Page 73 of The Blood Orchid
The Silver Alchemist’s eyes narrowed. Zheng Sili looked like he was about to pass out, while Wenshu’s gaze darted around as if cataloging the exits.
“You don’t want to stop me from going to Penglai,” I said. “You want to go there yourself.”
A dark smile crept across the Silver Alchemist’s lips. “It’s no wonder you took the Arcane Alchemist’s ring,” she said at last. “He’s a fool.”
She knows him, I thought grimly. Of course she did. Like the Arcane Alchemist, she must have been much older than she appeared. Marrying fifteen times hardly made sense for a wealthy young woman, but made a lot of sense for someone who had been alive for centuries, perfect and ageless from the waters of Penglai while her husbands grew old and died, one after another. She was one of the Eight Immortals, which was why the red zircon ring on her finger looked just as bright and alive as the Arcane Alchemist’s opal.
“Well,” she said, clutching the jar to her chest, “I suppose you want the ring back?”
Tentatively, I nodded.
“Then we have an issue,” she said. “We’ve made an equal exchange. That’s how alchemy works, isn’t it?”
“I never agreed to your terms,” I said.
The Silver Alchemist sighed. “I accepted the ring in exchange for your life. If you intend to take back the ring, then I must take back your life.”
I let out a sharp laugh. “Many have tried,” I said, jamming a hand in my satchel full of alchemy stones. “Only a horse has ever succeeded.”
As I spoke, I brushed my fingertips over my remaining stones, mentally cataloging how many I had left. Zheng Sili had his fist in his green velvet bag, doing the same. But even now, the Silver Alchemist didn’t reach for a single stone of her own. She turned away, completely vulnerable with her back to us, and ran her finger across a row of jars. She paused after half a row,her fingers hovering over a jar with a yellow and white ribbon around the neck. She carefully pulled it from the shelf, then twisted the lid off.
“Guan Rén,” she said sweetly, setting the open jar on the floor, “I need your help.”
Wenshu and I looked at each other in confusion. She thought her husband was... in the jar?
“Do you want to just hold her down while I take the rings?” I said quietly to Zheng Sili. There was no point in hurting her if she really was this helpless.
Before he could answer, the jar fell onto its side with a heavythunk, spinning in circles on the floor, faster and faster.
A familiar scent knifed up my nose, making my stomach clench. I clapped a hand over my nose and backed up into Zheng Sili, who gagged into his sleeve. This was the scent of half-baked corpses that customers dragged into my shop in Guangzhou, the kind with maggots for eyes and skin that slipped right off flesh like a loose jacket. A body poisoned with rot, far beyond the help of an alchemist.
Abruptly, the jar stopped spinning, and a silvery mist crept across the floor. It shrouded the tiles and blurred the shelves, casting the whole room in cold gray. My teeth chattered harder as the mist numbed my ankles.
A dark shadow rose from the fog, stretching up the wall and spilling onto the ceiling before congealing into a dark figure in the center of the room.
A man rose unsteadily from the silver blur, his skin bruised blue gray from rot, his flesh falling from his body in wet chunks, eyes shrunken and dry like two tiny pearls deep inside his skull.
The rotting man shuffled closer, legs bumping the low table and jolting the teacups. At the touch of his flesh, the wood ofthe table rapidly turned wet and crumbled, as if unmaking itself. Even after it fell to the floor, it continued to rot, gnawed through with a sudden bloom of fungus, settling on the ground at last as wet dirt.
“Nope. No way,” Zheng Sili said, already heading for the door. But the man lunged to the left and swiped a hand clumsily at him, making him yelp and duck behind Wenshu. I stood rooted in place, barely able to feel the alchemy stones beneath my fingertips.
What kind of alchemy was this? Presumably, if the yingbì in front of every door were any indication, this was some sort of ghost. I was no stranger to raising the dead, but I’d only ever been able to do so if I had a body to put them in once I restored their flow of qi. I supposed it was possible to manipulate a dead person’s qi into another form, but that must have required immense alchemical skill.
I glanced at the red ring on the Silver Alchemist’s finger, now so bright that it cast the entire room in a sinister red tinge.
The Arcane Alchemist had found a ring at Penglai that had let him push the limits of normal alchemy. Surely, the Silver Alchemist’s ring could do the same. But rather than using its powers for incomparable beauty, she’d used it to trap the souls of the dead.
As the rotting ghost stumbled forward, the Silver Alchemist sat back down and lifted her teacup to her lips. “My husbands promised themselves to me until the end of time,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “My alchemy still sings through them, honoring all that they were. This is the only way that love can be eternal.”
Perhaps I was still half dead from the spear to my stomach, or perhaps I was too entranced by the thought of how powerfulthe red zircon must have been, but before I could back away any farther, the ghost lunged across the table.
He moved like a silk scarf tossed through the air, a smoothness to each motion governed not by the limits of the human body but by the flow of alchemy.
Before he could reach me, cold hands closed around my arm. Zheng Sili yanked me to the side so hard my shoulder nearly popped out again. He tripped over a low chair, and both of us tumbled to the floor.
The ghost had barely missed me, crashing into the wall instead. A flurry of moths appeared out of nowhere and gnawed through the paper murals of the wall he had touched, followed by fungus that devoured the wood behind it. A hole yawned open in the wall, letting in the screaming, sandy winds from the courtyard.
He barely touched the wall at all, I thought, recoiling against Zheng Sili, dreading what would happen if the ghost touched my bare skin.