Page 9 of The Blood Orchid
I turned to pose some feigned ignorant question, but froze at the sight of Wenshu on the ground, one hand on the side of his neck, the Sandstone Alchemist no longer beside him.
“Gege?” I said.
He pulled back his hand, trying to make some sort of gesture, but his fingers twitched and trembled. A single thin line of blood ran fresh across his throat, the mark echoed on his palm. It wasn’t a deep wound and didn’t seem to have bled that much. But his lips were tinged purple, his face drained of color.
I took a step closer, but before I could reach him, something stung my neck.
I turned to the Sandstone Alchemist, now behind me, a blade in his hand.
“There’s something you have to understand about the desert,” he said. But even as he spoke, I knew that he hadn’t cut mewith a normal blade. The wound seared as if cauterized, the ache rushing from my throat to my chest, blooming into my arms, cramping my muscles.
“The sand is alive,” he said, his words blurring into heat waves. “It flows just like the ocean. There is no permanence out here. The landscape changes every moment because the desert breathes, and what the sand buries is meant to stay buried. The desert keeps its secrets.”
I reached for my satchel, but my fingers were already cramped into a tight fist, too painful to move. The viper circled the man’s throat.
Venom, I realized. He must have coated his knife with it.
I fell forward onto my knees, drops of blood staining the sand that drank it hungrily.
“Penglai Island is lost for a reason,” the Sandstone Alchemist said, his voice already sounding so far away. “I won’t let you unbury her.”
Chapter Two
The world thumped beneath my cheek as the trapdoor swung shut. Now it was only me and Wenshu, choking into the sand, the sun burning half our faces, far from anyone who could help us. I couldn’t even turn my head to see him as lightning fired through all of my veins, my breath thin and choked, lungs seizing. Durian was making a high keening sound, trapped in my bag beneath my leg, but I couldn’t roll over to let him out.
I clapped a trembling hand to the wound on my neck, drawing out some of the blood with my iron ring, but it made no difference. The venom was everywhere in me, and I couldn’t simply drain all my body’s blood to extract it. I didn’t know how to separate the snake’s toxins from my own blood, because I had no idea what the venom was made of.
How long did it take to die from viper venom? There were snakes in the south that could kill you in ten minutes, but others took hours. Judging by how my vision was already fractured, this wouldn’t take long.
I turned my face to the sun, its bright halos searing across myvision, breaking it into hazy shapes. Was this really how I would die? Withered like dried fruit in the sun, felled not by a great monster or the Perpetual Empress but by a snake that ate rats and prairie dogs?
I wondered if they’d strip my title in death. Royal alchemists died fighting for the House of Li, not out alone amongst the tumbleweeds, swallowed by the desert.
My father’s words buzzed in my ears, the low voice that always seemed to come to me when I was dying, too many times to count now. I saw the words of his notes painted in the sky.
If there is an elixir of eternal life, I will find it.
I will never stop until I can return to them.
He’d been talking about me and my mother, but the words might as well have been my own. Had my father died in this same desert, his flesh pecked away by rodents, his bones crumbled to dust, mixing with the same golden sands now filling my mouth and scraping my eyes? The heat waves in my vision spiraled, and the world churned like an ocean of gold, the ghostly white silhouette on the horizon shimmering closer.
Get up, Zilan, he said. But I couldn’t, and in the next shimmering heat wave, the silhouette vanished.
In the dance of lights in my fading vision, I thought of the viper’s eyes, the same golden glare as the Empress. The Sandstone Alchemist had caressed its golden scales like it was some sort of mythical dragon, not a common pest that lurked in tall grass. Ever since the fall of the palace, I’d thought that the last thing I’d see would be golden eyes, but not those of a snake.
My eyes shot open, my fingers clawing into the sand.
The Empress’s eyes were not naturally gold. They were the consequence of a century of eating life gold made by alchemists.The snake’s eyes and scales were probably not natural either. The Sandstone Alchemist seemed to care greatly for his viper, so perhaps he’d fed it life gold.
Life gold filled your body, turned you to a jewel on the inside, impervious to aging. But it also meant that your blood ran gold... and the same was probably true for venom.
I clamped my hand down harder around my neck, drawing all my concentration into my firestone ring. It was red zircon, a firestone from Champa that I’d peeled from the prince’s wall before setting off, the kind of stone meant for destroying. It was dangerous to turn destruction alchemy on my own body, but what choice did I have?
The alchemy surged through my veins, searching for every trace of gold in my bloodstream. It sensed the foreign substance, tangled up with another caustic chemical, something I’d never worked with before. I clenched my fingers and let the firestone break me apart.
Destroying was so much easier than creating. That was another one of alchemy’s central tenets. It took great skill to create something new, but destruction only required rage.
My veins screamed as the firestone stung through them, wrenching gold from blood, forcing the current of my heart in the wrong direction as the gold raced back toward the wound. A pressure rushed up my throat, then a stream of gold and something that stung like acid poured from the wound at my throat, sizzling as it blotted the sand.