Leopard Chao Changes His Spots
Day had long fallen into night when Leopard Chao shoved free of a beastman's corpse and staggered to his feet. He spat blood, only some of it his own, and breathed in deep, shuddering breaths. The air was stale with the smell of matted fur and dead flesh, but so much sweeter than the air of the grave.
Chao laughed, high and cracked. The beastmen had ambushed his band by a rill, taking the horses first to force the fight. It had been a massacre, but Chao was a survivor; a belly cut to kill a big brute, a faked slip in its viscera to land under it and a technique to slow his breathing he'd learned from a traveling Varangian, and here he was, alive.
He tore off his shirt, soaked from the day's gore, and set to his next task. There were men fallen by, Flying Spears and Marukani, and he owed them a proper funeral at least.
He took one man's coat, though, mostly clean; the dead have their dignity, but there's no sense freezing.
Chao laid the men out. He fished smooth stones from the water and placed one on each corpse's chest to weight down their P'o souls until dawn. It was long, tiring work and it took Chao some time to realize that the weak groan he heard was not his own. On hands and knees, the mercenary bent his ear to every mouth, but man after man lay cold. Only as he reached Rabbit Wen did he hear life's wheezy rattle.
Rolling the thaumaturge onto his side, Chao sifted through the man's pack to find the healer's tools; blood-staunching compresses, wound-cleansing unguents, alchemical foulness that Chao couldn't name. But he had seen it all before, in long years soldiering, and put that experience to use.
Chao heard a far-off trumpet, but didn't recognize it, was too tired to mark it as friend or foe. He only wiped the blood from his hands. Rabbit Wen stirred, though, and sat up. Chao said "it's always the worst soldiers who survive."
Wen touched his bandaged stomach. "You left lumps in me, captain. Did you give no thought to where my spleen should sit?"
"I might have given you another man's in addition to your own. In the dark, I wasn't sure." Chao smiled at him, to spite the carnage.
"Did we lose the rest, then, captain?"
"Aye." Chao pointed to a fallen Marukani rider. "Clearfield gave his death rattle while I was busy with you. He might have lived, but I had to choose."
"They came on us quick, captain."
"We should've disguised ourselves, hid the smell of our steel beneath sheep carcasses or horse dung."
"There's enough of both here to do for us, captain, all the way to Nexus."
Leopard Chao flexed his right hand. A year before one of the Mask of Winters' deathknights had crushed it past mortal healing. There was adamant in place of some bone, now, but the work was so seamless that Chao couldn't feel it. "They saved people, Wen. They were making a better world."
"Captain?"
"I'm not going to Nexus. I'm going to hold together what they started, until they come back to finish the job."
"The general sent us home, captain. Even a dragon couldn't hold this together, with what we're facing."
"These people need somebody, Wen." The sky pinked as the sun came near and Leopard Chao stood to gather wood for the pyres. He hummed an old, familiar fanfare that he still half-heard in the distance.
Wen grunted, still too injured to help. "Then I guess I'm not going to Nexus, either."
