Archivist Wasp

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “What the—” she gasped, exerting the whole of her will to keep from thrashing. “Get it off!”

  “It hasn’t been five minutes yet,” said the ghost amicably. “And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  There was something in the ghost’s free hand. Wasp was one for two in having excellent reason to dislike the objects that appeared there and was about to start fighting in earnest when another howl drifted up from somewhere among the apple trees. She went still.

  “Now there are two ways we can do this,” the ghost was saying. “Calmly or the other way.”

  It held up the thing in its hand, thumb-and-forefinger. In the bare light coming off of its hand itself, the object looked like a pebble, but probably was not, and the ghost was squinting at her doubtfully. “Are these even around anymore? Pills. You swallow them. Don’t chew.”

  “I know what a damn pill is,” Wasp said. “And you can shove—”

  “It’s this or them,” said the ghost. “That’s it. There’s nothing else now.”

  Wasp eyed the pill. In the light, it might have been green.

  “It won’t hurt,” said the ghost to her unasked question. “It makes you sleep. That,” nodding to the spiderweb-thing, “is a cloaking device. Camouflage. In part.” That dubious look again. “Do you—”

  “I can make my own camouflage.”

  “Not like this you can’t. With this they won’t be able to find you. You’ll be safe until we’re back.”

  This was feeling wrong now, all wrong. “Back from where?”

  “From where the ghosts are.”

  Wasp spluttered. “It’s going to kill me?” As soon as the words were out, she wondered why she cared. Then wondered why she wondered.

  “No no no. Nothing like that.” A pause. “Not quite.”

  In the ghost’s hand, the spiderweb-thing seemed for all the world to be trying to scrabble out of its grip. The ghost held it steady, but Wasp could feel the outmost edges of the thing tickling at her jawline, seeking purchase. She’d heard enough. “Let me—”

  The noise of the dogs again. Voices, joining the hunt, close enough to hear.

  “Shit,” said Wasp. A moment passed. “Give it.”

  The ghost dropped the pill into her mouth. She dry-swallowed it and almost immediately fell back dizzied. “My head . . .”

  “Feels strange. It will. And it’s about to feel a whole lot stranger. I can leave you alone or talk you through it. But I have to close you up either way. The edges start oxidizing almost immediately if they’re not anchored. They lose resilience. And we need them more or less airtight.”

  Whatever was in that pill had Wasp feeling like someone had unpacked her skull and stuffed it full of wet clay, but at airtight, alarm started slowly bubbling up.

  “Wait,” she said. “What?”

  “Trust me,” said the ghost, and let go.

  Immediately the thing was upon her, fusing to her skin. So light, so seemingly immaterial, she could not tell at first how far it had spread over her face.

  She willed herself not to scream—and screamed. Or thought she did.

  No sound came out. And no breath came in. She tried to fill her chest with air, as if preparing for a dive, but her lungs kicked up against her ribs and would not cooperate. Still she could feel no pressure on her face. Her time was running out. The pill had congested her nose, but she tried to filter some air through it anyway. The first two breaths felt like inhaling through a mattress but the third breath failed her altogether. Her lungs pulled and pulled, got nothing.

  Her eyes cast about and landed on the ghost. It was saying something, but she couldn’t hear it. The spiderweb-thing must have already blocked up her ears. Darkness was sidling in on the periphery of her vision. Was it the thing’s searching edge? Or was she blacking out? The ghost reached and gently thumbed her eyelids down, and a pale softness crawled inexorably over, and she was blind.

  All there was left to her was the pounding of her heart, hard and fast, then slowing, slowing. There used to be a story the upstarts used to tell, up late, in the dark, trying to scare each other sleepless. Something about a person knocking at a door, hard and fast, then slowing, slowing, and his friend inside the house, in the dark, too afraid to answer until the knocking had already stopped. Whatever he found on the doorstep always changed, depending on the telling. His friend, his head staved in, his fists bloodied on the door. A monster, eating his friend, whose fists were bloodied on the door. His friend, become a monster, sharpening its bloodied claws against the door. Or nothing.

  Wasp’s heart gave those last few feeble taps and misfired, dropping her down into the dark. The story’s wrong, she thought. Nobody answered after all.

  Chapter Seven

  Wasp was dreaming. She hated dreaming.

  In her dream she was lying on a ledge on a mountaintop in a black wind, something pressed against her face. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. Someone was saying, over and over, soft and low: it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay. Then there came a silence in which nobody said anything, not even the wind, and she found she could get up, so she did.

  The ghost was waiting. It looked different. The markers of its ghostliness were gone from it. The shattered salt-chains at its feet. The dark glow evaporating off of it. The way it flickered, sometimes, as the real world snagged at its edges and sent moonlight shining through it for a split second before it regained control.

  She heard the dogs again, closer still. Above the din the Catchkeep-priest was singing out in high glee, sending a shiver up her spine: Wasp, oh Wasp. A merry chase.

  “You don’t need to worry about them,” said the ghost. “They won’t find you now.” It had its hands on her shoulders. This was not designed to be comforting. It was designed to hold her in place. Reflexively she twisted free, tripped over something on the ground, and went over in a heap. The night sky swung wide above her in narrowing arcs as her head recalibrated. If she had ever been so disoriented before, she couldn’t remember when.

  That thing on the ground, though. It was all the no-colors of the rock of the Hill, shadowed as the moonlight would shadow such rock, and even actively looking for it, her eyes could barely pick it out from the ledge on which it lay. Still, she couldn’t discern its outlines, its shape. Even stranger was the thread, fine as an eyelash and the color of lightning, which connected the thing on the ledge to her. She touched the place where it disappeared between her breasts. She had strangled upstarts with wire that felt like this thread. She backed a step and the thread unspooled from somewhere—within her? within the thing on the ledge?—to follow.

  “I’d thought to ease you into it,” the ghost was saying. “It’s a shock, I realize.” As an afterthought, “At least it worked. I wasn’t sure it would.”

  Her brain was muzzy. A shock? What was? She remembered a pill, far smaller and far smoother than the midwife’s herbal boluses, with a kick swifter and harder than anything she’d ever pilfered out the back of the distillery when the brew-mistress’s back was turned. A pill, and then that awful dream of airlessness, and then—

  All at once she began to laugh. “I’m a ghost?” She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what was so funny, but once she had started laughing, she found it very hard to stop. Her laughter flew out over the valley, and down below in the dark, the dogs kept on with their snuffling and the Catchkeep-priest kept on with his hallooing and not a one of them was any bit the wiser. “I’m a ghost!”

  “You still have your knife,” said the ghost. In its tone was something Wasp took a minute to place as admiration. “I didn’t expect that.”

  “I ought to stick you with it. Trust you. You said your pill and your whatever-it-is weren’t going to—”

  “And they didn’t. Your body’s systems have been slowed down dramatically, but you are exactly as alive as you were ten minutes ago. And with a considerably better chance of staying that way.” The ghost paused, grasping after phrasing
she would understand. “Sort of like a bear? In winter?”

  “Bears are built to hibernate. I’m not.”

  “And that,” it rejoined smoothly, “is why we don’t have time to stand here talking.”

  Wasp squatted down beside herself, awkward in the Archivist-coat. That had come through along with the knife, and also the backpack. More nuisance than anything, she guessed, but kept them on. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” She aimed an experimental poke at what she guessed was her shoulder and glanced up surprised. “It’s cold.”

  “It provides camouflage in the infrared as well as the visual spectrum. Never mind. More importantly for you, those dogs shouldn’t be able to smell you, either.”

  Wasp ran her hand lightly over the cloaking device she still thought of as a spiderweb, wondering how her previous escapes would have gone if she’d had this thing on her side then. Wondering where she might be right now if she had.

  She clamped her mouth shut on the crazy laugh that threatened to tear its way back out of her. She could feel it boiling in her gut. Her blood had turned to lightning. The Catchkeep-priest, the shrine-dogs, all of them down in the orchard chasing their tails. Sniffing each others’ asses too, maybe. She wished them joy of it, and gnawed her tongue to keep from giggling.

  Killing pissant little upstarts, that was supposed to make her feel victorious. It never had. Until this moment, she never really knew what that even felt like.

  “We don’t have long,” said the ghost. “We have to keep moving.”

  Wasp snapped out of it fast. “How long?”

  The ghost shrugged. “Two days, maybe three, once you’re through to where we’re going. But that’s weeks up here. Sometimes more.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Like I said. We have to keep moving.”

  “Moving. Sure.” Wasp surveyed the ledge. “Moving where?”

  “Back down.” At the look on Wasp’s face, which encompassed the baying of the shrine-dogs and the Catchkeep-priest running along behind, the ghost clarified. “To the lower ledge. Where you go—” it paused to invest the next word with infinite disdain—“hunting.”

  Wasp didn’t much like its tone of voice, but what could she do? She was in too deep now to turn back. The thread in her chest reeled out slack as they descended.

  The ghost reached the ledge first. “There.”

  It was facing a wall of solid rock.

  “Where?”

  Arms folded, it tipped its chin. “There.”

  There was a crack in the wall the width of Wasp’s shoe. She’d seen hundreds of ghosts change their size at will and disappear into it, but apparently being a ghost didn’t confer that trick unto her automatically. Nor could she really imagine this particular ghost shrinking itself down to the size of a rat to wriggle in there.

  “If it makes it easier,” the ghost said, “imagine a door.”

  Wasp looked at the crack in the rock.

  “Forget that. Look ahead of you. Always ahead.”

  Wasp looked ahead. Six feet to either side, rock. Dozens of yards above her head, rock. Where the ledge ran out, the drop. The ghost took two steps forward and disappeared, then reemerged. “Now you.”

  Wasp thought: I am a ghost. I will pass straight through.

  She strode forward and smashed her face on the wall.

  “Don’t think: the rock is insubstantial. It isn’t.”

  “Yeah, I kind of got tha—”

  “Think: I am stronger than the rock.”

  She eyed the wall with deep misgivings. “Am I?”

  “I don’t know,” said the ghost. “You tell me.”

  “I am stronger than the rock,” she said, and smashed her face again.

  The ghost made an exasperated sound. “It might help to close your eyes.”

  Wasp bristled. This, all of this, was moving way too fast, and not one crumb of it was anything she’d expected when she agreed to it. “I don’t take orders from you.”

  “No. You don’t. Why don’t you wake yourself up and run back to the people you do take orders from. The pill will wear off in a couple of days. Get comfortable.” Halfway through the wall, a parting shot. “I should have known you weren’t up to this.”

  The ghost disappeared. Wasp waited, but this time it didn’t return.

  “You need me,” Wasp shouted at the place where it had vanished. “I’m going to find your Ragpicker-taken dead friend for you, remember?” She kicked at the wall. In her semi-ghostly state, she found this profoundly unsatisfying. “Remember?”

  Nothing. She crushed a rising panic down. She walked to the wall, pressed her hands against the rock and pushed. Feeling stupid, she shut her eyes and held her breath and tried to shrink herself down to squeeze through that crack at her feet, as she had seen so many ghosts do before her. Some minutes passed. All it gave her was a headache, which she didn’t think should have been possible.

  She thought about turning herself in to the hunting party. She thought about letting the pill wear off, climbing back into her body, and waiting on the ledge to freeze. She thought about risking an escape by foot, on land, among the living, with the shrine-dogs on her scent. And she thought about what would happen when she was found.

  “Not this time,” she said, and walked through the wall.

  There was a moment of disorientation as the fabric of her person interleaved with the fabric of the rock, but before she’d noticed she’d passed the point of smashing her face again she was already through. The ghost was waiting at the other side, in an almost perfect darkness. Before them, a wide path opened up in the raw rock of the Hill and curved gently down into the black, studded with luminescent fungi, or insects. They were too high up for her to tell. The light given off from them was feeble and flickering, shadowing more than it illuminated, the milky green of pus. And in it, the ghost nodded at her, evidently satisfied.

  She could have punched it.

  “That’s it,” she said. “No more tricks. If you’re about to push me into a pile of shit, you tell me before I’m up to my neck in it. Make me believe that helping you is a better choice than going back where I came from. Or I walk.”

  “If I’d told you what you had to do to get here,” the ghost said reasonably, “would you have come? I couldn’t risk you staying behind. It seemed the most expedient way to convince you.”

  “What did? Making me think I couldn’t do those things? Climb the Hill? Get through the wall? Live through that—whatever that thing—” The sensation returned to her, of the spiderweb-thing smoothing over her nose and mouth, her lungs kicking against nothing. Her skin crawled.

  “And then make you realize you could do them,” said the ghost, watching her levelly. “Yes. You were hardly going to take my word for it. You had to prove it to yourself.”

  “I—” Wasp began, then stopped. There was no tactic that would have fit her better, and she knew it. She didn’t want to ask, but she had to. “How did—”

  “You remind me a little of someone I used to know,” it said. “Long ago.”

  “This ghost of yours, you mean?” Wasp asked. “Foster?”

  It said nothing.

  “So she was—”

  “Stubborn?” The ghost’s gaze slid over her, down the path, toward nothing Wasp could see. “Breathtakingly.”

  A pause. “We should keep moving.” After a few steps it seemed to realize Wasp wasn’t following. It stopped but did not turn.

  “No more tricks,” Wasp said to its back.

  A moment of silence, and then it nodded. “No more tricks.”

  Wasp took a few steps toward the brightening farther down and stopped. What she wanted in her bones was to hang back and let the ghost negotiate the hall before her and encounter whatever was around the blind curve at the bottom first. So she put on a brave face and soldiered on.

  The hall was longer than it looked from above, and steep enough that she had to curl her toes to grip the rock through her flimsy shoes. She couldn’t
tell whether, as she descended, the air grew warmer or colder, drier or damper; only that other, stranger smells than rock and autumn began to add themselves to it: spice and smoldering and chemicals, and a sweetish rotten smell that put her in mind of the Catchkeep-shrine, its carrion and flowers.

  At the bottom, they found a door. The smell was stronger here.

  Something had been nagging at Wasp since she’d passed through the wall, and this door, the hugeness and incongruity and somehow the finality of it, brought it to the forefront.

  “If I die here. I mean, I can’t die here. Can I?”

  “A ghost can’t, not by the strictest definition. But by the strictest definition you’re also not a ghost.”

  “So . . . I won’t?”

  “So I’m not sure what will happen. So do your best not to find out.”

  “Yeah,” said Wasp. “Thanks.”

  Its deadpan and her sarcasm sailed straight on past each other, strangers passing on a dark road in the night.

  “You want to watch that,” said the ghost, pointing to the thread emerging from Wasp’s chest, disappearing back and back behind her. “Don’t let it break.”

  Wasp immediately started fussing at it, gauging its strength. It was tensile and stronger at least than the hard tug she gave it. “What’ll happen?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one before. My guess is that if something goes wrong, and it snaps, then you lose your way back.”

  Goes wrong, thought Wasp. What part of this hasn’t gone wrong?

  “Maybe you’ll be stuck here,” the ghost went on. “Maybe you’ll disappear altogether. Like I said, you’re not a ghost. You’re in-between. You might just be—” here it made a gesture more eloquent than Wasp liked, an opening of one gloved fist like the ghost scattered something unseen to the wind: all gone—“undone.”