They had never seen a body hung up like this before, rigid and with the hands and face swollen. His clothes had once been very fine, silk dyed a rosy madder, and his traveling shoes looked hardly worn at all. Horribly, Chih found themself thinking that he looked like some kind of decoration, hung up to celebrate a midsummer festival or perhaps some child’s name-day and then left behind when all the rest had been taken down.

“We missed the party,” they said in a very small voice, and Lao Bingyi gave them a sharp look before nodding.

“We certainly did,” she said. “Now come help me, cleric.”

“Um, what?” asked Chih blankly, and Lao Bingyi gestured towards the hanging body.

“We need to help him down,” she said bluntly. “Khanh is going to cut the rope.”

Chih was already shaking their head, their eyes wide, hot, and dry, their hands making vague refusing gestures as if they had been offered food they did not particularly care for.

“Oh, oh, no I can’t,” they said, a little shrill.

“Of course you can. You’re strong enough, believe me, and he needs it more than you need to stand by and stare.”

Chih wanted to refuse again, but Khanh, who was already dragging in a sawed stump that was used for seating at the shelter in normal times, nudged them as he went by.

“Do you know what it’s like to cut down a hanged body? This is how you find out.”

Chih swallowed hard and nodded. They weren’t brave, and despite the shaved head and the indigo robes, they weren’t particularly virtuous, but more than anything else, they were curious, and sometimes that could stand in for the rest.

They came with Lao Bingyi to grasp the hanged man around his waist and one leg. There was a skin-crawling moment where the man’s cold hard hand brushed their chest, and up close, there was a smell after all, something musky and choking. Chih grasped the hanged man with Lao Bingyi on the other side, and when Khanh climbed up on the stump to cut the rope, they gasped as the full weight of the body dropped on them.

“Steady, cleric,” snapped Lao Bingyi when Chih stumbled, and that helped, the sharpness of her words and the utter lack of surprise or dread in them. To Lao Bingyi, this was one more task that had to be taken care of, like sweeping out the shed or gathering water, and even as a part of Chih’s mind cataloged the way the man’s silk robes shone in the setting light, and another part screamed in quiet horror, a third part was grateful for Lao Bingyi’s pragmatism.

They laid him down on the floor of the shed, and Khanh knelt beside him.