She spent three days – distinguishable from the nights only by the jailer alerting the prisoners to "go to sleep it's night time ya fucks!" – in the cell without a hint of respite. She attempted to ask the jailer – a grimy, fat man who plodded up and down the aisles of cells one minute of every hour and seemed to sleep the rest – for an audience with a judge. But his only reply was a whack from his preferred implement: a thin iron rod that stung and cut, but did not break bones.
On the third night she'd been told, rather rudely, to go to sleep, a new prisoner was thrown into the cell next to her. Even though it was perennially dark to the point of black inside the dungeon, Lian's enhanced eyesight recognized the man immediately.
"Tang?"
Tang, though, didn't respond, and Lian was quickly informed it was not just because of his visible dejection at the prospect of being the latest victim of Chongqing's justice system.
"Is that the name he gave you?" the jailer asked, emitting the laughter he usually reserved for a particularly good smack with his iron rod. "He was Zhu when he was caught trying to stow away on a ship heading to Thanjar." The jailer laughed again then returned to his nearby desk where he promptly fell asleep.
Tang looked from the jailer to Lian and approached the set of bars they shared, "Lian! You got caught up here too? What happened?"
"They're not fans of Shuli Go around here. I found out a little late."
"I don't think they're a fan of much, except bribes. I sold my entire cart and didn't even have enough to book passage out of town after I paid for all the permits and seals I needed."
Lian tilted back slightly, "Why did you give them another name when they arrested you?"
"Oh! That. I… I didn't want to besmirch my family name by becoming a criminal. I, I panicked."
"No, you didn't," she said flatly. "The Chongqing authorities aren't my favorite right now, but they would never touch a cart like yours that bore an official Imperial emblem of trade. The mayor would lose her head in a fortnight if more than one merchant was taxed unfairly. It's a port city for heaven's sake."
Lian pointed out all the errors in Tang's story without feeling hurt about being lied to. Chances were Tang was a man just slightly less desperate than the men who had tied him up four days earlier. Tang, for his part, contorted his face into distress and defiance for a split second before he saw that Lian was completely unmoved. Then his features switched entirely, as if one face had been wiped away and another revealed underneath.
"Oh, fine, no point with a charade any more," he shook his head. "Might as well tell you my real name. It's not Tang, and it's not Zhu either. I'm Mei."
"Mei?" Lian asked, chuckling, "Mei's a girl's name."
Tang-Zhu-Mei nodded, his smirk beleaguered from repetition, "A fact I've had explained to me many times. Go ahead and laugh if you want. I've heard it all. Every pun and insult. Go ahead, try me."
"I don't want to insult you. I'm frankly too busy being impressed."
Mei smiled, "Impressed?"
"You know how many people can lie to a Shuli Go and get away with it? You're the first I've met."
"Yeah well lying is one thing I've had plenty of experience with…"
Lian truly was impressed. His entire body had changed along with his face. Gone was the woe-filled merchant with the halting spaces between sentences. Instead there was a trickster whose aura was pure nonchalance, even in the face of an interminable jail sentence. The weeping sweep of his lips were even mangled into a confident grin. Those lips…
"It wasn't your first time," Lian said, more to herself than Mei.
He retracted for a second, almost searching back into his mind for what she could mean, before arriving at the night in the sentry post. "Ah…no," he grinned again. "Sorry about that. I figured you wanted to and I just kind of wanted it… that way."
"You figured I wanted to?"
"Well, you Shuli Go have a reputation."
"You think I just sleep with everyone I come across on the road?"
Mei shrugged. "I dunno, maybe every second one?"
Lian grunted. "And what about you? Every woman who's willing I'd imagine."
"Mostly," he chuckled, "and I usually pay for the unwilling."
All at once Lian saw how the three previous days had played out for Mei and his ill-gotten goods. He'd quickly sold the contents of his wagon, then spent two days gambling and whoring, probably intending to leave a sizable portion of money intact for his future travels before either a woman or a game of cards got the best of him and suddenly his investment had dwindled to nothing. It was a story she'd seen dozens of times, even back when she still had her own Go and had been responsible for enforcing the debts of the troubled and horny.
"So who were they?"
"Who?"
"The dead merchants."
"Oh. I paid them for passage. They said they could get me to Chongqing safely…"
"You didn't kill them then, right? You're not some bandit commander who got turned on by his men are you?"
"Me? No, I don't have the stomach for banditry. I am…" here he paused like his Tang identity would have, "…I am an outlaw though, of sorts."
"Well, not any more. You're firmly in the law I'm afraid." Lian knelt down and leaned her back against their shared wall of bars.
"Oh, you mean this? Oh no, I'll have us out of here in twenty minutes."
"What?" Lian snapped her head back to look at him, intrigued but disbelieving. She had been looking for ways to escape since her capture. Not out of any desire to escape the law of course, but just in case a riot broke out or the city's justice system was more corrupt than it appeared and her right to a fair trial looked to be postponed indefinitely. In three days she'd found nothing.
"Sshh," Mei held his finger to his mouth before motioning for her to come closer. She did so and found that close up, Mei was even better looking than Tang had been. Grimier, with a sheen to his hair and bits of dirt on his face, but with a rugged handsomeness she couldn't ignore. She allowed the handsomeness to carry her into a state of excitement: at the prospect of escape, at the conspiratorial nature of his voice, even just the proximity to his body. "You ever heard of Jinshu magic?"
Lian had heard of it. She couldn't imagine someone who hadn't heard of it. Hearing it come from Mei's lips shriveled her excitement into a husk and sent it somewhere deep inside her. "You mean the magic of metals?" Her voice was lacquered with pure dismissal. "The make believe magic people tell their kids to scare them away from careers in alchemy? Yeah, I've heard of it."
Mei, instead of becoming discouraged, just grew more handsome by the width of his smile. "Do me a favor Lian. You can see better in here than me. Is our guard asleep?"
Lian didn't need to look – the jailer's snoring, while quiet enough for most to ignore, had been one of her constant companions the past three days. "Yes."
"Then all you need to do is stand over by him, and our exit will present itself to you."
Lian almost laughed it off, but decided to humor Mei after his smile refused to fade. She walked over to the edge of her cell, the first in the row, and then looked back to Mei. Her former lover's face reverted away from a grin and into concentration as he gripped the iron bars that connected to Lian's cell and began to mumble.
At once the hairs on Lian's neck stood upright, a telltale physical sign amongst Shuli Go that magic was in the air. Air escaped her lungs and brought out an audible gasp as the jailer's keys – haphazardly left on the desk next to his iron rod – began to tremble, then move, inches at a time, scraping along the desk before flying across the gap and striking the metal cage of the cell, sticking there as if held there by invisible string.
A thick clang ran through the hall of cells, every set of eyes suddenly on Lian, even though none of them could see well enough to know exactly what was going on. A rumble of murmurs began to bubble amidst the cells, each prisoner asking what the sound was, what was going on, who was making the noise. None of which woke the jailer, who was used to sleeping through robust conversations between prisoners. What almost woke the guard though was the iron rod also being pulled towards the cage, slowly spinning towards the end of the desk, picking up speed with each rotation.
"Mei! Stop it!" Lian hissed.
The keys dropped to the ground and the rod stopped its motion, half extended over the edge of the table. The mumblings calmed down.
Lian grabbed the keys even as she failed to believe what she'd just seen. As a Shuli Go she'd been schooled in every known magic. Even those Shuli Go weren't supposed to actually control, they had been taught to recognize and repel. Yet Mei had bound metals across a room with a few words. She walked the keys over to him still in disbelief, racking her mind to find the appropriate question to ask. Instead she was forced to ask, "What are you doing?" When he reached through the bars and took the keys from her.
"I'm getting us out of here."
"What? What do you mean? I'm not going anywhere. I'm not about to become a fugitive."
"Sweet heavens Lian," it was now his turn to dismiss her concerns, "you really are the densest woman I've met in a long time. You think you're ever getting out of here?" Mei was already fiddling with the lock to his door, trying each key in the darkness, one at a time.
"Of course, I was arrested based on a misunderstanding. They have no reason to keep me."
"Except I'm sure they told you every crime in Chongqing is punishable by service. Service without pay. Slavery is why they'd want to keep you." He found the right key and turned the lock, the gate coming open with ease. That familiar, longed-for sound was picked up by all the other prisoners, who restarted their rumblings with renewed vigor.
"But, I'm forbidden from staying in one place, by law. When the Empire learned they were keeping a Shuli Go in servitude, they'd force my release."
Mei stood outside the door to her cell and whispered his reply, "You idiot. Chongqing is a five day sail to the Eastern Kingdoms. Ten days to the Slave Islands. You'd be thrown in chains too strong for even you to break and sold as a slave. Either way the city of Chongqing gets your value as a permanent servant."
Lian wanted to argue with him – argue that slavery had been outlawed in the Central Empire for two thousand years and that the punishment for even trading with slavers was death – but at the same time she knew as well as anyone that Chongqing was the last hub of slavery in the Empire. A final place where the law turned a blind eye to profit and the incoming riches of the spices, silk, and craftsmanship of the Eastern Kingdoms. Lian looked down the hall of cells, each of the prisoners in there young, still fresh despite their imprisonment – just approaching the breaking point past which the dark path of forced servitude had been set out for them. She listened to their voices calling to be released from their cells and heard their accents – each one a foreigner, away from their families and any protection. They had been chosen, like Lian, for their susceptibility. Lian's competing drives as a Shuli Go – between a sense of justice and an even greater trust in it, and the survival instincts to assess a situation – clashed and Lian came to a painful realization.
Mei, whoever he was, was smarter than Lian in this particular field.
"Get me out," she said, her voice firm but her eyes imploring him. The situation had won out over justice. It was not the first time in Lian's life these two had collided, but it was the first time she was about to be the victim of justice herself. The sensation of being on the wrong side of the law but the right side of survival sent a bitter rush of bile through every one of her senses.
Mei's smile returned and he opened her cell. "I'm going to release all of them too," he nodded towards the other cells. "We'll need a distraction when we try and make a run for it."
"They're criminals," Lian refused, grabbing Mei's arm, "some of them probably deserve whatever punishment they get. We can't just let them all go."
"You want to give interviews?" Mei's voice was incredulous, and quickly getting drowned out by the growing cries of the other prisoners. Their shouting finally reached the breaking point, prompting the jailer to jerk half-awake and brush the iron rod, sending it clanging to the ground. And that sound, finally, woke him up.
He jerked awake but took a second to piece together what was happening in the darkness. Finally he reached for his missing keys and shouted an incomprehensible sound of alarm, loud enough to alert others higher up. Lian's situational instincts kicked into overdrive and she instantly closed the distance, kicked the iron rod up to her hand and smacked it across the jailer's face, sending teeth flying and knocking him out cold. Just like in the forest, her hands instantly began to shake, but this time it was tainted by the knowledge that she had, four years after being pushed out of the legal profession, broken the law herself. Not just broken it, but stepped right past it, as if it didn't apply to her. The bitter taste sank all the way to her stomach where it rotted into nausea.
Her illness allowed Mei time to unlock the rest of the cells, gathering the other inmates – about twenty or so – to gather around her, near the door that would lead them upstairs and into the city guard's headquarters. Lian's ears were ringing with self-doubt when he gave his instructions, but she heard his final batch, whispered only to her as she trembled on the spot.
"Hold on to the rod. Use it if you need. And follow me."