That evening, after the sparring with A-yeong was done, Hyeonheo set a blunt needle down in front of Pung.
“Do you know what is more dangerous than your eyes?”
Recalling the force that had risen far too large in the day’s match, Pung looked down at their own fingers.
“My own strength?”
“More precisely, the strength you fail to gather back in time. The greater the force, the more it shatters when even a little leaks out, so if you cannot draw it in finely, in the end the first thing harmed will be the very thing you meant to protect.”
Hyeonheo loaded energy into the blunt needle and stabbed at Pung’s shoulder. The instant that killing intent was met, force gathered at the fingertips to answer it, and it was too large for the room to hold. Rather than force it into confinement, Pung tried to let it spill toward the empty side. On the first day the corner of the table was torn away; next the window frame and then a teacup broke, one after the other. Only after learning to drive nails from A-yeong, after acquiring the sense of setting direction before strength, could that force be turned into the ground and the wind. Even so, along the bottom of the one teacup that survived to the end ran a crack as thin as a hair.
“Look first at what was harmed, not at whether you won.”
Pung set that cup beside the training ground. It meant that blocking an attack was not the end of it; one had to look as well at the place one’s own force had passed through.
As the days went on, Pung gathered that force back a little more finely each time, let the momentum that could not be reduced spill down beneath the feet, and when even that was dangerous, turned it toward the empty air. A-yeong glared every time a hole opened in the wall, but one day handed over a hammer and taught Pung all over again, starting with how to grip the handle.
“Anyone can hit hard. You have to look at the nail head and strike it straight.”
“Can this force be handled like a nail too?”
“Why are you asking me? It’s attached to your own body.”
It was a curt answer, but A-yeong did not leave Pung’s side until the wall was mended. Hyeonheo drank tea, feigning ignorance of the squabble between the two, and each time the cup was set down, looked first to Pung to see whether the crack had widened.
When the second winter on the mountaintop lay white over the ridge, a medicine peddler pushed through the snowstorm and into the yard. He collapsed without even managing to lower the medicine chest from his back, and dark red blood had clotted on his right calf.
While A-yeong heated water, Pung examined the wound. The graze of a blade was not deep, but an ink-dark venom was burrowing into the meridians like a fine root, making for the heart.
“It’s poison.”
When Hyeonheo drew back the peddler’s eyelid to check the pupil, the man barely moved his dry lips.
“I met three masked men below the northwest pass. They asked whether I had seen anyone, and when I said I hadn’t, they went through my medicine chest and my ledger.”
The ledger he drew out from his robe was packed with records of herbs bought on his rounds of the border villages. Red circles were drawn beside several place names, and the marks, beginning at the northern edge, came gradually southward along a closed old road.
“What are these marks?”
“Places where people have vanished. Last month three disappeared below Baegunryeong as well, and in one village even a child went missing. They kept asking whether I knew Nohachon.”
The moment those three syllables were spoken, Pung’s chest dropped. There was no red circle beside Nohachon yet, but a thin line drawn in ink stretched toward the northern villages.
Was Granny Donggu safe? Had Hwang-u seen the letter and the red spirit herb left behind? Five years had passed since the fall into the abyss, and even after coming out into the world again there had been no returning home, so there was no way to know what had happened to the village in all that time.
The silver ring trembled faintly toward the north.
“I’ll go and look for them.”
As Pung rose, Hyeonheo laid a hand on the ledger.
“This man must be saved first.”
“Can you not draw out the poison?”
“There is not enough snow-spirit root. If you go to the eastern cliff now, you can be back before the sun sets.”
Out beyond the door there might still be a trail of the masked men to seize. But even in the time it took to hesitate, the ink-dark venom was spreading closer to the peddler’s heart, and the man’s breath thinned as though it might break at any moment.
Gritting their teeth, Pung took up the herb basket.
“I’ll bring the snow-spirit root first.”
Racing along the snow-covered mountain path, trees and boulders swept past at a fearful speed. It was a road that took more than two hours at an ordinary pace, yet Pung reached the eastern cliff in less than half a quarter of an hour, and with the meridian sight found the white, slender roots hidden under the cold earth.
The trouble was what lay around the snow-spirit root. Black specks small as insect eggs ringed the edge of the patch like a band, and a faint venom seeped from the damp soil. Someone had scattered poison powder here, meaning to ruin every snow-spirit root on this mountain that might serve as an antidote.
Pung dug deep into the earth and picked out only the root tips the poison had not touched. The amount fell short, but there was no time to find another patch. Back at the house, Hyeonheo decocted the snow-spirit root together with many other medicines, and A-yeong and Pung held down the peddler’s convulsing body all night long.
“Will he live?”
“We won’t know until he’s past the night.”
Pung looked to the door again and again, wanting even then to run for the pass, but each time the peddler’s breathing broke off there was no taking a hand away. In the end the man passed the crisis around daybreak, and only after his breath settled into an even rhythm did Pung set out for the northwest pass.
Thanks to the previous day’s snow the footprints were not hard to find. There were three sets in all; one dragged the right foot, and another’s prints sank deep, as though under a heavy load. But the trail ran through the forest and broke off before a cliff, where only a few drops of dried blood and a scrap of burned paper remained.
Pung widened the meridian sight. Tree roots, beasts in their winter sleep, even the thin thread of water running beneath the rocks came into view, but there was no trace of a living person. From the moment they lost the peddler, the men had expected a pursuer to come and had wiped away their tracks.
A little faster, and perhaps they could have been caught.
Down at the foot of the cliff, Pung found a wooden tag half-wedged in a crack in the rock. On the face an unfamiliar black wolf design was scratched, and on the back the number “seventeen” was carved.
Back at the house, when the tag was held out, Hyeonheo’s face hardened.
“Do you know this thing?”
“Not for certain.”
Hyeonheo copied the design onto paper. The movement of the hand was calm, but too much ink clung to the brush tip, and the last stroke bled out black.
“If we give chase now, could we not still catch up?”
“You mean to run north without even knowing where they went?”
“If we sit still, there is no telling what will happen to Nohachon. Had I chased them from the start, I would have found more than a wooden tag.”
“And that man might have died.”
Pung closed their mouth. The impatience of having lost the masked men kept coming before the relief of having saved the peddler, and if the men were heading for the old village, the people of Nohachon might be the ones to pay the price of the choice.
“In the martial world, whichever side you choose, something is lost.”
Hyeonheo set the wooden tag down and looked straight at Pung.
“You do not choose because a right answer exists. More often you can take a single step only after deciding what to protect and bearing what you will lose for it.”
“Next time I will not let go of either one.”
“For that, you must first throw away the habit of trying to do everything alone.”
“If only my feet had been a little faster…”
“An enemy faster than your feet will appear one day. And there will be those who deceive your eyes as well.”
Hyeonheo pushed the ledger and the wooden tag across to Pung.
“What if someone had chased the masked men while you were digging the snow-spirit root? What if you had left the trail to A-yeong and gone for the herb yourself? Falling short in strength and losing your quarry is not the only defeat. To be unable to lift a hand because you tried to bear it all alone is a defeat as well.”
Those words stayed in Pung’s chest for a long time.
After the peddler left, Pung set the cracked teacup and the wooden tag side by side beside the training ground. Whenever the body loosed force, the crack in the cup was the first thing checked, and whenever the mountain paths were taken, Pung asked what Hyeonheo and A-yeong had seen before judging alone.
The three of them added the date and the place to the map each time news of a disappearance came from herb gatherers and traveling merchants. Pung went in person to survey the closed old roads and the herb transport routes; A-yeong gathered the talk of merchants coming and going through the market; Hyeonheo searched through the old marks of the martial world and the lineages of poison. The seasons turned twice and the cold wind blew over the ridge again without any clear answer, but the scattered dots slowly revealed the shape of a road running north.
In that time Pung’s power changed too. Even while reading killing intent before it came, the force rose only in the direction Pung set, and the silver ring pointed north as always. Above all, instead of running out ahead alone, Pung learned to match stride with the other two.
One day as the last autumn was deepening, A-yeong came back from the market at the foot of the mountain and threw open the door without pausing for breath, a crumpled sheet of paper in hand.
“They say people have vanished in Nohachon.”
Pung shot to their feet.
“Who?”
“Four confirmed. And the two who disappeared below Baegunryeong a few days ago were on their way to Nohachon to sell herbs.”
The dates and places of the disappearances were written on the paper. At the sight of the four dots set beneath those three syllables, Nohachon, Pung’s fingertips went cold, and the faces of Granny Donggu and Hwang-u rose one after the other.
Pung spread the map and marked the newly reported places. Looking only at the main roads there was no pattern at all, but when the lines were drawn along the herb country and the old roads, the dots at Nohachon and in the valley south of Baegunryeong joined into a single transport route. Its end pointed north, just as the ink line in the peddler’s ledger had.
“Hyeonheo.”
Pung turned the map around and traced the line with a finger.
“They are not coming down from the north. They are gathering people here and moving them north.”
Hyeonheo looked from the map to the wooden tag and back. When these latest missing were added to the records gathered so far, the number came, as it happened, to seventeen.
“This tag may have been a mark for counting people.”
The silver ring trembled harder than ever before.
“I will go down.”
The words did not leap out on impulse. Pung spoke only after reckoning where to begin looking and whose help to seek.
“I will find the survivors of Nohachon first and confirm the places where people vanished. The ledger and the design on the tag must be looked into through the martial world rather than the magistrate’s office. I will not go alone.”
A brief light crossed Hyeonheo’s eyes. From deep in the cabinet he drew out a long-aged wooden box and set an old token on the table. On its faded surface three characters remained: “Martial Alliance.”
“I go with you.”
“You as well?”
“If this design is the one I know, it will not end with Nohachon alone.”
A-yeong came up to the table too and pressed a corner of the map flat.
“I’m going too.”
“It may be dangerous.”
“Already forgotten those words about throwing away the habit of doing everything alone?”
Pung closed their mouth. It was not a wrong thing to say.
“When the day breaks, we begin preparing to go down the mountain.”
Hyeonheo pointed in turn to the old western road and the market.
“Before going straight into Nohachon, we look at these two places first. If they are choosing people and moving them, traces will remain. Gather what you need before tonight is out.”
Stepping outside in the midst of packing, Pung stood under the eaves and looked at the northern ridgeline. As the cold wind bit into the collar, the door opened from behind, and A-yeong held out a thick outer coat.
“Planning to stand out here all night again?”
“I only meant to take a little air.”
“Every time it’s ‘a little’ and you’re still out till dawn. Put it on. If you catch cold I’ll have to carry you down on my back.”
Pung took the coat without argument and put it on. From the collar came the smell of grass well dried in the sun, and though A-yeong turned back first, the door was not closed until Pung followed.
Inside the warm room, three water flasks sat beside the travel packs. One bore the worn knot Hyeonheo always used, another the red thread A-yeong liked, and the last had no mark at all. Instead, beneath it lay Pung’s old herb basket, firmly stitched with a new leather strap.
Pung set that flask in line with the other two and bound all three together with a cord so they would not fall over.
Crossing the threshold, Pung stopped short.
Through the gap in A-yeong’s door were a map of the north, a short sword freshly tended, and a travel pack that looked as though it had been waiting a long while already for the day of departure.
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