Chapter Seventeen

The three of us stood side by side on the gray sand of the river plane, looking up at the flat sky and white coin of the moon

overhead.

"So this is how you do it," Yufei said, staring in wonder up at the moon. "I should have studied alchemy. This is way more

fun than reading about Confucius."

"Fun?" Zheng Sili echoed, arms crossed. "Alchemy isn't about fun."

"Again, we're comparing this to Confucius," Yufei said.

With Chang'an in shambles, what little time we had was running out, and I wanted help looking for Taizong in the endless forest

of this plane. I had a feeling someone that long dead wouldn't simply be sitting around in human form, waiting for me. It

was more likely that I'd have to dig through the dirt for clumps of moisture left behind from his river.

Zheng Sili, despite how annoying he was, probably would be able to help. And of course Yufei had refused to be left behind.

Zheng Sili looked down at Yufei with distaste, then opened his mouth to say something he would probably regret, but I yanked the rope and forced him to uncross his arms before he could.

"Don't be a snob," I said. "It's not like you've been here before either."

"Yes, shame on me," he said, as the wind picked up in a sharp howl, blasting our hair back. "It's practically a summer palace."

Still, he knelt down and stared with wonder into the river. He reached a hand forward.

"I wouldn't do that, unless you want to see all of my brother's life," I said.

He drew his hand back, frowning. "I can't imagine it's that exciting, but he'd probably murder me, so I will refrain."

"How wise," Yufei said, reaching out to touch one of the prickly pine needles.

The trees shifted in a cool breeze, and all of a sudden, Yufei vanished. The rope on my right wrist pulled taut, sending me

spilling into the mud. I tried to stand up, the rope still dragging me forward, but I'd pulled Zheng Sili's rope with my other

arm, and he fell over on top of me, crushing me down with a muddy splash.

"Jiějiě, focus !" I called out into the darkness, elbowing Zheng Sili behind me.

At once, the rope went slack. Yufei stood over me once more, looking bewildered as she pulled me up by a muddy sleeve.

"I don't know what happened," she said, gazing out across the forest.

"You move through this place by desire," I said. "We need to all think of the same destination, or we're going to get separated."

Yufei said nothing, winding the rope around her wrist a few times so the loose end was shorter. Zheng Sili grumbled and wiped

mud from his robes behind me.

"Get over it," I said. "It's not even your real clothes."

"Shockingly, eating spirit mud tastes almost exactly like eating real mud," he said, glaring at me.

I took a steadying breath and turned to the sky. "Just think about Emperor Taizong," I said.

"What about him?" Zheng Sili said. "I never exactly saw his face."

"His name," I said. "Just close your eyes and imagine you're writing his name into the sky."

Zheng Sili glanced unsubtly in Yufei's direction. "Can your sister write?"

Yufei raised an arm to smack him, but I held her back. "Yes, all of us can write, asshole," I said.

"It's a valid question for peasants," Zheng Sili said, crossing his arms.

"We're not peasants!" I said, yanking on the rope to force him to uncross his arms again. "Can you shut up for five seconds?"

He looked like he wanted to say more, but mercifully closed his mouth and looked to the sky. I took a deep breath and curled

the rope up in my palms—if their minds wandered, I'd rather have rope burn on my palms than have my shoulders yanked out of

their sockets.

I took a steadying breath and focused only on the sensation of the ground beneath my feet, the all-consuming darkness that

made my eyelids grow heavy, as if nudging me toward a deep and eternal sleep. With my next exhale, I imagined a fine brush

in my hand, painting the characters of Taizong's name across the sky.

I took a step forward.

The ground whispered fast under my feet, like each step carried me a hundred miles. The stinging wind rushed past us, whipping

my hair back, sealing us in a tunnel of screaming air.

I knew we were drawing closer when the winds grew quiet enough that I could breathe once more. I drew to a stop, the ground jagged and frozen beneath me. Then I opened my eyes and lurched backward.

I stood at the precipice of a dark and endless canyon. My toes just barely hung over the edge, the wind rushing up from the

chasm in a high-pitched scream. While the living and the newly dead had running rivers or withered riverbeds, the place of

Taizong's soul was a ribbon of vast nothingness that had been ripped out of the ground.

I knelt down, the rope going slack as Yufei and Zheng Sili knelt beside me, peering into the darkness. I extended my hand,

and the air parted like lukewarm water, ribbons of invisible silk tangling around my fingers.

I glanced over my shoulder, where the forest should have been, but there were only thousands of dark holes in the ground where

the trees used to be. Out into the horizon, the sky was a lightless whisper of silver that bled into black. The darkness rendered

Yufei and Zheng Sili's faces papery white and gray, as if this place had stripped us of all our colors, extinguished the memory

of light.

I turned back to the river of nothingness and leaned closer. Yufei gripped my arm as if to hold me back, but I only used her

as an anchor to lean farther across the yawning chasm, extending my fingertips out into the night, where the darkness seemed

to shroud them completely.

Something brushed across my hand—a tiny spark of brightness, perhaps a silverfish glinting over my knuckles. I jolted back,

the sensation like a needle driven up under my nail. But as the pain bloomed bright, the lights of the main dining hall in

the palace of Chang'an flashed across my vision.

I had only ever seen the empty hall shrouded in a haze of incense, but the vision before my eyes was bright with jewels, warm with laughter, the sharpness of ginger knifing up my nose, so vivid in contrast to the nothingness around me.

Then the light glinted away, and the image was gone.

"There are residual memories," I said, pulling my hand back, examining where a single drop of water tracked down my palm,

running down my wrist—moisture pulled into the air, trapped in clouds, thin and distant remnants of the river that used to

be the Emperor's entire life. Death could never erase anything completely.

Yufei took my wrist in her hand, pulling it closer to her. Under the gray light, I realized that the nail of my ring finger,

where the water droplet had landed, had turned purple as a corpse. She prodded at it, and I watched the nail flash white from

pressure before darkening to purple again.

"I don't know about this," Yufei said.

"Me neither," Zheng Sili said. "This definitely feels like a place we're not supposed to be."

"Because we're not," I said, frowning. "All kinds of life alchemy go against the natural order of the world."

A cold breeze shivered up from the base of the canyon, like a wintery sigh.

I handed Yufei and Zheng Sili the ends of the rope that I'd gathered. "Hold on tight. I'm going in."

"In there ?" Yufei said, raising an eyebrow. "Into the death pit?"

"It's not a death pit," I said, kicking my shoes off so I could feel the moisture on as much of my skin as possible. "Just

give me thirty seconds or so?"

I turned to Zheng Sili, but his expression was hard to discern in the colorless light. He let out a sigh and wound more of the rope around his hand.

"Your brother will blame me if I come back with a corpse on the other end of this rope, you know," he said.

"I know this is hard to believe," I said, dangling my legs over the edge, "but there are things in this world that I fear

more than my brother."

Then, before I could change my mind, I dropped down into the darkness.

For a moment, it was like falling into a dream, my limbs wrapped in velvet darkness, sparkling drops of water like whispered

stars around me. My feet landed on soft ground, but the rope on my wrists remained loose, even though I could no longer see

Yufei or Zheng Sili above me, a world away.

Slowly, Taizong's memories came to me.

I was sixteen, a boy who lived in a house of gold but would never be the emperor. I sat outside the hall where my brothers

studied, watching the shadows from the lattice windows carve diamonds onto the gold tiles. At high noon the diamonds filled

with sunlight, and I tried to hold the bright reflections in my hands but never could. Instead, I lay on top of them and let

the sun carve into me as well, make me golden, make me bright and perfect. But it would never work, because second sons are

safeguards, and third sons are shadows, and I only existed where the light could not reach.

I was twenty, and a woman with silver hair pressed golden lips against my throat. She was a song of silver, her words honey that dripped down my collarbone, her promises congealing into hope. She whispered to me about a world that did not yet exist, but maybe one day could. I stayed up late imagining, and for a while, I kept that dream secret and perfect inside of myself. No one saw me, so no one noticed the universe I carried inside my ribs.

I was twenty-eight, and the world was paved with gold. There was stinging sunlight and parched dirt and armor with the weight

of a thousand kingdoms on my back, the gates of Chang'an open wide before me. The sky was white and the horizon red, phoenix

trees the color of blood shivering around me, shedding their crimson leaves like bloody rain. The scarlet-winged trees.

That was the day the world changed.

I was high in the scarlet trees, hidden among the bloody leaves, and my brothers were on the ground, approaching the gates.

I clutched the bow slung over my shoulder, the arrow meant to kill my brothers. Both of them were here, but neither of them

saw me tangled amongst the red leaves, because they had never really seen me, not even once.

This was how they were supposed to end. If they died, I would be the crown prince, for there was no one else left. It was

a simple choice that would change everything, something I'd long decided, and yet...

My hand trembled and the arrow fell, stuck in the branches below me, lost.

I thought of the woman with silver hair, the world we found, the ring we made together. It sat on my finger then, burning.

I dropped down from the tree. My brothers drew their swords, then lowered them when they realized it was only me. They would

not raise a sword to someone they did not fear. After all, I was unarmed. I was small. I was so very close to being forgotten

forever.

They spoke to me, but I did not hear. I pressed my hands to the earth, and everything began to bleed.

Alchemy rushed into the ground. It devoured the roots of nearby trees, squeezed scarlet sap from their trunks, wilted their

branches to ashes. Groundwater rushed up from deep beneath the soil, pulling apart the tiled pathway. Flowers abandoned their

petals, walls shivered into sand, the burning iron of earth metals drew up as if purged, and the world was red and red and

red forever.

My brothers fell to their knees, and the tiled ground unlatched like a jaw full of jagged golden teeth, devouring them. And

at last there was silence across the shattered courtyard, and what remained of the broken world belonged to me alone.

I was thirty-five, a commander at war, and the world trembled beneath my palms, for it feared me at long last. The fields

before me were sharp with bones, the sky shattered with screams. I am the Son of Heaven, I am Tengeri Qaghan, I am the Earthquake Alchemist.

I was fifty-one, and the world was gray, and the light was gone, and my son was standing over me. He reached for my hand,

and that was how I knew that all things were coming to an end. I thought he was there to say goodbye, but instead he slid

the ring from my finger, the one that a woman with silver hair had forged with me long ago. I reached out for him, but all

I could see were golden diamonds, sunlight I could never touch, bright red leaves falling down and down and down into darkness.

The ropes yanked me up. I splashed into mud, its coldness shocking me awake. Yufei and Zheng Sili looked down at me, both

talking over each other so loudly I couldn't make out their words.

My body no longer felt like my own, my skin borrowed and loose, my bones shuddering even though I didn't feel cold. Yufei took my hand and rubbed it between hers, a burning warmth spreading through my fingers. I sat up and the world spun, so I latched on to Zheng Sili's sleeve to stay upright.

"Are you all right?" Yufei said.

"She's not dead, at least," Zheng Sili said.

That much was true, but I didn't know how to answer Yufei's question. My whole body was still too numb.

Taizong was an alchemist , I thought. Even Hong hadn't known, which meant the royal family had kept it a secret even amongst themselves. The House

of Li had always spoken of Taizong as one of the greatest emperors China had ever seen, and now I knew why.

He had a ring, just like the Arcane Alchemist and the Silver Alchemist.

Come to think of it, the woman in Taizong's memories was definitely the Silver Alchemist, though she'd looked younger than

I remembered. Somehow, they had known each other when Taizong was alive.

I managed to pull myself upright, letting go of Zheng Sili's sleeve.

"Gaozong took the ring," I said, breathless. "When Taizong was on his deathbed, Gaozong took it. He must have known what it

was."

Zheng Sili groaned. "Great. Another dead guy?"

"A fresher corpse this time, at least," Yufei said. "Maybe his river won't eat us alive?"

I looked back out across the black expanse of Taizong's life, flashes of it rushing through me in tiny shocks. The world hummed,

somehow delighted in my discomfort. After all, I wasn't supposed to be here.

"We can try tomorrow," Yufei said hesitantly.

I thought of Hong sitting up in the trees, too scared to sleep. It didn't matter how tired I was—he hadn't slept in weeks.

I shook my head. "Let's go while we're already here."

"Are you sure?" Zheng Sili said.

I stood up on legs that I could hardly feel. My nails were cracked and black, my skin prickled with goose bumps, like I'd

been stabbed with a thousand thin needles. "The hardest part is over," I said.

Yufei held my hand, and Zheng Sili stood close beside us. I took a deep breath, thought of Gaozong's name, and led us forward

into the darkness.

The ground began to hum. The sound of wind picked up as the trees rushed past me, the world breathing us into our new destination.

The cracked earth softened beneath my feet, my shattering footsteps now barely a whisper. The wind began to quiet down, and

slowly, I drew to a stop and opened my eyes.

We stood before a racing river. The sky had brightened from a murky darkness to a hazy morning gold. Fish glinted down the

stream like diamond shards in the perfectly clear water.

Normally, when I revived the dead, I had to walk around the barren riverbank until I found the dam where their qi had stopped.

The only time I'd visited a flowing river was when I tapped into my own qi, or my brother's.

I turned to Zheng Sili. "Were you thinking of Gaozong?" I said.

"Obviously," he said, frowning. "I'm not illiterate."

I knelt down by the river and stuck a finger in, at once shocked through with the burst of light and life like a solid slap across my face. I wrenched my hand back, frowning in disbelief at the silvery fish rushing through the waters, the endless torrent, the swaying kelp and whispering sands just beneath the surface.

"What is it?" Yufei said, drawing closer. "What's wrong?"

"The rivers of the dead dry up quickly," I said, "but this one is still flowing."

Zheng Sili frowned. "What does that mean?"

I stared at my own distorted reflection in the churning waters, mockingly clear. "It means that Gaozong is still alive."

Zheng Sili turned to me, expression pale. "Are you sure?"

"Look at the river," I said, sitting down heavily at its edge.

"He had a public funeral," Zheng Sili said, shaking his head and backing away. "Who did you bury if it wasn't the Emperor?"

"The corpse of one of the guards," I said, shrugging. "We never found the Emperor's body."

"Then why the hell did you think he was dead?"

I started to answer, but the words died on my lips when I realized how foolish they would sound:

Because the Empress said so .

"Why would the Empress lie about this?" I said, my fingers clenched in the dirt. "She didn't want Gaozong to die until he

changed the line of succession to put her first, and he never did. Doesn't his fake death make her life more difficult?"

"Maybe she doesn't know?" Yufei said.

I grimaced. I'd learned the hard way how dangerous it was to assume that the Empress was ignorant about anything at all, especially

something happening right under her nose.

There was little the Empress didn't know, but every now and then, someone deep in the palace managed to surprise her. When I'd eaten the pearl and torn out her throat, and when the Moon Alchemist had smuggled the princesses out through the tunnels, saving the last of the House of Li. So maybe someone had rescued the Emperor from the brink of death and smuggled his corpse away?

"Actually, this tracks," Zheng Sili said.

I turned to him. "It does?"

He nodded. "A powerful alchemist has been pseudo-resurrecting the Empress into corpses all over the country. The son of another

great alchemist is mysteriously dead after stealing a magical alchemy ring, yet there's no body. Think about it."

"You think Gaozong is the alchemist helping her?" I said. "The Empress kept him sick for a century. Why would he go back to

her?"

Zheng Sili shrugged. "Maybe she's blackmailing him."

I didn't know enough about Gaozong to say if that made sense, but I knew there weren't many other living alchemists powerful

enough to help her. At least not any that she trusted. I remembered the man who had attacked me at the river when I'd been

expecting the Empress, eyes bright with life gold. Perhaps that had been Gaozong.

The ropes on both my wrists suddenly tightened, yanking my arms backward. Yufei let out a surprised cry, so I yanked her end

of the rope first, then Zheng Sili's end, drawing them both out from the darkness.

"Could you focus before you rip my arm off?" Zheng Sili said. "That one was definitely your fault."

I wanted to yell at him, but he was right. I'd been thinking about the Empress, which was dangerous in a place like this.

My own mind could deliver me straight to her. Hopefully I hadn't drawn too close.

I turned back to Gaozong's forest, but the vibrant trees were suddenly bare and withering, melting into the foggy darkness.

The rope on my left wrist went slack. I turned, expecting Yufei beside me, but instead, a loose length of rope spiraled on

the ground, the end cut and frayed.

All tension in my right wrist disappeared, and suddenly I was holding two frayed rope ends in my hands, both my sister and

Zheng Sili gone.

The fog swirled around my ankles, so thick it almost felt like cold fingers caressing my skin. Far away, in a swirled haze

where the forest should have been, two pinpricks of golden light pierced through the darkness. Slowly, they drew closer, and

all I could see were two round, golden eyes.

I took a step back, then another, then turned around and ran. The frayed ropes dragged behind me, rapidly unspooling into

wispy white ribbons.

But in the darkness, I'd forgotten where I was. My next step wasn't met with ground under my feet but the freezing surface

of a river that swallowed me whole.

While the river of Taizong's soul had felt like clinging to driftwood in an empty sea, the river of Gaozong's soul felt like

drowning a thousand times. The entire river seemed to pour into my mouth at once, filling my lungs, stabbing into my ears,

silt scraping across my open eyes.

A bright flash of sunlight trapped in the arc of a sword, festering wounds and burning flesh, armor that glints like dragon

scales, and thatched roofs that scream with fire. A palace of yawning darkness, rammed dirt walls built higher and higher,

deep graves in red dirt, concubines in pink silk, maps of bright blue ocean, kingdoms across the sea, death so far away and

dreams so very close.

The images blurred together into a nauseous tide of colors, years spinning by in moments. There was grass under my bare feet and metal scorching my palms and warm lips pressed to my cheek and so many sensations all at once that my skin felt flayed apart.

The ring , I reminded myself, clinging to that one bright thought. That was the only part of Gaozong's life that mattered to me.

When I exhaled, the whirlwind of sounds evaporated, invisible hands floating away from my skin. The world smelled of flowers

and spring mornings.

I opened my eyes.

I was standing in the quiet yard of a convent cast in white stone, cicadas chirping far away, a fountain bubbling softly in

the center. In its pure waters, the reflection of a young man stared back at me. I thought at first it was Hong, but the jaw

was too broad, the shoulders too square, the gaze too sharp—Hong did not have harsh edges like men who had seen battle—this

had to be Gaozong.

A small figure in plain white robes knelt on the ground, praying, facing away from me.

I took a step closer, dead leaves cracking under my feet. The figure went still at the sound, then slowly looked over her

shoulder.

Her eyes were a warm brown instead of the gold I remembered, but she had the same comet-bright smile, the same glint of hunger

behind her eyes. She turned completely and bowed.

"Don't," Gaozong said, kneeling before her, reaching out for her hand. "You will be my empress. You bow to no one."

Falling in love with Wu Zhao was a bit like falling into open sky.

In palace silks, she was the brightest flower in every garden, and at night her eyes were twin stars. Her words whispered in my ear might as well have been the words of a god, for they carved themselves deep into my heart, became the sacred promise of my soul.

She is that first sharp blade of light that breaks across the morning sky, she is the comet that rakes across the darkness,

she is my forever. I will build an eternal world for her.

I recognized, distantly, that I was drowning in Gaozong's thoughts. They filled my lungs until they burst, stole away every

thought that was once mine. She was everywhere and always, her hands the touch of comet tails searing my skin, her dreams

like bright new skies.

I clenched my fists, clinging to whatever scraps of my own mind remained. There was the Empress waving me closer, and her

hair was more vibrant than all the night sky, tangled with constellations of flowers. And there was her pearl necklace, the

one that had once snapped and spilled pearls across the throne room on the day she died. I clung to that thought, the image

of her grinning before a wall of fire, then dying between my teeth, blood and salt and dreams that would never come true.

I tried to get a good look at the ring on Gaozong's hand, but the edges of the memory blurred, dissolving when I tried to

discern any details.

Then I was standing atop the gate, looking down across a kingdom of gold, and Hong—no, Gaozong—was looking at me like the

world was mine. I looked down at my yellow silk dress, the color only the empress and emperor could wear. The hands were not

mine, too thin and small. Such delicate hands that would one day kill so many.

"Anything you want, it's yours," Gaozong said.

"Anything?" I said. And the words were maybe mine, maybe hers. Alchemy had once made me the same promise. "You may come to regret those words," we said.

I held out my hand, and he didn't even hesitate, laying his palm on top of mine, clasping our fingers together.

And there it was at last: a red diamond wrapped in the embrace of a golden phoenix, tight around his ring finger. The ring

stolen from his dying father, who used it to seize the palace for himself.

The ring that I had definitely seen before.

The world dissolved, an eclipse of night crashing over Chang'an, Gaozong dissolving into ashes at my feet. Nothing existed

except for the blazing, clear image of the ring.

I remembered that jewel tangled in my hair as Hong held my face. He had worn that ring in the river plane, which meant he

had died wearing it.

I had a vague memory of Wenshu returning all of Hong's jewelry to me when he'd woken up in his body, but I couldn't remember

what I'd done with it. I definitely hadn't packed it for our journey, which meant it was surely back in Chang'an, in the palace

under siege.

We would never find it.

It was such a small jewel, and if it hadn't been crushed under the feet of soldiers, surely it had been stolen in the raids

and sold for its value in gold. I'd held it in my hands, and then I'd lost it.

I clawed my way out of the riverbank, falling onto crooked roots that jabbed into my ribs, barely registering the pain. I

stared at my palm where Gaozong had laid his hand in mine, wishing I could wrench the ring from his finger. But this world

was not the real world, and its treasures were only an illusion of light.

Except...

I sat up straight, remembering the restaurant in Baiyin where the Empress had ambushed me and my brother. I'd attacked her in the river world, and when I'd woken up, I'd found her broken pearls still clutched in my palm.

Maybe objects in the river plane began as tricks of light, but in the hands of an alchemist, they didn't have to stay that

way.

I took off running before I could even see, tripping over broken branches, repeating Hong's name in my mind in a panicked

loop. The soft, fertile ground of the river of Gaozong's life quickly withered and tightened with coldness, until at last

I was standing by the same forest where I'd met Hong so many times.

The rope arced into the sky once more, exactly the same as the last time I'd visited. I grabbed the lowest branch of the tree

and scrambled up and up, bark scraping my palms raw. How high had he climbed?

The clouds thickened into an impenetrable gray cloud as I climbed higher, each branch its own island in the sky. I nearly

fell down when I reached out for a branch and missed, but a cold hand closed around my wrist and yanked me up to the next

branch.

"Hong—" I said, but my words died on my lips.

Perched on the highest branch, the Empress held the frayed end of the rope in one hand.

"Hello, Scarlet."