The next morning they left the gambling den just after sunrise – Mei having promised double his losses plus interest to the owner – and set off towards the docks, where Mei promised he still had a deal with a merchant ship heading east.

“You mean the one that sold you out to the guard when you couldn’t pay?”

“No, that was a different ship, after the captain of the one I did pay for found me trying to sleep with his sister.”

“So our escape relies on a man who’s already turned you out once and whose sister you bedded?”

“Tried to bed. And yes. That was three days ago now though, I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

“And what about passage for me?”

“Well, you’ll probably have to work for your keep, but it shouldn’t be hard for a Shuli Go…”

Lian wanted to let him know just how terrible his plan was, but she didn’t have a better one, and she wanted to leave Chongqing as quickly as possible, preferably without any conflict. Working her way east before coming back to the Empire wasn’t the worst solution she could think of.

They reached the shore and hid atop a low roofed building adjacent to the docks, then surveyed the situation. The docks were already filling up with men and cargo coming and going, the usual dockside vendors also opening their stores. Most importantly, there were only four city guard on watch, each on two slow, leisurely patrols. Lian did not expect it to be difficult to avoid them.

“That one over there,” Mei pointed to the ship second farthest from them – a medium sized one with one large sail painted the eastern merchant blue. “We need to get aboard quickly, the captain said he was leaving at first dawn.”

“Ok,” Lian responded, wrapping her sword in a cheap piece of fabric that they’d stolen from the room the night before.

“You ready?” Mei asked.

Lian nodded, and they descended the side of the building, then waited for a set of laborers making their way to the dock for a day’s work: their clothes and appearance as haggard as Mei’s and Lian’s. The pair fell in behind the laborers, hoping to blend in. The laborers headed to the first available ship, and Lian went as if to follow them, but Mei pulled away, heading straight to their target. Lian paused momentarily between the two paths before quickly trotting to catch up with Mei. She glanced around nervously to see if anyone had noticed the oddity of her path, but it was still too early for anyone to care. The two pairs of guards were each interacting with the merchant stalls a hundred yards away from the piers, and the way was clear. Lian and Mei both picked up their pace as they reached the halfway point to their ship.

Then a full division of the city guard came around a corner from the other end of the dock, near their ship. Twenty soldiers in armor, spears and swords, walking on a direct path to intercept them.

Mei grabbed Lian’s hand and whispered, “We need to run!”

Lian squeezed his hand back in warning, “If we run, they’ll notice and stop us.”

“If we don’t run they’ll spot us anyway. That’s the same group of guards that arrested me…”

“Just keep walking, nice and calm, keep your head down—”

But Lian knew it was too late. Mei was panicking, his entire body vibrating through to his hands. More than anything he wanted to avoid capture, and for once he was not clever enough to know how to get what he wanted. So he let go of her hand and sprinted, straight towards the ship, still a hundred and fifty yards away.

“Shit,” Lian cursed, jogging to catch up to him, hoping that their pursuit looked like two lovers in a fight and not two escaped convicts making a run for it.

Unfortunately for her, no one bought it. One of the guards spotted Mei and with her superior hearing Lian could hear him announce to the whole guard, “There! The man running! Isn’t he the one we arrested?”

“What?” A different voice, louder and gruffer, asked. “The one who escaped?”

“That is him! Quick!”

“Fucking shit,” Lian swore again, and then set off in a sprint. She caught up to Mei quickly and just as quickly realized he wouldn’t be able to make it to the pier before the guards did. “Keep going!” She yelled into his ear, making sure he heard over the sound of his own panicked wheezing, “I’ll buy you some time.”

She turned her run towards the city guard and yelled over her shoulder, “Make sure it’s ready to go!”

As she approached the guards a chorus of shouts rose up to get out of the way, each yell colored with a unique condemnation of her gender. None of them saw her as a threat however. It was that stupidity that let her kill three of them before the first of them even shouted, “She has a sword!”

After those first three, her fight instantly became desperate – her every effort not on killing or even wounding any of them, but just keeping them focused on her while simultaneously not surrounding her, so that she could eventually make a run for the ship. Their spears posed the greatest risk, but Lian had trained against similar weapons for years, and killed men more skilled than these many times. She parried, slashed, and broke shafts with ease, even managing to grab hold of the spears and pull the soldiers in towards their death on two occasions. But eventually the louder one who had shouted – the captain, evidently – began to realize what was happening, and ordered his men to form an encirclement.

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Lian glanced back at the ship, no more visibly ready to go than it had been moments earlier. They needed more time. Lian grimaced as the encirclement became complete, slowing her movements and prompting the guardsmen to do the same. Every few seconds she glanced at the ship, until finally she saw movement on the sails.

The circle was now tight however, and the guardsmen with spears remaining were too numerous to attack individually. Instead of striking out, she flipped her sword downward in her palm, faced towards the ship, closed her eyes, and channeled her energy.

“Puoto-de, kuotu-yuano” she intoned in ancient Imperial, and struck down into the ground with her blade. And directly in front of her, in an arc of about thirty degrees, the ground shook with a terrible vibration. A vibration that travelled up the feet of each of the guardsmen, and into their legs, where it struck their bones and shattered each one into hundreds of pieces.

More terrifying than the sound of the wave were the screams of the fallen, their bodies collapsing onto the ground but lacking a way to die immediately. It was one of the most painful spells a Shuli Go could cast, and Lian hated using it, but it was all she could do in the situation. She sprinted past the fallen soldiers and left the ones still standing shouting and shrieking in disbelief. The captain was attempting to corral his troops back to attack her but she was too fast. She made it to the pier, then to the rope ladder waiting for her on the side of the ship. Hauling herself up, she arrived on the deck of the ship to find it in a flurry of activity as they prepared to leave.

The guard captain was not finished however. He brought three men from his guard and the four patrol officers with him, and they too, made it to the ship. One of the deckhands tried pulling up the ladder and received a spear into the throat for his trouble. The deck grew quiet and the crew backed away, leaving a small clearing near Lian, where the guard captain appeared first, followed by his other men.

The bone shattering vibration spell had taken more energy out of Lian than she liked. Her sword was starting to feel heavy in her hands, and her entire body was racked with soreness. Channeling enough energy to destroy bodies had left her own exhausted. And eight men, determined and well armed, might as well have been eight hundred.

Still she raised her sword into a defensive posture and breathed deeply, trying to marshal her strength.

Then Mei stepped in.

Whispering something of his own in ancient Imperial, he came up beside her and flicked his hands. With each flick the wind roared to life, nearly pushing her over and successfully knocking three of the soldiers off the side of the ship. The others barely held on, falling to their knees to lower their centers of gravity.

It took Lian a moment, but eventually she realized it was magic. Yet another type of magic that very few people in the world knew. But this was not bedtime story magic, this was something she recognized, and identified him at once for who he was.

“Leave now,” Mei bellowed, his voice strong and menacing, the final metamorphosis away from the lighthearted man who had brought her out of sadness the night before and the delicate, wounded merchant she’d met on the road. Very few had the training to be all three things and to be each of them so convincingly.

“Mei,” she whispered. To herself really, her face contorted in confusion and fear.

“Leave!” He yelled again, his voice booming, the wind echoing his words and their ferocity.

It worked too, the four other soldiers all voluntarily jumped off the ship and ran back onto the pier rather than face this much magic all at once.

The captain was unswayed. An older man, perhaps in his forties, with grey in his beard and sweat pouring down from under his helmet, looked calmly at Mei and grinned as though he had seen through all of Mei’s tricks and could now kill him in style. Lian was about to interject and fight him herself, when the captain suddenly lunged at Mei with his spear outstretched.

Mei reached a hand out towards the guardsman and then flicked his fingers apart. At once the captain’s spear dropped out of his hand and he stumbled towards the ground. Mei’s hand remained pointed at the guard’s head, and the older man rolled about on the ground. When he faced upwards again Lian knew what Mei was doing.

The guardsman’s face was blue, deprived of all oxygen. Mei had created a vacuum around the man’s head, a magical barrier through which no air could reach. The man clawed at his throat, his face, and finally at Mei himself, but eventually he died, every blood vessel on his face exploded, his chest cavity expanded and his eyes the full black dilation of death.

Mei closed his hand and exhaled, the powerful magic taking something out of him too. Lian stared at him for a second, wanting to ask him a million questions, when the captain of the ship appeared and asked them instead.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Captain, good sir,” Mei’s jovial attitude coming back quickly, “we really should be going shouldn’t we?”

“Are you kidding? They’re going to have me fucking hanged for that! You kill Chongqing guardsmen on my ship? And expect to get away with it?”

“Please, it was purely in self-defense, and I think you’ll find—”

But the captain was having nothing of it. “Boys! Get the swords, we’ve got to kill this bastard and send his body back to the mayor before she has us all gutted.”

Before Lian could even think of responding, Mei already had.

“You won’t do that,” he said, the joviality out of his voice faster than it had arrived.

“Like hell I won’t. I make my living coming to this port. I’ll not have it closed on me because of some two-shit wizard decided he and the missus needed a honeymoon.”

The crew had produced daggers and small knives, and were already getting closer than Lian liked. She began to count how many she could kill before they overwhelmed her.

“You so much as take another step, I’ll do to you all what I did to him!” Mei announced, the wind once again appearing out of nowhere and amplifying his voice.

“Like shit!” The captain spat at Mei and then rushed him.

And Mei did to them all exactly what he said he’d do.

He spread his arms wide and all at once the air disappeared for fifty yards in all directions. Including around Lian.

The experience was amazing. And terrifying. She was struck first by the change in pressure, her lungs suddenly feeling as if they’d been expanded with a bellows. So fierce was the desire to exhale, she spent half her breath before she realized what was happening and managed to keep it in her lungs. Her vision began to cave almost instantly, and her entire body went numb at once. She collapsed onto her knees before she began to channel her Shuli Go techniques of elongation, the kind that allowed her to breathe underwater for minutes at a time. But this was not breathing underwater, this was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Worst of all was the pain, emanating from every point of her body, as the oxygen ran low and her body burned with a deep hunger – a hunger so used to being sated its appearance was a profound torture she had never expected. It was that torture that eventually rendered her unconscious.

But not before she caught one last sight of Mei, his arms outstretched and his eyes wide open, the irises a blazing hot red and the whites themselves illuminated as if with a fire.

“Mei,” she tried to whisper to him, only there was no air to deliver the message.