Notes.

The story told by Mago's grandmother is one of the creation myths that make up Korean mythology. The four guardians are part of it as well, and are also more broadly from Chinese mythology. Same thing for Bari (but I'm not saying anything else about this).

The appearance of the "creature", or rather of the Boogeyman, was inspired by the monsters in Guillermo Del Toro's films, and in particular by the figure of the "Pale Man" in "Pan's Labyrinth".

CHAPTER LXIX

"Everyone is a monster to someone. And since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it."

(Jonathan Steinberg and Robert Levine, "Black Sails")

a. The flowers of Bari (the arrival)

The veil fell while she was waiting for Yeo Woon to return from the torture chamber. Suddenly, the whole prison became considerably darker, more obscure, and the blackness engulfed her completely as Mago, huddled in a corner of her cell, her legs folded up against her chest in an instinctive protective posture, blinked frantically to try to see something. In fact, the darkness took on a thick consistency, like molasses, or like the hair of the kingdom's subjects, of a deep raven black, except for when the sun's rays was casting amber reflections on it.

However, the black that devoured the space around Mago had no room for even the slightest light : Mago knew it, for she quickly realized that she knew this absolute, deep darkness, almost as well as she now knew the paths leading to the Baek house and winding around it, to end up licking the banks of the Han River. It was not the same darkness one could encounter during the night.

After all, night could be pierced by the moon, by the flames of the torches. Mago was certain that none of these sources of light would have had any relevance for the darkness that came to her in the prison of the royal palace of Changdeok, nearly two hours after she had been arrested with her master and their living companions at the northern gates.

This darkness was of another kind, of another nature. It was impenetrable, unknown, perfect in its total opacity. The walls of the prison, the floor strewn with wisps of straw, the silhouette of her cellmate, another gwishin captured before her, gradually faded away, and soon, only the darkness remained, as an inky fog. Mago did not move, stayed holed up on the floor, too afraid to do anything.

She had seen this darkness before, remembered walking in it, anxiously, with another (dead) woman, and the terrible feeling of being watched from all sides, and not being able to escape. She didn't remember where her steps were supposed to lead her, but the voice of her companion was still loud in her ears, and even more in the dark. Hurry up, she had begged her, walking faster, we must keep walking, we must not stop. Mago had obeyed.

But now, she felt strictly unable to get up and go back on the road, and waited, waited, in the dark and the solitude, without understanding anything.

(the passage is open)

There was a murmur somewhere, bouncing back to her.

(the portal is open the door this world the other world the portal is open open open open)

The whispering grew in volume, grew in power, rose towards her, with the sound of flowers blooming, opening like doors, petal by petal, white and long, like the legs of spiders, and the more the murmur was rushing in her direction, the more she felt tetanized, so much so that she buried her face violently in her knees, with the persistent idea that she should not (look at) what was approaching her, running towards her, tasting a new, horrifying freedom.

(open open open it's coming the Eyes the Eyes are coming the trees burned the flowers and the blood and the Eyes they are called the Other and the Peacock and the Flowers and Bari say my name don't say my name think it pray it I am I am it's me the Eyes the Flowers my secret name is Bari I'm coming I'm coming the dead are mine I'm coming pray my name I'm coming)

The whisper screamed near Mago, drawing a groan of pure terror from her. She could feel the morbid glow of the white flowers of the clearings beneath her now, even without seeing them, and they were a threat here, a danger in the dark.

(THEY ARE HERE)

(I AM HERE)

(O BARI)

Mago, unable to restrain herself, let out a desperate howl of fright between her knees, and only lifted her head much later, when she could feel the touch of the wood of the cell walls was again against her back. She moved her legs, her feet crumpled up some stalks of straw, which helped to calm her terror and brought her enough serenity to leave the shelter of her knees and to take a look around her.

She first noticed that the prison was now bathed in the amber light of the setting sun, and the wood had taken on fiery shades, which worried her despite the disappearance of the darkness and what she identified as a return to normalcy, at least partial. For although she had returned to the world and her ears were no longer filled with the dreadful murmur she had perceived in the dark, there remained nevertheless something of that sudden and hostile trance, an obvious trace, a very distant memory too, to some extent.

Behind the bars of her cage, standing tall and silent, their bodies and heads wrapped in long black capes, were four individuals whose faces Mago could not see, for they were hidden under paper masks whose shapes she could nevertheless recognize. There was a tiger, but also a tortoise, entirely painted in black. She also distinguished the extraordinary and unbalanced figure of a dragon, the lines of which were of a deep blue, and finally that of a red bird, with shades of gold that she soon compared to those of the declining daylight.

They were watching her from behind the bars, completely still. She could have rushed to them and asked for their help, begged them to get the keys and go down to the torture chamber, where Yeo Woon had been taken. She actually thought about such a prospect, but did not do anything about it. She remained curled up against the wall, stunned, but most of all petrified by a growing terror, which went hand in hand with a gradual understanding of the elements that were presenting themselves to her. The figures in front of her frightened her as much as the whisper in the darkness (the Eyes), as the blackness itself.

That's because they all come from the same place, she understood, digging her nails into the skin of her knees, they come from the dark, all of them, them and the whisper.

(and the gwishins)

The four figures were too tall, too dark, too quiet. Mago looked at their masks, and as she was studying the lines drawn and their colors, she remembered an old story that her grandmother had told her when she was still a little girl, usually to get her to go to bed without too much protest.

It was a myth-like tale, too opulent and breathtaking to be anything but an allegory, but she had regularly returned to it as a child, with renewed pleasure, to try to analyze its meanings and discover its hidden meanings and implications.

"Once upon a time," her grandmother narrated to her, sitting next to Mago with a candle lighting her old and beautiful face, "there was a great goddess, who was called Yul-Ryeo, and who died one day giving birth to another goddess named Mago. Mago was very powerful, and gave birth to four celestial beings, two women and two men, whose appearance resurrected Yul-Ryeo. Her return from the realm of the dead was so powerful that it caused a great explosion, and thus emerged the world, the heavens, the earth and the oceans, which then blended together to form everything we know."

"The trees?" Mago had asked one day, amazed at the idea of such a colossal power of creation.

"Yes. Trees, plants, flowers, wind, fire, animals, absolutely everything. Yul-Ryeo's body became the world, and Mago wanted to stay with her while her children, the celestial people, ruled the living beings from a gigantic tower, the Magoseong. They ruled for a very long time, millions of years, but eventually they died, and were buried in lavish tombs at the four ends of the world. Each of these tombs was guarded by a creature. The one in the east was guarded by a blue dragon, the one in the west by a white tiger. The northern and southern ones were protected by a black tortoise and a red phoenix. Whoever approached them without permission was devoured."

"And what happened to the tombs? Are they still there?"

Her grandmother always smiled when she asked the question in an impatient, curious tone, eager for answers.

"I don't know. Maybe. It is said that they were built very far away, on a land no man can reach."

Mago counted the figures in front of her (on, two three four), then counted them again, and so on, again and again, a dozen times, while her grandmother's voice was echoing against the walls of her skull and pounding, without interruption (the blue dragon the white tiger the black tortoise the red phoenix they are the guardians the guardians of the dead).

The story was old, the concept too abstract to be real, and yet Mago contemplated the tall figures in front of her, the masks, their inertia reminiscent of those of corpses in their coffins, and while saying to herself "no, it can't be, no, no, no", a second conclusion, which came from the depths, and which was more mocking, climbed the ladder of her free-falling reflections, and whispered in a cuddly voice "it can be".

She heard the prison door open wide, letting in a ray of sunlight, and when she turned her head to face the four individuals draped in black again, she discovered emptiness, and the cell of her neighbor, prostrate in a corner. His eyes were wide, his mouth half-open, his legs and arms close to his body. From where she was, Mago saw the stains on the skin of his neck, the veins. Their eyes met, and she knew. He saw them too.

Though they did not negate the horror of it, there were nevertheless things worse than prison, worse than torture, and they lay in the darkness, hidden, silent, patient, as still as statues, for it went without saying that the slightest movement of theirs unleashed terror. The gwishin's eyes were too dark. Mago interpreted the signs, brought them together, and the result of her deductions took the form of a boar torn to pieces, of a deer split in two, of slaughtered villagers.

She glanced again at her cellmate, who nodded slowly, as if agreeing with her on a procedure to follow. She noted, with redoubled apprehension, that his hair was entirely white, like a cloud in the sky.

She had said nothing on the way to the prison, surrounded by soldiers and drawing stares from the curious people who were straggling across the city at such an early hour of the morning. She had stopped struggling, screaming, trying to bite, from the moment the soldiers had let go of her after Yeo Woon had emphasized her mastery of martial arts and her definite usefulness to the army of the dead, emulated by Seung-Min and Baek Dong Soo.

She's a kid, the reinforcement commander had observed, glancing at her with disdain, and she knew what he meant, what was implied by his statement (to death). She had rushed forward, had sought to escape, using her small size and the agility conferred by both the latter and her training to escape the clutches of the soldiers. If they had been in the forest, or in a wider street, she could have probably pierced their defensive wall and run very far, without turning around to check if her companions could have possibly taken advantage of her evasion to try to get out of their military enclosure.

Things had always been more or less like this until now. She had prioritizing her survival, escaping without thinking of anything else than her will to get away, to disappear. In the narrow alley within which Baek Dong Soo had led them, to avoid running into other patrols like the one that had come to stop them at the northern gates, she hadn't even been able to get past the first line of soldiers, for they were already grabbing her by the arms, lifting her up, holding her in an iron vise and forcing her to her knees, pulling at the collar of her tunic to reveal her neck.

She had felt the warmth of their living fingers against her dead skin, had thought of the gwishins she had seen die that way, many times, while she was standing in the shelter of a grove, behind a tree, a wall, or running, ever faster, to get away. Thinking about it, she was aware that it was above all her lack of alternatives and escape that had terrified her, more than the fact of being decapitated, and perhaps also, in part, the agonizing impression that her resurrection had ended up being a huge waste of time, since she had not even had time to take full advantage of it, even though she had experienced a longer period of time than others of her kind.

They had taken Yeo Woon away immediately after their arrival at the prison, and it was only then, from the moment they had opened the cell door to get her in, that she had started protesting and shouting again, struggling against the fists that were forcing her inside, clinging to her master's tunic, calling out to him, and then shouting at the soldiers not to take him to the torture room. Nothing had worked.

She would have been infinitely surprised if the slightest of her attempts had provoked a rebellion among the soldiers, but she had not been able to contain her panic and fear, which the sight of the cell with its wooden bars and straw-covered floor had raised to a dangerously dizzying level, threatening the balance of her mind. She had screamed for a long time, all alone, in the gloomy silence of her cage.

Yeo Woon, on the other hand, had remained so calm and disciplined as the soldiers led him out of the prison and into the torture chamber that she had become very worried, and the time spent waiting alone against the wall without any news had done little to diminish her anguish. The sunlight filtering through the small window of the prison soon became her only way to estimate the passage of time.

And as night slowly began to fall, she heard the creaking of the main door opening again. She threw herself on the bars of the cell as she saw her master approaching, surrounded by two soldiers. She was desperate to see his face, and more specifically to see the damage, the mere thought of which had been enough in the last few hours and before (the Eyes) to distill in her a distress close to madness. During her wait, she had remembered Baek Dong Soo's stories, and the awful, barbaric details contained in them.

Yeo Woon stood with his head down as one of the soldiers turned the key in the lock and opened the door to their cell, but she found his gait frighteningly shaky, his shoulders hunched, and his tunic was sticky with black blood in various places, rekindling her anguish fiercely. With horror, she noticed that, like their cellmate, her master's hair had also turned completely white.

She had no mirror, but she perceived however the glances of the soldiers towards her own mane, and guessed without difficulty the cause of the perplexity that they expressed. She too, without doubt, must have had her hair entirely in the colors of the flowers of the clearings of the dead.

"Your turn is tomorrow," one of the soldiers warned her in a cold tone, pushing Yeo Woon inside.

Mago did not answer. Her master took a step, then two, wavered, and collapsed on the ground while she rushed towards him and, in a silly but primitive reflex, quickly put a hand under his head so that he would not hit the ground too hard. The soldiers had already left, refusing to attend the spectacle of the pain, to glimpse the guilt that it would have shown to them.

She pushed back very gently, with delicate and careful gestures, the long ivory locks obstructing Yeo Woon's face, and felt the tears come to her eyes, slowly, convulsively.

"Master," she called in a whisper, or rather begged him. "Master, it's Mago. Can you hear me?"

At first she was taken aback, for the right side of his face was covered with clumsy, blood-red bandages that seemed to indicate care rather than torment. But then Mago lifted one of them slightly and saw that Yeo Woon's skin was abominably blistered, blackened by the flames, and it was tearing off in shreds like that of a lizard or snake in full molt.

The burns went down his neck, seemed to extend to his torso and possibly much lower. Both of his hands were fully bandaged, and Mago noted that he was missing seven fingers, three on the left, and four on the right. His eyes were closed, and each of his features was contracted with pain. She reduced the pressure of her own fingers around his head, for fear of aggravating the pain of his burns.

She thought of the medicinal plants given to her by the Herbalist, safe in their little leather pouch, and followed the thread of reverie that led her to the safe walls of the room in the Baek house, to the breakfasts of hot, fragrant meat, Baek Yun-seo's morning smile, Yoo-Jin's drawings, and her training sessions under Yeo Woon's watchful eye in the secrecy of the back garden.

She thought of Danggeum, who had become well accustomed to the company of Baek Dong Soo's horse and whose inactivity had caused her to gain a little weight and become even more phlegmatic. Your turn is tomorrow. Before leaving for the Hanyang clearing, she had run her hand through Danggeum's mane, had felt the long black hairs between her fingers, and the affectionate push the mare had given against her palm.

Be kind to the animals, her grandmother had told her, and they'll return the sentiment. Mago began to cry for good, leaning over her master, while she was taking the full measure of the disaster.

Earlier, she had seen him fight, sword in hand, blade and cheeks splattered with blood from a throat she herself had slit. None of the soldiers at the time had been able to subdue him, or even touch him with the tips of their weapons. Except for Baek Dong Soo, whom Mago considered an exception, she had never actually seen him fight anyone, but she had a vivid memory of the first night she had watched him resume his training, and the way he had ended up tearing the bark off the trees around them.

With the soldiers, his movements had been just as precise and pithy, and unlike Mago, who had barely moderated the force of her blows, he had spilled almost no blood in his wake.

She passed her hands on her own cheeks, withdrew them wet and black, then slightly raised the head of her master to put it on her knees. Her legs were too small for her to hold it completely without the risk of it plunging to the ground, but she held it with both hands. Across from them, in the shadows, the other gwishin was looking at them, but he did not say a word of comfort.

She didn't blame him : she couldn't think of anything to say that would have brought them any peace of mind. It was also possible that he was conserving his strength for a more obscure purpose, related to the elements Mago had distinguished earlier.

"Master," she called again, her voice trembling and full of sobs. "Oh, master."

She knew, having seen it but also heard it in the collective consciousness, that the blood of the living was still the best way to treat and close any wounds a gwishin might have, even those that caused them no pain. The bandages along Yeo Woon's face were fresh, slick with crimson.

After torture, Baek Dong Soo had told them, it's customary to bring in a doctor to treat the tortured so that they can be ready for transfer to the army of the dead camp more quickly. She wondered where their host and Seung-Min were, and if they were thinking about them, especially the first one. She wished she could turn into a mouse, a tiny, crawling, invisible thing, and escape through a crack in the wood, or dig a hole in the ground.

It's over, she thought bitterly, this time it's really over.

Then Yeo Woon finally emerged from the exhaustion caused by the pain of his burns, and when he began to speak, Mago listened to him uninterrupted, avidly, with a gloomy fascination, a mixture of anticipation, fear and rage.

b. Inquisition

The grunts of the third gwishin began at dawn, and the very first signs of the hunger crisis caused Mago, though she had expected it after Woon's explanations, to twitch with such apprehension that he felt it reverberate just below his head, in the muscles of his student's thighs, where she had kept him settled throughout the night with immense care.

The throbbing of his burns was just beginning to become bearable, and the slightest movement revived the pain, screaming and incessant in spite of the blood ointments carefully applied by the doctor that the soldiers had brought into the torture chamber once the executioner's work had been done. A captain was standing there against the wall, and had watched everything, the way Dong Soo had done a dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, in the same place. He had done nothing to interrupt the executioner, nor had he uttered a single word as the flames roasted and devoured all that they could of Woon, hungry for flesh and consumption, demanding, excruciating.

The fire occupied the entire room, from the torches along the walls to the small fireplace where the executioner heated his instruments. But apart from these elements, the place was plunged into shadow. While walking down the steps, held by two soldiers, Woon had caught the stench of charred flesh, suffering, despair and anger. These things stayed in the rooms where they originated, grafted onto them, etched into the dirt of the floor, into the furniture, into the expressions of the people who regularly visited them.

The chair on which he had been tied was impregnated with them. Later, when the executioner had locked his calf in a white-hot iron armor and Woon, under the weight of the acute suffering, cumulated with all the others, had felt like his nerves were exploding one after the other and roaring, like a thousand tigers held prisoners between the walls of his skull (it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts stop have mercy it hurts it hurts), he had felt coming to him other screams, cries which were not of him, but of the gwishins who had been sitting there before him, and had also undergone the torture. At no time had the captain, standing in the corner of the underground room, intervened. He had kept his arms crossed, and sometimes looked away.

Woon had wondered, delirious with pain, if Dong Soo had done the same with all his peers, before realizing that he had spoken of the dead as his own for the first time.

He had no idea of the exact number of tools used by the executioner to perpetrate his work, but he was almost certain, with hindsight and the renewed lucidity generated by the progressive healing of his wounds, that the man had emptied his arsenal on him. He was an old man, but his fingers were quick, precise, his gestures efficient and fast. He opened mechanisms quickly and removed them just as fast, only to replace them with others, to the point where you ended up losing count completely and becoming convinced that the torment would never end.

He did not know how long the torture had lasted, and couldn't care less when it had been over. Everything around him, and inside him was a blaze. He thought he had started screaming in the middle of the session, when the frail-looking old man, whom Woon could have killed with a twist of his wrist if his hands had been free, had forced the flames into his mouth.

From the rest, he kept an abominably confused, feverish consciousness of the events. But he had seen the four black-cloaked figures before him, static and dark, and had recognized the tiger mask that had appeared to him at the Spring House during the first wave of the Dead Winter. Each furnace had brought memories, older and older images, ancient sensations, making him shrink further and further, deeper and deeper within himself.

The moment the executioner had removed the flames from his mouth, Woon's spirit had rushed to the bath of the Qing temple between the mountains, to the just-warm water, to the monk, and to the bloody softness of the skin of his skull between his (teeth). The blood of the living healed everything, cured everything, and fought the Dead Winter infinitely better than human heat.

He and Mago had awakened the next day, huddled against the corpse covered in gaping bites, his head buried in its entrails, and bathed in warm blood. It's time for me to pay, Dong Soo had said years earlier in the office of the royal palace, when Prince Sado had been imprisoned and he had just agreed to sacrifice himself to ensure the latter's survival.

As the soldiers were untying the iron flaps that were holding him to the chair to bring him back to Mago, Woon, in a state of exhaustion and weakness such as he had never known, even after being wounded by Dong Soo on the day of the crown prince's death, even during his resurrection, had concluded that the torture had to be his own punishment, for making excuses, for Heuksa Chorong, for Prince Sado, for what had happened when he was seventeen. He had hardly thought of Dong Soo while being tortured.

He had only been able to do so at the end, when all the pains had become one and the same, and had produced the same beats as his heart in the fields, when Dong Soo's sword had lodged there. The pain had not been the same. He had wanted the latter, and it had been more beautiful than brutal, while the other, the one given by the executioner, had been crude and unnecessary.

He had asked him questions, about the so-called leaders of the gwishins, about where they were hiding, about the collective consciousness, and, much later, about Dong Soo and the Yeogogoedam. Woon had screamed, moaned, vomited black blood, but had answered nothing. Chun had been on the chair before him. Dong Soo had told him that he had not said a word to the persecutor. His ignorance about resurrections had surely played a major role in his silence, but Woon also suspected that Chun would have refused to speak even if he had possessed the proper knowledge. The chair still bore some of his marks, to a lesser extent. The wood still smelled of rain and storm.

I am the rain, Woon thought, as the right side of his face throbbed cruelly, I am the storm, it's my turn, my throne, my sky, I have made it mine, it's mine now. At the training camp, Dong Soo had said, "your name means cloud," one day when it was raining hard and dark masses carried the showers and floods. The clouds made the water, the clouds ruled. They made the lightning, the fire in the sky, and Woon had been the Sky Lord, had been a murderer, had inflicted death and suffering, had held it in his hands, had (liked it).

Torture was the prerogative of both murderers and executioners. It was the tool of those who mastered pain and death. Woon had been a master of death, like Chun, like the other Sky Lords before them, like all the assassins of Heuksa Chorong, like the martial artists (Dong Soo-yah). Alive, he did not fear death, but had worked with it, like an old friend, or an old lover.

He had always more or less prepared himself for the possibility of being captured, tortured, and then executed for his crimes. Never assume that you will always win, Chun had told him, his eyes turned to the swords of his predecessors, there is always a moment when the wheel turns, and from hunter you become game.

The figures had stood before him, ethereal, sinister, and Woon had heard the voices of Hui-Seon and Jae-Ji close by. Hold on, they had said, be strong, be brave, hold on, we're coming to you, we're coming, everything is complete, everything is accomplished, we'll come and they'll bend the knee to us and they'll all pay.

There had been the descent into the dark, strapped to his chair, the creaking whisper that had rushed up to him, reminding him of his own carcass and its empty eye sockets, the flowers and the absolute horror that came with them (The Eyes The Peacock Bari), and that had caused him even more dread than any device the executioner could have put under his nose. He had closed his eyes, to avoid seeing whatever was ascending.

Then the torches on the walls of the torture room had flared up again, and the old man had asked him if he would obey and join the army of the dead. Woon had barely managed to nod his head. His single answer marked the end of the session. That one resisted well, the captain had remarked in a dry tone, before fleeing into the open air.

The third gwishin was one of those Woon had pulled from the depths of the river many nights ago. They had exchanged a brief glance before Woon had been taken to the executioner, and as the man's glance was saying "yours," Woon had experienced again the touch of all the hands that had grasped his, the swirls on the surface of the water, the way the newly resurrected gwishins had looked at him afterwards, peacefully, as if waiting for something (gwishin-king). He had not heard from them afterwards, nor had he seen them or known where they had gone.

The man in his cell, withdrawn into himself, was the first one whose path Woon was crossing again. He had noticed his lividity, the shadows on his face that looked like bruises, and that announced the rise of a ruthless appetite. The gwishin he had awakened from the bottom of the Han River had looked at him, had understood. Woon would wonder at length, afterwards, if he had not been captured and imprisoned simply to perform this function, to enable him and Mago to escape.

Let the Whisper do, Hui-Seon had said, and the Whisper, before taking Woon back to Dong Soo's house, might have said other things to the gwishins then gathered around him, commands or predictions, like the advice to let the army take them. The man let out a dry rumble. Mago could not take her eyes off him, and she barely stopped to look at him when Woon, hearing the prison door open, took his head off the pillow of her lap to stand up and get ready. They would only have one chance.

Though just conscious, and most certainly ravaged by hunger, the other gwishin knew it too, and he had kept remarkably calm during the night, limiting his movements for the next day, for what he had to accomplish.

The dead in prison were fed with the minimum, to avoid the occurrence of hunger crisis and the many risks involved for the soldiers who were in charge of the gwishins, more specifically to make them walk between the prison and the torture room, but also, once the executioner's care was finished, the road between Hanyang and the camp of the army of the dead.

Mago had confirmed to Woon that a soldier had passed by the day before and brought her an infinitesimal amount of food at the end of the day, and that he would come back the next morning for the same task. Dong Soo had also mentioned a similar organization when he had told Woon and his student about the torture of the gwishins. Apart from this one soldier, there were no others inside the prison.

Its access was controlled by two guards who stood at the top of the steps leading to the entrance of the building. Woon listened to the sound of the soldier's boots as he was walking down to them, his arms loaded with tasteless meat. He didn't know how long the other gwishin had stopped eating, but he could easily imagine that he had been working on it since his capture.

He had probably hidden the portions he had not eaten, so as not to arouse the suspicions of his jailers. He stopped making any sound as soon as the soldier's footsteps echoed on the stone steps. Mago's whole body tensed as he approached. Woon's burns seemed to subside, cancelled out by his focus. His stomach felt like an abyss. The torture had made him hungry, and very much so.

The soldier entered their field of vision, and then the other gwishin let out an enraged, insane howl, before rushing forward, emerging furiously from the corner where he had been huddled until now, his arms outstretched, his fingers spasming in their desire to seize the prey that had just appeared. The bars did not change anything.

His assault was violent enough, and above all unexpected, to cause the soldier to move backwards convulsively, and when his back hit the bars of Woon and Mago's cell, they jumped together, as they had once done with the boar, or the monk in Qing. The tray of food brought by the soldier crashed to the ground. Woon held him against the bars, grabbing him with one arm around his waist, then a second around his face, blocking the soldier's mouth, before biting into the flesh of his neck, although the angle was bad and he could only tear off tiny fragments of skin.

The blood tumbled down his throat, hot, thick, intoxicating. The pain made the man cry out in a wet, gurgling voice, which was completely muffled by Woon's arm. Meanwhile, the other gwishin was raging behind the wooden beams of his cage, overcome with hunger, and Mago was hurriedly untying the bunch of keys she had seen the day before, hanging from the soldier's belt, when he had come with their food.

As soon as she had it in her hand, she ran to open the door of their cell, rushed out, and applied the same treatment to the cage that faced them, freeing their hungry neighbor who immediately pounced on the soldier and sank his teeth into his neck, tearing the flesh, Woon's arm preventing the screams of pain and fear from spreading beyond the stairs to the other guards, until the man stopped struggling in his embrace and his screams were reduced to borborygms, drowned in his own blood.

The gwishin had struck where he had smelled the blood, where Woon had bitten. The rule had been one of the first he had learned in Heuksa Chorong : there was nothing like slitting the throat of an opponent when you wanted to get rid of him as quietly as possible.

When the man went limp and heavier in his grip, Woon gave him over completely to their cellmate, who then attacked his face with his teeth. Blood had soaked Woon's sleeve, his arm, and where it had run, his burns were already tormenting him less. He went out in his turn. Mago was standing behind the door of the opposite cell, protected by its wooden bars. She was watching the other gwishin devouring the military man with a glint of appetite in her eyes. The smell of blood was massive, heady.

Woon let it gulp him down, approached the bloody corpse. The third gwishin (mine) looked up from his feast, gave him a distraught look, then stepped back respectfully, head down, on all fours, leaving the meat to Woon. Woon crouched down, opened the sides of the soldier's uniform to reveal his belly, and turned to Mago, inviting her to inaugurate the meal.

She let herself fall next to him, leaned over, opened her mouth widely. They gorged themselves with his steaming, slippery entrails, and allowed the other gwishin, by way of thanks, to finish decimating the man's face and neck.

When Woon finally extricated himself from the soldier's guts, which he and Mago emptied completely, the third gwishin had regained consciousness, and was kneeling beside the body, his face awash with fresh blood, his eyes roving over the crevices left by his teeth, the missing pieces of flesh, the tears in the walls a sickening, glistening pink.

"We need to get out," Woon told him. "And quickly, before the others start to worry."

The other nodded meekly, with an almost inappropriate serenity. The two guards who chaperoned each side of the prison door would not in themselves be a major difficulty. The real problem would be escaping from the palace without being seen by other military personnel, and then returning to the barracks to retrieve Dong Soo, hoping that he was still there and had not been transferred elsewhere.

When Mago came back to her senses, Woon gave her the sword of the dead soldier and ordered her to use it on the guard on her right, while he and the third gwishin, who introduced himself as Jae-Bum, would attack the one on the left. Before they began their ascent up the steps to the prison gates, Woon tore off a fragment of the fallen soldier's uniform, and used it to clean his face of his blood, before passing it to his student and Jae-Bum.

The stains on their clothes could not be washed away, but it would still be possible to pass them off as something else for the time of a diversion, for they were dark enough to be confused, which was not the case with the ruddy splashes on their cheeks, noses, foreheads, and around their eyes and mouths. Once they were clean, they got up and headed for the stairs.

"Can't you bring this one back?" Jae-Bum asked, pointing to the bloodied soldier lying on the ground. "He could be useful to us."

Woon shook his head.

"I don't think so," he replied, putting his foot on the first step. "He died by our doing, believing that the gwishins are the enemy. It would be more dangerous to bring him back than to leave him here."

He did not add that he had no idea how to bring about a new resurrection. Jae-Bum seemed to understand it, and nodded. He and Mago followed him up the stairs, trying to remain quiet and unobtrusive as the daylight grew brighter, and the two guards' silhouettes soon stood out in the bright winter sun, confident, unaware of what was coming their way.

Mago jumped first into the back of the one on the right, with a smooth and formidable leap, aided by her small size and light frame. She brought one hand over his mouth and thrust the blade of his colleague's sword into his back, while Woon and Jae-Bum were silencing the second guard, using a similar procedure. Jae-Bum gagged him with a firm hand while Woon, ignoring the tugging of his burns, pulled the sword the soldier wore at his waist out of its sheath, where it had so far been wisely stowed, to thrust its blade into the side of its owner.

He let out a strangled groan, offered a meager resistance, before collapsing like his comrade. Woon took a quick look around, noting the absence of witnesses and other sentries. It was probably still early, because the sky was dark. Once the two guards were dead, the calm that fell was total, and unusual, to the point Jae-Bum made a remark about it.

"There should be more noise," he said. "The prison isn't so isolated from the other buildings of the palace, where the daily bustle is concentrated."

"Maybe it's too early," Mago observed .

"No," Jae-Bum objected. "Usually, even at this time of day, there's still a certain amount of activity, and many people passing between the different buildings."

"And you know this because you were employed at the palace, I suppose?"

"I used to be a guard at the main gates," Jae-Bum confirmed to Mago with a bitter smile. "I guess death is not without irony, because I could just as easily have been one of those men we just killed."

Woon cut short any possible response from his student. Time was not on their side.

"We have to go to the barracks."

They could put on the uniforms of the dead soldiers, except for Mago, for whom the measurements were unlikely to fit, then take their weapons and make their way to the barracks to find Dong Soo, perhaps Seung-Min if they had the opportunity.

"It's not a good idea, master," Mago argued after he had expressed his arguments. "There are too many soldiers out there, and we'd be walking into the lion's den. We should prioritize our safety and focus on getting out of the palace."

"If we can get out at all," Jae-Bum added . "There are guards in every corner, and the defense has certainly been strengthened after the gwishins appeared. Even if we take these soldiers' clothes, we should keep a low profile as much as possible, and avoid showing our faces, especially in places where the bulk of the army is concentrated."

Woon looked up from the corpse of the soldier from whom he was removing his uniform. Mago was staring at him urgently, the hilt of her sword still tightly lodged between her fingers. Jae-Bum had also begun to strip the other guard, and his hat was already on his head.

"I'm not leaving Dong Soo with them," Woon said. "Go without me if you want, I can do just fine by myself."

Mago knelt down in front of him.

"You don't stand a chance," she said. "You know that. The three men here were small fry, and most likely new recruits. Look at their faces. They can't be more than twenty-five, while the barracks is full of experienced soldiers, and I'm not even talking about the weapons."

"I'll be discreet. I'm used to it. It won't be the first time, and if you're not there, it'll be easier."

"Master..."

"Take Jae-Bum to Na-Young's house first," he continued, pulling the jacket of the military uniform over his own bloodstained clothes and gathering his hair up to fit completely into the cap of it. "If our denunciation was not perpetrated by a member of the Yeogogoedam or someone who knows her, and she has not been arrested, see if she can provide you with food and supplies. Then go out of town, and go to the house where we set up the day we arrived at the gates. We will meet you there."

"Who, "we"?"

"Me. Dong Soo. And Seung-Min, if we find him."

Mago sighed and shook her head.

"Master, you're not talking seriously. They will spot you, and they will kill you for good. You must come with us at all costs."

"She's right," Jun-Bum interjected, as he completed his transformation into a royal prison guard. "Soon, the relief should come for these men, and they will discover our escape. Everyone will be on the lookout then. We'd better get away now and come back later, after the reinforcements arrival."

This time, it was Mago who looked at him doubtfully.

"What reinforcements?" She inquired, instantly more suspicious.

"The others," Jae-Bum replied with a shrug, as if his statement were a given. "They should be here in a few hours. You heard it, didn't you?"

(we're coming to you)

"That's not certain," Woon pointed out curtly, standing up in his turn, wearing the full soldier's uniform.

"It is," Jae-Bum replied calmly. "The Eyes have arrived. Our time has come, and the time of the living is waning. If you want your friend back, wait until you have the strength you need. They're near. You will be of no use to him if the soldiers capture you again, and even less if they execute you on the spot. You may even put him in more danger, since they will most likely associate him with your escape and feel that he should be eliminated as well."

Mago was watching the bodies of the soldiers, visibly lost in thought. Woon remembered the four masks in the torture chamber, the flowers, the whisper from nowhere. What do you mean? Dong Soo had worried, hands on his shoulders, in his room, when he and Mago had just emerged from the trance that had gripped them all. Who has always been there?.

Woon felt the warmth of his hand on his knee, the texture of his hair against his lips, the smell of smoke, the parchment-like skin of the hollows between his fingers, the bones of his hips between his thighs (oh Dong Soo-yah). Together came, as a same opaque sensation, the discouragement, the anger, and the stinging sorrow of renouncement.

"He's a living, master," Mago reminded him gently. "He has responsibilities in the government, and from what I understood, he's close to the king. I'm sure they won't treat him like a common criminal."

"If he does belong to an institution connected with the palace, he must be facing investigation right now," Jae-Bum said. "This is the procedure."

Mago nodded sharply in support of the third gwishin's observations.

"See? I'm sure he's fine, at least for now. He's probably more worried about us than he is about himself, and he'd probably rather know you're safe than trying to dodge a whole army to come and get him. As soon as the others get here, we'll go get him."

"If they come."

"They will," Jae-Bum assured him with an encouraging smile. "Just a few more hours, I promise. You know I'm right. You felt them as much as I did."

(we will come and they will bend the knee)

Woon remembered, just for a moment, the alley in Hanyang, Dong Soo's face when he had announced their surrender, and the dismay that had appeared in his eyes when Woon had told him that he could not fight as he had before, during the war minister's coup, before Woon had thrown himself into the fray to lend him a hand.

There was a reflex in him, deep, intimate, in his desire to come between Dong Soo and everything else, to keep him against his belly, between his legs, and reduce everything else to nothing.

"Very well," he conceded to the others, and the instinct clung on despite everything, painfully.

He and Jae-Bum lowered the bodies of the two guards down the prison stairs, in an effort to gain some time on the relief. Then they set off, staying close to the walls, along their solid surface and under their generous shadows. Muffled echoes reached them, from a building further away from the palace. Woon turned around after a few steps to check.

On the rooftops, a twisted, dislocated figure with a back as round as a cherry was moving forward on all fours, quickly. The clamor seemed to come from where it was. Its head rose up. Woon couldn't see its features well because it was too far away, but it seemed to be looking in his direction.

(bogeyman)

I'm here, he thought suddenly, feverishly. I'm here, it's all right, don't do anything, I'm here. The creature on the roof did not move, did not hear him.

Woon turned away, and followed Mago and Jae-Bum towards the exit of the palace.