The three of them came down from the mountain and walked for several days toward Nohachon, out on the frontier.
If Pung and A-yeong had used their movement techniques, it was a distance they could have covered in a single day, but Hyeonheo deliberately kept to a pace fit for ordinary people. Each time they passed a village or a market street he slowed his steps and told them the stories tangled up in the place, and Pung realized all over again that the jianghu he had learned from books and the jianghu he trod with his own two feet were two quite different things.
The jianghu he had heard about on the mountaintop had been like one vast painting, distant and grand. But the jianghu before his eyes smelled of people, and in the alley right beside a marketplace brimming with laughter, hunger and fear sat crouched.
In one village he watched disciples of a renowned orthodox sect stride down the market street. People hurried out of the way and bowed their heads, but in their eyes there was more fear than respect.
One of those disciples shoved a child who had failed to move aside in time, and the child went sprawling; a palm scraped raw on the stone paving welled with blood. The warrior did not so much as glance back, laughing with his companions as he walked on.
When Pung started forward a step without meaning to, Hyeonheo caught his arm.
“Not now.”
“But that child…”
“It would be no hard thing for you to put them on the ground. But once we have gone, who will protect the child and their family?”
Pung could not answer readily. If those warriors took their revenge, the ones to suffer would be people with no strength to stand against them. Hyeonheo watched the warriors’ backs recede, then spoke quietly.
“Those who speak of righteousness with nothing but their mouths are the most fearsome of all.”
It was as if the teaching that not everything orthodox was right had taken on flesh and appeared before Pung’s eyes. In the jianghu, knowing right from wrong did not mean one could throw a fist as one pleased. If you had strength, you had to bear what came after you swung it, and to Pung that felt far harder than teaching those warriors a lesson.
The closer they came to the frontier, the heavier the air on the road grew. Travelers thinned out noticeably, and the occasional peddlers they met turned south in a hurry before the sun had even begun to sink. Whenever they asked one of them the road to Nohachon, the answer was a closed mouth and a finger pointing the way.
Each time, Pung’s heart grew more impatient. Was Granny Donggu safe? Where was Hwang-u, who was built like an ox and yet so timid that he checked the door latch twice every night? Long years had passed since he left the mountain, but to Pung, Nohachon was still our village.
On the day that made several, a familiar river revealed itself on the left side of the road.
Pung nearly stopped in his tracks.
The water ran over the same shallow rapids as in his childhood, and along the bank dry yellow reeds had grown taller than a grown man. In spring he and Hwang-u used to splash in barefoot to catch minnows; in autumn he used to hide in the reed bed to escape Granny Donggu’s scolding.
But when he looked closely, the changes began to lodge in his eyes one by one. The willow on the embankment had half its trunk dead and blackened, as if it had been struck by lightning, and several of the stepping stones leading down to the water had washed away, leaving the line broken and gap-toothed. The footpath that had run through the reeds lay buried in weeds, as though no one walked it anymore.
“Do you know that river?”
When A-yeong asked, Pung wet his dry lips.
“It’s the river that runs in front of our village. Go round that reed bed over there and you come to Donggu.”
Once the words our village were out of his mouth, his chest turned heavy. The gladness of having returned came second to the unease of having come too late, and the silver ring trembled coldly on his finger, as if urging that feeling on.
Pung quickened his pace without realizing it. Even as he kept track of Hyeonheo and A-yeong following behind, his eyes chased nothing but the roofs across the river. In his childhood the dogs would have caught the sound of strange footsteps from that far off and started barking, and smoke would have risen from every hearth, the smell of soybean stew mixing with the smell of damp firewood.
Today there was no sound at all.
Not a single thread of smoke to be seen.
The old cairn at the mouth of the village and the crooked jangseung post still stood as they had, but the road beyond them was narrower and darker than Pung remembered. In the alley where he had run about with the other children until he was covered in dirt, only dry reed leaves rolled along, and the pumpkin vines that had draped over the low stone walls had withered black.
Pung felt a fear deeper than the sight of some unfamiliar ruin would have given him, because he knew what this place was supposed to look like. He remembered where a dog ought to be barking, which chimney ought to send up smoke first, which wall ought to have the thud of a pestle coming from behind it, and all of it was gone.
The whole village seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something to pass.
“That house down there with the blue tiles is Granny Donggu’s.”
Pung pointed deeper into the alley. One corner of the roof, far off, had sagged lower than before, and under the eaves there was no sign of the bundles of medicinal herbs the old woman had always hung to dry.
“Will you go on ahead?”
At Hyeonheo’s question, Pung pressed down the urge to run there at once. The stillness of the village was strange enough that he must not move alone.
“I’ll look on the way. Hwang-u’s house is at the end of that alley too, so…”
His words trailed off. There was no knowing whether Hwang-u was still in that house, or even alive. Pung curled his hand into a fist and slowly opened it.
As they entered the mouth of the village, the three of them slowed. Though it was broad daylight, most of the houses had their doors firmly barred, and the few residents they happened to meet in the alleys looked away the moment they saw the strangers.
Pung studied those faces. There was a set of eyes he faintly remembered, and a man who resembled somebody’s father he had seen as a child. But after five years shut underground and another three spent on the mountaintop, Pung had changed beyond recognition in height and in build. More than that, the villagers were too busy fleeing trouble to try to recognize three strangers in martial robes.
“Excuse me…”
When Pung moved toward one man, the man flinched and hid himself behind a door. The sound of the bar dropping rang through the alley, and as if startled by it, the window across the way slammed shut too.
Pung drew back his outstretched hand. It was not so much that being unrecognized stung; what frightened him was whatever had made people this afraid.
When he looked around with the eyes that saw energy meridians, behind every barred door a faint energy crouched. Energy gone thin, as if from meals too often missed; energy trembling sharp and taut with sleeplessness. House by house it lay tangled together. The life force of people long crushed under terror was as precarious as a brazier with its embers going out.
Just then an old woman carrying a water jar appeared at the far end of the alley. For a moment Pung’s eyes went wide, wondering if it was Granny Donggu, but as she came closer he saw it was an unfamiliar face. So as not to startle her, Hyeonheo set his staff upright and spoke carefully.
“A word, if I may. We hear that people have been vanishing in this village of late…”
The blood drained from the old woman’s face. Her hands shook hard enough to slosh the water in the jar, and she shook her head urgently.
“I know nothing… nothing at all. Just never step outside once the sun is down. That is all.”
“Do you know an old woman who lives in Donggu, and a man called Hwang-u?”
Pung asked in haste, but the old woman did not answer. She looked up at him once, then vanished into the alley with terror on her face, and a moment later came the sound of a door shutting and a bar dropping, one after the other.
Unable to follow, Pung stared at the firmly shut door. It was hard to judge whether she had heard the names and denied knowing them, or had simply been unable to speak.
“This place feels downright sinister.”
A-yeong lowered her voice and pressed close to Pung’s side. Coming down the mountain she had chattered and asked about everything that caught her eye, but since entering Nohachon she had gone noticeably quiet.
“Let us first go where people gather.”
Hyeonheo pointed to the middle of the village.
“In places like this, tongues may be heavy, but rumors still gather in one spot. You may hear word of the ones you are looking for.”
There stood a shabby tavern that Pung remembered as well. When he was small, wine jars had been lined up before the door, and at sundown the din used to carry all the way to the riverside. Now there was only a worn flag, the character for wine, 酒, half rubbed away, swaying weakly in the wind.
The moment he pushed through the creaking door, Pung froze in the very posture of stepping over the threshold.
The tavern was all but empty, with only a handful of customers, and in one corner a young man in black martial robes sat alone, silently tipping back his cup.
The energy coiled about the man was like nothing Pung had ever seen. Dark red past the point of red, nearly pitch black, it ran deep and savage inside and outside his body, and yet not one strand of it strayed. It was as if a blade forged over long years in blood and darkness had been forced into the shape of a human being.
He had been taught the colors and currents of demonic energy on the mountaintop, but he had never met anything this thick and heavy. Pung felt his throat go bone dry and swallowed hard.
Hyeonheo, who had been leading, also halted for an instant, and even A-yeong, who had no idea why, looked at their stiffened faces, closed her mouth, and held her breath.
Perhaps feeling Pung’s gaze, the man slowly raised his head, and across the empty tavern their eyes met head-on.
They were deep, cold eyes. A blade-like edge flashed in the look that pierced Pung, and a chill slid down his spine. It was as if the man had noticed even the fact that Pung had looked into his energy.
If that man so chose, he could cut down anyone in the room in a single stroke. Pung could not have explained how he knew, but his body recognized it before anything else did.
It was the man who looked away first. He dropped his eyes back to his cup as if nothing had happened, and that indifference felt more dangerous still.
Hyeonheo laid a light hand on Pung’s shoulder.
“Sit down for now. This is no place to make a scene.”
His voice was calm, but the fingertips on Pung’s shoulder carried a faint tension. The three of them took a corner table well away from the man, and Hyeonheo spoke low, for Pung alone.
“Take your eyes off him, but do not lose the feel of him. There is no telling when a man like that will turn into a blade.”
Pung nodded and took in the tavern. The few customers only fiddled with their cups, and the proprietress wiped the same table over and over while stealing glances at the door. The old proprietress of Pung’s memory, who had carried the trays out laughing heartily, was nowhere to be seen; whether the place had changed hands or she too had vanished, he could not tell.
It seemed the customers feared more than just the nights when people disappeared. Not one of them turned a glance toward the man in the corner, and if anyone happened to face that way by mistake, they startled and corrected themselves at once.
Hyeonheo ordered wine and a simple dish, then put a word to the proprietress in passing.
“The village seems quite unsettled, by the look of it. Has something happened?”
The hand holding the rag stopped. Only after she had swept the room once with her eyes did she lean in and lower her voice.
“Did you come here without knowing, sir? People vanish in this village these days. Every night, without fail.”
“People vanish?”
“More than ten gone already. Healthy folk disappear clean out of their beds in their sleep, with no sign of a struggle and nobody who heard a scream. The magistrate’s office has washed its hands of it, and the fine lords of the orthodox sects have not shown so much as the tip of a nose. What can the likes of us do but bar the door and hold our breath once the sun goes down?”
Pung leaned forward without thinking.
“Are Granny Donggu and Hwang-u among the missing?”
The proprietress’s eyes turned to Pung. She narrowed them for a moment, as if groping after a face she had seen somewhere, and then her guard went up.
“How do you know those names?”
“I’m from this village too. I left long ago, but…”
At his answer the proprietress’s gaze wavered. Her lips moved as though she meant to say something, but, seemingly conscious of the man in the corner, she shut her mouth tight.
“I know nothing.”
She left in a hurry. The meaning was plain enough, ask no more, but Pung could not shake the feeling that it was not that she did not know the two names, only that she could not say them.
Under the table, A-yeong quietly took hold of Pung’s sleeve. Her usual boldness was nowhere to be found, and her fingertips were trembling faintly.
“I’m a little scared here.”
Pung nodded to her as if to say it was all right, but his own heart was far from easy. More than ten people had vanished, and still the magistrate and the orthodox sects had turned their faces away from this village. While those with power kept their hands off it, the people of the alleys where he had once run and played were enduring the nights, hoping only that they would not be next.
Just then the man in the corner set down his cup.
Tak.
The small sound rang unusually clear in the hushed tavern, and when the man rose and laid the price of his wine on the table, the customers’ shoulders stiffened as if by agreement.
He started toward the door, and as it happened, his path brushed right past where Pung sat.
Pung held his breath. Up close, the man looked far younger than he had thought, at most about Pung’s own age, yet the dark red energy wrapped around him was as thick and heavy as that of an old master who had been through every hardship.
How could anyone hold demonic energy that strong at such an age? Pung tried to read the energy before him, but the more he tried to gauge its depth, the more the dizziness grew, like peering into a bottomless pit.
The man’s step slowed for the briefest moment beside Pung, a hesitation far too distinct to be chance.
“Just now. What did you see?”
He asked without stopping, his voice low enough for Pung alone to hear.
Pung’s heart dropped.
He had noticed. That Pung had seen his energy.
When Pung did not answer, the man looked down at him out of the corner of his eye, and for an instant a blade-like edge flashed in that cold gaze.
“Put your eyes where they don’t belong and one day you may lose them.”
The man paused, then added indifferently.
“That’s advice.”
With that one word he walked out of the tavern without a backward glance, and only after the creaking door had shut and even his footsteps had faded did Pung let out the breath he had been holding, long and slow.
“Danpung, what did that man just say to you?”
A-yeong asked with a worried face, but Pung shook his head, thinking that telling her his eyes for energy meridians had been found out would only unsettle her more.
“It’s nothing.”
He feigned composure, but a cold sweat had already gathered along his spine. Hyeonheo studied his face and asked in a hardened voice.
“Did you see it, Danpung? The energy coming off that man.”
“Yes. A dark red energy I have never seen before. It was so deep I couldn’t see the end of it.”
“Demonic energy. And no ordinary demonic energy at that.”
Hyeonheo’s eyes turned to the closed door.
“If he has mastered demonic arts of that order at so young an age, he will be one of the handful who count even within the Demonic Cult.”
A blade of the Demonic Cult was prowling around our village. And one strong enough for Hyeonheo to be wary of, at that.
It might have been the first clue that the disappearances in Nohachon were not unrelated to the Demonic Cult, but Pung’s questions only grew larger. Why would a master of that caliber appear in person in a small village on the frontier? It was impossible to believe that so much force was needed to abduct a few people, and if that was so, what he was after might not be the missing at all, but something else.
“Danpung, A-yeong. This matter looks to be harder and more tangled than we thought. You will both need to steel yourselves.”
Hyeonheo’s gaze sank deep, and A-yeong, without another complaint, pressed her lips together and nodded.
Pung looked for a long time at the tavern door through which the man had gone. Beyond it lay Granny Donggu’s house and the alley where he had to find some trace of Hwang-u, and waiting there too was the night of our village, where people vanished once the sun went down.
Even so, a strange feeling unlike fear stirred in one corner of his chest. Apart from Hyeonheo, that man was the first whose depths even his own eyes had failed to read to the end.
‘That man… who on earth is he?’
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