Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  But this ghost’s quest, meantime—whatever happened to her in the end, this might end up being the first plan she set her hand to that actually worked. Something to fix instead of break for once. Something she could weigh against that pile of failed escape attempts and dead upstarts and destroyed ghosts and wasted years. Something she could do.

  She watched her hands, as if waiting to see what they would decide. She watched her fingers brush the sixteen stars arrayed along the blade, watched her thumbtip trace the razor edge, watched her hand close round the hilt. She held the knife in her fist a moment. Then she got up.

  The ghost was sitting on the doorstep, drawing some kind of symbol in the dirt with a stick. Where the firelight hit it, it shone through.

  The ghostgrass bundle was no longer hanging in the doorway, she only realized now. She’d been too distracted to replace it when she’d left. This specimen could get up and walk at any time. The fact that it still showed no inclination to was intriguing.

  “If you try to attack me again,” she said, “I’ll put you down or I’ll die trying. I have nothing to lose.”

  “Neither do I,” said the ghost. “Not anymore.”

  “Then here’s how this is going to play out. That thing you fixed my ankle with?” Wasp lifted her chin in the direction of its coat. Her voice was shaking, but she had ground to stand, and nobody was going to stand it for her. “The second we find this ghost of yours, that thing is mine. No shit, no later, no I-changed-my-mind. No more accidents. Mine. Or I’ll end your ghost in front of you.”

  The stick stopped moving in the dirt.

  “I would not have offered it in trade,” the ghost said icily, “if I didn’t intend to trade it. Apparently some of us hold our word in higher regard than others. I do not make empty promises. Or—” it eyed her—“empty threats.”

  Wasp drew breath to snap back, then stopped. She could engage with this, or she could get out of here tonight. There wasn’t time for both. Right now, on winter’s threshold, there were a dozen hours left before morning. Before her absence would be noticed. And the Catchkeep-priest’s reach was long.

  She stuck out her hand like a gambler sealing a bet. “So we have an understanding?”

  The ghost looked at it a moment, then took it. Frostbite and vertigo, all over again, even through the glove.

  “Okay then,” Wasp said. “Let’s go hunting.”

  Chapter Six

  She packed as she had packed each time she’d run away: filling the backpack with such things as she imagined a person might take with herself on a journey, if a person found herself suddenly in a position for journeying. After binding the ghost earlier, she’d collected her ghost-destroying kit from the ledge. Now she removed the milk-vial, the notebook, and the charcoals, and left the other things in the pack, along with the apples slowly turning to mush at the bottom. She refilled her bottle from the last musty dregs of the water-jug and repacked that. Then added the handheld sharpening-stone for the harvesting-knife. Her last clean shirt, wadded into a ball. The end of the raisins. Unlike when she’d run away before, a jar. She was hunting a ghost, after all.

  She deliberated a moment, then swallowed her pride, wrapped the upstart’s blanket around her shoulders, and went outside with the backpack and a lamp to inspect the heaps of offerings she still hadn’t brought indoors.

  Most of it was random bits of salvage junk, intriguing at best, or food, rendered basically inedible by having spent so many days out in the air. A pouch of black walnuts and dried wild blueberries didn’t smell rancid yet, so she took it. There was also a pair of knit mittens and a new set of laces for her shoes. She stuffed it all in the pack.

  Her lamplight caught on something a few feet away, back on the path. Her knife. Not the harvesting-knife, the other one. The one she’d fought her Archivist-choosing fights with, murdered the better part of a dozen upstarts with. It lay where she’d dropped it yesterday, Aneko’s blood still streaking the blade, staining the grip.

  She stomped over and grabbed it, then stalked back to the house. Closed her fist around the hilt, drew back her arm and drove the blade an inch into the doorframe. Let the Catchkeep-priest find it there when she was gone. Let him chase her around with it forever. She wouldn’t set her hand to it again.

  On her way back in, she noticed a big old cookpot full of firewood. It might be of use to her later. She started to carry it in.

  Standing in the doorway, with the knife just past her ear and the cookpot hugged in her arms, something snapped in her like a bone.

  Later. It might be of use to her later. As if, deep down, beneath all her talk, she knew that what she was about to try would fail, as everything else she tried had failed, and then her life would go on as it had always done, pacing out the length of its leash, smashing into empty air at either end like a bird against a window. Take the knife out of the doorframe. Sweep the dust from the little house. Restock its jars with the useless dead.

  For the first time, she was standing on the edge of something vast. She could back down, or she could jump.

  She threw the pot to the floor. It slammed up against a wall, knocking down a teetering jar. The jar fell and shattered, and she flinched. The sound of it, though, she found deeply satisfying. It was like a drink of cold water after a day of trudging through dust and coming home emptyhanded. It was like the split second after waking, when she didn’t yet remember who or where or what she was, and only drifted, nothing amid nothingness.

  Experimentally, she swiped another jar off the nearest shelf. It broke. She felt it the whole way down her spine.

  The rest of the shelf followed after. Then the next. From wall to wall she went, tiptoeing over shards of glass and clay, calmly, methodically knocking every jar down as the ghost sat at the table, chin on gloved fist, and watched.

  For an instant she worried that Catchkeep Herself would materialize in the little house and strike her dead, but She did not. For another instant she worried at the colossal noise she was making. But the benefit to living ostracized from the rest of the town was that nobody was likely to hear her way out here, a mile up a hill of slag from anything.

  She stood a moment, catching her breath. Whatever had snapped in her had not re-knit. She had moved beyond impulse and into purpose. She’d knock this whole place down.

  What she really wanted was to set the house on fire, but she knew the smoke would carry across that mile, and anyone who looked up at the hill would run to the Catchkeep-priest, and he would be up there with a search party within an hour in daylight, two in the dark. The dogs would make it in less.

  She compromised by cramming the hearth with as many armfuls of the field notes as it would hold and lighting them. Once the fire took, she fed it with a few logs from her supply, which would keep it sending its cheerful smoke up her chimney for some hours after she had gone. Another couple of trips from the table to the hearth and the notes were consumed.

  Wasp took a step back to admire her handiwork. It was a bigger, cozier fire than she’d ever dared light for herself, firewood being so scarce and winter so long. Some small part of her wanted to curl up on the floor in front of it and sleep. Instead she rummaged around under her cot for one last thing.

  The Archivist-coat came out in her hands, covered with dust and smelling as foul as the day she’d first stuffed it under there. It was given to her with the harvesting-knife and her name, and she would be divested of it along with the knife when she was replaced. She seldom wore it because she despised what it marked her as: predator and parasite, poisonous and holy, scapegoat and saint. Also because she still woke sometimes from nightmares in which it reached its mottled arms up from under the bed and kissed her to smothering with the mouth it had somehow grown in the place where, were she wearing it, her shoulder blades would go. Its breath was dogleather and gore and the smell of that daisy-chain of dead girls who had worn it before her, who would wear it after.

  It was, however, the warmest thing she owned. And if it unner
ved her somewhat that it fit as well as it did, causing her to suspect that dead Archivists of all shapes and sizes had marveled over that themselves—this was not the time for it. She slid her arms in, suppressing a shudder. Buttoned it up to her chin. Squared the backpack on her shoulders. Her ankle took the extra weight with no complaint.

  She almost wished she’d be there to see the Catchkeep-priest’s face when he realized she’d either taken or destroyed all the Archivist-tools. The knife, the coat, the jars, the field notes, the salt. She doubted it would break the cycle of bloody-handed Archivists and dead upstarts altogether. But she was certain it would slow it down.

  “Ready?” said the ghost, waiting at the door.

  “Always,” she said.

  Coat or no, the cold still took her breath away. Three steps out into it and any warmth she had thought to hoard from that roaring fire and bring with her had evaporated. And the path in the dark was a terrible thing. The ghost at her side gave off a dim silvery phosphorescence which she could only hope would be enough to keep her from breaking her neck.

  Only one way to find out. She pulled the coat-hood up over her head and started walking. There was a certain rhythm to it, involving the ghost walking at a forward diagonal from her, so that she could see where her feet ought to go. After years as Archivist, it irked her unaccountably to rely on a ghost, but if that’s what got her out of here in one piece, she’d do it and like it.

  “How long before they realize you’re gone?” the ghost asked.

  Wasp shrugged invisibly in the dark. “If I’m lucky? Tomorrow. The upstarts get up early. The Catchkeep-priest sleeps late. He’s the one to worry about.” She couldn’t orient herself well enough to know whether tomorrow was the day the cart would come up her hill with offerings. If it wasn’t tomorrow, it was soon.

  The ghost did not ask And if you’re unlucky? She was glad of it.

  “So what’s your name, anyway?” she asked.

  There was a pause. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You don’t remember.” It astounded her, given the ghost’s strength, but there it was. “Do you.”

  Another pause, and then: “I remember hers.”

  Wasp waited. It wasn’t forthcoming. Colleagues, she thought. Right. “So what’s hers?”

  “Foster,” it said. “Catherine Foster.” A third pause. “Kit.”

  They walked in silence, trying to oil up their rusty etiquettes.

  “Mine’s Wasp,” said Wasp.

  “Wasp,” said the ghost. “What kind of name is that?”

  “The one I was given,” she said. “Because when it was my turn to fight the Archivist, I poisoned my blade and stabbed her full of holes. Then I became Archivist.”

  “Archivist.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re an archivist.”

  “Yes,” said Wasp, getting testy now. Defensive of something she had no interest in defending. Which only made her angrier. “Why.”

  “Well,” said the ghost.

  “What.”

  It shook its head. “Nothing.”

  More silence. They were down into the orchard now, negotiating between wide-armed shapeless trees. Circling around would have been quicker in the dark but also took them much too close to town. Even in the cold, with nearly all of the fruit wintering in town cellars, the air smelled like applesauce. Ghosts of apples, thought Wasp.

  The moon had fought free of the clouds now, making Wasp rather easier to spot if someone happened to be looking. It also released her from depending on the ghost’s own light to see by, so she took a few long strides to come up alongside it and found she had to hurry to stay there. Still, it was easier to talk this way. Not that she really knew what to talk about. She mulled it over for a while and gave up.

  “You don’t look much like a wasp,” the ghost said eventually.

  Wasp nodded. “It’s the wings, isn’t it,” she said.

  The ghost didn’t acknowledge her attempt at a joke. She couldn’t really blame it.

  “I would have expected someone a little more. I don’t know. Willowy?”

  This was not a word in Wasp’s vocabulary.

  “Smaller. Slighter. Less—” The ghost made a vague shape with its hands.

  Wasp, who had earned her muscles, took this as a compliment.

  Further silence. As they neared Execution Hill, the moon passed behind it, and they walked into its shadow. It occurred to her that the ghost hadn’t actually told her where they were going. There were any number of places where she could count on ghosts to appear. There was the fallen well out back of town, the tiny meadow of suns-and-moons in the dark beneath the snapped spine of the oldest bridge, and the collapsed maze of white tunnels that branched like roots beneath the town of Sweetwater, stretching as far as the mountain of bricks and glass and tortured metal that marked one corner of the garden’s perimeter fence, appearing to terminate somewhere down there, among the other roots, in the dark. And there were always ghosts who’d only show their faces during a thunderstorm, or a blizzard, or when those greenish lights would streak across the night sky like rain against a window, which made people say that Carrion Boy was crying, and lock their doors, and light their lamps. Maybe because she’d found this ghost up the Hill, it felt right to her to return there. At least this time, with neither ankle trying to murder her, the climb’d be easier. But the ghost was moving with a purpose, and that unsettled her. How did it know where to go?

  “Back up to the ledge?” she asked. “It’s pretty slow up there after dark. The bridge is better. Or,” she glanced up, gauging the film of ash over the stars, “maybe the well. This is a waste of—”

  “You’ll see,” said the ghost, and she stopped walking. She was about two seconds from telling the ghost she wasn’t going into this blind, whatever it was, and she wasn’t budging another inch without some details. She glanced at it, irritated, to find it measuring her with its eyes. She felt like a new puppy under the Catchkeep-priest’s appraising gaze: how sharp might her teeth get, how long her claws, how much use might she be before she failed. “How high can you climb?”

  “High enough,” she said, and, fueled by spite, started up.

  Half an hour later they made the ledge. Down from there was darkness, darkness and a few late distant lights from the town. Even from this height, if other towns cast other lights, off among the hills, she couldn’t see them.

  “We’re here,” she said. She’d been right. The ledge was deserted. Only the faintest gray light seeped from the crack in the rock. “What now?”

  “I already know you can climb this high,” said the ghost. “I asked you how high you could climb.”

  “There’s nothing higher. Just more rock.”

  “But you can get there.”

  “It’s just rock. No ghosts. Nothing.”

  “It sounds perfect,” said the ghost, already climbing. Wasp hung back, torn between defiance and curiosity. Eventually she started up, wondering if she could remember the way she’d ascended the one time she’d managed it, gained the peak, and stood there in a bleak wind and an emptiness, expecting more.

  It was a harder, sheerer climb from the ledge on up, often with no approximation of a path, not even a broken one. Handholds, footholds. Sometimes not even that much, and she flailed and fumed and clung cursing to the wall like a tick on a dog and the ghost reached back for her and hauled her up in merciful silence.

  When they reached the top, Wasp was sweated to wringing inside the Archivist-coat, but taking it off in that wind would be chasing the Chooser’s cape and no question. She stood on what little ledge there was, shivering and miserable, willing herself not to look down, while the ghost extracted something else from another pocket of its coat and shook it out into what at first Wasp mistook for a spiderweb the size of her quilt.

  “Here,” said the ghost, tossing it to her. She expected the wind to rip it away before it reached her, but whatever it was, when she caught it she found it was surpris
ingly substantial.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m freezing. You still haven’t told me why the hell you’re wasting my time up here, and I’m—”

  From somewhere in the valley, faint but unmistakable, came the baying of a dog, and Wasp’s veins ran ice. Possibly closer, certainly not more distant, another took up the cry.

  “Sounds like we’d better hurry,” said the ghost.

  “Hurry where? I’ve escaped up here before. They’ll outlast me. They always—”

  “Give me that.”

  Wasp was still staring down the Hill, straining her ears in the silence to gauge how far the search party had come. When the ghost pulled on the spiderweb-thing in her arms, she let go.

  “Now lie down.”

  This got through. “What?”

  “Listen. We don’t have much time. You don’t know me. You don’t like me. But for five minutes you need to be quiet and trust me.”

  Wasp had no idea what would happen if she said yes. But she had a crystal-clear idea of what would happen if she said no and waited for that hunt to catch her up instead. There was no third option. By the time she made her way back down—if she made it down—it would be too late to evade the Catchkeep-priest and his dogs. She wouldn’t even be able to antagonize them into killing her where she stood. They wouldn’t let her off that easy.

  She looked at the ghost. Then she looked out into the dark beneath the Hill.

  She lay down.

  “Curl up,” said the ghost. “As small as you can.” She crammed her knees up against her ribs, and the ghost draped the spiderweb-thing over her. “Try to stay calm. This will feel . . . a little strange.” As the thing settled on her, the edges of it tucked themselves in around the edges of her, adhering to the rock where it touched, while the middle sank in places to snug itself to her shape. The ghost held it clear of her face, which she was glad of in a moment when she realized that the thing was actually pinning her to the rock on three sides, and the fourth side was busily and soundlessly questing for an anchor point.