On This Unworthy Scaffold, Heidi Heilig [best books to read for success .txt] 📗

“I have bad news about that.”

Looking up in surprise, I follow her gaze to the cleft in the earth. In the light of the gathering souls, I can make out the marks of picks and chisels. It is not a crack, but a scar. “They took the salts.”

“Mined out the whole vein. They must have known we’d come looking for it at some point.”

“But where did they take it all?” Then I curse as the answer comes. “Nokhor Khat.”

“That’s my guess, though of course it’s hard to ask.” Glaring, she nudges the monk’s corpse with her foot. The sight shocks me.

“Don’t!” My voice echoes in the tunnel, and Theodora startles, wide-eyed. I open my mouth, looking for the words to explain. “His minions—these n’akela . . . he made them what they are. And now they’re only following orders. Besides, it isn’t even her body,” I add, remembering the akela I’d seen in the temple. “She killed a monk to get it. I saw the monk’s real soul by the altar. She may have been trying to warn me.”

Theodora narrows her eyes, looking from me to the body, then back. “You went to the temple.”

“It’s just down the hall,” I say, defensive, but she turns back to the body.

“And the monk’s soul is there?”

“She was,” I say, frowning. “Why?”

“Well.” She kneels down beside the body, tucking a strand of silver hair behind the old monk’s ear. “Le Trépas can’t be the only one who remembers the way things were before La Victoire.”

“You want me to bring her back?” I look askance at Theodora, then back to the body. I have made many fantouches out of smaller souls, but the only times I’ve trapped akela, it had been under duress. Sunan . . . or Akra. “It seems disrespectful.”

“We only need her to answer a few questions,” Theodora says. “And isn’t that at the heart of the Keeper’s powers? Passing down knowledge?”

I chew my lip, staring at the monk, but now I too am curious. She might even remember when Le Trépas came to the temple. And if there was a way to stop the nécromancien, wouldn’t the Keeper’s monk want to share it?

Slowly, carefully, Theodora and I lift the old monk’s body and carry her back to the soul-bright temple. Without the n’akela inhabiting her skin, the body is fragile, light—the bones like a bird’s. With her own soul looking on, we lay the monk’s body down gently by the altar where she would have worshipped, near the faded flowers she herself might have put there.

Then, as respectfully as possible, I make the mark of life on her forehead. With a soft gasp, she opens her eyes, and I am relieved to see they are as dark as tea.

“This is . . .” Her voice is a whisper as air returns to her lungs. “Unseemly.”

“I’m sorry, grandmother,” I say, but Theodora is already pulling a notebook from her pockets. I have seen it before—or one much like it. She keeps them everywhere.

Flipping past doodles and notes and diagrams, she finds a blank page, then pulls out a pen. “Have you heard of the Keeper’s Book of Knowledge?”

The monk only purses her lips, giving the Aquitan girl a look. “Answer her questions, please,” I say, softening the order, and the monk’s mouth twists.

“Of course I have.”

Theodora wets her lips. “Do you know where it is?”

The monk gives her a pointed look. “If I did, I would have put it back where it belongs.”

I glance over my shoulder, at the broken altar, filled with stagnant water. “If we find it, we’ll do just that.”

The monk turns her head, slowly, painfully, and in the soullight I can see bruises around her neck. “If you find it,” she repeats. “Le Trépas hid it well before the armée imprisoned him.”

“Do you have any idea where?” Theodora asks, but the monk shrugs.

“Those of us who remain have been searching the countryside for years,” she replies. “It is nowhere to be found.”

Dread creeps into Theodora’s voice. “Could he have destroyed it?”

“No,” the monk says simply. “Or their soul would have been reborn.”

“Whose soul?”

“The Keeper’s.” The monk reaches out to the altar, resting her gnarled hand on the stone. “Do you know the story? How they took human form to learn what life was. How they were born, and died, and born again a thousand times. The book is bound in their holy skin,” she says. “And it holds their soul. It has not been destroyed.”

I do know the story—it’s part of our troupe’s repertoire. But Theodora looks up from the page, a delicate look on her face. I know what she’s thinking. Is what the monk says true, or only wishful thinking? “Are you sure?” she says at last, and the monk fixes her with a solemn look.

“I am,” she says. “Because when I died, no one came to hear my story.”

Theodora’s hand stills on the page. On the breeze, the wind sings. “Did you expect to see the Keeper?”

“Of course I did. If the book had been destroyed, the Keeper’s soul would have been there. If the book was close by, I would have seen their faces. Instead I saw nothing. The Keeper is not in Chakrana.”

“Not in Chakrana,” Theodora repeats slowly, tapping her pen on the page, but when I meet her eyes, I know she’s thinking the same thing I am.

“When did Le Trépas go to Aquitan?” I ask her.

Theodora cocks her head, but it is the monk who answers. “It was after he took the book,” she says. “Aquitan is one place we have not been able to search.”

Theodora stands, pacing through the temple, careless of the souls that swirl around her feet. “Thank you, grandmother,” I say to the monk, but she only bows her head.

“All the thanks I want is to be released,” she says. “And that you burn my body, so this doesn’t happen again.”

I frown, taken aback. “But . . . what about your story? Without the Keeper, it won’t be heard.”

“Life must go