Page 2 of The Scarlet Alchemist

“There was only a small window of time that I could remove his body unnoticed,” old man Gou said, lowering his voice, as if anyone unfortunate enough to pass by would actually process his words before falling unconscious from the stench.

“Which I might have been able to accommodate, if you had come here yesterday andmade an appointment.”

Old man Gou huffed. “Is this trinket shop more important than my brother?” he said, his grip tightening on the bag.

Important to me, or to you?I wanted to ask but knew better than to say that to a man, even one who was breaking the law and probably wouldn’t risk making a scene. There was a dagger under the counter that I had no qualms about drawing if he grew too upset, but bloodstains were annoying to clean and hard to explain to Auntie So.

One of the problems with the death industry was that everyone came to you with pain so great that they were convinced no one else could have felt it before. They didn’t like that I had rules, that I charged for my time, that their tears didn’t move me.

It doesn’t matter that death is sad. This is a business, Uncle Fan always said when customers cried.If you make a poor man’s business a charity, within a week he’ll have twice as many beggars and nothing left to give.

Besides, old man Gou didn’t need my charity, and if he wanted someone to cry for his brother, he could buy a couple mourners down the street. His satchel bulged with coins and his purple silk robes twinkled with golden embroidery. His hands had no callouses, no dirt caught under his nails like the farmers or artisans. He hadn’t fallen on hard times, clearly.

He must have read the sternness on my face and decided to change tactics, because he finally set the bag on the floor with a heavy sigh. I prayed whatever swampy liquid sloshing around inside wouldn’t stain the floor.

“Surely you don’t have many customers these days,” he said, strolling over to a shelf and lifting a ceramic ox. I opened my mouth to demand he put it down, but he let out a breath and a cloud of dust flew up into the air, the soft powder swirling around the horribly smug look on his face.

“We have enough,” I said, gripping the edge of the counter. People who couldn’t afford life gold were still planning funerals, of course, but there were no more aristocrats emptying our shelves when their fathers passed. Most customers bought one or two míngqì and cried over the counter while begging for a lower price. We gave it to them, not because we were good people but because a few coins were better than none at all.

Old man Gou raised an eyebrow. “You’d be better off making chamber pots.”

I didn’t reply, because I’d actually said the same thing to Auntie So.People can shit in a hole in the ground, not in my art, she’d responded.

I shook my head. “Closing at random times is bad for business.”

“Zilan síuzé,” he said, offering me a stiff smile, “please, my brother has two young daughters.”

It took an immense effort not to roll my eyes at how sweetly he said my name. When I was younger, he’d laughed when his son called megwáimui—ghost girl—and didn’t scold him when he ripped up all the purple orchids that grew at the edge of the city, chewed them up, and spit them at my feet. I couldn’t even be that mad at him, because I also wanted to chew up my name and spit it out in a purple slurry.

Zilán—written with the characters forpurple orchid—wasn’t the kind of name that you gave a girl who would be someone important someday. It was what you got stuck with when your father was a foreigner and your mother had—for some bizarre reason—let him name you even though he barely spoke Chinese. Maybe it was fine for Scotian girls to be named after flowers, but in Guangzhou, names were our parents’ hopes and dreams for us, not just pretty things they saw in the dirt.

My cousinWénshu’s name had the character forbookin it, because even before he’d proven his annoying aptitude for reading, he was destined to be a scholar. My cousinYufei’s name was a misty shroud of snow and rain, the hidden face of a beautiful goddess. But zilán was a flower so common that it couldn’t even be sold, so fragile that a few days of rain would tear it apart. It was pretty for a moment, and then it was dead.

The shop was truly starting to smell now, and if I’d hoped for any customers today, they certainly wouldn’t come if old man Gou stood there any longer with his brother’s leaky corpse. It was best to just deal with him quickly.

I sighed. “Lock the door.”

Old man Gou turned and drew the wooden bar across the door behind him. He cleared his throat, stepping farther into the room. “I want—”

“Payment first,” I said, tapping the counter.

He froze as if slapped. “You haven’t even looked at him yet.”

“A consultation costs fifty gold.”

His expression curdled, but he obeyed, emptying his satchel onto the counter. Gold coins spun across the polished wood. These were the diluted kind used for currency, not the nuggets eaten for immortality. I could tell that from the tarnish alone.

I picked up one of the coins and held it up to the window, examining its shine, then dropped it in my cup of tea. Real gold always sank to the bottom, but fool’s gold—the cheaply transformed kind that would turn back to coal in the next hour—would float.

“My brother had heart pains,” old man Gou said as the coin sank to the bottom of my teacup.

I picked up another piece and put it in my mouth, biting down gently. Real gold was soft and malleable. This one came out with the impression of my back molars. Satisfied that they were real, I began to count.

“Cinnabar and mushrooms didn’t help,” old man Gou went on.

“I am not a healer,” I said, because his voice was distracting me from my counting. “His diagnosis doesn’t matter to me as long as he’s in one piece.”

Old man Gou’s upper lip twitched as I lined up his gold in neat rows. He was probably unaccustomed to being spoken to so casually. Bags of gold could buy him many things, but my respect was not one of them.

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