In all the many years that the Stonefire Ring had stood, more than a thousand certainly, some said many more, there had always been one person tasked with sitting beneath the northeastern facing dolmen. There, under the bridge formed of basalt columns, the hexagonal pieces perfectly even, fashioned and worked though never by human hands, a watcher stood facing outward. Their eyes were meant to focus on one thing alone, the towering conical peak of Mount Ayam, snow-capped and piercing unto the clouds. It would have been difficult to look upon much else. Nothing but scrub forest and alpine fields dotted the stony landscape between the Ring and the towering peak. The mountain itself rose immense and baleful, occupying a vast expanse of horizon.
On an unexpectedly warm day in early spring, just before the midday meal was to be served, the duty of holding that lonely, boring observation post fell to a young acolyte named Suyi. Barely eleven years old, she had progressed no further than the first step on the path to becoming a shaman, but her senses were strong. Many years later it would be taken for granted that her position there, in that moment, had not been chance. It had been a premonition granted by the spirits.
The other residents of the ring, a double handful of jalsi – full shamans – of varying seniority, twice their number in acolytes, and a handful of servants, had gathered about the long stone used as a table for the serving of meals. They were outside the ring of basalt henges, among the outbuildings used by the residents and visitors. It was inconceivable to actually place a structure within the sacred circle itself.
Noise filled the air, the continual murmur of many people engaged in animated discussion. The midday meal was one of only two chances each day to gather and share insights, and with many of the jalsi only staying at Stonefire for short overlays they made the most of such few opportunities as there were. It would have taken much to grab and unify their attention.
Suyi’s scream was more than sufficient to the task.
The girl’s outcry was one of abject, primal terror. Raw sound burst from her throat, incoherent, wordless; filled only with fear. On and on the vocalization ran, until not even the least gasp remained to her throat.
Plates and eating sticks dropped from hands. Robes whipped in the light wind as bodies rose from kneeling upon the black stone. Jalsi ran, scrambling and rushing to reach the disturbance. The air vibrated with potential; foreboding that those attuned to spiritual energies could practically smell.
Chae was one of the first to reach the fallen girl. Not because she was particularly fast – many of the others were taller and blessed with longer legs than she – but due to her deerskin boots, close fitted and with hard nubs of iron creasing the soles. The hard stone offered greater purchase to her than many of those who wore mere straw sandals.
A small, spindly child; waifish with the signs of poor nourishment in her earliest years, Suyi appeared nonetheless hale. No blood flowed from her flesh, no crimson-black whorls of corruption tainted her skin, there was no visible sign of injury. Only one thing marked her as anything but ordinary. Her eyes, previously the deep green common to most of the people of Amham, fluttered open colored bright, burning orange.
“It comes.” The girl whispered with a rasp, as if tainted by smoke. “He wakes. His fury rises.”
Looking down beside Chae was Seung Kyung, an older man with a long, severe face and thin eyes. Poised, powerful, thoroughly present within this world and others at all moments, he was the senior of those gathered at Stonefire. Though she had known the masterful elder shaman for over a decade, Chae had never seen his composure so much as shaken.
It was shattered now. Something loomed behind his eyes, a bleak cloud coalesced out of the entwined emotions of sorrow and despair. “Child.” Despite trepidation sufficient to make his knees shake the master’s voice remained steady. All those assembled looked to him as he bent down over the fallen girl. He placed a hand behind her skull, pressing up black hair and raising her from the basalt gently but steadily. “Who is it? Who has awoken?”
Suyi spoke only one word. “Ayam.”
Seung Kyung went white.
The earth shook.
It lasted but a heartbeat, a single terrible sensation of sliding, of the very world itself jolted to the side, then snapped back, as if a hand of incalculable power had lifted all the stone beneath them, the entire hill and surrounding valleys, only to drop it again.
Chae shook her head, suddenly fighting disorientation. Several of the older shamans, no longer surefooted, dropped to their knees. Everyone blinked rapidly and cast glances in all directions.
Save for Seung Kyung. The senior shaman, a legend among his fellows, rose up, cradled the acolyte in the long silken sleeves covering his arms. He turned to look out beneath the northeast henge once again. Tears swept down his cheeks.
The earth shifted again. This time for longer, sustained. How long exactly could not be said, but as Chae curled up with her head against her knees to shield it from the rippling stone beneath, she managed to count to ten before all stilled.
Dry thunder, not truly thunder; some massive burst of sound many times more powerful that had no name, rolled across the hilltop. Striking the ears it pressed down hard, overwhelmed everything, driven through not only hearing but also sight and touch. There was only that thousand-fold whip-crack.
When vision returned it was suddenly bright.
Spring in Amham was a time of rain. Though the day had been mercifully dry there was no dissipation of the thick bank of clouds overhead. Bright light made no sense.
Chae turned, her gaze followed that of her senior. There, looming in the northeast, the clouds had vanished. They had not parted; such a gentle term did not apply. Great gray bulkheads had been rent asunder. A gap remained; a break that reached to the summit of the mountain.
A summit shattered; cone burst to pieces, fragmented. In its place there was only fire.
Red and raging, a furious blossom rising higher and higher with each breath, this spouting flame consumed the distant summit, searing such that even at this distance – over a day’s strenuous hike away – it was too much to look upon. Further up, above the clouds, a great smoking plume, brown and black and a slurry mixture of countless gray shades expanded, surged in immense heaving gulps to swallow the sky, higher and higher.
Mount Ayam, a brutal mountain of fire, called a volcano by the spirits, had come forth from slumber.
The earth shook a third time, just for a moment; enough to betray any anticipation of normal stillness.
Seung Kyung turned about. His eyes were dry. He placed Suyi on the ground before him. The girl, orange eyes lurid in that light coming from other than the sun, had recovered sufficiently to stand, though her gaze was directionless, absent. “It seems Ayam’s wrath has come. As it was known it would. The future has become the now. Our vigil has not been in vain. Now we can only act.”
His words were strong, and everyone turned to listen. Bare glimmers of hope returned. They dared to believe that they would escape the doom that rose above the sky, already higher than any possibility of seeing the top.
“Ayam cannot be fought.” Seung Kyung continued. His face, severe at the best of times, was funeral now. Each word carried with it bitter regret. “He is stronger than any spirit we might call against him, than every spirit all of us together could gather. There is no exchange we can possibly offer one who seeks nothing but destruction. There remains only to save what can be saved.”
Chae looked out to the expanded plume, pouring forth still, with no signs of stopping. How far would it go? Could it bury all things between mountains and sea? Her teeth clenched. Surely not. There must be something they could defend.
“The Stonefire Ring is secured.” She barely heard these words, focused far away, staring at the mountain, at the devastation tied to one simple name. “The space within the columns is beyond Ayam’s touch. That pact will hold through all. Those here must move all essentials, all records, relics, and everything else that can be spared, within those bounds. Our acolytes, aides, and those shamans unsuited to running shall undertake this. Yong.” He jerked a quick nod as an elderly jalsi, a man bent and weakened by the accumulated years who managed to stand only with a stick in each hand. “I leave that task to your direction.”
“Spirits willing, we will persevere.” The old man agreed.
“The rest will follow me.” As he spoke Seung Kyung met the eyes of one shaman after another, silent choosing those to join his desperate mission. Chae was jolted from her reverie as he did so. Understanding came then, without a need for further words. “We must evacuate Jin Town and the surrounding villages. The people will be confused. They must be made to run. It is the only chance.” Reaching out, he placed his hands over the thin shoulders of Suyi. “Sentinel.” There was great respect in his voice then. “We all rely upon you now. Your eyes have seen this. Have looked upon Ayam’s wrath. Where will the blow fall?”
Orange eyes flashed, shimmering with banked power, a fearsome connection both awesome and terrifying. Suyi stared out to the assembly, eleven years against the nearly three centuries of service collectively represented. There was not a sliver of doubt in her. She spoke a single word. “North.”
Chae closed her eyes, head shifting downward. The worst possibility; Jin Town – the trade center astride the mountain pass – and all its attendant villages, twenty thousand and more lives at least, lay directly in Ayam’s path.
“Then we must lead the people west, toward the sea.” Seung Kyung made the announcement with terrible finality. “I do not know how long we have, but there is none to waste. Run hard, save what can be saved.”
They ran. Eight pairs of legs dashing north, running towards wonder and wrath, charging at the face of oblivion, to steal back whatever they dared to grasp. Before leaving they paused to gather in little more than water. Chae tied her robes high, almost to her waist, that she might run faster, but even as she sacrificed for speed she did not forsake a large dark bag slung over her shoulder. Soft, formed of sealskin, it wrapped tight to her back and hung there bulky but light.
Something things were part of being a jalsi and could not be forgotten, no matter the risks.
Fit and well-schooled in marching through wilderness by her wide-ranging duties, Chae made swift progress down the narrow ox-paths leading from the isolation of the Stonefire Ring to the upland villages clustered near to Jin Town. Carved out from the vast and deep green forests of Amham, these little settlements clung to the sides of the great cleft valley that marked the northern side of Ayam, the break in the high mountain range claimed by the volcano that allowed passage across the otherwise fearsome peaks marching through Regner's center.
Water flowed down those slopes, fed year round by the thick snows clinging to upper reaches. White blankets now vanished from the skirt of Ayam's burst cone. They fed into densely packed paddy fields, in some places so confined that they were layered in terraces against the rising earth.
Little clusters of square pit houses, sunk down and roofed with thatch, marked out the homes of the people. Here and there a gray stone structure, kiln, forge, or granary. Most were easily seen, positioned in thick earth where rice could not be grown, gripped the forest edges, held back by continual effort the encroachment of the emerald boughs. Simple essential human spaces. Homes.
All soon to be swept away.
Chae's endurance was strong, but she was not the fastest. A tall young man, Jin Hwan, proved fleet of foot and outpaced the others. He raced directly north, plunged in among the villages, pale robes flapped in the wind. At this Chae turned slightly eastward, into the heart of the pass, towards the trade road and Jin Town itself. Seung Kyung moved with her. The senior jalsi was closer to twice her thirty winters than not, but he proved immune to tiring and moved with an easy loping pace than ate up ground.
Swiftly as they moved, Ayam was not to be beaten in a race.
The great gray morass rising to impossible heights was no longer a pillar. Spread wide in an immense formation, a vast shape vaguely vase-like as if the flanks of the mountain were churned on the potter's wheel of the sky itself, they came to encompass everything above. Mid-afternoon had barely begun by the time Jin Hwan's shouts of warning reached the first of the villages, but already darkness had stolen over the day.
Mighty thunderstorms sometimes swept over the coast in summer, black and opaque, sundering connections to the distant sun. Chae could recall such days, the crash of vast thunderheads, clouds roiling in chaos sprawl in pale half-light; frightening indeed. This was worse, much worse.
The day vanished. All was starless night, the only light came from the baleful glow of Ayam himself, as the mountain's rage boiled ever higher. The strange perspective of this light, low and angular, played tricks on the eyes, leading to stumbles and near falls. Lurid shadows rose, flickering and dancing at the back of the eye.
In the valley proper villages clung to the road. A dirt track leading all the way from the distant coast to the west and to the great river Amyeun to the east and thence down to the far coast, it was not particularly impressive. Often muddy, marked by the ruts of heavy-wheeled carts and scored by the footsteps of year after year of trudging oxen, it wound a sinuous trail cut with hard labor from the grip of the great forests of Amham. Wealth flowed down it, carried out from the east through Jin Town. So people built near to this path.
Today they would run down it.
The first village was far enough from Jin Town that it could host an inn, a wide hostelry of raised logs with attached stables catering to those who chose not to press on in bad weather. A natural gathering place, many of the terrified residents had assembled here, several score in all, what Chae guessed to be all the able-bodied adults this little place held.
They crouched in the stables, staring wildly at the burning mountain to their south. Many faces bore the streak-marks of tears. Others muttered continuously. A number of eyes were wide and shifting, signs of strong drink imbibed earlier. Fear radiated from them all.
Heavy boots clomped hard along the road, the approach of the jalsi was far from stealthy. One head turned first, others followed. A cry went up, and bodies spilled out from within the inn itself. As Chae and Seung stumbled to a stop every eye was turned to them. Staring at the white robes, the clean and pure shade of linen only shamans wore.
Desperate hope danced across the gathering.
Seung Kyung did not waste it. “Mount Ayam has awoken!” he shouted the words, unleashing the powerful voice a leader cultivates. “His wrath descends! All must flee at once. Take water only, leave the rest behind. No time remains. Run now, run with all the strength you possess. Your lives demand it!”
Silence. Blank faces stared back in such. For a moment Chae watched, thinking someone – likely the wide-faced man with three chins who surely ran the inn – would dare to object.
Instead, Ayam overruled all objections by sending another quake through the earth. Back and forth, the shaking tore thatch from roofs and sent a bale of hay tumbling free within the stacks at the back of the stables.
“Run!” Seung Kyung proclaimed.
They ran.
Families scrambled back to their homes, gathered up children, elders, and quickly filled waterskins, gourds, and whatever other receptacles could be grasped to hand. Within moments they began to snake their way down the road to the west, propelled by fear. Stolen glances as they retreated were filled with sorrow, directed at homes, fields, livestock. The first pangs of loss emerged ere the devastation had barely begun.
“Chae.” Seung Kyung briefly turned to her, granting instructions. “Head up the valley from here and rouse the villages on the slopes. I will move along the road itself. Loop back when you pass the old rockslide.” He pointed to a tear of tumbled rock and scree along the northern wall of the valley. “We will meet at the Fork Stone on the road and choose again. Go swiftly.”
Nodding, Chae went.
The journey that followed passed in a strange and lurid blur. The hideous off-light of Ayam flickered and twitched as the blackness grew overhead, until it blotted out even the distant west and the descending sun. The terror on the faces of the villages, desperate to understand the madness that had erupted to consume all they knew and all they loved. Earthquakes in descending intervals, until there was only an almost perpetual low rumble, the very ground vibrating beneath the feet.
Breathing hard, Chae scrambled up narrow mule tracks and along the edges of rice paddies, calling out to all she saw, carrying the word, the command on the sacred lips of the jalsi. A simple message condensed to one word. Run!
Amham's people were schooled in faith, knew the spirits and those who walked between them. They listened. Primed by the horrors thrown by the mountain across the roof of the world, they obeyed swiftly. A chain of bodies, backs bare save for where they carried those children too young to walk, wound its way down to the west, seeking whatever safety might be found.
She could only hope their feet would be carried beyond the grasp of Ayam's rage, and that their journey would be swift enough. Too many, struggling with grandmothers or little children, stumbled slowly through their paces, progressed only haphazardly.
Over five hundred were sent to flee at Chae's call by the time she reached the Fork Stone.
The marker was a great spike of pale gray, a megalith, slammed into the ground midway upon the journey to Jin. The name came from the dual spikes forming a y-shape pointing along the procession of the road. It had been laid down long ago, when the center of the pass lay here, not further east. A shift, she suddenly realized, that a previous episode of Ayam's waking rage had precipitated.
Her hands shook in the face of this revelation. The sheer scale of it at last revealed. An image of the whole pass swept away beneath a wave of fire lanced through her mind. She could only gasp and look upward at the red heart of the mountain in the distance. How much time?
Seung Kyung met her before the marker. The older shaman leaned heavily against the megalith. Approaching, Chae could feel that he had called upon the spirit within, drawing a measure of strength to support his efforts. There would be a price for such a blessing, but the senior jalsi had a well of support from the standing stones of Amham to draw upon, more than any other shaman. Something that she wished she could duplicate at the moment.
Bending his head slightly as Chae approached, Seung Kyung detached his hands from the rough granite surface. His body seemed vital and hale, but his eyes spoke of considerable tiredness. He could not go much further and still have time to run back west. This was an ill sign, for they were little more than halfway to Jin Town.
“We will-.” Seung Kyung began. Then he stopped.
There was a strange whistling sound, emerging from overhead. Then a soft thump echoed behind Chae. It was an unfamiliar noise, vaguely similar to that of a pine cone falling to the ground. A moment later it repeated, then again, an intermittent pattern.
A few heartbeats and the truth became clear. From high above a stone descended in a great arc, slamming down into the center of the road.
Pale gray, almost whitish, it was roughly the size of a chicken's egg. Irregular in shape, the surface was scored with strange holes. No more than a pebble, truly, but a pebble that had fallen from the sky.
And it was not alone. Slowly at first, but building swiftly, the pattering chorus of these rocks falling from high above grew. Intermittent, then constant, then as ceaseless a stream as rain. Vomited forth in anger by the mountain, they had risen only so far and now returned to the earth as they must.
Chae met Seung Kyung's eyes. The senior jalsi stared back, crestfallen. His shoulders were slumped, gaze directed downward. “Our time is up.” Speaking softly, the words could barely be heard over the rising crash of stone. “We must turn back. We can go no further. Only the spirits can say if we will survive from here.” He turned away, looking out to the west.
In the east, the stone walls of Jin Town, dark and black for they were hewed from the sturdy basalt of Ayam's lower slopes, could just be glimpsed, one shadow against another in the darkness. The hinge of trade to the lands of the east. Between the town proper and the villages immediately abutting it there were five thousand. More in the space between.
Nari Gyeon, Chae's sister-in-law, had been born within those walls. She herself had passed through those gates in the company of her cousin Kin and his foreign bride. Buildings, streets, faces; memories called these up one by one, flashing across behind her eyes. Then burned.
A stone came down, arcing gracefully, and struck Chae in the chest.
The pellet was light and airy. Barely solid, it pressed the white linen down against the hard leather of the lamellar beneath. There was no real pain, but the impact, the pulse of energy conveyed, this penetrated much further.
She turned, looked upwards along the slope, stared directly at the burning there, at the downfall front now moving closer. The still-growing wrath of Ayam. Devastation wrought without reason, without purpose. A vast wave of dark fire pouring forth to obliterate everything that they had not been swift enough to save. This was all the warning their vigilance had purchased? A thousand years of effort did not amount to a single day in the reckoning of the volcano?
“No.” Chae said slowly.
Seung Kyung turned about. “Jalsi?” There was genuine puzzlement in his voice.
“No.” She repeated the declaration. Louder this time, firm. Her eyes sought out that crimson brightness and did not turn away. “I will not turn back.” As the words emerged she realized she had never intended to retreat. She had always meant to run the whole way. That much was no longer possible, but it would not be the end either.
“Five thousand lives.” It was a simple calculation, child-like in clarity. “The life of one jalsi is nothing compared to that.”
“You cannot save them.” Seung Kyung shook his head. “You have much talent Chae-Jalsi, but no one can fight the mountain. Not that we gathered every jalsi of Amham together could we win.”
He was a learned man, wise beyond the norm even among jalsi; the one who had counted the stones of the land and gathered their might together. It was not a lie, not anything less than the whole truth. A spirit such as Ayam was simply beyond the capability of human hands to compel.
“I need not win.” Chae faced the obliteration before her with open eyes. “If I can slow this catastrophe at all, buy even a few moments, that will be a worthy exchange.” The slowly stumbling children, boys and girls who had not yet seen five years, fiercely struggling to run as hard as their parents confirmed her choice. Even one would be enough.
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“Do not do this Chae.” Seung Kyung pleaded. “You will only anger Ayam further.”
“I do not think that possible.” The crimson stared back at her, insensate in its impulses. “I honor your wisdom, Seung-Jalsi.” She glanced briefly at him, meeting his green eyes with her own. “But this choice is mine, and we stand side by side before the spirits.” That was law. No shaman could overrule another. All who had earned their robes were equal in the eyes of the spirits and therefore among each other as well. “I am going. You have my apologies.” She refused to allow any regret to enter her mind as she turned away.
“Chae!” Seung Kyung's plea echoed in her ears as she started up the slope, but it was soon lost in the rumbling downpour of rock.
Marching through the pumice fall was maddening. The stones were dangerous and clattered endlessly. Though they were merely painful when they struck the body, especially with armor as protection, the head was vulnerable. Chae carried her sealskin bag above her head, trusted to the fur-padding lining the inner spaces to protect what lay within and desperate to shield her skull from that continual assault.
Every step was difficult. Bad enough to walk up a slope in the dark after running for hours, now the pebbles from above began to coat the ground. This loose layer formed natural scree; each step treacherous. Progress was slow, painful, and difficult. It grew worse when she exited from the scrub forest on the lower slope and trod on bare black stone, sharp-edged and uneven.
Ankles burned, feet rubbed blister raw from slipping through odd positions, and her arms grew sore from holding the sealskin above her head. Thoroughly reduced to misery in a short time, Chae ground her teeth and pushed further upward, drawn by the red light.
[You ssshould probably ssstop.] The voice emerged within her skull, sliding around beneath the bones, cold and smooth. [Continue like thisss and Ayam won't even notice you.] The words, hissing and serpentine around a forked tongue, held no real compassion. Instead, they sounded oddly amused.
[Your concern is touching Ela.] Pushing her impression back to the snake spirit bonded within, Chae allowed her misery to leak through. [You have no objection to this?] it was almost surprising, almost. She'd thought Ela actually liked her.
[I will missss you.] The words were even and poised, but the scales scraping within the bone shuddered briefly. [But would not dissshonor thisss choice.]
Biting down hard, Chae fought the surge of emotion this brought welling up. Drawing on every bit of dispassion sharing a bond with a serpent had gained her, she crushed it down. To lose focus now was to allow doubt to grow and multiply. Once that began, nothing could be achieved.
Instead, she launched one gamble. [Any advice for fighting this mountain?]
[Hold nothing back.] The answer was immediate, and bitterly honest. [None can collect from the dead.]
Swallowing slowly, these words were taken in for the truth they held. A better demonstration of friendship she could not have expected.
The rain of pumice continued, deep and greater than any hailstorm. The gravel detritus created in this fashion soon over-topped the toes of boots, then rose to ankle height. By the time it was done, and Chae stood clear of all plant life on the barren wastes of Ayam's black skirted slopes she was slogging through a layer reaching halfway to her knees.
When the fall ended abruptly, the ensuing silence carried an impression of mercy. Damage there had been, but this much, though enough to ruin crops, break bones, and shred roofs, was merely a disaster. It could be endured, survived.
Deep fiery reds crashed on the summit and revealed the lie to the one pair of eyes daring to stare down the gullet of the enclosing jaws.
High above, at a point where the blue was gone and the sky was black before naught but distant stars, the cloud had reached the apogee of its expansion. The great force of discharge from below ceased. Now there was only a mountain of rock stretching five times the height of the greatest peaks of the world, a mountain suspended by aught but heat. Energy stolen away swiftly by the frightful void cold of those upper reaches.
Cooled only slightly, it began to fall. The torrent crashed down. Rock mixed with the high ices and merged into molten, pulsing, goop, a fluid mixture with unique consistency. It rained down on the slopes, pouring onto the basalt in immense quantities, many times more than the spare soils and loose gravel could contain. Further falls from above pushed upon this, heat from below supercharged it. Mashed together it formed a perfect maelstrom of energy and power, triggered to race outward in an avalanche of boiling hot water, mud, and smoke; the phenomenon watchers of a later age would call pyroclastic flow.
To Chae there was only a gray-brown wall, a tidal wave formed not of water, but of stone, huge beyond reckoning, rising higher and higher with every breath. All-encompassing, enough to bury the pass to many times her height, to engulf Jin Town and all those within as if they had never been. Absolute annihilation in fire and water at once; a vision of how the world would end.
It could not be permitted.
She moved with careful deliberation, even as that onslaught advanced. The flow was terrifying in speed as well as immensity, but the jalsi knew that now of all times she dared not rush. Everything must be done with absolute perfection.
She cleared a space of fallen stone with her boots, and pressed together a rough table before it. This done she brought up her sealskin and opened the ties on the bag. From within she pulled three things. Two sticks; one drum.
Her janggu.
The drum was double-headed, a hollow hourglass shape precisely carved from paulownia wood. Perfectly smoothed and polished till it gleamed even in the dim light cast by the volcano, the wood was decorated by a complex snake motif, green and gold and black scales in pattern wrapping around in long coils. Ela's image preserved.
Stretched hide heads, uneven, each unique, were mismatched in color. One was ghoral – the rare goat of the highlands. The other had been taken from wapiti – the great northern deer of the deep woodlands. Each was held in place by a hoop of fine bronze, bound together with chords of pure white silk. The two beating sticks were varied, one a long spike of bamboo, the other a birch mallet, smoothed and polished.
The instrument was a masterwork, enough that even in this moment it filled Chae with soaring pride and a twinge of embarrassment to possess. The absurdly extravagant gift of her brother. Not regretted today; every portion of aid would be of inestimable value.
Chae sat cross-legged, the hem of her robe smoothly enclosing her limbs, before the instrument. Dipping her fingers into her waterskin to grasp the last bits of moisture there, she then passed them across the surface of one of the many pieces of pumice. The loose stone yielded a powdery, chalky mixture of ash. With her index and middle finger she marked a path down her forehead to the bridge of her nose, feeling the trembling potency.
Only then did she pick up the sticks.
The onrushing cataclysm was closing, faster than a horse could run, swifter even than most birds. It would strike in minutes at most. Any chance to run away had long since passed.
Such certainty brought a strange sense of peace. Hands grasped the carved drumsticks gently, loose and easy.
The shaman began to play.
She began with the mallet. Low, steady strikes that resounded freely, building power to her rhythm. This accelerated quickly, drawing the shaking energy of the earth up, letting it fill the song and set alight the beats. Rushing thrumming power over-topped itself in sequence, tumbling and rolling.
Snap. The first strike of the bamboo. Quick snips followed, a speeding harmony, jumping and chattering. The pattering of the pumice fall once more, rippling and surging in counterpoint to the greater pulses below. The two strains bound together, mirroring the oncoming ferocity.
Blackness surrounded her, devastation ran forward, and a crimson shroud lay over the world. Chae played, silhouetted against oblivion. Chartreuse light burst from her eyes, a pale glow flashing in time with her cadence. Her arms blurred, mallet now racing across, played on both drum heads. Bamboo raced from center to edge, whipped around the ring and back. Pulsating whip-chords. Small though the sound was before the titanic explosion of decibels unleashed by the volcano, it could be heard clearly and strong. None dared to drown it out.
Mind divorced from the work of her body, Chae fell into the shadows between, feeling without seeing the complex overlay of presences all around her. The network of spirits found behind the world, under-girding all things, bones of truth and power. They quaked now, pressed down by the overpowering molten cinnabar essence that was Ayam.
But they were not gone, and when a jalsi sends out the call answers are required.
Reckless, propelled by certain destruction, Chae offered no pleas, proposed no bargains, formulated no exchanges. No, there was simply one action; one demand, made with the whole of her being, with unwavering conviction, daring all counters.
Stop Ayam.
Wind gathered, swirled forth above. Power in unseen bars of air. Great gusts wrapped into the beats of the drum, mighty gale storms roared with the power to rip trees down and strike birds from the wing.
Racing forward, the wind threw itself against the oncoming tide of burning mud.
A pause, half a heartbeat of flickering. Loose stones floating in the surface of the avalanche briefly rose, skipped against the surge.
Then it stopped. They snapped back down. The wind halted, then reversed. Debris flashed forward, driven ahead on a lash of heat, thrown ahead with brutal cutting power, sliced through all before them with sharp splinters of edged stone.
A swirling whirlwind descended upon Chae's position. Tiny knives ripped out. The force of wind grasped her, threw her back, flat and rolling, plunged through the pumice layer.
Eyes forward, she never lost sight of her drum. The axes of stone slammed into it. Shards-flakes of gray cut into the deep maple-shaded wood; pierced, punctured. Rips and tears burst the heads, cut through even the strength of silk. Wood shattered, fragments bent, cracked, and were carried by the howling rage of wind to tear apart their fellows.
The janggu disintegrated before her eyes.
Six months labor by a master carver. A fortune in materials and artistry that only nobility dared commission. A decade in Chae's care, honored and loved every day. Carried from one end of Amham to the other and even beyond. Hundreds of spirits had heard that song. Dozens of lives had been saved and demons banished beneath the steady beat.
It had amounted to less than a heartbeat against Ayam's wrath.
No time to mourn. Hold nothing back, Ela had ordered. Chae let the tears flow down her face, but kept moving.
Rising to her feat she reached up to her chest. Twin necklaces, long strings of wooden beads, carved in series, each a different grain than the last, rested there. They marked and named the great trees of Amham's mighty forests.
Pulling them off, she took these strings one in each hand, rattling. Her hands flashed through rapid circles, a flurry of motion to crash and scatter, up and down, back and forth, letting loose and free captured energies.
Throwing her arms wide, Chae pulled down through the beads and then yanked upward, grasped with the totality of her spirit and refused to let go.
All along the slope, in front of the cascade, roots burst from the ground. They grew forth at impossible speed, twining and crashing, gnarled and thick brown shoots curled upon each other, warped into solidity. They merged into a twisted, shuddering barrier, low and labyrinthine, though ascending higher and higher with each moment.
Pockets and holes stood within that barbican, endless in number; a maze to channel and trap the assault of mud, to drive it down and throw it aside.
Striking this verdant dike the flow diverged, splashed outward, churned, paused.
Chae exhaled.
The wave broke and buried the roots completely. Corded wood sundered, shattered, and was submerged utterly within the impossible mass of the onslaught. In a blink of an eye nothing could be seen to reveal that it had even been.
Beads flew free from their strings, burst into flame as they did so, wooden bullets they screamed in all directions, throw apart as they immolated. Slammed against the leather bracers on her forearms, many pierced through, left holes in scattershot pattern, seared burns against her skin where the defense failed. Then they died away, hissing and bubbling with the scream of the green shoot cast upon the bonfire.
Pain drove Chae to her knees, burned all across her forearms and wrists. She bit down hard and tasted blood in her mouth. Tiny sparking flames formed a field around her, the dying echoes of the connections Ayam had severed without pause or recognition. The power of the forest was nothing more than more fuel to subsume.
Not done yet. She spat metallic red at her feet and reached her hands to her waist. There she tore a string and came away with a piece of iron in each hand.
Paired metal disks, each sized to fill the open hand. Smoothly concave, cymbal-form in shape; iron rippled as turned upon a wheel. The edges of each disk were narrow, frightfully sharp.
Neither wind, nor wood. Then she would call upon water.
Slicing her thumbs against the edges of the plates, Chae spun them hard and threw them as high as she dared.
Little pieces of iron, glowing bright in the scarlet reflection of the volcano, they hung there in the sky, spinning slowly in the spirit-sight. Standing tall at the center point between these Chae clasped her hands together, fingers entwined, thumbs high. The coppery smell of blood exuded as the cuts on her thumbs dripped across each finger in turn before falling down to strike the ground. The shaman closed her eyes, felt down deep, turned back to the ancient and most sacred link to the waters of the world.
Eyelids snapped open, salt tears flew free beneath the brilliant green streaming forth. The spinning disks whirled in the air. Then they descended, plunged deep down, drilled, bored, cutting deeper and deeper. Basalt gave way before them in that furious rush.
Twin fountains of water burst roaring onto the slope.
Chae threw her hands forward, blood-stained palms thrust up. She screamed out a voiceless roar, hurled everything she could grasp forward in that surge.
Water met mud on the slope. Steam boiled forth in every direction. Clouds coated all. Bubbles burst and filled the sky. The air itself shook and churned, a maddening roil. At the forefront of the avalanche the wave broke apart, streams of water launched into the face of madness. Mud quivered and vaulted in all directions. Stones were thrown high above, shattered to fragments as heat and cold met and joined.
Breath failed to sustain her screaming. Chae drew in her lungs again, headless of the steam, and screamed out a second time, holding strained hands. Bleeding and burnt, she stood fast, watched the pause, the breakage. One moment, another, shouting so long as the air lasted, momentum held fast.
Stones crashed down, those hurled high by colliding steam falling once again. Smashing against the slope, the heavy boulders set basalt to crack. Streams of water lost cohesion. Geyser-fountains dissipated. A loose pool spilled out instead and the tide of boiling mud sucked it up and rolled onward.
The iron disks emerged from the depths, shattered to shapeless fragments.
Altogether, less than a minute earned.
Valueless.
Time had passed, and the distance had closed. Chae had but one tool left, and barely the space to use it. Yet she hesitated. Not enough, this is not enough. Her right hand grasped the hilt of her bronze dagger, snake scales carved on the blade, turquoise gem in the pommel, steady rattan fibers holding a solid grip beneath bloody fingers. There must be something more.
Exchange. Offering. Nothing for free from the spirits. No power without price. No growth without loss. The way of nature, inviolate.
The rules all jalsi knew. The very basis of being a shaman, standing between, bargaining with both sides, all eyes open.
Fingers uncurled about the dagger hilt. She moved her grip to the left hand.
Her right hand moved. The arm tightened. The index and middle fingers curled into harsh claws. They lifted to her cheek.
Without thinking, unwilling to dare consideration, refusing reason; Chae dug in hard, nails penetrated skin and tissue, rippled deep into the flesh there. Then she pulled.
Lurid tracks, one long and one short, tore down the side of her face, reached to the edge of her lower jaw, red ruin spread out from them, a gruesome suppuration of the self. From the eye to edge of the chin her index finger wrought the long wound, a mark no one would be able to look upon her and miss, carried forever.
“Ayam!” Chae screamed. She reached up and pressed the broad bronze blade to the wreckage of her cheek. The metal was warmth in the heated air pushed before the oncoming oblivion. Both sides of the blade touched there; both hands upon the hilt.
“Go back down into the pit of the earth!”
She slammed the dagger down with all her strength, plunged it to the hilt in the stone.
The blade slid through dark basalt, granite hard, as if it was naught but water.
Stone cracked. The earth heard the call.
It opened before her, a mighty gouge in the mountainside. Too deep to see the bottom, this great ravine carved forth from the slopes of the volcano, ragged-edged, impossible.
Boiling mud and stone met the border of that cleft, and then plunged down. Vast torrents of mixture, steaming and surging, descended into the darkness, divorced from their path across the surface and pressed to a deeper road.
In the distance, at the summit of the shattered cone, something flickered.
An immense weight, heavier than conception, beyond all possibility of motion, slammed upon Chae. It had no substance, but held her absolutely still without any exertion of effort. She could not move, could not speak, could not even breathe. Only sight remained to her, and in that cold vision she watched as the crack in the earth was bridged by a layer of mud and then, moments later, pulled closed.
At this moment she realized that all her previous efforts had gone totally unnoticed by Ayam. Only now had she done enough to draw even an instant of the spirit's attention.
The front of the boiling storm splashed out beyond the ravine. Earth shook, and Chae's body was thrown free.
Her body rolled, spinning down slope, bruising everywhere, ravaged and slammed. Her skull rattled, joints screamed. By the time she came to a stop she could barely see, there were only blurs, motions shifting in the distance.
These, and the rising roar of the lahar.
Somehow Chae got a bloody hand beneath her. There was enough strength to rise to one knee, then another, and then to stand, wobbling, before the onrushing doom.
Not enough. She could not have said where the thought came from, what drove it. Yet it did not dissipate, did not fade.
She felt something in her left hand, something solid, rough. Eyes moved slowly, glancing at length upon a piece of pumice. The rock was triangular, with a long pointed end.
A poor tool, a primitive thing, unshaped, but such had powered her ancestors. Humans could do much with such simple things.
[Hold back nothing, right Ela?] Chae looked into the oncoming wall of the pyroclastic floor, now vast enough that it blotted out even the view of the summit beyond. It was the only thing in the world. That, and the stone in her hand.
She smiled, and raised it up beneath her neck. One name waited on her lips.
[Stop.]
A single word, crashing through the expansive landscape of worlds. It came not with anger nor with bile, but simply stood, firm and unyielding. There were no echoes, but there was no forgetting.
It was obeyed.
Everything froze. Chae could not move. The massive wall of heat, mud, and destruction pouring down toward her was utterly still. In the distance the ongoing collapse of the mighty cloud plume from its great heights was captured as a painted image, a single moment stretched to eternity.
Into this stillness stepped a presence. A figure, vaguely humanoid, formed of molten stone. Standing tall, though not impossibly so, he possessed broad shoulders and a firm, square face. There were simple features on that face, eyes and mouth of burning coals, smoldering as red fluids slowly traced convection patterns through the form. Each movement was swift and sure, almost a stutter-step from one posture to the next, avoiding the in-between, but the bearing was absolutely magisterial.
This, the shaman knew with complete certainty, was the spirit of Mount Ayam made manifest.
He looked down at her. This was not intimidation, it was commonplace for one of her stature. [A single human.] Ayam’s voice was implacable, a low rolling rumble that occasionally jumped a beat, but without any of the rancor expected. [Such a small thing to successfully demand my attention.]
Closing upon her, Chae could feel the heat radiating off his presence. It was incredible. Every nerve felt aflame. She was amazed her clothing did not burst alight at his glance. There was no doubt that if this being willed such a thing to occur, it would be so.
[You are interfering in matters beyond your scope.] Ayam announced. Redness flickered across his smoldering visage. [The turning of a pattern at a scale beyond the capacity of your life to grasp unfolds. Your dedication is commendable, but misplaced.]
Ayam’s words revealed much, but it was his bearing, the deftly regal mien and calculated unflappability of the spirit, which brought the revelation to the forefront of her thoughts. He is not angry. A simple thing, in truth, but it unleashed a tumbling series of pieces to re-frame the entire situation.
Ayam’s wrath. They had all considered it to be so, believed the great fiery mountain was furious, that he was unleashed the molten power of his rage against everyone nearby. Even if Jin Town was not the target – more likely the spirit of some other mountain or forest at such scales – all had believed the eruption was motivated, desired. Looking at the spirit in humanoid presentation, Chae realized how mistaken they had all been, how their humanity had blinded them.
Not angry; simply awake. This devastating process was part of Ayam’s purpose, an event itself driven by even greater forces she could not imagine. There was no fury, no consideration for anything within the pass at all. The villages, even the forests, were utterly ephemeral, mayflies to the estimation of Ayam. He was part of the life of stone, and everything else was beneath consideration.
[Tell me.] Ayam ordered, voice beyond any possibility of refusing. [Who are you to face me?]
[I am Chae-Jalsi, of Amham.] Her voice sounded small when conveyed across that strange stillness to the streaming stone being.
[Humility.] The spirit all but scoffed. [And why do you oppose what must be?]
[You are going to kill thousands.] She discovered she could move again when she pivoted to point to Jin Town in the distance. [Young and old, men and women. They will all be buried and lost. Whatever chance there was to stop it, I had to take it.]
Now anger did flash across that burning face. Magma poured through the mouth, and eyes turned black as coal. [Such presumption.] Ayam sneered. [That the flickering lives of your kind mean anything. That you matter more than all others who shall feel my touch this day.]
Chae said nothing to this. She could not imagine what could be said. It was both perfectly true and utterly false at once.
Ayam turned back to her, meeting green eyes with red. [None among them could force my hand. Know this, your actions are not capable of accomplishing anything here. I can sweep aside all you have done with the barest expression of my will. Yet you have demanded that I do so, and that, no other has done.]
[You do not seem a fool.] Ayam’s furious presence bored into her. [What did you hope to accomplish?]
[Delay.] The simple truth. [An hour might save a thousand lives.]
[And you would have destroyed yourself to purchase even a small part of this.] The musings of the volcano before the frozen tableau were too much to take. The powerlessness of it, the shear futility she faced, drove Chae to her knees.
Ayam’s eyes met hers a second time. [I commend your dedication.] The words were slow, filled with molten power, storming and immense. They bore an implicit command, drew her back up onto her feet to face the spirit’s judgment. [And your humility.] He rose, stepping from the ground to stand on air before her. Wind rose, hot and dry, carrying the scent of ash.
[I grant until the sun sinks below the ocean in reprieve.] The volcano proclaimed. The words echoed throughout the valley, careening from one mountain to the next. They must have filled the ears of those many hours distant. [Not one moment more.]
Chae looked up, driven to her feet to stare. She could barely believe what she had heard. No more than a stare, wild-eyed, at the burning image could she manage then.
With sudden movement, flashing past as eye-bending speed, Ayam was on the ground once more. His right hand moved, rising up. Two fingers forward, he placed them at the base of her left eye. Slowly, he traced a line downward. [You have marked yourself.] The spirit’s touch burned like nothing in Chae’s experience. A pain that shattered the depths of her imagination and only grew deeper and deeper from there. All she was, all she had been, all she would be, these were blanked to nothing before that primal combustion. [Ayam now marks you.]
Consciousness failed. The world went black.
It had been mid-afternoon. For five long hours the eruption was frozen. Great clouds of ash hung motionless in the sky. Vast pyroclastic mudslides stopped abruptly, teetered unbalanced without falling. Even the molten flame at the center of the conflagration was totally still.
All others ran.
Seung Kyung understood instantly what had happened. Messengers were dispatched, met already fleeing people on the road, exhorted them to greater speed, to leave all non-essentials behind. The fleet-footed Jin Hwan reached the town whose name he shared and led its many people out to the east, sought safety on that shorter route down the slope. Villages were emptied, and even men in distant logging camps found the time to run north up the slopes, reached safety in the high peaks.
There were still deaths, of course. Those too old or infirm to walk could not be saved, and the exertion of the forced march proved too much for the hearts of a number of others. Fleeing down the steep switchbacks of the road east a number tumbled from the crowded trail and were lost. The final reckoning was close to two hundred dead.
Jin Town was buried under a massive ash flow, covered to twice the height of the walls. Countless villages were similarly carried away by slurry or smashed flat by a second outburst of pumice fall. Heavy damage reached as far as the outbuildings of the Stonefire Ring, several of which saw their thatch burned away when hot ash descended into the straw. Everything was destroyed, but when the great mass of ash settled the pass proved gentler than before and the flat expanse was easy to traverse. The town would rebuild to even greater prosperity in a few short years.
The girl Suyi, lost in the scramble at the Stonefire Ring, absconded with a horse and raced over the slopes. She found Chae’s unconscious frame, levered her onto the panicked animal, and managed to escape before the slope was deluged with boiling mud.
Chae awoke at the exact moment the sun set. Weak and in pain, she could do nothing but cling to the horse the young acolyte led back to the sacred circle. There she collapsed before they could praise her for the impossible.
The wounds and burns received before Ayam would heal, in time. The only marks retained were those on her face. Identical in position; the ragged and irregular scars carrying the memory of her nails on the right, and a black band of ash on the left. A debt that someday must be paid.
Chae knew this, but did not fear. Some things must be changed, and some things must be. A shaman walks between these, always.