“Right,” she said, still fidgeting. “And if something happens to my body? Up there?”
“Again, I’m not sure. I imagine you’ll know it if you see it.”
“Great,” said Wasp. Then something else hit her. “You said stuck here. You mean I die. I become a ghost. For real this time.”
The ghost said nothing.
“This is nothing like in the stories. Down here, ghosts are supposed to be immortal.”
“They are,” said the ghost. “What they are not is invincible.”
Wasp barked out a nervous laugh. “Doesn’t look like it makes much difference from—”
“This is your last chance to turn back,” it said. “I won’t stop you. There are other exits, deeper in. But this door is not one of them. And I can’t open it for you.”
The door was a double door, its knockers fashioned of some dull no-colored metal. They were the exact perfect height for Wasp to reach, the exact perfect size for Wasp to grasp. They were neither overly warm nor overly cold to the touch.
The sound of her exhalation was louder than it should have been, in that space.
“Is it true?” she asked. She had not often looked the ghost square in the face, but she did now. “They—”
—believe in me down here? she thought.
“—talk about me down here?” she said.
“Yes,” said the ghost. “No. Does it matter?”
“I don’t know,” said Wasp, and knocked.
Chapter Eight
For a long, long moment, nothing happened. Then, with a sound like someone’s back breaking, the door split in half and began to slowly swing inward on silent hinges. Wasp, thinking of strange doors and the things that came through them in songs and stories—“Marryings and Buryings,” “Catchkeep’s Steeplechase,” “Carrion Boy Feeds the Crows,” “Off-map to Sweetwater”—leapt back and stayed there, white-knuckled on the knife-hilt, breathing fast and low.
From the corner of her eye she saw the ghost standing by the wall, its arms folded, its look pitying. It was this more than anything that terrified her.
What came through the door was herself.
Herself in miniature: maybe two years old, maybe less. Unrecognizable except for the fact that her parents were carrying her, and though she’d thought she’d long since forgotten them, she found that something rose up in her now, remembering. They were dressed in ragged lightweight work-clothes, though there was snow in their hair. The bones stood out in their faces, and the muscles had wasted on their frames. It was not lost on Wasp that the baby they carried was the only remotely well-fed one of the three.
They came through the door, walking the stilted, stuttering walk of ghosts, and stopped before her knifepoint and her stricken stare, not seeing either.
Behind them came the Catchkeep-priest, two shrine-dogs pulling a wagon full of food behind him. They stopped a few paces back, and the dogs lay down in their traces, surveying the Wasp-baby with glittering eyes.
All three of them, Catchkeep-priest and shrine-dogs alike, looked filthy, road-weary. Wasp thought of the times, once or twice a year unless combat or disease had made a particularly bad season for upstarts, when Catchkeep granted Her priest a vision of Her Archivist’s new possible successors. He’d vanish for a week, nothing but threats of Catchkeep’s retribution keeping the upstarts in line, and return with two or three scarred holy babies—larval upstarts, with no inkling of their holiness or of their doom.
It was very strange, seeing this happen to herself, but that was not the part that surprised her. The part that surprised her was the wagon full of food that the Catchkeep-priest was now unhitching and her parent-ghosts were clearly exerting a great deal of effort not to run to. Wasp narrowed her eyes. It looked for all the world like the Catchkeep-priest was trading food for—
That done, the Catchkeep-priest glided over and stood in a little triangle with her parents, the now-squalling lump of Wasp held with obvious reluctance out into the middle. She could not make out what they said, only that he was making comforting noises at them and they were making comforting noises at her. Then the lump that was Wasp passed hands and her parents took up the wagon full of food and made their faltering way back through the door with it.
The Catchkeep-priest watched them go. He was astonishingly young, maybe ten years older than Wasp was now. When they were gone, and the door had shut behind them, he folded the baby into the crook of his arm, tilting her into the light.
She didn’t realize what was wrong about her face until he drew the knife, held the baby’s head still, and sliced into her cheek the four long gashes that would in time heal over and thicken into the scar that Wasp now wore.
Catchkeep’s mark.
Even now he was smearing some kind of sticky-looking black ointment on the wounds, and the bleeding stopped. This, too, Wasp had seen before, once when the Catchkeep-priest had driven his knife between the bones of her hand, pinning it to the wall. A festering had set into the wound, swelling her hand until it could no longer hold the harvesting-knife, and he had taken her aside, threatened her into silence, and smeared both sides of her hand with black goo. In an hour it was a scab. In three days it was a scar.
But this was impossible. The first thing any upstart ever learned about herself was that when she was still in her mother’s womb, Catchkeep Herself had come to her and set Her claws tenderly to her unborn face. Every upstart was born with that mark, and Wasp was no exception. It branded them as Catchkeep’s chosen, the raw unformed unproven stuff of Archivists. It was the basis and the justification for everything she and every Archivist before her had been put through in the performance of their duties. It was the chopping-block on which the life that should have been hers had died.
And, if her eyes were to be believed, every word of those stories, every minute of those lives, every inch of that mark was a lie.
The Wasp-baby squirmed, sobbing her outrage, and the Catchkeep-priest bounced her in his arms and sang soft songs into her tiny ear until she hushed. And this, at that moment, in Wasp’s estimation, somehow above and beyond all else, was unforgivable.
A sound came out of her in a voice she didn’t recognize and she drove the harvesting-knife to the hilt into the Catchkeep-priest’s eye. From the blade outward he began to dissolve, still singing, and took the baby with him. The knife fell clattering. As the baby’s face atomized to silver sparks, she was smiling.
Wasp slumped, all the fight run out of her.
“It shows you what you are,” the ghost said softly.
“You could have warned me.”
“I could have. And it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
Something in its tone got her attention. “When you went through. What did it show you?”
The ghost’s face darkened. “Nothing I didn’t know already.” A pause. “We should continue.”
They continued.
Through the door, the hall widened and spilled into a cavernous room. A sudden wall of sound and smell rolled out to meet her. The sound was voices, more voices than Wasp had ever heard in one place. More than on the busiest market-morning, more than in the celebrations before the bloodshed on the Archivist-choosing day. The smell was ghosts. Lots of ghosts. She entered the room and was abruptly surrounded. Unlike aboveground, here they looked like people, life-size, not silver. They had pigmentation, faces, clothing, mannerisms. Only the smell, like someone had left the window open on a clear March day, gave them away for what they were.
The door behind her opened again and a tired-looking old male ghost came through. It had not been there in the hall beneath the Hill.
“On the outside, the doors leading here are different,” the ghost said to Wasp’s confusion. “When they get here, they’re the same.”
Almost as soon as the door had shut behind the old male ghost it opened to admit a middle-aged female one, bled out to the color of milk, its arm having been bitten off to the shoulder. Still screaming run to nobody Wasp could see.
Next came a male ghost, bloated blue with drowning, dressed in some shiny material Wasp didn’t recognize. Then came two child-ghosts, walking hand in hand, nothing visible amiss with either of them.
Three years as Archivist had taught Wasp that a certain kind of death, especially the violent or untimely sort, will cause a ghost to imprint upon it, obsess over it, become it.
A certain kind of death or maybe a certain kind of ghost, she thought now, watching these. However each of the two child-ghosts had died, it hadn’t been alone. They were not seeing death. They were seeing something else. Together, they had kept enough of themselves to bring with them, to light their way.
Beside Wasp, her own ghost was watching them, a terrible hunger in its eyes. She reached to touch its arm, thinking this is what people do, but then thought better of it and let her hand fall, halfway to its sleeve.
“Keep moving, right?” she said. Already in her head those words were taking on an almost ritualistic significance, like a rope she could pull herself along, hand over hand, when all else failed.
With a visible effort, the ghost dropped its gaze, smoothed its face to a blank.
“Right,” it said. It lifted its chin toward something across the room. “Over there.”
Over there was a second door, very like the first. It struck Wasp that there were no other structures to the room; just ghosts, and ghosts, and the door in, and the door out. One by one, ghosts approached that second door. Sometimes it opened. Sometimes it stayed shut. It began to dawn on her that a solid half of the ghosts in the room, maybe more, were milling around aimlessly, avoiding the queue for the door. Other ghosts, for whom the door didn’t open, left the front of the queue to join them.
Wasp scrubbed her clammy palms dry on her coatsleeves and marched forward to take her place in line. The ghost went with her.
“Staring at the ground isn’t going to find anyone,” Wasp told it, mostly to keep her mind off her own apprehension.
“There’s no one here I have any interest in finding,” it replied.
Of course, thought Wasp. These are the newly dead. But yours—
“I guess older ghosts wouldn’t, I don’t know, come back up to give these ones a hand?” she asked. “They sort of look like they could use it.”
From what Wasp had seen of ghosts in random groupings, she didn’t really guess there was much by way of solidarity among the dead, and the only reason she could think of for having asked in the first place was that she’d been dragged down here on a hunt for the ghost of a centuries-old corpse she wouldn’t recognize if it came up and kicked Wasp in the rear. She needed more to work with.
“I’ve never seen it,” said the ghost. “But,” after a moment, “as far as she’s concerned, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Huh,” said Wasp. In her mental field notes on her quarry she was underlining stubborn. Adding reckless. Adding kind.
The queue inched forward.
“Wouldn’t it help if I knew what she looked like?”
“Of course,” said the ghost, and then stood staring into space for a full minute, brow creased, to all appearances doing what the Catchkeep-priest called waffling. “She. She’s.”
Wasp felt her patience fraying. “Well, that’s wonderful. You don’t even—”
The look the ghost gave her was murderous. “I remember.” It hesitated further, weighing something in its mind, and eventually removed a square of paper from a pocket and set about unfolding it with a care and delicacy, usually in Wasp’s experience, reserved for a midwife’s more complicated surgeries, or a scavenge-gang deactivating ancient bombs for parts. Wasp knew old paper, and unless she missed her guess, this one had been folded and unfolded countless times, crumpled and uncrumpled, thrown away more than once, but every time retrieved.
Unfolded, the sheet of paper was covered on one side with words written in a cramped and desperate penmanship, with a thick reddish smudge in a corner. Wasp only got the briefest glance at it, but one glimpse of the ghost’s face told her, in no uncertain terms, not to ask. The other side had printed words, large ones above an image, smaller ones below. Age and wear had weathered the paper to felt along the creases and the words had all been lost, printed in something less indelible than whatever the words on the back had been scrawled in.
The image, too, was soft and grayed, but in it Wasp could see two figures standing, and she already recognized one. It—he—must have died shortly after the picture was taken. In front of the ghost, the image might as well have been a mirror. The same pale skin, the same dark hair, and due to the black-and-white nature of the image, even the same gray eyes. A mirror, right down to the meticulous mask of the face. Though, Wasp could see, the living man’s mask was there to hide slightly different emotions than the ghost’s was. She narrowed her eyes at it, intrigued.
In the image, he was standing in an obviously posed manner, shoulder-to-shoulder with a woman. Both had their weapons drawn. Both wore the same uniform, or nearly. The ruins of some building lay smoking behind them. Colleagues, thought Wasp. I see.
Wasp brought the paper up, inches from her nose, and squinted at the woman. Foster. The top of her head came about level with the man’s eyes. Her eyes and skin were darker than his, and her hair was cropped shorter. Due either to the angle of the photo or to something else, her face took on a fierce, inquisitive cast, putting Wasp in mind of a predatory bird. She had one eyebrow lifted, one corner of her mouth quirked, as though issuing a challenge to Wasp across the centuries: Find me, little girl-with-a-knife. Find me if you can.
Wasp took in the sword and the gun, and the easy proficiency with which Foster held them, and into the mental field notes went warrior. Took in the eyes, quick and defiant, with a sorrowing edge. They were liar’s eyes, and loyal eyes. She added clever. Also dangerous.
These traits were not all coming to right angles in her mind. The image was enough for Wasp to pick Foster’s ghost out of a crowd—probably—but now she was worse off than before.
Now she was curious.
She made the slightest move to flip the paper over to the written side and the ghost seized her wrist and pulled the paper from her hand. Pure contrariness, she almost held onto the paper so that the ghost would have to tear it in half to get it free. But whatever the ghost had done to her wrist, she couldn’t move her fingers, and the next thing she knew the paper was gone and her hand was beginning to burn and tingle as the blood rushed back in.
I deserved that, she thought, and said nothing of the kind.
Beside her the ghost was stewing in its own head, at the questionable mercy of thoughts she had no way of naming. If she’d had the materials to sketch it she would have tried. Catchkeep still rode her, even this far from home. It wouldn’t end until she ended it.
Reach out, thought Wasp. What people do.
“She looks . . .” Wasp began, then found herself fumbling. Her mental field notes were rearranging themselves, condensing to a point, but if there was a word for what she found there, she didn’t know it. “She looks . . . very . . . capable.”
Something in the ghost’s eyes lit and was suppressed. Pride. “She was.”
“Is.”
The ghost looked away.
“Well, she’s down here somewhere,” Wasp said. It was half a question.
“The dead can’t die,” said the ghost, “but they can be destroyed. You know that as well as anyone, don’t you? Archivist.”
Wasp literally backed a step at the sudden hate in its voice. “I didn’t,” she began, and then stopped, unable to finish the sentence with any certainty.
Yes, she’d freed many ghosts against the Catchkeep-priest’s direct orders. But those orders had been to destroy them all—or at least all of the ones whose information she’d exhausted and transferred to her notes. A twice-caught ghost, according to the Catchkeep-priest, was as useless as a crapper with no hole in it. A thinned-out harvesting-field of ghosts, however, was not. How often had she obeyed? And how often had the Arc
hivists before her?
The sheer weight of years was staggering. The ghost standing before her was older than her whole world and everything in it. It was a wink of the Chooser’s good eye that it hadn’t already been annihilated by her or by one like her, if any of them were strong enough to take it on. The girl with the knife in her belt and the scars on her face. Each of them the shadow of the one that came before. Each of them the same. And if what she’d seen at the door was true, and none of the upstarts were marked by Catchkeep in the first place, and none of them were special, and none of them were chosen . . .
She’d been lying to herself too long. She wasn’t any different.
They stood the rest of the queue in silence. Eventually—a minute later, an hour, a day—Wasp’s turn came. From a distance she hadn’t been sure what to expect. A password, maybe. A lock. A trap. The door before her looked much like the one she’d entered through, except there was no knocker. Nor were there any knobs or handles or anything by which she could open it herself, if it refused her.
She took her place before the door and heard a voice inside her head. No, she thought later: not heard so much as felt, and not a voice so much as a compulsion. Speak your name, it said. You have three chances.
“Wasp,” said Wasp.
Incorrect. That’s one.
Her temper flashed up. “Ragpicker take you, you useless chunk of slag, my name is Wasp.”
That’s two.
She stomped her anger down before it got her stuck here in some ghosts’ waiting-room until Ember Girl burned the world and flung her free. Think. She had to think. Behind her, the queue was muttering already. It wasn’t helping.
For years she’d been Wasp. It was who she was. Everything up until that point had been training to get there. She’d grown up as any upstart grew up: bounced back and forth between houses, cared for by the families of the town until she was old enough to begin her training, and each family had called her by whatever name it chose. She’d been called after a dead daughter, a runaway daughter, a daughter someone had never had. Then she’d moved to the shrine quarters, with its long table and its stone sleeping-alcoves, and by that time the false names had worn from her along with the true one, like an old coin too often handled. It had been so long since she’d even thought of what she’d been called before, and it sickened her that it had taken her until her third chance before the door to remember which name, under all of the false ones, was true.
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