The Pillars of Helantopolis

Shemona has been sent from her convent to track down a killer, but Shemona has a problem. She can’t join with living spirit energy, so she can’t do the things that she should be able to do as a Laoshan spirit manipulator: read minds and bend people to her will. Alone and friendless in a place that seems increasingly hostile and alien to her, Shemona has to turn to her own unusual skills in manipulating the empty spirit tracks of things that were once alive (a practice discouraged by her teacher and her convent) in order to do the job she’s been asked to do. And as the body count continues to rise and the mysterious source of the deaths evades her detection, Shemona realizes that there is more at work than a rogue energy manipulator choosing random victims. As she begins to untangle the mystery, she is forced to acknowledge and develop talents that, for most of her life, she has been ashamed of. She finds that those she thought were there to help her might actually be her greatest enemies, and that her instinct to distrust those who are different from her must be thrown aside if she wants to survive.