The Mantid Maiden - 2
The Moyong Clan was a martial family that had preserved its name for over a thousand years. The people of the Central Plains called them the Overlord of Liaodong Province, but few of them knew what those words truly implied.
Only the officials appointed to Liaodong Province, and those who made their lives in the Manchurian lands, understood the full weight of the title.
"Ruuun! Ruuuun!"
"Goddamn the Moyong Clan!!!"
Attacking was useless — the ones the Jurchens hurled themselves against were Murim warriors who wielded martial arts. Fleeing was just as futile, for these riders sat a horse better than any Jurchen alive. They balked at no weapon, and never once hesitated to open a barbarian's throat.
"By our Lord's command! Show them why we are the Moyong Clan!"
Murim folk who, across a thousand years and more, had grown calloused to the business of dealing with foreign tribes. They were the Overlord of Liaodong Province. The Moyong Clan.
"All of them have been subdued."
Moyong Sang-ah looked down in silence as the Changbongdaeju forced the leader of the Jurchens who had raided Pioneer Village to his knees before her.
"You bitch! You think the Chieftain will just sit still— Ghk!"
Not worth hearing out. One stroke, clean as a ruler's line, and a head went rolling across the ground.
"Keep one alive and send him to the Chieftain. If he takes issue with today's affair, tell him to come find me by tomorrow."
She had no wish to shed blood without cause — but if it was her own people bleeding, that was another matter entirely. If they wanted a fight, so be it. She would show them why they were the Moyong Clan.
Moyong Sang-ah flicked the blood from her blade and turned her gaze somewhere distant.
"Yes. I'll see the message delivered. Just to be safe, I'll contact the main force— My Lord?"
A child was walking toward the Changbong Corps. Whose little one was this? One of the Pioneer Village children, perhaps. Moyong Sang-ah moved to meet the small figure approaching her.
"Fairy Lady! Fairy Lady!"
Perhaps it was because she looked too beautiful for this world — the child called out to Moyong Sang-ah as though begging a boon of a fairy descended from the heavens.
"What is it, little one?"
"Mama won't wake up. Can you make her better, Fairy Lady?"
The child's innocent words raked the hearts of every warrior watching. At the small fingertips lay a mother who had already turned her back on this world.
Moyong Sang-ah's eyes trembled as she looked upon the child.
"Come here, little one."
Moyong Sang-ah knelt to bring her eyes level with the child's. What was there to say? This was an age too young to understand death. Her chest gone heavy and numb, she opened her arms.
"Fairy Lady... did Mama go up to heaven, like Papa did?"
She could feel the small body shaking. Moyong Sang-ah opened her mouth as carefully as she could, wary of wounding the child further.
"Yes. She has gone to heaven."
"Can't I go too?"
The words stabbed into her heart more cruelly than any blade. Moyong Sang-ah stroked the child's hair with infinite tenderness.
"She would want you to live long and happily, and come to heaven only much, much later."
From Moyong Sang-ah's lips flowed words her lost other half had once spoken. Words she could never bring herself to say for her own sake — but an imitation of her husband, she could manage.
The child broke into tears. Moyong Sang-ah stroked the small head in silence. The decision had come only after long deliberation, but the warmth of the little one in her arms told her that reaching out her hand had been the right choice after all.
"The Chieftain has sent a letter."
The next day, what greeted Moyong Sang-ah was not a Jurchen warband but a lone post rider, arrived on a single swift horse.
"Read it."
I am Turshan. This affair is regrettable. Though I am called Chieftain, not every clan among the tribes answers to me.
"So he takes a step back."
The raid had been no order of his but a sudden flare of violence, and he had no taste for war. Unlike his first letter, the Chieftain's posture here was humble.
I have no wish for a misunderstanding between us to carve a rift that cannot be mended. Let both sides cool their anger — let our next meeting be when the horses have grown fat. In return, I will not touch your people for the while.
"The barbarians! Tucking their tails between their legs and running!"
A few of the Changbong members broke into triumphant grins the moment the letter's contents were read aloud. But the faces of the corps' officers only hardened.
"Changbongdaeju."
Moyong Sang-ah called over the Changbongdaeju, whose expression had stiffened, and had him explain to the less-seasoned members.
"Among the Jurchens, the phrase 'when the horses grow fat' can mean a span of months — but it is also a threat: a promise that they will ready themselves for war if it comes to that."
The season when the heavens stand high and the horses run fat.
To settled peoples, it was nothing more than a pretty phrase evoking autumn's mood; to those who lived pressed against the foreign tribes, it was a word of dread.
For the season when horses grow fat is the season of barbarian raids.
...
"Attach escorts to the survey teams, and see that they can send word at a moment's notice should they come under attack."
The chieftain had written his letter with deliberate ambiguity. Moyong Sang-ah answered by ordering defenses that would lack for nothing.
"Yes. Understood."
"My Lord — would it not be better to simply sweep these troublesome Jurchens away altogether?"
A young member of the Changbong Corps stepped forward and dropped to one knee, as though offering counsel in earnest.
"We will be organizing survey teams from now on. Will you kill every last Jurchen under heaven each time?"
Foolish words, of course.
...
"Everyone withdraw — the Changbongdaeju stays."
"As commanded!"
"Haah..."
Once the last of the members had filed out, Moyong Sang-ah let slip a small sigh before she knew it.
"Who in all of Liaodong has a family that has never suffered harm at a barbarian's hand?"
"You have swelled the Changbong Corps in size — so now the substance within is the problem."
Moyong Sang-ah nodded at his words, frustrated, yet acknowledging the truth of them.
The Changbong Corps had begun as nothing more than a guard detail for her protection. She needed a power base within the Moyong Clan, and so she had resolved to grow the corps — the only force she could truly call an ally.
With the wealth and connections at her command, she had before long raised it into an organization that represented the Moyong Clan itself — but any body bloated that quickly was bound to show its side effects.
Nowhere was that more true than in their hatred of the foreign tribes. To the people of the Central Plains, barbarians were simply something to sneer at; in Liaodong Province, they were a danger that lived and breathed. Hatred there was impossible to avoid.
"Thanks to your Lordship's pointed glares, at least they've stopped calling the Joseon folk barbarians."
With a bitter smile, as if he understood her heart, the Changbongdaeju sought to soothe his Lord.
"Once, a Changbong member misspoke in front of me and shook where he stood."
"Haha! He swore he thought he would die beneath your Lordship's gaze. He came begging to be posted to some rough frontier where your eyes would never find him — so it was true, then?"
"I believe something of the sort did happen."
One corner of Moyong Sang-ah's mouth lifted, sheepish.
"In the end, it all rests on you, my Lord."
Reading his Lord's expression, the Changbongdaeju spoke with sudden, grave earnestness.
"What do you mean?"
"Reclaim the Moyong Clan — and then change it. The young lady... no. My Lord. You can be the one to change it."
For the Overlord of Liaodong Province had power enough to do exactly that.
"...Since I've already come out this far, I'll look in on the other survey teams before returning. Make the arrangements."
At his words, Moyong Sang-ah sank into thought for a moment, then named her next destination.
"They say this is the only room in the inn fit for an honored guest. We'll lodge next door, so please rest comfortably."
They were on the road back, having visited all three of the survey parties combing for the Hall of Accomplished Martial Archives. Moyong Sang-ah opened her mouth to say that even an uncomfortable room would do — then swallowed the words.
"Everyone — drink in moderation."
The Changbong Corps had wandered for days on end without proper rest, breathing dust the whole way. This was their first roof in seven days, and hope gleamed in every eye.
For morale's sake, Moyong Sang-ah decided to permit this small indulgence.
"Hahaha! As you say!"
"Thank you, my Lord! The watch will be kept without fail!"
Having warned them once more against drinking themselves blind, Moyong Sang-ah withdrew to her room.
Deep in the night, Moyong Sang-ah's eyes opened.
Weary from the long itinerary, yet sleep would not take her. An honored guest's room, they had called it — but its walls were paper-thin.
"Uuugh..."
Was someone next door writhing with the aches of a long road?
A low, ceaseless groaning — now like a woman's voice, now like a man's — gnawed at Moyong Sang-ah's ears until sleep was beyond all reach.
Instead, she sat up in bed and toyed with the ring on her left ring finger.
"She would want you to live long and happily, and come to heaven only much, much later."
They had been words meant to comfort a child — yet the realization that she herself had spoken them wrung a bitter, self-mocking breath from her. What right had a woman with no reason to live happily to wish for long life? She would simply carry out, in silence, the task her departed love had left in her keeping.
All for the right to look upon his face just once.
Moyong Sang-ah kept turning the ring on her finger, over and over.
A ring her husband had left her as proof of their marriage. Forged of Changbai Pure Silver, it carried the power to sense the approach of demons — but she wore it to hold her husband in her heart, however far he had gone...
Why is the ring reacting?
Energy was seeping from the band — pouring out with firm insistence, as though bracing against a force drawing near.
The wide room held no one but her.
If the Changbai Pure Silver was reacting, there could be only one reason.
An assassin!
Moyong Sang-ah slashed in a single flash toward the source of the stirring energy.
"Kgh!"
The assassin reeled backward, clutching his wound, plainly caught off guard.
Since when—?
There was no time to wonder. The ring pulsed again. One. Two. Three. Three inside the room, and no telling from where. Professionals, then.
Moyong Sang-ah did not deliberate. She kicked the door from its frame and burst through.
The guards — since when?
Before the door lay two Changbong members, already corpses.
Unruffled, she descended at once to the inn's ground floor. No serving boy, no innkeep — the hall stood empty.
She made for the door — and a figure was already there, barring the way.
"You Female Mantis bitch. There's no running for you."
Before she knew it, ten men in black had ringed her in.
"Did my dear brother send you?"
So that was why things had been so quiet lately. Demonic energy. Murderous craft. Only one man alive would stoop to tricks this filthy.
Moyong Sang-ah thought of Moyong Bi — the brother who had joined hands with the Demonic Cult and poisoned their own father.
...
No answer came.
Silence, as though no soul were there at all — as though she stood alone in an abandoned house. Had the inn itself been a trap from the very start?
Step by step, the ten black-clad men closed the distance, come to strangle the life from her.
Could she take them all? Moyong Sang-ah tightened her grip on her blade.
Then—
"They put poison in the food, you see. I took it for the work of common bandits — but it seems their sights were set on something else entirely."
Crash! With the crack of a kicked door, someone came bursting out of the room beside the one Moyong Sang-ah had been staying in.
"Who—?"
Moyong Sang-ah and the killers alike shared the very same thought.
The world holds any number of coincidences.
A precious ring, handed over offhandedly by one man, warns a woman of mortal danger.
"The Wudang Sect."
So too it was when a Daoist read the book one man had written against a world bereft of chivalry — and came down into that very world.
"Successor to the Eight Trigrams Sword Technique."
And so too it was when that Daoist — having met the man, and gained from him a chivalrous heart that would not waver — reached out a helping hand to a woman he had never met.
Fate.
That one man's life should save a woman yet again was surely no coincidence at all — it was a bond of fate that no blade could sever, try as one might.