Lian left after breakfast the next morning to change her clothes and gather more money from her bank. Mei stayed in the room at the Golden Slumbers long enough to clean up slightly, and to pack her book into her robes, hiding it between the folds of her red dress. She walked through the brothel, giving a few hellos and goodbyes to other workers, then headed to the basement and the office there to deposit Lian's latest gold coin.
She expected Madam Cicao to be sitting behind the large desk, calculating the expenses and the revenues in her thick ledger. But instead she found Duan sulking behind the desk, staring at her, motionless except for the two fingers he tapped against one another to a point in front of his face.
Mei froze momentarily. I should have known, she chided herself for thinking she could avoid his prying. Then she convinced herself he couldn't possibly know everything, and nonchalantly walked up to the table and deposited the heavy gold coin on his table.
"A good night?" Duan asked between tapping fingers, the question not really a question.
"One gold not good enough anymore? Should I be charging more?"
"With that customer? Maybe. I'm sure she'd pay it."
"What customer?" Mei knew she wasn't good at bluffing, but she didn't want to admit just how much Duan intimidated her.
Duan laughed and put his hands down, reaching for the gold coin and playing with it, rolling it over his knuckles, back and forth, over and over.
"You should be careful around her. She's the type that can cause problems for a woman like you."
"I've had repeat customers before."
"Not a Shuli Go. At least not that I can remember."
Mei held back her frustration as best she could. But he seemed to know everything, and it enraged her to no end. At the risk of breaking face against him, she whipped up her robes and turned to leave. "I'll be fine."
She heard Duan go back to his tapping, this time on the two sides of the golden coin, a dull thud emerging from every strike of his fingers. She was breathing heavily by the time she got out of the basement, and her heart was thudding by the time she left the brothel. She pressed herself against the outside wall and tried to fight down the sudden rush of illness she felt in her stomach, the trembling in her vision. Duan was an evil man, who just so happened to hold her life in his hands, but he seemed more concerned about Lian than he had any of her other repeat clients.
Clients she'd had many times in the past. One man who spent forty gold coins to spend every night with her for a month. He'd proposed at least once every night the last week, sometimes multiple times a night. The last night he'd threatened suicide if she wouldn't marry him. A few days later a servant found him hanging in his home, next to his wife, whom he'd murdered first. Mei had felt bad for the man – he was bland, rich, ugly, and intelligent, a combination that rarely found a woman engaging enough to love and marry – but hadn't felt guilty in the least for leading him on. A man that smart and wealthy knew she was playing a part. It was his own desire to be lied to that drove him to death. She just happened to be the one he decided upon the first night. Other women in the Golden Slumbers had similar stories. Mei just had more than most.
She returned home to the quiet solitude of her walled off courtyard and the home behind it. It was there that she finally caught her breath and could push Duan out of her mind. She took Lian's book and searched for a place for it in her reading room – not much more than a few shelves, spots for a few candles, a small table, and a chair. Her library was already too large for the room, and the only place for The Shuli Go Training Guide was on top of a stack of other books on the table. She ran her hand over the cover for a moment, smiling.
Then she changed into a comfortable, unostentatious dress, high collared and with relatively narrow sleeves and skirts. She brushed and pinned her hair back into a look common amongst the lower classes. She hoped Lian would dress the part of unassuming visitor, so as to avoid attention and make their travels that day easier.
Mei had, since the moment Lian had proposed it, already mapped out the entire day's travels, and she was genuinely excited to go about them. Mei didn't know much beyond what she read in her books, but she did know Yiwu. Every inch and corner. She'd had too many lovers to count in her years, but Yiwu was the only one she was faithful to, always ready to explore and enjoy this city that had grown to nearly a million people.
They met in the central square just as the sun was peeking over the buildings and the shops were coming alive with shoppers and hawkers alike. Mei spotted Lian in the middle of the square and was immediately taken aback.
Instead of dressing to blend in, she'd come in her regular Shuli Go clothing, swords and all. The clothes themselves were plain enough – though the brown pants did draw attention to the fact that a woman was wearing them – but the two swords, one on her back, and a shorter, curved one on her waist, caught the eye like sunlight reflecting off a mirror. Mei approached her almost sheepishly, and was at once aware of how differently Lian held herself in public, wearing those swords. The somewhat timid, almost deferential woman who'd stood in her room barely able to get out a sentence looked authoritative and confident beyond all measure in the middle of the early morning bustle. She grinned when she saw Mei, and Mei smiled back.
"Hello."
"Hello," Lian replied, a hand casually resting on the handle of her sword, the grin on her face spreading. "Where are we going first?"
"Right here," Mei said, pointing down at her feet, then out at the square full of carts, voices, and energy. On the edges of the square the city staff were preparing the banners for the new year's celebrations, and the center was alive with specials and steals for the holiday that was fast approaching. In less than two weeks the square would the center of a huge festival full of colorful banners, fireworks, and couples strolling through the longest night of the year, hand in hand, awaiting the long night's greater pleasures.
"Here?"
"Right here," Mei repeated. "What better place to learn about a city than right in the middle of it?"
"Ok. Sure. What about this place then? I mean, it looks pretty ordinary," Lian said, struggling to think of what this place reminded her of – it really did resemble the center squares of half a dozen other cities she'd been visited in her lifetime.
"Ah, that's only because you're looking on the surface," Mei motioned for Lian to follow her towards a set of stalls just off the middle of the square. "You want to understand a city like Yiwu, you have to know what the layers that have been covered up in time are like."
They stopped in front of a stall and Mei continued. "They say when King Xue first united all the Zhezhun people under his flag, this," she pointed to the ground, "was where they coronated him."
Lian looked skeptical. "And now you can buy… fish heads here. How regal."
Mei laughed. "Hey I'm just telling you what I was taught. When I was in school they dragged us all here and gave us that exact speech."
"What else?"
"Well, over there," she pointed to a set of three tall, narrow buildings with adjoining walls that sat on the east end of the square. "Is where the great fire of 2840 started. Only fifty buildings were left standing after that fire, and it took a hundred and fifty years for the city to grow back."
"What else?"
Mei guided Lian to northwest corner. They stopped short of a small iron disc set on the otherwise gravel and stone square. "This is where the Central Empire cut the heads off of a dozen Chaste Shei who were caught using forbidden magic." She forced herself to take a deep breath, which she hadn't done since Lian mentioned the fish heads. "And this," she pointed to the iron disc, "this is where the heads of one of them turned to iron before a crowd of hundreds. Just like that," she clapped her hands together, "it hit the ground and transformed. The crowd almost rioted because they were convinced that particular Chaste had been so powerful an alchemist he probably could have turned all their lead to gold if the Empire had let him live."
Mei looked at Lian only to find the woman looking back at her, a smile on her face and an expression of surprise in her eyes.
"What?" Mei asked.
"You're excited," Lian said, with wonder.
Mei blushed. She was enjoying showing off her knowledge of the city. She'd hoped to remain more modest than this, but she couldn't help herself. She had a lot to share.
"So," she said, changing the subject, "what does this place remind you of? Where would you take me to bring me back here?"
Lian's look turned more serious and she scanned the square before setting her eyes on the iron disc and examining it carefully. "There's a square in Kuntao, this city in Ming Kingdom. It reminds me of this. Not the size or the shape or anything, but it's very… grounded. It smells a certain way. Like fresh earth, under all the other layers of the stuff that's for sale. And apparently it's where Empress Shi VI created the first Shuli Go. It doesn't have an iron disc, but it does have a small hill the city's never been able to flatten. Right there in the square. If they take off the stones and press the earth down, within two weeks it's pushed back up. They've dug underground twenty feet deep and twenty feet in all directions, and there's nothing under there. But every time they put the stones back in place, the hill shows up again."
"…What is it? I mean, why does it do that?"
"I have no idea, but that hasn't stopped people from coming up with their own explanations."
"And none of them sound real enough for you?"
"I don't think a drop of Empress Shi's blood was enough to create a magical hill, no. And I don't think it's a scar left on the world by the evil existence of the Shuli Go. But I am probably biased about that last one."
"…And the smell? Where does that come from?"
"Well, see Kuntao is just a few miles from where the Harmony River splits off from the Golden River. And apparently all the best water flows east along the Harmony, and the Golden gets dirtier all the way to the coast. And you can smell it. If you walk west along the Harmony, from Nianjang all the way to Kuntao, the air gets fresher, the rains are more pleasant, and the scent is just… clean. I don't know exactly how to describe it. And the very center of it all is in that square in the middle of the city. Every step past that you get closer to the Golden River and all its smells start mixing into the air."
Mei thought of the cleanest air she could imagine, years ago, when she still left the city occasionally. She would go upriver and watch as the water raged and took every bit of dirt and debris shoved into it down towards the sea.
"It sounds lovely."
"It is."
Mei took Lian's hand and led her away from the square, down an alley, and on to the rest of her tour.