The rising sun washed the peaks in a blush of gold and pink as they rode down the rough northern slope of the Kunlun mountains. The light seemed to revive Lokesh, and he broke into one of his traveling songs, praising the deities who preserved mountains. Akzu and Jowa rode ahead, out of earshot, speaking in the same urgent tones they had used in the yurt with Fat Mao the day before. Every few minutes Jowa stood in his stirrups, looking ahead as if searching for something. Fat Mao, perhaps. The Uighur had been gone when they awoke.
Suddenly Akzu raised his hand in warning. As they stopped, the sound of hoofbeats came from higher on the slope, from a trail that ran along the crest of the ridge above them. A small rider appeared on a loping grey horse. Shan heard Akzu curse, then call out to the rider, who wheeled the horse to a halt fifty feet above them. It was Malik.
"The zheli have to be warned!" the youth called out to his uncle. "Khitai is still alive. The thing that is Bajys will come for him too, and maybe the others!"
Akzu cast a worried glance toward Jakli. "We need you, boy," he shouted in reply. "You don't know where to seek. This is not the time." Anger seemed to enter his voice as he spoke. "I am head of Red Stone clan. I tell you no."
The young Kazakh gazed out over the mountains for a moment. When he turned back toward his uncle Shan saw pain in his eyes. "And I tell you I am tired of digging graves," he called back, then kicked his horse into a sudden gallop.
Shan watched Akzu as the headman gazed toward the boy and saw his face shift from anger to fear and then pride. "Go with God, boy," the old man offered quietly, then muttered to his horse and continued down the trail at a fast trot.
Half an hour later, at the top of a ridge that descended sharply in a series of switchbacks, Jakli pointed to a ribbon of grey on the northern horizon. "The highway," she said, "four hundred miles west to Kashgar."
Shan leaned forward in his saddle and pointed toward a huge rock formation a quarter mile to the west. It stood like a massive sentinel, towering three hundred feet above the ridge. At its top, fastened to a long pole held fast with a cairn of rocks, was a large square of ragged red cloth, perhaps six feet to the side. It was a huge lungta, a Tibetan prayer flag. In front, Lokesh stopped singing and stared toward the cairn, his hands cupped around his eyes. As he recognized the flag he began to wave, first at Shan, then toward the flag.
Shan studied the towering rock. It seemed impossible to climb. But someone had done so, as if daring the Chinese to risk their own lives to take it down. Not just someone. A Buddhist. It was a border land. Many different peoples lived here, Jakli had said. But Tibetans, Malik had warned, were singled out by the prosecutor for special treatment. Border lands had people of mixed blood. Like Jakli herself, part Kazakh, part Tibetan. Mixed blood and perhaps mixed allegiances. Like Lau, perhaps- the mysterious woman with a Han name whose death had so stirred the lamas, the dead woman Jakli was taking him to visit.
"Lha gyal lo!" Lokesh called out in his loudest voice, causing Jowa to spin about with an angry glare. The old Tibetan ignored the purba. "Lha gyal lo!" he repeated. "May the gods be victorious!"
"Your friend," Jakli said, looking at Lokesh, who waved at the flag again. "Is he crazy? I'm sorry- is he touched from old age, perhaps?"
"Senile?" Shan smiled as he studied his old friend. "If senile is being unaware and lost and unable to connect things, then Lokesh is the opposite of senile. He has seen too much. All he wanted was to be a monk, a monk healer. But he so excelled at his lessons that his gompa sent him to work for the government. Then Beijing came and said he couldn't be a monk anymore. After a few months he got married, to a nun who had also been expelled. Two weeks later he was thrown into prison for being a government official."
"For thirty years," Jakli recalled.
Shan nodded. "Every visiting day his wife would come. Usually she wasn't allowed close enough to talk, so they would wave at each other, just wave for hours. And two days after he got home his wife died."
Jakli's eyes had grown moist as Shan spoke. She looked at Lokesh, then turned away, into the wind, and urged her horse forward.
They rode for another hour, descending constantly, until they reached the junction of several horse trails behind a long narrow structure at the head of a gravel road. The three-sided building was constructed of cinder blocks that had begun to crumble into dust. At one end the wall had partially collapsed, causing a sharp dip in the corrugated tin roof. To avoid total calamity, stout logs had been braced on sheets of plywood that pressed against the exterior walls. As they dismounted and walked around the end of the building, Shan saw half a dozen trucks in various states of disrepair, sitting in the shadows of the building. The garage and its motor pool was operated on Ministry of Agriculture subsidies, Akzu explained, for the small farming and herding enterprises in the region.
A small cubicle had been constructed of plywood in the rear corner of the building, at the end where the wall was intact. On a crude door cobbled together of wood and cardboard was a faded poster of a dozen young men and women representing some of the scores of ethnic groups that had been liberated by Beijing. Clad in the blue uniforms of the proletariat, they all joyfully raised wrenches and hammers toward the sky. Cultivate the Wealth of the Minorities, the caption read.
Past the door sat an emaciated short-haired dog and a short dark man with several days' growth of beard and stains of motor oil on his hands and arms. Reading a newspaper at a rusty metal desk, the man glanced up as Akzu appeared, offered a grunt of greeting and pointed to a board from which five nails extended, each holding a ring of keys.
"Leave quickly, uncle," Jakli said softly as she approached the door. "The clan needs you."
The man's head snapped up at the sound of her voice. He looked at Jakli with a frown, then back to Akzu. "Checkpoints," he muttered. "Four miles up the road to Yoktian, then out on the main highway, going west."
"Jakli is taking them-" Akzu began.
The man interrupted Akzu with an upraised hand. "Don't want to know where, old friend. Too many people asking too many questions these days. Just a mechanic, that's all I want to be." He picked up the paper, revealing an open ledger book underneath, then slammed the ledger shut and gazed at the board of keys.
"Take the turtle," he said, pointing to the last set of keys in the row. "We never officially acquired it, so it's not on the books. Don't have to record anything."
Akzu tossed Jakli the keys and pointed toward the last bay, which held a small sturdy truck that appeared to have been assembled from parts of other vehicles. It had wide tires, a short cargo bay constructed of rough cut lumber, an oversized gas tank that extended along the frame, and a long cab, so large it accommodated a narrow rear seat. The high, rounded lines of the cab did indeed resemble a turtle shell.
"Who?" Akzu asked the man.
The man frowned again. Too many questions, he had said. "Grey," he offered with a tone of resignation, and Shan realized Akzu meant, whose checkpoint? Grey was the color of the Public Security troops, the knobs. The army wore green. Traffic police wore blue. "But she's not there. Too busy elsewhere. Grabbed four yesterday. Three the day before, I hear, from town. Some teachers from the school. Motor pool. That's how I heard. They took a driver."
Jakli, who had just gestured for Shan to join her at the truck, stopped abruptly at the announcement. She stepped back toward the cubicle. "On what grounds?" Jakli asked in a raised voice. Shan had begun to under stand something about the spirited Kazakh woman. If Lokesh sometimes unexpectedly overflowed with sorrow, then Jakli was subject to attacks of defiance in a similarly unpredictable manner.
"On the grounds that she is the prosecutor," the man replied, but he looked at Akzu, as if he were not inclined to converse with Jakli. "It's about that woman, Lau, someone said. They're taken for questioning about her disappearance. You knew Lau. They could take you too."
"But she drowned," Akzu said, exchanging a worried glance with Jakli. "People say she drowned."
"So I heard. But no body was found. Anyway, must have been a slow time in town."
"What do you mean?" Shan asked.
The mechanic looked at him with the same reluctance he had shown with Jakli. "Army shoots someone, that's national defense. Public Security knobs shoot someone, that's for public security, by definition. We shoot one of them, that's assassination. Simple. Like inserting pegs on a board. They have forms all printed up. But this one, just an old Kazakh woman disappearing? A Kazakh or Uighur here or there, usually she doesn't care."
"But this time," Shan observed, "the Prosecutor is putting up checkpoints and picking up witnesses."
"Not witnesses," the mechanic shot back. "The actors in her latest production. The political gallery."
Shan studied the man. He suspected the man had not always been a mechanic. "The prosecutor is using it," he said, nodding his agreement.
The mechanic held up his hand again, as if signaling that he would hear no more of such dangerous talk. Akzu gently pushed Jakli out of the cubicle as the mechanic went back to his paper.
Moments later Jakli stood at the driver's door as Akzu showed her a map pulled from the visor of the truck and pointed to several dotted lines that wandered back and forth across the dark line that represented the Kashgar highway. "Go with speed, niece," the headman said. "Then back to town. You will be missed at the factory. You take too many risks. Remember Nikki. Remember your aunts."
Nikki. Shan remembered Malik, speaking of the present he was carving. There had been another name which the boy had been wary of speaking.
"Always," Jakli said with a shy smile that encompassed both Akzu and Shan. "Watch for Malik, Uncle," she added. "Watch for the children." She gave Akzu a quick embrace, then froze.
A bright red truck was skidding to a halt in the loose gravel in front of the garage. Shan recognized the gleaming vehicle as one of the four-wheel-drive trucks produced by an American joint venture in Beijing, a factory he had audited once in his prior incarnation. On the front door of the truck was a large insignia in gold, a representation of the head and shoulders of a man and a woman, their arms crossed over a rising sun, one hand holding a hammer, the other a wrench. Below the sun was an oil derrick, a tractor, and an animal that may have been a sheep. Shan realized he had seen it before, two nights earlier, on the truck that had stopped them in the Kunlun. The Brigade had arrived.
Akzu quickly stepped out of the garage, into the sunlight, in front of the red truck, as if to distract the new arrivals. As he did so a Han Chinese emerged from the rear seat, a man of perhaps thirty years, wearing a red nylon parka that bore a minature version of the same emblem on its breast and sunglasses under an American-style front brimmed hat. He rapped a knuckle on the window of the front passenger seat and pointed toward the cubicle in the shadows. The two men in the front emerged, the driver holding a clipboard, the other a small calculator, and stepped briskly toward the cubicle.
Shan felt a tug at his sleeve. Jakli was pulling him back, behind the turtle truck. He let himself be eased into the shadow as he watched a second figure climb out of the back seat, a tall, lean man with a thin face and high cheekbones, wearing a brown suitcoat, at least two sizes too small, over the blue pants of a factory worker. Shan glanced at Lokesh and saw from Lokesh's sudden interest that his old friend had also recognized the man's features. The tall man was unmistakably Tibetan.
"Akzu," the man in the cap said as the headman approached. "An unexpected pleasure!" His voice was as smooth and polished as his face. An eastern voice. A university-trained voice.
"Ko Yonghong," Jakli whispered to Shan. "District manager for the Brigade."
Akzu greeted the younger man affably but slowly stepped around the red truck, even as Ko put his hand on the Kazakh's shoulder. Akzu wanted him away from the garage, away from Jakli and her companions.
The wind caught Ko's parka as he walked and opened it. He was wearing a white shirt. Only then did Shan notice that the two men who had gone to the desk wore light brown shirts, clean shirts with collars and cuffs, like uniforms, like those he had seen on the high road in the Kunlun. He glanced into the windows of the red truck, as though hoping for a glimpse of Gendun, then studied the district manager carefully. Ko Yonghong. Ko Forever Red. It was a name favored by parents who were ambitious Party members. The man who was liquidating the Red Stone clan.
Suddenly, before Shan or Jakli could restrain him, Lokesh stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand toward the tall stranger.
"Tashi delek," Lokesh said in an affable voice. Hello, in Tibetan.
Though softly spoken, as if not to be overheard, the words stopped Ko Yonghong, twenty feet away. He spun about and stared at Lokesh with intense interest for a moment, then paused to light a cigarette with a gold lighter and grinned at Akzu, as if the herdsman had presented him with an unexpected gift.
"Ni zao. Ni hao ma?" the Tibetan replied with an awkward smile and a quick glance at Ko. Good morning. How are you? in Mandarin. "I am called Kaju. Kaju Drogme."
The announcement instantly brought Jakli out of the shadows. At the same moment Ko stepped to Kaju's side, still studying Lokesh. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then gazed slowly down the line of trucks in the garage, as if looking to see what other surprises lurked in the shadows.
He wasn't the man who had challenged them two nights before in the Kunlun, Shan knew, but he could have been the man in the seat, smoking in the dark. Why would the Brigade be inside Tibet, why would it be waiting on a deserted road in the middle of the night? What had they done to Gendun, he wanted to shout. But why, he wondered in the same instant, why had they not just taken all of them, Jowa and Lokesh too, if the Brigade was so interested in Tibetans? Shan slipped around the front of the truck, into the light, suddenly feeling the need to protect Lokesh.
"Red Stone has no vehicles," Akzu said suddenly, and Shan understood what the men in the garage were doing. Taking inventory.
Two streams of smoke snaked out of Ko's nostrils as he stepped around Kaju to the front of the red truck, where he could see all of them at once. "You will be pleased to know the enrichment program has been expanded. We're privatizing the motor pool as well."
"Enrichment?" Akzu asked tersely. Shan could see that he was restraining himself, trying not to antagonize the Brigade manager.
"Poverty Eradication seems such a demeaning term," Ko said, sounding more like a political officer than a businessman. "Think of all the shares in the company you'll have, comrade. You'll be an owner of the garage now too. We will be launching stock exchange shares soon. We have special advisers working on it from Beijing. Consultants from America, even."
One of the men, Ko's driver, suddenly ran out of the end of the garage. A wrench flew past his head. Ko pretended not to notice. The man stopped and glared back into the shadows a moment, then moved to the rear of their vehicle and opened its hatch window. He rummaged through a large cardboard box and pulled out a carton of cigarettes, then ventured back into the garage.
"I'm so pleased that you have acquired your own consultants, comrade," Ko declared with a narrow smile, sweeping his hand toward Shan and his companions. Shan watched the man's eyes as he studied them with an unsettling air of satisfaction. Ko Yonghong, Shan decided, was a man who constantly looked for personal benefit, who sought to identify advantage or leverage in every new relationship. The director stretched his arms languidly and nodded slowly, as if making the point that he did not want to learn the identity of Akzu's companions. As if he had already decided who they were and had more to gain by not challenging them.
"You're the new teacher," Jakli said suddenly, looking at Kaju. "For Auntie Lau."
The Tibetan seemed relieved by the question. "We are expanding her good works, yes," he said in a thin voice, nervously glancing at Ko. "The Brigade has made a contribution to funding. Comrade Director Ko wants to bring the orphans into a more formal program. An official cultural integration program at the school in town. An assigned classroom."
"What she did for them no school could provide," Jakli shot back.
Ko stepped closer and raised his hands as if in surrender. "Not traditional school," he offered in an earnest tone. "Just make the Brigade resources available."
"It's not Brigade resources they need," Jakli said with a spark in her eyes.
Ko cocked his head as he examined Jakli, and leaned forward. "You're very pretty," he offered, still in his earnest voice. "I could get you a job."
Jakli ignored him. "The Kazakhs and Uighurs can take care of their own orphans."
Ko raised his hands in surrender again. "Please. I am a friend of your people," he said with a smile. "We could organize a sports team for them, be sure they receive necessary testing. Put them on the rolls for eligibility in our special youth programs." Ko patted Kaju on his back. "But it's all up to our new teacher. We don't want to scare them off. Whatever they're comfortable with. Above all, it must be a process of consensus. It will be traumatic for them at first, when they learn of our loss."
"Our loss?"
"Surely you understand that Lau was valued by all of us. A treasure. We can offer special counselors, if they need them."
"We're going ahead with the classes. I don't want them to miss a session," Kaju said softly. "They need to keep progressing, keep learning about the new society. It's what she would want."
Jakli appeared surprised at the man. She had wanted to be angry, Shan sensed, to resent Lau's replacement. But the young, nervous Tibetan seemed genuinely concerned about the children.
"You came quickly," she observed.
"I was already here."
The mechanic emerged into the sunlight, holding the carton of cigarettes. He retrieved his wrench from the dirt and sat against a tree at the end of the building, opening the carton with obvious relish and lighting a cigarette.
"I don't understand," Jakli said.
"Kaju graduated from a special university program in Chengdu. A facilitator in intercultural relations," Ko explained. "We're very proud of his work. The way of the future. Privatization, integration, the path of a strong nation."
Shan began to recognize a new species in Ko. Shan had been raised in a world which revolved around Party rank, a world so structured around political rank that officials sometimes carried their office chairs into meeting rooms as a form of intimidation, because even office furniture was allocated according to which of the twenty-four grades of the Party a cadre belonged to. But Ko was not in the government. The cool sneer of a Party official seemed to lurk behind his every expression, but he was a businessman.
Akzu was staring at the ground. He had seen the path mentioned by Ko. The liquidation of Red Stone clan. Shan remembered the agony on his face when he had heard how their children would be sent to memorize Party scriptures.
"You'll see, comrade. We only want to help. If the Poverty Scheme doesn't work, come and tell me," Ko said, resting his hand on Akzu's shoulder again, then stepped to the vehicle that Jakli had been about to drive away. He opened the door and gestured for Shan to step inside. "Meanwhile," he said, looking at no one but Jakli. "You and your special friends no doubt have important business. Do not let us delay you."
Ko kept smiling. He seemed very pleased to have discovered Shan, Jowa, and Lokesh. Pleased, and not at all interested in stopping them or intimidating them. And that, more than anything, scared Shan.
As Jakli and Jowa moved around to the driver's side, the Tibetan teacher followed them, wearing an uncertain, nervous expression.
"Why are you here?" Jowa growled to the man, in Tibetan.
"I am a teacher. I told you," Kaju replied in Mandarin.
"I mean here, today, in this garage."
Kaju looked back at Ko. "I asked to come," he said in Mandarin, refusing to reply in the language in which Jowa addressed him. "Here, in the shadow of the Kunlun, there are places to hide. I want to explain how hiding helps no one."
Jowa's eyes narrowed, more suspicious than ever.
"Who's hiding?" Jakli asked, watching Ko, who was leaning against his own truck now, out of earshot, still wearing his satisfied smile.
"Maybe not hiding. Running away, perhaps. Maybe you could help."
"Who?" Jakli pressed.
"The children, of course. The orphans," Kaju said. "Lau's children. My children now. We have to reach out to them, help them understand why they have a new teacher, why they must move on. Dealing with death is a learning experience too."
The flash of anger in Jakli's eyes was unmistakable.
"I want to help them," Kaju offered, "We can't stop the classes, or we will lose them, lose all her good work. But only half came to the last session after her disappearance. We must all strive against distrust."
A special university program, Ko had said, Shan recalled as he watched the Tibetan. Kaju had clearly mastered the vocabulary. He wondered if the Tibetan was capable of conducting a conversation without resorting to political slogans.
Jowa pushed Jakli into the driver seat and shut the door behind her. He stared at Kaju. "Because they're being killed, you bastard," he said under his breath, in Tibetan, so low that Shan barely heard.
But Kaju had heard. His jaw dropped open. His face paled. He stood there, confusion gripping his face as Jowa and Lokesh climbed into the back of the truck. Jakli eased the vehicle out of the bay and was halfway across the garage yard when she slammed on the brakes. Another vehicle was emerging from behind the poplars that lined the road, a boxy black sedan. With a sinking heart Shan recognized the car. A Hong Qi, a Red Flag limousine, perhaps fifteen years old, the kind passed on to senior officials in remote corners of China after being retired from use in the eastern cities. Jakli made a small choking sound and her hand jerked to the door handle as if she were going to run.
They watched as the limousine stopped directly in front of the Brigade truck, as though to block it. A brawny young Han man climbed out of the driver's seat, then opened the rear door. A woman wearing a dark blue business suit emerged. She was in her forties, with the high cheekbones and broad face of northern China. Her eyes were hard, her mouth set in what looked like a well-used expression of disdain, and her hair was tied in a tight knot at the back of her head, underscoring the severe cast of her face.
Shan watched Ko Yonghong as he stared sourly at the new arrivals and uttered something to Kaju that caused the Tibetan to disappear into the shadow of the garage. Then, as the woman turned toward him, a cold smile rose on his face and he gave a small nod of greeting.
Shan looked back at Jakli, who still stared nervously at the woman. He did not need to ask her who the woman was. The Jade Bitch. Prosecutor Xu Li.
"You said she was using Lau's death," Jakli whispered. "What did you mean?"
"Picking up Lau's acquaintances. Erecting checkpoints. It's a campaign, not an investigation. I knew a senior Party member in Beijing who said that crime should never be seen as a social problem but as a political opportunity, and that murder was the best opportunity for any law enforcement official."
"Opportunity?"
As they spoke neither moved their gaze away from Prosecutor Xu. She stood beside her car, looking at Ko Yonghong expectantly, waiting for him to come to her.
A third figure climbed out of the Red Flag. A lean man with a pockmarked face, wearing a trim grey uniform bearing four pockets on his jacket. A officer of the Public Security Bureau.
"Sui," Jakli hissed. "Lieutenant Sui. From the barracks in Yoktian."
"There was a murder in Beijing years ago," Shan continued, watching the knob officer as he spoke, "a youth without a job who stabbed a street vendor, an old man who sold noodles. The killer was arrested at the stand, eating a bowl of noodles beside the body, blood on his shirt. But after a week of analysis Public Security announced that the vendor had been from a family of landowners and that he had failed to state this when his family background was requested on his license application. A political review had been conducted, and it was concluded that the vendor had still been victimizing society by lying to get a license, that his antisocial deception inevitably attracted violence. Citizens were invited to amend their registration forms to correct incomplete data or, better still, to inform on any other former landlords who tried to conceal their class history. Long essays in party newspapers, speeches on television. Thirty or forty were arrested and sent to prison."
His gaze drifted toward Ko. The sour expression was gone. He was glaring at the knob officer with obvious resentment. Ko did not like Public Security, or at least did not like Lieutenant Sui.
The knob officer stood at Xu's side for a moment, surveying the compound with a predator's eyes, then stepped into the shadow of the garage.
"But the killer was punished, surely," Jakli said.
"Sent to work camp for a year, for not having a residency permit."
"This is different. Lau's death was not political."
"Her death?" Shan asked. "You said the prosecutor doesn't even know she's dead for certain. All she has is a report of her disappearance." A movement at the end of the garage caught Shan's eye. Akzu was quietly leading his horse around the building, behind Xu's back. "What is her biggest political complaint?"
"The border clans. She says they are irresponsible. They foment unrest. They're reactionary."
Shan nodded his head grimly. "Lau was a teacher. A moderating influence. Trying to bring the orphans of the clans into the social fold. So the border clans thought of her as an enemy."
"Impossible! She was one of us. Never did we-"
"By failing to engage in the socialist dialectic," Shan persisted, explaining the likely mindset of the prosecutor, "the border clans have cut themselves off from the moral nourishment of the state. They breed animosity and social irresponsibility." As he spoke Shan continued to look at Xu. "She must hope Lau is dead. Proof that the clans are destructive of society and must be eliminated."
Jakli said nothing. He looked at her. She was biting her lip, her eyes moist, still staring at Xu.
Ko also wanted the clans gone. The Poverty Eradication Scheme was accomplishing that goal. But somehow the prosecutor and Ko seemed to have little in common, as if they wanted the clans gone for entirely different reasons, or perhaps in entirely different ways. The Prosecutor's way, Shan suspected, was much more absolute than Ko's. Ko might be little more than a good soldier in the former army brigade. But the prosecutor had more authority. Ko answered to a corporate office in Urumqi. Xu Li answered to Beijing.
Suddenly there was a tap on the driver's door. Jakli turned and gasped. Lieutenant Sui glared at her through the glass, his face as thin and hard as an ax. As her arm shot forward to lock the door, Shan reached out to restrain her. She resisted a moment, then relented and opened the door as Sui pointed toward the front of the truck.
Moments later Lokesh, Shan, Jowa, and Jakli had been herded into a line before the knob lieutenant. He didn't ask for papers but simply wrote in a tablet, wearing a victorious expression, looking up to study each of them in turn, as if meticulously recording their descriptions. Shan turned his head to see Akzu with his horse, standing by the end of the garage, his face drained of color. The mechanic sat nearby, shaking his head grimly.
"Public Security has amended the Poverty Scheme," Sui suddenly announced. His voice had a hollow, metallic quality to it. "The wild herds are to be rounded up. The horses represent a security threat." He swept them with the cool, slow stare that seemed to be a trademark of every Public Security official Shan had ever known. "They are to be rounded up and brought to Yoktian with the remainder of the livestock." His gaze settled on Shan for a moment, examining him in pieces, settling for a moment on Shan's close-cropped black and grey hair, then the loose end of the frayed belt, several sizes too big, that protruded from his narrow waistband, then finally his cheap vinyl shoes, cracked and caked with dust.
"They're not yours," Jakli said in a brittle tone, looking at Sui's chest, as if she were trying to detect a heart. "The horses belong to the Kazakh tribes; they always have since the time of the great khans."
"Exactly," Sui said with a lightless smile, as if Jakli had proven his point. "We know what the khans did to China."
Shan stared at the man in disbelief. It had been a thousand years since the khans, progenitors of the modern Mongols and Kazakhs, had invaded China, displacing the Sung dynasty and establishing the Yuan court. He saw movement from the edge of his eye and turned to see Akzu edging forward, leading his horse toward the knob with fire in his eyes now, as if the leathery old Kazakh was going to attack Sui.
"You'll never find all our horses," Akzu said in a venomous tone from ten feet away.
"Not so hard to round them up with helicopters," Sui answered with a sneer that exposed a row of yellow teeth.
"Chinese don't know horses," Akzu protested. The reins slipped from his hand to the ground and he stepped closer, his fists clenched.
"Harvesting of unutilized agricultural resources," came an icy voice from behind Akzu, "is a longstanding policy of the people's government." As the prosecutor spoke she stepped toward them, her driver towering just behind her.
Akzu's shoulders slumped and his chest sagged forward, as if he had been stabbed in the back. He didn't turn to face the woman, but simply stood, staring at the ground.
Shan's heart raced as he sensed Jowa tense, as though ready to spring at the knob. Then suddenly Ko Yonghong passed Xu Li and stood beside Akzu as though to protect him. "These people are enrolled in the Poverty Scheme, Comrade Prosecutor," he declared in a frustrated tone.
Xu seemed not to hear him. She touched her forehead and Sui stepped forward and with two quick motions knocked off the hats that Lokesh and Shan wore, then moved back for Xu to see.
"You mean the Kazakhs, Comrade Director," she said to Ko as she strutted forward, her escort still hovering a step behind. Her small black eyes glanced at Jakli, who seemed unable to raise her face toward the prosecutor, then studied Jowa and Lokesh with a sour expression. Xu hated Tibetans, Malik had said. She considered them all traitors. Her gaze finally settled on Shan.
Ko retreated, yelling orders at the men conducting the inventory, kicking a stone into the air that landed near the mechanic, who sat with a disinterested glaze on his face, smoking another cigarette. Akzu remained frozen in place, silently watching the prosecutor.
Xu paced along the gravel in front of them, still watching Shan, then gestured her escort toward the limousine. She followed him there and conferred with him in low tones, then the man jogged to Sui and spoke into his ear. The knob frowned, then moved backward, watching their small party warily, as if expecting an ambush. "The People's government appreciates your contributions," Xu's escort said in an oily tone and gestured them toward the turtle truck. Jakli grabbed the hats from the ground and pushed Lokesh toward the cab as Jowa and Shan climbed into the rear.
As the engine roared to life Ko approached Akzu, put his arm over the headman's shoulders, and guided him back to his horse. Jakli waited until Akzu disappeared around the building, then put the truck into gear and sped past the poplar trees that marked the entrance to the garage. Shan watched in the side mirror as the compound disappeared in the distance, then felt Jakli's glance. No one followed. The Prosecutor and Public Security were zealously filling up Glory Camp but still had let them go.
They drove for over an hour, twice detouring along dry stream beds in order to avoid checkpoints. As they passed a sign announcing five more miles to Yoktian, Jakli slowed, studying the willow trees that lined the road. She nearly stopped, then, checking to see that no other vehicle was in sight, abruptly turned into an opening in the trees. The route was more of a broad trail than a road, and the sturdy little truck bounced and heaved as they crossed ruts and holes that would have stopped lesser vehicles. After a few minutes the track reached a small stream flowing from the south and followed it toward the mountains. The Kunlun were in full view now, and Shan could see the high peaks that marked the Tibetan border.
Suddenly Jakli stopped the truck. "It's your lama, isn't it?" she asked as she followed his gaze. She was silent a moment. "I could take a different road if you wish. If you wish, I will take you as close to Tibet as I can. He is your friend. Your lama. Lau will wait."
Shan offered a grateful smile and shook his head. "I will go to meet Lau. It is why he asked me to come."
But now Jakli was studying the snow-capped peaks. "When I was young, people stayed away from the high mountains. They called them the edge of beyond, as if there was a totally different world on the far side, or maybe the world just ended there. Then I learned it was my mother's world, on the other side. Now-" She shook her head slowly. "The high plateau up there, where the dropka live, it's one of the last free places, beyond the reach of evil. Like beyond means safe. Many days, it's the only place I want to be." She was silent a moment, then put the truck back in gear and drove on.
"The edge of beyond." Shan repeated the words like a prayer. It was true. Gendun, as always, was at the edge of beyond.
After a quarter hour, Jakli pointed to a grove of trees at a bend in the stream and leaned forward in anticipation, then eased the truck to a stop under the shade of a grove of poplar trees. There was a small log building near the water, a tiny cabin with a porch, a single plank door and no window.
"It used to be a herder's hut, for the summer when the high pastures are green," Jakli explained as they climbed out. "One of Auntie Lau's favorite places."
"She lived here?"
"Sometimes. She had a room in Yoktian for many years, in the unmarried teachers' quarters. Officially, she lived there. But she stayed here in the warm weather, after the herds got so small the pastures here weren't needed. This was like a- I don't know. A retreat. A sanctuary, in a way. She came here years ago to help a flock of sick sheep. She kept coming back. Not so far from the highway to be inaccessible by car or truck, but far enough to be quiet, to be a world apart."
Shan saw the fond way Jakli looked at the cabin and the meadow beyond, filled with heather and asters in brilliant autumn hues, surrounded by rhododendron with leaves of crimson. It was like an oasis in the high dry mountains, the long slope above facing south so that it was protected, capturing more heat and water than the surrounding landscape. "It was that kind of place for you too," Shan suggested.
She nodded. "Auntie Lau taught me many things here."
"About animals?"
"About animals. About nature. About medicine. About people. About the stars. She was full of knowledge. Sort of overflowing with knowledge. I never knew anyone like her. Everyone, all the Kazakhs and Uighurs loved her. She was from nobody's family but everyone's aunt. It's why she got elected to the Agricultural Council."
"She brought the zheli here?"
Jakli nodded again. "Several times a year. Sometimes for what she called a reverence day."
"Reverence day?"
"Sort of meditation all day, whatever kind of quiet each of the orphans felt comfortable with. Some drew pictures. Some wrote letters. Some stared at flowers."
"What did Khitai do?"
Jakli considered the question for a moment. "I was there at the end of the day the last time. I think he climbed up the trail and sat near the top of the hill. Yes. I remember him. He was on a rock ledge," she said, pointing toward a slab of rock that jutted from the hillside. "Like an old goat, looking out over the mountains. Not with pride, just lost in the beauty."
Shan looked at the empty ledge. Was Khitai sitting on some other rock today, watching? Did he even know a killer was coming? Had Malik found him? With a shudder he realized that, by seeking out the zheli, Malik might be putting himself in the path of the killer.
Jakli stepped onto the narrow porch of the hut. "This place was like a shrine when she was here."
"A shrine?"
"A mosque. A temple. A religious place, is all I mean. You wanted to think big thoughts, just to please her." She opened a wooden latch on the door and led Shan into the cabin.
It was indeed as sparse as a temple inside. A small table, a chair, two benches, and a bedframe made of hand-hewn timbers comprised the only furnishings. Its walls were unfinished logs, many still holding their bark. A tin basin with two cups sat on the chair and a felt blanket lay folded on the bed. In the center of the table sat a single pine cone.
Shan stepped to read a sturdy piece of paper pinned to the log wall. It contained two flowing Chinese ideograms, one over the other, elegantly drawn with brush and ink. The liquid strokes combined the image of a bird flying away into the sky and the symbol of two hands struggling for a single object. It meant do not contend and was associated with the Eighth Chapter of the Tao te Ching, the greatest of the Tao teachings he had learned as a child. The characters brought a momentary aching to his heart, for the Eighth had been his father's favorite verse. Shan knew the passage well:
The greatest good is like water
Which benefits all things
And yet it does not contend
It stays in places that others disdain
And therefore is close to the way of truth
The verse was used to describe how enlightened individuals found contentment by not struggling, by staying in lonely, quiet places where truth, like water, was more likely to be found. Sometimes the final words of the passage were translated as the way of life. Truth or life. Perhaps, he thought, looking back at the ideograms, for Lau there was little difference.
He touched a corner of the paper with his fingertips, then pulled them quickly away, as if he were intruding on Lau.
"She was like that," Jakli explained from his back.
He turned and nodded. "I need to understand something," Shan said as she roamed about the small room, gazing upon its contents. "Yesterday when you came to us, Akzu said you didn't owe Lau anything, after what she had done to you."
Jakli turned from the opposite side of the table. "I never understood. A misunderstanding of some kind, I guess. I was in a camp, for reeducation. Lau wrote a letter to the prosecutor, saying I should not be released as scheduled, that I should serve extra time on probation at the factory in Yoktian they use for former prisoners. The hat factory. When they told me why I couldn't go back to the clan I didn't believe it. But they showed me Lau's letter." Jakli sat in the chair and cupped her hands around the pine cone. "It's okay," she said in a confused tone, toward the cone, as if somehow it were a vehicle for reaching Lau. "Just a mistake, I know. She had been nervous lately."
Shan heard someone enter behind him. "There's no sign of her. Nothing that speaks of her," Jowa said over Shan's shoulder.
"Maybe that is her sign," Shan suggested, looking at the paper on the wall, "the simplicity."
Jakli led them to a trail at the far end of the meadow. As she disappeared into the brush, Lokesh halted in front of Shan. A small waterfall could be seen at the edge of the woods. Birds sang. "It's the kind of place where the soul of a boy could linger," Lokesh said with a sigh, then excitedly called Shan to watch a large beetle crossing the path.
Their small procession followed the stream above the meadow for nearly a mile on a foot trail that wound its way through more rhododendron thickets and stands of tall evergreens. He studied the path. It was little more than a game trail, but judging from the many recently broken plants and seedlings at its side, it appeared to have seen heavy recent use.
The path opened into a small clearing bordered on the opposite side by a rock wall that rose vertically nearly fifty feet. From the lower limbs of an ancient pine that towered over the wall, something man-made dangled in the wind. It was a diamond-shaped frame of sticks bound with twine, with strands of brightly colored yarn connecting the sides. A spirit catcher, a talisman used in many of the nomadic cultures, to trap the devils that fly in the air.
Jakli stopped at the foot of the wall and motioned her three companions toward the far side of the tree. Shan stepped forward. In the shadow of the tree was a darker shadow. It was a hole in the rock, a narrow cleft perhaps six feet high and wide enough to slip through sideways.
Shan followed Lokesh's eyes toward a small pile of brush at the side of the hole. No, he saw, it wasn't a pile of brush, it was flowers, bundles of flowers dropped at the side of the opening. They were mostly asters, the autumn wildflower that was in bloom on the slopes. Some looked so fresh they could have been dropped an hour earlier; others were dried and brittle. Beside the stack were over a dozen crude animal shapes of twigs bound with brown twine and vines, creatures with long legs that Shan took to be horses and creatures with short legs that might have been sheep or goats. Beside the stick creatures were several small clay objects, in the shapes of pots and bells. As he bent to examine them more closely, the air suddenly chilled. A frigid draft swept over Shan, raising the hairs on his arms. It was coming from the cave.
Jakli appeared beside him. She stood in the chill wind with her eyes closed, reverence on her face, as though praying. He had heard of such caves. Some said that death lived in these frigid places and that such wind was its breath. Some of the old Tibetans said such places were portals to the eight levels of cold hells that were taught by the oldest of the Tibetan sects.
Jakli reached into her pocket and produced a small battery lamp that she handed to Shan, then reached behind the pile of flowers and retrieved two sticks saturated with resin at the tips. She handed them to Jowa, produced a box of wooden matches, lit the torches, then took one for herself and stepped into the cave. Shan followed her closely, his throat suddenly dry. They were going to visit Auntie Lau.
After half a dozen steps, the passage widened to ten feet, but the ceiling dropped so low they had to bend over, holding their lights extended at their sides. The cold wind seemed to increase, dampening the light of the torches. Moments later they emerged into a larger chamber, perhaps fifty feet wide and three times as long, with a twenty foot ceiling. The air was more still, but even colder. Jowa uttered a gasp of surprise as he extended the torch over his head. The ceiling was glowing. Long stalactites of crystal hung down. It was ice, Shan saw. The entire ceiling was coated with ice.
"It wasn't so long ago that the glaciers left these hills," Jakli explained in a low voice. "Their roots are still here." She led them across the chamber to a five-foot-wide opening, which led into a smaller chamber with the same high ceiling but no more than twenty feet long.
In the dark and the cold, Auntie Lau was waiting.
She lay on a knee-high rock slab at the rear of the chamber, her hands on her stomach, her face so peaceful it seemed she was only napping.
Jakli knelt at the dead woman's side. Shan watched as she pulled a sprig of heather from her pocket and dropped it on the slab beside the body.
"I met her when I was just a girl that first summer she appeared. I was just eight or nine years old. My horse had a stomach sickness. I heard a healer was at a sheep camp so I was going to walk my horse to her. But after three or four hours my horse would go no further. He gave a long bellow and stood, weak and aching. I sat and made a fire, and suddenly she was there. She said she had heard a sick animal call. But she wouldn't give it medicine, not right away. She wanted to know about my horse, about how long we had known each other and where it had been born and how it acted in the rain. Then she touched the horse in many places and spoke to it. Finally she mixed some herbs and told me to stay there that night and sing to it. In the morning he was better, so strong he wanted to run all the way home."
Lokesh sat beside the slab, giving Jakli a small nod as if to encourage her to continue.
"One of my cousins said she must be some kind of sorcerer, when I told him," Jakli recounted. "But I said she laughed too much to be a sorcerer. I saw her many times after that, often unexpectedly, in the mountains, in the desert, wherever. Once she was healing a small squirrel that had been dropped by an owl. She said it was her duty to heal all the injured and the sick but that the greatest duty of a healer was to the smallest and the weakest."
"What do you mean, she appeared?" Shan asked.
"You know. One of the homeless. Her family had been lost too. She was like a wandering healer. We were fortunate she decided to stay in Yoktian County."
Lau's hair, black with a few strands of grey, had been set in two short braids tied with dark red ribbon. She was dressed in a long grey robe embroidered with flowers along its edges, her legs wrapped in red woolen leggings that covered the tops of a pair of small, well-worn leather boots. A red scarf, embroidered with flowers and leaping deer, covered most of her head, pulled low over her brow. Someone had dressed her for the cold.
"How far away is the place where she was killed?" Shan asked.
"Karachuk? In the desert, many miles inside the desert. They used her horse, then a truck to bring her body. Half a day's travel."
"Did you bring her?"
Jakli nodded. "From the road. The Maos came and told me at the factory, and I met them at the road."
"So the Maos were at this Karachuk when she was killed?"
"No. Some others, who went to the Maos." Jakli returned his steady stare with a cool, determined expression. There were secrets she would not tell.
"And she told you she wanted to be left here? Is this the Kazakh way?"
"No. But she had ideas. I mean, she lived her life in her own way. I think she wanted to leave it in her own way as well. She said to take her to this cave above the cabin."
"Who?" Shan asked. "Who did she ask?"
"She told her friends. About three months ago, she told her friends this is where she wanted to go."
The body had been kept remarkably fresh by the cold. It could stay like that for months, he thought. Maybe years. "It's a lot to ask of friends."
Jakli looked at Lau with a sorrowful smile. "It wasn't any trouble."
"But the way you speak about her, she wasn't the kind to put burdens on her friends."
Jakli knitted her brow, as if trying to understand Shan's point. "Lau was only going to die once," she said slowly.
But why this cave? Shan asked himself. It was as if the cave itself meant something. But what? A place where demons lived. Or maybe a place that demons feared. He walked slowly around the slab of rock, studying the dead woman. "If she was an outsider, without papers for a work unit here, how could she have been elected to the local council?"
Jakli shrugged. "She was checked, no doubt. She was Kazakh, and the herders loved her. As I said, she was everyone's aunt. And it was only the Agricultural Council. No real power."
"But the authorities. To get on even such a council a background check would have been required."
Shan could see in Jakli's eyes that she understood. Lau's family could have been lost in many ways, for many reasons. If it had been imprisoned, officially disbanded, or executed, its members by definition were bad elements in the eyes of the state. Holding office even in a lowly Agricultural Council was a privilege denied bad elements. He remembered Akzu's suggestion at the grave of the boy buried by the Red Stone clan. The demon wants to finish what it started with the parents of the zheli. Lau too had been from a lost clan. The secret that bound the victims could be from decades earlier, when the Kazakhs and Uighurs were being subdued by the People's Liberation Army.
"She was rehabilitated. I don't know. The people wanted her. The government is more forgiving now." Jakli spoke the last words without conviction, while looking at the slab of ice that covered much of the wall behind Auntie Lau.
Shan knelt by Lokesh, at the woman's head. The light of the torches gave her bloodless flesh an orange glow, adding to the sense that she was only sleeping. It seemed that at any moment the woman might sit up and chide them for disturbing her rest.
"We had to let people think there was an accident," Jakli said. "There had to be an explanation. We couldn't report her murdered and have the government involved."
Shan looked up. It was as if Jakli had waited to explain, so there would be no secret from Lau.
"A riding accident," Jakli continued, looking at Lau now. "We arranged for your-" She paused and drew in a deep breath. "We arranged for her horse to be found walking along the high road that follows the Yoktian River. The next day, someone at school reported her missing. She had a jacket, given her by the Agricultural Council, with her name on it. Fat Mao dropped it in the river. A woman found it floating downstream, near town."
Slowly, as reverently as he knew how, he eased the scarf above her forehead. A hole, over a quarter-inch wide, was at the hairline. He brought his lantern closer and saw dark smudges around the wound. It had been done at close range, execution style.
"Do you think it will keep growing?" Jakli inquired. She was looking at the ice patch again. "Maybe it will reach out and cover her. She could last a long time like that. Thousands of years."
Shan rose with a reverent bow of his head and noticed Jowa standing at the entrance. The purba had not ventured further into the chamber, as if he had decided to stand guard. Or was frightened.
On the wall that curved away to the left, toward the entrance, Shan noticed dark shapes in the ice. He extended his electric torch toward them and saw that they were hands. At least a dozen hands had been pressed into the ice and left their unique indentations on the wall, like farewell salutes.
A tomb of ice, Shan thought. A guardian to the cold hells. What had Auntie Lau's final hell been like? She had not been killed randomly. She had been sought out. But why?
He gave voice to his thought. "Could she have been robbed of something?"
"She owned almost nothing," Jakli said. "The Brigade school gave her a room and an office."
Shan stepped to the end of the platform and knelt. "When she was prepared, before she was brought here, did anyone see-" As he slowly, painstakingly unwrapped the leggings, he answered his own question. "Ai yi!" he gasped under his breath. Bruises and welts, never healed, were on top of her feet. She had been beaten, beaten long enough before dying for the bruises to appear.
"We saw," Jakli said, her eyes welling with tears. "She must have been in such pain." Her hand shot to her mouth and she turned away. "But she wouldn't have talked. She was strong."
Shan nodded, not because he understood Lau but because he understood interrogation. Either she would have talked after the torture on one leg began, or she would have kept silent through the torture on both legs. He moved to her side after quickly covering the legs again and slowly rolled up the sleeve on Lau's lifeless right arm. Inside the elbow was another welt, centered over a tiny red spot.
"I saw that also," Jakli said over his shoulder. "Just a bruise. Nothing," she said in a cracking voice, a voice that told Shan she knew what it meant.
There was a movement at his side. Jowa had approached to look at the arm. "Injection," he announced solemnly. "She was injected with something when the beating didn't work." The purba exchanged a knowing glance with Shan. It meant her killer knew interrogation technology and had access to the drugs that were used by government interrogators. She had been killed for something she owned after all. She had been killed for information, tortured to reveal something.
Lau seemed more a mystery now than before he had visited her. Shan turned toward the entrance, then hesitated and stepped to the left wall. On an impulse he pressed his palm into the ice, near the impressions of the other hands.
"Why," he asked, feeling the numbness spread through his fingers, "did she stop serving on the council?" He pulled his hand away and studied his ice print. It was deeper than the others.
"When we did that," Jakli said, nodding at the handprints, "Akzu said that if the ice doesn't shift, the hands could be preserved for centuries. He said it would be the only evidence that we ever existed." She looked at the prints, then fitted her hand into one near the center as if confirming it was hers. "Just an emptiness in the ice in a dark cave on a forgotten mountain."
Shan looked at the woman, startled by her words. Jakli kept facing the wall. "I washed her at the stream," she said in a whisper. "I keep thinking of the terrible pain she died in." She pushed her hand more firmly into the ice, as if to create a greater emptiness. "Lau was disqualified somehow," she continued in her whisper, as if worried Lau might overhear. "Four months ago someone said she was no longer eligible to hold office."
"Someone?"
She shrugged. "The rules change all the time. The Brigade has taken over many of the functions of the old councils."
"But someone announced that Lau could no longer serve."
"I don't know, I guess. She just was gone. Someone else just started attending instead of her."
"Who?"
Jakli did not respond until she had stepped to the entrance to the larger chamber. "Ko Yonghong," she said in a brittle voice. "Comrade Managing Director."
"Was Lau told the reason?"
"If she was, she never told anyone else."
"You never thought it was odd, the timing?"
Jakli shook her head, confusion clouding her face.
"It was not long after that she asked for her body to be taken here." Shan reminded her. "As if it was only then that she became worried. Why, do you think?"
Jakli looked back on the dead woman, biting her lower lip. She looked as if she were about to ask Lau herself. Then she shrugged and turned back to Shan. "She associated with undesirables."
She was referring, Shan knew, to herself, and Akzu and the nomads. Perhaps even the Maos.
"But who was closest to her? Did she have a helper? Perhaps she was training someone. I need to know what her reaction was, when she heard she could no longer serve. Angry? Scared? Relieved?"
"No one."
"No one? Or no one you want me to see?"
Jakli seemed to consider his words as she bid farewell to Lau with a nod of her head, then stepped back into the larger chamber. "It's complicated," she said. "I want you to find the killer. But this is a land of secrecy. The Chinese make it that way. There are things that could be dangerous for you to know."
"Dangerous to whom?"
"Me. You. Others."
"You mean the resistance? The lung ma?"
"Resistance? There is no real resistance. Just intelligence gathering. How can we resist the People's Liberation Army or the Security Bureau? The Tibetans tried it, using flintlocks and swords against machine guns. A million of them died. Not resistance. A preservation movement, that's the best anyone can hope for. It's what Lau told the zheli a hundred times. Preserve what is good for the day when the bad goes away."
A minute later they were nearly at the mouth of the tunnel. Jowa and Lokesh could be seen outside by the old pine, straightening the stick-figure offerings. Shan paused at the entrance, holding his light close to the wall. There was something he hadn't seen before, a drawing made in chalk, a series of lines within a six-inch circle. At first it appeared to be an egg with a small plate on top, capped with something like a button with a flower growing out of it. Below the egg shape on either side were flowing, curving lines, like a banner blowing in the wind.
With a flash of recognition Shan pressed the light closer. It was in white chalk, recently laid on the rock.
"Do you know it?" Jakli asked over his shoulder.
"A bumpa, it's called, in Tibetan. A sacred treasure vase. One of the eight sacred Buddhist symbols."
"A vase?"
"An urn. A sacred receptacle," he said, his brows wrinkled in confusion. "It means hidden treasure."
Jakli stared at the chalk drawing a moment, then slowly stepped outside, leaving Shan alone. As he stood there, a particularly strong gust of cold air hit his back. Lau's breath.
Outside, he found Lokesh kneeling by the old pine, righting the stick animals that had fallen over, arranging them in a semicircle around the entrance to the cave, facing outward. The old Tibetan sang one of his old songs while he worked, sometimes pausing to admire the handiwork of one of the figures.
As Jakli bent to help Lokesh, Shan touched her shoulder and gestured toward Jowa, who stood nearby, facing the thicket on the opposite side of the clearing. One hand was behind his back, a finger raised toward Shan, signaling him to wait. The other hand hovered over his blade.
The wind died, and Shan realized what had alarmed Jowa. There was a sound coming from the thicket, an animal sound, like a low-pitched growl. Shan stepped to Jowa's side, No, it wasn't a growl, he realized as he moved closer to the sound, it was more like a moan.
Something moved in the thicket. Jowa ran.
The thing flashed into view between two rocks, a low, dark shape trying to escape beyond the wall of rock. Jowa disappeared into the thick rhododendron and Shan followed. Jakli streaked past him with the speed and stealth of a seasoned hunter.
The creature ran hard. Shan saw it again as it scrambled across rocks in a pool of light fifty yards ahead. It was black, but its two rear feet were bright red. It was making another sound now, a wrenching howl, a sound of new fear. Shan ran faster, ignoring the branches slapping his face, stumbling twice on the loose rocks, leaping over beds of moss, pausing once to listen, then sighting Jakli again and darting toward her as she disappeared back into the dense undergrowth.
Then another sound split the silence of the forest. Jowa had caught the thing and was shouting for them.
Gasping for breath, Shan arrived in a small clearing to find Jowa and Jakli looking down at a dark figure that cowered at their feet. Shan wondered where they had found the large black chuba which covered the thing, then realized that their quarry was wearing the chuba.
Jakli lifted an edge of the sheepskin robe and exposed two human feet, clad in bright red, ankle-high athletic shoes. She gasped, as if recognizing the shoes. Her eyes flared with sudden anger and she pulled on the chuba, struggling to lift it for a moment, then wrenching it free to reveal a small man, quivering with fright. She paused a moment, her eyes full of fire, and pounced on the man, pounding his back with clenched fists.
Jowa and Shan exchanged a look of surprise, then bent to pull her away. She would not relent. "Traitor!" she screamed, still hitting the man. "Murderer!"
They had to forcibly lift her, one under each shoulder. When she was off the man's back she lashed out with her feet, kicking him on his arms and legs.
The man did not fight back. He seemed not to have noticed the blows. He lay curled up, making the same low moaning noise they had first heard from the thicket by the cave.
"Don't you understand?" Jakli cried in frustration. "It's Bajys! The child-killer!"
Shan rolled the man over. The face that looked up was contorted with fear. Bajys kept his hands locked about each other, as if he had to stabilize himself even though lying on the ground. His eyes blinked open and shut. Tears streamed down his face.
Jakli shouted at him in the Kazakh tongue. The words were unintelligible to Shan, but the sharp, accusing tone was unmistakable. The man looked at her in confusion, then looked to Jowa and began speaking.
"Help me. Help me, brother," he said, his chest heaving with sobs. "The monster has been loosed. There is only death. The world is ended. I cannot find my way out."
Something was wrong. Shan, Jakli, and Jowa exchanged a confused look. Bajys was speaking Tibetan.
Jakli spoke to him again, in the language of their clan, not shouting this time but still in anger. Bajys just looked at Jowa with pleading in his eyes. Jakli's rage evaporated into bewilderment. "It can't be," she said to Shan in Mandarin. "He's a Kazakh. He's never spoken Tibetan." She spoke to Bajys again in her Turkic tongue, but the man stared at her dumbly, then looked at Jowa.
"Tell this woman," he said in a trembling voice, "I do not understand her. She confuses me with someone else. Tell her not to waste her time in anger. There is only time for prayer now. All we can do is pray."
Jakli's face seemed to go limp. She looked to Shan as if he could explain, but he shook his head and helped the little man to his feet. They made a slow procession back to the clearing, Jowa and Shan supporting Bajys, Jakli behind, a numb, confused expression on her face.
Lokesh showed no surprise when they led the little man into the clearing. He took his hand and led him to a log in the bright, warm sun in the center of the clearing, then sat with him.
"Are you a priest then?" Bajys whimpered to the old Tibetan.
Lokesh gestured for Jowa to join them, then placed his own rosary in the man's hands. "We both trained at gompas," Lokesh said, nodding toward Jowa. But Jowa remained standing, as if unable, or unwilling, to console the man. "I have seen them," Lokesh offered with a sigh. "I have seen demons in my lifetime too." His voice was serene, as if in prayer.
"He couldn't-" Jakli said to Shan as they watched. "Sometimes I practice my Tibetan, sing Tibetan songs. Bajys never understood. He's a Kazakh, a Muslim. He can't speak Tibetan." Her voice drifted off as she looked at the diminutive man. He was holding the rosary tightly wrapped around the fingers of his left hand, his right hand clasped over them, rocking back and forth, murmuring a mantra in Tibetan.
But Jakli would not give up. "Where did you go?" she demanded again, now in Tibetan. "Why did you run away? They are certain you killed the boy-" Confusion seemed to grip her tongue.
"She used to go to the old place in the sand," the little man said suddenly, in Tibetan. "When I saw that Khitai was dead I had to find her." His voice was barely above a whisper. "When she wasn't at the cabin, I went out on the sand. All day and part of a night I walked. I went to the Ihakang place, the sanctuary place." He raised his hands in front of him as though to defend against something invisible to the others, then pushed the beads against his forehead so hard they pressed into his flesh.
"Khitai isn't dead," Jakli said. "It was the other boy."
But Bajys seemed unable to hear her. "I looked in the huts away from the Ihakang," he continued. "But there was only dead people. Everyone dead. Like in the old thangkas," he said in his trembling voice, referring to the religious paintings that often hung in Tibetan temples, "where the demons are eating human limbs." He stared at the ground, his eyes wild. "People were in pieces. A leg. A hand. Dead hands."
They stared at Bajys in horror.
The little Tibetan seemed not to notice them, as if he were lost in his vision of death. Surely, Shan told himself, it was only a vision. Not a memory.
"We'll go below," Shan said quietly to Jowa and Lokesh. "We'll make a fire. Come when he is ready."
But Bajys spoke again.
"Then I remembered the special place inside the mountain," he said in his tiny hollow voice. "So I came back here. I sensed her here. I shouted for her with great hope. But she wasn't in that place. She was just in the back place, the ice room, and when I found her she had no voice left for me."
Shan sprang up, grabbing the battery light, and ran back into the cave. Moments later he stood at the front of the wide chamber, Lau's burial room opposite him. Lau had a place in the mountain, not the burial chamber where Bajys found her. A special place. He played his light along the walls at floor level. To his right the wall was solid, dropping straight to the stone and clay floor without interruption. He began walking along the left wall, the base of which was obscured at several places by slabs of rock that had shifted from the ceiling. He explored each slab, shining his light into the shadows where they had fallen against the wall. After fifty feet he stopped. There was something in the air, the vaguest hint of incense and singed butter, a temple scent. In the next pocket between the rocks there was no sign of an opening, but the scent grew stronger. Then around the next slab he found a small gap at the floor, big enough for a person to crawl through. The clay floor below had been worn smooth. He dropped down and crawled inside. After ten feet the passage opened into a chamber slightly larger than Lau's burial room.
Shan had been in shrine caves before, where Buddhist artifacts and relics were secreted, sometimes centuries old, and when his light played upon a small golden Buddha he had thought he had found another. But it wasn't a room of Buddhist treasures he had found. The Buddha, at the far wall, was on a small altar of hand-hewn timber, joined with pegs. Around it were seven containers, representing the seven offering bowls of Buddhist worship. But the bowls did not match. Some were not even bowls. There was a chipped tea cup in the row, and a tin mug of the type Shan had used in prison. Yet they held the traditional Buddhist offerings. The first, second, and sixth were filled with water, the third with flowers, the fourth with incense, the fifth with butter, the last with aromatic chips of wood. On the Buddha's shoulder a prayer scarf had been draped. Beside the foot-high statue was a small ceramic stand to hold stick incense, partly covered with ashes. Six feet in front of the altar was a large tattered cushion, then a single, smaller cushion five feet beyond it. For a teacher to sit with his student. Beside the smaller cushion was a brazier with two charred stubs of wood, the remnants of a fire.
A log had been wedged into a crack in one wall, and hanging from it was a painting on cloth, a Tibetan thangka, so worn it was threadbare in spots. Shan studied the painting, holding the light close. The central image was a fierce woman mounted on a horse, robes swirling about her as if blown by a wind. It was a rendering of an obscure figure seldom seen in temples. But in the prison barracks, when the winter storms had kept the prisoners from work, the old lamas had taught about such figures and the lost gompas that had revered them. It was a protective goddess, in the form known as Magic Weapon Army.
Another light flickered behind him. Jakli appeared, carrying her torch. She stood in a numbed silence, in apparent disbelief at Shan's discovery, then her eyes filled with wonder as she stepped tentatively toward the small Buddha. She studied the room for a long time before she spoke. "I have visited the cabin more than a score of times with Lau," she said at last, confusion in her voice again. "Once we even came to the cave, to see the ice. But I never…" Her voice drifted off. She sat on the student's cushion and picked up a piece of chalk lying beside it, rolling it in her fingers as she gazed around the room.
Shan cast his light along the rear wall. There was a stack of folded blankets on a straw pallet and several ceramic pots beside a small pile of split wood for the brazier. Above them, where the wall presented a flat, even surface, were marks in chalk, words in the graceful Tibetan alphabet. Although he was still being taught the written language of Tibet, Shan recognized several simple figures in a row along one side. Chig, nhi, soom, shi, nga, trook, doon, gyay, gu, ju, he read. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
"When I was young," he said to Jakli, surprised at how the secret chamber moved him, "my father would take me into the closet of our apartment whenever the Chairman gave speeches. My mother played the radio as loudly as possible, and he took out secret books, old textbooks, and he would teach me things. English. The history of America and Europe. The Declaration of Independence. He made me memorize the American Declaration of Independence."
"He could have gone to prison."
"He already had. He had been a professor of Western history. A Stinking Ninth," Shan said, referring to the lowest rank of the Nine Bad Elements identified as enemies of the people by Chairman Mao. "The very worst kind, since he had American friends. This was after prison, after his release. Even after our family had been sent for reeducation at an agricultural collective." He sighed and looked around the chamber again. Lau taught here. Bajys knew about it. Which meant Khitai knew about it. Maybe others of the orphans. It was an illegal place. A Buddhist place.
"How many Tibetans are there," he asked, "among the zheli?" He looked at the cushions. One for a teacher, one for a student, only one student at a time.
"Several of the shadow clans that help are Tibetan, dropka families. But among the children, two or three at most. The zheli are Kazakh and Uighur. Maybe one or two Tadjiks."
"Kazakh like Bajys?"
Jakli's only answer was a confused frown. She walked around the room, touching things with the tips of her fingers. "A secret room," she said. "For secret Buddhists."
"For children," Shan said, looking back at the simple numbers written on the wall. Or one child.
"She taught me Buddhist ways," Jakli said. "Quietly, at private places. But not here." Her face was clouded with emotion.
"I think this was different. I think someone else came here," Shan said. "Not Bajys. Maybe not just Lau. Maybe another teacher. A Buddhist. I think it's why Lau asked to be taken back here. For a final meeting."
"But she was dead," Jakli said in confusion.
Shan walked around the room. He stood in front of the Buddha, placing his palms down on the makeshift altar, then stepped back to the chalk writing. He recognized several other words. He saw the six syllable mantra, Om mani padme hum, invoking the Compassionate Buddha, and below it the twelve syllable mantra, Om ah hum vajra guru peme siddhi hum, invoking the blessing of the holy teacher Guru Rinpoche. The top rows had been written very high, several inches higher than he could reach. He stretched his arm overhead to prove it to himself, then surveyed the chamber once more. "Nothing to stand on," he observed. "No stool, no bench."
"What do you mean?" Jakli inquired.
"Lau was no taller than me. I don't think she wrote this."
Jakli studied the writing for a moment. "She didn't. I know her hand. She is teaching me- she was teaching me to write Tibetan." She looked back at Shan, wide-eyed, as if just realizing the meaning of her words. "Someone else was here," she whispered. "Someone else was the teacher here."
Shan nodded. He had not found the missing lama, but he had found the lama's home. He stepped to a cluster of simple, familiar drawings on the adjacent wall. From over his shoulder Jakli pointed to the first image on the left side, a vertical line with something like a bloated figure eight at the top. "A monk's stick," she said.
"A staff." Shan nodded. "A mendicant's staff," he added and explained that grouping depicted the prescribed possessions of an ordained monk. He pointed each out. The staff for walking and shaking in a prescribed fashion when asking for alms. A water pot and a water sieve, to prevent the drowning of innocent insects, then an alms bowl, a blanket, three outer robes, two underrobes, a sitting mat, and sandals.
He stared at the drawings, then back at the numbers on the wall and the thangka. The chamber was for a child and not a child. And it was Tibetan but very old Tibetan, from a teacher rooted in one of the oldest of the Buddhist sects. He stepped to the pallet and found a perfectly folded maroon robe. He carefully lifted it. It was a monk's robe. It was clean. He looked back at the tunnel leading to the chamber. The robe had no marks from the clay. It was for use inside the chamber only. Beside where it had lain on the pallet was a large pair of sandals, larger than Shan would wear, larger than Lau would wear.
Jakli stepped back and sat again on the student's cushion, and he knelt beside her, realizing after a moment that they were both staring at the empty cushion by the altar. The missing teacher. They were waiting to be taught, but there was no one to take the cushion.
"Messages," he said at last, giving voice to his speculation. "The trail lies in all the messages." He felt Jakli's gaze but did not look away from the cushion. "Lau's coming here in her death was a message, her way of sending a warning to someone unknown to anyone else. If she were killed she wanted the teacher who used this room warned away from the danger. But she couldn't risk divulging his or her name, not even to you. Even if she took such a risk, who should she tell? It was too unpredictable, where and when she might die."
"But she knew," Jakli said slowly, studying the piece of chalk intensely, as if hoping it might begin writing answers for her. "She knew that she was in danger, didn't she? She knew months ago that she was in danger. I never thought of it."
"And she knew that, no matter what, no matter how or where she died, certain friends would honor her last request," Shan suggested, and Jakli offered a sad smile in reply.
"There were other messages," he continued. "It was the purbas who brought word to the lamas about Lau. The Maos knew of her, or someone connected to her knew the Maos. The Buddhist who taught in this room perhaps. But why?" He turned toward her with a sudden thought. "Or was it you? You know the purbas. You know the lung ma."
"No. I was in town, making hats. Fat Mao sent for me."
Shan nodded. Fat Mao knew. Because the lung ma sent the message to the purbas. "But why?" Shan repeated. "It's not just that what went on in this room was Tibetan, or even that it was secret. There was something else, so important that word went to Lhadrung." Why Lhadrung? Why Gendun and Lokesh? he asked himself silently. It wasn't just that Gendun had been born in the region but that Gendun was involved in the mystery, part of the greater secret.
"Lau," Jakli said. "Lau was the secret."
"No. Part of it, yes. But the killing didn't stop with her. There is something else, an evil still unfolding that we have to stop. Something connected with the children."
Jakli bent forward, plucked something from the edge of the cushion, and held it up in her fingers. A small clump of brown fibers. "Wool," she said, rubbing it between her fingers. "Full of lanolin. Unwashed. Like from a herder's vest. Or a sheepskin blanket." It told them little but set the image, that of a student on the cushion, huddled in a sheepskin against the cold air, facing the teacher who sat before him in his robe.
"The teacher," Jakli said. "Maybe it's the teacher who the killer wants. From Lau the killer learned where the students were. The zheli. So he attacks the students to find the Tibetan teacher who uses this room."
Shan slowly nodded. The Muslim boy Suwan had been killed first. But the next boy killed had been Alta, the Kazakh boy being raised by Tibetans, a boy being taught the Buddhist way, a boy whose rosary had been stolen by the killer. Then there was Khitai, whose name Lokesh somehow knew yet didn't know. He rose and walked along the wall again, then stopped and faced the long mantra on the wall, written by the secret teacher.
"There was another message," he said. "Not so secret. After the killing at the Red Stone camp, warnings went out. And about us coming. The dropka on the road knew."
"Many people would have heard about that killing," Jakli confirmed. "The clans have their own ways of spreading news. Herders meet in remote places. Notes are left on trees. Some old clans send dogs with letters on their collars. People were told to watch for the killer."
"But not just a general warning." He told her what the dropka had said, on the high road entering the Kunlun. You are going there, to save the children. "Lau died, then Suwan died, and someone decided the children were in danger. The teacher who used this chamber. Perhaps he warned one of the herders. That would have been enough to start the warnings, to cause the dropka to flee."
"Many people knew about Lau, about the zheli," Jakli said. "When a mother ewe dies, the lambs are always in jeopardy. And some said the zheli was always a dangerous thing, that there were those in the government who opposed it."
"Is that why she was forced from the council?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. You heard Ko today. People became accustomed to it. People support the zheli program now."
People, Shan thought. Meaning the Han who were quietly building a little kingdom in Yoktian.
Jakli stood and stepped toward the tunnel. "Did they ever find your father out?" she asked, as she bent to her knees by the tunnel. "In his secret classroom."
Shan stopped and looked at the writing on the wall. What kind of world was it where in order to be enlightened you had to hide? "No," he said in a wooden voice, still looking at the wall. "They would have eventually, but the Red Guard came one day, just because he had been a professor. They beat him and broke things in his body. My mother and I were held and forced to watch. He didn't die then, but when he breathed little bubbles of blood came to his lips. The next day they came back and made a bonfire of all his books in the street. He watched from the window because he was in too much pain to move. He watched them in horror and I watched him and slowly he just stopped breathing."
He stood in silence, looking at the secret writing on the wall.
"But the books from the closet," Jakli asked softly. "Did they get those too?"
Shan looked back with a sad grin. He shook his head slowly. "Afterward, I just went in alone, with a candle."
As she disappeared down the tunnel Shan hesitated, then picked up the chalk she had left on the bench. Quickly, in small Chinese ideograms, he wrote near the entrance. The way that is told is not the constant way, he wrote. His message for Gendun, who had ways of finding secret treasures. As he looked at his words a realization swept through him. Perhaps the room was no secret to Gendun. The hermitage in Lhadrung was populated by secret teachers. This chamber was home to a secret teacher. No one knew about the teacher who used the room. But Gendun had told Shan that Lau had been killed and a lama was missing. The purbas had only known that Lau was dead. The fact that the message had come that way had been a message in itself, meaning that the lama who used the chamber was gone, unable to communicate with Lhadrung directly. So Gendun had inferred the second part of the mystery, that someone had taken the lama.
They walked past the clearing without speaking to Jowa or Lokesh, who still sat with Bajys as he swayed back and forth, reciting mantras with the two Tibetans. At the cabin they lit a fire in a circle of stones.
"No one will believe it about Bajys," Jakli said as she made tea in a dented pan she had retrieved from under the porch. "I don't know if I believe it. It doesn't make sense."
"You mean they will still hunt him as a killer?"
She nodded. "Maybe he is. I know people who say it is possible to be possessed," she said, remembering Malik's words. "Maybe in killing the boy, something possessed him, then left him afterwards."
"Something that taught him to speak Tibetan?" Shan asked. "Something that made him recite Buddhist prayers?"
"He could still have killed the boy."
"The man we found up there is no killer."
"But he lied to us. He's no Kazakh."
"Did he lie? Or just not tell all the truth? You said it before. Some secrets are too dangerous to tell," Shan reminded her.
"He didn't kill the boy," Lokesh said confidently. "He didn't kill Auntie Lau."
"You think they are the same? I mean, one killer?" Jakli asked, looking from Lokesh to Shan. "He has to speak to us, tell us what happened."
"He might not know," Shan said. "Maybe it was seeing the dead boy that did this to him. He had built something around his Tibetan self. A Kazakh shell. And the shell was shattered, lost forever, when he saw the dead boy."
"An old shaman told me once of souls getting confused when death was close," Jakli said. "Getting mixed up, being lifted out, then going back to the wrong body."
"And whose soul does he have now? The killer's?"
"I don't know. I just know that he's not Bajys but he has the body of Bajys." Jakli sighed, then looked up into Shan's eyes. "And they will still kill him. You don't know the old clans. They have their own justice. The government won't help, even if someone asked. If the clans are convinced Bajys is the killer, they will punish him. When I was young two horse thieves were caught near our camp. They were hung from two limbs of the same tree. I went out looking for lambs and saw them. All purple and bloated." A visible shudder moved through her body.
"Who among Lau's friends were Tibetan?" Shan asked.
"No one," Jakli said. "Me, I'm the closest to being Tibetan. I've known her all these years and I've never seen her with a Tibetan except the dropka who watched the children, and they usually stayed away, bringing the children and then hiding until Lau was done."
"She was Kazakh," Shan said with a hint of skepticism, "with friends who were Han Chinese and Uighur. But she had no Tibetan friends. Even with the Tibetan herders wandering the hills below the Kunlun."
"Tibetans aren't given papers for Xinjiang. Very few are classified as natives here. They're treated-" She shrugged as if it was painful to finish the sentence and busied herself with the tea.
"Badly," Shan said, finishing the sentence for her.
Jakli nodded. "Speeches are given by the prosecutor, by Public Security officers. Tibetans are always the example of the uncooperative minority, of the reason why assimilation of the country has taken so long. In Yoktian, a friend showed me something on a computer, an image taken from phone lines. It was from somewhere outside China, and it was a film of a Chinese flag being burned. A Tibetan child appeared and lit it on fire. When it was ashes, the film repeated. Again and again."
"You mean Tibetan friends would have been politically dangerous to Lau."
She nodded again.
"Then why did she learn Tibetan?"
"I don't know. She knew lots of languages. Tadjik. The people's Mandarin. The Party's Mandarin. English."
"English? Why English?"
Jakli looked up as if surprised by the question. "This is China," she said with a small, chastizing smile. "People sit in closets and learn things." She looked up the mountainside. "Lau taught people what they needed. She sometimes taught about Buddha. But she also taught about Mohammed. If she had Han children in her zheli she would have taught them about Confucius and Lao Tze. That's what she did."
"No. In the cave, it was different."
"I don't think so. Why would you believe-"
"Because," Shan suggested, "she never took you there." His words brought a small, nearly silent moan from Jakli. He had seen many things in Jakli's eyes when she had entered the cave chamber and sat, stunned, on the student's cushion. Wonder. Confusion. Reverence. Sadness. But also pain. "You were a friend, and a student too. She taught you about Tibet and Buddhism. But she hid this place even from you."
"But you said there was someone else. Another teacher."
Shan nodded. "A friend who was Tibetan, who does not appear Tibetan. Who else came to this place?" The chamber had not been just for talking about Buddhism. It had been for teaching the Tibetan language and other things Tibetan. The things lost, or nearly lost, to the two generations born since the Chinese invasion.
Jakli looked for a long time into the fire. "There were herders sometimes, passing through. A crazy Xibo who watches the water. In his fifties maybe. They say he's a lunatic." The Xibo were a Manchurian people, uprooted from their homelands nearly three centuries before and sent west to fight the Muslims on behalf of the emperor.
"The water?"
"The Agricultural Council gives a small stipend to make sure key streams are kept open and not contaminated. Many of our streams only flow in the spring. Only a few are constant. So they have people, usually retired herders, who watch the water, keep dead animals out, clear fallen trees from it."
"Who else?"
"Her drivers. And people at the school in Yoktian may have visited here sometimes. Others from the Agricultural Council, maybe."
"Drivers?"
"Sometimes. She couldn't drive a car. So when she was on business for the Council, she used the vehicle pools."
"But not since then, not since she left the council?"
"Sometimes one of the drivers still helped. A Kazakh from the motor pool."
"Would he have known where she was the day she died or who she had been traveling with?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Do you know where he lives?"
"In town, probably. But now at Glory Camp."
"Glory Camp?"
"You heard Fat Mao. Prosecutor Xu stopped at the motor pool in Yoktian."
Shan studied Jakli. "She didn't pick you up. Even though you're a friend of Lau's. Because," he suggested, "the prosecutor knew exactly where you had been when Lau died." He paused and studied Jakli, who seemed to have little concern about being absent from her probation job. "Were you there, at your factory?"
Jakli grimaced and nodded, still staring at the fire. "I left for a day when we brought Lau to the cave. Then I left when I heard you were coming. It's mostly Kazakhs and Uighurs who work there. I have friends there. They cover for me. It's not strict. Not usually, as long as enough hats are being made."
"Prosecutor Xu saw you today. Does she know your face?"
She looked up at him with a frown, but before she could reply Jowa called from the trail. Bajys was emerging into the meadow, supported by Lokesh and Jowa. He seemed barely to have the strength to stand.
"Bajys will have to be protected," Shan said.
"There's a place deep in the Kunlun," Jakli said readily, as though she had been thinking the same thing. "A Tibetan place. Jowa must know about it."
Shan studied her. "You mean, a place where purbas hide?"
"A secret place."
"Are you one of them?" Shan asked abruptly, before the three men were in earshot.
"A purba? Tibet is their cause."
"But not yours?"
"I struggle for my people," Jakli said with a sigh. "For Kazakhs. For Tibet, when I can." She darted forward to help Bajys onto the porch, then took control with a matronly air, sending Shan for water, Jowa for firewood, and Lokesh for dried grass to make a pallet for the ragged, wasted little man.
Bajys sat limply, his eyes unfocused, as she pulled off his shirt, wiping his body with the cold river water. He seemed not to notice any of them.
They drank tea, sharing the two cups from the cabin, and waited until Bajys began to look about, as if finally recognizing where he was.
"It's me, Bajys," Jakli said in Tibetan. "From Akzu's camp."
He looked at her without expression.
"What happened, that night in the rocks?" Her voice was slow and tentative, as if it were not anger but fear she now felt. "Were you with the boys? We need to understand. Do you know that it wasn't Khitai?" Jakli asked.
"Where would he go?" Lokesh interjected. "Where would Khitai run to?" Bajys twisted his head one way, then the other, as he stared first at Jakli, then Lokesh. "I heard the shot. I saw him lying there, with his red cap, and ran. He's dead." The little Tibetan stared toward the door of the cabin, as if seeing someone there invisible to the others. "That was the one I loved," he said in a hollow voice. "That was the one I was to keep safe. He'll be dead again. But that was the one I knew."
Shan stared at him, trying to make sense of his strange words. "Why did you come here?" he asked. "When the boy died, you fled to Lau. Why?"
Bajys's gaze roamed around the campsite before he spoke again. "Sometimes it comes like this, like a dark cloud. And people just die. It can't be stopped." A rattling noise came from his lap. His hand with the beads was shaking.
"Wangtu knows," he said suddenly in a small, quivering voice. "Wangtu told me. Lau was being stalked, he said."
Jakli greeted the words with a frown. "Wangtu doesn't know," she said with abrupt annoyance. "He just talks."
Bajys looked at her and shook his head. "Wangtu knows," he said mournfully. "The world is ending." He seemed to be shrinking before their eyes, growing smaller, hollowing out. Shan had seen it before, even in brave men, and he shuddered to think of the ugliness that caused it. Bajys had gone from the horror of finding the dead boy to see the wise, gentle Lau and instead found human limbs scattered about, a place of terror and death.
"You know this Wangtu?" Shan asked Jakli.
Her frown returned. "I told you about him. Lau's driver. I knew him when I was young."
"That one at Glory Camp?"
"Not for long. She'll question him, he'll offer something unrelated, he'll be released."
"What do you mean?"
"Don't you understand? That's her game. Throw as many as she can in the camp, let them sweat. They can always think of somebody's sin."
"But for how long?" Shan asked. "When will he be released, so I can speak with him?" The prosecutor, he realized, may have deprived him of the only witnesses who could make sense of Lau's death.
"A week, maybe two."
"Too long."
She looked at him and sighed. "You want to get into Glory Camp? Go to town. Burn a copy of the Chairman's speeches in the square."
"I don't want a one-way ticket."
"No way to see him that doesn't involve going into the prison."
A tremor crept along Shan's arm. His right hand clamped over his left forearm, over the number he wore there, the number tattooed on his skin by his prisonkeepers in Tibet. Talk of a prison, even a low security lao jiao camp, seemed to cast a chill over the group. Shan moved closer to the fire.
A hawk screeched overhead. Red and gold leaves danced across the ground, scattered by the late afternoon wind.
"It wasn't supposed to be me at all," Bajys said suddenly, barely above a whisper. "The oldest son goes, that's the way it always was."
Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. There had been a Tibetan tradition of centuries, now shattered, like so much else touched by Beijing, that the oldest son of each family would be sent to train as a monk.
"I was just a dropka, I just wanted to stay with the herds. But my brother was back from a month at the gompa," Bajys said, his voice weak but steadier. "He was getting ready to return for six years of study. We were celebrating Losar, the new year festival, and saying goodbye by playing in the snow one last time. There was a place on the mountainside with a creek that became a long ice slide in the winter. We would sit with a sheepskin on the ice and slide, a hundred, two hundred yards, down to the flat ice where the river was. My brother slid down as I watched and laughed. But when he got to the bottom a black hole in the ice opened up. He shot into the hole and was gone. We never saw him again. No struggle. No body. Hardly a splash. At first I thought it was a good trick and I laughed. But it wasn't a trick. He was gone, laughing with me one second and gone the next. Like he never existed. Even before the Bardo, before the death rites were done, they cut my hair and sent me to the gompa in his place."
His face contorted with pain, Bajys looked into each of their faces, as though inviting any of them to explain it to him. But no one spoke. They sat silently watching the fire.
Shan studied his companions. He knew without asking that they had reached a common understanding. A killer had to be stopped. Khitai and the rest of the zheli had to be saved. The missing lama had to be found. But first Bajys would have to be taken to shelter by Lokesh, who could protect his soul, and by Jowa, who could protect his body. They would go deep into the mountains. And Shan would stay, because Shan had to go back to prison.