Page 2 of The Deadliest Candidate

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, proppingit 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 NewCopenhagen 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, everyGateway 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.

Chapter two

The Letter

Fern’s morning passed accordingto the rigid routine set out in her diary.

She was a scholar working in one of the oldest libraries in the Northwest Union: it was only too easy to get lost in the shadows of wooden archways, in the feathery silence of blue carpets and ancient tomes, amongst the velvet of slow-gathering dust and the dull glow of gas lamps over bronze railings.

But Fern was not in Vestersted just as a book lover, she was there as one of its Head Librarians, responsible for the uppermost floor, every book that lived there and every librarian working amongst its shelves and pillars, a responsibility she took as seriously as any saint’s vocation.

Fern was in her office investigating the latest report for missing books on her floor—a staggering number given the considerable effort Vestersted Library put into vetting its card-holding members. As usual, most of the titles on the list were books linked to Sumbra, the subject of the Gateways, the cosmic space beyond themand its entities. Just like the Gateways themselves, books pertaining to Sumbra were strictly chartered and controlled by the Reformed Vatican.

Three more books had gone missing since Fern had set off to Santico. So many, so fast. She sighed and let her head roll back over the brown leather of her chair. Her tiredness sank upon her, almost surprising her. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. Exhaustion was no excuse to be idle. Not when books were missing.

Especially books on the subject of Sumbra, with the Reformed Vatican keeping an ever-watchful eye on libraries across the world.

---