Page 7 of The Blood Orchid
I had learned his real name in the Moon Alchemist’s notes. He’d taken on a Chinese name when he met my mother, but the Moon Alchemist had only ever called him Laisrén.
A strange look eclipsed the man’s face, slowly taking in my appearance with narrowed eyes. Whatever he saw in me, he didn’t like. He tightened his grip around his knives.
“Laisrén’s daughter is dead,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, dragging down my sleeve, showing him the name carved crudely into my forearm, the soul tag that had dragged me back from death in the Empress’s throne room. “I am.”
His gaze burned my scar for a moment before he sighed, lowering his knives. “Where is Laisrén now?”
“Dead,” I said.Because of me, I thought but didn’t say.
The man’s brow creased. The sand around his ankles began to whisper, lighting up like tiny constellations. In the dim light, I realized that the ground swarmed with yellow eyes, thin snakes the color of sandstone drawing closer. Wenshu drew back, but I stood still. The viper on the man’s shoulder hissed again, its gold scales glimmering.
“Show us the map,” Wenshu said, even though he most definitely was not going to be the one stabbing a viper if the need arose.
“You two could never find Penglai Island with only a map,” the man said. “It’s a place for the greatest alchemists that ever lived. You don’t even know what you’re asking for.”
“I’m not asking,” I said, sharpening one of my iron rings into a spike.
The man’s shoulders dropped a fraction, and that was how I knew we’d won.
“You’re just like him,” he said, before turning and heading back down the tunnel, not waiting for us to follow. “Come on.”
The Sandstone Alchemist had carved out an entire world below the ground. The chasms of sandstone looked bone white in the darkness, the heat of the desert a distant memory as we descended into the cold and lightless labyrinth. Every now and then, starbursts of golden light flashed past my feet—tiny snakes glinting in and out of the sand.
Through the many archways, I caught shadowed glimpses of sandstone dining tables and pools of groundwater and stores of meat, though I didn’t know what kind of animals one could reliably hunt out in the desert. Over the Sandstone Alchemist’s shoulder, the viper watched us unflinchingly as the air grew colder.
You’re just like him, the Sandstone Alchemist had said. Surely he was talking about my father. My mind burned with questions I wanted to ask, but I knew none of them would be well received, and there was much more at stake than my own curiosity.How am I like him?I wanted to ask.Demanding? Persistent? Smarter than you initially thought?
Auntie So had only ever told me that my father looked like an uncooked jellyfish and didn’t speak comprehensible Chinese. The Moon Alchemist had met him as well, but we’d had much more pressing things to talk about back then, and now I could no longer ask her anything. The Sandstone Alchemist was one of the only people left who’d known him.
We drew to a stop in a room full of sandstone shelves crammedwith scrolls, a low table in the center of the room surrounded by scattered, dusty floor cushions.
“I will give this to you, for Laisrén,” the Sandstone Alchemist said, kneeling down to ignite the candle on the table with a handful of firestones. As light filled the room, his shadow swelled behind him, like a great beast rising to its full height. He stood up and moved to the wall, and the shadow shrank back to a human size. “Then,” he said, “you will leave me and never come back or tell anyone where you got it from.”
“I have no intention of returning to the desert if I can help it,” I said. “And I’m not going to send people after you. I have bigger problems.”
The Sandstone Alchemist narrowed his eyes as if appraising me, then nodded and bent down to the lowest shelves, shuffling scrolls around somewhere in the shadows.
Wenshu shot me a deeply skeptical look, his mouth pinched into a grimace. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking:This was too easy.
This man looked like he’d been fermenting underground for years, clearly hiding from something—or someone—at the cost of all else. He would not give away his secrets before we’d even shed a drop of his blood. Whatever he was about to give us would not be what we wanted.
The question was, how would we figure out where he actually kept the map?
He had his back turned to us, which meant what we wanted probably wasn’t even in this room, or else he would have watched us closely.
But I had ways to see without using my eyes.
Quietly, I pulled three waterstones from my bag, squatted down, and pressed them to the ground.
Just like in the middle of the desert, alchemy rushed through my fingertips, channeling deep into the ground, seeking webs of roots. I imagined the alchemy spreading out and feeling beneath the foundations of the sandstone palace, giving me a mental map of the building and any rooms with extra fortification. But I’d forgotten just how deep underground we were.
The alchemy slammed into a hard layer of stone beneath us, the whole world trembling with a heavythumpas the power dispersed uselessly. Sand and clay powder rained down from the ceiling as the whole building quaked.
The Sandstone Alchemist snapped his gaze to the left doorway, then back at me and Wenshu. Luckily, I’d already stood up, feigning surprise.
“Earthquake?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Or do you have even bigger snakes down here?”