Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

She had been punched in the face by a ghost, nearly trampled by another, had a few try to drink her dry of blood like something out of a story from the Before.

  But she had never seen anything like this.

  There was something behind her. She whirled and there was nothing there.

  Invisible? she thought wildly. Can they even—

  She stood a moment, scanning the ledge, her heart banging at her ribs like it wanted out. “Nothing,” she whispered. The sound of her voice comforted her. She said it louder. “It was nothing.”

  She turned back and was lifted bodily from the ledge and slammed up against the wall.

  The air flew out of her with an ugly sound. For a second she hung there, too stunned both in her muscles and her mind to fight.

  This ghost was stronger than her. Stronger than the Catchkeep-priest. Stronger than the shrine-dogs, who were bred to reach two hundred pounds of solid muscle, their heads as high as her shoulder.

  She could not get it in focus. Had she hit her head that hard? It was still holding her pinned against the rock face of Execution Hill. It would have made much more sense if it wasn’t a ghost at all, if someone had followed her up here, someone from town who had finally decided to try their luck at doing her in, maybe a friend of that last poor dead upstart, wanting revenge, or a friend of one of next year’s, looking to better someone’s chances. It wasn’t like she lacked for enemies. But there were the other ghosts, all turning toward it, half-yearning half-terror, and there was a sort of dark light rising off of it like steam, feeding back and back along the rock where the other ghosts drew it up shuddering, and anyway since when had anyone in town been an upstart’s friend—

  “Start talking,” said the ghost, its voice perilously calm.

  Wasp’s mouth fell open. If this wasn’t already wholly beyond the realm of her experience, it certainly was now. “I—what—”

  The ghost stared at her. She stared back.

  Chooser help her, she was about to die and some part of her mind had detached itself to take field notes.

  male specimen. died young. not all that much older than me really.

  weird voice, gone rusty, like it doesnt get used much.

  some kind of uniform. dark. boots. havent seen it before.

  gray eyes. angrylooking. mostly. something else in there. hurt? shocked? down deep. cant really make it out.

  dont look like ghost eyes.

  The ghost narrowed them at her. “Clarify.”

  It sounded like the Catchkeep-priest when Wasp was halfway between a failed escape attempt and a whipping. Only much, much worse.

  It was now or never. She slashed up hard with the harvesting-knife and the ghost let go. She tucked her legs to hit the ledge rolling and came up blade-first, strangely disoriented and shaking her head to clear it.

  To her satisfaction, there was a long tear in the ghost’s coat-sleeve, issuing a steady runnel of silver. The ghost either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  Off behind it, one or two of the other ghosts, full to bursting with that strange dark light, exploded into silver sparks like a dry scorchweed blossom stomped. The others scattered back into the rock.

  “Back off,” she shouted at it. Her voice shook, but her knife-hand did not. “That’s not a warning I give twice.”

  The ghost advanced a step and froze there. Its image seemed to stutter somehow in mid-stride, flickering. When it spoke again, its tone of voice had changed.

  “We’re leaving. Right now.”

  Wasp was reaching her limit. She burst out laughing. “The hell we are.”

  The ghost just gave her that wordless stare. She’d thought she’d seen hauteur on the Catchkeep-priest before. That was nothing, nothing at all, to this.

  She calculated. Her chances didn’t look good. There was the saltlick, and there was the jar. The jar whose lid had gone over the edge and was now two hundred feet below, clay shards among scree. The saltlick which she’d have to get through the ghost to reach. Even with all her tools at her disposal, and uninjured, could she bind this thing? She was beginning to sorely doubt it.

  “The plan changed,” said the ghost. “Get up.”

  Get up?

  “Look, I don’t know where you think you are,” she said carefully, “or who you think I am, but—”

  The ghost took another step. Wasp knew the look in its eyes. It was the look she gave upstarts on that final approach before they came under her blade. She threw her body aside as the ghost strode toward her, nearly tipping herself over the ledge. The harvesting-knife came up bloodied, and so did her forearm. She hissed annoyance between her teeth and began sidling around, trying to interpose her body and blade between the saltlick and the ghost. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was what she had. They circled like brawlers. She couldn’t see this ending well.

  She was two steps and a blind grab from the saltlick when the ghost drew a blade of its own.

  Wasp flung herself back out of immediate range, her mind racing. This ghost could bring things through with it? Apparently so, for it was now coming at her with a sword, and it had a gun on its belt as well.

  It was too much. It was beyond too much. And she wouldn’t make it to the saltlick at this rate, not without losing limbs on the way. If, that is, the sword could cut her. She wasn’t sure. But she knew where her guess was going.

  She backed another step, which took her up against the wall. Her eyes fell on the blood welling up out of the gash on her arm, then to the blood still on the harvesting-knife.

  It wasn’t a weapon. She’d never used it as a weapon before. She’d never had to really fight a ghost before, sure as hell not like this, anyway. And to stab this ghost, now, with her blood on the blade, was a Ragpicker’s gambit if ever she’d seen one.

  Wasp went to wipe the blade on her sleeve—and stopped. She was thinking of those lesser ghosts, all exploded, and how they’d drunk up this ghost’s shed power until it had overloaded them. Thinking this ghost had to have a limit, too. Wondering where it was. Whether she could reach it.

  It would have looked like a worse idea if she had anything else to choose from short of jumping off the ledge with a prayer.

  However, the ghost’s reach with the sword was easily twice what hers was with the harvesting-knife, and Wasp had serious doubts about getting inside it now, let alone getting the ghost inside her reach. Still, she had to try. Without warning she dropped to the ground, under the swing of the ghost’s blade, and stabbed her own bloodied knife down through the top of the ghost’s boot until the point hit the porous rock of the shelf and wedged there.

  She must have hit her head harder than she’d thought, because as the knife came down she thought she saw something, for a split second, there and gone before it could be identified, darting from her mind like a fish the net had missed—

  A shudder went through the ghost as the holy metal and the blood took hold, and she pulled the knife free, blinking in awe. She hadn’t thought it would work.

  It couldn’t last long—a few seconds at most—and Wasp didn’t want to stick around to wait for it to wear off, the ghost’s awful strength to come raging back, her choice either fighting a losing battle or fleeing down the mountainside like a whipped dog. Which wasn’t any choice at all.

  In one motion she swiped the saltlick, dropped her hip to sweep the ghost’s legs out from under, planted a knee on its chest, and pressed the salt to its mouth, grinding it in with the heel of her hand. She scattered more around it where it lay. Jar or not, blood was blood, salt was salt, the knife was the knife, and she’d hung her hopes on worse before and lived.

  “By blood and salt I bind you,” she gasped. “You will follow.”

  The effect was instantaneous. The ghost lunged at her and came up short, collared by the empty air. Wasp crouched a few paces back, knife at the ready, for all the good it would do if the last trick up her sleeve had failed.

  Slowly, slowly, something changed in the ghost’s face and it began to see he
r clearly. It was drawing itself up now to its full height, looking at her the way she would look at a snake in her path, if she couldn’t identify it as one that might bite her or one she could eat. Wasp was amazed to realize that, just as she had suddenly been able to see the goo the child-ghost had bled from its cut roots, she could now also see the way the salt and blood eddied around this ghost’s feet, carried on the current it exuded. It didn’t thrash at the shackles, didn’t draw on her again. It stood like a stone, and Wasp hated herself for being humbled by some dead thing’s dignity.

  It was powerful, so powerful. But she had caught it. It was hers. Until she said otherwise, it would stay.

  When she thought of all those unanswered questions in the field notes, what answers she might glean from this specimen, she felt a little dizzy. So what if she’d lost the other ghost? She could toss her notebook off the ledge right now and it wouldn’t matter. Archivists had gone up against powerful ghosts like this one and been broken against them, or fled. If any had captured one successfully, there was no record of it in the field notes.

  After three years of observation and study and guesswork, here was a ghost she could learn from. It was like nothing she’d experienced. Nothing she’d even known was possible. It had been a long time since she’d seen anything that looked so much like a way out.

  She may have had a long fight and a longer heal, as the Catchkeep-priest had so helpfully pointed out, and maybe she was starting to lose her touch, as she’d suspected from the number of wounds the last batch of upstarts had given her. But after this, she wouldn’t be showing them weakness. She wouldn’t be showing them a has-been Archivist, rusting to garbage in her little house on the hill. She would be showing them one of the most potentially useful discoveries that any Archivist had likely ever made in four hundred years and counting. She would be showing them something so huge, so important, that she might be able to trade it for her freedom. She would—

  “So I take it you are in the business of hunting ghosts,” the ghost was saying. It watched her levelly, its eyes unfathomable. The pain and shock was gone from them, Wasp saw, gone or quashed. “Excellent. Then I could use your help in finding one.”

  If the rock of the Hill itself had spoken to her directly, it might have caught her less off guard. This ghost could see her. It could speak to her. It had . . . come looking for her?

  It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. But there the ghost was, staring at her. Not through her. At her. Waiting for a reply.

  “I think,” she said slowly, “we might be able to come to an agreement.”

  Chapter Four

  It was getting on for sundown when Wasp had picked her way back down the Hill, hoping against hope she wasn’t so late for her meeting with the Catchkeep-priest that he’d go looking for her at her house and find her coming across the orchard, stumbling with exhaustion and accompanied by a ghost, salt-snared but jarless, walking on its own two feet.

  They crossed the orchard in a silence that was not quite hostile but nothing like companionable, and Wasp would have felt more like she was escorting a prisoner, as was the case, if anything in the ghost’s demeanor had suggested it. Beside it, she felt diminished and vaguely ridiculous, like a lapdog it had let off-leash to growl at rabbit holes. The ghost didn’t seem to be much for small talk, which suited Wasp fine. Her mind was racing. The ghost wanted her to . . . find another ghost? She didn’t even begin to know what to make of it. An hour ago she was nearly beside herself because she’d witnessed a ghost dumbly mouthing repeating syllables in the general direction of another. Here, now, half delirious with questions, it was a long walk back to that simpler place and its simpler confusions, and the door to it was shut.

  The Archivist part of her brain, meantime, would probably only stop cycling through its function when the part that controlled her breathing went, or her blinking, or her heart, or her stupid improbable plans that never held water and would probably one day get her killed.

  This part carried on muttering field notes to itself, oblivious.

  of course I cant do what it wants. but that isnt the point. the point is that ghosts dont ask people to do things. ghosts cant talk to people. ghosts sure as shit dont go looking for other ghosts, sure as shit dont go asking living people to run their errands. Ive never seen two ghosts so much as nod at each other before today, let alone—

  conclusion: I am dreaming.

  Wasp tripped over a rock, stumbling hard on the bad ankle. Amended it.

  hurts way too bad to be dreaming.

  How Wasp was going to explain to this ghost what she wanted in return for helping it, and how it would react to that news, and what she would do when it did . . . she hadn’t figured that part out yet. She was working on it. Her best guess, though, was that it wasn’t going to respond well when she asked it to go willingly into study and interrogation. And smooth talking was never her strong point. For now, all she knew was that she wasn’t letting this preposterous thing out of her sight. She’d already lost one ghost, one plan, one hope today. Over her dead body she’d lose another.

  Luckily, when she reached her little house on the hill there was no sign of anybody. Something about the ghost made her want to keep it secret. It almost would have been easier to return from the Hill emptyhanded, because now when the Catchkeep-priest asked her what she’d caught today, she was certain she’d lie. She thought of the Catchkeep-priest circling this ghost like a vulture, questioning it, dissecting it with his eyes, and the idea made her want to punch a hole in a wall and she wasn’t sure quite why.

  By the time she reached the door her whole leg from the bad ankle up was one throbbing ache, and to put weight on it was a coin-toss: would it give out, would it hold. She had resolved not to limp and failed miserably. She faltered up the last of the long path and listed between the toppled heaps of offerings by the door. There she stopped.

  It came to her that she was standing in a choosing moment. Ghosts didn’t get into her house unless she let them. She didn’t have to let this one. She stood there, in that choosing moment, weighing dangerous in one hand over useful in the other.

  Well, everything was dangerous. She couldn’t say the same for useful.

  “Stay back a second,” she said, and reached high with the knife to cut down the bundle of ghostgrass that hung above the door. A few steps behind her there was a dark, scorched-looking ring drawn on the rock the whole way around the house’s footprint. Wasp went to that next, and squatted down awkwardly on one ankle to draw the knife over the line in a slicing motion, twice, as though she were cutting a gap in the circle three feet wide. “Walk where I walk,” she said, and stepped over the ring, through the gap, not touching the marks.

  The ghost watched her. The look on its face, on a living person, might have been quizzical. “Keeps ghosts away,” said Wasp. “I’m the only one in town allowed to have salt. It’s too rare and too dangerous. For ghosts, this place must light up like a warn-fire. When they find it . . .” She shook her head. “It’s not pretty.” A pause. “No offense.”

  She went inside and began to light the lamps, whatever use a ghost would have for them. She dropped the backpack, washed her face, rubbed some soap through her hair, bound her arm, found a clean shirt with sleeves long enough to hide the bandage and the gash.

  If she didn’t know it was beyond the Catchkeep-priest’s ability to capture ghosts, she would have sworn he’d put this one in her way to test her. She imagined him poking it into her path with a stick, gingerly, as if it’d bite. The townsfolk gambling: could she bite back harder?

  “Don’t break anything,” she told it, and left.

  A mile later, she reached the shrine. She stood a moment, gasping up the blood-and-ash-and-flowers smell of the place, so that by the time she circled around to the living-quarters she was only a little out of breath. The Catchkeep-priest opened the door before she knocked, one finger keeping his place in some old book, and looked sidewise down at her, taking her in at a glance:
favored leg to salt-caked nails to lacerated cheek to baleful stare. The shrine-dogs padded to the door to bristle at her and the Catchkeep-priest kicked at their legs until they backed down.

  “Busy day,” he said. She guessed it was a question. She didn’t answer it. He didn’t mention that she was late. She hadn’t expected him to. It wasn’t his way. His way was to keep her waiting until the hammer fell. She’d walked the last quarter-mile with her hands shoved in her pockets to hide the trembling.

  From inside the house she could smell fresh bread and some kind of garlicky stew, and she became suddenly, acutely aware that she hadn’t eaten since that morning.

  The Catchkeep-priest opened the door wider and stepped back. From deep in the room she could hear the upstarts laughing, she assumed at her. “Come in, come in.”

  His voice was mild enough, but then she saw his eyes. She went inside.

  She hated everything about this room: its long table, the shallow curtained sleeping-alcoves along the walls, the great room of the Catchkeep-priest’s quarters between the upstarts’ and the shrine. If a ghost was a recording of a memory, as some believed, and Wasp pulled back the curtain from the third alcove on the right, she might find the wide-eyed bloody-handed ghost of herself, hugging her knees and shivering, trying to unremember the sound of her little dagger sinking hilt-deep into girlflesh, the day she earned her name. And in the alcove two up the line from it might be the ghost of the upstart Naomi, who’d snuck into Wasp’s alcove after that fight, though she was risking a beating to do so, and sat in silence holding her hand, never complaining, though Wasp’s nails dug in until they drew blood and were stained with it for days. And in the alcove almost directly across the room from hers, the ghost of the upstart Becca, who’d taken her own handmade shiv to the big veins in her thighs that same night, because Wasp had drawn the short straw first and cut the Archivist down before the other upstarts got their fighting chance to do the same.