Part 1

In the final decades of the Shan dynasty, the Shuli Go – magic-infused lawmen and women who had kept the peace for two thousand years – were disbanded as a caste. With their unique skills they were often sought out as bounty hunters and private investigators. Of all the locations they travelled to looking for work, none were more welcoming than the Great Cities of the Empire.

Fa 6, 3279 CE – Ming Kingdom – Three years after Wamai

The Screaming Goat Wine House was famous for many things, but its fame started with the name. Legend had it that the original owner picked it after making a drunken wager with two friends as to who could find the most nonsensical name for a tavern that could last a thousand years. In truth the wine house had only stood for four hundred years thus far, but the name had not changed in that time. Liangyong, the Great City in which the tavern was located, had burned twice in that period, yet somehow the Screaming Goat managed to avoid destruction.

Some owed its longevity to the fact that it never turned anyone away and never kicked anyone out, meaning that there was never a drop of wine spilled outside its doors – wine that would have caught fire when the city burned, the thinking went. Others owed its survival to the series of politicians who had performed illicit dealings in the place, and seen to it that this one institution remained protected at all costs. Still others chalked it up to good luck and divine intervention. Zhao Lian, often the only sober person within a hundred feet of the place, had her own theory about the survival of the Screaming Goat, but it mostly revolved around blood magic, a thousand year old curse, and an actual screaming goat that had been inhabited by a celestial spirit. Even though they were the drunks, everyone she had shared her theory with regarded her as the incoherent one, so she eventually stopped relaying it at all.

That night was a particularly boisterous one at the Screaming Goat, and Lian sat in the middle of the laughter and wine and bad food because she was sitting across from the star of that night: her good friend Tan Yaling, who had just performed the last show of her twenties.

"Tonight!" Yaling slurred as she held up a cup of wine in each hand, her coordination already hampered enough to slosh drops of the wine onto the table. "I become an old maid!"

Most of the usual suspects who often lingered around Yaling – the lovesick, the horny, and the would-be muses – found she had crossed into a level of drunkenness far less alluring than the woman they imagined they had fallen in love with. The few more lecherous ones who had stuck around after Yaling's performance had taken a look at Lian's two swords and thought better than to try and take advantage of Yaling's intoxicated state. Consequently, the cheer that her announcement initiated was far less boisterous than might be expected.

The cheer came mostly from Lian and Chen An – their shared friend who was exactly halfway between Lian and Yaling in terms of drunkenness. It was a cheer for their friend's inevitable slide into depression, halted, however fleetingly, by bowls and bowls of alcohol.

Even past the point she would remember the next day, Yaling had a grace and beauty that had brought men and women from hundreds of miles to witness her. A poet, bard, and storyteller, Yaling was first and foremost a musician and singer. One of, she claimed, the ten greatest who had ever lived, alongside Bao the Builder, who forged the first metal instruments, and Wu the Windtalker, who it was said could sing a note loud enough to shatter a mountain. While one of the most talented musicians Lian had ever seen, and more than enough to draw an audience to the Screaming Goat, both women knew the real reason people came from all over to see her: she exuded a type of artistic sexuality that drove people to impulse. Lian had seen men who had never so much as spoken to Yaling propose on the spot, women present gifts of jade and silk on plates of gold, and spontaneous fights break out over the right to carry her kanbo five feet. Usually being around Yaling was like being in the presence of a God. The only difference was Lian knew just how far the real Yaling was from the divine interpretation of her fans.

"Thirty years old and not a thing to show for it," Yaling lamented after she'd downed both cups of wine and sat back down at the table, falling into An with a thud.

"You have plenty," An reassured her, pushing her upright and handing her the half-empty decanter. "More gold than some kings, and more parishioners than some Gods. Not to mention the men."

"Bah!" Yaling replied, "men are worthless. But still worth twice the gold and parishishine…" she stumbled at the thought of polysyllabism "…the fans."

"Is that what you're worried about then?" Lian asked. "A man? You're truly worried about being unmarried at thirty?"

"It's just so hard…" Yaling turned from boisterous and defiant to crying mess instantly, "I mean… when you've had them all, like I have, how are you supposed to find one? Just one? The one?"

She tumbled onto An's shoulder, tears running fast and free down her face. "It's not like your songs and stories," An reassured her, "real life doesn't have one true love and riding off into the sunset."

"But why not?" Yaling wailed from deep in her strong lungs. Someone two tables down threw an empty cup in their direction to indicate she should shut up.

Not naturally a depressed drinker, within another two cups Yaling was back on top of the table, leading the whole bar in a choral rendition of Liangyong's favorite drinking song "To the Floor", which inevitably devolved into its chorus:

Drink, and drink, and drink, and drink some more,

Drink, and drink, and drink, and drink the floor.

Repeated ad nauseam, until the song became literal. A drink imbibed every round, the song traditionally ended only when the first singer vomited. The Screaming Goat had been designed for just such ejections however, and each table had numerous tin buckets called vomitoriums set aside for the task, as well as a set of sloped grates fashioned into the floor that carried the sickness down to the sewers below the city.

Ten minutes after "To the Floor" Yaling was passed out next to An, her face sideways on the table, her hair splayed across her face and a vomitorium near at hand just in case. It was getting late, or early, depending on how one assessed the situation, and the din of the Screaming Goat had fallen into a murmur, many of the others in the great hall in a state similar to Yaling. This quiet was what allowed An to lean on the table and speak to Lian in something resembling confidence, her head low and her eyes afire with a secret.

"I have a lead…" Lian barely heard, prompting her to lean onto the table too, the shared act between her and An screaming conspiracy, the type of which had been started more often in the Screaming Goat than almost any other place in the Central Empire.

"On what?" Lian asked back.

"Something that could make us both very rich women."

"I'm already rich, or haven't you heard the stories of me walking out of Wamai with ten baskets full of gold?" Lian asked, joking. The truth was she had successfully managed to hide her wealth mostly in plain sight, through investments and a number of small bank accounts across the Empire. Still, rumors had persisted of a woman with two swords who had left Wamai with riches beyond measure, and Lian did have two swords. Mostly she played the part of a poor wanderer and joked when the rumors caught up with her.

"I'm talking wealth enough for us to buy a Slave Island. Each. This isn't some hustle. This would be Imperial gold, right from the Empress' hoard. Word is the reward for this is ten thousand gold and a million silver."

"So twenty thousand gold?" Lian asked, already dubious of the story because of the dubious duplication of measures. Real rewards, in her experience, weren't poetic enough to obscure their true value in multiple currencies.

An, too drunk to do the math in her head quickly, took a moment to confirm that Lian was right, then continued. "Yes, yes. The point is, enough for us to retire, with a host of servants to feed us every day for the rest of our lives. Even your life, Lian."

Lian knew An well – they had met years earlier during an unfortunate run in with a corrupt former Shuli Go in the Northern Shu Kingdom – and Lian knew An was not the type of woman to buy in to bullshit and lies. An was a plain looking, thicker woman, too muscular to be curvy and too fat to be lithe and graceful, who had realized early in life she had no desire to get married. That she had had a series of cruel family members and young men in her home town tell her she would have even less luck finding a decent man to marry had most certainly influenced that decision, but An had made the best of it. She had left her home and become one of the Empire's best hunters: she could shoot the eye of a sparrow from three hundred feet away with a bow, and four hundred with a crossbow. Her tracking skills were better than Lian's own, even with Lian's enhanced Shuli Go senses. And for tight spaces An kept a pair of long daggers up the back of her leather vest. Lian had seen first-hand what those daggers were capable of and felt sorry for anyone who met them: whether they were animals being hunted or cruel men on the hunt themselves.

Still, as much as she trusted An, Lian knew better than to believe twenty thousand gold pieces were just waiting to be claimed. But the body language of the two of them – bent head to head, elbows on the table, voices low, led her to ask anyway: "What is it then?"

An smiled, took a small sip of Lian's water, and whispered. "A book."

"What book?" Yaling piped up from her position on the table.

"I thought you were asleep," An lectured.

"I am." Yaling's jaw barely moved as she her words slipped out. "…What book?"

An's voice dropped even deeper, her body matching the motion, all three of the women sinking low as she uttered, "The Book of Dragons."

Yaling twitched, then wretched, then threw up into the vomitorium. Lian didn't feel far off.

"It doesn't exist," Lian informed them both.

An, helping Yaling with her hair as she heaved into the bucket, shook her head. "I have it on good authority. Not only does it exist, it's right here in the city. And if I'm right, just think of what the Empress would offer for it."

Everyone in the Central Empire knew Empress Wei III had been fanatical about installing her daughter as the heir, only to see that same daughter die from an illness. Everyone also knew that the Book of Dragons supposedly carried a spell that could bring back the dead so long as their body was carefully preserved. And no bodies were more carefully preserved than the Imperial family in the mausoleum in Nianjang. Everyone knew that, too.

What only Lian seemed to know at their table was that the Book of Dragons was as mythical as any of the other fairy tale talismans people across the Empire told their children about: the Blue Phoenix sword that could cut through diamond, or the Endless Gourd that had once tipped and flooded the world in wine. As far as physical things Lian could touch and sell to royalty, she had more faith in the bones of Yaling's musical ancestors.

"You should probably put an arrow through whoever sold you that shit," Lian encouraged An.

"That would be Zu, the Plague of Liangyong," An replied with the tone of a verbal blow well struck.

It was just such a blow. Zu the Plague was Liangyong's greatest criminal mastermind. Wealthy enough that he could have bought himself the Mayor's post ten years ago, and so feared he had once put down a peasant uprising fifty miles away with a single letter addressed to its leader, Zu was not the type to buy into half-baked ideas. A ruthlessly practical man, if anyone was capable of doubting the existence of the Book of Dragons more than Lian herself, it would be Zu.

"You talked to him?" Yaling asked as she wiped bits of crusted vomit from the corners of her lips and put her head back on the table where it would stop spinning.

"I did," An confided. "He called me and three other trackers in to his office last week. Told us he'd split the proceeds fifty-fifty, and then gave each of us a lead. And I think mine's the right one. I'm going to see him tomorrow, and I want you two there with me."

Lian had been used as muscle before, but never quite so blatantly, and never by a friend. Still, when dealing with someone like Zu, she could see why An would want Lian there with her. Yaling however, was a different story.

"Book of Dragons?" Yaling suddenly sat upright before tipping slightly to the left. "Isn't that the one…?"

"Yup," An agreed, "the one with the curse of eternal youth and beauty."

Lian bristled. If anyone didn't need to be cursed with eternal youth and beauty, it was Yaling. And if anyone was more likely to ignore the "curse" in the description itself, it was Yaling. Lian was sure the Book of Dragons was not real, but if there was any truth to the rumor, she'd have to keep an eye on Yaling. Lian felt herself giving in.

"I'll be there," Yaling answered, before looking Lian in the eye and adjusting her vow. "We'll be there."

"Yeah?" An asked, excited.

Lian convinced herself she was more interested to see what Zu was up to than anything else, so she nodded, lifting her cup of water in the air. "We'll be there."