The passage was damp and smelled faintly of blood. Small oil lamps hung along the walls at even intervals, and the floor was layered over with drag marks where people had been hauled through and with the ruts of cart wheels. This was no side path used on occasion; it was a road beaten hard over long years for carrying people and goods in secret.
Pung gathered energy into both eyes so as not to lose the energy meridians of the men walking ahead. Beyond the stone wall four strands of energy wavered, and two of them were folded together with the faint pulses of the people carried on their backs. Watching those guttering lights, Pung bit down on a lip.
‘Hold on just a little longer, I beg you.’
When the passage bent to the left, a low voice came from up ahead.
“Counting the ones we brought in today, does the number come out right?”
“We’re two short. The Elder said to fill it before daybreak.”
“That Demonic Cult dog with the red saber has gone, so now it’s only us doing the suffering.”
Pung’s toes locked for a moment. Even in the dark, the stir of Hyeonheo turning to look could be felt, and A-yeong, too, swallowed hard. A Demonic Cult man with a red saber was very likely the man with the dark red saber they had run into the day before. It could not yet be declared the same person, but the fact that a Demonic Cult member came and went from the manor had now been confirmed out of the kidnappers’ own mouths.
The one in front clicked his tongue.
“Mind your mouth. Whatever that man discussed with the Elder is no business of ours. Just see to the goods bound for the Demonic Cult properly. After last night’s commotion the guard has doubled.”
“Was that old master of theirs really such a great figure?”
“Don’t go digging after that name. The Elder said he would handle it himself.”
Pung pressed the golden ring with a thumb. It was growing hard to believe there was no connection at all between the manor and the attack the man with the dark red saber had made on Hyeonheo. Yet whether he had taken part in the abductions, or had swung his blade to protect the manor’s secret, could not be known. Recalling what he had said before leaving, that he would find out what Pung was guarding, only drove the questions deeper.
Hyeonheo raised two fingers, then pointed into the darkness of the fork. Pung followed the energies of the men ahead and shook their head. The right was blocked; the energy meridians ran on only to the left.
The three of them kept their distance from the kidnappers and trailed behind. Pung spread energy thinner than a sheet of paper and felt out the movement ahead, while Hyeonheo studied the devices hidden in the walls and floor. At every turning they passed, A-yeong scattered a little white medicinal powder, hard to catch with the eye, a marker so they would not lose the way when they brought the people out.
Before long, thin lines of energy rose into Pung’s sight. Iron wires buried beneath the stone floor ran to bells inside the walls, and beside them the stone was pocked with small holes packed close together, holes that would pour out poison needles if a foot came down. The kidnappers stepped on precisely every third stone as they passed.
Pung caught Hyeonheo’s sleeve, halted them, and pointed at the floor.
“There’s a wire under that stone. Poison energy is clotted in the walls on both sides as well.”
Hyeonheo examined the floor, then said quietly,
“If we had come in without knowing, we would have been found out on the first step.”
The three crossed the trap by following the stones the kidnappers had trodden. Crossing last, Pung felt the silver ring tremble faintly. The ring gave off a minute energy, as if being drawn toward the depths of the passage. It resembled the way it had pointed north, but now it seemed to answer to poison rather than to direction.
‘Is it chasing the poison? Or searching for someone the poison has taken?’
There was no room to seek an answer. The energies ahead suddenly dropped away below and blurred beyond the stone wall. When Pung quickened their steps, a staircase leading down appeared at the end of the passage, and from below rang the heavy sound of an iron door opening.
“Two new goods.”
Someone answered the kidnapper’s voice curtly.
“Throw them in the inner cage. Don’t mix them with the ones we dosed today.”
A moment later chains clashed and the door shut. The men’s presence drew away down the opposite passage, and only after the footsteps had vanished entirely did Hyeonheo descend the stairs.
Beside the iron door hung a wooden tag the size of a palm. Beneath a black wolf baring its teeth, seventeen lines had been ruled in red ink. Pung felt it resembled the mark seen on the list of porters at the market, but it had been glimpsed from a distance then, and certainty was hard to come by.
A-yeong pointed at the wooden tag and whispered,
“This mark, isn’t it the same as the tag we picked up before?”
“There is a good chance they are the same lot.”
Hyeonheo answered shortly, then set an ear to the iron door. No trace of a guard could be felt inside, but several energies lay tangled together in a direction other than the one the three had come from.
Pung looked at the dark yellow poison energy seeping through the crack of the door. A thin lingering trace of dark red energy was mixed into it. Its grain resembled the demonic energy seen in the blade the man with the dark red saber had swung, yet it was far more turbid, far stickier. It might have sprung from the same root, but it was not a trace on which to declare it one man’s energy.
Hyeonheo pressed a palm to the hinges of the iron door. As fingertips laden with internal energy moved slowly, the rusted iron slid aside without a sound, and the three of them barely opened a gap wide enough for one person to pass.
Beyond the door stretched a low, long corridor with a number of small rooms set along either side, and on every door hung a slip of paper bearing the name of a medicinal herb and a date. At first Pung took it for a storehouse of herbs, but the moment they drew near and felt human breathing inside the rooms, their face hardened.
The first door read ‘Solomon’s seal, three days.’ Within it lay a middle-aged man, bound hand and foot. On the second door was a slip that read ‘White atractylodes, five days,’ and a pale woman leaned against the wall, dragging in breath after breath. People had been sorted by the names of herbs.
A-yeong covered their mouth with a trembling hand.
“How can they hang names like that… on people?”
Pung could not answer either. Once they had each been people with names and families. Yet here they were called by nothing but the drug fed into their bodies and the number of days they had endured. To those who did not count people as people, the abducted were no more than objects to be carried, tested, and thrown away.
Hyeonheo examined the lock of the nearest room and shook their head.
“Open it now and an alarm sounds. The mechanism has to be cut first.”
Pung drew still more energy up into their eyes. A thin iron wire ran from every door, all of them gathering into a small room at the end of the corridor, and four energies were settled around it. They could be put down head-on, but if even one man so much as brushed the alarm, the whole manor would wake.
“I will go in first.”
“You have used your eyes too long.”
It was as Hyeonheo said. A hot pain throbbed at Pung’s temples. From chasing dozens of strands of energy at once, the edges of their sight had blurred, and the smell of blood hung at the tip of their nose. Even so, the energy meridians of the people locked up were weaker still, and the longer the hesitation, the deeper the poison would go.
“I can still see. The alarm wires are gathered on the left wall of that room. Cut the wires first and it is done.”
Hyeonheo studied Pung’s face for a moment, then nodded without a word. A-yeong drew out an antidote pill and a needle case and gripped them.
“Once the guards are down, I’ll see to the people.”
The three approached the end of the corridor. Hyeonheo set fingers to the crack of the door first and counted the breathing inside, while Pung picked out the energy meridians of the four beyond the door one by one. Two sat at a table, one dozed against the wall, and the last stood close to the alarm wires.
Hyeonheo folded three fingers down.
Three.
Two.
One.
The door opened without a sound and Hyeonheo’s sleeve cut the darkness. Before the man beside the alarm wires could stretch out a hand, his wrist was snapped, and Pung read the nearest man’s energy meridians and struck the pressure point where chest joins shoulder. As that body sank limply, A-yeong swiftly drove a needle into the nape of another.
The last guard opened his mouth, but Hyeonheo’s fingers grazed beneath his throat and the scream never broke. Even after all four had fallen almost at once, nothing was left in the room but the faint sound of a chair rocking.
Pung ran straight to the wall and studied the alarm wires. It was built so that touching one wrongly would pull another, so while Hyeonheo held the connecting links and stopped them moving, Pung cut the wires one after another with a blade. When the last iron wire went slack, the locks along the corridor released in a rolling succession of sounds.
Clack. Clack.
Pung opened the doors and went through, and the sight waiting within stopped their breath.
The cellar cavern was divided into small compartments by iron bars, and in every cage people were penned like beasts. Every one of them had eyes clouded and dull as though drugged, the flesh wasted away until the joints of their bones stood plain. One leaned against a wall without stirring; another muttered words no one could make out, endlessly.
Along one side of the cavern stood a row of poison jars that reached a person’s waist. Dark yellow energy writhed in each poison jar, and a groove running along the floor fed into every cage. They had not stopped at feeding poison but had let the fumes flow through as well, ruining the bodies of the people little by little.
A-yeong gripped one of the cages and looked inside. That ever brazen face had gone pale, and moisture gathered at the eyes in an instant.
“Is this… something a person does?”
“Even a beast stops hunting once its belly is full.”
Hyeonheo’s voice was low, but inside it lay an anger Pung had never heard there before.
Pung’s gaze stopped before a small cage. A boy, still a child, was huddled in the corner with his knees drawn up. The moment Pung saw the child’s shallow breathing, there rose the image of the old woman sobbing with her missing grandson’s shoes clutched to her chest.
Pung took hold of the bars.
“Child.”
The boy slowly raised his head. Unfocused eyes passed over Pung with no sign of recognition. Pung wanted to tear the bars away and lift the child up that instant, but the poison energy filling the cavern and the condition of the people had to be seen to first. Moving them blindly could take the last breath of those whose energy meridians had been cut.
Pung gathered what strength remained in both eyes and swept over the cages. As countless energy meridians pressed into sight all at once, their head ached as though splitting apart. One had a weak heart meridian; another had poison energy knotted around the dantian. In the two just dragged in, the poison had not yet seeped into the lungs, but among those long imprisoned several looked to be in danger unless something was done at once.
A-yeong caught Pung’s trembling shoulder.
“Don’t try to see it all at once. Show me the dangerous ones first.”
Pung steadied their ragged breathing and pointed them out one by one. A-yeong divided the antidote received from Hyeonheo and fed it to them, while Hyeonheo released the pressure points of those able to move on their own. But there were more than twenty people confined, and close to half could not so much as stand without support.
The old man in the nearest cage, perhaps sensing someone there, opened his clouded eyes.
“…Who’s there? Have you… come to take another one?”
Pung knelt and brought their eyes level with the old man’s.
“No. We came to rescue you.”
The old man gazed at Pung a while, then shook his head weakly.
“It’s no use. When the moon is full… they send us beyond the mountain. Not one who went has ever come back.”
Beyond the mountain lay the territory of the Demonic Cult, which fit with what the kidnappers had said about handing people over to the Demonic Cult. This place was a prison for holding the abducted, and a workshop for breaking their bodies to suit some sorcery no one could name.
“Do you know why they take the people away?”
“Materials, they said. Only the ones who live through it… can be used….”
The old man’s voice trembled thinly. Hearing it, Pung clenched a fist until the palm went numb. They had come down from the mountain wanting to see the wide world, and this corner of the world they had met was darker and crueler than any mountain beast’s den.
Even so, it could not be turned away from. These people had homes to return to as well, and someone was surely still waiting in front of those doors. With strength or without it, a person ought to be able to choose on their own two feet where to go, and Pung thought that was no different from the freedom they had longed for.
“I will see you out of here, without fail.”
The old man’s lips trembled faintly.
“Get away, quickly. Today… today is the day the Elder comes.”
“The Elder?”
“Of the Dokgo Family….”
Before the old man could finish, a slow clapping rang out from the far side of the cavern.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Pung turned at once and stepped between A-yeong and the cages. Hyeonheo advanced a step and pushed up their sleeves, and from the opposite gallery, sunk in darkness, dozens of strands of energy showed themselves all at once. Warriors who had been hidden stood packed close, ringing the space between the poison jars and the cages.
Pung clenched their teeth. Whether they had been watched from the moment they entered the cellar, or whether there had been some device other than the alarm wires, could not be known. One thing was certain.
They had walked into the middle of a trap.
When the clapping stopped, an old man’s laughter came flowing out of the darkness.
The hand that had worked the darkness of Nohachon from behind was, at last, about to show itself.
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