Shuli Go Stories Vol. 1: Beyond the Mists

Part 7

The room given to Lian for her adjudication was cold and palatial, and also her sleeping quarters. Her bed was against one wall, adorned by four posts and draped by green silks embroidered with gold. Seventy feet away were arched windows fifteen feet tall that looked into the inner courtyard and the final wall that led to the castle. The room was on the third floor and the windows faced east, and when the sun crept out from behind the Wamaian mountains dozens of miles away, they bathed the room in a warm, pleasant glow.

That first day though, Lian had already been awake for hours before the sun appeared. Agitated, she'd practiced her sword techniques in her own clothes before changing into the courtiers clothes provided to her, only to change back and go through the first twenty sword sequences all over again.

Lian hated when she had a task that went along someone else's schedule. She had wanted to start studying the Wamaian legal texts the previous night, but Ida had insisted she would require a staff of experts and translators, all of which was true but none of which made Lian any less restless. Instead of repeating the same movements a third time, she wandered the length and width of her room, observing each grey stone under her feet and in the walls, and the few other furnishings they had left her: a large desk tilted slightly to make for easier reading, a solid wooden chair at the correct height, a small chest into which she had put her clothes and sword, two small bowls of wine and water, a much larger jug for defecation, and the ten foot tall door that separated her from the rest of the world. She likened herself to a prisoner who knew she would have to get very familiar with every contour of her cell. As important a role as she was told she would play, she did not get a sense of overwhelming friendliness or accommodation from the Wamaians. She was there to do a job, and she would not be made privy to any more of Wamai than she needed to do it.

The first of the servants arrived at sunrise with tea and buns. She dismissed them at once and invited in the first of the experts and translators, anxious to finally get to work. She knew exactly how she wanted them set up – the lead scholar in the chair, a second legal scholar on one shoulder and a translator on the other, while Lian paced behind them, listening first to the original Wamaian and then the translation, and absorbing. Their books arranged in order of importance, she would start with the oldest, most important texts and then listen to their advice on where to proceed next.

That was the plan at least.

Compared to Imperial law, Wamaian was simple, chaotic, and nuanced. The Imperial legal papers Lian was familiar with from the Empire were broken into four categories, each one building on the other in a pyramid of expectation: from the prescribed rites at the bottom, which were primarily proscriptive, to the legal code at the top, which described the greatest crimes that warranted specific and exact punishments. Justice, each Shuli Go was taught, flowed like water down this pyramid in a constant flow that ensured the greatest crimes were treated uniformly, while the lower levels left room for interpretation and the diversion of liquid where it was most needed.

Wamaian law was closer to an epic poem: each case wandered from statute to statute, each law interjecting its one small piece to the narrative, until the decision was arrived at not through any interpretation, but close, careful reading of the text in the correct order. Lian's head filled quickly with cases of precedent, ancient texts which were in some cases not even legible in the modern version of Wamaian, and the overlapping claims of superiority of one law over another. Books did not pass onto the table in a linear show of importance, but were instead criss-crossed to and fro as different aspects of the law emerged. It reminded her more of the logic puzzles Imperial bureaucrats had to master for their entrance exam than anything she'd actually dealt with before.

Eight hours in, she was certain of almost nothing. She ate in silence with her translators and scholars, going over the dizzying amount of information she'd been presented. And this was only one case.