On This Unworthy Scaffold by Heidi Heilig (best pdf reader for ebooks TXT) 📕

breath, but my hand shakes as I press the knife against my palm. The air hisses out through my teeth; the cut is deeper this time. But as the blood wells up, I use it to write both symbols.

Nothing.

I try “life” instead, then “death,” but the symbols only sink into the paper and fade the same way. Frustrated, I shut the book and toss it on the carpet beside me. But why would my blood work? I should be trying the blood of someone who serves the Keeper—like the monk at the temple at Kwai Goo. But even if her blood would have illuminated the writing, she is dead, and we burned her body. I wrinkle my nose as the acrid smell of burning hair returns—a memory, a hallucination. Trying to focus, I shut my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose, but now all I can smell is the iron tang of blood.

My own power comes through my lineage—the blood Le Trépas and I share. But he killed all of my siblings. Was the blood gone for good? Death begets life, he had told me once. What begets knowledge?

Perhaps the Keeper’s monks would know, if we could find them. If we could bring the book back to Chakrana. If we could get back ourselves.

The monk’s taunting smile swims in the dark behind my eyelids. Frustrated, I open my eyes, staring at my hands, bloody, scarred, and stained with ink.

The ink . . . the Keeper’s gift.

Slowly I turn back to the book on the carpet. Could it be that simple?

My hands shake as I pick up the broken bottle, trying desperately not to spill the last drops. I dip my fingertip into the remaining ink and open the book, marking the first blank page with the Keeper’s symbol: knowledge. Just as the blood did, the ink sinks down and disappears. But this time, it floats back up, swirling like a black storm on the page, and settling into new words:

What would you like to know?

THE KEEPER AND THE LIAR

Part 2

In the days when our ancestors were young, stories began to fill the world, but the Keeper still did not know how the first story ended.

So the Keeper watched and waited until they found the soul of the liar in her next life. She was still full of stories, but now she had no time to tell them.

Instead, she woke at dawn to care for her youngest daughter, and stayed up late with her eldest son. And as the sun crossed the sky, she tended to her parents, and her husband, and their humble house and their tiny farm, and she cleaned the soot from the fire after cooking meals and wiped the sweat from her brow after washing clothes. When she fell into bed at night, she was too tired to tell stories, even in her dreams, for work of the mind is a luxury to those who work so hard with their hands.

But art and truth have their own power, even over the gods, and so the Keeper came to the liar’s door, and when she opened it, they gave her three gifts.

The first gift was ink, mixed from the soot of her fire and the sweat of her brow.

The second was a secret that only the Keeper knew, about a rich man with no heirs who had buried his wealth under a tree.

The third was a shovel.

Chapter Seventeen

In the Room of Wonders, with the Book of Knowledge open on my lap, I stare at the Keeper’s question on the page. How exactly does one speak to a deity? Though I have prayed at times, this is much different: never before had I expected an answer.

Would they tell me anything? Everything? But what did I want to know? What had Le Trépas asked—and did I want the answer?

“Is Le Trépas really immortal?”

I am out of ink, so I speak the question aloud, hoping the Keeper can hear me. Seconds pass like hours as I wait. Then the ink seeps back into the page, rising up in new words. “He is.”

“How?”

“Forbidden magic.” The answer comes in dark swathes of ink. “Stolen blood.”

My hand goes to the scar at the crook of my arm. “Mine?”

“This was long before you were born,” the Keeper replies. “The blood came from the last servant of the Maiden. One of your previous incarnations,” they add, and my heart flips in my chest. “It is good to see your soul again.”

I reread the words twice before they fade. More questions bubble up in my own mind. I had wondered, as we all have wondered, what other lives our souls have led, though speculation had become an Aquitan parlor game: Madame Audrinne herself had been half convinced she’d lived a past life as a famed princess. I have a feeling that the Keeper would tell me my own distant past if I asked, but do I want to know how that girl lived? I can guess how she died. “Le Trépas killed her.”

“Only her heart’s blood could cast a spell that would outlive her.”

I shiver, and not from the chill air in the Salon des Merveilles. “What spell was it, then?”

“Life, death, and knowledge.” The symbols sweep across the page, lighter now. “With her blood, and mine, and his, Le Trépas drew his own soul from his body and put it somewhere else for safekeeping. The magic is forbidden for a reason,” the Keeper adds quickly, as though worried I will try it. “He is something less than human.”

“I don’t want to use the spell.” My lip curls at the thought. “I just want to know how to kill him.”

“A man without a soul cannot be killed,” the Keeper replies. “You must find where his soul is hidden, and return it to his body.”

“Where is his soul?”

“I don’t know.”

I blink at the page. “You’re the Keeper of Knowledge,” I remind them.

“I keep knowledge that souls give me.” The words grow