“Heh heh heh. I thought a rat had slipped in, but it seems I have a rather large guest.”
Out of the darkness above the stair stepped an old man draped in silk, and unlike his rather benevolent face, his narrowed eyes held a coldness that did not count people as people.
To Pung’s eyes, a dark-yellow energy coiled about the old man’s body. It was thick and clinging, as though every source of poison scattered through the village had gathered into one, and it seemed to rot a person’s insides before it ever touched skin.
Hyeonheo stepped forward.
“That is the crest of the Dokgo house. Dokgo Muheon — you, who were an outer hall Elder of a collateral branch before the clan was wiped out, how is it that you are in a place like this?”
Dokgo Muheon did not hide the worn crest stitched on his sleeve.
“So that stiff-necked Hyeonheo is still alive. And still prattling about the orthodox and the demonic, I see.”
“Did you hand people over to the Demonic Cult while walking in and out of the Martial Alliance under the name of an orthodox sect?”
“The road lies wherever there is power and profit. The old orthodox sect, and the line between orthodox and demonic as well, will all be swept away before long. I have merely taken my seat early in the world that is coming.”
They were words far too large for a man who hid in a manor on the frontier and called people materials, and they sounded as if someone far greater stood behind Dokgo Muheon. But with soldiers spilling from the passage and the stair now, there was no leisure to dig after that backer.
There were dozens of them at a rough count. The energies reflected in Pung’s eyes were all coarse and hard, and inside Dokgo Muheon’s body there crouched a flow far deeper and more sinister still.
“A living mouth is a heavy thing. If you have seen something, then be buried here along with it.”
Dokgo Muheon raised his hand.
“Let not one of them leave alive.”
The sound of weapons being drawn scraped through the cellar cavern. Hyeonheo rolled back his sleeves with Pung and A-yeong at his back, and as a weighty presence rose from that lean body, the feet of the nearing soldiers slowed without their willing it.
“Danpung. I leave A-yeong and the caged ones to you.”
“And you, elder?”
“I will take that old viper.”
Instead of answering, Pung gripped A-yeong’s hand once, hard, then let go, and the people in the cages could neither flee nor turn a blade aside. One of them leaned against the iron bars and barely breathed, and a child huddled in the corner watched the outside with clouded eyes.
With his back to them, Pung raised both fists.
The soldiers rushed in all at once.
Hyeonheo had kicked off the floor half a beat sooner. As his aged frame split the air and shot up toward the stair, three warriors barring the way were swept off by his palm and thrown into the stone wall, and he drove through the broken gap straight at Dokgo Muheon.
“I am the one you face!”
The remaining soldiers poured toward Pung and A-yeong and the cages behind them. In the cramped cavern it was hard for many to swing blades at once, but troops packed every passage, so wherever one fell another pressed in at once.
Pung gathered energy into both eyes. The meridians running along swords and spears rose up like dozens of streams of water, and he saw brightly the sword tip going first for his throat and the spear blade boring toward his flank.
Twisting his body to let the first blade slide off, Pung struck up under the warrior’s elbow with the back of his hand, and as the sword lifted he pressed the point beneath the armpit, and the man sank down without strength. The spear that flew in after it he caught by the shaft and turned aside, then heeled the dragged-in spearman’s knee out from under him.
A saber dropped from the side, and Pung slipped in half a step, wound the wrist and twisted it, then shoved the man’s body to block the path of the two behind him. Those who went down groaned with pain, yet the breath stayed in them, and to take no lives while leaving none able to rise again, his fingertips needed an even finer strength.
A-yeong drew her short sword as well. While Pung swept the spear blade away she ducked low and cut across a warrior’s shin, then struck up at another’s jaw with the turning hilt. When a staggering soldier stretched a hand toward Pung’s back, A-yeong stamped down on that wrist and shouted.
“I’ll watch behind, so hold the front!”
Without even room to answer, Pung leapt in among the crowding blades, and when he let one slide past, two came layered together; when he felled three, four showed themselves in the passage. As the flow of the meridians filled his sight to the brim, his temples ran hot and the backs of his eyes ached as though pricked with needles.
Still, thinking he must not let anything slip, he tried to seize more of the flows. When he tried to read them all at once — the sword ahead, the saber curving in from the left, the spear grazing the floor, the blade turning toward A-yeong, even the footsteps trying to worm in between the cages — the differing energies tangled and blurred into a single mass.
His sight wavered for an instant.
As though they had been waiting for that gap, two warriors drove into Pung’s blind side, one blade going for A-yeong’s shoulder, the other for her flank.
“A-yeong!”
Pung threw himself between the two of them and slapped the flat of the first blade aside with his palm, and the blade that followed he barely turned away by twisting his forearm. With the shriek of steel his hand went numb as if splitting open, and the deflected sword tip cut a shallow line through A-yeong’s hem.
A-yeong swallowed her breath, her face gone pale, but she soon reversed her grip on the hilt and drove it into the warrior’s solar plexus, and she shoved away another spear coming over Pung’s shoulder with her short sword, teeth clenched.
“I can fight too. Don’t try to watch all of it alone.”
At those words Pung gathered his scattered breath, and the eye that saw the meridians was no divine gift that revealed everything. The greedier he grew, the more surely he might lose the one blade he could not afford to lose.
Pung boldly threw away the flows at the edge of his sight, and even the blades that came for him he let pass if they were not fatal at once. When he picked out and held only the energies turned toward A-yeong and the people in the cages, a clear road rose again among the tangled streams.
He pushed up the saber coming from the left with his elbow, seized the shoulder of the soldier who cut in beneath it, and threw him into the man beside him. The sword that sliced past Pung’s collar he did not chase. Instead he kicked apart the spear shaft being thrust between the iron bars, and struck the ankle of a warrior running at the cage where the child was held, dropping him to the floor.
Once he had settled on what to guard, his body grew swift again.
A-yeong did not miss the narrow openings Pung made. She pressed the point on a fallen soldier to cut his movement short, and to one who leapt in from the side passage she snapped her wrist as if throwing a dagger and stole his gaze. In the instant the man flinched, Pung’s fist landed on his chest, and with a dull sound the warrior was flung backward.
Above the stair, the exchange between Hyeonheo and Dokgo Muheon rang off the stone walls. Every time Hyeonheo’s palm came pouring down, the edge of the stair crumbled and Dokgo Muheon’s silk robe whipped violently, but a dark-yellow poison mist rose like a snake and barred the old man’s way.
Hyeonheo stopped his breath, circled outside the poison mist and drove out a palm, and Dokgo Muheon twisted aside to barely let the shock slide off, then shook out both sleeves, and slender poison needles flashed beneath the torchlight.
One of them grazed Hyeonheo’s sleeve.
As the cloth darkened to red, Hyeonheo’s energy wavered for a moment. He sealed the point near his shoulder with a finger at once and raised his inner strength to force out the poison, but in that brief gap Dokgo Muheon drew back up the broken stair.
Pung crushed the urge to run to him, for if he left his place the wall standing before the cages would be gone. There was nothing to do but trust Hyeonheo and beat aside the spear in front of his eyes.
The ease drained from Dokgo Muheon’s face, and when Hyeonheo’s next palm grazed his shoulder he staggered and caught the railing, and swept the cavern below with bloodshot eyes. That gaze halted on the cages and on the poison jars set out in rows.
“Better to bury every last thing than leave evidence behind!”
Dokgo Muheon shrieked and slashed his hand down.
“Break the poison jars! Don’t leave one thing in here alive!”
Pung’s heart dropped.
Dark-yellow venom seethed in every jar, each standing waist-high on a man, and the grooves in the floor ran into the cages, and if even one broke, those long worn down by poison would not endure it. If all of them broke, then A-yeong and Hyeonheo, and no one at all in this cellar, could come through unharmed.
Hearing the order, several soldiers peeled away from the line and ran toward the jars. When Pung moved to chase them, swords and spears barred his way all at once, and from behind came the ragged breathing of prisoners clutching the iron bars.
If he took a single step, those blades would pass behind Pung’s back and pour into the cages.
The warrior who reached the nearest poison jar raised his saber high with both hands.
With his back to the prisoners, Pung could not move.
Join the discussion