When Lian arrived at the Golden Slumbers for the eighth night that week, she was determined to find out once and for all why Mei could not simply leave her job. She didn't want to upset the other woman, but she also had to start preparing to head to Zhosian for the upcoming summer: it was usually a month and a half long ride from somewhere as far north as Yiwu, and she had several other stops to make along the way. If she didn't leave Yiwu soon, she'd miss her chance to finally tell Quan she was ready to bring him down into the Central Empire.
Lian had spent all day preparing herself for Mei to scream and wail and decline to answer, and Lian had even steeled her resolve accept this final rejection. She wouldn't let herself be strung along forever. Even if Mei wasn't taking her money anymore, Lian wanted something more from the woman, and if Mei couldn't offer it, Lian would take her leave. She'd be heartbroken, she knew, but she had commitments she had to keep, especially to Quan. If Mei wasn't ready to leave, Lian would respect that, but she at least needed an answer to why their leaving together was an impossibility.
So she was rather surprised when she walked in to Mei's room and found Mei sitting on the bed, her face wrinkled in worry, and Mei said, "I need to tell you something."
Mei looked like she was about to cry, a sight Lian had not seen even a shred of in their time together. Lian sat beside her on the bed and fought the urge to embrace her in a hug so tight Mei would never be able to leave it. She settled for taking Mei's hand in her own.
"And I need you to help me." Mei said, before she did start to cry. Lian, in preparing for a night of tears, had half expected Mei's beauty to be somehow augmented by tears, but it wasn't. Mei crying was just as disfiguring and painful to watch as anyone else.
Lian squeezed Mei's hand and replied. "Of course. You know I will. Just tell me."
Mei fought back sobs for a moment or two, then breathed deeply and stared at her hand connected with Lian's.
"I…I'm cursed, Lian."
It took Lian a second to understand what Mei had said. But understanding the word didn't mean she understood the meaning. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm cursed. I had a curse put on me."
"You mean, a real curse? A magic curse?"
Mei nodded, fresh tears forming in her eyes and her face still focused on their interlocked hands.
Lian took a moment to collect herself. This had not been what she expected at all.
"What kind of curse?"
"It binds me, to this place," she motioned with her head to the room. "I… I have to come here. I have to work here. If I don't, I'll die."
"Is this the contract you were talking about?"
"Yes. My parents… my parents agreed to it, to pay off their debt. They owed some people a lot of money, so they sold me to this place. But that wasn't enough for the owners of this place."
"Duan?" Lian asked.
Mei paused a moment. "Yes, yes, Duan, and his family. They had to make sure I could never leave. My parents owed so much money I would have to work here until I died to make it up. At least that's what they said. The only way to make sure that happened was to curse me. They tied me to this place."
"What do you mean? What happens if you try to leave?"
"I'll die."
Lian's vision shook, her entire body trembling with rage and fear, all the way down to the hand she shared with Mei. She would kill Duan. She could picture it, how easy it would be to decapitate him in a dark alley on his way home. No witnesses, no problems. Lian had to admit that was often how she dealt with her feelings: picturing a particularly clean murder, even if her experience with murder had never been particularly clean. In this case though, it wouldn't help anything, she realized. She needed to lift the curse first, then kill Duan.
"I need to know everything about the curse," Lian explained, cupping Mei's chin with her free hand and tilting the woman's tortured, tear-stained face towards her own. "That's how curses work," she explained. "Each one is different, and I need to know what was said, by whom, and what chemicals they used."
"What?" Mei pleaded, utterly confused. "I, I don't know any of that."
"Mei, you need to think. You need to remember. Every word. If I know the words they used and the ingredients they gave you, I can lift the curse."
It was a lie. Curses weren't things Shuli Go dealt with very often. They were trained to deal with them, it was true, but Lian had only lifted two in her entire life up to that point. And they were the simplest, most basic curses that even a half-decent herbalist with a vendetta could whip up: a love curse, and an entrapment of a recently deceased spirit. Some alchemically-negating pastes and a few words in ancient Imperial and everything was cured, just like that. But binding someone to a place, perhaps even to a particular act inside that building, was robust beyond anything Lian had ever seen – it sounded like something from the Book of Terrors.
"I… I really, I can't. It was… I was so young, I don't remember."
"Then I'll have to pry it out of Duan," Lian's thoughts turned to the quickest torture methods possible with a speed that surprised even her.
"He wasn't there," Mei shook her head in defeat.
"What do you mean?"
"He wasn't. It was just one man. The priest. The Shei priest who ran my school. He was the one who did it all."
"Where is he?"
"He died, years ago."
"Fuck."
Mei started crying loudly and fell onto Lian's shoulder. The Shuli Go ran her hand over Mei's shoulder, cooing and soothing her before trying again.
"Ok, let's try and figure this out from the start. Where were you when it happened?"
Mei sniffled and wiped away her tears. "Here, in the Golden Slumbers. In the basement."
"Ok, good. Tell me what he did to you. Did he tie you up? Make you kneel?"
"Yes. Yes I was kneeling. He didn't tie me up or anything. I was… I was wearing a white dress. Like a funeral dress."
"Ok. And did he put anything on you? Did he touch you with anything?"
Mei thought for a moment between sniffles. "Yes. He, he ran a comb through my hair. And he put something on my palms. It was…blue. A blue paste. He told me to rub it into my palms."
"Did it smell like anything?"
"…There were a lot of smells."
"Like what?"
"Like burnt eggs. And coals, coal-smoke. And he made me drink something."
"What was it?"
"I, I have no idea. It was dark, and there was a lot of it. I remember it had things floating in it."
"What did it taste like?"
"I don't remember…"
"Mei, please. You have to remember. That could have had anything in it. I need you to remember what it tasted like."
"I can't! I just remember as soon as it hit my tongue it made me drowsy. I think I fell asleep right after I drank it."
"Shit. That could be anything."
Lian saw Mei start to panic, the reality that Lian may not be able to help her dawning on her. "What do I do then? Tell me! What do I do?"
Lian squeezed both of Mei's hands under her own and tried to calm her own voice, "I'm thinking. Give me a few minutes."
Mei was reduced to quiet, quick, involuntary sobs as Lian thought back to everything she could remember about curses. Then she ran through her options, including finding out more by going to one of the great libraries in Nianjang and seeing if there were any older tomes that dealt with a curse of this type. But that would be months of travel and work, and it promised nothing. Without the exact curse, it would be like treating a poison with the wrong medicine. It was more likely to hurt Mei than anything else. And Lian remembered Mei's story about the Shei Chaste who had experimented with dark magic. If the Zhezhun priesthood had taken to formulating their own magic, there wouldn't be any help except from the dead priest. And Lian doubted he'd been stupid enough to allow his own spirit to be trapped here on Earth.
Then, a flicker of something from her school days. The class on curses springboarded into her mind with crystal clarity, the way it often did for Shuli Go. She remembered her magic teacher standing in front of the class and saying:
"Curing a curse of distance is a course of distance."
A silly pneumonic device, which was the preferred teaching method of this particular teacher. But it worked. The lesson was simple, once Lian remembered it all.
"There is one thing," Lian whispered, almost afraid to believe it herself.
"What?" Mei was desperate. "What is it?"
"We could try and outrun it."
Mei's face turned skeptical. "What?"
"It's an old principle. If the curse has to do with location, you move the victim away from the source. As you go away, its power on you will fade. I met a Shuli Go who did it with a spirit that was draining blood – he drew the spirit further and further away from its home with a set of larger and larger bowls of pig's blood. And after it went far enough it just… disappeared because it had lost its tie to the origin of the curse."
"But the curse binds me to this place. That's the whole point. How would that work?"
"Yes, but it's not just a curse of proximity. You take days off, right?"
"Yes."
"What happens if you don't come back here often enough?"
Mei shuddered through her entire body. "It's… like every bone in my body grows brittle and I can't hold myself up any more. It feels like I'm dying. In an hour it becomes the worst… the worst kind of pain I've ever felt."
"And how long before it starts doing that?"
"Almost right after my day off is done, it starts."
"Okay. Then it's not just the distance. The curse has enough flexibility for you to leave for a while. It's probably one day. We'd have one day to get far enough away for the curse's hold on you to break it."
Mei looked terrified, and Lian felt terrible. She couldn't offer anything firm to the woman she cared for, and the uncertainty weighed on her like a thousand stones pressed right into her chest. But the more she thought of the principles behind the different curses she'd thought of, the more she became convinced she was right. If the active element of the curse was the timing, not the proximity to the building, then it could happen: they could escape.
Excitement and hope filled her chest, and she squeezed Mei's hands to reassure her. And like any infection, her hope spread, and for what felt like an hour Mei looked into Lian's increasingly positive face until she, too, broke into a hopeful smile. Mei threw her arms around Lian and the two women embraced in a tight knot of clothing and limbs, their heads on one-another's shoulders, the tears flowing quickly but warmed by the possibility Lian had inspired.
"It's going to be ok," Lian whispered over and over again into Mei's ear, and she believed it more and more each time.
They parted and Mei asked, "How far do you think I'd have to go?"
"It depends. How far does Duan let you go away from the city?"
"He sent one of the guards from here to join me once. He said I could go as far as a mile upstream."
"Ok. It's got to be at least a dozen miles. Maybe fifty. If this curse is strong enough, even a hundred."
"A hundred miles? In a day?"
"We'll buy horses and I'll figure out the fastest way to get as far away as we can. We'll exchange the horses at midday if we have to. We won't stop until the day is up." Lian thought for a moment. "Can you ride?"
"It's… it's been a long time."
"Ok… ok. We can buy some Zhezhun Reds. They're smaller, easier to ride. Not as fast but they can run for miles before they get tired. We'll go as fast as you can. A hundred miles… we can do it. Definitely."
Mei smiled again and leaned in to kiss Lian, a quick peck on the lips. Lian was amazed to find just how differently Mei tasted with tears on her lips – salty, confused. Lian loved it – she couldn't wait until she'd tasted every kind of emotion on her lover's lips.
Mei pulled back and her eyes were wide again. "Oh shit."
"What?"
"Duan."
"What about him?"
"He threatened me tonight. He doesn't want me to see you any more. I told him tonight would be the last night."
"I'll be with you all day. If he tries to hurt you I'll protect you. He can't send anyone to hurt you if I'm there."
Mei nodded. "Usually if he wants to hurt me he'll just not let me come back here. I'll wake up at home and find a bunch of his guards there. And they don't let me go to work. I'll scream and scream and hit them and they don't even hit me back because they know the curse is worse. They just wait until I get so weak and frail I'm begging them to let me go."
"Why would he do that?"
"If I complain. Or if I don't want to work. If a client's angry. It was just a month ago he did it to me because one of the clients raped me and I screamed for him to stop loud enough for the other customers to hear."
Lian flexed her every muscle. It was involuntary at this point. A physical response to the strictly aphysical nature of a word. She had to force herself to relax, then she brought a hand up to hold Mei's cheek again, and to brush the hair out of her eyes. "I'm so sorry."
"It's ok. It happens here. It's part of the business. Once you realize it's happening you just kind of…" she didn't finish and Lian didn't need her to.
"Anyway," Mei continued. "He kept me away until I was too weak to even stand. Then the guards picked me up and threw me against the wall. It's like the most terrible relief. It only takes a few minutes and I'm back to normal."
"Just the wall?" Lian asked. "The outside wall?"
"Yes."
"Ah that's even better. We won't even have to come inside. We can just touch the wall and then go. We'll have a full day and horses at the ready. We can make it a hundred miles easily."
"But Duan," Mei was not convinced. "He has all sorts of connections with the city guard. He'll have us stopped until he can come back and claim his property."
"Ok…" Lian wasn't willing to let anything stop them. There was a way around it. There had to be. "What about…" She paused and thought. "Wait, you know the city. You must know a way out of here that most people don't. A hole in the wall or something. A place we could escape."
Mei thought for a minute, then her face lit up in realization. "Yes. There's an old drainage path that hasn't been used for fifty years. It's a bit of a tight squeeze through the wall, but it heads straight outside. Even if they follow us, they probably wouldn't be able to follow us through that. All of Duan's idiot guards are the big, burly type. We could slip out without them. The only problem is it goes straight into the forest below the eastern edges of the city."
"That's fine. I can have horses waiting for us in the first clearing. Do you know how far that would be?"
"Maybe a mile. Two at the most."
"Ok. We'll be fine then. We slip out at night, make it to the clearing, get on the horses and go."
Mei nodded, every issue sorted, every hope still strong. "When?" She asked.
"I can go get everything sorted now. We could leave tonight."
"No," Mei responded instinctually. "Not tonight. I need to pack up some things from home."
"Then tomorrow morning."
"No, I… I don't want to come back here in the morning."
"Tomorrow night?" Lian asked.
Mei nodded. And it was settled. Their plan finalized, they looked to one another for belief that it could come to fruition. That everything would work out and they would be gone this time the next day, out into the open fields, heading straight east out of Zhezhun. Lian had doubts that she buried deep, under the weight she felt in her chest to embrace Mei and hold her tight. She gave in to that weight, pressed it down upon Mei, the clothes falling from her body like sheets of paper brushed from a desk, and then they were against each other totally, their skin hot and fresh and trembling with the hope of expectation. They kissed and cried and felt their flesh come alive under one another's touches. And Lian realized she had never felt like this before and even if this wasn't love it was incredible and beautiful and she loved this feeling. She didn't want it to end, so she simply didn't let it – she just held Mei in her arms and between her legs and against her every body part until they both fell asleep on top of the sheets, their bodies producing all the warmth they needed on that night so close to the middle of winter and the end of the year.