Ren
Fa snaps awake in a back alley in Kaitei City with no memory of how he got
there or where is he is or even who he is. He only knows three things: his
name, the name of the man who woke up in the alley next to him, and that he has
to get out of the city before a nebulous someone from his forgotten past tracks
him down and kills him. In order to escape a city in the grip of a tyrannical
governor, he and the equally amnesiac Li Jiang sneak aboard a merchant vessel
taking books to the far-off city of Gaôzu.
Only
it's not a merchant vessel. It's a disguised nauto-aeroship—a ship fueled by
alchemy that can travel by sea and air—and it's captained by one of the most
notorious pirates in the Yè Xiàn Ocean or the Yún Sea of Clouds above it. The
government calls her a necromancer and a criminal. The oppressed citizens of
the empire call her a hero. Her men, ghost-warriors rescued from the empress's
slave camps, call her simply Captain Mŭlăohŭ, the Tigress.
A
dethroned princess with an unusual connection to the sea, Mŭlăohŭ has more
important things to worry about than two stowaways on her ship. She has a little
sister to overthrow and an empire to take back. But Ren may hold the key to
doing just that, if his secrets and his past don't get them killed first.
In
an alternate steampunk world resembling a dystopian Imperial China, where
condemned men are sentenced to eternity in terra cotta prisons and mermaids
have razor teeth and a thirst for blood, where sky pirates are the good guys
and smuggling books is a capital crime, this is the story of two sisters vying
for a throne and the man caught between them…who may or may not be an enemy.
TIGRESS SHARK will take you from the Beijing-like city of Kaitei to the depths
of the Yè Xiàn Ocean, from the Valley of the Emperor's Necropolis to the
heights of the Jade City floating in the Yún Sea of Clouds as Mŭlăohŭ and Ren
lead the first wave of a rebellion five years in the making.
