"Not a dream then," Cho said to herself once the coughing had stopped.
"You died." The voice was quiet and small and belonged to a young boy, kneeling on the cobbled streets beside her. He had mud coloured hair and eyes as pale and distant as clouds. He wore a faded black robe fit for a funeral, contrasted sharply by a red scarf around his neck.
Again Cho remembered the pain of her death, crisp and vivid and refusing to fade away. She struggled to sit up and then glanced down and saw her yukata soaked with blood. Peace lay nearby, lodged in a man's neck, and her other sword was still in its saya. She slipped a hand inside her robe and felt her chest.
"They stabbed you. A lot," the boy said. "Even after you died. They stabbed you some more."
Cho counted a dozen painful little wounds, each one clumsily stitched together.
"Sorry. I'm still learning how to use a needle. Flesh is quite different to cloth. It tries to slip away and you have to pull it through. I tried to be thorough." The boy was still kneeling on the cobbles; one little life amidst a sea of bodies. Yet he didn't seem out of place. He seemed very much like he belonged with the corpses. He tugged at his red scarf, working the fabric between his fingers over and over again.
Cho pulled frantically at robes to bare her skin. She didn't trust her fingers to tell her the truth, she needed to see it with her own eyes. But her fingers hadn't lied. The boy hadn't lied. Her chest was riddled with poorly sutured wounds, red marks, and skin fused by fire.
"How did I survive this?"
"You didn't. You were quite dead." There was an apology in the boy's voice.
Cho pulled her yukata tight. It was stiff with dried blood, most of it hers. For a moment she just hugged herself, trying desperately to forget the feeling of swords sliding into her, separating skin. "Then how am I alive? Am I… alive?"
"You are mostly alive. I brought you back. I can do that apparently. Only once though." He nodded, more to himself than to Cho. "Yes. I think only once. There are rules."
"You think?" Cho took a deep breath and placed her fingers to her neck to feel her pulse. It was strong and rhythmic, definitely the pulse of the living.
"You are the first person I've tried it with. You're bound to me now." The boy still hadn't moved, he knelt on the cobbles, fiddling with his scarf. Ash smudged his cheek, but he didn't wipe it away.
"Bound to you?" Cho shook her head. "I thank you for saving my life…"
"I brought you back. I cannot save what is lost, only bring it back for a time. It binds you to me."
Cho struggled to make sense of the boy's words. "The only thing that binds me to a person is my oath as a Shintei."
A frown creased the boy's face. He was young. Cho wasn't the best judge of age, but she doubted he was more than eight years old. Truth be told she was worried he might start bawling there in the street. She decided to look around for his parents, the mystery of how she was still alive could wait, but there was nobody. The courtyard outside the sanctuary was deserted save for corpses and the boy.
The morning light painted the gory scene in its full horror. She wondered how many of the bodies were her doing. Her last moments were a blur of fighting and blood. And pain. Cold steel thrusting into her, a scream that tore from her throat and scattered living and corpses alike. She shook her head and concentrated on the present.
Cho picked Peace from the ground and wiped the blade on her own yukata, there was little that could be done for it now, she would need to find something else to wear and quickly. She slid the sword back into its saya, next to its partner and rose to her feet, feeling her back crack from the stretch.
"You are bound to me," the boy said again, his voice almost pleading. "You have to help me. Those are the rules. Please."
"Help you do what?" Cho's hair had come free from its braid and stirred in the wind, thick brown strands whipping her in the face. She set about tying it back with a strip of her robe while she scavenged the dead for a body roughly her size.
"I have to kill someone." The boy got to his feet and followed after Cho like a puppy as she searched the dead. "I'm not strong enough to do it myself, so I was given the power to bring people back. I brought you back to help me."
"Hmmm." Cho found a corpse with only a savage neck wound by way of injury. She set about stripping the corpse down to its under-wrappings. She preferred the robes of her homeland to the blouse and britches the people of Hosa wore, but she found a pressing need be clothed in something not caked blood. "How long was I unconscious?"
"You were dead since last night. I had to wait for all the bandits to leave and then sew your wounds shut. You were cold by the time I was done"
"Half a day." Cho pushed the mostly naked corpse away and retreated to the steps of the sanctuary. There was less blood there. The boy followed her. "The battle will be long over. I should go after the survivors."
"They're all dead," the boy said. "Why did you sacrifice yourself here?"
Cho turned a frustrated look on the boy, yet he continued to stare at her. "Turn around."
"Why?"
"Because I need to change, and would rather you weren't looking at me."
"Oh. But I've already seen all of you when I sewed your wounds." The boy lowered his head and shuffled around to face the corpse strewn cobbles. "You must have known you couldn't win, but you stayed here anyway. You sacrificed yourself. Why?"
Cho unwrapped her yukata, folding it carefully despite its being ruined, and placed it on the second step. She pulled new under-wrappings out of a nearby backpack and bound her chest tight. She started pulling on the britches, blouse, and faded lamellar, but decided against the last. She was unused to fighting in heavy armour and doubted it would serve her well. She decided to keep her sandals, crisp with dried blood as they were. She had never liked the boots the people of Hosa pulled wore, preferring wraps and sandals.
"Long ago I swore an oath to protect the innocent. Part of my Shintei training." Cho paused and shrugged away the thought that it was an oath she had rarely kept. "I didn't really expect to die." She glanced to where the Red Bull and Hundred Cuts lay, almost lost among the other bodies. Flaming Fist and his men cared little for their own dead further than taking what was in their pockets. "Can you bring them back as well?"
The boy was still gazing away from her. He shook his head. "They are not strong enough. I need heroes to help me." He turned and again fixed her with his pale eyes, a hopeful smile on his lips. "Like you, Itami Cho. You are Whispering Blade."
Cho felt a pang of guilt at that. "I am no hero."
"You are. All of the stories say it, I've read them. You slew a thousand wolves at the Shrine of Saicomb…"
Cho set about tying her swords back around her waist. "It was more like a hundred."
"Including the great wolf, Aeva, the mother of the horde, cursed with human form in the light of the sun. You rescued Prince Ying Sung from the Burning Mines…"
"The stories definitely exaggerated that one."
"But you did rescue him before the cultists could use his skin to summon their demon god." The boy seemed more animated each time he listed one of her deeds.