Page 76 of The Deadliest Candidate

Baudet nodded without any conviction. His face was pale, his golden hair and moustache dull despite how carefully groomed they were. He seemed a shadow of his former self, but then, so did Srivastav, and even Lautric, who had been slim and weary to begin with.

Fern herself probably did not look much better than any of them, and when she finally returned to her apartment, she collapsed onto her bed, her stomach in knots, her mind a writhing, pained thing.

Edmund’s words from earlier were finding their mark, slowly, striking her like a poisoned blade, and the poison was spreading.

He had spoken the truth, of course, and that was the most painful part. None of them had come to fail. Most of them would fail. If Josefa and Vittoria were gone, was it not for the best?

But Fern could not accept that. She could not accept Josefa, afraid in the darkness of her bedroom, or the desperate scream in the Arboretum. She could not accept Dr Essouadi’s illness.

Becoming Grand Archivist was a good thing—it would be—but everything felt wrong.

All of it. The fear and hopelessness in Baudet’s face. Edmund’s words, the truth of them, the Jathvi Empire and the Bloodspire and the Lautric House, all stabbing into Carthane all at once, Srivastav and Drei and Lautric being nothing more than blades wielded by greater forces than them.

Fern could not accept any of it. She sat up on her bed, trying to force herself to accept Carthane—the reality of it.

A black shadow slid from behind her, and Fern felt the knock of a small feline skull against her elbow.

“What should I do, Inkwell?” Fern said, her voice a croak.

Inkwell swept her with his body as he turned and left the bed. He did not feel the need to comfort Fern, it would seem, nor to provide answers. No, Fern would need to do those things herself.

Except that once she’d forced herself back to her feet, forced herself to the bathroom to drink some water and wash her face, Fern came back to find Inkwell sitting on her desk. Sitting with his little back quite straight, andhis tail waving patiently, and the glowing moons of his eyes fixed upon hers.

And when she walked to her desk, she found that the fuzzy inkblots of his black paws were resting on top of her little notepad—the one where she kept her hand-drawn map of the passageways. The passageways which would lead her, if she searched fast enough, to the Astronomy Tower from within.

“In which of your nine lives did you learn to be so wise?” Fern murmured, bending to retrieve the map from under Inkwell’s paws.

Inkwell, purring, jumped away from Fern’s desk and onto the foot of her bed, where he lay down to sleep with the contentment of one having just completed some important mission.

Armed with her daggerand her map, Fern set off once more through the passageways.

As the autumn wore on, a profound cold was beginning to settle into the stones. Wrapping her grey coat tighter around her, Fern took the now-familiar path out of the Mage Tower.

From there, she accessed the subterranean passages from the large chamber that formed the first level of Carthane’s expansive undercroft. Those corridors were lower, lit faintly by scarce torchlight, and the abhorrent stench of sewer water or the pungent, briny smell of mould and algae seeped through the stone.

Avoiding the dead-ends marked on her map, Fern headed in the direction of the Arboretum. Instead of curving left alongside the corridor, she took a right turn, guessing the direction of the Astronomy Tower.

It led her down a corridor so long it disappeared into shadows. Undaunted, Fern pursued that shadow. It evaded her for a long time, escaping her every time she reached the next distant torch.

After what seemed like an age, the shadows finally dissipated. The corridor came to an abrupt end at the foot of stone steps. Above them stood a narrow door.

After a quick note and a doodled update on her map, Fern put her things away into her pocket and cautiously ascended the steps. She lay her hand against the door and froze. She could hear sounds beyond. At first, she had assumed that it was the storm she could hear, but she had been wrong.

She pressed her ear against the wood. A deep, hoarse hum, and something else. Something low and keening, like a weak cry. Fern frowned, listening intently.

The low wail warbled, gurgled, formed misshapen words. Whatever she was hearing, it sounded like a voice, but utterly inhuman. She had thought—hoped—that she and Lautric had heard Josefa that night, and now, maybe Vittoria. But this sounded nothing like either young woman. A sharp shudder raked up Fern’s spine like the skittering of scorpions.

For a moment, she hesitated.

For a moment, she wondered if she ought to turn back.

No. When had she ever let fear get the better of her? She had been afraid of the Sentinels as a little child, butshe had still ventured through Carthane. At the orphanage, she had been afraid of the schoolmaster and the matron, but she had still snuck out to read at night when she was supposed to be asleep. When she was a student, the Sumbra doors had filled her with unspeakable dread, but she had still studied them, forced herself to stare into their dizzying abysses and converse with their disturbing creatures.

Fern grasped the door handle and pushed.

The first thing that greeted her was pure darkness. A darkness so profound it seemed to defy the very existence of light.

The second thing was the smell of blood. Thick, putrid, visceral. A smell like an abattoir, repugnant and nauseating.

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