Page 5 of The Blood Orchid

A man stood before us.

We both flinched, Wenshu nearly dropping the match as the pale wraith of a man took a step closer, a curved knife in each hand. His skin had the blue hue of corpses and glowed with a thin layer of dew, his long black hair damp around his face. His eyes were the murky white of the sand-torn sky, tinged red fromsand that gathered in the corners, on his lips, in his beard. Topaz and ruby rings glittered on his knobbed fingers. Could this be the Sandstone Alchemist?

I tried to recall any words in Lanzhou dialect to say to him, but before I could speak, a golden viper curled around his throat, baring its fangs at us.

At once, Wenshu and I stepped back, pulling our robes forward so the loose fabric hung in front of us. Auntie So always said that if a snake wanted a piece of you, you better make sure they got a mouthful of fabric instead of flesh.

But the snake didn’t strike, instead hovering by the man’s face, its piercing golden eyes brighter than the match in Wenshu’s hand. I pulled my sleeve back so it draped across my bag, just in case Durian chose that moment to poke his head out.

The man said something in a language I didn’t understand. I had never traveled to the northwest before, had never heard their dialects from a world away on the southeast coast.

Wenshu and I shared a confused look. The man sighed impatiently and tried again, louder, shaking his knives.

“Who sent you?” he said, in something that resembled the dialect of Chang’an, knives pointed at both of our throats. The emphasis on each word was unbalanced, so it took me a moment to understand.

“No one,” I said, trying to enunciate in case he didn’t understand. “We’re looking for the Sandstone Alchemist.”

The man let out a sharp laugh. “Then you’re looking for a corpse.”

I sighed, mentally running through how many chicken-blood stones I had left. His words probably would have deterred anyone else, but death was not the endpoint in the journey of a resurrection alchemist.

“How long ago?” I said.

The man frowned. “What?”

“When did he die?” I said slowly. I turned to Wenshu. “It’s cold enough down here to delay decomposition. If his brain is still mostly intact, I can work with that.”

“Mostly?” Wenshu echoed palely. “You want to interrogate a dead man with half a brain?”

“He doesn’t need to recite Confucian texts, just point us to a map,” I said.

“The ethical implications—”

“We can put him back down after.”

“We?”

“He has been dead for centuries,” the man said, louder, like he desperately wanted us to shut up.

“No,” I said sharply. “He hasn’t.” I knew because my father’s notes said he’d spoken to the Sandstone Alchemist, and my father was certainly not hundreds of years old. This man was lying because he had something to hide. There was only one person who had ever told me a convincing lie, and I had killed her.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “You’re going to take us to the Sandstone Alchemist, or I will hack your snake’s head off with a shovel and bury you under ten tons of sand.”

The man only laughed, and a hot flash of rage burned through me.

“You see these wires?” he said, gesturing to the ceiling with one of his knives. “You see how they sparkle?”

I glanced up at the wires for a quick moment, not wanting to take my eyes off the armed man for too long.

“Yes?” I said.

He reached out and pressed a single finger to a loose wire dangling by his side. It came away with a bright bead of redblood on his fingertip. “The metal is not reflective,” he said. “It shines because of its sharpness. These wires could chop you up like a peach, if I wanted them to. Your bones will become wall ornaments, because I’ll never get them untangled.”

Then he touched the wire again, and light bloomed in his fingertip.

The web of wires shivered as alchemy raced through them, illuminated against the walls of the tunnel. I grabbed Wenshu and pulled him close to me as one of the wires came free from the ceiling, lashed out like a whip, and sliced off part of his sleeve.

I reached for my satchel, but at once, the man released the wire and the netting fell limp and still. One of the man’s ruby rings turned to black ash, falling to the ground.Classic destruction alchemy, fueled by firestone, I thought. This man was an alchemist.