged from it, descending slowly from the gangway, one leading the other through the rain.

They stopped for a moment, glancing around them, and then glided, with identical speed and grace of movement, down the length of the pier towards the quay, where the constable stood with his shoulders squared and his countenance as unfriendly as it had been the previous night.

Fern could not hear the conversation that unfolded, though she could guess much of it, but she was too busy observing the two strangers.

A man and a woman, her age or perhaps younger, both exquisitely well-dressed in Aegean-blue travelling habits. At first, Fern might have guessed they were lovers from the way the man’s hand stayed protectively draped over the woman’s back, or the way the woman looked up at him, up-tilting her head in an expression of respect bordering on adoration.

But as the couple concluded their conversation with the constable, they set off from the quay and passed close to the bridge beneath which Fern was sheltered. She noted first the colour of their hair beneath the hoods of their greatcoats, a vivid red like polished copper hit with low sunrays, then their resemblance: delicate faces marked with a curious harshness, and large, emotive eyes.

Immediately, Fern realised her error. They were not a couple—they were siblings.

Pieces of their conversation reached her as they passed by.

“—have no intention of staying in this sad, dirty little place any longer than I have to.”

“Perhaps this is Carthane’s way of testing us.”

“We’ve been tested enough, Teddy.” The woman’s tone was lazy, almost playful, but there was a tightness to the way she spoke that indicated true emotion.

“And have we not endured, dear sister? What’s one more test?”

“We’ve been saying this all our lives.”

They stopped suddenly, and the man took the woman’s face in his hands with a surge of tenderness so fierce it startled Fern back against the icy stone wall behind her.

“And have we ever failed?” the man asked.

His sister shook her head. Her eyes never left his. “Of course not.”

“And what do we do?”

She answered softly, so softly Fern almost missed her reply. “What we must.”

“And what’s the only thing that matters in the end?”

“Only us.”

“Only us.”

They walked away, disappearing in the direction of the inn, but Fern stood frozen for a long time, with the strange feeling that she had just witnessed a great and terrible oath.

“Strange business, Miss, and no mistaking it. I didn’t see the body myself, mind, but my two sons, they were collecting driftwood when the commotion happened. A frightful sight it was, they said, and my boys are not so easily affrighted—the sea’s not for the faint of heart, and we live in the shadow of the Library; what should come of us if our nerves were as easily startled as those of you city folks—without meaning to cause offence.”

The fisherman tugged on the floppy edge of his hat. He sat near the door of an open hangar on the edge of the quay, greasing the mechanism of his harpoon gun without even looking at it.

Despite his age, despite how frayed the sleeves of his thick woollen jumper were or how salt-crusted his boots and hair seemed, there was a certain liveliness to the man that Fern rather liked.

“Is it possible the body might belong to someone from East Hemwick?” Fern asked.

The fisherman shook his head, paused and took a sip of tar-black coffee from the paper cup resting precariously between cracks in the ancient cobblestone.

“Not on your life, Miss. Around here, we know the sea too well to let her take us, and our children learn from us. Corpses in East Hemwick belong to the earth, not to the sea. My boys—they’re eight-and-twenty and four-and-twenty—they’ve never once seen a body like this one. The sea washes up all sorts of things on our shores, Miss, but not bodies, not like that. ”

“Do you think the ostary will learn the identity of the body?”

“No, Miss, he never will.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s investigating East Hemwick, but the truth of the matter is that the osta—the oss…”

The fisherman had looked up at something behind Fern, the word cracking then fading in his mouth. His eyes had widened then narrowed, and his calloused hand tightened around the barrel of his harpoon gun. Fern turned.

A new figure had appeared on the other side of the quay.

Fern took an instinctive step back, her heel catching on the cobblestone. Silence had fallen over the small port, a silence so heavy it seemed to even send the crashing waves receding back into the horizon.

The figure was short and slim in stature, but it needed neither strength nor height to send people stumbling out of its path. It wore plain white robes; a simple mask of silver covered its face. Pale light emanated from the twin almond-shaped holes of the eyes, glowing faintly.

The unmistakable eyes of an ostary.

Fern’s jaw clenched shut, and a shiver ran all the way through her body despite the warmth of her woollen clothing. She wrapped her coat tighter about her and said, “Thank you, I should—”

The fisherman gave a quick nod. “Go. If you round the hangar, you’ll see stairs leading to the seastrand. Follow it around and you’ll find a stone path back up to the village. ”

Fern expressed her gratitude with a deep nod, and then she turned swiftly and left, following the fisherman’s instructions. She imagined the quay workers hoped they could do the same, but the ostary had already approached one of them, and all the others scattered. It reminded Fern of watching mice run away after one of them had been caught in the jaws of a cat—part saviour, part sacrifice.

She descended the set of steep stone stairs leading down to the seastrand, which lay like a thick ribbon of dull gold between the crashing waves and the village.

The tide was low, and in their wake, the waves had left all sorts of little forgotten treasures. Driftwood and chips of seashells, shattered by tide and time, tangles of seaweed, brown bladderwrack bubbling with vesicles and dulse gleaming gelatinous red.

Was this where the body had washed up? Fern walked slowly alongside the tidemark, searching the sand and seaweeds without meaning to. She found nothing, of course. There was nothing her eyes, sharp though they were, would find that the ostary’s magically enhanced ones would not have detected in mere seconds.

It pained Fern to return to the inn without any answers, but what choice did she have?

Fern’s mind was constructed so that every question felt to her as though it must be answered, like a fire that must be put out if she did not wish it to burn her. But this one, it would seem, must remain unextinguished, searing away at the edges of her mind.

Even an ostary of the Reformed Vatican couldn’t solve this mystery—what chance did she stand ?

And yet something small and irksome nibbled at her thoughts. Did the villagers of East Hemwick know more than they let on? Perhaps, like her, they could not ignore the coincidental timing of Carthane hiring a new Grand Archivist, the arrival of the candidates, and the dead body from the sea. How could those things not be connected?

But of course, it was the nature of the human mind to form patterns out of chaos. Sometimes, chaos was only chaos.

When Fern got back to the inn, after a long walk on the seastrand and a gloomy dinner in a small pub near the train station, she found Addie at the bar, scratching at her accounts book with a dry pen.

Addie looked up, and her greeting was blunt.

“You’re back. Found the answers to all your questions, have you?”

Fern walked up to the bar, and her reply was just as blunt.

“Do you think the murderer is one of us?”

Addie gave a short harsh laugh. “What does it matter? The Library has struck its fist. The ostary will return to its marble monastery, the constable back to his desk, and you and your ilk have been summoned. Better make haste, Miss Sullivan. This job of yours, it would seem, is worth dying for.”

And this , Fern thought, is how rumours are born . Addie’s words were the beat of the butterfly’s wings that meant somewhere in New Copenhagen, someone as clever and wise as Oscar could be caught in a hurricane of rumours. It would not surprise Fern if Addie were paid to say such things to strangers. Wasn’t that the surest way to keep interlopers at bay? A battlement not of stone and mortar but of lies and fear.

“Perhaps it’s not the job that’s worth dying for,” Fern answered solemnly, “but the pursuit of knowledge.”

Addie’s sharp eyes shone with amusement. “I think you mean the pursuit of power, my girl.”

“Ambition and curiosity are two very different things.”

“Not so different as you imagine. Both of them brought you here, after all.”

Despite the harshness of her words, there was no unkindness in Addie’s voice. The boy came downstairs, carrying Fern’s suitcase and Inkwell’s wicker carrier, and Addie herself walked Fern out.

“It’s not too late to turn back,” she said, opening the door for Fern.

“I have no wish to turn back.”

“No,” said Addie. “None of you ever do.”