Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  She knew the knife was Foster’s broken sword, buried for countless centuries before being given to the first Archivist. Maybe now, she reckoned, it was trying to compel Isabel back toward those ghost-passages, back to Foster, wherever she was in the ghost-place. For all the sense that made.

  But Isabel wasn’t in the ghost-place now. And she wasn’t mostly a ghost herself. This was just a memory she carried, the way your hand would cramp after gripping something too tightly too long. A thing to make note of, maybe, and move on.

  Isabel let go of the knife, scrubbing her palm on her pant-leg until the prickling subsided. Took out the notebook again. Flipped to a different page, on which she’d drawn a crude map. The C shape of the ridge encircling Sweetwater with the lake in the opening. Town, orchard, gardens, ruin. Four Xs marked barricades. The whole page was littered with dozens of dots, a nonsense constellation. Now she added another, just before the X of the barricade nearest the ruins.

  Under her notes on the barricade she considered adding harvesting-knife doing its thing again, then thought better of it, pocketed the notebook, and walked back toward town. She’d check the barricade by the well and save the one under the broken bridge for tomorrow. Exhaustion was slamming into her now in huge soft waves and three barricades in one night was more than her body was going to handle without full-on mutiny.

  It was the middle of the night by the time she’d finished checking the well barricade, and the streets of Sweetwater were empty. Isabel dragged ass back to the Catchkeep-shrine and let herself in as quietly as she could.

  Past the long table she went, past the chore rotation wall, down the double row of curtained sleeping-alcoves and into hers, the next-to-last on the right before the big room at the end of the hall that once housed the Catchkeep-priest’s chambers and now served as a public common room for townspeople who needed someplace to stay. It was full dark inside the Catchkeep-shrine, but she’d walked this hallway so often she could do it blind.

  She was practically falling over anyway by the time she collapsed onto her cot. But there was something she had to do before she slept. Something she did every night, no matter how busy or tired or sick. All her life had been steeped in four centuries of ritual, after all. This was one that was hers alone.

  So she got up, and lit the lamp, and opened the chest of field notes.

  She’d destroyed the original field notes long ago. In an attempt to sabotage the Archivist-upstart system in her absence, she’d smashed all the ghost-catching jars and burned four hundred years’ worth of field notes before venturing into the ghost-place to earn her freedom.

  What was in this chest was what had come after. The notes she’d taken on her own terms. After the Catchkeep-priest’s death she didn’t capture or destroy ghosts anymore unless they left her no options, but until she’d fine-tuned the ghostgrass barricades she’d still sketched the ghosts that wandered in through Sweetwater’s waypoints. Like most ghosts, once they’d pushed through they hadn’t done much. Just pace their circuits, or mindlessly repeat their dying words over and over. They’d looked very different and very alike, and she’d sketched them all and recognized none.

  And then the barricades had gone up, and there were no new field notes, because no more ghosts ever made it through.

  She liked to study those old notes sometimes. Some of them she’d taken herself. Some of them had the names of other ghostgrass-rotation regulars—Kath, Lissa, Bex—signed at the bottom.

  When she’d been Archivist, the oldest sheet of paper in those field notes had been a list of questions she was supposed to ask a ghost, if she ever found a specimen that could answer them. Name of specimen. Age of specimen. Description of surrounding environment during specimen’s lifetime. Place and manner of specimen’s death. Manner of the world’s death, if known, in as much detail as possible. And so on.

  The oldest sheet of paper in this new box of field notes was dedicated to the only two ghosts she’d ever found who could’ve answered almost every question on that list, if it’d occurred to her at the time to ask them.

  She didn’t want to pull that page out now. Really she should have burned it when the ghostgrass barricades went up and nothing on that page was allowed to matter anymore.

  Looking at it now made her feel gutpunched. So she made herself look.

  Around the margin were little sketches, no larger than an inch or two. A creature that looked like a dog, but was not a dog. A broken sword, and a whole sword next to it. A bridge over a black river with a meadow beyond. A crossroads of wide streets like a canyon bottom between the sheer cliffs of buildings taller than ten Sweetwaters stacked up. An open door with nothing through it. A whirlwind or cyclone. A tiny house in a sea of grass, its chimney throwing a scarf of smoke. A round metal door set into the ground in the middle of a snowfield. A maze made of thorns, hung with faces and hands. A wispy thing that looked like a spiderweb. A smooth thing that looked like a pill.

  In the center of the page stood two figures, identically dressed: dark pants, dark jackets, dark boots, a belt with a sword and a gun in it. A man and a woman. He was a little taller than she was, and her hair was a little shorter than his. Isabel’s years of sketching field notes still hadn’t prepared her to exactly capture the expressions on their faces, so she’d given up and they just looked out at her blankly, as if waiting for her to do better.

  Above the woman’s head she’d written catherine foster. Above the man’s head she’d written nothing.

  She sat and looked at that page for a few seconds, rubbing at the old wound in her leg. “Not today,” she said to the drawing, or to herself. Slowly, deliberately, she turned the paper over and slid it under the bottom of the pile.

  “Can’t sleep either, huh?” Sairy said from the doorway.

  “Not really,” Isabel said, lowering the lid of the chest and smoothing it unconsciously with both hands. There was too much in her head. It wouldn’t all fit. Somewhere, something had to give. She wished she knew where the plug was so she could pull it out and let it all drain away.

  “Still not going to tell me who they are,” Sairy said, raising her eyebrows at the now-closed chest, the field notes within. How long had she been standing there? “Are you.”

  “You know who they are,” Isabel said tiredly. “They’re in the field notes. They’re ghosts.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s the most detailed drawing in that box. You drew all that…stuff around the edges.” Sairy made an exasperated gesture toward the chest. “You wrote their names, for Chooser’s sake.”

  One of their names, Isabel thought. A twinge in her chest where the thread used to be. Not as bad as it’d been earlier, and anyway she was used to it.

  “Fine,” Sairy said. “Just…if you want to talk. About anything. I’m here, okay?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Isabel said. “I’m…” She trailed off, realizing she had no idea how to accurately finish that sentence. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “Then go to sleep,” Sairy said, and left.

  Isabel cast one last glance at the chest of field-notes—idiot—and blew out the lamp. In the dark she dropped into sleep like a stone into deep water.

  At first she didn’t realize she was dreaming, only that she was still walking in the moonlit fields outside of town. Making her looping circuit between waypoints in the exact manner of a ghost pacing out its last moments, walking the length of the same invisible tether.

  In the dream she was holding the harvesting-knife out in front of her with both hands, following it across the fields like some Before-story’s water-witch. Like the knife was dragging her out of the safe zone and out into the burnt-out heart of the Waste, and in the dream she never once glanced back.

  She’d had this dream before, and all at once she recognized it. Soon there’d come the part when a voice would startle her attention up from the knife and the dust at her feet. It was a voice she’d know an
ywhere, a voice she’d long since blown her chance to ever hear again.

  What is it exactly that you’re doing? that voice would ask her, and then she’d know she was dreaming, so she’d wake up and pull on her boots and stick the knife in her belt and throw herself so hard into her chores that she’d be too tired to dream again tomorrow.

  What—the voice began to ask, and then there came a noise like the whole world being crumpled like a sheet of paper in a fist, and she woke up to the sound of screaming.

  * * *

  Isabel had hurled herself out of the sleeping-alcove and into the hall before she’d given conscious thought to getting her legs under her, let alone spent time preparing her injuries to bear her weight. Her knees felt rubbery. No—there was something wrong with the floor? It was too dark to see. Something in the kitchen was crashing noisily. Like Catchkeep’s Hunt was barrelling through, leaving nothing standing as it swept on by. Somebody—Kath?—was praying loudly to the Chooser, her voice wrung strange with terror. Somebody else was crying.

  “Sairy!” Isabel called. Toppling against the wall. Hanging onto it as it shook like it wanted to be rid of her. Stones grated together, then went still. “Jen! Somebody report!”

  “Isabel!”

  “Sairy?”

  “What the shit just happened?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to find a lamp.”

  “Stay put, I’ll come to you.”

  “I’m fine. Is anyone hurt?”

  Something else fell over with a splintery crash, this time from the direction of the altar.

  “Jen?”

  “I’m here,” Jen called from down the hall. “Kath, stop it, it’s okay.” Then, louder: “I think it’s over!”

  Isabel hitched up breath. Her legs were jelly. In the wake of the adrenaline dump, her everything was spent. “Everyone report!”

  “I’ve got Kath and Meg here,” Jen called.

  “I’m good,” Lissa shouted. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Isabel yelled back. Feeling her way along the wall, back into the alcove, she lit her lamp on the fifth try with trembling hands. “Where’s Bex and Glory?”

  “I think Bex ran outside,” Sairy called. “Bex!”

  “Got the lamp,” Isabel said. “Glory, report?”

  Nothing. Just muffled crying, coming from farther down the hall.

  “Glory, are you hurt?”

  No reply.

  “Stay there, Glory, I’m on my way.”

  “I’ve got her,” Sairy called from the direction of the Catchkeep-priest’s old chambers. “Her arm’s hurt but she’s in one piece.”

  They all converged in the common area by the light of Isabel’s lamp. The long table hadn’t moved, but everything else looked like Ember Girl had taken the room between Her hands and given it a shake. Chore tokens had scattered to the far wall. Probably half of their clay bowls had broken. Drying bunches of whatnot—garlic, come-what-may, ghostgrass, wild mint—had fallen from the ceiling. Something unseen crunched underfoot. There was a general smell of vinegar.

  Sairy sat Glory at the table, then lit a second lamp from Isabel’s and proceeded to inspect Glory’s arm, the elbow of which was already swelling. “This is nothing,” she said brightly. “Look, the bone’s not even popping through.”

  “You’re a world of help,” Glory gritted through her teeth.

  “I try.” Sairy beamed at her. “Seriously, let’s give this a minute, make sure it’s stopped. Then I’ll walk you to the midwife. She’ll get you fixed right up.”

  Meantime, Jen was making the rounds of the room, squinting into her notebook and moaning in agitation. “This jug of vinegar is cracked,” she announced. “And some of the wine, and—what is—there are seeds everywhere.” She bent down and raised something miniscule to the light, then dropped to her knees, aghast, and scrabbled at the floor. “My carrots—”

  “Not too bad in here,” Bex called from the altar-room.

  “I thought you were outside!” Sairy said.

  Bex emerged from the altar-room, a chipped skull and a green stone in her hands. “A few of them fell off the wall,” she explained, failing to fit the stone back in behind the skull’s teeth. “Sorry,” she muttered at it.

  It came to Isabel that they all were unconsciously touching their scarred cheeks as they watched this operation.

  “And the altar?” Lissa asked.

  Bex shrugged. “Couple candles broke, and I had to pick up the offerings. The statue’s okay. What the hell was that anyway?”

  “Earthquake, I think,” Jen said. “I’ve never…been in one before.” She shivered. “I didn’t like it.”

  They fell silent, and Isabel realized she could hear noise from the town now. A general yelling and rushing. Something large and distant let out one long slow creak and fell. The Catchkeep-shrine was one of two sturdy stone buildings in all of Sweetwater, and even here she’d felt the stones of the wall grinding as the earth cracked and buckled under—

  Her veins ran ice. The ghostgrass.

  She was halfway out the door before she realized she’d gotten up. She turned and Sairy was holding her sleeve.

  “Isabel,” Sairy was saying. “Isabel, wait.”

  Isabel shook her off. “I have to check the barricades.”

  “You sit,” Sairy told her. “I got them. Kath, you’re in charge of Glory.”

  “But you can’t—”

  “I’m just going to check them.” Already tying braids of ghostgrass around her wrists and ankles, already stuffing more bundled grassblades into her pockets, already checking her hands and arms for scratches. “If there’s trouble, I’ll get you.”

  It should be me, Isabel wanted to say. If ghosts came through, I need to see them, I need to know if—

  She clamped down on that thought like it was a wound and she was trying to stop it bleeding. “Report anything unusual,” she said instead.

  Something in her voice betrayed her. “Anything in particular?” Sairy asked.

  “Anything unusual.” Watching Sairy go through a brief series of stretches, preparing for the run to come. “And be careful.”

  “Always am,” Sairy replied, and was gone.

  Isabel stood a moment staring into the dark outside the shrine. Like she could see the waypoints from here. The damage to the ghostgrass barricades. Whatever might be pushing its way out of those silver slashes from the ghost-world into this.

  If you want to come with us, went a voice in her head, it’ll be—

  “Well,” she said briskly, louder than necessary, “let’s get Glory to the midwife and see who else needs our help.” Keep moving or sink, she commanded herself, and lifted the lamp. “Looks like we start early today.”

  * * *

  They left the shrine in a group. Isabel leading, Meg and Kath walking Glory, Lissa and Jen pushing Jen’s market-cart. Bex stayed behind to tidy the altar and ready the shrine for the townspeople who would doubtless arrive later to pray before the Catchkeep-statue, as they always did in time of calamity.

  They stuck together, traveling in a weird small straggly pack, not knowing what they’d find. At least the nearly full moon meant that they could leave the lamp, and the sun would rise soon.

  On Jen’s cart were some bandages, a jug of water and a cup, and as many bundles of ghostgrass as they could gather. Also a recent experiment of Glory’s: a little pot of ghostgrass crushed with oil into a paste. The barricades had made it pretty much impossible to test the efficacy of that ghostgrass salve, but they’d all smeared a little on their skin for protection before heading out into the dark.

  They got Glory to the midwife. Hung fresh ghostgrass bundles from damaged houses. Helped the cheesemaker rescue a goat trapped beneath a fallen shed. Bandaged a cut on the songkeeper’s arm and tied a five-strand ghostgrass braid around it in accordance with open wound protocol. Assisted injured townspeople back to the midwife’s, clearing space on the cart and pushing them one by one. Gave the water-boilers
fresh ghostgrass bundles to ensure safe passage to the lake. Let Onya walk with them so that her mother could help her neighbors repair a wall. Jen tasked Onya with filling the water-cup for anyone who looked thirsty, which she did until the jug ran dry. There wasn’t much to fix, for which they all gave thanks to the One Who Got Away.

  Isabel buried herself in the work, and by midday Sairy was back. “Everything looks good,” she told Isabel. “Nothing to report.”

  “No ghosts?”

  Sairy shook her head. “No anything. The barricades are sound.” She gestured at the hills that cupped Sweetwater in their center. “I think the ridge protected us from worse.”

  But the sun was high by then, and Sairy was drenched with sweat and breathing hard, so Isabel sent her back to the shrine for food and water and rest.

  “I’ll take her,” Jen said. “I have to check on something anyway.”

  “Everything okay?” Isabel asked her.

  “I think so?” Jen replied. “Trade run from Stormbreak was supposed to show at dawn. Maybe the quake hit them too.” She looked momentarily confused, which was a very un-Jen-like expression. She glanced at Isabel questioningly. “As far as that? And still reach here?”

  Isabel had no idea, and shook her head.

  “I have to talk to Ruby. One of the other high seats if I have to. Someone might’ve heard something.”

  Obviously fretting, which was also unlike Jen. Though it made sense. Sweetwater and Stormbreak traded heavily in all seasons. Jen and the other trade supervisors would have to scramble fast to open new lanes of barter with other towns if Stormbreak failed.

  After Jen left, Isabel thought no more of it, and for the next couple of days Jen didn’t bring it up again. There was a sense of watchful waiting about her, though, and the next day when Isabel asked after the Stormbreak trade run, Jen looked so distraught that Isabel didn’t ask again.