Shuli Go Stories Vol. 5: The Two Keepers

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. Once arbiters of disagreements and keepers of the peace, their existence outside the law made life difficult for them, and for other parts of society. Possessing greater strength and speed than normal, legend of their abilities persisted long after they had ceased holding official positions in the Central Empire.

Lu Qui 16, 3277 CE – Southern Shu Kingdom

Brilliant River Valley was a small village in the foothills of the Zhosian mountains. It was a village so simpleminded and lacking any real society whatsoever that its entire name was just a description of its geography. It was in a valley near the Brilliant River. It was a small village of maybe twenty-five homes and a single gathering house that quadrupled as the magistrate's office, the courthouse, the post office, and the inn. The inside of this building was little more than a wide dirt floor with a few curtains for rooms and a set of individual tables for serving the tasteless, barren fare that passed for food in that remote part of the Central Empire. And it was there that Zhao Lian was having a very bad day.

"Hey bitch, I'm talking to you."

The bad day was actually the culmination of a very bad week. Lian had left the Zhosian mountains heartbroken. On her way down the mountain path into the Central Empire there had been a small avalanche that had wiped out the road for a few days, and which Lian had helped clear with her bare hands. Then her horse had broken an ankle just at the end of the ride down. She'd been forced to kill the animal and walk the last twenty miles until she reached the first ramshackle little village she could find. The profiteering denizens of which saw a woman desperate for a beast of burden and vastly overcharged her for an old, weathered pony. A pony which groaned, whined, and complained so pathetically under Lian's weight she was almost certain she'd wind up killing two animals in a week. That pony had just barely made it into Brilliant River Valley, the sound of its tortured whinnies Lian's only companion on the long, rough ride.

"Hey! Look at me when I'm talking to you."

Lian's bad week was just a part of a very bad month. She found that despite her best efforts, the rather substantial amount of money she'd acquired the previous year seemed to be disappearing faster than she thought possible, and she was down to the same amount of money she regularly had after leaving the Zhosian mountains for the winter: none at all. The weather the past month had been cold and rainy, and the temple where she slept every night had the unfortunate habit of ringing very large bells at the break of dawn to begin a morning prayer. And that far south, in the middle of summer, dawn started just a few short hours after the bells had previously rung for dusk prayers. Lian had, more than anything, been looking forward to a single night's uninterrupted sleep. Sleep she evidently wouldn't find in Brilliant River Valley.

"You fucking cunt. Turn around right the fuck now."

But actually Lian's bad month had been part of a very bad summer. Flush with what she thought was enormous wealth, much of which she'd already donated to the temple that housed and cared for her son Quan, she'd returned to her twelve-year-old boy hoping to find a way to reconnect with him and maybe even discuss a way he could join her in some way in the Central Empire. She'd returned to the Zhosian mountains and the cold, windy plateau where Quan lived, with hope. Hope that the relationship she'd fractured countless times with her son would somehow be mended into something more familiar and comfortable and loving. She'd left Zhosian heartbroken, her son still living in the temple he hated almost as much as he hated his mother.

"That's it," a thick, meaty hand slammed down next to Lian's teacup, rattling it but not her. "You're gonna fucking look at me or I'm gonna twist your head to do it."