Excerpt: Kill one to warn a hundred.

The streets of Xianyang were humid and smelly in the Spring. Trash lay piled in the corners and dogs scavenged through it with easy abandon, their tails wagging viciously to swat away the accumulating flies. At dusk, the city dwellers would sweep away the trash as best they could, piling it up into heaps in back alleys and menacing the dogs with brooms to stay away from their homes. A stray dog can be a ferocious enemy, but it is also a coward. Their homes defended, the men would find their ways to wine bars or front stoops and gossip lazily about their neighbors and the days events, while the women began to put on the pots for dinner. It was at these dusk conversations, when the sun was just beginning to droop heavily behind terraced rooftops, that the most interesting viewpoints could be heard. It was also at these lazy gatherings that the observant could witness some strange or significant events.

The men sitting outside Old Li's shop that evening would be witness to one such significant event, though they did not realize it at the time. As they sat, talking and drinking rice wine out of oversized bowls while the aroma of fresh cooked rice began to waft from the interior of the shop, a caravan rattled by on the dirt road beside them. It was an ordinary enough looking caravan - plenty of them passed this way regularly. Xianyang was the capitol of the empire and the seat of Shi Huangdi. Trade and goods were plenty here. If you wanted to find something, they would say, you could find it in Xianyang. So no, a caravan rattling along a road was not something to pay much attention to at all.

As it passed them by the man sitting up front behind the mules said barely a word, his face low and dark underneath a wide-brimmed hat. A terrible stench emanated from the back of his wagon, like rotting fish, improperly salted and preserved. The men nearly moved to turn away at the smell, wrinkling their noses and pulling their sleeves up to cover their faces. How could the driver sit like that and not want to vomit, they wondered. And why was he bringing such obviously spoiled cargo in to the market? Surely he did not expect to sell it here.

"I think your fish is bad," one of the men called out by way of a friendly gesture. They were amicable enough men and they had been drinking for quite some time now. So it seemed natural enough to greet the stranger although they did not know him and he had given no indication of noticing them. The driver of the caravan seemed to scowl as they spoke to him, though again it was difficult to make out his features in the shadows of his hat. He beat the mules more vigorously and the caravan began to move at a more rapid speed, disappearing around a bend in the road. The men watched it leave, but before they could think more on the oddity of the encounter, a woman emerged from the shop with the first of several steaming bowls of porridge and any thoughts of ill-advised merchants was lost in the promise of food.