The Gathering Darkness

The three Namgung Clan escorts were not wanting in talent. I explained the ultimate truth of the Great Expansion Sword Technique with Namgung Cheol-ung demonstrating, and he had it at once. And when I opened the art up for them with the Seven Virtues of Water at its center, the way all three of them looked at me changed.

“Master.”

In the end the word I had not expected came bursting out of all three men at once.

“Master is too much. I am content enough being a scholar, so call me Scholar.”

Master was no light word for a scholar either, but in the mouth of a martial artist it weighed a great deal more.

If the rumors are true, the Master Scholar cannot let his true self be known. To call such a man Master would be doing him harm rather than honor. He is a man who has to keep his identity hidden.

The three of them put their heads together, and then answered.

“We understand. But in our hearts, Master Scholar Cheon is our teacher.”

That much I could hardly force on them, so I let out a sigh.

“That is no matter to me, but do not go about calling me Master anywhere.”

“We shall be careful.”

Their hunger to grow stronger was fierce, and they drank in everything I taught them. Where they had been stuck in the Great Expansion Sword Technique, one explanation was enough to carry them through.

“Was the Great Expansion Sword Technique this easy? How can this be?”

“Is the learning not easy because the teacher is good?”

Namgung Cheol-ung said it gravely to the two of them making such a fuss.

All three were coming along well, so I asked Cheong Yo and Song-ran to bear with me.

“Tonight we shall camp in the open, somewhere with good ground. Can you endure it, uncomfortable as it will be?”

Cheong Yo smiled softly.

“Do not trouble yourself. Sleeping under the stars gives a musician a great deal of inspiration too.”

Cheong Yo and Song-ran took it well, and I was grateful for it. The two maidservants looked after them closely, so I had little to worry about on that score. Yeo-seol got on with them both besides, which meant I could leave her in their company and step away a while.

I sat the three men down a little way off from the others and spoke.

“Seeing what the three of you have achieved, I feel you ought to be training in a higher martial learning.”

“The highest martial learning we know is the Great Expansion Sword Technique. Regrettably we know nothing beyond it. We have no choice but to go on polishing the Great Expansion Sword Technique.”

There was something downcast in Namgung Cheol-ung’s face as he answered.

“From now on I shall hand the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique down to the three of you.”

“What?”

“What—!”

Namgung Hwa-jun started so hard that he came up off the ground where he sat, and Namgung Pyo clapped a hand over his own mouth. Namgung Cheol-ung’s eyes went round as brass bells.

“Er — Master Scholar. Hear me out, and do not take it amiss.”

There was nobody about, but Namgung Hwa-jun glanced around him all the same before he brought it out carefully.

“The Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique is a martial learning permitted only to the direct line of our house. If a man of the collateral branch masters it, that is trouble of its own.”

“I have already had the clan head’s permission.”

“What do you mean…!”

Namgung Pyo shook his head as though he could not make sense of it.

“Who in the world is Master Scholar Cheon, that the clan head should grant such permission — and how does Master Scholar Cheon know the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique at all? Master Scholar Cheon does not seem to understand: the code of our house is strict. It would never teach an outsider the house’s own sword techniques, let alone one of the higher martial arts like the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.”

Their doubt was only natural. Men of the collateral branch carried the Namgung name themselves and were still denied the art; that an outsider should have mastered it lay outside anything they could make sense of.

With that doubt still in them, I do not think they will take the teaching even if I offer it.

The thing had snagged in a stranger place than I expected. There was nothing for it but to take the plaque out of my robes and hand it to Namgung Cheol-ung.

“Look at this and you will understand.”

Namgung Cheol-ung and the other two crowded round the plaque and peered at it.

“This is—!”

“How does Master Scholar Cheon come to have this?”

They flipped the Protector’s plaque over and back again like a pancake on a griddle, and then looked at me.

“But this — is it genuine?”

None of them had ever laid eyes on the Protector’s plaque before, so they had no way of telling a true one from a false. The azure dragon carved into it, the emblem of the Namgung house, won it half their belief and no more. They simply had no eye for the genuine article.

“Then will you know this one?”

I held out the Azure Sky Sword Namgung Hak had given me.

“Eh? Is this not an Azure Sky Sword?”

The Elders and the clan head’s direct line carried that sword, and they had seen it often enough to know it at a glance. Two azure dragons wound about each other up the hilt and finished in dragon heads where they met the round guard, and no sword in the murim but this one carried carving so fine.

They straightened where they stood and spoke respectfully.

“We pay our respects to the Protector of the Person.”

“I am an outsider, but the clan head appointed me Protector of the Clan Head’s Person.”

“Ah. I had heard that our house has Protectors, and outsiders among them. That Master Scholar Cheon should be one of them…”

“No wonder. This is why he knows the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.”

I waited a while for their feeling to settle, and then began.

“From now on the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique will be handed down to those of the collateral branch who have the talent for it. You have grasped the Great Expansion Sword Technique, so you may master the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique.”

All three sprang up and made me a full bow to the ground. They moved together, as though it had all been agreed beforehand.

“We shall call you Master Scholar, but in our hearts you are our teacher. We ask to be taught.”

I gave them the oral formula of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, and I went kindly through the interpretation of it besides. An oral formula without an interpretation is dangerous past telling; with the interpretation, it was not hard to follow. Explaining the formula and the moves took two hours.

“If you come to a place where you are stuck as you train, write it down and put all your questions to me together in the evening.”

“As you say, Master Scholar.”

They were courteous past all measure, as though they were dealing with a true teacher. If that was what was in their hearts, there was no stopping them.

Watching them train in such high spirits put me in the mood myself, and I brought out my dantian. It had been a while, and the thought came to me of taking it out and training with it.

The dantian came out of my mouth and floated there in the air. However often I saw it, there was no calling it anything but a marvel.

I pointed a finger at the far side of a tree.

— Thock!

The dantian bored clean through the trunk and out the other side. The tree was more than a man could get his arms around, and watching the thing go through it left me speechless.

There can be no more dangerous hidden weapon than this.

Then the sense for qi coming to me through the dantian drew a cry out of me.

“Oh!”

I could feel what lay on the far side of the tree. Living things caught in my sense for qi: an owl turning its head round and round as it hunted for prey, and a snake climbing a tree even at that late hour to get at the chicks in a nest. The sense for qi the dantian threw out went feeling its way over everything around it.

Ordinarily a master whose internal power ran high enough could loose the qi of his dantian in every direction and sense what lay about him, and the higher the internal power, the wider the range. A dantian that had come outside the body made a better showing than that, and the sense for qi it gave was far keener.

Shall I see how far this will go?

I sent the dantian further out, to see how far from me it could get.

Past three hundred feet nothing comes through the sense for qi at all. It must be that there is not much internal force in the dantian.

As things stood I had a bare six years’ worth of internal force, so there was nothing surprising in that. If anything, that the dantian could get a full three hundred feet out at all struck me as remarkable.

“Eh?”

Then, as I swung the dantian round to bring it back, I found something in my sense for qi that felt familiar. Whoever it was lay hidden, and thinking it might be an enemy I fixed my attention on the dantian. The energy that came through was one I knew.

The Boundless Azure Sky energy in them is fully ripened. So the clan head has secretly put five escorts on us.

Come to that, doting on Yeo-seol and me as he did, the clan head could hardly have taken no measures at all. Knowing what Namgung Hak feared, I decided to know and pretend not to.

It is a kindness of the clan head’s, after its fashion.

I called the dantian back and sent it over to where Yeo-seol was. My own eyes could see them well enough, but I wanted to test how the sense for qi would take them in. The dantian floated high in the air, and unless somebody lifted their head to the sky there was no chance of anyone seeing it.

Cheong Yo and Yeo-seol had a small fire going, and they sat gathered round it, talking and laughing in bright peals. Sleeping rough it might be, but it looked a merry enough camp, and a smile came to my face of its own accord.

It was then.

“Mm?”

Song-ran had lifted her head and was looking straight at the place where my dantian was.

I moved the dantian with my finger. Song-ran’s head turned after it, following exactly the way the dantian went.

She is moving because she sees my dantian. How can she do that? Song-ran cannot see. Or is it that, having no sight, she can feel other energies instead?

I shook my head at once. Not even the escorts Namgung Hak had sent could sense the energy of my dantian, and that Song-ran, who could not see, should see such an energy made no sense at all. Believing it would mean granting that her internal power ran higher than theirs.

The dantian rose high into the air, and I drew it back. Song-ran went on staring in the direction it had vanished.

I had better keep an eye on this.

She had been with Cheong Yo a good long while and there had been no trouble in all that time, but in that moment I came alert.

If Song-ran has some impure purpose in her, then not only Cheong Yo but Yeo-seol is in danger.

If there was any comfort in it, it was that I had found it out before it became a problem.

After three days of nothing but following, one of her men spoke up.

“Elder.”

“What is it?”

“When do we attack?”

“Tsk, tsk. Can you not feel the masters guarding them from the shadows?”

“I am aware of them.”

“You are aware, and you still say that? We could throw every one of us at them and still not shake those five off. They are escorts the Namgung clan head took pains to send, so what else would you expect. Regrettably, our strength is not enough to deal with even five escorts.”

“But we cannot simply go on watching forever, can we?”

“Which is why we must use the Blood Cult dogs. Those five we leave to them.”

“But it looked to me as though the Blood Cult mean to attack when the party crosses into Jiangxi. They are massing their strength over that way to hold the road Scholar Cheon will pass along.”

“That is precisely my point. The Blood Cult still know nothing about those five escorts. We must tell them.”

“But the Blood Cult have something like twenty men.”

“Which is why I have written this letter, is it not?”

Yu Yeok-rip held the letter out to her man as she spoke.

“This goes to Mok Jin. Shoot it in on an arrow from a distance and that will do.”

“And if he doubts the Elder’s letter and does not move?”

“Mok Jin is steeped in his thirst for revenge; he will want to make certain before he doubts. Once he has confirmed the five escorts, he will raise the number for the attack.”

“Would it not be better to tell the Demonic Cult instead?”

“Child, what foolishness is this. The Blood Cult have set out for revenge on Scholar Cheon; the Demonic Cult covet the Ice Sacred Body. Handle it badly and the Ice Sacred Body ends up in the Demonic Cult’s hands.”

She glared at her man as she said it.

“And what concerns the Ice Sacred Body is to be known to you and me alone. Do you not see why I keep it even from our own young ones? Because if one of them knows and then falls into the hands of the Blood Cult or the Demonic Cult, we are undone.”

“I understand, Elder.”

“Good. Then move quickly. If you mean to land a big fish, the net has to be strong.”

“Yes, Elder.”

Yu Yeok-rip looked at the small firelight far off, and her eyes curved into crescents.

“Others they may fool, but not my eyes. How many years have I, Yu Yeok-rip, lived on the ice crystal — would I not know an Ice Sacred Body?”

Anyone who had eaten the ice crystal and honed martial arts on it resonated with an Ice Sacred Body as a matter of course. Jong So-bin kept Ye-won at her side as though the girl were the Ice Sacred Body, but Yu Yeok-rip had felt all along that she was not, and so she had broken away early from the front line of the scramble and gone looking for the real one. After that she had combed through everything around Jong So-bin, and in doing so she had seen Scholar Cheon with Yeo-seol, and known.

A very cunning thing you did, Young Palace Lord. To go so far as to leave the Ice Sacred Body with someone who has nothing to do with any of it — who would ever have imagined it. Though it did shake the Blood Cult and the Demonic Cult off her, which makes things easier for me too.

Yu Yeok-rip was in fine spirits, and the night wind felt uncommonly cool. She spoke as though Jong So-bin were standing in front of her.

“But there is this. Young Palace Lord, there is something even you do not know. This Ice Sacred Body is no ordinary Ice Sacred Body. Had you known it, you would never have left the Ice Sacred Body in another’s hands. It seems the Palace Lord never told the Young Palace Lord. Now why would that be?”

She had killed the Palace Lord and drawn the memories out of the dead woman’s mind, and so she had come to know the Ice Sacred Body’s true secret as well. She alone knew it.

“Which is why the Ice Sacred Body must be mine and no one else’s.”

Yu Yeok-rip’s whole face filled with a smile, wide enough to pull the puckered wrinkles at the corners of her mouth smooth.