Page 93 of The Blood Orchid

“You can’t kill him here,” I said at last. “His soul lives here, not his body.”

The Empress raised an eyebrow, looking up at me in surprise. “Can a soul not break just like a body?” she said. Then she dropped the end of the rope into the spiraling darkness of the forest floor. “I’m not here because of Hong,” she said. She closed her eyes, her lips mouthing words that I couldn’t decipher. After a moment, I realized she was counting. “Thirty-five thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four,” she said. “That’s how many times my name is written on the skin of peasants in Guangzhou.”

I tensed, already sensing where she was going with this, but not wanting to say it out loud, to make it real.

“You specialize in death, don’t you, Scarlet? How many people do you think each of those peasants could kill before they’re subdued? I suppose it depends. The children probably can’t kill as many as the adults.”

“You don’t have that many bodies,” I said, shaking my head, not wanting it to be true. “There aren’t storehouses full of corpses in Guangzhou. And how long would it take you to resurrect them one by one? That’s not a real threat, and you know it.”

The Empress laughed, the sound echoing back cruelly a thousand times in the cage of the sky. “I know this is very hard for a child to believe,” she said, “but you don’t know everything about alchemy.”

She reached into her pocket and withdrew three red and white stones, presenting them to me in her palm.

“Recognize these?” she said.

Of course I did. It was chicken-blood stone, the kind my father had theorized was the key to resurrection, the kind I’d used to bring back the dead a hundred times over, the kind thathad helped me win at my final alchemy trial where I’d become the Scarlet Alchemist.

“It’s an incredibly powerful stone,” the Empress said. “I was impressed the first time I saw you use it, but your methods were primitive.”

She pressed her palms together, grinding the stones between them. They crumbled apart easily, for they were firestones and destruction was their natural state. She opened her palms, which were stained with pale red powder, then tilted her hand and let it fall in a crimson snow over the forest floor.

“I think you know as well as I do that activated alchemy stones work well if ingested.”

I tensed, thinking back to the first time I’d tried to kill the Empress. I’d tried putting one type of activated stone in her morning tea and the second in her afternoon tea. When the stone types combined, they were supposed to kill her. But of course, the Empress had seen through my plan easily, and the second dose had never arrived.

“What are you saying?” I said. “That you’ll make all of Guangzhou eat chicken-blood stone?”

“Not at all,” she said, grinning. “I’ll make themdrinkit.”

I shook my head, drawing back. “I don’t—”

“I think the Pearl River is my favorite,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “It’s much cleaner than the Cháng, but of course, some degree of filth is inevitable when it comes to peasants.”

I clutched the branch, mind unspooling, sure I was going to fall all the way down. The Pearl River sliced through Guangzhou. My cousins and I had waded into its muddy banks to collect clay. It was where people fished, bathed, and drank. If she poured chicken-blood stone into it, then surely all of Guangzhou would be exposed at one point or another.

“You gave me the idea, Scarlet,” the Empress said, grinning. “Activate the stone, and it works even if the alchemist isn’t around.”

“Those people aren’t dead,” I said. “You can’t just cram two souls into a living body.”

“Maybeyoucan’t,” the Empress said. “But if it comes down to me and a peasant, I always win.”

Just like when Wenshu took his body back from Hong, I thought, cold horror rippling through my blood. Surely the people branded with the Empress’s name would have no idea what was going on. They wouldn’t know they were supposed to fight for their own bodies. The Empress, with all her determination, would simply rip their souls out of their bodies and cast them into the river plane.

“I’ve been playing a long game, Scarlet,” the Empress went on. “Thirty-five thousand people are just waiting for my command. I’ll make sure they start with this one little míngqì store by the shore.”

I lunged for the Empress, hoping to knock her clean out of the tree. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt her permanently, but it would still be satisfying.

But she caught my wrist and wrenched it to the side before I could reach her. I managed to grab another branch with my other hand, barely catching myself. The Empress ground the heel of her gold shoe onto my fingers.

“If I were you, I’d start listening,” she said.

I clenched my jaw and nodded. She lifted her heel from my fingers and I quickly hauled myself onto the closest branch, glaring up at her.

“I know you’re uneducated, so let me be abundantly clear,” she said. “Guangzhou is not an important city to me anymore. There is nothing it has that another city cannot offer me, and Iwill sacrifice it a thousand times over to get what I want. I will wipe it off the map, and where it once stood, there will be a red sea filled with the blood of peasants like you.”

I thought of my auntie and uncle, who wouldn’t stand a chance if one of the Empress’s undead soldiers burst into their shop. So many people had died for me already, and now an entire city would be next.

“What do you want?” I said, my voice so small and pathetic, everything the Empress knew that I was beneath my title.