Someone grabbed his arm and began pulling. He stood, resisting, staring at the dead boy. The woman beside the man with the boy began shouting at the prosecutor. Then she turned and began shouting at the rapidly growing crowd. Some people were fleeing, Shan saw, trying to urgently weave through the crowd, to escape the square. Han. The Han Chinese were fleeing.
"Niya!" someone shouted, and the crowd began to loudly chant the name. "Niya! Niya! Niya!" The name from the posters, the name of the red-haired woman he had seen on the posters.
The knobs, he suddenly remembered. There were knobs with machine guns. He turned and saw the two grey uniforms on a balcony overlooking the far side of the square. One appeared to be speaking on a portable radio. The other held his gun at the ready.
On the Ministry steps the herder with the boy still stood, silently holding the boy as though presenting the body to the prosecutor. He was crying. The dead boy's eyes were partially open, as if the boy were squinting, trying to see something in the distance. His shirt was torn and stained with blood. There was a hole in the center of his forehead.
Someone grabbed Shan's arm with two hands now and would not let go. It was Jakli. He looked back at the dead boy and let himself be pulled down from the truck and led away.
They walked fast, though not so fast as to attract attention, past four blocks of pressed earth and cinder block structures in various stages of disrepair, the shops, garages, restaurants and dreary offices with grey metal shutters that kept Yoktian alive. He asked her who the boy was but she said nothing. He asked who Niya was, and then he saw she was choked with emotion, her eyes moist, her jaw clenched as though to stifle a sob.
Jakli led him into a compound of four one-story buildings surrounded by a waist-high wire fence. A concrete walkway, so badly buckled and split that Jakli stayed on the dirt beside it, led to the mud-walled building that sat in the center of the compound, flanked on three sides by identical structures. Shan stopped at the entrance and looked at the wooden sign that had been fastened over the doorway. It had once held a slogan, but half the sign had blown away, so that all remained were the words Strengthens Children.
Jakli did not realize he had stopped until she was twenty feet down the darkened hallway. She turned with her hands on her hips, waiting.
"Was the boy from the zheli?" Shan called out.
She looked up and down the hall with worry in her eyes, then stepped closer. "An orphan, yes," she replied in a taut, melancholy voice. "His name was Kublai. Staying with a clan about twenty miles into the mountains. He was watching sheep and didn't come back. When they went to look they saw his body below a cliff, with a dead lamb in his arms. He had fallen, they thought, probably while rescuing the lamb. But when they retrieved the body they saw he had been shot. The lamb," she added with a sudden, deep despair, "the lamb was shot too."
"Who is Niya?" Shan asked again. "What does she have to do with the boy?"
"My cousins reached four of the zheli families and warned them away," she said, looking at the floor. "Malik brought a second boy to hide at Red Stone. The boy had tied two mastiffs to him, as if they would stop the killer. Some Maos are there at Akzu's camp now, guarding the boys. Other Maos are looking in the mountains too. The children are so hard to find."
"Are the boys connected to this Niya?"
But Jakli seemed not to hear again. She turned and walked, more slowly, stopping at a door near the end of the hall. Someone sat on the floor beside the door. The Mao with the gold teeth, who had brought the shoes. As Jakli bent to speak with him, Shan pushed the door open.
Inside, Lokesh looked up from a simple wooden table and offered a silent nod of greeting. It was a small room, with a window that looked over the schoolyard toward the south, toward the snow-capped Kunlun. Its walls were lined with photographs, at least two dozen. There were horses, many pictures of horses. There was a picture of a large Buddha statue, photographs of mosques, and even a reproduction of an old painting of Lao Tzu, the sage of Tao, riding an ox. At the top of a tall metal bookcase a string of prayer flags had been fastened, which draped down the side of the shelves.
Lokesh held a bell in his hands, an old bell cast of bronze, the tip of its handle ending in a familiar scepter-like shape. It was a dorje bell, used in Tibetan ritual.
"She forgot her bell," Lokesh said grimly, with a meaningful glance toward Shan. The peal of a dorje bell was said to drive away evil. Beside the bell on the table was a ball of thread, perhaps three inches in diameter, with red, green, and yellow threads intertwined. Not thread, really, Shan knew, but a sacred emblem used by some Buddhists to wrap around ritual implements as a means of invoking wisdom. One of Lokesh's hands left the bell and stroked the ball of thread. Further down on the table was a large book, a Koran, and a black dopa, one of the Muslim skullcaps.
"What is it you seek, my friend?" Shan asked the old Tibetan. His words came out almost as a sigh, cast out on the wave of emotion he still felt from seeing the third boy. He knew Lokesh had come down from Senge Drak, had chosen not to go back to the safety of Lhadrung, because he was looking for something, something he had hoped to find at the school.
"It is hard to put into words," Lokesh said in a hoarse voice, shaking his head, as if something was telling him not to speak. He gripped the bell with both hands. "In its physical emanation it is the Jade Basket. But it is said to be able to transform itself, if it needs to, for protection."
"Protection of what?" Shan asked.
Lokesh's brow wrinkled. "On the outside," he said with difficulty, as though the words caused him pain, "the last time anyone saw it, it looked like a silver gau. Open it and there is a finely carved basket of jade, and inside that a place for a prayer."
The last boy's shirt, Kublai's shirt, had been torn, he remembered as he played the image from the Ministry steps over in his mind. Like that of Alta and Suwan.
"That's what you came for?" Shan asked. "This Jade Basket? Is that what you must take back?" Is that what Lau died for? he almost asked. For an artifact? There were symbols, he knew, objects of great power, of great veneration, for which devout Buddhists would gladly give their lives to protect. Indeed, dying for such objects would add great merit for the next incarnation.
"It's not safe to speak about it," Lokesh said, still shaking his head. "If you don't know how to approach it, then the closer you get, the farther it is." He looked up at Shan, clearly struggling painfully with something inside. "Don't-" His voice choked off and he stared at the bell with a doleful, perplexed expression.
"Did Lau have it? Is that why you came here?" Shan asked.
But Lokesh just stared intensely at the bell in his hands. He seemed beyond hearing again.
Shan walked about the office, then stood in the doorway, surveying it. Xu had been here. Public Security had probably been here. Managing Director Ko had certainly been here. Xu had taken what seemed to be Lau's personal effects. But Lokesh had found two more, he believed, the ball of thread and bell. They had been hidden in plain sight, camouflaged with her cultural instructional materials. From behind him in the hallway he heard the Mao speaking to Jakli, pointing to something on the office opposite Lau's. He stepped to the other side of the hall to investigate. The Mao was pointing to a handwritten sign taped to the glass on the door. In two-inch characters someone had written one of the Great Helmsman's most famous slogans. Religion is the Opiate of the Masses. There was a nameplate on the door. Committee Chairman Hu, it said. Shan remembered the plump, worried Han teacher he had met at Glory Camp.
Shan wandered back into Lau's room. From the end of the table he picked up a piece of paper. A printout of names.
"The zheli," Jakli explained over his shoulder. "A list from the computer of all the orphans she worked with, and the zheli class schedule" She pointed to three names on the list. Suwan, Alta, and Kublai.
"Did Lau use the computer?" Shan asked.
Jakli paused and pulled the list closer. "No. She didn't like computers."
"Or, at least, didn't trust them," Shan suggested.
Jakli nodded as she examined the list. "Someone else did this."
"It makes it easier," Shan said in a low voice and saw the question in Jakli's eyes. "For the killer." The killer had the list, available at any Brigade computer, and only needed the location of the zheli members. Which was why he had tortured Lau. He studied the schedule. The zheli had two class meetings left for the year, one in a week, and the other five days later, both at a place called Stone Lake. He pointed at the entries.
"At the edge of the desert," Jakli explained. "It was a tradition of Lau's, to end the season of classes with two sessions there. To understand the desert better, she said. It's too hot to go there in the summer."
"The boys," Shan said. "Which are the boys? I wasn't certain before, but now it seems clear. The killer is only attacking boys."
Jakli studied the list and pointed out nine more names. She held her hands together and twisted her fingers as she stared at the names, as though she had seen a ghost. It was not a student directory. It was a death list.
There were notes fastened on the wall, torn from student workbooks. Thank you, auntie, one said, for showing me that the desert is still alive. My baby bird sang a song today, another said. Two seemed to be poems. While my horse drank, it said, I saw an old farmer, so asleep a mouse nibbled at his whiskers. Another was written with a more mature, artful calligraphy. In the mountains, it said, old men wait, with the wisdom of snow.
Shan looked out the window. The building across the courtyard to the south had low drifts of sand along its walls. Beyond them, he gazed at the Kunlun, toward Senge Drak. Jakli had left Gendun there that morning, sitting on the sentinel stone on top of the mountain.
He sensed someone step behind him. He did not turn but saw the tumble of long dark hair from the corner of his eye. Jakli silently reached onto the wall and removed the second poem that he had admired, the one about wise old men. She folded it, and put it inside her shirt. He watched as she retrieved a chair from the table and studied the montage of photographs on the wall. After a moment she set the chair down in front of the wall, climbed it, and pulled down a photograph of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. She handed it to him with sad smile and stepped down. The photograph was stiff and heavy. He turned it over. On the back was affixed a photograph of a red-robed, balding man with spectacles, wearing a serene smile. The Dalai Lama. Jakli used her fingernails to slit the tape that held the secret photograph and put it in her pocket.
Suddenly the light in the office was switched off. The Mao with the gold teeth was at the door, silently pointing out the window. People had begun filing into the courtyard, arranging themselves along the wall of the opposite building. Jakli froze, then darted to the wall, and pressed against it, as if to hide.
It was knobs, herding children out of the school. Thirty or forty students had apparently been pulled out of classrooms with their teachers, who cowered in the doorway to the courtyard. The students were being arranged in a single line along the wall. One knob officer was shouting at them to be quiet, while another stood with a video camera, sweeping its lens along the faces of the children. As they watched, the youngest children, perhaps seven years and younger, were dismissed and sent running back to their teachers. Another group of older children, teenagers, was dismissed a moment later. The knobs began talking to the fifteen or twenty children who remained, one man speaking as another recorded the interview with the camera.
"It's all right," the Mao said. "Just stay quiet."
"They know the zheli's not here," Jakli said.
"Sure," the Mao said, "But some of the children may know how to find them. For the Poverty Scheme, the knobs are probably saying. Have to round up the orphan children, for their own good. Like the wild horses," he added bitterly.
Shan looked back toward the table. Lokesh was watching the children with anticipation in his eyes, as if perhaps he was thinking of going to them. Had the Mao told him about the third child? Shan wondered.
As if reading his mind Jakli stepped to the table and sat across from Lokesh. She placed a hand over his and shook it until Lokesh looked at her. "Another boy," she announced gently. "Another boy has been killed in the mountains."
When she had finished explaining what she knew, Lokesh sat staring at the dorje bell, lost in his thoughts again, more forlorn than ever. Shan leaned over Jakli. "The boy. Was he missing a shoe?"
"I don't know. Is it important?"
"The other two, they each had a missing shoe."
"What kind of shoe?"
He shrugged. "Just shoes." He thought a moment, then told her about the wooden tablet Bao had found and his reaction to it. "Suwan had one," Shan said. "It was shattered by his killer."
Jakli looked up with new worry in her face, then stood and stepped to the bookcase. She retrieved a photograph of a horse with a wooden frame from the top shelf. Not a frame, Shan saw as she held it out, but a flat piece of wood onto which the photo had been carefully taped to give the appearance of a frame. Jakli turned it over to reveal the wedge shape on its reverse side. Another of the tablets with the ancient writing.
"It's called Kharoshthi, this writing. From the people who lived here two thousand years ago. Sometimes the tablets are uncovered in the desert."
He reported Bao's reaction when he had found one of the tablets on Prosecutor Xu's desk and how Xu also had several of Lau's personal effects.
Lokesh looked up. "What? What did she have?" he asked in a strained, hurried voice.
"Not a gau," Shan said. "Books. A little jade horse. A pen case."
"A pen case?" Lokesh asked urgently, leaning forward. "Copper? With turquoise circles?"
Shan shook his head and studied his friend in confusion. "White metal. With coral."
Lokesh grimaced as if in pain and looked back at the bell.
Shan's eyes drifted back to the wooden tablet in Jakli's hand. He asked what Bao had meant when he had asked about the Antiquities Institute.
"The People's Antiquities Institute," she said. "It's a group of government scientists, archaeologists with Party memberships."
"I don't understand," Shan said. "Why would he say it has to do with Westerners?"
Jakli looked up with new alarm in her eyes. "Westerners? He said that?" She shook her head slowly. "It was the Americans who gave the tablets to Lau, enough for her to distribute them to the zheli. It was part of her helping them understand who we are."
"But to Major Bao it is an act of treason," Shan said, his mind suddenly racing. He had been wrong about Xu. She had not known about Sui, nor about the two dead boys. It could have been Bao all along, Bao and the boot squads searching for those he considered traitors to China. He must have found a link between Lau and the Americans and might be following the zheli to the Americans. Shan remembered the poem about the lama and Bao's reaction to the wooden tablet on Xu's desk. Evidence of treason. To Bao, finding traitors would be more important than finding Sui's killer, at least temporarily, if he were on the verge of closing in on his traitors. Shan and Jakli exchanged an alarmed glance.
"The Americans have to be warned," Jakli gasped. "They go to the zheli class sometimes."
"To the zheli?" Shan asked in disbelief. "Surely it would be too dangerous."
"I was there with Fat Mao when Lau tried to talk them out of it. The Americans said they wanted to talk about their work to the children, to the next generation, to let them know there are other people on the planet who care about them."
Their work. What was it the Americans were doing that could so infuriate Bao? Digging up ancient tablets? Looking at old cloth?
"They said it was worth the risk," Jakli added, "to have children listen."
Shan remembered Deacon's strange words. He and his wife had come to Xinjiang to stop hiding. "Maybe you should go to the Americans," he said. "I must help the children."
Jakli gazed at him, her eyes widening in realization. "But what you said about Bao, it means that it is all about the Americans, about following a chain of Lau's students to the Americans. The children are hiding. You will never find them. But if we can't find the children, then we must go to the other end of the chain and work backwards. Find the Americans, and trace back their link to the children. Cut off the trail that Bao is following. It's what we have to do. And then," she added with a determined glint, "then we get you back in time to cross to Nepal."
Suddenly a figure appeared in the doorway, a thin young woman in the grey uniform of a knob. They froze, all except Lokesh, who stood and rang the dorje bell, the bell that drove away demons. He rang it loudly, repeatedly, stepping forward while extending the bell toward her, and with each of his steps the woman retreated, until finally she turned and bolted down the hall. Jakli grabbed Lokesh, who was laughing now, and they ran down the hall in the opposite direction.
Karachuk felt different this time, Shan thought. There was still the excitement, the feeling of entering a lost century, but there was also something else. Not fear, but close to fear. A sense of foreboding in the wind.
Jakli seemed to sense it too. She had maintained a brooding silence for much of the journey to the lost city and now paused warily as they passed out of the corridor of ruins and saw the domed building where Shan had met Marco. She looked at the sky, which was grey and unnaturally dark for mid afternoon, and frowned, then nodded toward a small spiral of dust, a tiny whirlwind that was scudding toward the wall behind them. "See one of those wind demons at night," she said, "when the moon is just right, and you'll be sure you've seen a ghost." She offered a half smile as she spoke, but it did little to ease the tension from her face.
Lokesh, standing in front of them, stared at the spinning zephyr. "When I was a boy," he said solemnly, "an old man told me that whirlwinds are one of the ten thousand forms that spirits may take. It is the way some souls move about. Inside, there is a brilliant seed of awareness." He studied the wind devil intently, as though trying to recognize something within it. "They can appear suddenly, like a thought, and then just-" Lokesh shrugged as the spiral passed over the outcropping and was gone from view, "just pass us by."
Shan looked at the path of the wind devil. It seemed the story of everything that had happened since he had left his mountain in central Tibet. Awareness passing him by.
Through his strange mix of emotions, Lokesh had understood they had to move quickly. There was no doubt now that the killer was still at work, and the remaining zheli boys had to be found and protected. The Mao with the gold teeth had also understood, and as soon as they cleared the school, he had jogged away toward town. But Jakli was right. If Shan had less than two days, he had to focus on the Americans. If Bao was the killer, he was only interested in the zheli and the Jade Basket as a way of finding subversives. Ultimately his goal would be the illegal Americans and those who helped them. If so, that was where the answers lay, with the Americans.
The ruins were empty. They walked stealthfully, like thieves, wary of the slightest sound and movement, sometimes starting from the occasional gasp of excitement from Lokesh as he gazed on the ruins. Jakli led Shan with short uncertain steps into Osman's inn. The stuffed chair and tables were still there, even the chess set, but all sign of recent use had been removed. Sand had been thrown on the tabletops. A search party would know it had been inhabited more recently than the remainder of the city, but would not know if it had been last week or ten years before.
No one had reclaimed Karachuk since the hurried exodus only forty-eight hours before. "Wasted. We wasted the trip," Jakli said in frustration as they stepped outside. "No one's-" She stopped as Shan pulled her arm and pointed to the corral, where Lokesh stood near the fence. He was holding a dark brown lump in his palm, wearing a victorious grin. "It's fresh," he called out, putting the lump under his nose. "Today!" It was camel dung.
As they hurried toward the corral Lokesh cocked his head toward the rocks at the back of the corral. "This place," he said with the same enthusiasm, "it is wonderfully full of spirits!" It took a moment before Shan could discern the object of his friend's attention, in the shadows near the top of the rock. A large grey creature, watching them intently.
"Not a spirit," Jakli said with new energy in her voice. "Osman's dog." She eagerly scanned the rocks. "Osman didn't go. He's the protector of Karachuk."
They found the dog's master in the temple, lying on a pallet below the rough-hewn altar. Only two candles lit the large room. The big dog, having greeted Jakli by burying his muzzle in her hands, had followed them into the chamber, then stepped in front of them and pushed Osman with his nose.
"All right, all right," Osman mumbled to the creature and sat up. As his eyes cleared he made a sudden motion toward something lying at his side, then relaxed as he recognized his visitors.
"Sorry to disturb your dreams," Shan said.
"Not sleeping, exactly," Osman said gruffly. "Listening." He spoke quietly into his dog's ear, and the animal trotted away, down the tunnel. Back to its post.
"Listening?" Shan asked.
Osman nodded and gazed down the dimly lit corridor. "For the wind. For helicopters. For spirits." He was in a dark mood. He seemed to be waiting for something evil to arrive.
"Any sign of Nikki?" Jakli asked softly.
"Of course not, girl," Osman grunted, rubbing his hand over his face. "He's too smart to come out of the mountains now. Probably go straight to the horse festival," the Kazakh added, casting a small, expectant grin toward Jakli.
Lokesh stepped to the altar and lit one of the butter lamps with a candle, then gestured for Shan to do likewise, paying homage to Buddha. As Shan stepped over Osman's pallet a glint of light caught his eye. On the floor, beside the pallet, was a long chopping knife, nearly as big as a sword.
"Too early to come back," Osman growled. He spoke to Jakli, but his eyes were fixed suspiciously on Shan. "The knobs could still come."
"We're not staying," Jakli replied. "We came to learn the way to the American. Deacon. He went into the desert. Which oasis?"
"No oasis."
"He has to be at an oasis," she said impatiently. "We must find him, Osman. There is no time to argue."
Shan looked about the room, which was growing increasingly brighter as Lokesh lit more lamps. The statue of Buddha had been covered again with the canvas. There were wooden crates stuffed with liquor bottles, a basket full of glassware, and in the farthest shadows something else. Cardboard cartons. Shan took three steps toward them before Osman warned him off with a raised palm. "Too much curiosity can be a dangerous thing," the grizzled Kazakh said.
But Shan had seen enough to recognize the cartons. He had seen identical cartons before, the new cartons of electronic goods from Glory Camp. In the hut with the dead American. On top of the cartons was a small, high-powered portable radio transmitter.
"Go back," Osman said. "Wait a few days. Deacon will return here."
"There may be no time to wait," Jakli said, her voice rising. "The Americans may be in danger."
"No one will welcome you, even if you find it. And if you don't find it, the desert will eat you. Nikki, he would kill me many times over if I sent you out there and something happened."
"Which is why you must give us very good directions," Jakli said, folding her arms with a determined stare.
Muttering under his breath, Osman produced a bottle of vodka from his pallet. As he reached for glasses, he studied his visitors again, then returned the vodka and pulled out a bottle of water. He filled a glass for each of them and motioned for everyone to sit on the floor. "You go due east ten miles, with your shadow always in front of you, then exactly northeast, through the Well of Tears, between the two walls. Then three miles due north. Sand Mountain, it is called," he began, drawing with his finger in the sand on the floor, describing the landmarks they would see. It was the old way, Shan realized, the way of the herders, imparting information orally, before everyone, so together all the details would be remembered. "If you had horses I'd say don't go today. Bad day on the desert, maybe. Smells wrong. With a truck, maybe, I don't know. Not the best sand for a truck." He shrugged and shook his head. "No. Wait here tonight. Tomorrow will be better."
Jakli exchanged a glance with Shan. Before they had left Yoktian she had arranged for a Mao truck to meet him on the road outside of town by evening of the next day, to begin his journey to Nepal. It was all they could hope for, she had said on the drive to Karachuk, to protect the boys and shield the endangered Americans. Then Shan could go on to his new life. Osman looked up at the glint in Jakli's eyes and sighed, then retrieved an old compass from one of his baskets. "Make it in less two hours," the Kazakh said as he handed Shan the compass. "Go like hell. There is no place of safety on the way."
Osman's ominous tone made no sense until forty minutes later, as the rugged little truck lurched across the sands. Then, as Jakli slowed to check first the compass, then her mirror to verify that she was navigating in a straight line, a small cry of distress escaped her throat. Shan followed her gaze toward the northwest. A tiny piece of the sky was missing. On the horizon, framed by dark clouds on either end, a green-black hole seemed to hover above the desert.
Jakli pushed the accelerator. "A storm," she said with alarm. "That color. It is the seed of a death storm. A karaburan."
"But it is too far away," Shan said. "It could blow in any direction. No need to-" He stopped as he saw the grim set of Jakli's eyes and silently accepted the compass as she put both hands on the steering wheel.
Minutes later Lokesh began chanting. But it wasn't a prayer, Shan realized after a moment. He was chanting the directions to the Sand Mountain. There was a long, treacherous gully, the Well of Tears, down which they would drive, then it was a sprint of three miles north until they reached the Claws. "How will we recognize the Well?" Shan had asked. Osman had only laughed, as though it were a foolish question.
"It's just a storm," Shan said, without conviction. He had never seen a sky like the one in the north. It didn't simply look like a hole in the horizon now. It looked like a huge mouth, and the mouth was clearly getting closer, like a predator that had somehow sensed their presence.
"It's why he said to hurry," Jakli said. "Osman has the old desert senses. He smelled something in the air." She gripped the wheel with white knuckles. Her foot held the accelerator to the floor. The rear axle fishtailed when it hit patches of soft sand. They crested a small dune and the front wheels left the sand, spinning in the air before dropping into the desert with a sickening digging sound as they landed. The sturdy little truck hesitated, then lurched forward again. At such a speed, they could land the wrong way and roll the vehicle. And an immobile truck in a sandstorm would be like a boat on a beach as a typhoon approached. Before long it would simply be engulfed.
"The Well!" Lokesh called out from the back, and his hand shot between Jakli and Shan to point to a long low ridge in front of them that seemed to have split apart at the center. "Straight northeast, into the Well of Tears," he recited in a singsong fashion. "Out of the Well, three miles north like an arrow," he continued, repeating the words exactly as Osman had last spoken them.
The Well was a gully between two walls of rock and gravel, and as they neared it the pathway grew more stable. Their wheels did not slip as much. But the walls seemed to go on endlessly, as far as the horizon. Had Osman said how far? No, just all the way through.
"Maybe the storm will go west of us," Shan offered.
"Maybe," Jakli said, but there was no sign of hope in her voice. The color had been slowly draining from her face.
"This canyon," Shan said as they entered the walls, "surely it will protect us."
"The storm comes from the northwest," Jakli said, her voice rising. "It builds its force below the western mountains, then grows as it eats the heat of the desert. Bigger and faster. A caravan in such a place might escape if the wind is right. If the wind is wrong, the wave of sand breaks over them. Or the canyon can act like a funnel, like a narrow bay in a storm that suddenly surges with a wall of water. They can be buried twenty feet under in minutes."
From inside the walls they could no longer see the storm. But there was something else. Shan opened his window an inch. There was a low steady groan, above which were cries and moans in many voices.
"Ai yi!" Lokesh cried out. "The misery!"
Certainly it could only be the rising wind playing on the strangely formed fingers and crevasses of sandstone that topped the walls, but the sounds seemed so human that a chill crept down Shan's spine. The Well of Tears.
"They come here," Jakli said, leaning forward in her seat as though she could make the truck move faster by sheer force of her will. "The souls lost in the desert for all the ages. The weak ones, the young ones, who have no direction, no strength to guide themselves to the next life. They gather here, pushed by the wind, trapped forever."
A strange, haunting feeling gripped Shan as he looked at Jakli. "You mean, the old legends say that," he said. Or had he just thought it? His tongue felt strangely thick, his mouth so dry he couldn't move his lips. Jakli wasn't sure they were just legends. Lokesh, sitting at the edge of his seat, his face nearly pressing against the glass, seemed to have no doubt. He knew they were not legends.
"Do you feel it?" the old Tibetan moaned, in a voice Shan had never heard from Lokesh, a voice of agony. Lokesh began doing his beads with one hand, his other hand pressing against the glass as though to reach out to the lost souls. His chant had changed now, and his mantra grew in volume. He wanted the Compassionate Buddha to hear above the din, to come and rescue all the stranded souls, those lost in the past and those about to be lost in the present.
Jakli was no longer able to hide her fear. Her hands began to tremble. A thin sheet of sand began blowing over the gully, creating an eerie, shifting ceiling ten feet above the truck. She pressed on. "Get it ready!" she cried above the rising sound of the wind.
Shan looked at her in confusion, then saw that his hands seemed to have understood her on their own. They held the compass close to the dashboard. The desperate travelers would have only one chance, one sprint across the desert to the Sand Mountain, a place they had never seen, a place they might not even recognize, a place that might even be buried by the storm by the time they approached it.
Would the compass work in the storm? he wondered. Would the rock walls interfere with it? Would the lost souls, eager for company, misdirect the needle?
The needle swung wildly back and forth until he realized it was because his hands were shaking. He clenched the instrument tightly and the needle began to stabilize.
Suddenly the sand sheet overhead dropped almost to the roof of the truck, then the walls disappeared. The truck shuddered as a blast of wind hit it, and Jakli struggled to align the wheel with Shan's arm, which he threw out in the direction of the needle. He glanced at the odometer. Three miles was all they had to cover. Three miles to outrun the storm and avoid death.
Jakli's head began to turn toward the storm.
"No!" Shan shouted. "Don't look at it!" He did not want her to see what he himself saw now, did not want her feeling the terror that now gripped him as he stared at the maelstrom. The storm covered the entire western sky, and the giant black-green mouth was open, moving directly at them. No, he saw, it wasn't that the storm covered the sky, for everything, above and below them, seemed the same disturbing color. There was no longer a sky, no longer a ground. The whole world was turning into a chaos of churning sand. This was the way it would feel, something said in the back of his mind, to face a tidal wave on a tiny island in the middle of the sea.
Lokesh shouted his mantra louder than ever, as though warning the storm away.
"Two more miles!" Shan shouted, glancing at the odometer. His arm ached with the tension as he continued to point with the needle. A tear rolled down Jakli's cheek. A mile and a half. Maybe they could do this, maybe they could beat the monster. A mile and a quarter.
Then Jakli was sobbing and Shan realized the truck wasn't moving. The wind gave the impression of movement, but the big wheels of the truck had bogged in the newly churned sand and were spinning uselessly, the odometer still turning. Then the engine coughed and died.
With the mechanical noises gone, there was only the howl of the wind. The truck rocked, like a small boat in high seas. Jakli stared outside a moment, then turned to him with a strange calmness. "That little pad," she said in a tiny voice. "May I borrow it?"
He handed her his pad and pencil, and she quickly wrote something, tore out the page, then folded it into the tattered envelope he had seen her with at Glory Camp, then put them inside her shirt, against her skin.
Shan could not see what she had written, did not want to see. But when she handed the pad back with a sad smile, she had pressed so hard that the indentations on the page below were clear. "Don't stay, Nikki. I'll be with you in the beautiful country. I love you forever," it said in English, and Shan was shamed to have seen it.
"We could run," he said. Somehow he remembered that she had warned him. The Taklamakan. It meant, once you go in, you never come out.
Lokesh's mantra had grown softer now.
"A lot of good people are out here," Jakli said in a hollow voice, still wearing her small smile. "Warrior monks. Merchants from the Silk Road. Pilgrims. I never thought…" Her voice drifted away, and she settled back into her seat, watching a small stream of sand particles that had begun to blow in through a crack in the rubber that sealed the windshield. She began singing a song in Tibetan. Shan had heard it before, a very old song called a spirit wedding song. It was for loved ones separated by death.
A distant feeling seemed to settle over him as he looked toward the maw of the storm, as if he were somewhere else, just watching. He opened the pad to an empty page in the back. Spilled ink in the sky, he saw himself write. Coming to drown me.
He watched his hand take the slip of paper and put it in his pocket. Then he, Shan, was back. "No!" he shouted to the storm, putting aside the part of him that was ready to die. He was not going to spend eternity in the Well of Tears. His door was in the lee of the wind. He tied the string of his bag to his arm, then opened the door and stepped out. The sand was nearly over the wheel wells now. He tried to read the compass but could not hold it steady, so decided to walk in the general direction the truck was facing. The wind beat him back after two steps. It clawed at his face, the sand stinging like hornets. There were storms, he had heard, in which the sand blew so hard that it etched the skin and flesh from the faces of living men. He remembered the statues at Karachuk. Maybe he would end like that, gnawed to ruin by wind and sand, a mere suggestion of a human.
Something was forcing its way into his mouth and nose. It was gritty and tasted of salt. He realized, from a strange distance, as though he were watching someone else, that he had fallen. He lifted his hand to his head, which was against the bumper of the truck and throbbed with pain, and his hand came away wet and red. Then he discovered with mild surprise that his legs were gone. No, not gone, he decided, just buried in the wave of sand that was rapidly moving up the body of the truck. Half a grave. Is there such a thing as half a grave? he considered dully. A sound like the croak of a dying frog escaped his throat, then he shook his head violently. "No!" he shouted. "Gendun!"
He dragged himself along the truck until he found the door and with great effort pulled it open far enough to slip inside.
Lokesh was singing with Jakli now, not a mantra, but the spirit wedding song, and Shan lay in his seat, gasping for air, listening. Then the others grew strangely silent.
"The old ones," Lokesh said in a whisper not of fear, but of awe. "They are coming for us, to take us to the Well." He started singing again, his voice calmer.
The rubber sealing began to crumble, eaten by the wind, and sand began churning through the truck. But Shan no longer heard the wind. There was a chorus of soft voices and he recognized each one of them, the lamas who had saved his soul. He wasn't going to have a new life. He was reliving old lives. An image flashed through his mind like a dream. He was on the Silk Road, and he was losing the emperor's treasures. He smelled ginger. His father was close.
Then he heard a strange sound, like a laugh, from behind him. He blinked the sand from his eyes and saw an exuberant smile on Lokesh's face. "I had always hoped it would be like this," his old friend said, "to be able to see them when they came for me."
And indeed, out of the maw of the storm two phantoms appeared, shrouded in black, faceless, arms extended toward the truck to receive them. The old ones had come for their souls.
There were many kinds of hells, the old Tibetans taught, but the atmosphere in all was the deepest of black. The tiny dull hint of consciousness, all that remained of Shan, clung to that thought. There were many kinds of hells, as there were many kinds of sin, but the worst were the cold hells, and the one Shan had gone to was surely the coldest and the blackest. There was nothing, only the cold and the black, and the silence to let him agonize over all his failures. He had abandoned the children, who would now die. He had abandoned Gendun, who would be captured and devoured by the knobs. He had lost the waterkeeper, who would just fade away among the political priests who had captured him.
His agony ebbed and flowed with his consciousness. Whenever he was aware, he was aware of pain. And when he tried to conjure faces, they were always the faces of dead children.
Once something soft touched his head. His eyes fluttered open and saw a blurred flame, and for an instant he seemed to see a woman with wise green eyes leaning over him. Her face, lit by the flame, seemed to be made of fine porcelain. He knew her skin would squeak if he touched it. Then the light went out and he was back in his cold hell.
After some time- hours, days, years, he could not tell- the visions sometimes became beautiful, with faces of sacred figures, sometimes one of the many Buddhas he had met in Tibet, sometimes Lao Tzu, the sage of the Tao, who centuries earlier had himself disappeared into the western desert. Sometimes he seemed to be in a great warehouse of the Silk Road and heard the braying of camels and excited voices in many tongues calling out, then he was being condemned for losing the emperor's caravan and was being tied to a post for the death by a thousand slices.
Once in his visions a man with light skin sat before him with a brilliant lantern, reading from a large book in a rich, deep voice, and the words he read were in English.
"The tent," the voice said, "the tent in which the Great Khan holds court is grand enough to accomodate one thousand princes. Each hall of the tent is supported by columns of spicewood skillfully carved, and the outside is hung with lion skins. Inside the walls are all of ermine and sable…" The words were strange, yet familiar- as though he had heard them before, but in a different language, and in another lifetime.
What were the stages, he tried to recall, the stages of Bardo, when the spirit drifted until it saw the path to rebirth? Ignorance at first, clinging to the illusion that the body still lived, then realization that death has occurred- the Glimpsing Reality stage, the lamas called it, when uncertainty and hallucinations of the past lives might pull the dead back, delaying the final realization that there was no path possible but rebirth.
He fell back into the dark, silent hell, then smelled ginger in his hallucination. His father was walking in the shadows ahead of him, excited because they were going to watch the sun rise from an old Taoist temple. They met a kind old Englishman whom his father introduced as a professor of Chinese history, who joined their journey. Later his father stopped and asked if he were tired. He rubbed Shan's cheek with his hand. His hand was wet. It was rough. It smelled foul.
Shan opened his eyes and cried out. The tongue of a silver camel was licking his face. Then he sat up, awake in his old body, and the animal twisted its head and looked at him with an expression of disbelief. With a gasp of unexpected pleasure, Shan realized that somehow he knew the animal's name: Sophie.
A figure appeared at the entrance to his chamber, then stopped and ran away, calling out excitedly.
A moment later Jakli ran in, Lokesh two steps behind her. His old friend knelt and clasped his frail hand over Shan's own, a huge smile on his face. Jakli held a large dipper to Shan's lips and insisted he drink again and again.
"How?" he asked, and found his throat was rough and gravelly, unprepared for speech.
Both his friends explained at once, and gradually he understood that it had not been the old ones they had seen but Marco and Deacon, wrapped in heavy felt blankets, tied to Sophie, who lay like an anchor on top of the nearest dune. It was an old trick of the desert clans. The anchor had to stay on top, where the wind hurt the most, because below, out of the strongest wind, was where the sand filled, where everything was buried. Marco and the American had pulled them inside the shelter of their blankets, then followed their ropes to Sophie, where they had waited for three hours, using Sophie as their windbreak, all five rolled in the blankets like a giant cocoon. When the howl of the wind had stopped, they had looked out to find themselves on a flat expanse of sand, the nearest dune a quarter mile away. The truck had vanished.
"Thank your god," Marco said, "that it was only a little one, just a small storm."
Jakli poured water on a cloth and wiped Shan's head. "You hit your skull on the truck," she explained. "A concussion, against the bumper."
"How long?" he asked in confusion.
She sighed and shook her head. "Almost two days. I'm so sorry," she said with pain in her eyes.
He wondered about her apology a moment, then realized she meant it was a day too late. He gazed at her dumbly, his mouth open. He would not be going to Nepal and a new life, he would not meet the old professor after all. "And this place?" he finally asked.
"Sand Mountain. Marco was already here. Osman called him on the radio and said to watch for us because of the storm."
"The radio?" Shan croaked. His throat still felt parched despite all the water.
But no one seemed to hear. They were looking up at the entrance to the chamber, where Marco stood with a lean sandy-haired man. Jacob Deacon.
"Is the great investigator ready to talk?" the Eluosi barked out from thirty feet away.
"He's too tired," Jakli protested.
"It's all right," Shan said and extended his hand to Lokesh. But as he started to rise dizziness overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees.
Marco walked to his pallet and stood over him, stroking Sophie's neck.
"A few more hours' rest," Jakli said. "This afternoon."
Marco nodded reluctantly. "If Sophie and Jakli say wait, I wait. But a few more hours only." He moved back into the shadows.
"This afternoon?" Shan asked. "But it is night."
"This is a cavern," Jakli explained. "A water station. A monastery even, long ago."
"A water station?"
"The aqueducts under the sand. The karez- they brought water from the mountains when there were still huge ice fields. The textbooks from Beijing say that engineers from Nanjing and Sian built them but the old stories and the walls say otherwise. Men from Persia came to build them during your Tang dynasty, in exchange for the precious stones and fruit from our land. The walls have paintings of them."
A thick, worn book lay beside his pallet. "Someone was reading to me," he said. He picked it up. The Travels of Marco Polo, in English.
"I was," Deacon said. "Warp's idea, she says it helps bring an injured brain back."
"Warp?"
Jakli put a finger to his lips. "There will be time later for explanations." She handed him the ladle again.
Shan drank. His thirst seemed unslakable. "The water still flows from the mountains?"
"A trickle, enough to keep Sand Mountain alive."
"But it must have been a thousand years."
Jakli nodded and pushed him gently back down on his pallet. "Now sleep again. We will be near."
But when he awoke the chamber was empty. Carefully, wary of summoning the pain that came with sudden movement, he picked up the clay lamp by his pallet and began to explore.
The chamber was roughly forty feet on each side. Two of the walls had been plastered and held life-sized paintings of stern men with blue eyes and long reddish hair and beards that were squared at the bottom. Their faces somehow reminded him of the woman in the poster, Niya. They were offering gifts to other figures who stood in front of horses, scores of tiny horses painted out of scale. Down the tunnel that led out of the room he saw half a dozen meditation cells. He looked in one and stepped back quickly. Two figures lay asleep under blankets of rough sacking.
The tunnel parted. To the right he saw lights and heard several voices. He stepped to the left and soon emerged into another large chamber. Sophie stood there with two other camels. On the sand floor beyond was a bright patch, reflected from a passage at the end of the chamber. Sophie greeted him with a soft wickering sound, and he rubbed her neck a moment, then followed the curving passage for twenty feet and emerged into brilliant sunlight.
Shielding his eyes, he stepped into the desert. The sky was a brilliant cobalt, devoid of clouds. He quickly discovered that the Sand Mountain was a long outcropping of sandstone, much bigger than the one that held the temple at Karachuk, perhaps two hundred feet high and over half a mile long. There was a ruin near the top, an old sentinel tower of cut stone. He walked halfway up the path that led to the tower and sat on a rock, then stretched and filled his lungs. The air was pure and clear, with no scent of the death it had carried two days earlier. In the far south a long line of white hovered on the horizon. Not a cloud, he knew, but the high Kunlun, where Gendun sat inside the mountain, waiting.
Two days, he thought. In two days the killer could have found another boy.
When he went back inside, through the small fissure hidden in shadow, Jakli was sitting at the entrance, bent over a wooden bowl, rubbing something with a brush of brass wire. She did not notice him until he knelt beside her.
"I'm sorry," she said, lowering the brush. "I should have taken you back to Senge Drak. You had a new life to go to. It is my fault."
"I think in that storm," Shan said after a moment, looking out the opening toward the desert, "in those moments when the blackness overtook us, I think I gave up that life."
She looked up and nodded solemnly, as if she perfectly understood, as if it had been the bargain Shan had made with the deities of the desert, the price he had paid to keep them all alive.
He gestured toward the bowl and she gave a sigh of exasperation, then rubbed the object in her hand with an oily cloth and held it up for Shan's inspection. "Virtue medallions," she said. "Deacon uncovered them by one of the altars."
Shan saw that there were perhaps a dozen pieces in the bowl, some caked with dirt, others already cleaned and shining brightly in the light. Jakli held the one she was working on in her open palm. It was a two-inch trapezoid made of bronze, slightly curved at the ends, which were punctured with small holes and inscribed with intricate ideograms.
"For the warrior monks," she explained. "We found references in some of the old books. Today, soldiers receive awards for valor. But valor was taken for granted in the old armies, in the monk ranks. It was virtue that was sought. Maybe a soldier made an act of sacrifice for his parents. Maybe he dedicated his life to the perfection of his archery. Maybe he spent all his off-duty hours writing the nine million names of Buddha, or performed great feats for the cause of truth. He would be rewarded with a medallion from his general."
"They must be centuries old," Shan said in an awed tone.
"From the Tibetan garrisons that were here. Eleven, maybe twelve centuries ago."
"They belong in a museum."
The words brought a strangely emotional reaction. Jakli clenched her hand around the medallion. "Not with the communists," she said in a fierce tone, then calmed. "Virtue shouldn't be locked in museum."
"No," Shan said, not certain what he meant. He knelt and reached into the bowl, picking up two of the restored medallions. Half of those in the bowl, all the clean ones, were tied in pairs with waxed string. Each pair matched. In his hand was a pair of two rectangles, inscribed with lotus flowers running across their faces. There was a round set, with an eagle's face, and another pair with a running horse.
"Auntie Lau," Jakli said. "She once told me that such treasures belong to no one, that they are entrusted from time to time to an honored few, then passed on like a force of nature."
Shan remembered that Lokesh had used similar words, about virtue. "But where do such things go?" he asked, reaching into his pocket to touch the medallion there, realizing now that Lau had possessed one of the ancient tokens. He began to pull it out, to show Jakli.
"The people of the desert are the ones to decide how to share the secrets of the desert," a woman's voice said at the edge of the shadows, speaking in English.
Shan dropped Lau's medallion back into his pocket and pulled out his hand.
"Warp!" Jakli exclaimed as a woman with long black hair tied in a single braid at the back emerged into the light. She wore heavy black-framed spectacles and was older than Jakli, and shorter, so small-boned that she seemed lost in the oversized green smock she wore. It was the kind of smock doctors wore, or laboratory workers.
"And the dead will walk again," the woman said, with a narrow smile toward Shan. She extended her hand as Shan rose. "We were very worried about you," she said, now speaking in fluent Mandarin. "Abigail Deacon."
"Professor of Cultural Anthropology," he said in English. Her grip was firm, and as she squeezed his hand the woman stared intensely at him. Her skin was olive-colored, and her eyes, though brilliant blue, had an almond shape, the hint of an Asian heritage.
"Shan Tao Yun," the American woman shot back. "Formerly of the Chinese government."
Shan nodded slowly, with a quick glance at Jakli. "Good," he said. "There is no time for anything but the truth."
"Is he always so serious?" Abigail Deacon asked Jakli with raised eyebrows.
Jakli smiled at Shan, who stood uncomfortably between the two women. "Sophie licks his face," Jakli offered in reply.
The American nodded thoughtfully, as though acknowledging the point, then wiped her spectacles on her smock and studied Shan carefully. "Jakli said you lost a chance at a new life, by coming to warn us."
Shan shrugged. "All I know for sure is, I gave up a hard week's ride in the back of a truck."
The American woman smiled. "The least we can do is invite you to dinner," she said, then turned and stepped back into the shadows.
"In his hut at Karachuk," Shan recalled after a moment. "Deacon was studying old cloth. Is that what his wife is doing here?" He didn't ask Jakli the rest of the question. What had Deacon been doing with a human leg?
Jakli nodded as she scrubbed another medallion. "Abigail is an expert. She sees things in cloth no one else can see."
"Why here? Why so much secrecy?"
"Here is where the cloth is. In the desert. In the ruins. It doesn't travel easily. So it's better to study it here."
"But there are museums of antiquities. In Lhasa. In Urumqi."
"What she does is special," Jakli said enigmatically.
"You mean political," Shan said in puzzlement. The Americans clearly were in China without permission. Surely they hadn't put themselves at risk of capture by a man like Bao over pieces of cloth.
Jakli kept cleaning a medallion without reply.
"What could be political about cloth?" he pressed.
Jakli frowned without looking up.
"I was sent on a path leading from the murders. The only way I can get to the end of it is by understanding everything I encounter on the way."
She cast a peevish frown his way, then covered the bowl with an old towel and stood with the bowl balanced against her hip. She led him down the tunnel, past the corridor to the room where he had slept. They pushed aside a heavy felt blanket that had been hung in the corridor, then a second, lighter cloth that was tacky to the touch, as though designed to catch dust and flying insects. They entered a well-lit room that seemed half laboratory and half library. Eight tables, made of planks on trestles, were arranged in two rows. One, against the wall, had a series of smaller trestles and planks that had been stacked to form shelves for dozens of books. Two tables held binocular microscopes, like the one Jacob Deacon had used at Karachuk, with a sophisticated camera beside one. Scattered about were large clear plastic envelopes holding bits of cloth. A balding man, with several days' growth of whiskers, was bent over one of the microscopes, manipulating a piece of cloth with two metallic probes. Abigail Deacon sat at a computer console surrounded by pieces of cloth in long transparent envelopes. Incandescent bulbs hung from wires strung across the ceiling. Shan followed the wires to a bank of batteries, larger but otherwise identical to the solar power system he had seen at Karachuk.
The older man's head jerked up. He muttered a syllable of alarm and Abigail Deacon turned. Her frown was not one of anger, only irritation at being interrupted. She turned for a moment to make several strokes on her keyboard, then removed the computer disc and inserted it into a plastic case. Shan counted a dozen similar cases on the table, all with discs inside. She spoke to the older man in the Turkic tongue, then turned to Shan.
"My husband said you would have questions. Lots of questions," the American woman sighed. She rubbed her eyes a moment, then motioned to a large thermos, from which she poured tea into three mugs, setting two on the table by the second microscope. "Sorry," she said. "Chairs are in short supply. We don't bring many nonessential goods this far. Take mine," she said with a gesture toward the stool at the computer console.
Shan shook his head. "You speak both Mandarin and the tongue of the clans," he observed, question in his tone.
The American woman nodded. "My grandmother was a Kazakh. Married an American archaeologist when he was here exploring the Silk Road early in the last century. Kept the languages alive in our family."
Shan's eyes fixed on the nearest envelope of fabric, a strip of vivid and jagged red, yellow, brown, and blue lines, like lightning bolts. It was frayed at the edges and had several small holes, but the colors were vibrant and the cloth looked strong. "You find cloth, Mrs. Deacon," he said uncertainly. "You make records about types of cloth."
"Warp," the woman said. She smiled when she saw Shan's confusion. "My husband is Deacon. I'm not Mrs. Deacon. Or Dr. Deacon. And not Abigail. Just Warp, like on a loom. Nickname from college." She made an up-and-down, swimming sort of motion with her hand, and Shan understood it to mean the motion of thread being woven through a loom.
"Warp," Shan said slowly, and the American smiled.
"Before we began paying attention to the Taklamakan," the American began, "there was only one place on the planet that gave us worthwhile samples of ancient textiles: Egypt. Always a problem for archaeologists, because it means a huge gap in understanding ancient cultures. Textiles played such an important role in life. Always a major industry. Typically textile production consumed more labor in ancient society than production of food, and always it reflected religion and culture. In Egypt we can use textiles to place a person's social status, his job, sometimes even his or her personal hygiene."
"But in Egypt," Shan said, "the fabric must be two, three thousand years old." He looked back at the sample. "This looks much more recent." As his gaze drifted across the laboratory, it paused on the top shelf of books. One end had been cleared away to make room for half a dozen cricket cages. He recognized them- Deacon's treasured cages from Karachuk. On another shelf were stacks of the wedge-shaped wooden tablets.
"We date with radiocarbon, using wooden artifacts found with the samples. Hairpins, utensils. Wooden jewelry. Wooden letters, sometimes," she said, nodding toward the stacked tablets. The American woman pointed toward the textile sample in the envelope by Shan. "That's about a thousand to twelve hundred."
"Sung dynasty," Shan said, wonder in his voice.
The American shook her head. "One thousand B.C. Your Shang dynasty."
Shan looked up in disbelief.
"The sands. The dryness. Exactly like in Egypt," she explained. She pushed another piece of fabric toward Shan, showing him its subtle design of sheep in several colors. The border of a robe, she explained.
"But this should be celebrated," Shan said. "I've never heard-" He broke off in confusion at the sad glance exchanged between Jakli and the American.
"These textiles and the others we have, they span over two thousand years," the American continued. "They share nothing with the lands east of here. Many designs coincide with Persia, even Macedonia. And this-" Warp pointed to a plaid with blue, yellow, and brown. "This twill is a direct match to shreds preserved in salt mines in what is now Austria, made by ancestors of the Celts."
"Dr. Najan," she said, nodding to the balding man at the microscope, "is retired from the museum in Urumqi. He has deconstructed the weaving of several pieces and can tell you exactly how the looms were built to produce such weaving. They were primitive looms of a kind still used today in Turkey and Afghanistan." There was a glimmer of challenge in the American's eyes now. "The evidence is irrefutable. When we publish we'll have enough to fill five volumes."
The People's Republic, Shan knew, was itself the oddest of fabrics, a patchwork of peoples and cultures and histories woven together and compelled to stay together by force and doctrine. History books were crafted in Party workshops to validate that patchwork, and the annexation of the vast lands of Xinjiang and Tibet had been politically justified by pronouncements that the native peoples had always been part of the Chinese people. Every few months headlines proclaimed more Party-sponsored research that proved the common roots of the Chinese and the Tibetans, or the Chinese and the nomads of Xinjiang. A favorite of Party bosses was a permanent Chinese chromosome project designed to prove scientifically that Tibetans and the other minorities all descended from Han Chinese stock. Shan knew about such studies, had even known some of the scientists involved in Beijing, for the same scientists sometimes worked on forensic teams. First came the doctrine, and the science was designed to accomodate the doctrine. It was not unlike his own work in Beijing, where in every investigation he had been assigned a political mentor and where it was even possible for investigators who defied doctrine to be accused of the crimes they were investigating.
Abigail Deacon seemed to be reading his mind, "Party scientists have announced with great fanfare that Tibetans and Han Chinese share 99.9 percent of the same DNA material," she said with a sour smile. "Likewise Kazakhs or Uighurs with the Han. What they don't tell anyone is that Han Chinese and Nigerians, or Amazon Indians, or Scottish Highlanders also share 99.9 percent of the same DNA. Because we all happen to be the same species."
Shan looked silently from Abigail Deacon to Jakli, to Dr. Najan, who was now looking at him with a defiant stare, then raised his teacup in salute. The painstaking research was for their science. The secrecy was for the independence movement.
"The woman," he said, remembering the square in Yoktian, "the woman on the posters. Niya."
"Niya Gazuli?" Jakli asked. "It means the Beauty of Niya, from the ruins of ancient Niya where she was found. In the desert, less than two hundred miles from here. They found her mummified remains after a storm uncovered a burial site. Dr. Najan was on the recovery team. She's at least twenty-five hundred years old. Red hair. A robe decorated with figures of horses and birds. And not a drop of Chinese blood in her. She's become a symbol, a rallying cry. Posters. Songs. Mother Niya, who taught us that the government lied. The government seized the research after word leaked out," she said with a meaningful glance at Dr. Najan. "Since then-" She shrugged.
"We know of at least one instance," Najan continued the story, "where the government confiscated mummies and destroyed them. They control research much more tightly now. Foreign involvement is suspect. Some scientists from Kazakhstan and Europe gave speeches and were condemned by Beijing as subversive agents, trying to meddle in the internal affairs of China." Bao had a term for such scientists, Shan recalled. The insects he intended to crush.
"But Beijing has no right to these treasures," the American interjected. "No one owns knowledge. It doesn't belong to Americans or Europeans or Chinese. We take small samples and return the specimens to the desert, to places only Kazakhs and Uighurs know."
"Are there others in Xinjiang?" Shan asked, remembering the steel ring in his pocket, where he had kept it since the night at Glory Camp. "Other American scientists?"
The American woman tightened her brow, as if uncertain how to reply. "Probably. We hear rumors of others. A German graduate student was discovered conducting an unauthorized excavation with Uighur students a few years ago. He disappeared, never heard of again, here or in Germany. Now everything is secret, compartmentalized for security. We only know about our project," she said.
Shan looked back around the lab, then at the two scientists, staggered by the size of the effort and the size of the risk. Bao had a scent. The Americans wouldn't be deported if found. They were illegals, invisible to officialdom. Bao would know that the best solution would be to make them disappear. Like another American who had been captured by the knobs and brought to Glory Camp.
Did they truly understand the danger? he wondered. With a chill he remembered that special knobs from headquarters were in the county. They didn't come for dead boys or a missing teacher. They had come for foreign subversives. They could arrive by helicopter at any time- the next hour, the next minute. He surveyed the resolute scientists as they returned to their work. Jakli understood. Surely Najan understood. If the knobs landed in airships they would have incendiary bombs, special bombs that could suck all the oxygen out of a place like this. They might take the trouble to march through and shoot each of them in the head. Or they might just seal the cavern up and let them all die more slowly. The knobs would have many options if they discovered Sand Mountain, but none would include taking prisoners.
"Your son," Shan suddenly remembered. "Your son is here," he said, instantly regretting the alarm in his voice.
Abigail Deacon searched his eyes for a moment. "What about him?" she asked.
"Is he here, at Sand Mountain?"
The American looked at Jakli. "He's safe. Not here, in the Kunlun."
"What do you mean?" Shan asked.
"With some herders. Lau arranged it, as if he were another of her orphans. One of the border families, a shadow clan, Lau called them. She said it was the safest place he could be."
"The zheli?" Jakli gasped. "Your son is with the zheli?"
Abigail Deacon didn't know, Shan realized with a chill as the woman looked at them in confusion. She had sent her son to safety in the mountains. But now the American boy was on the zheli death list.