Chapter 18: The Pull

Chapter 18: The Pull

Before the sun rose above the mountain crest, Pung, Hyeonheo, and A-yeong left Nohachon. The inner energy he had drawn on inside the poison mist had not returned even by half, and his hollow dantian throbbed with every step, but Pung did not slow his pace.

More had failed to return than had come back. There was the child who had gone back into a grandmother’s arms at dawn, and then there were those like Granny Donggu and Hwang-u, whose fate and whereabouts alike remained unconfirmed. If Dokgo’s message reached the Martial Alliance first, the evidence might vanish, or even the testimony of the survivors might be driven off as lies.

Pung pressed a hand to the fragment of the ledger tucked for now inside his inner robe. Between the organization of the black wolf emblem and Dokgo there surely lay a road far longer than anything written in the ledger, and there might well be someone within the Martial Alliance joined to that road — but unease was no reason to stop.

For three days they avoided the main roads and moved along the skirts of the mountains, and the inner energy spent in the poison mist filled slowly back; a faint warmth returned even to the dantian that had felt scoured empty. Hyeonheo studied the road behind them at every rest, but found no sign of pursuit out of Nohachon.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, rounding a gentle ridge, Pung stopped at an unfamiliar sensation spreading from the forefinger of his left hand.

It was not sharp, the way it was when the ring answered an enemy’s killing intent, nor fierce, the way it was when he drew its power out; it was a pull, as though a fine thread had caught on his finger and were drawing him slowly toward the western valley beyond the ridge. When he opened his hand, a thin radiance flowed across the surface of the golden ring.

“What is it?”

A-yeong, walking ahead, turned around, and before Pung could answer, the silver ring began to tremble violently. Unlike all the times it had groped after something to the north, this time the energies of the two rings lay folded in a single direction and pointed west.

“They have never responded together before.”

Pung opened his meridian sight, shallowly. He saw no trace of a martial artist hidden in the forest, but one earth vein that should have run on gently bent strangely beneath the ridge and poured deep into the valley.

Hyeonheo searched the western sky. A little over three sijin remained before the sun touched the ridge, yet in the mountains darkness came down faster. Straying from the planned route meant pressing on through the night, and a greater risk of falling behind Dokgo’s message.

“Do you want to go and see?”

“Yes. But we cannot linger long.”

“Until the sun touches the western ridge. If something appears to block the way, or the time to get back grows short, we withdraw before then.”

Hyeonheo looked down at the two rings, then met Pung’s eyes.

“Even if it is those things that lead, the one who sets his foot down must be you.”

Pung looked back and forth between the road leading to the Martial Alliance and the western valley. It was a rare chance to learn what the rings were, but he could not let that curiosity cost him the evidence from Nohachon. Having resolved not to overrun the hour he had set, he turned west.

There was no path in the valley worn by human feet. Mist pooled low between waist-high silver grass and rain-scoured rock, and the deeper they went, the fainter even the sounds of birds and insects grew. Examined through meridian sight, the earth energy that ought to have spread in every direction curved round in a circle, pushing the senses of anyone who looked away outward, again and again.

“An old formation.”

When Hyeonheo set the staff against ground that looked perfectly sound, the soil caved away and a deep crevice between stones was laid bare.

“Do not trust the path you can see. Find where the energy runs on.”

Pung picked his way forward through the thin gaps in the earth energy. A boulder close at hand would be shoved off beyond the mist; behind a thorn thicket that blocked the way, the true flow would appear instead. By the time they had backed out of one wrong turning, the sun had already slipped nearly a handspan.

Halfway up the valley, Hyeonheo raised a hand. In the wet soil beneath the bent silver grass, a large bootprint was half-pressed, and in the sole’s mark lay the traces of iron studs worn down at the corners. No water had gathered inside it; the print was not old.

A-yeong laid a hand on her sword hilt.

“Did someone follow us?”

“The direction is reversed. Whoever it was came in, then went back out.”

The traces around it broke off, as if deliberately swept clean. Whether it was someone who had chanced to tread on a gap in the formation, or someone who had come knowing what lay inside, was hard to judge; but that someone had entered this place recently was beyond doubt.

Just then a low reverberation carried in from outside the valley. It resembled the sound of wind, but the beat at which the earth veins shook was far too regular, and the pooled mist flowed backward for a moment. When Pung widened his meridian sight, one outer ring of the formation they had come through snapped, and the flow within twisted swiftly.

“Has someone tampered with it from outside?”

“This is no natural collapse.”

Hyeonheo’s gaze turned to the western sky. There was time yet before sunset, but if the way back closed first, the three sijin they had set aside meant nothing.

“We find the destination within one sijin. If the flow bends once more, we pull out at once.”

The approach from outside had cut short the time they were allowed.

The three closed their intervals: Pung finding the gaps in the energy at the front, A-yeong guarding the rear, Hyeonheo pinning the shivering crossing points with the staff. By the time they reached the cliff at the valley’s end, Pung had found a faint line running across the middle of the rock.

When the vines were pulled away, a crack appeared, narrow enough that a body had to twist to pass. From within seeped air cold and dry, nothing like the damp of the valley, and as the golden ring brightened, even the silver ring rang as though tightening around his finger.

Hyeonheo stacked three stones at the entrance and laid dry grass across them — a marker made to topple if anyone came in after them.

“If the way forks inside, or the formation moves again, we turn back.”

They lit a torch and went in, and on the walls of the narrow passage appeared patterns of circles and lines tangled together. The two strands of line turned in opposite directions yet meshed at intervals, and in the grooves that had lost their light, gold and silver dust remained faintly.

At the end of the passage sat a round stone chamber. Blue ore set in the ceiling gave off a dim glow, and on a low stone dais at the center lay a single aged scroll. Nothing else was to be seen, but from the moment they stepped into the chamber the two rings rang as though they were one body, stretching their energy toward the dais.

Pung checked the surroundings, then approached the scroll. The paper was dense with characters resembling those in the passage, yet he could read not one of them. Looking into it with meridian sight, the thin light trapped in each character strained toward the golden ring, while the rounded lines in the margins answered the silver ring.

The rings did not drag at his arm, nor carve commands into his mind; they seemed only to be waiting to see whether he would reach out.

Of his own will, Pung touched his fingertips to the scroll.

A low reverberation swept the floor of the chamber, and as characters steeped in blue light rose from the paper, A-yeong drew her sword and Hyeonheo set a hand on Pung’s shoulder — poised to pull him away should danger come, but not barring the choice.

The characters parted into two streams. One whirled fiercely over the golden surface and soaked in; the other circled calmly above the silver and settled. Each time the strange energy lodged in a ring, an immense vision flashed through Pung’s mind.

A gate piercing the sky.

Countless iron chains coiled around it, binding it fast.

Beyond it, a darkness without end.

And in that darkness, a single sword driven in alone, enduring long ages.

When the last character was absorbed, the scroll split like a bone-dry leaf. Pung tried to catch it, but the paper crumbled between his fingers and left only gray dust, while a single meaning that was neither speech nor writing sank into the depths of his consciousness.

The key of choice.

It could bring him before the closed gate. But whether to loose the seal and take the sword was the portion of the one who held the key.

Pung staggered, and Hyeonheo caught his shoulder; A-yeong, without lowering her sword, looked from his eyes to his hands and back.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m not hurt.”

When Pung had explained, Hyeonheo gazed for a while at the dais where only dust remained.

“A thing is not necessarily evil for having been sealed, nor precious for being old. If what you have gained is a key, then one day you may stand before a gate that must not be opened.”

From the direction of the passage came the ring of stone striking stone.

The blue patterns were going out one by one from the outside in, the earth energy flowing along the floor surged backward: another outer ring had snapped, and the formation had begun folding inward. The passage narrowed visibly, and coarse stone grit poured down from the ceiling.

From beyond the far wall of the chamber, too, came the resonance of an empty space. By the way a thin earth vein ran on toward it, it was surely another room or passage, and clues about the sealed gate and the sword might well remain there.

Pung took a step toward the wall and stopped. Opening it would take no small amount of time. If whoever had left that fresh print was pressing the formation from outside, their line of retreat would vanish entirely in the meanwhile.

Above all, the business of the living came first.

“We’re going out.”

A-yeong looked back at the wall.

“Don’t you want to look further?”

“I do. But the people I have to find now aren’t beyond that gate. They’re outside.”

Hyeonheo nodded, briefly.

“Remember that choice.”

As the three plunged into the passage, the way seemed to double into two overlapping paths, while behind them followed the roar of the chamber’s ceiling caving in, and each time a pattern on the floor went dark, even the walls changed their places. Pung groped with meridian sight after the grain of what earth energy remained, but the collapsing formation had churned the very flows into confusion.

The right-hand wall thrust out without warning. A-yeong stood where she could not dodge, so Pung hauled her arm and twisted his body, and the edge of the stone tore through his sleeve as it went past. Hyeonheo drove the staff down into a crossing point of the patterns, and the heaving passage stilled for a moment.

“On the count of three, run. Do not stop.”

Hyeonheo’s true power spread through the floor, and one of the falsely doubled paths faded. Pung and A-yeong slipped through the gap first, and the instant the staff was pulled free, the pinned formation sprang up and swallowed the passage behind them.

As the entrance drew near, they heard the stacked stones rolling away. Pung quickened, but the earth energy sealing the crack in the cliff folded inward, and a blue membrane hardened like rock.

“Someone is pressing the formation from outside!”

Hyeonheo shoved one side of the membrane upward with the staff. Pung began to draw out the golden ring’s power, then stopped and forced his shoulder into the thinnest fissure his meridian sight could show him. A-yeong jammed her scabbard into the opening and levered it wide, and just before the formation closed, Hyeonheo too pulled free.

The three rolled down beneath the cliff, dodging the falling stones. When Pung had caught his breath and looked back, the stones piled at the entrance had all toppled, and one had been kicked out to a place the formation’s recoil alone could hardly have reached. In the wet soil there were marks, too, where a sole had been scuffed across to wipe them away.

“If we give chase, could we catch them?”

“By the skill with which those traces were erased, it will not be easy. Nor can we know whether there was only one.”

Pung searched beyond the valley, but the twisted earth energy kept his meridian sight from reaching far. The sun already hung on the western ridge, and whatever room they had had to follow the outsider’s trail or seek another entrance was gone.

The three swung wide around the collapsing formation and made their way out of the valley. Only after darkness had fallen did they regain the road they had planned on, and when Hyeonheo reckoned the sun’s position against the distance covered, the delay caused by searching the stone chamber and escaping it came to a full three sijin.

“If we are to cross the pass before the day is out, there will be no resting.”

While A-yeong watched the road behind, Pung looked at the golden and silver rings beneath his sleeve. Having swallowed the characters of the scroll, they had lost both light and energy and lay quietly settled — yet when he closed his eyes, the chain-bound gate and the sword beyond it rose up vividly.

“Stare long enough at a thing that gives no answers, and you come to take your own heart for the answer.”

At Hyeonheo’s warning, Pung took his hand from the rings. Delivering the evidence salvaged from Nohachon and uncovering where the vanished had gone came before any search for the sealed gate.

To make up the three sijin they had lost, the three set out onto the mountain pass under fallen darkness.