Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  weakest Ive ever seen

  no salt no blood but walking talking

  She underlined talking three times, then circled it twice.

  talking louder now with the blood in it but this thing went from silver smoke-blob to climbing out of the jar in a three-count on its own and that was before any blood any salt any reason

  Underlined on its own. Underlined reason.

  shouldnt be happening

  stupid to destroy without further study.

  Like it mattered, sparing something already dead. Stupid that she should feel relieved, but she always did. She’d just have to destroy it later, once she was done with—

  She glanced up, frantic for a second because the ghost was not where she had left it. Then she caught sight of it, meandering back along the ledge, its hand twisting at the air as if turning invisible doorknobs. Wasp watched as it reached the others and began to play with its shape, stretching and shrinking, stopping when it was roughly the height of most of the ghosts in the group. It stood among them as they patted its arms and face, which had grown fingers and a nose, respectively. It was looking into the face of each ghost in turn, still repeating those syllables that might have been a name. The last syllable had a little upward tilt to it now. As if it were asking a question.

  Wasp stared, charcoal forgotten in her hand. A ghost was communicating with other ghosts? This was big. This was very, very big.

  “Hey,” she whispered at it, feeling stupid.

  Of course, the ghost didn’t respond. She’d mostly known it wouldn’t. Ghosts couldn’t talk to people, not even Archivists. She had a whole box of field notes to prove it. It was only a very, very strong ghost that could do something like attack a person, but even then it did so mindlessly, like a tantruming child kicking at the floor.

  She tried again. “Hey there. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Nothing. No surprise there. But she could still recapture the ghost for study. See what she could get from it. Give its death a purpose. It would be the same purpose that a struck spark gives firewood, but it was better than none.

  She was just reaching for the jar when the ghost found a crack in the wall and shrank down some more to disappear inside. She leapt after it, too late.

  Wasp dropped her head into her hands, swearing as colorfully as she knew how. It was a good few minutes before she calmed down, but she had to. When a tiny spark of hope shone out from the shitheap of her life, she had to focus on it. It was the only way she was going to get through another year of this without losing her mind.

  The ghost was gone, but it could have been worse. She would have loved to study it further, try to figure out what it wanted, and, more importantly, what had given it the strength to want it in the first place. No point in worrying about that, though. She was losing the light. She’d tell the Catchkeep-priest she’d destroyed the ghost like she was supposed to, and catch another one to study. It’d have to be a good one, to make her less pissed at herself than she was right now. But she also had the notes.

  It was rare that she was supposed to release a ghost, but what she was meant to say when she did so was this:

  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.

  What she did say was:

  “Back into the soup with you, troublemaker. Next time, pick someplace smarter to haunt.”

  Destroying the captive ghost had been only one of her appointed tasks today. She was also supposed to catch another. The midwife’s niece wanted a baby, but was suffering from an uncooperative womb. An egg would catch, and clot, and grow, then lose its grip and trickle out, and the midwife’s arsenal of tricks was to no avail. The midwife had prayed to the Chooser and come away with the notion that an animated clot might have the will to hang on as a new body pieced itself around it. She’d gone to the Catchkeep-priest with her petition and her offerings to Catchkeep, and the Catchkeep-priest had given Wasp the job of finding her a ghost.

  In Wasp’s experience, the townspeople were terrified of ghosts, and with good reason. Unlike Archivists, they weren’t under Catchkeep’s protection, and Catchkeep’s dominion was ghosts. It was very, very rare for someone to come asking for a specimen for personal use, but it did happen. There was trade in ghosts to neighboring towns, for instance—once or twice a year, maybe, the Catchkeep-priest would barter a bottled ghost for Chooser knew what, and one time Wasp had seen her predecessor catch a particularly nasty specimen and tether it in the town gardens to keep the scav kids off the perimeter fence. The harvest that autumn had doubled.

  But Wasp was not her predecessor. She didn’t have a fraction of that kind of love for the work. As an upstart, Wasp had been sent up to the Archivist-house on an errand for the Catchkeep-priest. All she remembered about the Archivist she’d go on to replace was that she’d left salt-trails running to her house, at least half the jars on her shelves were not only full but also blood-streaked on their inside walls, and she’d been in the process of squeezing a cut finger for a hungry ghost when Wasp had knocked. When the Archivist had grinned at her, Wasp had shuddered at the sharpness of her teeth.

  Wasp wasn’t in the habit of keeping ghosts around for long, and she wasn’t looking to start a collection. She might have three full jars, at most, on any given day. Her method was as pared-back as possible. Cut, capture, carry home in jar, take notes, bring back in jar, destroy. No reason to prolong suffering, even of the dead. When they’d come to her asking to tether a scarecrow-ghost as her predecessor had done, she’d done it—but after a few nights of its howling drifting up her hill, she’d snuck into the gardens and cut it free. When they asked her to catch another, she’d obeyed. When that one and the next two also disappeared, they stopped asking.

  So Wasp would catch a child-ghost for the midwife’s niece. She had no idea how the midwife was planning to put this ghost in a living woman’s womb, or whether a ghost would even want such a thing, and what a ghost might do in that case to show its displeasure if the idea was not to its liking. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Still, before and after her doubts she was the Archivist. She had a duty to her people. The fallout from their decisions wasn’t her business. Not unless the ghost got loose.

  The other ghosts were still milling around the crack in the rock, oblivious to her inspection. Most were ankle-height or less; a few topped out around her knees or thighs. The tallest one she’d ever seen stood half as high as the ledge, but she’d only seen it once. Where it’d gotten the strength for that trick from, she had no idea. She’d been an upstart then, and had kept well away.

  Thankfully, her thumb had stopped bleeding. Not that any of this batch of ghosts looked particularly threatening, but the blood had been known to bring it out in them, and things were weird enough today already without adding a brawl on top. She’d bandage it. Meantime, she’d better get moving and distract them, just in case.

  Wasp rummaged in the backpack and came out with the little plastic box containing the saltlick. She set it down near the nearest of the ghosts, putting herself between it and the bloodstained pit of rock. The ghosts nosed forward, browsing at the air—one or two taking a step, then others following, and a scuffle erupted at her feet as the ghosts descended upon the dish.

  It still startled her, how violently the salt drew them. The field notes said it was because it put the ghosts in mind of their former flesh. That to them, it was the salt of sweat, of tears, of blood. It drew them because it made them remember being alive, made them hunger for everything they’d lost.

  She sketched the feeding ghosts in her notebook, her mind on the one she’d let slip through her fingers. It fascinated and depressed her, the way the ghosts moved, pacing their confines. Sounding their boundaries, back and forth. She saw much of herself in them, so she never watched for long. />
  Today there were eight lone ones and what looked to be a rare set of three. What with their ability to change size at will, it was always hard for her to tell the ages they’d been when they’d died, but by the way two of them were nudging the third one on before them toward the saltlick, shielding it against the others’ jostling with what they most likely still thought of as their bodies, Wasp’s best guess was that this used to be a family.

  As the salt took hold of them, their faces began to resolve: first the features grew, claylike, then refining—their hair grew out, straight or curly, then darkened or lightened from that dullish silver—their eyes grew pupils, irises, and color slowly began to bleed in. Their heights and sizes began to stabilize, to calibrate against each other. It was a family, she could see now. Or used to be. Two females and a tiny male, maybe three or four years old at time of death.

  It might be weeks before she found another child-ghost so young. And she hated unfinished business.

  Keeping her eyes on the lapping ghosts, one hand reached behind her blind and felt around on the rock for the jar, while the other hand drew the harvesting-knife free of its dogleather sheath at her belt. The knife was as long as her forearm, forged from some bright metal, with a guard like a sword and a grip wrapped with the same dogleather as the sheath, and worth more than everything else in her little house combined. The shape of the blade was irregular, the hilt longer than the handle of a knife of similar size would be, and the point was unevenly tapered, as though the true point had broken off and this was what was left. But it was a ritual blade, not a weapon, and it served.

  When she readied it in position, the low autumn sun caught on the sixteen dots of darker metal inset along the blade: the six larger ones, the size of a wild blueberry; the ten smaller ones, the size of a clover-seed. Vaguely they described a wedge-shaped head, a jaw like a beartrap, a barrel chest, long legs, a lashing back-curved tail.

  Years ago, when she stood bloodied on the lakeshore above the previous Archivist’s cooling corpse, and was presented with this blade, it was held out to her in such a way that the constellation on the blade caught and returned the light of the matching constellation in the sky. Catchkeep.

  The harvesting-knife felt strange in her hand now after two weeks without it. Strange and yet as familiar as any other part of her. She took a step toward the child-ghost, and it turned.

  This part used to frighten her a little. The sea-change in the ghosts’ eyes as the salt waylaid them. The look on their faces, like they woke from a nightmare to find that the monsters had followed them back out into their cozy beds. It had not taken her long to realize that the only monster they were seeing was her.

  The child-ghost turned back to the saltlick. Its parent-ghosts didn’t seem to have noticed her at all. For the thousandth time she reminded herself of what the field notes had taught her: that when she harvested a ghost, the ones it had traveled with wouldn’t even know it was gone, no longer had the minds with which to understand the loss or the hearts with which to feel it, any more than a hand feels the loss of a pared fingernail. That ghosts, essentially, were recorded information rewinding, playing, rewinding. Skipping and resuming. A resource to be tapped and nothing more.

  She wished she knew whether that were true.

  Knife in one hand, jar in the other, she was kneeling behind the child-ghost ready to slice it free and lid it up when she realized: there was only the one jar. Only the one jar, which she was about to fill with a ghost that had died too young to be of any use to the field notes.

  It wouldn’t be the first time she harvested a ghost she didn’t have much hope of learning anything from—but usually it was not her first day on the job after half a month in recovery, she hadn’t just lost the ghost she should have been bringing back to study, and she hadn’t forgotten to bring enough damn jars with her on a hunt. And she didn’t much relish the idea of coming back up here to try again tomorrow.

  If she took the child-ghost for the midwife’s niece, she would have made good on that particular duty, but otherwise she’d be returning to the Catchkeep-priest emptyhanded. And that was not a place she wanted to be.

  But then she thought of the child-ghost, and wondered whether the midwife was right and it was possible for it to be reborn. She thought of the children she had seen chasing each other around town and concluded that, as far as she could tell, children liked to be alive. It was her best guess that this one might have liked it, too. She only hoped it wouldn’t come back as a baby girl with Catchkeep’s mark on her cheek.

  She glanced at the child-ghost, the parent-ghosts. “Paring a fingernail,” she said, either to them or to herself, and decided.

  A quick swipe in a ring around the child-ghost with the harvesting-knife and it shrank back to ankle-height, weakened. Free for the picking. She set down the knife, closed her hand around the ghost’s waist, and pulled. It came free of the rock with a sound like uprooting weeds from mud and she dropped it into the jar, looking anywhere but at its face.

  Where she found herself looking instead was into the eyes of the two parent-ghosts. They had turned from the saltlick and were staring at her with a look that she had seen rather often on the living but very, very seldom on any ghost. Complete awareness. Utter hate.

  It froze her. These ghosts, these nothing little ghosts she’d disregarded, actually had the strength to turn their backs on the salt without her say-so. It flew in the face of everything she knew.

  “No,” she whispered, as her palms went clammy and her heart began to race.

  First she’d released a ghost from two weeks’ confinement, which was apparently beyond long enough to wither it like a leaf, but somehow the ghost had found the strength to remember. To search. To attempt to speak. To communicate with other ghosts, if Wasp’s observation was correct. And then there was the look in the parent-ghosts’ eyes. Which was now in the others’ eyes, too, as all the ghosts abandoned the salt to turn their faces upon her in unison, as though alerted by the sudden racket of her breath, the sudden stink of her fear.

  She’d read warnings in the field notes about clusters of strong ghosts. One on its own meant a difficult catch, but a first-class specimen. More than one meant trouble. No catch at all, and maybe a dead Archivist. It had happened before. She had a pretty good idea where this was going.

  It wasn’t these ghosts that were the problem. Not any of the ones on the ledge, not the one she’d lost.

  It was worse.

  Chapter Three

  Slowly she set the jar down and gripped the harvesting-knife, wondering if it would defend her. Eyes scanning the ledge for the ghost that she knew had to be there, somewhere: the one that brimmed with so much careless, reckless strength that it was running over with power, it was shedding power—and the others were drinking it up by the roots like rain.

  Stupid. She’d been stupid. So focused on some little ghosts’ weird behavior that she didn’t notice the bigger picture. Didn’t even look for a bigger picture. Stupid and careless and too hung up on hope, which had gotten her precisely nowhere thus far. And now she was going to have to think fast if she didn’t want to get herself pasted on the rock with all those notes she’d been so pleased with up until about fifteen seconds ago.

  She could have kicked herself in the ass. Saved this mystery ghost the trouble.

  She couldn’t see it. This thing was strong enough to slap her dead like a fly where she stood, and she couldn’t see it. How could she not see it? It had to be there. Maybe she was rusty from being so long out of the field, but that didn’t explain it. Without the salt to bring them into focus between worlds, the blood to give them strength enough to put their faces on and speak, most ghosts were too weak to do much of anything aboveground, but this one—wherever it was—with this kind of strength radiating off of it, it should be huge, it should be, she didn’t know, glowing or something, it should be obvious—

  Her hand was too sweaty now to have any kind of sure grip on the knife. Quickly she pa
ssed it to her off hand, wiped her damp palm on her leg. For a fleeting second a childish urge welled up in her and she nearly shouted for help. But who could hear her? And, hearing her, who would come? The matter of her death was between her and Catchkeep. To the townspeople she was the Archivist, faceless, nameless, a goddess’s eyes and ears and hands. They honored her as they had honored those who’d come before her, and they would bury her likewise. And pull another Archivist up after her, climbing on her corpse.

  On the ledge by her foot, the child-ghost’s jar was beginning to tip back and forth, teetering and righting. A thin wail, high and pure and so tiny, reached Wasp’s ears.

  She should not have been able to hear it. It should not have been there to hear.

  “Shit,” she whispered, backing a step.

  At the cry, the staring parent-ghosts now broke from the saltlick entirely and bolted for the jar, swiping at the lid. There were sigils on that jar and their hands should pass through. They did not pass through. There was a melodious clinking as the lid rolled away off the ledge and was lost, and from the jar the child-ghost emerged into its parents’ arms. They bore it away between them, and for the first time in three years of hunting and harvesting Wasp could actually see the oozing silver trail, half snailslime half brine, that a ghost left behind from where it had been cut free.

  Wasp had seen strong ghosts before. She had seen a ghost as tall as a tree, a ghost bigger than her house, a ghost that had emerged from the rock still wreathed in the live fire that had killed it, which ignited where it touched, and singed her backpack as she’d leapt away. She’d read the stories in the field notes, the cautionary tales of Archivists who got too cocky and were found in unrecognizable piles, bones cracked to get at the salt in their marrow, silvery footprints leading away.