The silver ring pulsed faintly toward the northern ridge.
Even after the fleeing man’s presence faded, the direction did not change. When Pung lifted his right hand, the blurred pattern on the ring’s surface stirred slowly, like water rippling, and the numbing force that had burrowed into the inside of his finger spread all the way to his wrist. The ring had moved on its own before, after he came out of the Abyss, but this was the first time it had pointed to one side so clearly.
Hyeonheo asked in a low voice.
“Do you feel something?”
“It is urging me to go that way.”
“Does it mean for you to chase the one who fled?”
Pung did not answer at once; he searched the northern ridgeline instead. Nothing showed in the forest where pine and rock overlapped, but when he gathered strength in his eyes, a faint trace of energy surfaced like a thread in the darkness. It was not a large, steady current like Hyeonheo’s. The thin, almost-breaking trail was stained here and there with a blue-black glow, an energy much like the poison needle that had rotted the tree.
It was someone who had spied on him and Hyeonheo colliding. If the man had also seen Pung’s body answer an outside force and spit out power, then he might not be simply running away, but going to report to someone. Pung had turned his back on the village so as not to draw shadows into it, and the shadow had already been treading on his heels.
“I will go after him.”
As Pung made to step forward, Hyeonheo raised an arm and blocked his way.
“Who can promise you that man is alone?”
“If we lose him, he will come again.”
“All the more reason for care. I have seen that you are fast, but tracking in the jianghu is not done with fleet feet alone. The road a fleeing man leaves behind holds more than traces. It holds snares.”
Before the words were finished, the silver ring shook hard. When the numbing force surged up near his elbow, Pung clenched his fist without meaning to, and the sensation of the ring forcing him to train in the Abyss came back to life. If it said run, he had to run; if it said break, he had to break; even with bones snapped and flesh torn, to survive he had no choice but to obey.
But now there was sky above his head, and he could decide for himself which road to take, and he had no intention of being dragged along again without knowing why.
Pung slowly opened his bent fingers.
“I will not go blindly just because the ring commands it. Whether I follow, I will decide by what I see.”
The silver ring pulsed once more as if showing its displeasure, and when Pung did not advance north, Hyeonheo looked back and forth between his hand and his face, then nodded lightly.
“Good. In that case I go first. Do not fall more than three jang behind, and if you smell anything strange, stop your breath before anything else.”
“Then keep the condition that I take the rear as well.”
“Meticulous even in a moment like this.”
Hyeonheo let out a wry smile and flung himself toward the ridge first, moving so lightly that his years seemed a lie; even when his sleeve brushed a pine branch it made almost no sound. Pung tightened the straps of his basket and followed right behind, or rather, had to pretend to follow. If he relaxed even a little he would shoot past Hyeonheo’s back, so he had to press his strength down with every step.
At first the traces were not hard to find; the man who had fled must have been in a hurry, for he had pushed through dry pine needles, and his toes had dug deep into the soft earth. Hyeonheo moved alongside the prints without stepping on them, examining the broken branches and the crushed moss in turn; there was no sign of haste in him, but no hesitation in his steps either.
Pung looked at the empty air between the trees rather than at the ground. The blue-black residue ran on like thread, then scattered in the wind, and the farther they crossed the ridges, the more distinct its color grew. The distance to their quarry seemed to be closing, yet strangely the footprints grew deeper and clearer still.
A moment later Hyeonheo raised a fist, signaling a halt.
Ahead lay a shallow gully a little more than two fathoms wide; fallen leaves were piled thick at its bottom, and a scrap of black cloth caught on a rock across the way swayed in the wind. The footprints ran straight down into the ravine, as though their owner had no thought of hiding himself.
Hyeonheo bent at the waist and picked up a small stone.
“Watch closely.”
The instant the stone fell on the leaves, a hiss burst from the brush on both sides; slender black needles pierced the air around the stone like driving rain, and yellow smoke curled up from the leaves the needle tips touched. The moment the raw, fishy smell reached his nose, Pung stopped breathing.
“A poison needle trap.”
“The footprints were too deep. They were not left in flight. They were carved so that we would follow.”
Hyeonheo covered his nose and mouth with cloth and studied both sides of the gully. The silver ring still pointed across, and the blue-black trail ran that way too, but Pung did not take that pull at face value. As long as he did not know what the ring sensed, he could not judge whether it was seeking out danger or carrying him into it.
Over the gully, a thick branch of an old pine stretched to the far side, and when Pung looked toward it, Hyeonheo spoke first.
“They may have set a hand there as well.”
Instead of leaping, Pung gathered strength in his eyes. The life rising along the tree revealed itself as a faint light, and among it was wedged a single black line like a needle. It was a thread strung taut beneath the branch; if anyone stepped on it, it would snap and pour out more poison needles.
“There is a thread on the lower branch. I will go above it.”
Pung chose a trunk far from the thread and pushed off the ground with his toes; his body shot up like a bird, touched the trunk once, and in the next moment came down soundlessly on the rock across the gully. Even moving with all his strength held down, the distance felt shorter than he had expected.
Hyeonheo, crossing after him, narrowed his eyes.
“Who taught you that movement art?”
“I cannot say.”
“I was wrong to ask again. Only go a little more slowly. Ought you not to leave an old man room to keep his dignity?”
Despite his words, Hyeonheo’s breathing had not been disturbed in the least. Pung let the corner of his mouth ease, then turned his head toward the forest on the right.
A stifled breath was mixed in with the wind. Behind a rock, a single strand of blue-black current churned roughly; the man who had fled was no longer moving, only keeping himself low.
It was the breathing of one who waits.
When Pung pointed the direction with a finger, the humor left Hyeonheo’s face. Hyeonheo seeped into the forest on the left and sealed the escape route behind the rock, while Pung remained in front. To read which way the poison needles would be thrown, showing himself was better than blocking his own view.
Pung closed the distance slowly.
Three steps.
Two steps.
The instant he took the last step, a black shadow burst from behind the rock, a middle-aged man with his face wrapped in cloth. The moment his eyes met Pung’s, the man shook his wrist without hesitation, and three streaks of steel light flashed from his sleeve.
Before the needles arrived, the man’s energy showed itself first; the force sliding from shoulder to elbow, then to wrist, split into three branches, each aimed at a different height. Pung twisted half a step, letting the first needle slip past, struck the flank of the second away with his palm, and bent back at the waist to avoid the last. The black needle grazed past his chest and buried itself in the rim of the basket on his back.
The man turned without even confirming the result. But Hyeonheo was already standing on his escape route.
“Who sent you?”
The man did not answer Hyeonheo’s question. His eyes rolled quickly left and right, and then he drew a short knife from his waist and aimed it not at Hyeonheo, but at his own throat.
Pung reached out before he had time to think; the force that sprang from his fingertips struck the back of the blade, and the short knife left the man’s hand and clattered against the rock. But the moment he blocked the knife, the strength Pung had thrust out to knock that hand aside, having read the killing intent the man gave off, swelled enormously before he could thin it down, and rushed upon the man’s chest.
If it lands like this, he dies.
Pung clenched his teeth and wrenched his arm around. The tightly packed force would not obey and tried to rebound, but he dropped his shoulder and shoved its direction off to the side. A golden ripple grazed the hem of the man’s robe and slammed into the rock.
A roar shook the mountainside. A boulder the height of a man burst from within and spilled fragments, and Hyeonheo spread his sleeve to block the stone shards flying toward the man. Pung too tried to seize the man by the nape, but the instant spent twisting that swollen force had been too long.
The man’s jaw moved.
Crack.
It was the sound of something small and hard breaking between his back teeth.
“Spit it out!”
Hyeonheo lunged and gripped the man’s jaw, but black blood ran out beneath the cloth first. The man’s body shuddered once, and then he folded from the knees, strengthless. While Hyeonheo laid him on the ground and rapidly pressed the pressure points of his chest and throat, Pung sat beside him and watched the currents inside the body.
The light gathering toward the heart clouded at a terrifying speed. The black energy that had spread from throat to chest rode the blood vessels outward in every direction; each time Hyeonheo moved his hand it seemed to halt for a moment, then burrowed deeper still.
Pung reached out and stopped. The two rings had brought his own broken bones and torn flesh back to life, but whether they would do the same for another person he could not know. Pouring the force that had stripped away Hyeonheo’s energy into this man might cut off the breath he had left.
“Can he not be saved?”
Hyeonheo pressed several more points, but the pulse beneath his fingertips did not return.
“He hid a poison pill under his tongue. It has reached the heart meridian.”
The man’s hand stiffened on the soil, and Pung looked back and forth between that hand and the knife flung far away. If his mind had not been stolen by the work of suppressing that swollen force, could he have subdued the wrist first? If so, he might have stopped it before the jaw moved.
He had wrenched his power aside so as not to kill anyone, and still the man before him was dead. Mountain beasts lunged in order to live, and if you opened them a path of retreat they mostly left; but a man took his own life rather than be caught. The jianghu Hyeonheo spoke of was a place where those with martial arts traded kindness and grudges. Yet to Pung, this choice, spending even one’s own life to seal a mouth, was stranger and more frightening.
Hyeonheo stripped away the cloth covering the face. It was an unfamiliar middle-aged man with a scar on his cheek like a burn, and below his throat the faint marks of an erased tattoo remained.
“Do you know him?”
“I am seeing the face for the first time.”
With the cloth wound around his hand, Hyeonheo searched the man’s sleeves and waistband. Apart from poison needles and a few coins there was nothing to reveal his identity, but from the bottom of a leather pouch came a dark red, hardened powder of earth. Hyeonheo rubbed a little of it between his fingertips rather than smelling it, and his expression hardened.
“There is old blood mixed in.”
“Is it this man’s blood?”
“The way it has dried looks different. Nor can I tell whether it belongs to one person.”
Pung shifted his gaze from the dark red soil to the northern ridgeline. Even after the man’s death the silver ring had not quieted; on the contrary, the pull toward that direction had grown clearer than before. What the ring had been chasing was not this watcher alone.
“If we go farther, might we not learn where this man came from?”
“We might. Or we might walk on our own feet into a place prepared to draw us in.”
Hyeonheo looked in turn at the slanting sunlight and the ravine bristling with poison needles.
“There is a rumor these days that people are vanishing along the northern frontier. One or two from each mountain village; at first it was taken for the work of beasts or bandits, but the places the news comes from are creeping steadily southward.”
“Did the vanished people come back?”
“Not so far as I have heard.”
The current running north wavered before Pung’s eyes, and it might well be a trace bound up with the missing people. Even so, the sun was already sinking, and the man who had died before him had carried a poison pill against the moment of capture. There was no telling how many more of his kind were in the forest.
Above all, Pung had not been able to draw his swollen power fully back. It had ended with the rock shattering as the force passed the man by, but if Hyeonheo had been near, he might have been swept up in the ripple. He could not go off to save people while harming the person at his side.
Pung drew back the foot that had turned north.
“I will go no farther today.”
The silver ring trembled low, but he did not clench his hand. He felt its urging and did not obey it.
“Instead, I want to find out where this man came from. And why the ring points that way.”
“To find that answer, you must first know how your own power moves.”
Hyeonheo wrapped the bloodied soil and the poison needles tightly and tucked them into his robe. They decided to send word to the nearby hermitage to see to the man’s body, and from the basket ruined by the needles Pung briefly sorted out only the herbs that could be salvaged. One red root rolled in among the poisoned leaves, but Pung did not reach for it.
“Is it not a waste?”
“It is.”
Pung drew his eyes away from the red glint among the leaves.
“Still, better that than someone getting hurt.”
Hyeonheo nodded without a word. The two of them watched for anyone treading on their heels as they made for the summit, and about the time the sun caught on the ridge, they spotted a single lamp between the trees.
White smoke rose from the kitchen chimney of a small, tidy house, and in one corner of the yard dry firewood was stacked in neat rows. As the smell of cooking rice came down mixed into the evening air, Pung slowed his steps without realizing it; to eyes that had been shut for five years in earth without a single ray of light, even the lamplight staining the paper window was dazzling. Fire kindled by people, warmth pooled beneath a roof, smoke rising like a sign that someone was waiting, all of it was as unfamiliar as the years he had spent forgetting them.
Hyeonheo pushed open the gate.
“Yeong-a, your grandfather is home.”
Hurried footsteps sounded inside, and then the door flew open. A girl who looked to be Pung’s age stuck her head out, her hair neatly tied, sleeves rolled up beneath it from kitchen work.
“Why are you so late? The food is going to get cold—”
The girl’s gaze landed on Pung. She looked over his dirt-covered clothes and the blackened basket in turn, and her eyes went round.
“Huh, who’s this little kid?”
Pung doubted his own ears. The girl looked a full head shorter than he was.
“Who are you calling a kid?”
“You. You came trailing along after Grandfather.”
“You’re smaller than me.”
The girl’s eyebrows shot up.
“You think being a little tall makes you a grown-up?”
“Then you shouldn’t have called me a kid first.”
Hyeonheo stepped in between the two of them and cleared his throat.
“This child is Danpung. He is a guest who will stay a while, so do not treat him carelessly. Pung, this is my granddaughter, Hyeon A-yeong.”
A-yeong folded her arms and looked Pung up and down.
“If you’re a guest, act like one and stay quiet. And don’t come into the kitchen touching things.”
“I have no intention of it.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you.”
A-yeong strode over and reached for Pung’s basket. Just as Pung moved to hand it over, a single black barb lodged between the broken bamboo ribs came into view, and her fingertips were coming down right on top of it.
“Don’t touch it!”
Pung snatched A-yeong’s wrist and pulled her back. He had moved too fast; A-yeong’s body came along lightly, her shoulder struck Pung’s chest, and she staggered and sat down in the yard.
“Ow! What do you think you’re doing?”
When A-yeong glared at him with a reddened face, Pung let go at once. There had never been any reason for his body to flinch in the first place — even before he took her wrist, he had read clearly that there was not a speck of ill will in her.
“There is poison on the barb. It looked as if your hand would touch it—”
Hyeonheo took the basket and covered the barb with cloth.
“Pung is right. It can be dangerous with only a brush of the fingertips, so do not go near it.”
A-yeong got to her feet and beat the dirt from her sleeve; her lips pushed out as though her anger had not entirely subsided, but she did not touch the basket again.
“Then just say there’s poison from the start.”
“You would have touched it before I could say it. I am sorry.”
When Pung bowed his head, A-yeong looked at him for a moment with the face of someone at a loss for words. Then she flung the door wide and spun around.
“Stand out there and all the good smells will be gone. Just come in.”
While Hyeonheo put the poisoned things away separately, Pung stopped before the threshold. On a small table sat soup smelling of soybean paste and a few dishes of seasoned greens, and when the warm air touched his face, the evenings of the house where he had lived with his mother came back to him from far away. The battered lid of a pot in his memory seemed to rattle open.
When the three of them sat down, A-yeong set a bowl of rice in front of Pung. Her hand was curt, but the rice was heaped higher than in the other bowls.
“Why aren’t you eating? Do you think it’s poisoned?”
“No.”
Pung spooned up some of the broth and put it in his mouth. It was a little too salty, and the greens were tough, but as the warmth went down his throat, one side of his chest ached. In the Abyss he had endured his hunger on red spirit herbs and nameless berries, and even after coming out he had filled his stomach with what he dug from the mountain. That someone would think of the hour he was coming back, light a fire, and leave food for him was something he had forgotten long ago.
As he ate slowly with his head lowered, A-yeong glanced over a few times. She did not ask the reason; she only nudged the dish of greens in front of her a little toward Pung.
As the meal was drawing to an end, Hyeonheo briefly related what had happened in the mountains: the watcher, the poison needle trap, the poison pill the man bit down on, and the blood-mixed soil. Of the ring’s power and of Pung’s eyes he said nothing.
A-yeong set down her spoon.
“North, isn’t that toward Yangga Village? The peddler who came by last month said someone had vanished near there again.”
“We cannot conclude that the soil came from Yangga Village.”
“Still, you said there are already several missing. We can’t just leave it be.”
Hyeonheo did not answer right away. As he took a sip of the cooled tea, a deep shadow crossed his face, and Pung saw it, though he could not fathom the reason for it.
“If we comb the north on guesswork alone, we may walk into a waiting snare. Tomorrow I will start by examining the poison needles, and I will also look for whether anything like the ring Pung carries is left in the records.”
Hyeonheo looked at Pung.
“At first I thought a day or two would be enough, but matters have changed. There may be others who have seen you, and the silver ring still points north. If you leave alone now, it will be hard even to notice that you are being followed.”
Pung laid both hands on his knees. Since nearly killing the man, his body had settled quietly, and only the silver ring on his right hand beat faintly beneath the table, toward the north.
It was not that he had no wish to stay in a warm house. But to trust others and settle in merely because he missed the warmth would be little different from being dragged along by the ring’s urging. To learn what waited in the north he needed Hyeonheo’s records and experience, and above all he had to learn how to pull his own power back before it killed someone.
Next time he did not want to lose the person in front of him. Still less could he allow himself to harm, with his own power, the person he meant to protect.
“I will stay a few days.”
A-yeong narrowed her eyes.
“Really only a few days?”
“When I learn what I need to learn, I will leave.”
“Who said anyone was keeping you?”
A-yeong turned her head away primly, but a little later she carried fresh bedding into the room Pung would use. Hyeonheo strung simple warning threads and bells outside the door against any intrusion, then sent Pung into the room, saying they would examine the poison needles when the day broke.
That night Pung lay in a room where a person’s warmth still lingered. Outside the window a mountain wind swept the leaves, and the sound of insects carried on from far off; the warning bells in the yard did not ring even once.
Even so, sleep would hardly come.
When he drew his right hand out from under the blanket, the silver ring pulsed faintly toward the north, and Pung looked through the gap in the window at the quiet yard and the forest sunk in black. Beyond the farther ridgeline, ash-gray mist holding moonlight spread low and slow.
Beyond that mist, the ring did not change direction once all night long.
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