Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  At ten she was still counting.

  At twelve she heard the lurchers.

  She spun, drawing the knife. They weren’t in sight yet, but they would be soon. Could they follow her down the well? It was anybody’s guess, but between in there and out here she knew where she’d feel safer. Backing toward the well, ready to throw a leg over and feel for the ladder with her foot, something caught her eye, and it wasn’t lurchers.

  Three ghosts were sprinting up from thirty or so yards away, keeping close to a tumble of rocks as they ran. She couldn’t make out their faces at this distance, but all three wore the wide-legged long pants, wide-sleeved shirts, and cloth shoes that, with their abundance of costly fabric, marked the holiness of upstarts.

  As they closed, and their scars and faces became visible, she still didn’t recognize two of them. The third, the one in the forefront, she did. It stopped and stood defiantly, old blood staining its pantlegs from the arteries in its thighs it had slashed when Wasp had drawn the short straw instead of her.

  “Becca,” she whispered.

  Another howl, closer this time, and the upstart-ghosts all drew their pairs of little knives and stood in a triangle, back-to-back, blades out.

  Working together. They were ghosts now, but they were upstarts first, and they were working together. Wasp felt like Carrion Boy in the Sinkhole of Gentle Deceits for as much sense as this place was making. Hell, even like in the story, there was a part of her brain whispering, louder as she pressed on: How bad would it be if she stayed? At least here there was one lousy person she could count on. Dead though that person might be.

  Gentle deceits indeed.

  The lurchers topped a rise and suddenly were there. Wasp had taken many dozens of them out at the cabin, but there were at least another fifteen here.

  Five per upstart. Those were Chooser’s odds, and Wasp didn’t like them. She looked at the lurchers, then at the well, then at the upstarts. She broke into a run.

  And the ghost of Becca shook its head. Pointed to the well with its favorite knife, the little whalebone shiv that had been her death. “Get out of here,” it called. Watching the lurchers instead of her. Bouncing on its toes in sheer excitement. “I still hate you, Archivist. But I hate them the tiniest bit more.” It grinned. “When you’re dead for real, I’ll find you, count on it. You still owe me a fight. For now I’ve got no time for you.”

  As the lurchers neared, the ghost of Becca flipped both little knives and caught them, then broke into a run, trailing both knife-hands loosely behind. The other two upstarts followed.

  Wasp started running after them—and stopped. Whatever waypoint the ghost had gone through, down the well. She had no way of knowing how long it would last before, like the cabin, it moved on without her. She couldn’t wait.

  She took a deep breath, pocketed a couple more stones, and swung her legs over onto the ladder. It appeared sturdy enough. Down she went, hand over hand, for several minutes. When the opening had dwindled to a pale dot in the darkness the size of a coin, she dropped another stone. She couldn’t hear it land. A couple more minutes’ descent and she dropped a third.

  Nothing. She looked up.

  The mouth of the well was like a full moon in a starless sky. It hadn’t changed.

  Well, if the ghost could do it, so could she. She took a moment to scan back through the memories she’d seen, first in the ghost’s blood, then in Foster’s. The city reappeared most, so she fixed her mind on that. The razor-straight crossroads, the stilt-legged buildings. In the middle of the crossroads, a ring of bodies, and Foster in the middle of that. Wasp locked her mind on it. If that instant, that choice, was the moment Foster’s ghost couldn’t move past, she might be there still, trapped and waiting.

  She cast a little thought, not quite a prayer, toward the One Who Got Away, and let go.

  Chapter Sixteen

  She landed in a drift of dry leaves. The first thing she did was look up, straining her ears for some clue as to how the fight above, between the lurchers and upstarts, was going. But the bottom of the well, where she’d mostly expected to land, was no longer there.

  Neither was the ghost.

  She thought of calling out to it, and stopped, her mouth half-open. What would she say? Ghost? Here, ghost! She was a long way off from that desperate.

  And she couldn’t get the upstarts out of her mind. A wink of the Chooser’s good eye to you, Becca, she thought, and touched her fingers to the scar on her cheek, and raised that hand to the empty air. Then, because she knew she could do nothing to help them now, she got up and looked around.

  She did not know a name for the thing she found herself in. Certainly it wasn’t the crossroads with Foster in it, which would have disappointed her more if she’d been at all confident that her idea of navigating the waypoints with memories would work.

  There were long walls to three sides of her, higher than her head, higher than the ghost’s, but made of bushes or low wide trees: some flowering, some fruiting, some evergreen, some bare. She couldn’t begin to guess at the season.

  The walls still kept some of their shape, though not much. It looked like someone used to maintain them, trimming back the branches, but hadn’t done so in some time. The fallen leaves were everywhere, half a foot deep in places, and when she kicked some away she found a floor beneath, the stones of it arranged in a simple pattern of dark and light, alternating.

  If she set her eye to a gap in the bare branches she could peek through. Beyond she could see a wall of what looked to be part blackberry bushes, part holly. Marking the corner of that wall was a massive evergreen bush that had been cut into the shape of some sort of towering animal, long since overgrown so that extra limbs jutted out from its sides, strange appendages from its head. It reared up on its hind legs, higher than the surrounding walls. It reminded her partly of a bear with antlers, partly of Catchkeep Herself. But there was something else about it. Something that snagged at her mind, made her itch to examine it closer.

  In front of her a path opened out, walled in brambles on the left side, yellow flowers on the right. Off in the distance she could make out objects caught in the brambles, though she couldn’t tell what they were.

  She started down the path toward them, hating how much noise her feet made in the leaves, hoping she would find the ghost before something else found her. She reached the brambles and the things caught in them were pieces of ghosts. Hundreds of pieces of ghosts, silvery and fluttering, fastened tight to the brambles as though someone had pinned them there lovingly. The bodies from which they’d been subtracted were nowhere to be seen. Many of the pieces were hands, with or without partial arms attached, and they seemed to wave at Wasp as she hurried by.

  In the wall of yellow flowers opposite, a low gap appeared, mostly overgrown, and she ducked through it. To her left and front, more paths branched off. She could see gaps through the walls even from here. Behind her, on the other side of the gap she’d ducked into, she could sense the ghost-hands fluttering their fingers. She shivered. Trying not to connect missing ghost with ghost pieces pinned to thorns. Wondering if she had any way of recognizing any of those pieces, silver and identical, if she wanted to get closer and try. Which she didn’t.

  She’d wandered maybe five more minutes when she heard a crashing sound off behind her. She thought of that animal-shape carved out of a tree, overgrown into something unrecognizable. She thought of the ghost-faces, breeze catching their mouths so it looked like they were about to speak.

  Whatever was making that noise, she wasn’t about to give it the satisfaction of dragging her out of some hiding place in the bushes, kicking and screaming. If it wanted her, it was going to have to earn her.

  Wasp drew her knife. “I’m here,” she shouted. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “And lucky to be here,” came a voice, behind her. Close behind. Wasp spun, slashing with the harvesting-knife, and her blade had struck the blade of the ghost’s sword before she saw who’d spoken
. “If you’d waited any longer to jump down that well,” it continued, “who knows where you’d have ended up.”

  “I was delayed,” she said, fighting down annoyance—but also a small upsurge of pride. She’d made the ghost draw its sword to block her. She wasn’t going to dwell on how it had gotten so close without her noticing.

  “This way,” the ghost said, halfway through a gap in the wall. “I think I found our exit.”

  “Yeah, about that,” she said, hanging back as the ghost returned through the gap. “There’s something I saw back there. It looked, I don’t know. Weird. Like a monster cut out of a tree.” She stuck a thumb over her shoulder. “Back that way.”

  The ghost glanced toward where she was pointing, then back at her. Wasp bristled under its look. “I thought we were looking for things that were out of place,” she said. Knowing she sounded defensive. Not caring.

  “We are and aren’t,” said the ghost. “Show me.”

  She led it back through a series of guesses at turns toward where she’d seen the bear-thing through the gap in the wall, hoping with everything she had that she wouldn’t make a wrong turn and run them into real trouble. Or, at the very least, make her look like a fool. So far, she wasn’t exactly feeling any closer to getting her hands on that healing device. Chooser knew how, but she was going to have to seriously step up her game here.

  After a minute they stood at the base of the thing, looking up at it. It was even taller than she’d thought, seeing it from a distance. It had to reach five feet above her head.

  “Here,” Wasp said.

  “This?” said the ghost.

  She nodded.

  “This isn’t anything.”

  Wasp reached up a hand and touched the bear-thing’s flank. Somehow it was hard for her to turn and leave without investigating further. The ghost narrowed its eyes at her. “You think this is a door.”

  “I don’t know. I just have a. A feeling. I guess.”

  “How does this feeling propose we get in?”

  “I don’t know. Cut through it? Climb it? Maybe there’s something hidden—shit.”

  She bent to retrieve the harvesting-knife, which had somehow managed to fall out of its sheath to land with a soft crunch in the leaves at the bear-thing’s feet. “Stupid,” she said to it, or to herself, replacing it at her belt. A fine time for it to start coming unsheathed. Her one weapon and her one way to access the clues that might eventually lead her to Foster. If she lost it down here she was cooked.

  Wasp started circling around the bear-thing, peering at the drifted leaves in its shadow.

  She got most of the way around the back when she stopped, feeling a strange tugging in her chest. She turned, and the ghost was holding her thread, thumb-and-forefinger.

  She nearly gasped. Without a doubt the thread was dissolving fast. She stared at it, shaken. Her mind raced. The change in it had not been as gradual as she’d expected. She’d first noticed it weakening in the cabin where she’d first read the ghost’s blood. Then again as she lay in the moss outside the cabin. And now. Each time it had been fainter than the last, and this time the change was especially distinct. It looked like if she breathed on it it would break. But as far as she could tell, she’d only been gone one night.

  At last she made the connection. Not only the first time, but each time she noticed a change in the thread was after she’d read the blood. If she hadn’t been so furious the last time she’d surfaced to reality, she suspected she’d have noticed it sooner.

  The good news was that if she’d already seen what she needed to see, and she didn’t need to read any more blood, she might well get out of this alive. But if she hadn’t—

  When the ghost had her attention, it let go. “As you can see, we don’t have all day.”

  Wasp gave the bear-thing one last once-over but saw nothing of note. She wasn’t even sure why she had this feeling, or where it had come from, or how to put it into words beyond the vaguest possible surmise. And certainly not how to put it into action. And of the two of them, she wasn’t the one who’d been down here, navigating waypoints, for longer than she could begin to guess at.

  “Fine,” she said, and followed the ghost as it began cutting its way straight through the walls of the maze to a clearing where a lonely stone fountain stood. A pedestal rose from the center of the basin, terminating in an upright stone ring a little over a yard across. Whatever used to be in the center of the ring had fallen or been knocked out, leaving jagged teeth of stone around the ring’s inner edge, like the glass around the frame of a broken window. Without it, the fountain’s water couldn’t spray. It trickled down the sides of the pedestal to collect in the basin, black and cold.

  Yellow leaves floated on that black water. Coins glinted, silver and copper, farther down. Each of the leaves had something written on it, many in alphabets Wasp didn’t recognize. She picked up a few. What was written on them was names. Not even sure what she was looking at, Wasp skimmed the surface of the basin with her eyes, scanning for one that said Foster. She didn’t find it.

  “Up we go,” said the ghost, and Wasp stood eyeing the pedestal and the ring doubtfully.

  “That’s the door?” she asked.

  “One way to find out,” said the ghost, and by the time Wasp had climbed up onto the basin’s edge, the ghost was already on top of the pedestal. Its boots didn’t even look wet.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  It squatted down, holding out a hand. It crooked two fingers at her. “Jump.”

  She jumped and caught, and got her other hand up on the edge of the pedestal, and pulled herself up. “See you on the other side,” the ghost said, then stepped through the ring and disappeared.

  Wasp paused, feeling stupid, glad the ghost was not there to witness what she did next.

  She went down flat on her belly, reaching with the knife until she’d hooked one of the yellow leaves from the water’s surface. Whatever it had used to say was now obliterate. She cast about for one futile moment for something to write with, then cut into her fingertip—to her relief, touching her own blood to the knife showed her nothing—and began to scrawl out kit foster on that wet leaf as best she could.

  “City,” she said. “Crossroads. Bodies in a ring. She didn’t kill them. She wants to run and can’t. Three days, she said. I need to find her.” She paused. If she felt stupid before, she felt beyond absurd now. She shut her eyes. “Please take me to her.”

  She dropped the leaf back into the water and waited until it touched down.

  Halfway through the ring, she felt a strange prickling at the back of her neck. For a second she was convinced that if she turned, she would find the bear-thing padding silently up behind her, ghost-shreds caught in its claws from the last victim it had pinned to the bramble-hedge.

  She turned. Of course, there was nothing there.

  At first she thought she’d come out on the high ledge of Execution Hill. The same dark rock, the same long drop.

  The ghost was half-sitting half-leaning on an outcropping, arms folded, staring out at a paste-colored sky. It was unclear to Wasp how long it had been waiting. Below them was a snowfield, pocked with pits and trenches of what looked to be greenish fire. The city in its meadow was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the maze they’d left, or the rocky plain with the well in it, or anywhere else Wasp might have recognized.

  So the one idea up her sleeve was going the way of every other idea she’d ever pulled out of there before. It didn’t need to surprise her to disappoint her. Or to piss her off.

  “What,” she said, “so we keep bouncing back and forth through these things until one of them randomly drops us where we want to go? That’s how you’ve been trying to find her?”

  “When you arrive at a better idea,” said the ghost placidly, “I’ll be delighted to hear it. Until then—”

  Wasp’s patience was patchy to begin with, but between her encounter with the upstarts, the ghost’s dismissal of her efforts, her failu
re to get through to Foster, her failure to bargain for the one thing that would let her escape the Catchkeep-priest, and now this, her temper stretched to snapping. “What do you call that back there? I had an idea.”

  “You had a feeling.”

  “You didn’t have a better one.”

  “I got us through.”

  “Through to what?” Wasp waved at the drifted expanse below. “If she’s down there, I hope she’s got a nice warm coat, because if she wasn’t completely buried in snow we would see her.” She cupped her hands to her mouth and started shouting. “Catherine Foster! Are you there? Stand up and start waving if you can hear me, because your friend here is about to get me killed looking for you, and I’d really rather not die down here in this ditch of a place, okay?”

  She set a cupped hand to her ear with a flourish. “No? Not here, you say? Huh. Interesting. Maybe next time your friend wants someone’s help, your friend might try listening to that someone’s ideas.”

  Wasp turned to the ghost. “What about those ghosts that told you to find me? Trusting them but not the person they pointed you to seems pretty stupid.”

  She was getting used to reading the ghost’s silences. This one stopped her cold.

  “There weren’t any ghosts telling you to find me,” she said dully. “Were there.”

  A moment passed.

  “Oh, I don’t believe this. You’re a real piece of work, you know that? You—I could—” She wanted to walk. Right there, just turn and walk, and don’t look back. How low she had sunk, to be lied to by a specimen and have to stand there and take it because their bargain was the last straw she had to clutch at. She could walk, but only so far without that thing to heal her.

  In the memories she’d seen, the ghost’s and then Foster’s, those devices had had limited power. Foster healing the people in the alley. The ghost healing Foster in the rotting tunnel. Both times, one device had died and been exchanged for another. Both times, Wasp hadn’t really gotten a great sense of how much healing they had done before they made those sad little three beeps and powered down, so it was a matter of blind hope that this one had enough juice left in it to fix her up from whatever damage her next and final escape would leave on her after—