Shuli Go Stories Vol. 3: The Stories They Tell

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.