Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Oddly, the Archivist didn’t dissolve into black slime the way the lurchers did, or turn silver like the other dead ghosts. It lay there on the street, inert as any corpse. Wasp got one arm planted and leaned on it hard until the darkness around the edges of her vision passed, then wiped the knife and sheathed it. She was bleeding freely from at least three deep wounds. Her whole body hurt.

  A few yards away, the ghost shook free of the salt. Wasp glanced up at it, amused by the alarm on its face. She realized amusement was rather out of place, all things considered, but between blood loss and nerves she was unable to tie down any other particular emotion to what she was seeing. She watched, then, a strange empty half-smile frozen on her face, as the ghost reached for its sword, the Archivist opened its eyes beneath her, the ghost blurred and was suddenly behind the Archivist, blade streaking down to cut off its head as the Archivist slid its harvesting-knife in between Wasp and the thread connecting her to her body, and sliced it cleanly through.

  Wasp’s hand went to the broken thread, a slow sick shock welling up in her. She felt as though she’d stepped on an old mine and was beginning to realize why she couldn’t feel her legs anymore. Her eyes went to the ghost. The ghost was looking at her, in part, the way a warrior looks at a weapon that has failed him in the thick of battle. And in part, the way a warrior looks at a fallen comrade, whom he, in turn, has failed.

  The other end of the thread fluttered softly down from the Archivist’s blade, across its crumpling coat-sleeve. It had the weight of breeze-borne spider-silk, the color of lightning. Where it touched down it withered dark and brittle, then fell to powder, vanished completely to Wasp’s sight. The colors of the Archivist’s body all drained and silvered as the body collapsed in on itself until it resembled a sun-bleached blanket left discarded in the street.

  The thread, she thought wildly. The thread was fading anyway. Now I’m stuck here for good. At least now I can find her. I can do something. It’s better this way. There was nothing for me up there.

  What would happen when she became a ghost? Had she become one already? Or was she on the verge of disappearing entirely? She seemed no different. She held her hands out to inspect them, turning them back and forth in the light.

  And then, all around her, there came a great rushing of wind. She braced her legs and leaned into it. It seemed to be coming from the ground beneath her feet, flung up in a cylinder with her in the middle. The Archivist-coat whipped up into flapping wings, the harvesting-knife rattled in its sheath at her hip, her legs and arms were lashed with uprooted chunks of concrete, and if she hadn’t cut all of her braids off already she might have lost an eye.

  The ghost, evidently untouched by this wind, was shouting something at her through it. She couldn’t make it out. At the look on its face, the shock wore off and panic took over. Maybe this was what disappearing felt like. Or being undone. Getting caught in-between, like Aneko’s ghost, drifting back and forth, her feet never touching the ground. Or maybe her wounds had been too great for her ghost-form to withstand and she’d melt to black slime like the lurchers, or be rendered down to a silver rag, hands flapping, eyeholes agape on nothing.

  She tried to calm herself. It didn’t take.

  “I can’t hear you,” she screamed over the wind. If her voice made it out, the ghost’s voice didn’t make it back in. She was on her own.

  Could she push her way out? She doubted it. Something about the wall of wind kept her from setting her hand to it directly. She rifled her pockets. Firestarter, saltlick, jar. Of these things she judged the jar the least likely to be missed if it broke, so she held it out before her, pressing it gently into the wind. When the barest edge of the jar made contact, it was torn out of her grip and spun out sideways, hard and fast. Too fast to duck. It hit her above the eye and she reeled, one side blinded, and fell back into the arms of the wind.

  And everything went dark.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A different wind woke her back up.

  It was colder, crisper, and smelled of winter: frozen earth, warn-fires, snow. It brought her straight back to the time she had left her little house on the hill to find that a ghost had turned the tables and hunted her instead. Except that, as far as she knew, that had been two days ago. And from the smell of the air, here, now, many weeks had passed since then. She might have been back in the snowfield where she’d found the hatch. She might be someplace new.

  She couldn’t see. Why couldn’t she see? She could feel the warmth of the sun on her face, so it wasn’t because it was dark. She reached up to her eyes—or tried to. There was something in the way. Something like a blanket tucked too tightly, something like a cocoon, which gave way and tore as she moved . . .

  Oh no.

  She froze. As slowly as she could, she tucked her arm back in. Forced her breathing to remain shallow and slow. Squeezed her eyes shut fiercely, like a child awakened by a dream with hours left till morning.

  Too late. The spiderweb-thing was falling to brittle pieces around her, each piece still in the shape of the part of her it had molded to, right down to the ears and eyelids and fingernails, the way a shed snakeskin holds the shape of the snake that has abandoned it. Eyes shut, she could feel flakes of the thing falling from her cheekbones, forehead, chin. Out in the elements for so long it had lost all resilience and now felt like the rough thin paper they made in town out of used or scavenged paper-scraps soaked and pounded and spread out to dry into patchy sheets in the sun.

  She sat up and they rained from her, head to toe, apart from a few large areas where blood congealed them to her wounds: her forearm, her calf, her side, the fresh gash above her eye. Noticing this was what finally drove the terror she’d been suppressing to the surface.

  She had been seriously wounded down there, in that world below. Along with the harvesting-knife and the coat, those wounds had come back up with her when that place had spit her out at last. Not only that, but she had gone weeks with no food or water, in a kind of sleep, and now that she was awake her body’s weakness was all too apparent. And she was stuck at the top of a mountain she had no hope of descending in one piece, and certain death awaiting her in the off chance she happened to succeed.

  Weakly, she began to laugh. It was winter now, deep winter. She had been gone at least a month, maybe more. In this cold, the Catchkeep-priest must have called off his search for her weeks ago. If she had cut her thread yesterday and been done with it, she wouldn’t have been so badly wounded, her body not so weak. She probably could have climbed down and walked off whistling.

  And now, she couldn’t get back down, and she couldn’t get back in either. She had no more little green pills, no more camouflaging spiderwebs, no way of cramming the bulk of her body through a solid rock wall. She had a knife in its sheath and the things in the pockets of a greasy coat and a precarious ledge not much bigger than the cot she slept on back in her house on the hill. And that was all.

  She was well and truly stuck.

  For a second she thought maybe the ghost would come and find her. It didn’t take her long to shoot that notion down. After all, they had reached the city, which by its own admission the ghost had never found on its own. It was hardly going to leave that place behind, put however many waypoints between itself and the place where Foster might be, to come after Wasp. Their partnership was temporary, a means to an end. Now that the end was in sight, she was alone.

  As far as she could tell, she had two choices. Stay up on the ledge and die. Or attempt the descent and, if she made it, run with all she had left in her. Maybe this time the One Who Got Away would finally smile on her and she’d reach a town where nobody would recognize the scars on her cheek and the knife in her belt, where she might scrabble out a foothold for herself. Roof, bed, garden. She might live. Blade under her pillow, watching the roads, waking from nightmares of huge bright dark creatures like dogs, but not dogs—but she’d live.

  Until she died. And then it would be straight back below with her, w
ith no friends and no companions, just that empty bleak vastness that went on forever. She could see herself now, walking on and on toward a horizon that grew no nearer, hoping to encounter someone on that endless road whose life her life had touched.

  Already she knew there would be none.

  What came back to her now was the scribbled fragment of writing beneath the bloodstain on the ghost’s paper: don’t want to have died for nothing.

  It was a sentiment she could understand.

  She gave her wounds a second, closer inspection. The one in her arm, comparatively, was trivial. The single stab in the muscle of her calf was a bleeder but nothing next to the long deep slash in her side, which she didn’t dare probe deeply for fear of what it might reveal. It was almost identical to, though on the other side from, and larger than, the wound she had taken in single combat against the last upstart she had fought, which had scabbed and flaked and scarred over as she’d slept that death-sleep on the ledge. The other difference was that now she was desperately weakened and had nothing with which to bind off the blood flow. For all she knew, standing up would be all it would take to send her insides slopping out. She shuddered. At this rate she would be dead within a couple of hours, and likely less.

  Suddenly Wasp found herself on the verge of what was quite probably the worst idea she’d ever had. But on that ledge, in that wind, all but bled out, and so thirsty she felt like any minute she’d crumble to dust and blow away, it looked to her like genius.

  She picked the rest of the papery stuff away from her wounds. It caught and tore against what blood had clotted, and she hissed between her teeth as the flow redoubled. For a moment blind panic overtook her and she pressed both hands against the long wound, nearly weeping with pain and fear, blood coursing through her fingers. Eventually she calmed enough to let go.

  Now all she had to do was wait and watch for her moment. And then be very, very fast.

  Half an hour later she was still waiting, and staying awake was proving harder than she’d anticipated. Even the day after an escape attempt, or a near-thrashing in a knife fight, her muscles had never felt so useless, her arms and legs so heavy. Each breath felt more and more like trying to thread rope through a needle. The gash above her eye throbbed. Half-delirious, she could have sworn she could actually feel her life dripping out of her with every beat of her heart, which kept on pumping away, oblivious of the fact that it was busily, dutifully bleeding her out on the stones. She dozed off, then jerked awake, more times than she could count. She kept her hand on the wounded forearm and poked it now and again, focusing on the pain to chase the sleep away.

  The sun went down, and the air grew colder. Wind whistled through the holes in the Archivist-coat, snuck in the back of the collar where her braids used to hang. For a while, it hurt to shiver, but she couldn’t make herself stop. Eventually it stopped hurting, but by then she had stopped shivering anyway.

  She couldn’t feel much of anything, really. No pain, no cold, no thirst or hunger. No desire to get up. No desire to do anything. What a relief it was, after spending so long wanting so much, or rather wanting so little so badly, to reach a place where she wanted nothing at all.

  Her eyelids were getting heavy again, and she poked at the wound in her arm, gently at first, then harder, digging her thumb in until it hit bone. But that trick wasn’t working anymore.

  Anyway, she’d only sleep a minute. A minute couldn’t hurt.

  She woke, unsure how much time had passed. Her body felt strange, like it wasn’t hers. Like it was a chair she sat on, or a bed she’d woken in, ready to kick off the covers and stand.

  So she stood. It was surprisingly easy. She felt so strong, so light. She looked down at her wounds—and noticed the thread, thin as spider-silk, white as lightning, emerging from her chest and wrapping around her side to keep going on behind her.

  If she turned to see her body in the state in which she knew she’d left it, she was sure she’d lose her nerve. It was only the thread, thinner and more tenuous than the first one but still there, still connecting her to the three-quarters-dead body on the ledge, that gave her the strength to walk away, able to hang all her hope on the one quarter that still pumped blood, drew breath.

  She descended to the lower ledge and stood facing the wall she had passed through before. What she hadn’t understood at that time, and thought she did now, was that this wall on this ledge on Execution Hill, along with the other places where Archivists relied on ghosts to pop up out of the ground like weeds, was something like the waypoint-doors she’d traveled through below. And she hadn’t yet been able to shake the idea that maybe those doors might be directed or controlled in some way, if only she knew how.

  Either she had tried once already and failed—or Foster was in that city, and the waypoint in the mirror had simply dropped them off on her doorstep.

  And there was only one way to find out which was true.

  Wasp drew the harvesting-knife and bloodied the point of the blade, then set the point to the rock face of the wall. The stone parted for her knife-blade, then sank back behind it like wet sand a stick has been dragged through, leaving a thin line, behind which a greenish light glimmered. She dragged it in a rectangle, tracing the rough shape of a door.

  Before she could change her mind, she set her hands to the wall. She fixed the ghost in her mind’s eye as clearly as she could. Its face and its stance and the odd mannerisms of its movement, as though it fought a constant inner battle between the explosive, destructive grace that Wasp had come to think of as its weapon-ness, and the iron discipline that kept it in check. Its cold humor and its colder rage. Its studied impassivity as it sat with its boots on her tabletop, narrowing its eyes over her field notes . . . which was different from its studied impassivity as it held the spiderweb-thing away from her face as she gasped in those final breaths . . . which was different from its studied impassivity as it unfolded the bloodied paper it had carried around with it since well before the world had died . . . which was different from its studied impassivity as it obliterated lurchers with that monstrous ease, all to keep her safe—no: as it obliterated lurchers beside her, with her, each of them keeping the other safe. Two against the world, Wasp thought, and did not allow herself to think it again.

  It was haughty, selfish, temperamental, deadly, insufferable. It was the only Ragpicker-taken excuse for a friend she’d ever had.

  “Take me to him,” Wasp said, not even noticing until later what was different about her choice of words. And pushed her way into the wall.

  This time, the wall pushed back.

  The wall pushed back, and the ghost stepped through.

  Wasp gaped at him. She’d sooner have expected to be hit by lightning from a stormless sky than see him standing here before her. He returned her gaze coolly, taking in the rents in the coat, the bloodstains, the thread. One slightly raised eyebrow was his only comment on her state.

  “I thought you might be here,” he said. “Although I didn’t expect you’d be alive.”

  “Give it a minute,” she said. “I’ve got one try left in me, and I don’t know where to try for. If she’s not in that city—if I can even get back to the city—”

  Wasp cast one last glance toward the higher ledge, where her body waited. Unprotected this time from the elements, its own thirst and hunger and blood loss, it would not wait long. The road she walked could well be endless, and the thread was so frail, so fine. In places it had darkened like a rotten fruit. In places she could see through it.

  For the thousandth time since she began her descent from that ledge, she thought about returning. Throwing herself on the mercy of the Catchkeep-priest. Going home. Trying to escape again after her wounds had healed and she regained sufficient strength to run or fight her way out.

  If the Catchkeep-priest didn’t cripple her outright. Or throw her to the upstarts. Or to the shrine-dogs. Fight? Run? She was close to dead and getting closer by the second. She was no match for anyone. She thought o
f inching down Execution Hill, spending the last of her strength to come up with a speech that might move the Catchkeep-priest to mercy. She thought of bowing her head and begging forgiveness as the whip came down.

  When I am a ghost, she thought, this will be the moment I can’t move past. When I stood between living a life on someone else’s terms, and facing an almost certain death on my own terms, and chose.

  Then it struck her.

  She wasn’t the only one who had made that choice.

  “She didn’t die from being tortured,” Wasp said quietly. “Did she.”

  The ghost said nothing.

  The knife was already in her hand. She held it out to the ghost. The ghost did not look at it. The ghost looked everywhere and anywhere but at it. “No more secrets. I have to know.”

  Nothing. She didn’t like the faraway look on the ghost’s face. He’d had centuries enough for brooding. Right now, Wasp’s patience was wearing thin.

  She reached up and backhanded him hard across the face. Anger brought him back. Good, she thought. It was better than no focus at all, or worse, focus on something he—and she—could no longer undo or repair. She shouted in his face. “Listen, do you want to find her or not? We don’t have time for—”

  The ghost said something softly. So softly she must not have heard him quite right, because it sounded like he had said—

  Suddenly she felt a sharp tug in her chest. She looked down. The thread. It had eaten up all its slack and was spooling up to where it had come from, tightening against her until it must either snap or pull her back to where it started. Back into her body, which had only enough strength left in it to die.

  At last it had happened.

  She had run out of time.