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 if Chao couldn't save them he could at least give them a proper funeral.
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, side-by-side. He fished the smoothest stones he could from the water, and placed one on each corpse's chest, to weight down their P'o souls until the 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 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 he put that experience to use.
Blood covered his hands by the time he was done, and when he heard a trumpet sound from far off, he was too tired to recognize it. Wen stirred, though, and sat up. Chao smiled at him, to spite the carnage. "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." The two men laughed, until Wen clutched his side and groaned.
"Did we lose the rest, then, captain?"
"Aye." Chao pointed to a fallen Marukani rider. "I heard Clearfield give his death rattle while I was working on you. He might have lived, but I had to choose between you two."
"They came on us quick, captain."
"Aye. 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 of the 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 think maybe it's worth holding what they started together, 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."
"So we do it my way, Wen. No armies that anyone can see, no stand-offs. We get sneaky, we go underground. We help these people do what Leopard Chao does; we help them survive."
The sky pinked as the sun came near and Leopard Chao stood to gather wood for the pyres. All the while, he hummed an old, familiar fanfare that he still half-heard in the distance.
