Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Not to mention the ghosts of four hundred years’ worth of dead upstarts before them, and of those who had lived, for a time, but in whom something somewhat less essential than a beating heart had died.

  Wasp wasn’t sure where the three latest dead upstarts had slept: Mariska, Suzie, Aneko. She might have stopped before those curtains, laid down some roadside flowers in her mind. They hadn’t died well.

  Puzzling at ghosts only brought to mind the one she was hiding among the empty jars in her no-longer-empty house, and she schooled her face fast before the Catchkeep-priest could read it.

  Upstarts scooted down the benches from her, muttering amongst themselves at her approach. Either it was her imagination or there was something new in their voices since the Archivist-choosing day had passed—disdain for the relic who’d kept her title but ended her fight by fainting in the sand, too thrashed or too soft to finish what she’d started. She was becoming mortal in their eyes. Replaceable. Killable. And there was no coming back from that.

  Her hair, weighted with the inbraided hair of one dead Archivist and eight dead upstarts, swung loose from its pinnings as she took a seat at the long table. It fell around her, heavy as a pelt, its smell of death outlasting all her soap. The upstarts stared at it, particularly at the multicolored ends they all must recognize, and thought of the three short straws they hadn’t drawn.

  The Catchkeep-priest set a bowl before her, served her with his own hands from the breadboard and the stewpot. Under the weight of the upstarts’ eyes, she ate. The Catchkeep-priest waited on her, served her seconds, and settled in across the table, steepling his fingers.

  “It’s so good to have you back with us,” he said. “It’s been, oh, much too long.”

  The upstarts leaned in, hanging on her words less than on her fear.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We were beginning to dread you weren’t coming back out of that hovel of yours this time.”

  She could feel the upstarts breathing down her neck.

  “Well, I did,” she said.

  “And it looks as though you fell foul of some mishap. Your first day back to work.” He tsked, and Wasp braced for what never came. “A pity.”

  Wasp, unable to think of anything witty to rejoin with, said nothing.

  “You have always been blessed with a spectacular talent, our Wasp. It is our honor and our pleasure to hope it does not forsake you.”

  Around her, a dozen upstarts were all wearing the same smile. It stretched their Catchkeep-given scars, made the smiles look even wider than they were. Wasp’s flight instinct stirred and started kicking. She fought it down.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You and I, Wasp, we’re so much the same,” he said, eating bread-bits with little birdlike pecks. “We have burned our pasts, our futures, our very names away in the service of something greater than ourselves. Can these green girls be faulted for desiring to serve as we serve?”

  Unless Wasp missed her guess, what the upstarts desired even more than that was to cut out her liver and wring it out into the sand and read their fortunes from the patterns of gore it left there.

  “No,” she said.

  The Catchkeep-priest nodded sagely, sipping stew-broth from a real spoon.

  Wasp wished he’d choke on it. She had plans for his ghost.

  “But the work won’t wait, will it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Not like that poor ghost,” he said, and Wasp’s heart started beating at its bars so fast and hard it left her short of breath, but: “Left to suffer in that jar for so long,” he continued, and she calmed. So he didn’t know. Not yet. “No light, no air, no salt,” he said, and the upstarts shook their heads as one. “It’s a good thing you put it out of its misery.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why not show a little grace to your inferiors,” he said, his voice light and warm and utterly menacing. “Tell them how you did it.”

  He was baiting her. Maybe he knew she hadn’t destroyed the ghost after all. Maybe he didn’t. Either way, she could take it or push back. And her tendency favored pushing.

  “They can figure out how to do it themselves,” she said. “When it’s their business to do.”

  A hiss went round the table. Wasp set her jaw. Let them come at her. But it was not the time and place for bloodshed, and they all knew what happened to upstarts who picked fights on the side, on the three hundred sixty-four wrong days of the year, so they stayed.

  In a year, though, when the time came, they would still remember. And the ones who could, the ones who drew the short straws, would try their very best to make her pay.

  “If,” said the Catchkeep-priest, beaming now. “If they become Archivist. If they can defeat you first to do so. I suspect that what you mean is if.”

  She had challenged them, and he was challenging her back. To tell the truth now was to court a whipping. All she had to do to get back out of it was open her stupid stubborn mouth and say no.

  She met his eyes.

  “Yes,” she said.

  There was a pause as the Catchkeep-priest dabbed at his mouth and put his napkin down with a sound like a withered flower dropping from its stalk. “Ah, Wasp. It is so good to have you back.”

  “So I’ve heard,” she said.

  “You are, after all, the most gifted Archivist I’ve ever seen. Truly we’d be lost without you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She was getting wary now. Talking to him reminded her of walking on a frozen pond. The ice would hold until it didn’t. It was anybody’s guess when that would be.

  “To say nothing of those poor ghosts. Why, that one you destroyed today, for instance. Where did you catch that one again?”

  “The baker’s house,” she said.

  The upstart sitting beside the Catchkeep-priest muttered something under her breath, and, without taking his eyes from Wasp, the Catchkeep-priest grabbed the girl behind the head and smashed her face into the table. While the upstart sleeved at her split eyebrow in silence, he kept on talking as if nothing had occurred.

  “The baker’s kitchen, as I recall,” he said. “And what was it doing there?”

  “It was after the salt,” she said.

  “You think it was after the salt. No, no, don’t give me that vicious look, everyone at this table respects your expertise. But I think the baker’s wife, with the broken jaw from when your gentle ghost flung a chair at her head—across the house from where the salt was kept, I could add—might think differently.”

  “And this is why people don’t keep salt in their houses,” Wasp gritted, her temper coming out in a slow leak. “This is why there’s a ban. I don’t have time to clean up after every slag-for-brains who thinks it’s safe to disobey it.”

  There. It was out. She’d backtalked the Catchkeep-priest in front of all the upstarts. Their gazes were darting between Wasp and the Catchkeep-priest, expecting calamity.

  The Catchkeep-priest only laughed, apparently delighted. But Wasp could see something very different in his eyes. It was only a matter of time before he found out about the ghost in Wasp’s house. She’d have to decide what to do with it soon. Tonight. Right now would be good. There was no guidance in the field notes for this kind of situation.

  She couldn’t get it out of her head. The damned thing had almost sent a ledgeful of ghosts into full-on riot. It had spoken to her. How long had it been waiting there? What did it want? She thought of it sitting there on the ledge in the rain, suns and moons rising and setting above its head. Waiting for her to drag her ass up the hill so she could find it. So it could find her. It was all terribly strange.

  “—are expecting great things from you this year,” the Catchkeep-priest was saying. “Don’t disappoint us. There’s a long winter coming. We would so hate to see you starve.”

  And he touched his cheek at the place where the four long slashes of Catchkeep’s holy mark would have been if he were Wasp, and kissed those fingers to her. If she
were standing over a warm corpse, in the sand, blood dripping from her knife in the starlight, and the Catchkeep-priest were someone else, it would have been a salute. From him, here, now, it was a promise she would fall, and soon, and another upstart would spring up where she had fallen, as corpseroot was engendered of the dead.

  It was also a dismissal, so she tossed down her crusts and left the hall, the gazes of the upstarts drilling through the back of her head. It took all her willpower not to slam the door behind.

  Safe in the cold again, she assessed her damages. This meeting could have gone way, way worse, as she was well aware. The fact she’d gotten out of there in one piece was pretty much exhilarating. Not a word out of him about the ghost she should have caught for the midwife. Not a word asking about what she’d been doing up the Hill instead. By now she recognized what he was doing, but it didn’t make it any easier to bear. Not when she was sitting across a table from him, his gaze going right through her, like he was seeing past her to the Archivist he could torment when she was killed, and the Archivist past that one. Until then, he’d keep her guessing, on her toes, not knowing which disobediences he’d let slide and which would bring the fallout crashing down. At least it worked beautifully on the upstarts. She despised that it probably worked just as well on her.

  She wound back around the front of the shrine toward the road, and an upstart was there waiting. Pure reflex, Wasp’s hand went to her harvesting-knife. It wouldn’t be the first time an upstart broke ritual and tried to better her lot against Catchkeep’s law. As far as Wasp knew, it would only be the third. Still, she couldn’t be too careful.

  This upstart was a young one, unblooded, fresh from whatever house had adopted her until she’d come of age to join the training at the shrine. Wasp didn’t even really know her name. Sarah? Sairy? Something like that. Her Catchkeep-mark wasn’t as neatly drawn as Wasp’s, its four lines running in an unclean parallel, as though Catchkeep had trembled in raking the unborn upstart’s tiny face with Her claws.

  The upstart was holding a blanket, threadbare and soft, more patches than weave. “Cold night,” she said, and tossed the blanket to Wasp, not meeting her eyes. “Aneko was my friend,” the upstart went on, softer, staring at the brown grass between her cloth-shoed feet. “Every night since she drew that stupid straw, she had nightmares about fighting you. After you got her knife away, you could have—could have cut her down. You didn’t. Maybe some of us look at that and see weakness. Maybe some of us see something else. She’s gone now, but I’m—you know, I’m sure she—” A noise came from inside, and the upstart stiffened like a spooked deer. “You didn’t see me.”

  Wasp was holding the blanket practically thumb-and-forefinger, practically at arm’s length, unsettled at this unexpected kindness. “Thanks,” she managed, but the upstart was already gone.

  She thought to leave the blanket there, at the shrine. She’d rather be cold than beholden. But the upstart was right. The night was bitter. And leaving the blanket there to be found would probably only earn the upstart a beating. Wasp slung it over her shoulders and went.

  Chapter Five

  Somewhere on that long dark lonely walk through town and then from it, away from all the lit-windowed houses where people ate warm food around cozy fires, and the blind-windowed houses where they were snug asleep, toward the single point of light among the rocks that was the one light she’d left burning, a wind came up and picked the clouds from the sky like scabs.

  Suddenly the night loomed very close. Despite herself, it gave her pause.

  There was Catchkeep, of course, lolling in Her sixteen stars; and there was Ember Girl, Whose heart was the blue star called the Beartrap, Whose head was the nebula called the Spool. Near Her, Carrion Boy bent His head in deference or treachery to the crows, and lower down, half-concealed behind the hills as though She waded through them to the thigh, stalked the Chooser in Her clacking cape of bones, with the Ragpicker following bent-backed behind. And beyond the horizon entirely, hidden by the turning of the year, the One Who Got Away stood with His/Her chin held high, perpetually triumphant.

  By the position of the stars, she’d been gone longer than she’d planned. The walk out of the hills and down to town had taken the better part of two hours, on top of however long she’d wasted there—to no point and purpose she could discern, apart from the Catchkeep-priest never missing an opportunity to try and take her down a notch in whatever way he could. She wondered, if she’d let the midwife set her busted ankle in the first place, whether the Catchkeep-priest would have bothered fabricating a reason to make her walk those uphill-downhill miles on it.

  What was strange was that the light in her house hadn’t gone out. Or else it had and the ghost had lit it anew, though it had no need of light itself and it didn’t seem too inclined to do her any favors. More likely, it had upset the lamp and the distant point of light she saw was actually her house going up in flames.

  Wasp started walking faster, inasmuch as she was able. She kept her mind off the pain by breathing deeply with each step on the bad ankle, sniffing for a fire. Beyond the woodsmoke drifting back uphill from town, there was nothing. By the time she made it to the crossroads—one path stretching back through town behind her and dead-ending somewhere far ahead among the rocks, the other wending away to left and right, skirting the hills on its way to towns she’d never seen—the bright point that was her house had resolved to windows, lit from within.

  It looked warm and welcoming. It looked like any other house. Not the cold stone hut of a goddess’s puppet, respected, shunned, and feared—but a normal house, where normal people lived their normal lives. The surreality of it stunned her in her tracks.

  After a moment she began picking her way toward those yellow windows, wary, as if stalking unpredictable prey. Up into the hills she went, along the footpath that was barely wide enough to admit the cart that trundled up from town twice a month, laden with the people’s offerings. Past corridors of blackberry brambles which her summers would be depending on for sustenance if those offerings ran dry. An old stone wall meandered through them, in places still knee-height after the world’s death and all that had come since. Another kind of relic. Another kind of ghost.

  Eventually the rutted dirt path tacked off at a steep incline into a narrow pass, where the rock turned reddish and scorchweed grew. She followed it, dragging the bad ankle now, into a little clearing on a high flat plate of rock, with the paved path of multicolored scavenge-glass, the tiny yellow-windowed house, the potted wild blueberry plant that fired up fresh shoots each spring only to be beaten into submission by the wind and rebel anew.

  There was no lock on the door. She needed none. The people would eat their dead before they stole from her. She pushed it open and shut it softly behind, as though that incongruous cozy light was a living thing she could disturb.

  The house had not burned. The lamp was lit. There was a fire in the hearth. The ghost was sitting in her only chair, surrounded by mismatched stacks of paper in various degrees of fire-damage, water-damage, unidentifiable staining, mildew, and general dissolution. It appeared to be reading her field notes.

  “Get your boots off my table,” she snapped, and did not quite squirm under the look it fixed her with, or under the ensuing silence as it went back to reading.

  Force of habit, she found herself studying it. It was all she could do not to pull out her notebook and start sketching it on the spot. Its clothing was basic and dark, something like a uniform but not one she recognized from any ghost she’d seen before. The gun and sword were in its belt. The ghost turned pages with a trained precision, a spring-loaded sort of predatory grace in which no fraction of any movement went wasted. Between its person and its clothing there was no color to it anywhere; it was all pale and dark, with those gray eyes. Its face was sharp, guarded, possessed of an icy and immaculate calm. Its posture was miles better than hers. It hadn’t moved its boots.

  Usually Wasp didn’t find silences awkward and fe
lt no need to fill them with pointless chatter, but this, this was unendurable.

  “I didn’t know you could read,” she said. She was cringing before she’d fully finished the sentence. “That didn’t—I mean—because you’re—look, forget it,” she finished lamely.

  Because you’re dead, she’d wanted to say. Because you’re a ghost. Because the other ones I find are prize specimens if they can recall enough of themselves to give me clues to when and where and how they died. The way they’re dressed. The way they talk, even though they can’t say much of anything—usually their dying words, over and over. And that’s a whole lot more than I get out of most of them. But you, whatever you are, by now I don’t think there’s anything you could do that would surprise me.

  What she heard herself saying instead was: “So, this other ghost. The one you need my help to find.” Something passed over the ghost’s face, gone before she could put a name to it. Whatever it was, it fascinated her. Her reflex was to try and bring it back, pin it down, write it up in her notes. To find a knife and twist it. “Dead friend of yours?”

  A pause while the ghost squared papers, set them down. “A colleague.”

  Wasp, thinking of her own colleagues, found this the tiniest bit hard to believe. It must have shown on her face, because the ghost continued: “She was murdered. Tortured to death. By our—” its mouth twisted faintly “—employers.”

  Now this tallied more with her experience. Still, the idea of this ghost’s search—of having something, someone, worth searching for, after however many centuries that must have passed since it’d died—it got under her skin and itched there, made her lash out in a way she didn’t understand. “Well, maybe you should have thought of helping her while they were busy torturing her. You die that way, you’re a long time dying. Plenty of chances to be rescued.” She spat the word like poison. “It’s a little late now.”