The next day Lian, Yaling, and An strolled alongside the walls of Prefect Tai’s palace, within the gates of the Ancient Castle. They were dressed in a primary color triptych of Yaling’s bourgeois dresses, playing the part of three friends out for a tourist’s stroll through the oldest quarter of one of the Empire’s oldest cities. Even if they had deliberately posed as three women looking to rob one of the great estates, there would have been enough real tourists to render the three of them more or less invisible to the guards that walked alongside them.

The Ancient Castle of Liangyong had served as the capital for at least three different dynasties, and though travel across the Empire was too expensive for the great majority of the population, those who could often listed the Ancient Capital as the one place they would visit. The residents of Ming Kingdom were particularly fond of their own capital, and for his fiftieth birthday the King had actually offered to pay for a trip to the capital for every person in the Kingdom who could prove they’d never seen the Ancient Castle or the rest of Liangyong. As far as state subsidies went, tourism was an odd industry to pander to for a politician, but it had briefly made him the most popular official in all the Empire. Rumor had it that the Empress had briefly considered a similar Empire-wide edict for the capital of Nianjang.

The Ancient Castle was less a castle than the original core of Liangyong, perched atop the southern cliffs above the Harmony River. Like a true castle though, it was defined by its walls, a haphazard semi-circle that had protected Emperors and the city from invaders, rebellions, and other, now mythical creatures that had threatened the Central Empire over the centuries. Within those walls the city had been gradually refitted into a few sprawling palaces, a smattering of expensive shops, and the Imperial Throne.

The Imperial Throne was the actual Imperial castle that had been rebuilt and renovated at the start of the Shan dynasty, even though the capital had been moved to Nianjang. It was sixteen stories high at its tallest, made of gleaming white sand-brushed stone from across the Empire; its main doors were painted Imperial red, over fifty feet tall, and embroidered with a golden tapestry describing the birth of the Empire after the Intersection between Heaven and Hell; its windows the first glass ones in the Empire, then the first stained glass ones, then the first to open and close with seals strong enough to keep out the wind and rain. Inside was even more lavish, and each day thousands of tourists walked alongside the Imperial Throne, gawked at its immensity, and toured its insides with state-appointed guides whose fees scaled along with the quality of their clients’ clothes.

The Imperial Throne loomed just a few hundred yards to the right of the three women as they stopped to rest their feet and fan themselves. Their eyes weren’t on the huge tower or its red doors however, but the much smaller, similarly painted doors of the Prefect’s own palace.

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“Only two guards,” Chen noted as she sipped from a water skin a few dozen feet from Tai’s door and the guards. “That’s no problem.”

“That’s only outside,” Lian said. “Probably a hundred inside. Besides, those ones aren’t really guards...”

“What do you mean?” Yaling asked from behind her fan, looking guardedly at the guards: rotund and pink faced, their armor barely fit and their weapons were dull and grimy. Just then a family approached carrying a toddler, who pointed to one of the guards. The guard picked the child from the arms of one of the tourists and put his helmet on the child. Everyone laughed.

“I see. They’re the pretty ones in the windows of the whorehouse,” Yaling commented.

“I don’t think walking in the front door is going to work,” Lian said.

“I haven’t seen any other way in, and we’ve been around the whole grounds twice,” An replied, picking at all the various places on her body Yaling’s too-small dress chafed and discomforted her.

“Well then, I guess that takes the ground out of the equation,” Lian said, then stared at An until the implication set in.

“Oh no…”

“Hold on,” Yaling said, staring at the guards, who had sent the tourist family on and had caught sight of the three women. “Time to move on,” she whispered at the same time as she smiled and waved at the guards, who naturally smiled and waved back.

Lian and An began a slow saunter away from the Prefect’s doors, Yaling a few steps behind.

“You’re not thinking the sewers?” An whispered angrily to Lian.

“Of course I’m thinking the sewers.” Lian responded.

“Of course you’d say that, you’ve never walked through them.”

“Hardly anyone has. Except you of course. That’s why it’ll work. They won’t expect it.”

“The sewers don’t even extend into all parts of the Ancient Castle. I don’t even know if they connect this far out.”

“Well we’ll have to do some subterranean investigating then won’t we?”

“By ‘we’ you mean ‘me’ though.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Ok see that’s where I have a problem.”

“What about you Yaling, do you have a problem?”

But Yaling was no longer behind them, and when Lian turned around she found Yaling at the red painted doors, talking with the guards.

“Shit.”

The guards were, of course, already putty-like in Yaling’s hands, but they nonetheless retained a semblance of a guard’s instinct, remembering that Yaling had had two friends, they scanned until their eyes rested on Lian and An.

“Quick, hold up your fan like you can’t believe she’s talking to them,” Lian instructed.

Both their fans shot up as if covering two sets of conspiratorial giggles. “I can’t believe she’s talking to them,” An raged.

“We have to get out of here, they can’t remember what we look like,” Lian stressed as Yaling stepped through the red doors escorted by one guard, while the other kept his eyes on Yaling’s co-conspirators.

They trundled off, An’s gait uncomfortable on account of the dress and Lian’s too fast on account of wanting to be anywhere else but under the eyes of the public relations specialists that doubled as Tai’s guards.

“That bitch,” Lian muttered to herself as they exited the Ancient Castle, An already twenty feet behind her muttering a similar expletive towards their shared friend.