Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain

Chapter 78 - Boring

Skulduggery – Crow

Anton – Bear

Ghastly – Panda

Dexter – Wolf

Saracen – Weasel

Erskine – Snake

Solomon – Raven

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Chapter 78

The door to the classroom opened and they all trailed in without comment. Valkyrie glanced down the corridor before she went in, but Raven was already gone. She looked around the room as everyone else sat down and found a seat in the middle that had no person in it, the only chair free. Moving carefully around the desks, she sat down.

The classroom was designed to be somewhat spacious, so the desks were large and each had two chairs so everyone had a buddy. Valkyrie's buddy was a girl, someone she hadn't met before, and was tapping her finger on her lap irritably. She was glaring at the front of the room. Valkyrie gently put her books on the table, thankful that everyone else had the same and she hadn't messed up somehow and got out her pen from her pocket. The teacher, a very elderly man with wisps of white hair and a dark, heavy robe around his shoulders, looked over them condescendingly.

"Who has finished 'The Intimacy of Living' by Fang Swollen?" He asked in a croaking, slow voice.

The class raised their hands quickly, and Valkyrie followed suit.

"Good," he crooned. "Chapter thirty-two, page three-hundred and eighteen. 'The soul is irrelevant to the bodies ability to move'. Who here can tell me how that is correct?"

All the hands went back up, but Valkyrie's didn't. She was halfway to putting her hand up when he put his small, milky eyes on her.

"You." He asked, pointing a very wrinkled, pale finger at her. "Tell me, how is Swollen correct?"

Firstly, he has a stupid name, Valkyrie thought. "His theory is based on the idea the soul and body are separate, which is a concept not yet proven. We can't know for sure either way if he is correct because we don't know enough about the soul within the body."

He smiled meanly. "Theory? Miss Cain, Cleric Swollen is one of the most respected Necromancers in our culture."

"That doesn't make him right. He might be, but we can't be certain until we know how the soul and body are connected."

He smiled a little meaner. "Do not talk back to me, Miss Cain. No, Cleric Swollen is correct because when a person dies, they lose life. When life is lost, as is the soul. The soul has to be irrelevant to the body's ability to move because if was not, the body would not be able to do what?"

Hands went back up, and he picked another. "Miss St. Clair?"

"The body would not be able to come back as a zombie if it was not able to act without a soul, sir," Melancholia St. Clair said. Valkyrie knew her and didn't like her that much. She was fun to wind up.

"Correct. Students, without a soul, a body can still move. It can be possessed, it can grow, it can have conscious thought. But it is not alive. For instances, a zombie. It no longer has a life, so it no longer has a soul. But it can move. Another example."

Valkyrie raised her hand. He picked her. "A reflection?"

"Are you asking me, or telling me?"

"I'm asking. It was not born and never had a soul, but it can be possessed, it can turn into a vampire, it can become a zombie, and it can move all on its own. But I wonder since it never had a soul to begin with, can it be considered a human body or is it still an image?"