I kept my spear leveled at Xie Qingyun's chest, watching the fight drain out of his one good eye. He sighed deeply as behind him, his men were being roughly handled by villagers who had remembered, somewhere in the chaos, that they outnumbered these raiders three to one.

  "Get off the horse," I said.

  Xie Qingyun dismounted slowly, his hands raised. He let his dao drop to the dust.

  "You're no simple deserter," he said surprisingly calm, studying me.

  Lady Chen herself was crouched in the dirt beside the fallen gunner, the SanYanChong in her hands. She checked the barrels, peered into the touch holes, ran her fingers along the mechanism with the familiarity of someone who had handled such weapons before. Then she stopped to search the quivering man next to her and produced what looked like a bottle and a bag of what appeared to be paper wads.

  "As I thought," she said, loud enough for the gathered villagers to hear. "No fire rope. You had powder charges and shot but the barrels aren't even properly loaded." She held it up, letting the morning light fall on its three dark mouths. "Although you've kept it in great shape."

  Xie Qingyun scoffed, "We could keep a weapon polished and oiled."

  A murmur rippled through the crowd. Deng Yuan, the village leader, pushed forward, his weathered face cycling through confusion, relief, and something that might have been anger.

  "... it was all a bluff?"

  "Mostly." Lady Chen set the weapon down carefully. "The SanYanChong is real enough. Zhang RuLin's forces do use them. But this one was probably looted from a near LuoYang," a hint of sorrow crept into her voice that quickly vanished, "and whoever took it didn't understand how to make it work."

  "What do we do with 'em?" Deng Yuan demanded, gesturing at the captured bandits. There were eight of them, including Xie Qingyun, disarmed and surrounded by farmers whose initial shock was rapidly transforming into rage. "They've been terrorizing us for months. Stealing our grain. Threatening our families."

  "String 'em up!"

  "Kill 'em," someone shouted.

  "Make an example of 'em!"

  The crowd pressed forward. Xie Qingyun, for all his earlier bluster, looked defeated rather than defiant.

  "Wait." My voice cut through the rising anger. I took a few paces towards Xie, diverting my head slightly when the SanYanChong barrel happened to come close to pointing at me and Lady Chen turned the weapon to point its mouth skyward. "Before we decide their fate, I want to understand something... Why?" I dropped down to eye level with the bound bandit.

  Xie Qingyun blinked. "Why what?"

  "You're not a natural bandit. You at least are ex-military."

  Something flickered in his one good eye. "What does it matter?"

  "Indulge me."

  "I was a captain in the Hedong garrison," he said quietly. "Six years. Fought the Khitan twice, the Xi once. Then I took an arrow to the eye at Yingzhou."

  Not one of my men at least. Hedong was still to this day in Tang hands.

  "So you turned to robbery." JingXi butted in.

  "I tried farming first." His tone was sarcastic. "Working land you don't own, giving most of your harvest to a fat aristocrat who's never held a hoe in his life?" He tried to gesture at his defeated band. "Better to die on my feet than on my knees."

  The crowd had gone quiet. I saw farmers exchanging glances, their righteous anger dampened by recognition.

  Lady Chen turned to me. "What do you think?"

  I was surprised she asked. "Military justice says execute them."

  "And if military justice isn't the only consideration?" LingZhu prodded.

  I said finally. "The followers. They're not leaders. They did what they did because they saw no other choice. "

  "And Xie?"

  I looked at the one-eyed man. "He... has to answer for that." The phrase made me somewhat thoughtful and I stroked my chin.

  "You know what... lets hold onto them for now"

  We stayed in QingTian Village for three days more.

  The villagers insisted. They fed us, let us rest, shared what little they had. We kept the bandits locked in an unused Yaodong as we found ourselves resting in another.

  Iron Wang took the time to do what he could with Jinxi and LingZhu's blades, connecting the broken tips of the blades back onto their bodies. I noticed he'd drip a few drops of his own blood, pricked from a finger as the metal hissed together. It was a common enough tradition for blacksmith and craftsmen though I never understood it.

  It beat human sacrifice anyways.

  He was distinctly more interested in Lady Chen's black steel sword. "I can't do much with this," Iron Wang gruffly remarked as he inspected the edge. "Harder than any I'd made, I'd ruin it reheating it." He pointed to a missing piece where the Heavenly Daoist's blade had made contact. "I reckon you've got a structural issue 'ere." He shook his head. "Whatever was hard enough to do it, you should stop trying to cut."

  Lady Chen however, was watching me.

  "You're thinking about the battle," she said. It wasn't a question.

  "I froze." I admit the words were rough to say. "When I saw that weapon, I couldn't move. Couldn't think. I was back at Songjiatun—" I stopped.

  "Cui BoFeng." Her saying my name made me look up. "Courage isn't the absence of fear."

  She thought for a moment.

  "Would you like to try shooting it?"

  I blinked and then slowly brought myself to nodding.

  The lesson came the following morning, in a clearing outside the village where the sound of practice hopefully wouldn't disturb anyone. I thought the chance of that was rather unavoidable.

  "The SanYanChong is a three-barreled matchlock," she began, laying the weapon out on a cloth between us. "Each barrel is loaded separately with powder and shot. The fire rope,this braided cord treated with saltite, is lit pressed here." She pointed to a hole I hadn't noticed before. "The touch hole, igniting the powder."

  ".... That is a lot of words I've never heard used that way"

  Lady Chen was incredibly patient. She carefully explained what a barrel was, what the principle behind the black powder was. Shot was easier for me to grasp, as it reminded me of slingshots and pebbles I'd played with as a child.

  She walked me through the process: measuring powder, wadding, shot, tamping each carefully. It was slower than I expected, more methodical. Maybe I'd have won out had I simply continued to charge after shots had been fired before. But alas...

  "Loading takes time. Misfires, no shot happening when the fire rope is applied, are common. About one in every three shots. The smoke and noise give away your position. In close combat, against a trained martial artist, you'd be dead before you finished reloading." She looked at me. "These weapons changed warfare not because they're better than swords and spears, but because they require less training. A farmer can learn to fire one in a day. It takes years to produce a skilled swordsman."

  I braced myself and applied the burning rope to the hole while the long wooden handle was tucked under my arm. The thunder boomed, slightly dulled by the cloth in my ear. Painful nonetheless and leaving my ears ringing. Ten paces away a small shrub evaporated into a hail of branches. I fired off the remaining two barrels in rapid succession.

  "I can see why Colonel Zhang uses them," I let out a breath after my ears stopped ringing. Suddenly I felt powerful, more than I ever had with a spear. A sort of intoxicating confidence that anyone before me would fall.

  We practiced for an hour, loading, aiming, the careful process of firing. By the end, my hands were black with powder residue and my shoulders ached from holding the unfamiliar weight. Lady Chen took stock of the supplies we'd confiscated and motioned for us to stop.

  "You're not a natural marksman," Lady Chen observed.

  I grinned, "I'm barely a natural soldier."