Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  As she worked, she explained to the ghost how for every upstart she had fought and killed, a large part of the dead girl’s hair was cut off and interwoven into Wasp’s. Three per year for three years, minus Aneko: undefeated. And some from the Archivist she had killed to get there. She explained how every year, after the fight, before she’d even recovered from her wounds, it all was unwoven, the new growth of her own hair trimmed, then everyone else’s plaited back in and glued where the plaits didn’t hold. How every year her head grew heavier, and if she were too successful for too long, the weight would blind her with migraines, slow her movements, level the field between her and the upstarts who would eventually tear her down.

  “Why?” asked the ghost.

  “It’s how it’s always been,” said Wasp. Then, realizing how weak this answer must sound, realizing she had no better answer to give, started cutting faster. Where her hair left the knife it turned silvery, reduced to ghost-debris, like the tangle of broken limbs sailing down the river. Like the mask in the lurcher’s mouth that was not a mask at all.

  The ghost observed her, saying nothing, as around Wasp’s feet the pile of braids and charms grew higher. Now that the fight with the lurchers was over, the ghost had reverted to that alert impassivity, precise and serene. When Wasp had said that she was made for fighting, it had been a bit of an exaggeration, meant to deflect an awkward compliment. But after what she had seen she had little difficulty believing that, for the ghost’s part, it was literally true. It looked to her less like a person than like a weapon that had gone walking, out of a story and into the world, wearing a person’s shape.

  But what use would a weapon have for this search it was dragging her on, she wondered. What sort of person would a weapon call friend?

  Another weapon, the answer came to her. Another of the same.

  The whole mess made her think of stories, of Carrion Boy and His ally-enemy Ember Girl. Each quested across a hundred songs and stories searching for the other, but the reasons for these searches—to trick, to slay, to rescue, or something in between—depended on the story. The only constant was that each time They met, They met in collisions that broke one against the other. It was not Carrion Boy’s fault, not Ember Girl’s. It was simply what They were. And the next winter, and the winter after that, They’d get up and, unable to do otherwise, start again.

  It was all well and good in bloodless stories about distant stars. Here, now, it made her uncomfortable on several levels, most of which she didn’t want to examine closely enough to identify. Another of the same had hit her with hard enough of a pang already.

  “What did you leave at the bridge?” she asked, knowing by now that she wouldn’t get an answer. Only needing a stone, however small and ineffectual, to throw at her thoughts and make them scatter.

  But the ghost surprised her. “A medal,” it said, and the knife froze in Wasp’s hand. She had hated so much for so long, but it paled to nothing beside the bitterness in the ghost’s voice now. “The medal they gave me for turning her in.”

  Wasp swallowed. There was one right thing to say to something like this, she felt, and as the only one here, it was her job to say it, whatever it was. She kicked words around in her mind, all useless, all she had: I am sure she was strong enough to forgive you. I hope she died well. They say the Ragpicker’s favorite sweet is should-have-dones. Don’t give Him yours.

  It was an easy choice between a wrong guess and a shut mouth, so she went with the shut mouth, and the ghost did, too.

  The last strands of upstart-hair landed on the bridge. Wasp sheathed the harvesting-knife and stepped out of the pile, brushing off her sleeves.

  The air was cool on the back of her neck. She felt so light. Almost unbalanced—she’d learned so long ago to move with this great ungainly weight strapped to her, and now it was gone. She half wanted the lurchers to return, so she could see how well she fought unrestricted. Whether her skill would match the ghost’s. This ghost’s or the vanished one’s, Kit Foster’s, trapped in that faded paper, testing her with its eyes.

  Shut up, she thought. Focus.

  She ran a hand through what was left of her hair. It was about fifty different lengths and stood out every whichaway, but everything that had belonged to the dead had been removed. What was left, as far as she could tell, was hers.

  The bridge stretched out before her. She started walking.

  Chapter Ten

  Across the bridge, a path led away amid grass as high as Wasp’s head. After the door-attached-to-nothing and the nearly invisible death-token bridge, she expected something more than what she saw: a dirt road, straight and narrow, tamped smooth by countless feet.

  The grass made her nervous. It could hide anything. Especially in the dark, which by now was virtually complete.

  In the monotony of the meadow it was impossible for her to tell how far they walked, and it seemed the city in the distance grew no nearer. She didn’t ask if that was where they were headed. She assumed it was. There was nothing else to see.

  Ghosts passed them, from time to time, on other business. None of them was Foster. They kept their heads down, their mouths shut, their eyes averted, so Wasp did the same. A moon hung low in the sky, heavy and orange.

  Wasp was getting tired, or thought she was. Could she be thirsty? Hungry? Footsore? Did she need to sleep, down here?

  “A little farther,” the ghost said, as if sensing her thoughts. “We can make up lost time in the morning.”

  Morning. Night. A moon. That these even existed in this place was a surprise to her. In hindsight she couldn’t now picture what she’d thought of, before, when she thought of where the dead go when they die and Catchkeep brings their ghosts across. A long road, leading nowhere. An empty room in which to sit and wait for nothing. A field to wander, as the ghosts she caught aboveground must have wandered, bent beneath whatever quests still rode them. Or aimlessly. Well, she was in a field, anyway.

  Yet again she found herself kicking questions around in her head. How was she to find Foster or anyone down here? Where was she even to begin to look? Could she catch ghosts with the saltlick down here? The idea seemed ridiculous. It was one thing when the ghosts she caught were faceless silver paper-doll cutouts the size of mice, and another when they seemed like ordinary people, as big and real-looking as her. And—if this ghost had been searching for hundreds of years already, what on earth did it think she could do that it hadn’t already tried? It wasn’t going to be happy when it realized that Wasp’s only ghosthunting experience involved sitting around waiting for specimens to come to her salt.

  And then there were the questions she wasn’t sure she wanted answers to. Was what the door had shown her—that the Catchkeep-priest had marked her for service himself—true? If the basis for choosing upstarts was a lie, what else was? And if Catchkeep’s hunt was not a fixture of the ghosts’ land as the stories told, then had she fought Catchkeep’s hunt at all, or something else? How had it found her? Would it find her again?

  Would she survive it if it did?

  “Here,” the ghost said, and it took Wasp’s legs a second to remember how to stop walking. They had stopped in the middle of the path, nothing of note before them or behind. Off in the distance, rising up above the tall grass, Wasp could just make out by moonlight a roof, a chimney. Smoke.

  “Someone’s there,” said Wasp, but the ghost was already tacking off through the grass toward the house. Moonlight caught on its sword. Quieter than the gun, thought Wasp, and, sparing a glance up and down the road for lurchers on her tail, drew her own blade and followed. Tiny bright things chirped and trilled at her from the grass as she brushed by. They didn’t look like any insects that she knew.

  From the way it was approaching the door, Wasp thought the ghost would kick it in. But it stopped at the last minute and tried the latch. Not locked. The door swung into the room, and the ghost slipped around it without a sound. Wasp snuck in after, blade ready, and the door clicked shut behind.


  There was nobody there. A fire in the hearth, a bed stacked with quilts, a table piled high with food and drink. Wasp, whose cradle-tongue was stories, eyed these warily. “What is this place?”

  “A waypoint,” said the ghost. “Of a kind.”

  “A what?”

  “It tells you where you are. Sets out a small place in a bigger one.”

  “A map.”

  “Like a marker on a map,” said the ghost. “Also like a door. Also sometimes like the room behind the door. Sometimes not like that at all.” It crossed the room and took a seat: elbow on table, booted heel on knee. “You wanted to rest. Now you can.”

  Out the windows, there was nothing. Grass grew flush against the walls, sighed and fretted at the panes. They could be anywhere.

  Wasp was eyeing the bed yearningly. It looked soft. It looked like a trap.

  “What’s the point of all this? Ghosts don’t need to eat. They don’t need to sleep.” She paused, unsure. “Do they?”

  “You tell me.” It gave the neighboring chair a kick, sending it skidding across the floor to rock to a stop before her. “Sit down before you fall down.”

  Wasp sat. The chair did not eat her. It did not wrap wooden arms around her and burn her alive. That at least was something. She picked it up, carried it to the table, and parked it next to the ghost’s.

  There was a drinking-bowl of water at her elbow. It looked safe enough, and she was so thirsty. She sniffed at it, then took a sip. It tasted like drinking out of cupped hands from a clear brook in high summer. She drained the bowl dry, then returned it to the table. When she glanced at it again, it was full.

  What with the weight off her feet and the coziness of the fire, it was going to take some doing for her to not start snoring then and there, her face on the tabletop. But there were grapes there, a basket of them, and not the stunted, wild sort that ran riot through the orchard-rows, a hundred to a handful. They were the size of her eye, the color of the river she had crossed. She could smell them from where she sat. They smelled untrustworthy.

  The look of longing on her face must have been obvious, because the ghost picked a couple of grapes from the basket, ate one, shrugged a little, then tossed her the other. She caught it. Rolled it in her hand. It wasn’t poison that worried her. It was doing something that would let this place lay claim to her. She set it down.

  “Something strange happened today,” she heard herself murmuring.

  “You don’t say.”

  “When I stabbed the lurchers. I—I saw things.” It sounded stupid any way she cut it. “Things that weren’t there. It—”

  “Go on.”

  “I saw them in the other world. The real one. They were heading toward my house. They were scenting for something. They hadn’t found it yet.”

  The ghost was watching her closely, eyes narrowed. “When you stabbed the creature.”

  “The lurcher,” said Wasp. Pure reflex, pure rote, the childhood rhyme was on her tongue. She swallowed it. “Yes.”

  “With that blade?”

  She nodded.

  “Let me see.”

  Wasp unsheathed. Firelight glittered on the sixteen stars. Not for the first time it came to her: sixteen stars in Catchkeep’s up-self, one per year that Wasp had wasted in Her name. She flipped the long knife and caught it by the point. Even as she offered the ghost the hilt she chastised herself: and since when have you been a show-off, hmm?

  The ghost took the knife, evidently unmoved. “You’re sure this happened when you stabbed it.”

  Wasp thought back. The lurcher, leaning over her. Her arm, drawing back to strike. The feel of the knife going in. Her vision, cutting away with the abruptness of a scene change in a dream. “I’m sure.”

  The ghost nodded. For a long time it said nothing. Then: “It’s an interesting piece. It looks old.”

  “The first Archivist carried it,” said Wasp, despite it all feeling a small upsurge of pride, probably misplaced. “Four hundred years ago.”

  “Not everyone who fights with a blade knows how to care for it. They train you well.” The ghost was turning the harvesting-knife over and over in its hands. The question it asked next did not look to be the question it was thinking. “Where did this first Archivist find it?”

  “It fell from the sky.” The upstarts learned this story first of all of them. With no effort on Wasp’s part, it came flooding back. “Catchkeep fought the Chooser for dominion over the land of the dead and won, sort of, but the last star was knocked loose from the tip of Her tail and fell, and the first Catchkeep-priest found it in a ruin deep underground, and gave it to the first Archivist, who realized that it could—”

  She stopped talking, disgusted at how she sounded. As though she were once again a wide-eyed nursery brat, dreaming of a day when she could fight and kill to make that holy knife her own.

  It was giving her second thoughts about that damn grape anyway. She popped it in her mouth. It was delicious.

  “These inclusions of darker metal,” the ghost was saying, still studying the knife. “What do they signify?”

  “Catchkeep’s up-self,” Wasp said, chewing. “Stars.”

  The ghost tilted the pattern into the light. “I remember this constellation.”

  “Yeah? I noticed the stars are different down here. That memory must go way back. But . . .” She paused, realizing what the ghost was saying. “Catchkeep should still be—”

  “People used to call it Ursa Major.” It hefted the long knife a couple of times, thoughtfully. “A bear.”

  It threw her, that Catchkeep was not always Catchkeep. Where Wasp came from, Catchkeep drank whole rivers, bit mountains from the sky, herded ghosts back and forth between the worlds of the living and the dead. The earth itself was Her first litter’s afterbirth. She was the beginning, and, when She finally caught the sun and ate it, She would be the end.

  Everything Wasp had been told since she left her body on that ledge had only confused her further. Her whole world felt like a spinning plate that someone had applied the lightest of touches to, beginning imperceptibly but unstoppably to teeter toward the wobbling that would knock it flat.

  “And this knife is the main part of your equipment,” the ghost was saying. “For the hunting of ghosts.”

  “It cuts them free,” said Wasp, though the words were crumbling in her mouth, losing all meaning. She would rather have explained this yesterday.

  “So that you can trap them.”

  “So I can observe them.”

  The ghost had an expression she was getting used to, a narrowing of the eyes in thought, but quickly smoothed over, as if it had been caught out giving a secret away. It did this now.

  “It’s not a weapon,” Wasp said. “It’s—I don’t even know what it is anymore. Yesterday I thought I knew. Today, I might as well have been harvesting ghosts with a fish-gutting knife, if it’s all a lie at the bottom of it any—” She blinked. “What are you doing?”

  What it was doing was removing the glove from its off-hand, then drawing the blade along the palm so that silver blood leaked out. It held the blade there a moment. Nothing seemed to happen. The ghost made an aggravated sound and let go of the blade. The edges of the cut were silvering, curling up like paper.

  It started to hand the harvesting-knife back, then stopped. It wrapped its cut palm back around the knife, blood to blade, and held the hilt to Wasp.

  She folded her arms. “What.”

  “I just want to see what’ll happen.”

  “What exactly do you think is going to happen?”

  “You cut a ghost with this knife and you saw something. Yes?”

  What she had left out of that recounting was how the visions had left her dizzy, woozy, just shy of retching. She was covetous enough of her dignity that the idea of hurling on the ghost’s boots gave her pause. “Twice,” she said. Not reaching for the knife.

  “It might not mean anything,” said the ghost. “If it happens again, it might. We won’t
know until we try.”

  It was true. She knew it was true. Besides, she’d come down here to do the work, and this was the work. It wasn’t like she had much in her to throw up anyway. “Fine,” she said. “But this is ridiculous.”

  Wasp took the hilt—and the room vanished around her.

  She was standing in a gap between high buildings in a city so alien-looking to her she thought she must be dreaming.

  The ghost stood a few feet away. So did the woman from the picture, Foster. Even if she hadn’t worn the uniform, the sword and gun, Wasp would have recognized her from her stance, from the calculating tilt to her head, from the set of her jaw and the light in her eyes. They weren’t much older here than Wasp, eighteen or so at most.

  The alley behind them was packed wall to wall with people, as far back as Wasp could see. These ones wore no uniforms. Some were armed. Most were not. Many were visibly injured. Most looked like they hadn’t seen a bed or a hot meal or a bath in some days. Wasp could hear at least three different babies screaming.

  Foster stood in conference with two men and a woman at the front of the crowd. As she spoke she was holding a device like the one the ghost had fixed Wasp’s ankle with, and the crowd was sending forth its injured.

  The ghost—though not a ghost, not here, not yet—stood apart, watching the street through half-lidded eyes. He and Foster were each flanked by a semicircle of staring children. He suffered their awed pinching of his sleeves and coat-hem in silence.

  From the distance came shouts, explosions, bursts of gunfire. The ground trembled a little under the approach of something large and slow, but Wasp couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. The noise of it was monstrous.