Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  The ghost was staring at her. It didn’t seem to have even noticed her thread.

  “It wasn’t the same room,” she said slowly, and the look on the ghost’s face, on anyone else, she would have called alarm. She was getting the distinct impression there was something it wasn’t saying. “Like a white box, with a white hall outside. It . . .” Looked familiar, she’d been about to say, but that made no sense, so she discarded it. “She didn’t die there. At least, not then.”

  “What you saw,” the ghost said, finding its voice. Its gaze flicked to the door shimmering in the wall. “Can you use it?”

  Wasp made herself shrug. She felt like if she so much as sneezed, the thread would go. “I have to.”

  She set her hand to the mirror and gestured to the ghost to do the same. She closed her eyes, unsure now of which memory to focus on. Thought of Foster in the white box. Foster lying about her injuries to the ghost. Foster in the torture room, staring down her interrogators unflinching, her eyes lit by something Wasp did not know by name. Thought take me to her. Steadied her hand against the glass and pushed—and her hand sank in to the wrist.

  Her guess was that if she lost focus, she would lose any chance she had at making this work, so she stifled the reflex to turn wide-eyed to the ghost: See? See?

  Instead she pushed her arm in farther. Instinctively she expected to hit an obstruction of some kind. The far side of the wall, maybe. The outside of the house. But she was to the shoulder in it, twisting to hold her face away, and her fingertips brushed nothing. It was like heading into deep water and trying to touch her toes to the bottom without letting her face slip under.

  Foster gazing out at her from the picture. Find me, little girl-with-a-knife. Find me if you can.

  Trusting the ghost would follow, Wasp stepped through the glass—and it must not have worked, because Foster was nowhere to be seen.

  The city, however, was.

  Chapter Eighteen

  She was struck by how huge the city was close up. Even from a ways back, they stood almost in its shadow. Whether it was because their wanderings had taken longer than she’d thought, or because the city brought its own sky and its own time with it, the sky was blood-colored with the setting sun, and the city’s million lights were being turned on one by one.

  The city looked very different than it had from the far side of the river, or from behind the black pond. Its buildings were higher and more regular. On each wall of each one was far more glass than Wasp had seen anywhere in her life. On each of these walls the sunset was reflected, so they all looked like they were in the process of burning to the ground. There were no outlying buildings, no gradual climb of rooftops from low to high, no gradual procession from grass and dirt to paths to small streets to big ones. No roads at all led in. There was the meadow, and then there was the city, disembodied, rearing up like a wall of spikes before her. It was as though the city and its concrete footprint had been cut cleanly from whatever map, whatever time, whatever world they belonged to, and dropped out of the sky to land here.

  Except for the combat damage, the explosions and gunfire, and the time of day, it looked a lot like the city she had seen with her hand on the harvesting-knife, reading the ghost’s blood, and Foster’s.

  An awful lot.

  The whole place was foreboding. She thought of those wide streets from her vision, those blind alleys, the unearthly silence of the lurchers coming through the cabin windows. Indefensible. It took a lot of effort for her to step forward, nearer whatever might be lurking between those buildings.

  If stepping forward even brought her nearer. If she didn’t keep walking in place like last time, trapped in the unseen current of the meadow as the city kept its distance. If she didn’t blunder through some unseen door and get zapped to Chooser-knew-where, and have to start all over again from the beginning.

  But she walked, and the city grew nearer, and soon she began to notice something odd.

  The city was full of ghosts.

  It was nothing like the few ghosts they had come upon, from time to time, in their journey to this place: heads down, eyes averted, listless and quiet. Here there were thousands, climbing around and over each other in a mass, setting the city boiling like a kicked anthill.

  Even stranger, while many kept their feet on the ground, there were those that seemed to be climbing or descending stairs—where there were no stairs. Crossing bridges—where there were no bridges. Entering doors—where there were no doors.

  If she put her head back and shaded her eyes with a hand, Wasp could discern the tops of all the buildings. By some illusion they seemed to sway, and she had to suppress a twinge of sick worry that they’d come down on her head.

  The ghost, catching her staring up into the sky, glanced at her in some surprise. “You see it, too?”

  “The city?”

  “This city. Look at them.” It raised its chin at that seething mass of ghosts. “What they’re seeing isn’t what you’re seeing. Where they are isn’t where we are.”

  Wasp watched a ghost walk straight through a concrete pillar holding up a building whose footprint was the size of most of her town. It did not reappear out the other side. A child-ghost sat five feet in midair, swinging its legs over an unseen ledge. A group of three ghosts, carrying a fourth, bypassed a staircase leading underground in favor of descending straight through the street.

  She thought of the waypoints, the doors leading nowhere or elsewhere, the ghosts navigating cities she couldn’t see. She could remain down here for centuries and she was certain she still wouldn’t understand a fraction of it.

  The ghost spoke without looking at her. Still staring at those buildings. “It’s the same, though, isn’t it. What you see.”

  Wasp didn’t need to ask what it meant. From here, she couldn’t see the crossroads with its ring of bodies, Foster standing in the middle, the hostage hidden down the alley, but—“Yeah,” she said. “But how—”

  “We’ve met your monsters,” said the ghost. In its voice was a kind of awe, which she had not heard there before. Also a kind of fear. “I think this is one of mine.”

  They continued forward, toward that endless wave of buildings and the ongoing chaos between them. Wasp saw soldiers and buskers, wanderers and suicides, gangs and loafers, workers and thieves, in armor and uniform, finery and rags, work boots and combat boots, aprons and robes, bell-skirted dresses, suits with ties and shiny shoes, as if every jar every Archivist had ever filled had been upended in this one place at once. Each ghost or group of ghosts was oblivious of the others. Each ghost or group of ghosts passed through the others when they touched.

  The closer it got to the city, the more noticeably the ghost was losing some of the inhuman smoothness of its movements, as though whatever it was holding in abeyance inside it was rattling its cage. Wasp, for her part, was mostly ready to do whatever they could do here and get out. It was not lost on her that stepping over the threshold of this city might well be more stress than her thread could take, and given a choice between facing the Catchkeep-priest again or being stuck in this place for eternity, she hadn’t quite decided yet which was the least of evils. Either way, she hated to leave business unfinished. And this business, like most business, wouldn’t finish itself.

  As they stepped out of the grass and onto the pavement, all the ghosts around them disappeared.

  They were left facing down a long straight road, from which other long straight roads branched off. These roads all were exactly alike. Most of the buildings had no doors. Above, the crimson clouds stuttered across the sky. It was less like a city than a dream of a city, an idea of a city. Or a memory of a city so often replayed that its details had started to blur and fade, like an ink drawing of a city left out in the rain.

  “She’s here,” the ghost was saying. “This is where she has to be.”

  It seemed wrong to Wasp. The moment she had stopped focusing on the city, it appeared before her. Then she thought of the bridge they had
crossed so long ago and felt like an idiot for not guessing at it sooner. You don’t travel in straight lines in this place.

  Despite that, she didn’t have the feeling about the city that she had about that thing in the hedge-maze, the hatch in the snow, the mirror in the rotting house. In its absence she could almost begin to describe it: like an itch she could only scratch just shy of. She paused and assessed. Nothing.

  “You never made it here before?” she asked. “Not once?”

  The ghost gave the slightest shake of its head. “I used to get close,” it said. “That was a long time ago. I never found the way in.”

  It slid a sharp look from Wasp to the harvesting-knife. It looked about to say something, then didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” said Wasp. “I don’t like the look of this place.”

  It wasn’t just the buildings leaning on her. Or the way the sunset reflecting off the glass-walled buildings painted the street before her red. Her skin was crawling like she had her back to the Catchkeep-priest, and she didn’t know why.

  Still, Foster might be in there.

  “Ghosts don’t like to be kept waiting,” she told herself.

  She took a step forward, then another.

  And something dropped down from a building behind her, landing neatly on the blood-colored street.

  Wasp whirled, knife out.

  What stood before her wore a knee-length, greasy dogleather coat. Four parallel scars raked down its cheek, temple to upper lip, investing its mouth with a permanent sneer. A tangle of many-colored hair, interwoven with bullets, bones, and charms, was pinned up with a skewer into a heap on its head.

  It carried a knife. A long knife. A knife with sixteen dark stars inset on the flat of the blade.

  Its coat was rent in places with puncture holes two inches across. Wasp’s coat bore the same holes, in the same places, stitched over in her own shaking hand when the coat had passed to her and she had scrubbed it until her fingers were raw and bleeding and the coat was as clean of gore as it was going to get, which was not terribly.

  More of the same punctures were in its exposed throat, and there was a gash down the unscarred temple where Wasp’s knife had missed its mark and gone skidding down the outside of the eye-socket toward its ear.

  Wasp could hear herself, in her head: Because when it was my turn to fight the Archivist, I poisoned my blade and stabbed her full of holes. Then I became Archivist.

  “No,” she said.

  The ghost was beside her. “You know her?”

  Wasp clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering.

  “I killed her.”

  The Archivist smiled, its teeth dovetailing strangely where they’d been filed down to points. Dipped its burdened head at her in mock respect, caught its harvesting-knife in a reverse grip and regarded Wasp over it. “Hello again, upstart,” it said, its voice only slightly distorted by the green stone in its mouth. “Allow me to return the favor.”

  Then it caught sight of the ghost.

  The smile fell off its face, then came back deeper, more calculating. Wasp’s memories of that smile were not fond.

  “You again.”

  The ghost drew but did not advance or bother to reply. Wasp was not used to seeing it hanging back from a fight. It unnerved her into doing the same. Maybe the ghost was thinking it could wring some answers out of this Archivist, who might, after all, have caught or destroyed Foster’s ghost. It wasn’t, she thought, an unreasonable idea. They stood behind their weapons and waited.

  The Archivist went on: “Weren’t you the one who came begging for my help?”

  Wasp’s educated guess was that begging was something of a stretch. Still, for some reason it came as a bit of a shock, seeing the ghost recognized. She’s different from the other girls who’d come before her, even though they’d carried the same knife, worn the same scars. Maybe for the first time it hit her fully, how long it must have searched. She thought of those dead Archivists, killed by ghosts nobody ever caught. She wondered whether this ghost might know anything about that.

  The Archivist tapped its scarred cheek, making a show of remembering. “Oh, what was it now? Looking for some dead bitch, wasn’t it? Well. Guess you found someone to do your hunting for you,” it said, its glacial eyes raking at Wasp. “Too bad for you. This one never did understand how to keep her head down to a task.”

  Wasp spat at its feet. “Didn’t have much trouble killing you,” she lied.

  The Archivist ignored her. It was smiling tenderly at the ghost. Its teeth were bloodied. From its death? thought Wasp. Or because it’s basically talking around a mouthful of knives?

  “You were a slippery one,” the Archivist was saying to the ghost, its tone friendly. “Crazy and confused. Don’t think I forgot you almost killed me.” Pensively, the Archivist stroked the place where the halves of its coat-collar joined, at a knot of scar tissue which Wasp’s fight had not put there. “I never could catch you. Not until today.” Its grin put Wasp in mind of lurchers. “So. Was your bitch even down here? Did you find her? What were you after anyway, hmm? Give her a big kiss hello? Stick it in her one last time for old time’s sake?”

  Bad idea, thought Wasp. Very, very—

  The ghost paled, inasmuch as this was possible. It looked slowly down at the Archivist in a cold fury.

  Too late, Wasp saw the trap.

  She lunged to intercept the ghost—but it had already shot past her, already gotten the Archivist’s head wrenched back by one fistful of hair and its blade laid against the Archivist’s throat. In an eyeblink the Archivist’s head would roll. If its neck didn’t snap like a daisy-stem first.

  “You will not—” the ghost began, and stopped.

  The Archivist was smiling.

  “No,” Wasp breathed. Her mouth took over where her brain left off and she kept saying it. “No no no—” She leapt with the knife, swinging down toward the Archivist’s hands before it could—

  The Archivist’s fist came up fast between them, closed around something. It set its lips to the opening at the end and blew. Something came out, a kind of crystalline powder. Finer than what Wasp had used for her own work, but essentially the same.

  Salt.

  This Archivist’s ghost-binding ability had been legendary in life, and immediately, finally, Wasp saw why. This salt was reddish with the blood this Archivist had dried into it, and glittered here and there where she’d added specks of holy metal filed from the harvesting-knife itself.

  It gusted into the ghost’s face, its particles ground fine enough to find their way into mouth and nose and eyes, sink in through the pores.

  The amount was minuscule. It was enough.

  “I bind you,” the Archivist crooned.

  And Wasp’s knife came down. It was no sword, but it cut deep, lodged in the bones of the wrist, and she almost lost it when the Archivist wrenched its hand away.

  The ghost was frozen in place, flickering like a candle in a drafty room. The Archivist didn’t have to disentangle the fist from its hair, the blade from its throat—the ghost flickered out for a split second and the Archivist simply stepped back through where it had been, leaving it, when it flickered back in, in the absurd position of menacing someone unseen.

  “Well, now that that’s out of the way,” said the Archivist, advancing.

  Wasp remembered this Archivist all too well. She was ducking before she’d even seen the knife move in its hand. She was rewarded by the sound of it slicing air six inches above her head, and the Archivist stumbled a half-step forward, unbalanced by the contact it hadn’t made. Wasp readied her foot and shot it at the inside of the Archivist’s knee. There was no crack and no cry. The Archivist, now unbalanced completely, fell to that knee but stood swiftly, unharmed. Okay, thought Wasp. I have to make it bleed.

  She lashed out high and fast with the knife. The Archivist, apparently judging the damaged arm useless, threw it up to block the swing. But Wasp knew this Archivist better than that. At the l
ast second she turned her wrist to send the blow glancing up that arm and toward the Archivist’s face, slicing at its eyes to blind them. At the same time she gathered all her strength in her legs and sprang.

  They came down in a heap. The Archivist found the lurcher bite-wound in Wasp’s arm and dug its fingers in. Wasp screamed and backhanded the Archivist across the face with her fist, then felt a hot spike of pain as the Archivist’s harvesting-knife began to sink into her side. Reflexively she twisted away, which she soon regretted as the harvesting-knife opened up a long gash, ribs to hipbone. Deep but not deep enough to stop her. Not quite yet. She swung her leg up and brought her heel down hard on the Archivist’s mouth. It spit a couple teeth but appeared otherwise unbothered. The sudden warmth running down Wasp’s ankle would be from the hole it was stabbing in her calf.

  She thought of those broken ghosts, reduced to silver cutouts, thrashing down the river. She wondered how much more of this she would be able to take before she joined them.

  A ways away, the ghost was still flickering, out and in. It was up to Wasp to protect herself. To protect them both. To do what they came here to do and get back to her body in time to run. This time the Catchkeep-priest wouldn’t bring her back. She’d escape or die fighting her way free. And she’d let the Ragpicker eat her and shit her out before she let this dead Archivist get the better of her.

  Twisting and cursing, Wasp fought her way to the top. She got the Archivist under her, its shoulders pinned under her knees, the harvesting-knife pointed at its throat, both of her hands on the hilt.

  She didn’t hesitate. She plunged it in, then pulled it out and plunged it in again. A few more times and she was panting and the Archivist lay still.

  “That’s twice,” said Wasp, and gave it one more stick for good measure.