Nu Xiong, a Miao hunter had been clearing thorns from his path for the better part of an hour, working his way upslope through the dense brush with the patient efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times, when the sound reached him.
Gunfire. Distant, but rapid — the staccato back-and-forth of a genuine exchange, not a single warning shot or a hunter's report. He stopped and listened.
He'd heard talk of the unrest in Chengdu, of course. The Miao and Han communities had grown close enough over the years that news traveled between them with reasonable reliability. But Chengdu was Chengdu, and this was Guang'an, and the two had always seemed like problems belonging to separate worlds.
Apparently that had changed.
He stood for a moment, perfectly still, listening to the firefight crackle and pop through the valley below. The sensible thing was to go around it. The sensible thing was to climb higher, put distance between himself and whatever was happening down there, and let Han men sort out Han problems in their usual noisy fashion.
His feet, however, had already started moving toward the sound. He noticed this only after he'd covered twenty meters, and by then it seemed pointless to argue with himself about it. He drew his blowgun and kept moving.
Below, Yang Qiu and Xiao Anguo had no idea they had acquired an audience.
"Your arm — brother, let someone else go. You're already—"
"It's fine." Yang Qiu had already torn a strip from his shirt and was wrapping the graze with his teeth and one free hand, tying it off with a competence that did not invite further discussion. He flexed his fingers, tested the tension of the bandage, and looked up. "A scratch. You just make sure that machine gun stays pointed at the road and not at the cliff. That's all I need from you."
Xiao Anguo looked at the arm, looked at Yang Qiu's face, and understood that arguing would cost him more time than it was worth. This young man had stopped being a supply soldier approximately forty minutes ago, and both of them knew it.
"Alright," he said quietly. Then, after a pause: "But if something goes wrong up there — I'll avenge you."
Yang Qiu stared at him for a moment. "That is..." He shook his head slowly. "Genuinely touching. Thank you."
He unslung the Hanyang, checked it, then reslung it across his back. Raised three fingers. Met Xiao Anguo's eyes and counted down silently.
One. Two. Three.
"Brothers — to the west! Protect the carriages!"
Whatever Xiao Anguo lacked in tactical vocabulary, he more than compensated for in raw authority. The roar came from somewhere deep in his chest, and his men responded to it the way iron filings respond to a magnet — instantly, completely, without a moment of hesitation. Ma Kui went first, which surprised nobody who knew him. Bingwen was a half-step behind. Even the soldiers who had been pinned down for the better part of an hour surged forward from their cover like men who had been waiting for exactly this.
On the hillside, Du Laoliu's men had been growing frustrated with an enemy that refused to show itself. The sudden charge caught them in the middle of that frustration, and they swung everything they had toward it — rifles, attention, and the Hotchkiss, which opened up with a shriek that knocked two of the newer recruits off their feet before they'd covered ten meters.
Yang Qiu didn't watch. The moment the machine gun pivoted away, he was moving — low and fast along the base of the cliff, crossing the exposed ground in a controlled sprint that kept his profile small, until he reached the dead end he'd already marked. His hands found the vine without fumbling. He went up fast, hand over hand, his feet walking the rock face, the old muscle memory doing what it had always done.
The climb that would have been a serious obstacle for most men in 1911 was, for someone who had trained on vertical walls twice this height in another lifetime, simply a nuisance. He crested the top, rolled into the undergrowth, and lay still for three seconds, listening.
Below, Xiao Anguo had seen him clear the top. He exhaled slowly, quietly, then found a soldier of similar build and positioned him behind the large rock, two rifles firing continuously in alternation — a simple trick, but effective. From Du Laoliu's vantage point on the hill, the silhouette and the rate of fire would suggest that Yang Qiu was still pinned down below, still occupied, still not worth worrying about.
The forest up top was dense and close, the kind of undergrowth that muffled sound and swallowed movement. Yang Qiu felt the familiar comfort of it settle over him like a second skin. He moved in short, slow intervals — advance, pause, listen — using the canopy shadow and the branches the way he'd been taught to use them, working his way around the perimeter of Du Laoliu's position.
He found him by the sound of his voice.
"Fire! Fire! Damn it, aim properly — those are twenty-silver-dollar horses down there, not target practice!"
Du Laoliu was standing by the Hotchkiss in the posture of a man who believed himself to be orchestrating something grand — palm-leaf fan in hand, brow furrowed with the studied gravity of a commander surveying his battlefield. Seven or eight bandits stood around him in a rough protective cluster. He kicked one of them for emphasis as a horse below screamed and went down.
Yang Qiu assessed the situation from the bushes, breathing slow and steady.
Seven guards, minimum. Du Laoliu within arm's reach of at least three of them at any given moment. Directly engaging would be loud, costly, and — if anyone managed to get a shot off in the chaos — likely fatal. Which left one option.
He waited.
"Go! Take men and push down the slope — I'll have the gun cover you! Five silver dollars for every kill!"
The bribe landed like a spark in dry grass. The bandits roared. A significant portion of Du Laoliu's protective cluster dissolved immediately, streaming down toward the road with the single-minded enthusiasm of men who had done the math and liked the numbers. The machine gunner poured fire ahead of them, covering the charge.
Yang Qiu watched the guards thin out and felt himself go very calm — the particular stillness that had nothing to do with peace and everything to do with focus, the feeling of a body organizing itself around a single purpose. He shifted his weight forward, pistol in hand, safety off.
One of the remaining guards was standing with his back partially turned, attention fixed entirely on the fight below.
Yang Qiu moved.
The man didn't hear him coming. A hand caught his neck from behind, fingers finding the right angle with the precision of long practice, and Yang Qiu twisted sharply. The sound was quiet and final. He lowered the body without breaking stride, pivoting smoothly to the next man and dropping him with a single sweeping kick that took his legs out from under him and put his head against the ground.
The third turned just in time to see the muzzle of the Colt M1911.
The .45 caliber round at close range was not a surgical instrument. The man was already falling backward when he hit the bandit behind him, and the collective confusion of the remaining guards — trying to process what was happening, where it was coming from, why their comrades were suddenly going down — cost them the half-second they needed.
Several of them didn't get another half-second.
The sharp, flat reports of the Colt M1911 cut across the ambient noise of the firefight below, and by the time the bandits further down the slope realized that something had gone badly wrong on the hill, it was already over. The men who had been splattered with the results of a .45 round at close range were not in a position to contribute further to the discussion.
Du Laoliu had dropped his fan.
He spun, hand reaching for his own weapon, and found the muzzle of an unfamiliar short pistol pressed against his forehead. Every man around him was down. The machine gunner in the trees had swung the Hotchkiss around, but his finger stayed away from the trigger — his leader was currently being used as a windbreak, Yang Qiu's arm locked around his chest, the pistol steady at his temple.
A long, taut silence.
"So," Yang Qiu said pleasantly, "would you like me to explain how this works, or have you got it?"
Du Laoliu, who had made a significant amount of money in recent months by being bold and moderately clever, now discovered that boldness had certain hard limits. His legs were shaking. His mouth had gone dry. The remaining bandits stood in frozen uncertainty, weapons half-raised, looking at their leader for guidance that he was manifestly incapable of providing.
"Hero—" His voice came out smaller than he intended. "Hero, spare me. I have an eighty-year-old mother at home who depends entirely on—"
The pistol butt connected with his forehead with a clean, solid crack.
Du Laoliu's vision went briefly white.
"Eighty-year-old mother," Yang Qiu repeated, with the tone of a man who has heard a particularly unconvincing excuse for the second time in one week. He searched Du Laoliu's pockets with brisk efficiency while the man was still blinking away stars — and stopped.
He held up the pistol he'd found in Du Laoliu's waistband and looked at it.
A Mauser C96. He turned it over. The real article, not a Hanyang copy — those wouldn't show up for several more years yet. How a mountain bandit in Sichuan had gotten hold of a Mauser C96 was a question that deserved a proper answer, but not right now.
He pocketed it and kept searching.
The money belt came last. He could feel the bulk of it before he saw it — thick with banknotes, representing what was obviously the accumulated proceeds of several months of highway robbery. He transferred it to his own person without ceremony.
Du Laoliu, watching this, made a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a whimper.
"Hero — hero, listen. Let me go, and everything here is yours. The machine gun, all the rifles, everything. It's all yours."
Yang Qiu looked at him. "It's already mine."
Du Laoliu's mouth opened. Then closed. Then he appeared to genuinely reckon with the logical situation he was in, and his expression shifted from entreaty to a kind of stunned self-reproach. He was in their hands. The guns were not going to fly away. He had, in fact, just offered to trade things that were already gone in exchange for his freedom.
Before he could fully process the depth of this miscalculation, something stung his thigh like a hot needle. He looked down and saw blood darkening his trousers, and understood dimly that Yang Qiu had apparently decided that the negotiation was over.
A .45 caliber round, at close range, on a human leg, is not a minor inconvenience. It was something approaching a miracle that Du Laoliu still had the leg at all — for a man of ordinary build, the bone would have simply ceased to exist. As it was, Du Laoliu discovered that he was capable of a volume and register of screaming that he had not previously suspected himself capable of, and he used it to instruct his remaining men, in terms that brooked absolutely no ambiguity, to put their weapons on the ground immediately.
They did.
The bandits who had charged down the slope returned to find their leader weeping, their comrades disarmed, and a very tall young man with a bloodied arm standing in the middle of it all looking profoundly unimpressed. The fight went out of them in the way that fights do when the math stops working — quickly, completely, and without negotiation.
Xiao Anguo and his men crested the hill at a run. The soldiers, carrying five dead comrades and several wounded in the back of their minds, worked through the remaining bandits with rifle butts and then with rope, and the sounds of the mountain road settled from gunfire into the quieter, grimmer sounds of the aftermath.
Ma Kui found Du Laoliu first, relieved him of everything he had somehow managed to retain, and then dragged him to a corner with several other soldiers whose eyes had gone flat and red. What happened in that corner was not complicated.
"Well done." Xiao Anguo came to Yang Qiu, looked him over carefully — front, back, both arms — and, apparently satisfied, punched him once in the chest with evident relief. "I'll recommend you for a commendation the moment we reach Chengdu."
"You flatter me, sir." Yang Qiu was breathing harder than he wanted to admit. The body he was currently inhabiting had a decent foundation — the old Yang Qiu had clearly taken his training seriously — but it was not the body he'd spent years conditioning in another life. Now that the immediate necessity had passed, every muscle he owned was informing him of this fact simultaneously. He felt as though he'd been wrung out. "How many did we lose?"
Xiao Anguo's expression settled into something older and heavier. "Five dead. Several wounded." He was quiet for a moment, then turned and walked over to where Du Laoliu was being attended to in the corner and added several kicks of his own before coming back. It was not a dignified thing to do, but Yang Qiu found he had no inclination to comment on it. "Pack everything up. If someone heard that noise and comes to investigate, we don't want to still be here."
Bingwen drifted over, looking at Yang Qiu with an expression that suggested he was seeing him slightly differently than he had that morning. He started to say something, stopped, and then managed: "The prisoners, sir — what do we do with them?"
Xiao Anguo didn't hesitate. "Strip the guns. Take everything useful. The rest of them—" He made a brief, downward gesture toward the cliff edge.
Yang Qiu opened his mouth.
"Help! The Qing army is coming! The Qing army—!"
The scream erupted from somewhere above and to the left, piercing and ragged, the unmistakable pitch of genuine animal terror. A figure in Miao clothing burst from the treeline at a dead sprint — thin, fast, moving with the specific urgency of someone who had already calculated that speed was their only remaining asset — and was gone down the far slope before anyone had fully raised a weapon, the screaming fading unevenly into the valley below like something falling away.
Silence.
Yang Qiu and Xiao Anguo looked at each other.
The same thought arrived in both of them at the same moment. They'd been so focused on the machine gun, the flanking maneuver, the prisoners — they hadn't cleared the surrounding brush. Someone had been up here watching. For how long, neither of them knew. Long enough.
They both raised a hand and, in near-perfect unison, slapped themselves across the face.
Careless.
"Brother Yang." Bingwen's voice had shifted register — higher, strained, with an edge of barely contained laughter that he was clearly fighting to suppress. He was pointing. "Your... your backside."
"What about my—"
Yang Qiu turned his head and saw it. A blowgun dart, buried in the meat of his left buttock, its small tail feathers still trembling faintly in the mountain breeze, as though pleased with themselves.
The silence stretched.
"Miao poison dart," Bingwen said, with the careful tone of someone delivering news they are not personally responsible for.
Yang Qiu stared at the dart. The dart, in a manner of speaking, stared back. He thought about the Miao figure in the trees, the blowgun clearly visible in the man's hand as he'd climbed. He thought about the fact that he had been so focused on Du Laoliu's guards that he had apparently failed to notice someone standing behind him with a tube pointed at his rear end.
He turned to Bingwen with the expression of a man who has decided that embarrassment is a luxury he cannot currently afford. "You. Come here and—"
Bingwen was already backing away.
"Bingwen—"
"I have to — I need to check on the horses—"
"There aren't any horses left, you watched them shoot the—" Yang Qiu pivoted toward Ma Kui, who had materialized from the corner with the finely tuned survival instincts of a man who had read the situation half a second ahead and was already moving toward the tree line. "Brother Ma—"
Ma Kui did not stop moving.
Yang Qiu turned to Xiao Anguo with the focused desperation of a man running out of options. "Sir. My lord. The poison — someone needs to—"
Xiao Anguo looked at the dart. Looked at Yang Qiu. Looked at the dart again. Then, with great dignity, he turned and began issuing instructions to his men about packing up the Hotchkiss.
"My lord—! Someone — anyone — I just saved all of your lives, the least you could do is—"
The mountain offered no reply except the distant fading echo of a Miao man's screaming, already halfway to Guang'an and showing no signs of slowing down.