Page 50 of The Blood Orchid

Zheng Sili made an exasperated noise and started storming in the other direction.

“Is that your plan?” I said, hurrying after him. “Throwing a tantrum?”

“No,” he said. “I’m looking for a stone merchant, since I apparently have to do everything around here.”

“I see someone’s not feeling hungover anymore and is back to being an ass,” I said, following him into the town center.

Stones were harder to come by in Zhongwei, but we managed to find a merchant with a cart full of stones tucked between the cabbage salesman and another cart selling seaberries. I thought back to the opals in my pocket, still unsure what I could even do with them. But the solution couldn’t have been that obvious, or else Zheng Sili surely would have told me just to make fun of my idiocy by now.

Zheng Sili filled a tray with a handful of lodestone and some desert kyanite, a blue stone I had never seen in person before, then turned to me for gold. By the time I paid the merchant,Zheng Sili was already walking away, picking out a bunch of grapes and waving me over to pay.

“Desert grapes contain sodium,” he said as I counted out coins.

“If that was what you wanted, we could have just bought salt,” I grumbled, but didn’t protest further, since I didn’t have any better ideas for how to find the Arcane Alchemist.

Zheng Sili was already walking away, mumbling something about stones to himself. I caught up to him with the armful of grapes as he ducked into an alley, moving to the deepest part, hidden in the shade between buildings. He spread his stones out on the ground before him and closed his eyes as if thinking. I peeled a grape and bit it in half, holding it in front of my bag until Durian poked his head out and snatched it.

“I need those,” Zheng Sili said, glaring.

“For what?” I said. “Care to explain?”

“You bought some ying waterstones back in Baiyin, right?” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken.

I sighed and dug them out of my satchel, tossing them to the dirt, where he carefully arranged them in a pentagram with the other stones.

“I’m making a compass,” he said at last. “It’s a magnet that can point us in the direction we need to go.”

“I know what a compass is,” I said, frowning. “But I already know which direction is north. Why would that help us?”

“Because,” Zheng Sili said, “instead of pointing north, it will point us toward the strongest concentration of alchemical energy.”

I frowned. “So we need to catch this guy midtransformation?”

Zheng Sili rolled his eyes. “Transformations are like qi fireworks going off all at once, and the more powerful, the longerthey linger,” he said. “Did you really never learn this? You just knocked some stones together and hoped for the best?”

“Says the guy who never became a royal alchemist,” I said, crossing my arms. In truth, I felt foolish for not thinking of this myself. Of course no alchemy stone could bring us to a man whose name we didn’t even know, but it could bring us to other transformations. It would have been useless in a city like Chang’an that brimmed with alchemy, but this far north, where alchemists were few and far between, it could work. I supposed Zheng Sili’s education hadn’t been entirely wasted on him.

“Cover me,” he said.

“Cover you with what?”

But he didn’t wait for my response, resting his hands over the pentagram, blue light rising like small bursts of lightning between his fingers. I jumped to my feet and stood in front of him, doing my best to block anyone else’s view into the alleyway with my skirts.

“I’m not a human wall, you know!” I said over my shoulder.

The crackling sounds died down, the light mercifully fading. “Not my fault you’re a string bean,” he said.

I turned around, frowning at the round compass clutched in his palms, a flat piece of black stone with a blue arrow that shifted in his hands, pointing toward the horizon.

“What are the grapes for?” I said.

“Oh! Right.” He leaned over and popped three of them in his mouth. “I was hungry.”

Before I could start yelling, he snapped the bunch in half and held the other half out for me. “I got you some,” he said.

“Ipaid for them!” I said, snatching the grapes.

“Yeah, with the prince’s money, so don’t act all high and mighty about it,” he said. “At least I gave you half.”

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