Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

It looks like these are yours.

  “Weren’t lurchers,” she whispered.

  Out loud it sounded crazy, but she was out of better ideas.

  When the next lurcher fell, she dropped with it. She had to see. Another tried to rush her from behind, but she feinted sideways and the lurcher sailed over her shoulder to land, claws skittering on the floor. It wheeled on her, bewildered, furious, though neither for long, because the ghost’s sword came down to skewer its head to the floor. The blade came back out with a sound that put Wasp uncomfortably in mind of biting into an overripe pear.

  She only had a second or two before her lurcher melted into slime. She looked and there it was: on the big muscle of the outer thigh, where the lurcher’s hair ran short, a faded gold tattoo. The flesh beneath it was beginning to disintegrate, but she could still make it out clear enough, especially as now she knew what she was looking for. An arrow, and a target, under a disembodied crown of sixteen stars.

  Catchkeep’s hunt, she thought, and a strange mad laugh bubbled up in her. She bit it back, twisting to kick out at another lurcher who’d thought to come down jaws-first on her bent neck.

  It was as if the ghost had heard the laugh she hadn’t made. “What.”

  Wasp was already fighting her way over to the hearth and the table beside it. “I know how to beat them,” she shouted. Then, under her breath: “I think.” To the ghost again: “Cover me.”

  “On it,” said the ghost, already there.

  Wasp thought about doing this one-handed, keeping the knife in her knife-hand where it belonged. To do otherwise would mean trusting the ghost. Putting her life, for a moment, completely in its hands.

  A second passed while she considered the ghost, slaughtering lurchers with more skill and grace than she could hope to match with a lifetime of training. Shook her head. Cursed under her breath.

  Then she sheathed the knife, turned her back on the fight, and went to the table.

  Water. That was there already. Fire in the hearth. Milk, she needed milk. There was a wheel of soft cheese on the table. It would have to do. Blood—she glanced at her arm where the lurcher’s teeth had gone in. Whatever was in the slime of its death-stain had cauterized most of the wound and left a spray of chemical burn around it, but blood still welled up from near her elbow where the slime hadn’t reached. If that wasn’t enough, she could always count on the knife to get her more.

  She sprinkled the water around her in a circle and smeared the cheese on the floor in a circle over the top of that. Pinched at the open wound in her arm until she had enough blood to dip her finger in, and traced the circle again. Dumped the grapes out of their basket and stuck the basket in the flames of the hearth until it caught, then dragged it, scattering sparks, in the same circle again. The floor began smoking. This would have to work fast.

  She reached one hand out past the circle’s edge.

  “Grab on,” she told the ghost. “I should be able to pull you across. You don’t want to be outside this circle when it blows.”

  Wasp had barely seen it move when she felt that frostbite-and-vertigo sensation again, and grabbed on tight. “Don’t let your feet touch the circle,” she shouted, and pulled.

  The ghost shimmered a little as it crossed the layered lines of the circle, and for a horrible instant Wasp was sure it’d flickered back into some memory, was about to attack her again, and she was about to have to figure out how to bind it within the confines of a circle four feet across. But it came through clean, let go, and took its place behind her without her even having to say.

  The lurchers lunged and slammed up against the edge of the circle as though they’d hit an unseen wall. They fell back snarling, pacing, throwing themselves against it again and again, until they were singed from the fire, bloodied from whatever invisible barrier they’d struck.

  Wasp resisted the urge to taunt them. Instead she drew the knife with her off-hand and pitched her breaking voice to carry.

  “I am the Archivist. Catchkeep’s emissary, ambassador, and avatar on earth. Her bones and stars my flesh; my flesh and bones Her stars. I am She who bears you, She who sustains you, She to whom your dust returns. You have lived well. You have died well. I release you. Do not ghost my way.”

  She knelt and plunged the point of the harvesting-knife through the circle’s nearest edge. Fire singed her fingers, but she held on. The holy metal sank through all four of the rings she had drawn, into the floorboards below, and light sheeted out from the circle in all directions. It rattled the door, threw the bed and table up against the walls, snuffed the hearth-fire, would have blown out the windows if they’d had any glass left in them to break. It flew screeching out the open windows and was gone, leaving a smell of ozone behind it.

  The whole room seemed to waver a little, like the air above a fire, and all at once the lurchers were extinguished—candles blown out by no wind at all.

  Their death stains vanished into the floor. The rings Wasp had drawn disappeared likewise. The fire left the circle and began to spread. The moon was very blue.

  The ghost caught her as she fell.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wasp was dreaming. She still hated dreaming.

  This time she saw the shrine-dogs. It was a strange mix of images, all tossed together. She saw them as puppies tumbling in the straw, squabbling over their mothers’ milk, sleeping in a twitching pile. She saw them being sorted by the Catchkeep-priest: those who would be tattooed for service at the shrine, those who did not make the cut. The ones kept back for the shrine whined and fidgeted on their new leads, struggling to join the others being bundled together into a sack weighted with smooth stones. The ones in the sack wriggled happily, ready for a game. Wasp saw full-grown tattooed shrine-dogs pacing Catchkeep’s shrine, standing guard. She saw a group of them heading up the hill, through the narrow passes, skulking in silence toward her house. One nosed open the door and they filed in sniffing. On the floor, one of them found something interesting. It was the Archivist-coat, still bloodstained from the fight that had made Wasp an Archivist, discarded in disgust and defiance the first time she’d attempted escape. One by one, the shrine-dogs sniffed at it and snarled so far back in their throats it didn’t even register on Wasp’s ear as noise so much as a vibration, an itch in her head. Then they padded noiselessly back out the door and were lost to view.

  The dream jumped scenes. She was looking at a long dark room lit by small running lights of such pure high vibrant colors that they hurt her eyes. In the middle of the room were twelve small white beds, placed in a double row, all the feet pointed inward. Wasp could make out unaccountable scuff marks on the floor to some distance either side of the rows, as though many other beds had been dragged in or out of there at some point in the recent past.

  At the head of each bed was a panel, smooth and black, covered in numbers and strange bright moving lines that marched up and down in peaks and valleys from left to right across the screen. Beside each bed was a kind of tall narrow metal rack from which an array of multicolored bags of fluid hung. Tubes snaked from these bags down toward the beds themselves.

  Each of the beds held a sleeping child, six or seven years old, buckled to the mattress with heavy straps across the hips and wrists and ribs. From the ceiling a device was suspended, emitting just enough bluegreen light to see by. To Wasp’s amazement, it was singing. It was running through a loop of three children’s sleep-songs, approximated in tonal beeps. Even Wasp, who knew what a lullaby sounded like, knew that they were songs meant for babies, or toddlers, not children the age of the ones sleeping here.

  Still, it might have been working. Several of the children had the tracks of dried tears on their cheeks, and Wasp saw at least a few who’d gnawed their lips or fingernails to scabs, but in sleep they looked almost at peace.

  After a moment a woman in a white coat arrived and walked the perimeter of the field of beds, scanning the panels. At one child’s bed she stopped and sighed, then removed a device from her pocke
t and spoke into it. Before she left, she tapped that bed’s panel until it went black, then reached down to thumb the child’s eyelids shut. Her hand came away red. When she pulled the sheet over the child’s head, it soaked through where it settled, and Wasp, death’s chronicler, found herself wondering what exactly had done that child in. The sheet below the child’s chin stayed white.

  As the woman’s footsteps faded, another child opened her eyes. It looked as though she hadn’t been asleep in some time. She lay there a moment, perfectly still, staring at the ceiling. After a moment she furrowed her brow, as though sensing something Wasp could not, and began struggling out of her restraints in complete silence. Once she got one wrist free, it was only a matter of seconds before she sat up, threw off her sheet, and stood. She brought the rack of bags of fluid with her, careful to keep enough slack in the bundle of tubes so that they didn’t dislodge from their feed at the crook of her elbow.

  In the bed opposite hers a boy appeared to be sleeping. She reached with her free hand to poke him awake, but just before her finger reached his shoulder, he opened his eyes. He didn’t look surprised to see her there. It wasn’t clear to Wasp whether the girl had picked the boy because he was the nearest, because she’d sensed he was the only other one pretending to sleep, or neither, or both.

  Without a word between them, the girl reached down to unbuckle one of the boy’s wrists. He permitted this, but didn’t move to undo the rest of his restraints. They regarded each other without expression in that hazy underwater-colored light.

  “Another one,” said the girl, sticking out her tongue, clutching her throat, rolling her eyes back in her head. She smoothed her face and stared at him expectantly. She leaned in. “You do it.”

  “Another one,” said the boy, mirroring her parody of death, if somewhat less dramatically.

  He didn’t ask who it had been, and she didn’t say. Neither seemed much disturbed. Wasp recognized the neutrality in their faces and voices, even as one of their own lay hemorrhaged two beds down. They were like tiny upstarts, far less intimate with the notion of camaraderie than with the notion of death.

  “Not you,” said the girl, and reached down to punch him on the arm, playful, grave.

  He eyed her quizzically. She shot him a pointed look. He got the idea.

  “Not you,” said the boy, and reached up to punch her on the arm opposite.

  “Not me,” said the girl, and spat on the floor to one side.

  “Not me,” said the boy, and raised his head to spit on the floor to the other.

  “Not ever,” said the girl, and held one hand, palm-out, at arms-length in front of her.

  “Not ever,” said the boy, and set his hand against hers, where it overlapped perfectly.

  Then, the call-and-response apparently over, the boy lowered his arm and the girl refastened it before returning to her bed to redo as many of her own restraints as she could. Both children stared at the ceiling a moment, then scrunched their eyes shut and waited for sleep to take them. Above, the musical beeping stopped, kicked over in its loop, and began again.

  Wasp came to, her knife-hand sticky with silver. She had been gripping the harvesting-knife in her sleep, her fingers on the blade. She sat up fast, not knowing where she was, and lightheadedness made her regret it instantly. She dropped back on her elbows until her vision cleared.

  She was lying on a mossy slope tending down toward a black pit of a pond around which gory-looking lilies grew. A breeze blew up from the water, smelling of copper, limes, and carrion. A lonely pale willow overhung the pond, and the breeze set its fronds clicking together. Closer, Wasp would find that they weren’t made of leaves at all, but whiplike plaits of tiny bones.

  Morning dew was damp against her back. The bite-wound in her arm was bound, as were the blistering fingers of her off-hand. Above, crouching on the willow, the sun looked like a ragged hole blown in a lavender sky. It cast no reflection in the water.

  Her gaze fell on the thread. It wasn’t a trick of the light. It really did look frailer, finer. Less silver. More gray. What was it the ghost had said? She’d be stuck down here or vanish. Be undone. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Nothing for it. The only way out was through.

  The dreams. The dreams that were not dreams. The first one must have come from the lurchers’ blood against her blade, but the second—

  “You’re hurt,” she croaked.

  The ghost was kneeling beside her, sword on the moss between them. “I’m dead.”

  Wasp, formulating a response to this, suddenly caught a smell on the air above and beyond the stink coming off the pond. It smelled like a warn-fire. With some effort she turned her head. Higher on the slope, behind a tumble of bluish rocks, she could see the cabin’s chimney, standing alone and naked in the air. The rest of the cabin was gone.

  “I burned it,” she whispered, aghast. For some reason she felt a worse pang at destroying the cabin than she had at the prospect of destroying her house, although her memory of the cozy cabin full of bloodthirsty lurchers wasn’t vastly more pleasant.

  “It’ll grow back. They always do.” The ghost narrowed shrewd eyes at her, piecing together Wasp’s deduction. “What did you see?”

  “First tell me how you managed to get cut on my knife.”

  “Well, I’m not sure how you envision you got out of there,” it said drily, “but you’re heavy. And awkward. And the only way to get that knife out of your hand would have been to break your fingers.” It tipped its chin at her. “What did you see.”

  “You carried me out?”

  “You weren’t in any position to carry yourself.”

  “How did we get here?” The wall of grass around the cabin. Then the moonlight pouring through where the grass had been. Now this. What had happened while she slept? “The cabin . . . brought us here?” She pictured it, stumping through that tall grass, the rising plume of its chimney-smoke following along behind.

  “Not in the way you’re thinking,” said the ghost. “Now. What. Did you. See.”

  “Not much,” she said, stalling. She hadn’t fully understood what she’d seen, but it felt like something buried too deep for too long for her to dig up and air out comfortably. “Mostly it’s lurcher blood on there. I don’t think we’ll be seeing them again. If there are even any left after that.” She paused, running the extermination of the lurchers over in her mind. An idea gone right instead of wrong for once. It pleased her. “Anyway, I saw where they’re coming from. I was right. They’re the ghosts of the shrine-dogs. Scenting a live Archivist down here, I guess. The coat, the knife. Something. Catchkeep’s hunt, indeed.” She snorted. “It’s like the scars. Just a story. It’s only real now because of me.”

  The ghost fixed her with a look. “Those things’ blood didn’t tell you about the cut on my hand.”

  “Then I saw some kids. Asleep.” Wasp shrugged, all innocence. “There was a.” Dead kid, bleeding out every hole in its head. “A song.”

  “Oh,” said the ghost. It blinked, or flinched. “Oh.”

  Suddenly, Wasp was desperate for a change of subject. And what with all this talk of visions, she didn’t have to look far before she found one. She thought of the lurchers scenting her, tracking her. After all, the shrine-dogs were bred to obedience and trained from birth to keep Archivists obedient as well, and now a live Archivist had appeared among them, in a place where the living did not go. Who knew what they must be thinking. What joy in their dead hearts.

  Maybe she could do the same.

  “So I was thinking. If I.” Her mind was going along faster than her mouth and it was telling her that she wouldn’t like the new subject any better than the old one, but there it was. “Okay. I have no idea how the harvesting-knife reads the blood, but it does. It reads lurcher blood. It reads your blood. It might.” She swallowed. “Read Foster’s blood. If we had any.”

  She looked over at the ghost, who was as still as a carving, its face about as readable. Just say it, she told
herself. It’s not like it’s going to get easier.

  She breathed deep and pushed the words out before she came to her senses. “There’s blood on that paper you carry around. I saw it when you showed me before. At least I think it’s blood. It looks like blood. If it’s hers . . . maybe we could use it. I mean. To find her. It might show me some memory you weren’t in. Something you didn’t see. Something I can’t learn from anyone but her. It’s a tiny bit but I don’t know, it might be enough.”

  There was a long, long pause. Then the ghost sighed, reached into a pocket, and brought out the little square of paper. It unfolded it, print side up, and flipped it over.

  The page was exactly as Wasp remembered. The words packed top to bottom, side to side. The handwriting like a handful of fishhooks. Here and there words leapt out from the jumble: letter, time, fight, Latchkey, together, help, nothing, understand. And there, in the corner, a red-brown smear. The ghost was staring at it, jaw clenched. “It’s hers.”

  “Okay,” said Wasp, aware she could hear her pulse hammering at her ears. She was no good at swaggering, so she couldn’t bring herself to say It’ll work. It’ll definitely work. Give me that thing and let’s go find the person who wrote it. And she couldn’t think of a smart way to tell the truth, which was more along the lines of I still have no idea what I’m doing. I never said I did. I’ll probably destroy that paper, whatever it is, for nothing.

  There was a tearing sound.

  “Here,” said the ghost, holding out a scrap. She took it. It was about the length and width of three of her fingers held together. The stain overlapped fragments of a few lines of text, which had been torn out with it, preserving as much of the blood as possible.

  . . . don’t want to have died for nothing . . .

  . . . think you understand . . .

  . . . fun while it lasted. See you around.