Gu Jin-ha's Trap

Cheon Yeo-seol had eaten her fill and come out into the garden to sun herself. And she was not the only one sunning herself. A calico cat dozed on top of the moon gate, butterflies and bees flew busily in among the flowers, and a bird was pecking up a mole cricket that had for once come above ground. Every sort of living creature had gathered where the sunlight fell.

She had been watching them blankly when, in an instant, every last creature vanished, and she turned her head.

A strange man was coming into the garden.

The cat on the moon gate lifted its head, a little tense at the stranger’s arrival. The man glanced at Cheon Yeo-seol, then put a question to Eun-bi as she passed.

“Hey. There’s a scholar here by the name of Cheon Tae-san, isn’t there?”

“Yes. He is here.”

“Where is he?”

“He has gone out.”

“Gone where?”

“That I do not know.”

“Truly?”

“Yes.”

“Bah. They say you can never find dog shit when you want it for medicine. Where’s the man gone?”

Gu Jin-ha had it in mind to draw Scholar Cheon into this business. Only so could he send Cheon Tae-san down into the abyss.

Still grumbling in his irritation, he caught sight of a girl in the garden of Cheon Tae-san’s quarters and spoke to her abruptly.

“Hey! Do you know where Cheon Tae-san has gone?”

“Don’t know!”

“Don’t know?”

“That’s right.”

“Is that so?”

“What’s your name?”

“And what’s the name of the one asking mine?”

Cheon Yeo-seol got to her feet and went on.

“I’ve been taking lessons in manners lately, and I learned that as a rule, before you ask somebody else’s name, it’s good manners to give your own first.”

Her eyes turned cold.

“And I learned you don’t talk down to a person as you please, however young they are. What was it — they say it’s ill-bred bastards who do that. Were you never taught a damn thing?”

“Whoaa. Would you look at this impudent little brat.”

“Whoaa. Would you look at this shabby, ugly bastard.”

“Did you learn that in your manners lessons too?”

“No. That one I learned when I was learning the ways of the world. I was taught that if a person swears at you, you answer them with the same swearing. That there are people who take you for an easy mark if you mind your manners.”

“The teacher who gives you these lessons in manners?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s his name?”

“What would you do with it if you knew?”

“Whoa, would you just look at this ill-mannered little wench.”

“You say things that get you looked down on.”

Eun-bi, watching Gu Jin-ha take his dressing-down, slipped away stifling a squeak of laughter. Of all the people in this place, not one had ever won a quarrel of words with Cheon Yeo-seol.

The more Gu Jin-ha talked the angrier he grew, until his hand rose without his ever deciding to raise it.

“This one really needs one across the face before she learns the world is a frightening place. Just — whack!”

“So it’s true, then.”

He asked with his hand still raised.

“What is?”

“That when a man can’t master his own temper and barks like a mad dog, the best course is to keep out of his way. You avoid shit because it’s filthy, not because you’re afraid of it.”

“You. Come here. You’re getting hit, and I mean it.”

The girl was so thoroughly hateful that the urge to strike her rose in Gu Jin-ha. And even so, Cheon Yeo-seol went on chattering away with that small mouth of hers.

“My teacher said this. That a person’s character shows in the face, and their way of living in the shape of the body, and their consideration in how they eat, and their humanity in how they treat the weak. Your face is nothing but ill temper, and you’re trying to hit a small, frail young girl like me — so you’re no martial artist of the orthodox murim, not for a moment. You’re demonic-path scum, aren’t you? A vicious demonic fiend at that. But how did a demonic fiend get into the Namgung Clan?”

At being sworn at outright, Gu Jin-ha stepped closer and raised his hand to slap her.

“You there! What do you think you are doing!”

An elegant middle-aged woman came up and spoke low, as though scolding.

“Who are you, that you would raise a hand to this child?”

“This child is so utterly without manners that I mean to give her a sharp word by way of discipline.”

Gu Jin-ha said it without a trace of shame. He had struck even a child before now whenever a thing did not suit his temper, and he saw nothing wrong in it.

“Do you know who this child is, that you would strike her?”

When Cheon Yeo-seol dirtied her clothes and had nothing else to put on, she often wore what Eun-bi wore. That was why Gu Jin-ha too had taken her for a young maidservant. A child of good family would hardly go about in such shabby things.

“Whoever she may be, if she needs disciplining, then a rod must be taken to her.”

Jeon I-an was dumbfounded that a stranger should come as far as the inner court of the house and behave so.

“You would take a rod to a child of the Namgung Clan?”

“A child of the Namgung Clan?”

“That is so.”

Gu Jin-ha looked the handsome middle-aged woman over with a sour eye.

“And who might you be, madam?”

It had never once entered his head that anyone from the Namgung Clan’s highest councils would come to Scholar Cheon’s quarters. He knew perfectly well what a martial house thinks of a scholar, and in one of the Five Great Clans it would run deeper, not shallower, than the cold eye the Murim Alliance’s martial artists turned on scholars.

Just then a deep voice came from behind him.

“She is my wife. Is there some difficulty?”

Gu Jin-ha turned his head at the familiar voice and started violently.

“What? Your wife, you say… the clan matron?”

Realizing his blunder, Gu Jin-ha bent so low he was all but flat on the ground.

“I am sorry. I did not know you.”

Jeon I-an, her anger not eased in the least, glared at him as though she would kill him.

“My dear, why are you so angry?”

“This man — would you believe it — was going to strike Yeo-seol, so I stopped him.”

“What?”

The words were hardly out before killing intent came spreading from Namgung Hak. For an instant Gu Jin-ha felt he had become a gnat caught in a spider’s web.

“You dare! You would have raised a hand to Yeo-seol!”

What little respect had been in his words, and in his manner of speech, was gone.

Gu Jin-ha saw a vision of his own body parted into dozens of pieces. A cold sweat sprang out over him, and though he wished to make some excuse, his mouth would not open.

“All this while I have shown you respect as a Second Seat Inspector of the Murim Alliance Inspection Corps, and you dare come into this house and offer violence. And to a child I hold dear, at that.”

Gu Jin-ha was entirely at a loss.

“Leave this instant. And do not set foot in this house again. Break that, and you had best be prepared for what it will cost you.”

He had not been struck, and yet he was so far out of his wits that it felt very nearly as though he had been soundly beaten.

“Clan Head…”

“Enough. I have no wish even to hear your voice. Simply go.”

Unable so much as to raise his head, Gu Jin-ha slipped quietly away.

Jeon I-an asked Cheon Yeo-seol,

“Yeo-seol, were you frightened?”

“No, ma’am. It’s not as if a stray cur going by is anything to be afraid of.”

Cheon Yeo-seol smiled brightly and answered her in polite speech, and Jeon I-an stroked her head.

“Oh my, how can she be so lovely. I have half a mind to make her my granddaughter outright.”

Cheon Yeo-seol shook her head.

“Brother said that would tangle up the family lines, so it would not be good.”

“What? Hohoho. The very things she says.”

Cheon Yeo-seol knew how to use polite speech now. But only for exactly two people.

When Namgung Hak and Jeon I-an had gone, Cheon Yeo-seol looked at the flowerbed and muttered.

“That ugly man came within a hair of dying. I’m all right, so you go on home.”

At the words, the triangular head of a venomous snake slid out from among the flowers, flicked its tongue, and vanished back into the flowerbed.

Gu Jin-ha’s pride was in the dust, his self-regard ground to pieces, and even once he was outside the Namgung Clan’s main gate his feet would not carry him on.

Every time I come to this place I am put to every sort of humiliation.

Slowly the focus came back into Gu Jin-ha’s eyes. Brimming with killing intent, they lifted to the Namgung Clan’s signboard.

Before he left, he went over to the martial artist guarding the main gate.

“Who is the child in Scholar Cheon’s quarters?”

At the question the martial artist looked at him with a sour eye. He had given his name every time he came and went through this gate, so the man knew perfectly well who he was, and to be looked at like that was thoroughly displeasing.

Now even the sentries look down on me? The Namgung Clan’s high hand reaches to heaven.

Another sentry spoke up.

“We call him Master Scholar Cheon.”

Gu Jin-ha was dumbfounded.

They would have me call him Master Scholar Cheon? Just what has this fellow Cheon Tae-san been doing here, that the Namgung Clan’s sentries carry on like this?

The sentry had once sprained an ankle in training and had it set right by Scholar Cheon’s needle, and he held the man in respect for it.

Gu Jin-ha looked at the sentry and ground his teeth.

“Very well. Who is the child in Master Scholar Cheon’s quarters?”

He asked as politely as he was able.

“She is Master Scholar Cheon’s younger sister.”

It was nothing that needed hiding, so he said it.

“Oh? I know Master Scholar Cheon well, and so far as I am aware he has no little sister of that age.”

“His cousin.”

“And her name?”

“That is as much as we will tell you. And we tell you even that because you are of the Murim Alliance.”

Seeing even the sentries stand this stiff with him, Gu Jin-ha let out a hollow laugh and turned away.

A cousin? Absurd. I have combed through everything around that man, looking for a handle to throw him into the prison by. And I am not to know of a cousin of his? With the Namgung clan head and the clan matron keeping her at their side, there is something in it. Perhaps that child is a daughter of his he has kept hidden.

His nostrils flared at the feeling that he had turned up an important secret.

A little later, hearing on his return that Cheon Tae-san was at the safe house, he remembered the humiliation the Namgung Clan had given him and smiled a rank smile.

Had I gone straight to the safe house I might not have been humiliated — but then I would not have found Cheon Tae-san’s weak point.

Gu Jin-ha reckoned that Cheon Yeo-seol was that weak point. There was nothing to be done with it just now, but he judged that weak points, once they piled up, would one day make a sword that could pierce the heart. With that in his mind, a smile came of itself even with Scholar Cheon’s hateful face in front of him.

The sight of Gu Jin-ha grinning at me put me out of humor.

“If I’d known Scholar Cheon was here, I wouldn’t have made the trip for nothing.”

For a man who had made a wasted trip, his tone was bright.

“But what brings Scholar Cheon here? Did somebody call you?”

Gu Jin-ha called over another Inspector and heard the whole of it from beginning to end.

“Hmm. So that’s how it is.”

Gu Jin-ha had the look of a man with something to say to me.

“Be that as it may. I sought Scholar Cheon out to ask for help.”

At the Namgung Clan he had spoken to me with deference because of the clan head; at the safe house he treated me outright as a subordinate.

“What is there for me to help with.”

I spoke to him in plain speech myself.

“Ha? At the Namgung Clan I let it pass, since we stood before the clan head — but here as well?”

“I told you. I’m on rotating assignment. A man of the Inspection Corps stops being an Inspector the moment he leaves the Murim Alliance. That’s Alliance regulation. They made a rule like that because men went around acting the Inspector wherever they pleased and taking graft. So don’t try to pull rank on me.”

It was not a wrong thing to say, so Gu Jin-ha could not particularly rebut it, and he turned the subject instead.

“There’s a report, with circumstances behind it, that the son of the Jeongryong Sect’s sect leader over there has been in communication with the Demonic Cult. Back when Scholar Cheon was at the Murim Alliance he had a fine eye for picking a hellion out, did he not? And he has an eye of his own in medicine besides, so he read a man’s nature well. Scholar Cheon can tell a hellion’s nature from demonic qi, can’t he?”

Listening to the fellow, I caught the smell of a dank conspiracy.

These are the words of a man who has already been working some trick in advance.

He was telling me to examine the man because I could tell a hellion’s nature from the force of demonic qi. That meant a trick had been laid beforehand. Above all, I had ended up standing at the opposite pole from the Elder Faction without ever meaning to, so demonic qi confirmed by me would be past doubting.

And on top of that, if I say there is none, there is room for them to press evidence on me and drag me down with it. This way and that, he has dug any number of traps.

And yet the plot was so plainly visible that I was near to snorting at it.

Wang Cheong, listening beside us, took on a slightly troubled look. They too had felt the snare hidden in it.