Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Isabel,” she whispered, and the door swung open.

  Chapter Nine

  She stepped through—and was abruptly in a forest. It was unlike the orchard back home, unlike anywhere she’d ever been. She and the ghost had come out in a clearing ringed round with trees she’d never seen before and couldn’t name, far taller and greener than the trees she knew. The grass of the clearing was dotted with flowers the size of her fingernail, blue enough to hurt her eyes. Overhead, the sky was bruise-colored and luminous. There was water, somewhere, near enough to smell.

  The grass, the leaves, even the clouds stood still. Wasp felt the same tingle up her spine she used to get when entering the Catchkeep-shrine, long ago. Treading softly, so that whatever power slept in that place would not wake and find her there. There was no birdsong, no rummaging of mice in the underbrush. All was silent.

  Until something crashed behind her, loud as summer thunder. She whirled, knife out—but it was only the door, shutting. A brief moment of panic: the thread that attached her to her body must be stuck now, in the door. But she pulled on it and found it spooling out of her, apparently endless, caught but unbroken.

  The door stood there in the clearing, unattached to anything. Grass grew around it. Remembering her cooling body’s camouflage, thinking of invisible walls, Wasp walked around the door. The clearing continued on all sides of it uninterrupted. She pushed it open. The clearing was through there too. At the boundary of the threshold, she could just make out the thread if she kept it directly in her sight, but the moment her eyes wavered from it, it seemed to vanish, and it was only after gasping and clutching at her chest that she reassured herself it was still attached.

  Wherever she was, she was stuck there.

  She glanced through the open door at the ghost. It seemed preoccupied, staring holes through the ground as though the grass and dirt of the clearing was reminding it of something it would rather forget.

  Wasp cleared her throat, and the ghost snapped out of it.

  “This way,” it said. “We have to find the bridge.”

  It took off and Wasp followed.

  Either the forest was tiny or the door was near its edge, because in a minute they’d come clear of the trees. Before them lay a river, black as tar and swift as thought, kicking up into whitewater. Among all that stillness, one thing that moved. Wasp saw no bridge, no boat, no crossing of any kind. The rushing water made no sound. Down it sailed a silvery clot of broken ghost-bodies, thrashing in silence but irreparable, having learned the hard way not to chance the river swimming.

  They weren’t too far from shore.

  “I can reach them,” Wasp breathed, and bolted toward the water with a branch.

  Half a step from joining them, the ghost knocked her down onto the riverbank.

  “You can’t help them,” it shouted in her face. “You can’t.”

  “Oh, but I can help you?” Wasp snapped back, disengaging herself. “You and you only? That’s convenient.” She didn’t think she’d heard it raise its voice before. Perhaps she’d finally shaken it. Still, deep down, she knew the ghost was right. She wasn’t any use to anybody floating down a river, arms broken, leaking silver ichor from her head. And she wouldn’t be much use to herself when she had finished here, if she cut off her way back to her body on the ledge.

  Still, she wasn’t about to admit a word of that to some specimen. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to let it shove her around. It reached out a hand to help her up, and she ignored it.

  “And you do not get to push me, get it?” Wasp stood, hand on the harvesting-knife. “I’ll give you that one for free. You’re going to pay for the next one.”

  Before the ghost could respond, a sound filled the air. A kind of rolling, keening howl, many-voiced, low and shrill and sonorous at once. The echo of it rebounded and faded, was taken up, elsewhere, again. In the silence since the door had shut, the sudden noise was huge. Worse, it was close.

  Worse still, she knew it, in her blood and bones.

  Catchkeep’s hunt.

  She’d forgotten all about it. It had been so long since she’d been a child small enough to be scared by fireside stories of the hunt, it hadn’t occurred to her that she was going to the place where those stories were real and could do her actual harm.

  No time to think about running. In the stories, once the hunt had locked on to a target, it could not be outrun. No time to guess what they’d do to her if the hunt tried to bring her down. Whether it would scent the Archivist in her first, or the interloper. In the stories the hunt had Catchkeep Herself at its head, and She was capricious and did what She liked. The hunt could send ghosts back to earth or annihilate them outright—or worse, it could be delicate, could break without destroying, and leave a ghost to try and make its way through eternity with whatever the hunt had left it.

  As far as Wasp was concerned, none of these things was an option.

  She squirmed out of the backpack and tossed it aside, back toward the woods. To her horror, she could see other ghosts making their way out from the door among the trees, following the path toward the river. “Stay back!” she shrieked at them, not knowing whether that would put them further from danger or closer. Hoping she and the ghost could draw the hunt, give them time to run or hide.

  By the riverbank, the ghost was waiting, sword out, back to the water, eyes scanning the woods. There was something in its face and stance that made it look much more like the image of its dead self on the old paper than the ghost-self Wasp was coming to know. Its focus had changed. It was in its element. Well, that much she could understand.

  She took her place beside it and drew the knife.

  Later, it would unsettle her. Here she was, an Archivist, drawing weapons with someone rather than against. Fighting back-to-back with someone. Knowing that if she pulled through this, it would be in part because of the speed and skill and competence of someone other than herself. And if the ghost did, it would be in part because of hers. It wouldn’t last, but at this moment, for the first time in her life, Wasp had an ally.

  It was very, very strange. It was not wholly unpleasant.

  “I make seven or eight by the sound,” the ghost was saying. “And closing fast. That way.” A tight little half-nod, over the woods. Back where she’d told the ghosts to stay. To keep them safe. Already, from the direction of the door, she could hear thin screams arising.

  Wasp cursed, then broke and ran.

  And something exploded out of the trees. She caught the briefest glimpse of it—vast, bright, snarling—and then she was on her back in the dirt with a weight on her shoulders and a stabbing pain in her chest where her air should be.

  There was a little rhyme the children of Sweetwater would say, as they were tucked into bed and the snuffed lamps left them alone in the dark.

  Catchkeep’s lurchers, running free,

  Herding the souls out over the trees:

  Cold ghosts you are. Till ghost I be,

  You have no power over me.

  It did not begin to prepare her for the thing that loomed over her now.

  It was like a dog, but not a dog. Its breath stank like a sickroom on fire, and its eyes glowed green. Its teeth were longer than her fingers. There was a silvery rag caught in its jaws. A silvery rag with eyeholes and a mouth. Over by the door in the clearing, the screaming had stopped.

  No time. Wasp gripped the knife, gathered, and struck. The blade squelched in to the guard between two ribs, and she gasped. She must be hallucinating. There, for a second, she had faded out, lost consciousness, something—she had somehow seen a vision of Catchkeep’s lurchers, several of them, stalking toward her dark-windowed little house on the hill. It jarred her. She faded back in just as she was pulling the knife free. If she had lost that second a moment earlier, a moment later—at any time but during the eyeblink of an opening following her blow—she would be dead, teeth in her throat, and knew it.

  Would Catchkeep’s holy knife harm one of Her own? It
was a gamble on a guess. But the lurcher shrieked and lunged, and it took all Wasp’s strength to wrench her head aside in time for the huge jaws to snap shut where her face had been.

  The lurcher was clearly unused to missing targets. It swayed back, unbalanced, and Wasp got her foot up between them and pushed with all she had. The lurcher fell sideways a half step. It was all she needed. She dug her nails into the slime-slicked dogleather of the grip and dragged the blade free for a second strike even as she planted her foot in the lurcher’s underbelly. It yelped like any kicked dog and swung back toward her snarling, but Wasp was out from under, crouched low behind the knife, counting seconds.

  She didn’t count many. The lurcher took another snap at her and she dropped her weight and shot up fast with the harvesting-knife, and the lurcher went down hard with the hilt sticking out of the soft of its throat and the point of the blade in whatever passed for its brain. She pulled the knife free as the lurcher began to melt into a kind of slurry, which disappeared into the ground with a smell of lilacs and a sound like eggs frying. The grass died in its outline, black and slimed. One down.

  And then she saw the ghost. She had never seen anything like it in her life.

  It had the death-stains of five lurchers arrayed around its boots and was working on a sixth. The lurcher leapt for the ghost’s throat, and the ghost’s sword got in the way. With no visible effort the ghost sidestepped, down came the teeth on the blade, the ghost gave what looked like a gentle push, and the top half of the lurcher’s head came off and deliquesced as it fell. The rest of the lurcher, carried by its momentum, plunged into the river. The current bore it away, a skin of black goo on the black water.

  Another sprang for Wasp, and the ghost, calm as ever, drew the gun in its off-hand and fired—and the bullet passed straight over the lurcher as it tumbled to the dirt at Wasp’s feet, her flung knife in its eye.

  With that, the silence returned.

  “Looks like the last of them,” she said, pulling the knife free. Suppressing a shudder at the feel of what she pulled it out of: meat, shadow, slime. Almost not registering the vision, dream-scrap, whatever, that zapped its way up the knife, through her arm, into her brain: a lurcher savaging what might have been a deer, facedown in its guts. She caught it in afterimage, blinked, and it was gone.

  The ghost gave the woods one last once-over and holstered the gun. Still it kept its sword drawn, its eyes on the dark beyond the trees. Wasp cast a sidewise glance at it, finding herself suddenly, aggravatingly shy before this new aspect of it, this awful vicious elegance she’d only seen hinted at before.

  To give herself something to do, she scrubbed the harvesting-knife on the grass. It didn’t work as well as she’d have liked. “Do they come through here often?” she asked, squatting by the water to wash the blade in the shallows. “The lurchers. Catchkeep’s hunt.”

  “Never,” said the ghost. “I assumed they were after you.”

  This made no sense. Even tiny children knew about the Hunt. Herding the souls out over the trees . . . And this, where the ghosts walked, this was their hunting ground. Centuries down here, a ghost couldn’t really help but notice. Either the ghost was lying or all the stories were. She thought of the scars on her cheek and wondered which was true.

  Silent motion at her side as the ghost joined her. Its sword hadn’t fared any better than her knife, and they were there for some minutes, saying nothing, letting the water do its work.

  “You fight well,” the ghost said after a time.

  Wasp shrugged. “I don’t have a choice. It’s what I was made for.” Something in the quality of the silence changed. She turned. The ghost’s stare was unreadable. “So do you,” she added hastily, looking away.

  “It’s what I was made for,” said the ghost, so soft Wasp almost couldn’t hear it, and now it was her turn to stare.

  Despite the muddy riverbank, the ghost stood smoothly. “It’s getting dark. We have to find the bridge.”

  “Bridge,” said Wasp. “Right.” Her questions could wait. She jumped up, dried the blade on her coat-sleeve, sheathed it. The backpack. She’d almost forgotten it. It was badly slime-splashed, and the fabric of it had corroded beneath the stains, disintegrated at a touch. Most everything in it was beyond hope of salvage. Only the saltlick, the jar, and the firestarter could be kept. She pocketed them.

  Just as she didn’t let herself ponder how the Archivist-coat somehow managed to fit all Archivists of whatever shape and size, she didn’t think too long on how the pockets seemed to stretch to receive the box of salt and the jar. Not for the first time she resolved to burn the coat the first chance she could, and wondered whether this time she’d actually follow through.

  Into the woods beyond where she had left the backpack, she could see a huddle of ghosts lingering by the door, gauging the safety of the path, muttering amongst themselves. Not looking at what lay ravaged at their feet.

  She went to shout out to them, then thought better of it. She couldn’t assure them of their safety. Not if she was, by her very presence, bringing the hunt down upon their heads. The best thing she could do for them was get gone. Fast.

  The sky had deepened to violet, casting green-black shadows. She didn’t see a bridge. “Which way—?”

  “It doesn’t stay in one place for long. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Wasp blew air out of her mouth hard. “I don’t know. Upriver.”

  They took off upriver.

  “I mean, you’re sure it’s here somewhere, right? We’re not going to just keep walking straight into another batch of those things?”

  “I’m sure it’s somewhere, yes.”

  “Funny. But the lurchers are out there, and they’re looking for me, I guess, and you don’t even seem to know how they got here to—”

  “And if they find you, you’ll handle it. You did as much already.”

  Wasp was not much used to having her abilities—not Catchkeep’s puppet’s but hers—spoken of favorably. She mumbled something incoherent under her breath and took a sudden keen interest in her surroundings.

  Upriver was turning out to be much of the same. The woods were at her left shoulder now, and denser here. Here and there she could glimpse movement off in the dark: ghosts walking unknown paths among the trees. The same purple sky above, in which stars were now emerging, their constellations unfamiliar. Beneath her feet the dirt of the riverbank was red as berries and wet-looking, even beyond where the water reached. It gave off a metallic smell.

  She mentioned as much to the ghost. “I know,” it said. “We’re getting close.”

  Some minutes later, it stopped. Wasp looked around. She saw nothing.

  “Here,” said the ghost.

  “Here what?”

  The ghost gave that slow half-nod toward something across the river. Wasp squinted in the almost-dark. A hundred yards of rushing water and a misty shore. A road beyond. The tall grass of a meadow. Lights, farther off: amber, sapphire, blackish red—and high up, like Wasp’s town stacked on its own head thrice.

  “Okay,” said Wasp. “What?”

  “Stand here. Where I’m standing.” The ghost stepped aside, making room. “Now look.”

  Wasp stood, and looked.

  And gasped. Because the bridge, suddenly, was there.

  It had planes and angles and high graceful arches. It was dull, shining, black, white, transparent, many-colored. Short of Execution Hill and Lake Sweetwater, it was possibly the single biggest thing Wasp had ever seen on earth.

  She took a step sideways and it vanished. Stepped back and it reappeared. She was beginning to understand what had driven that raft of broken ghosts to swimming.

  Close up, the bridge was made of trash. Coins. Stones. Shells. Keys. Birdskulls. Bits of glass. Bits of plastic. Bits of driftwood. Broken weapons. Dried flowers. Trinkets. Bullets. Leaves. Rings. And a thousand things Wasp didn’t recognize. Some of it pristine, some of it eroded into nonsense. Most pieces no larger than the palm of he
r hand.

  “The dead build it together,” said the ghost. “From their pockets, from their coffins. From their mouths and eyes.”

  Wasp thought of all the dead Archivists, green stones on their tongues. How even the poorest dead of Sweetwater were buried with pebbles, pear-seeds, clay tokens. Something. How the townspeople thought it lucky to die in early summer, when the suns-and-moons could be picked from the fields and placed over each corpse’s eyes: one yellow, one white.

  She’d come with little and lost most of it already. What remained to her was a knife, a jar, a firestarter, and a half-empty box of salt. Her shoes, her clothes, a vaguely disturbing dogleather coat, the long curved pin holding up the burden of her hair.

  Her hair. She felt silly even considering it. She felt like Ember Girl in the stories, who seemed to cut her hair off every time she embarked on an adventure. But it was there to leave, and she didn’t have much else that she could spare, and it was nothing she would miss or need. And she liked the idea of laying all those murdered girls down to rest here after carrying them through the upper world so long.

  She pulled the pin out, and her hair fell deadweight to her waist. As an almost-ghost, she felt she shouldn’t have been able to still smell it, but the stink of death was still as strong on it as ever. It might have been her imagination, but she was sure that cutting into it only made the smell worse. As though it wasn’t hair at all, but a rotten egg cracked open or a days-dead raccoon run over by a cart. And sawing through the mass of it, sharp as the harvesting-knife was, took much longer than she’d guessed.