Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  As the words left her mouth, she wondered if the leash of salt and blood would hold or if the ghost would stand up at her little table and shoot her dead. But it held, or something held, and the ghost didn’t so much as favor her with a glare.

  She busied herself by limping over to the hearth and plumping down before it, her hands held out to the fire. When her fingers had thawed enough to flex, she started on her shoes. Half-frozen mud and the cold sweat of injury had molded them to her feet, and she was braced for the flare of sick pain when she tugged the fractured ankle free, but as small as her wince was, it didn’t escape the ghost’s notice. She looked up, and it was already beside her. She hadn’t even seen it get up.

  It had a sort of device in its hand that was nothing like anything she recognized, in the field notes or out of them. It was a kind of metallic cylinder about the size of her thumb, one side covered with a glossy black film. The ghost set one fingertip to the film and it lit up.

  “Stay still,” said the ghost, and pressed the device, light-first, to the greenish swelling at her ankle. Nothing happened for a second, but then the device gave two little chirps and started humming in a way Wasp could not hear so much as feel: belly, scalp, and teeth. Whatever it was doing hurt worse than walking on the ankle, worse than busting it in the first place. This went on for a very long moment. She bit her lip and rode the pain the whole way down, and then, as suddenly as it had started, it was done, and the ghost was sitting its bootheels before her, watching her attempt at stoicism with thinly veiled amusement.

  Then, too fast for her to pull away or do so much as yelp, it grabbed her ankle between both hands and turned it hard each way. She had a split second to remember how the ghost had attacked her on the ledge, a split second to make a grab for the knife, a split second to prepare for the pain to jolt its way up every nerve in her leg when the fracture snapped across for good. It never came. Even as she looked on, astonished, the angry color faded from her skin, and she could have sworn she saw the swelling begin to subside. The device, meantime, made three mournful little beeps and its light dulled and winked out. “There,” the ghost said, and stuck it in a coat pocket as Wasp stared. “Now you should be able to walk.”

  “What,” she said. “What did—what is—”

  “Standard issue,” said the ghost.

  Her fingers itched to draw it. “Can I—”

  “No.”

  She couldn’t help herself. “So why didn’t you use that thing on your—”

  The ghost’s fist shot sideways, sending a shelf of ancient glass jars to shatter on the floor. Wasp gaped in horror after them. Whatever she could learn from this ghost would have to be more or less priceless to make up for that.

  Already the ghost’s infuriating calm was restored, leaving only the mess to prove to her she’d broken through at all. “I did.”

  Wasp put on the Catchkeep-priest’s gentling voice, which fit her badly. “And . . . and it didn’t . . . ?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said the ghost, chafing at the salt. “Understand?”

  There were times, Wasp knew, when I don’t want to talk about it meant exactly the opposite. At least it did for her. She also knew that this was not one of those times. She could force it to talk. She could string it like a puppet and watch it dance. Maybe. But that was a last resort. If she was going to treat the dead the way the living treated her, she’d be no different from everything she was trying to escape. And the ghost had healed her ankle. It wasn’t quite like she felt she owed it, but—

  On the other hand, even pausing to consider her options was letting her guard down, and that was a slippery slope straight to nowhere good. She wouldn’t be the first dead Archivist to underestimate a specimen.

  Sitting here, watching this ghost seethe, Wasp felt the lack of the notebook like she’d feel the loss of a limb. No way could she let this thing walk.

  Even so, something was prodding her gently at the back of her mind. It took her a moment to recognize it as her conscience.

  She had to open her mouth and tell the ghost the truth before things got messy. She could say So if you’re so smart, and you already know that I hunt ghosts, then you already know how I do it. Which is how it’s always been done. I’m not a tracker. Archivists, we just catch what we find. We don’t go looking for specific ghosts. Nobody ever has. I don’t think it’s even possible. I can’t promise you anything.

  But she didn’t.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” Wasp said instead, “I’m not exactly in a high place to scatter favors from. I know what you want from me. I’m getting that loud and clear. I still haven’t heard what you’re offering in return.”

  After a moment, the ghost reached into a pocket and came out with the thing it’d healed Wasp’s ankle with. “This.”

  Wasp eyed the device hungrily, and something huge turned over slowly in her mind, forcing her to ask herself hard questions.

  Could she have bought her way free with what the ghost knew about the world Before? Would the Catchkeep-priest have really let her go?

  The ghost might have told her exactly what had gone wrong with the world, and on whose watch, and how to keep it from going wrong again. It might even have told her what had come Well-Before, going back and back to the beginning of time. And none of that might matter.

  Catchkeep might never let her go. The Catchkeep-priest, the upstarts—to say nothing of the townspeople, who would not be cheated out of her, the one they made offerings to so that the ghosts that thronged and jostled at their walls would leave them be.

  But now, with this device, it wasn’t up to them, wasn’t up to anyone but her. Wasp wouldn’t have to buy her way free. Wouldn’t have to barter with the Catchkeep-priest. Wouldn’t have to play by his rules, or Catchkeep’s, anymore.

  She was certain she could take the Catchkeep-priest in a fight, if it came down to it. What she hadn’t been at all sure of, until this moment, was her ability to survive her wounds for long enough to enjoy more than a few feverish blood-poisoned hours of freedom.

  And when she was out and gone from here, a normal person, a person with whom people did business, what couldn’t she get in trade for this thing? It could keep her in real food and fresh water for years. It could buy her seeds and compost and planting soil, and she could feed herself for years to come. She could buy the offerings-cart and hack it into firewood, and never again be indebted to the people’s tolerance.

  Wasp swallowed. Her head was swimming with possibility. She almost had to lean against a wall.

  Watch it, she thought at herself, quick and hard and fierce, like the pinch that tells you you’re dreaming. Don’t you go carrying a last resort in both hands.

  Then she realized how silly it sounded. What was her Archivist-path paved with, if not last resorts?

  What was sillier was that she just couldn’t make herself speak up and seal the bargain, and she didn’t like her guess as to why.

  So maybe she felt more affinity with the dead than with the living. That wasn’t news to her. This particular specimen, though, had come at her with a sword. No way was she going to let herself feel bad about deceiving it. Let it think she knew exactly how to find its missing ghost. Wasp reckoned the thing’d been dead some-thousand years already. A little false hope wouldn’t hurt it.

  The ghost was watching her closely, eyes narrowed like it could see through all the layers of her person to the self-serving, lying-by-omission, desperate bones beneath.

  She built herself a blank face and stayed behind it. Wait this out.

  “You’re wondering why I’m here,” the ghost was saying. “Why I came to you for help. After all, I don’t know you. I have very little reason to trust you.” For the first time, Wasp saw the faintest flicker of confusion in its face. “And yet I find I do, a little.”

  “Well?” she said. “Why?”

  “First let me ask you the same.”

  Wasp blinked. A ghost was interrogating her. Oh, the Catc
hkeep-priest would love this. If by love she meant probably whip her senseless if he found out about. Well, he wasn’t here. This was still her house. “Fine.”

  “I came to you. But you let me in, knowing I needed your help. Why?”

  “You’re avoiding the question. Weren’t you reading my field notes? You see what most of them give me to work with. A few mindless words, if they’ve been at the blood long enough. A name. Or nothing. Sometimes I can guess how they died. If I see a ghost full of bullet holes, I write shot. If one’s on fire, I write burned. If one’s walking around carrying its head under its arm, I write—”

  “Now who’s avoiding the question?”

  “You don’t get it. I had to. I had to bind you. I had to bring you back here. Do you think I chose any of this?” She backhanded the air, a gesture that took in the entire tiny room. Dimly she was aware that with every word she spoke she was climbing out on a limb and sawing it off behind her. But she’d loosed her temper now, and it wasn’t coming back when called. “I had to kill people to get here. I have to kill people to stay here. And I’ll be stuck here until they figure out how to kill me. The door out of this place is my grave. You want to find a ghost? Here’s ghosts.” She tore the pin from her hair, shook out the black-brown-red-blond of it, and the room filled with a carrion stink that she may or may not have been imagining. “There’s some more.” She flung her hand toward the piles of paper that were her life’s work and the life’s work of all the Archivists before her, violently shortened lives though they’d been. “And out there in the dark? They go on forever. Why don’t you go take your pick. You want my help? You tried to kill me. So you can just—”

  “That,” said the ghost, unperturbed, “was an accident.”

  “And you,” Wasp retorted, “are a resource. Like water. Like firewood. Like dried dogshit, when the firewood’s run out.” She’d warmed to her own anger now. It swept on out before her and dragged her along behind. “There’s a list of questions in that box that’s been waiting four hundred years for a specimen like you to answer. I don’t have to help you. I don’t have to make any kind of deal with you. And I certainly don’t have to risk my ass out there for you. Maybe instead I keep my head down and do the work, and you sit there and serve your purpose. Maybe we make a new bargain. You give me that thing, and I don’t destroy you when I’m done with you.”

  The ghost’s smile made her wish her faith in the harvesting-knife had carried on unbroken. “Try it.”

  This was one hole she wasn’t going to dig any deeper. She’d had enough of her grand plans blowing up in her face. She could still see that upstart staring up at her from the reddened sand. The Catchkeep-priest’s voice replayed in her head: Do you know it took that poor girl four days to die of her wounds, raving of fever and thirst in the street? She could have at least given the upstart a quick death, clean, with dignity. Everything she tried to fix only ended up breaking worse. She was done.

  “You know what? Get out. I changed my mind.” Wasp was on her feet, kicking the blood-salt current clear of the ghost’s boots. Casting about for the harvesting-knife to finish slicing it free. “Maybe I thought this was different. Maybe I thought we could help each other.” She could have punched herself in the face for how stupid that sounded. “I find your ghost. You give me that thing you fixed my ankle with, give me a fighting chance to get out of here. Well, I should have known better by now, shouldn’t I. Like I should have known better when I tried to save—”

  The words died in her mouth, unsaid. Her eyes stung. She stared at the floor. “Just get out of here.”

  A moment of fear as she paused, knife in hand, and wondered what the ghost would do, when she finished freeing it of the bindings. Kill her for ensnaring it? Flicker back into memories again, as it had on the ledge, and kill her because of whoever it had mistaken her for?

  Well, she and her knife were as ready as they were going to get. Looking at her options, going down fighting a forbidden fight on her own terms was surely not the worst of them.

  The silence was endless. Then:

  “I came to you,” said the ghost, “because there’s a ghost I need to find, and I need a ghosthunter’s help to do it. Because the dead speak highly of you. Find the girl with the knife in her belt and the scars on her face, they told me. She’s different from the other girls who’d come before her, even though they’d carried the same knife, worn the same scars. She helps the dead, when she can, even when the living punish her for it. She probably will not want to be found. But she is worth finding.”

  This brought her up short. Her thoughts and feelings were all slagging together, mismatched, half-formed, inseparable.

  Embarrassment: the ghost knew she’d disobeyed orders and let other ghosts go. She wasn’t half bad at keeping that secret. The Catchkeep-priest had beaten her every time he’d found out, of course, but there’d been plenty of times he hadn’t known about. And the Catchkeep-priest was cozy in his bed a mile downhill, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Not here.

  Pride: those ghosts had gotten away, gone back down to the ghost-place, because of her. She’d accomplished at least this one small rebellion on her own. The Catchkeep-priest couldn’t whip that out of her.

  Mostly, though, she was stunned. The other ghosts were aware that she’d let them go. They knew who she was. Here, aboveground, she was lucky if one in ten specimens could mindlessly spit out a couple meaningless words, totally oblivious of her scribbling them down—as if any of them had ever proven useful. But down in the ghost-place, they were discussing her amongst themselves?

  Wasp stared, distantly aware that her jaw had dropped.

  The ghost cut its eyes at her, pure scorn. “I see they were mistaken.”

  It dropped a mocking little bow before her and walked out, trailing what remaining bonds of salt and blood she’d not yet broken, which it had snapped at whim.

  It was over.

  It was over and she was out of ideas. Trying to force her way out had failed. Trying to win her way out had failed. Trying to break the cycle and free the upstart Aneko had failed. Trying to bargain her way out had failed. Her chance, slim as it had been, had passed her by. Leaving what? A cot in a closet of jars. A leaky roof. An old knife and a box of salt. The scared charity of the living and the worthless notice of the dead. All of which were hers by right, like it or not, until another year had passed. At which time she would either kill to keep it or be killed herself and leave a corpse for the upstarts to gloat over.

  She pictured throwing her knife down in the sand. Letting them defeat her. Choosing to die. She pictured her ghost walking, a knife in its back, savaged by shrine-dogs, a green stone on her tongue as befit a dead Archivist. Dying all over again, with every step, of shame.

  If Wasp were writing field notes on herself, they’d read:

  plans attempted: 1000000

  plans succeeded: 0

  never learns. better off destroyed.

  Her gaze fell on all those shattered jars. It wasn’t that she was afraid to die, or afraid of pain. How many times had she drawn blood with the harvesting-knife to bind a ghost? How many wounds had she taken in combat and walked from? It couldn’t hurt much worse, and if it did, she wouldn’t notice for long. Already she could see the Catchkeep-priest’s face when he found her on the floor, bled out and smiling. Let the upstarts fight over the knife and the saltlick and the rotting little house. Let the system dissolve altogether, and Catchkeep’s stars tumble from the sky to burn this whole place down. She was done.

  The harvesting-knife in her hand felt like an extension of her arm. She’d taken good care of it, kept it clean and polished and so, so sharp. It had drawn her blood countless times, and she could depend on it to cut clean. So clean that, for a few precious seconds, she knew she wouldn’t feel a thing.

  She set the blade longwise against the blue vein in her wrist, drew a steadying breath through gritted teeth—and stopped.

  She probably will not want to be found. But she is
worth finding.

  The thought went rolling around her mind pleasantly, like a smooth stone. There was a certain agreeable novelty to having value attached to her actions. Not her actions as Archivist, as the puppet of a goddess, as Catchkeep’s-bones-and-stars-Her-flesh, but her actions performed through her choice, her risk, her boldness.

  In the face of it, sitting there, giving up, she felt foolish and ineffectual. What she was doing was no answer at all. She couldn’t win this way. To make those long cuts up the insides of her arms was to do nothing but prove herself too weak to fight back. She looked at the jars and thought of her own ghost-self scrabbling at the walls of one of them, a stunted silverfish Wasp, caught by whatever upstart succeeded her, once the knife had changed hands and the blood had been mopped from the floor. She thought of bending her neck to the saltlick as the Catchkeep-priest looked on smiling. It made her sick with hate.

  If she chose to help the ghost—Wasp didn’t have a clear idea of what exactly that would involve. But if her bad luck finally caught her up out there, it would be the result of choices she had made. It wouldn’t be for nothing. And it wouldn’t be here.

  And after that? Right now she wasn’t sure. Her mood had either swung back into tentative hopefulness or hit rock bottom, where the only place to go, she’d heard, was up. She couldn’t tell which. She’d learned they mostly feel the same.

  Either way, for the moment, with the ghost’s device escape seemed almost possible. So maybe Catchkeep would reach down out of the stars and slap her dead. But that would mean that Wasp had first succeeded in gutting the Catchkeep-priest like the pig he was, and run far and fast enough the upstarts hadn’t caught her before their goddess did. And, in light of her alternatives, she found she was pretty much okay with that.