The turtle truck lurched across the desert like a small boat on a rough sea, rocking and pitching as it broke across the waves of sand. Jakli worked hard at the wheel, frequently adjusting the angle against the dunes, dodging patches of light-colored sand, always warping back in a northeasterly direction, toward the heart of the desert. She had stopped as she had left the road, looking at Shan with a grave expression. "The Taklamakan," she said, gesturing toward the endless expanse of sand. "It's an old word, from before the time of writing. Because so many people have died out here. It means once you go in, you never come out."
But Shan already felt mired in a place with no escape. The American was not his responsibility, he kept telling himself as he gazed at the desolate landscape, not his mystery to solve. He had Lau and Gendun and the dead boys and now the waterkeeper, and he had no room on his back for the dead American. It was only by some grim chance that he had stumbled upon the body. The American had nothing to do with Lau and Khitai. Perhaps his death was part of the strange game between the knobs and the prosecutor or even connected to Ko Yonghong, who had boasted about his American consultants. More likely, it was the work of the boot squads, who brought subversives from all over China to a place like Glory Camp. But still the death of the American hovered near like a dark shadow. He had begun to accept what the natives of the region kept telling him, that it was a shadow land, a forgotten place, a land between worlds, where people lived like ghosts in shadows and life was very cheap.
"You seem to see things I do not," Shan observed, uncertain whether it was anger or just a hard-edged alertness that had settled into Jakli's eyes. Even after she had agreed to take Shan to the place where Lau died, Fat Mao had argued against it, complaining that she had to return to the hat factory, that the place called Karachuk would be too dangerous for Shan. Fat Mao had returned them to the garage by then, where Akzu had been waiting, sharing a skin of kumiss with the surly mechanic. Akzu had pointed toward the high ranges and raised his voice. Finally, when Jakli had promised to return to the factory after delivering Shan to Karachuk, he had embraced his niece and knelt to pray facing west, toward the Muslim holy city.
"By rights, we should not be in the desert in a truck," she said after a moment. "Only with camels is it safe, and even then the inexperienced often die. But we have only a short distance, and this close to the mountains we can drive most of the way on the old river bed," she said as she guided the vehicle down a short bank of sand onto a wide, level channel of packed sand. "The key is to avoid the soft spots."
"If we don't?"
"The desert can swallow a truck as easily as a man or a camel." As if on cue a pile of white bleached bones appeared on the bank of the dead river. It contained a long skull and heavy ribs and was pointed in the direction of the snowcapped mountains. "It's always been this way, since the early Silk Road. Some people got wealthy from the passage. Some people just died."
After almost an hour Shan discerned a line of shadows on the horizon. Irregular and large, they seemed like misshaped buildings one moment, eroded rock formations the next. For a moment, from a distance, Shan believed that they were creatures bent under heavy loads.
At a curve in the riverbed Jakli accelerated and shot straight across the bank, directly toward the formations, then, half a mile away, turned ninety degrees to drive parallel to them toward the south. "The Silk Road," she said abruptly. "Do you know much of it?"
"The school texts," Shan said with a shrug.
His words brought a grimace to her face. "They will tell you it was a region of terrible class struggle, of great oppression, of temples for the worship of wealth built on the backs of slaves," she said, slowing the vehicle to steal a glance at the mysterious shapes. "Our history texts," she said, slowly shaking her head, "they are like studying beautiful paintings from the back of the canvas." She gestured toward the shapes. "The glorious Karachuk. Ignored by our teachers because it was not Chinese. But it is because of places like this that I have learned not to curse the Taklamakan. The very elements that make the desert so treacherous have preserved its treasures."
Jakli's expression grew lighter as she eased the truck toward a low, flat ridge. Following her gaze Shan saw an ancient wall. "Karachuk was an oasis on the southern arm of the Silk Road," she explained, "when the ice fields in the mountains still fed the river enough to keep it flowing all year. A major city once, praised for its fertility and hospitality in the ancient texts. Uighurs lived here, and Kazakhs and Tibetans. Life was so pleasant that many travelers lingered for months or years, even for the rest of their lives. The old writings spoke of it, but it was lost centuries ago in a grandfather sandstorm, a karaburan. Then ten years ago another storm came and the top of it was swept clean."
Shan could clearly see now that the shapes were the remains of man-made structures. A pressed earth wall the color of the sand rose in spots to a flat top and elsewhere had crumbled, revealing in its gaps small sand hummocks whose orderly placement suggested buildings. As Jakli crested the dune that extended south of the wall like a giant drift of snow, a huge form of distinctly human features greeted them. It was a statue of a reclining Buddha, twenty feet high at the shoulder, leaning on an elbow to face the southern mountains, toward Tibet. Most of its head was gone. Only the mouth, curved in a serene smile, remained above the neck.
"I had forgotten that the Buddhists were here," Shan said slowly. Buddhists. Perhaps he had begun to find a trail after all, a trail of hidden Buddhists. The Muslim boy who wore a rosary. The secret Tibetan classroom in Lau's cave. The waterkeeper in the rice camp. A headless Buddha in the desert.
"It was all Buddhist, for hundreds of miles north and east. Then Muslims came from the west and Chinese came from the east," Jakli explained. "I have read the journals of a traveler from the east," she continued after a moment. "Xuan Zang, his name was. He passed through the kingdom of Karachuk on a pilgrimage to India, as an envoy from your emperor. Twelve hundred years ago. The kingdom's census showed five thousand souls living here, in a luxury and peacefulness unknown in what was then China. Grapes hung from arbors above every doorway. Households had peach and pomegranate trees near the street, and the king ordered that a passerby had the right to pluck a ripe fruit for refreshment, but only one." Jakli looked in his direction with a wry smile. "Now that was enlightened communism."
She pointed toward the south, where the tops of the high ranges could be seen on the horizon. "But they owed everything to the ice fields in the mountains, which fed the rivers and irrigation channels that flowed here. Then the ice fields began to shrink. People began to move closer to the mountains as the water disappeared. By the time the sand storms came it was already mostly deserted. I remember when the the storm uncovered the city. People said it was the work of God, to remind us of who we are. Others said it was the work of the desert spirits, who were inviting us back."
There was one more dune, smaller, that ran diagonally along the southern end of the ruins, in front of a gap in the old walls near the Buddha. Jakli accelerated over the low mound. The front wheels of their vehicle left the sand, and with a heavy lurch they landed in the ghost city of Karachuk.
The ruins cast a spell over Shan the instant he climbed out of the truck. They were in a small courtyard surrounded by vague shapes of buildings constructed of baked mud bricks, their color and texture so much like the sand that the entire landscape was a patchwork of browns and grays. The twisted, desiccated remains of trees climbed out of the sand here and there. The top of an arch protruded from the desert thirty feet away.
Jakli began to walk toward an opening between the outer wall and the largest, most intact of the structures, a roofless rectangular building of stone blocks with high narrow window openings almost as high as the wall. A barracks perhaps, Shan thought. Short stumps as thick as his arm, baked rock-hard from the centuries of dry heat, poked out of the sand at regular intervals beside lower walls that might have been the ruins of personal dwellings. There once had been free peaches for the thirsty traveler.
As they passed the large stone structure Shan saw the remains of wood beams protruding in a row from the outer wall, supports for roofs long gone. At one of the ruins the walls remained high enough to hold the beams in their original position, giving an idea of how the street would have looked eight or nine centuries before. Shan cautiously stepped into the doorway. He started and leapt back at the sight of two large eyes staring at him. Jakli laughed, and he peered back inside to study the life-sized mural painted on the interior wall. Although cracked and disjointed where plaster had fallen away, he could plainly see the figure of a leopard feeding on a small brown animal. The colors had bleached away to mere tinted shadows, but the savage emotion of the cat's eyes seemed as vivid as the day when they had been painted centuries earlier.
As he backed away a sound came from nearby, the braying of an animal or perhaps just the wind playing with the ruins. After another hundred paces their path opened into a courtyard with several misshapen stone columns arranged in a circle. Jakli stopped and pointed at the columns. As he approached them he saw features in the wasted stone, a hand here, a graceful leg there. It had been a garden of statuary.
They climbed half a dozen stone steps from the ruined garden to the top of a small knoll, the highest point within the walls. The reclining Buddha dominated the scene behind them. The figure appeared so relaxed, so natural a part of the rolling landscape that it seemed at any moment the statue might stand and start walking toward the Kunlun. At the far end of the ruins, to the north, at least three hundred yards away, more ruined statuary stood in a line in the sand.
"Sentinels," Jakli explained as she pointed to them, "covering the northern approach. Stationed at the top of the city wall." She turned and gestured toward a shape closer to them, on the long, low dune that covered the western wall. The helmeted head of a warrior emerged from the sand. Beside it the top half of a hand protruded, held up as if in warning.
The sight brought an unexpected grin to Shan's face. He felt an odd peace in the presence of such ancient beauty and mystery. He had seen statues like these at other ruins in China and Tibet. But always before they had been pockmarked with bullets or scorched from explosives. The army had been fond of using such statues for target practice. Most ancient fortress walls had been brought down because they symbolized imperialism or could be used by rebels. The huge national libraries, some filled with manuscripts dating back over two thousand years, had been destroyed by the revolutionaries. Temples, not only in Tibet, had suffered the same fate. As a student Shan had been bused to one of the old imperial tombs to watch the Red Guard conduct a criminal trial for an ancient Ming emperor, disinterred from his tomb. The emperor had been convicted of a lengthy list of crimes against the people, and his body burned with the artifacts from the tomb.
But Karachuk had evaded the hand of Beijing by sleeping under the sands. Shan could have contemplated the scene for hours. He saw the same grin on Jakli's face and knew she felt it too. He realized that the things he enjoyed the most in life seemed to be those which had been forgotten, overlooked by modern Chinese society. The hidden monks of Tibet. The old Taoist texts taught by his father. The hand of an ancient warrior rising out of the sand.
They continued down the path, away from the wall, descending gradually toward a large bowl below a long, high outcropping of rock that defined the eastern boundary of the town. Shan paused to study the collection of buildings below the center of the outcropping, a dozen small structures which were in far better repair than the others. They were constructed of the same pressed earth and mud brick walls as the other structures, but their walls, though cracked, were still intact, and they had roofs, capped by grey, sun-baked tiles that had been covered with sand and pieces of rotten wood. Beyond the huts was a larger building consisting of a square end joined to a round domed structure, which also appeared to have survived the centuries without serious decay. Or perhaps, Shan considered, as he studied the structure, it and the smaller buildings had been artfully reconstructed to appear as ruins to the casual, or distant observer. Behind the domed building, in a corral consisting of three stone walls abutting the face of the outcropping, stood several long-haired horses of the short, sturdy breed that had once conveyed the soldiers of the khans across two continents. In front of the large structure Shan noticed a small ring of stone above which hung a tripod of weathered beams. A well.
Shan became aware of Jakli standing apart, gazing at him uncertainly. "I don't know what they will do. It's dangerous place, like Akzu said."
"But Lau died while visiting here?"
Jakli nodded.
"Meaning she had friends here. Like Wangtu said, people she trusted."
Jakli nodded again.
"If Lau had friends here, then I am not afraid," he said, hoping his voice did not betray his uncertainty.
She seemed about to answer when her head snapped up.
A man was walking away from the large building in an erratic, weaving motion toward the corral, as if drunk. They watched from the shadows as he quickly saddled one of the horses and trotted down a path that led through the north end of the ruins.
Jakli was still watching the man as Shan moved down the trail, past the huts to the plank door of the large building. The horses silently watched him. A faint scent of smoke hung in the air. He paused at the door, glancing at Jakli, who lingered on the hill, surveying the little village nervously, as if she had decided after all that it had indeed been a mistake to bring him here.
Suddenly the door exploded outward, propelled by the weight of a man who collided with Shan. The two men landed in a heap in the sand and the stranger seized Shan's throat in both hands and began to squeeze. Shan gasped feebly and tried to buck the man off. His assailant responded by releasing his throat and pounding Shan's chest with his small, hard fists as Shan twisted and turned, trying to escape.
"Thief!" the man shouted at Shan in a shrill voice.
Two more hands appeared, grabbing the man's shoulders as Shan slid away. Jakli held the man for only a moment, then he squirmed from her grip and crawled toward Shan, his eyes wild and murderous.
"Hoof!" Jakli screamed. "You have to stop!" She kicked the man's back, without effect, then kicked again, harder, knocking him prostrate on the sand.
The action brought the man to his senses. He pushed himself up on his hands, looked around with a blank expression, then slowly rolled over and sat up, gazing at Shan and Jakli in confusion.
"Ah, it's you," the man called Hoof said dully to Jakli, and his gaze drifted toward the door. "I didn't see you," he muttered. His confusion seeemed to fade, replaced by something that Shan thought might be disappointment.
Shan felt moisture on his hand where he had tried to push the man away. "You're bleeding," he gasped, suddenly afraid he might have injured the man.
The expression on the man's face as he looked at his wounded right shoulder was not alarm, but disgust. "Robbed, and stuck in the bargain," he groused in a high voice. "Nothing but bad joss here." He had a huge nose and pale skin, with spots on his cheeks that might have been freckles. His small features came to life as he sat and studied Shan. "No one wants you here," he said with an odd hint of hope in his voice.
"You should clean that cut," Shan said, exploring his pockets for something to help the man.
"You'll have to go before-" The man's warning was cut off by the appearance of a figure in the doorway, a tall man wearing a embroidered skullcap and a brilliant green shirt from which the sleeves had been torn. He held a glass, which he was wiping with a scrap of cloth.
"Damn you, Osman!" Hoof squealed. "Some dog's whore stole my pouch." As if having an afterthought he raised a hand, which was red with his blood. "And stabbed me. A man isn't safe!"
The man he had called Osman grunted, and his eyes lit as he saw Jakli. He raised his head with a broad smile, then noticed Shan. The smile disappeared. He threw the rag at Hoof and stepped back into the shadows.
"Sons of pigs!" Hoof cursed and threw the rag back at the door.
Shan tore a strip from his undershirt and tied it around the man's wound. As he did so the man's expression softened. "You'll need to leave. I could help you," the man said in a new, confiding tone. "I am called Hoof. I'm a good Tadjik. I know the desert. I have Chinese friends. I'll take you to town. You'll be safe in a town."
"He's safe where he is," Jakli said, stepping forward so that she towered over Hoof, who was still sprawled in the sand.
"Sure he is, sure he is, if he's with you." Hoof scuttled backward on all fours, crablike, out of Jakli's shadow, then leapt up and darted back into the building.
Shan looked after him. "His name is Hoof?" he asked Jakli.
She sighed, watching the doorway with worry in her eyes. "It's a way of some of the old herding clans. A baby is named after the first thing the mother sees on the morning after the birth." She motioned him toward her, as if to lead him away from the building.
But Shan followed Hoof inside.
At first it seemed he was entering a cavern. He stepped into an unlit corridor five paces long, with deeper shadows that hinted of alcoves on either side. In the dim light he studied the sand floor of the corridor as he moved down it, trying to understand what had just happened to the Tadjik. A stone wall faced him at the end of the hallway. A ghost wall. The hands that had constructed the structure had been guided by a geomancer, one of the shamans who were more important than any architect or carpenter in building even the simplest stable in the traditional kingdoms of northern Asia. Practicing his art of feng shui, a geomancer had long ago directed the placement of a wall facing the door, because evil spirits only flew in straight lines. The main entrance itself, Shan realized, opened to the south because those same spirits lived in the north.
The scent of lamp oil and and cinnamon hung in the air. He heard laughter and a loud voice telling a ribald joke in Mandarin.
At the wall he turned to the left, into a short corridor that ended in a small arched doorway. Shan stood in the arch and stared through a miasma of tobacco smoke into what appeared to be the public room of an inn. The chamber was illuminated by a dozen large candles and four kerosene lanterns, two of which were suspended from the wooden beams over a large table by loops of what looked like telephone cable. The table, which stood ten feet away, had been raised by piles of flat stones under its legs, so that it stood at the waist of the man who had briefly appeared in the doorway, the tall man called Osman. He was leaning on the makeshift bar beside a basket of dried figs, a stack of flat nan bread and a collection of bottles containing liquids, most in various shades of brown. Drinking glasses, many of them cracked and dirty, were stacked precariously at the edge of the table. Behind Osman a large shaggy grey dog lay on the floor, asleep.
A dozen men were scattered around the room, seated at several large wooden crates that functioned as makeshift tables. The wounded Hoof shared a bottle with another man at the table furthest from the door, holding his arm, scowling at Osman as he muttered something that made his companion laugh. A small, exquisitely carved table stood in the center of the room, unoccupied. On it stood an ornate chess set and beside it was a large, filthy, overstuffed chair that had the appearance of a pincushion from all the straw that had been jammed into the holes in its upholstery.
The clamor of voices abruptly ceased as he stepped into the room.
Shan was the only Han.
With the eyes of half the men fixed on him, Shan moved uncertainly to an upended box beside the bar. As he sat and reached for one of the figs, his observers turned away. The volume of conversation rose again. Two men rose to refill their glasses, giving the stuffed chair a wide berth. Shan saw that the sleeve of the bright red shirt worn by one of the men appeared empty, and he looked closer. The man was missing an arm below the elbow.
Through the smoke Shan studied a mural painted on the wall behind Osman. It contained figures with long faces and beards, the faces of Europeans or perhaps Persians. They were riding donkeys with heavy packs toward a man who awaited them under a grape arbor. One of the figures had its eyes scratched out, a familiar sight in the lands of the Muslims, whose holy law forbade images of humans. A nail had been driven into the plaster above the mural to support a small framed black and white photograph of a horse. In a niche beside a curtain that hung at the opposite end of the bar was a stone Buddha, badly cracked, into whose pursed lips a cigarette butt had been jammed. A hand-lettered sign hung on the wall above it, proclaiming This Bar is Nei Lou. On the wall past the curtain was suspended a white flag with a crescent moon and a single star.
"Do you have tea?" Shan asked.
"What you see is what you can have." The man called Osman held up a leather drinking bladder. "Kumiss," he said, then pointed with it toward the bottles. "Bai jin. Mao-tai. Beer. Vodka." He had a gravelly, impatient voice. "Two yuan."
"Two yuan?" Shan asked in disbelief. Two yuan would buy a meal for an entire family in many parts of China.
"Our special rate for eastern visitors."
"I'll just have water."
"Three yuan."
Shan felt someone at his shoulder. "Two teas, Osman," Jakli said.
The bartender frowned. "He's with you?"
"With me. A friend of Auntie Lau."
"He's here on your word?"
Jakli said nothing. She stared at him for a moment, then stepped to the wall and pulled the cigarette butt from the Buddha's mouth, throwing it to the floor. "Two teas."
Osman considered her silently, then leaned down and pulled a large black thermos from the floor. He filled two of his glasses with steaming black tea.
"Nikki?" Shan heard her ask in a quick, anxious tone as he surveyed the room. "I don't see his men."
The question seemed to put Osman at ease. "Not yet. Tomorrow, maybe. One last caravan. Soon, be sure of it." The tall Kazakh studied Jakli's face, which had suddenly clouded with worry. "He's fine, girl. You have my word. No one catches Nikki," he added with a smile that exposed a silver tooth. "No one but you." He poured another tea, then raised it to his own lips in a toast. "To dark nights and sleeping sentries," he said with a small grin.
Shan looked back at the one-armed man as he returned to his seat with his glass refilled. He had heard in prison about men escaping the gulag and chopping off their own arms above the tattoo to destroy the proof of their genealogy.
Jakli pushed her stool closer to Shan, as though to shield him, and they quietly drank their tea while Osman wiped glasses at the opposite end of the bar. As Shan surveyed the occupants she quietly explained the rules of the community. No one removed artifacts from the sand, unless they were to be kept and used at Karachuk. No one built anything that might appear like modern construction to aerial surveillance. No one built anything, period, without Osman's approval. No one burned wood from the ruins, for fear of telltale smoke, and for the need to preserve what was there. He asked about the flag. From the Republic of East Turkistan, Jakli explained, in which Osman's grandfather had served as a vice-governor in Yoktian.
"This is Osman's town, then?" Shan asked Jakli in a low voice, keeping his eyes on the man behind the bar.
"My ancestors lived here," Osman interjected loudly and stepped closer. "It's my right." His eyes locked with Shan's, as if he was waiting to be challenged, then after a long moment he turned to Jakli. "Where's Akzu?" he asked.
"With the Red Stone. The Poverty Eradication Scheme. Less than two weeks now."
Osman grimaced. "The bastards. I told him. Bring the clan here." He clasped his hand tightly around a bottle and for a moment he stared at it. "This is the way it ends," he said grimly, "with corporations and Chinese giving speeches." He looked back up at Jakli. "I told him, better yet, bring me Director Ko. We'll make him right at home." The men at the nearest table laughed and Osman acknowledged them with a thin smile, then turned back to Shan. "You have business with Nikki?" he asked in a voice that was filled with suspicion. "Something special to buy?"
"I came because of Auntie Lau," Shan said. "She was-" But he saw that Osman was not listening. The bartender had sensed something, a movement, a shadow nearby. He was slowly turning toward the curtains that hung at the far side of the bar, his hand moving under the table, as though reaching for something. The grey dog was on its feet suddenly, growling.
The room grew silent again as a whispered warning shot through the crowd and the occupants of the tables looked up anxiously at the rear curtain. A finger, a very large finger, appeared near the top of the curtain and slowly began to push it aside.
Osman instantly relaxed. He brought his hand back from under the table. Several of the men in the room gave a small cheer. A bald man wearing a fleece vest rose and made an exaggerated bow toward the curtain. Others raised their glasses over their heads. The dog shot forward, wagging its tail.
"Marco!" Jakli exclaimed with sudden joy and ran to the stranger's outstretched arms.
Shan would have been at a loss to describe the man who entered the room. Many might have simply used the words big and Western. But to call the bearded man big would have been like simply describing a bear as big. And certainly he had the face, the features, the build of a Westerner, but there was something in the man's countenance that was not of the West. His eyes were blue, but they roamed across the room with the same hard, wary intelligence Shan had seen in Akzu and some of the other men of the clans. His skin bore the same leathery creases Shan had seen on the clansmen. There was one obvious difference, however. The stranger's face carried lines around his eyes that said he was a man who often smiled.
"Comrades!" the man thundered in a boisterous, mocking tone as he released Jakli from his hug and pulled her with him toward the bar. "Your commissar has arrived! I am going to instruct you in good socialist thought! I am going to clamp your loins so you don't have children! I am going to ration your belches, your bottles, and breaths! I am going to register your lice and tax your horses' piss! And you'll crave every minute of it because it is all for the beloved People's Republic." He spoke in perfect Mandarin, and pronounced the last words like shots from a cannon. His audience laughed raucously.
A huge grin settled onto the face of the man Jakli had called Marco. He reached into the deep pockets of the massive overcoat he wore and produced two bottles of vodka with Cyrillic labels.
"But first we drink!" The bottles were corked. He produced an expensive Swiss army knife and opened its corkscrew.
Osman tossed him a glass. "What do we celebrate now, you old bear?"
"Sure we celebrate! Because I'm alive and you're alive! Because Jakli is so beautiful and Nikki is so bold. Because we've all beat the odds and seen another harvest season. Because I'm bringing enough vodka to the horse festival to stay drunk for a week!"
Every man, even the sulking Hoof and his companion, rose and converged on the bar as Marco filled their glasses. "To smugglers!" he toasted when all the glasses had an inch of vodka in them, "Wan sui!" His shout shook the lanterns. "Ten thousand years! Wan sui for all smugglers, the most honorable of all professions." He considered his glass a moment. "We don't pretend to obey rules we don't believe in," he declared with exaggerated solemnity. "And we always give people what they want." The men at the bar slapped the big man on the back and snorted with laughter as he taunted them with a pair of worn ivory dice.
At last his eyes came to rest on Shan. "Who's this ragged little thing, Jakli dear?" he asked, with a smile that had lost its light.
"He's come to help. About the killings."
Marco's nostrils flared. "God's breath, child!" he growled in a low voice. "Surely you didn't-"
"He's not from the government," Jakli interjected quickly. "He's from Tibet."
Marco frowned, then studied Shan with a cold gaze. "A hard place, Tibet," he said after a moment.
Shan nodded. "Especially for Tibetans."
Marco gave a bitter grin and a nod of acknowledgement. "Where in Tibet?"
"Mostly, the 404th People's Construction Brigade. At Lhadrung."
"Lao gai." Marco spat the words like a curse. He swallowed what remained in his glass, then stepped to Shan's side, gripped his forearm in his huge hand, pushed up his sleeve, and examined his tattoo.
He pressed it and stretched it, then nodded his approval, as though a connoisseur of such marks. "Before that?"
"Beijing"
Shan's announcement silenced every man within earshot.
The brawny man poured himself another shot of vodka but left it on the bar as he examined Shan more closely. "A silk robe!" he exclaimed with false warmth, referring to the mandarins who had run the empire during the dynasties. Amusement was in his voice but not in his eyes. He lifted his eyebrows in mock bewilderment. "Or perhaps a palace eunuch?" The men yelped with laughter.
"I am called Shan Tao Yun," Shan said quietly.
Marco raised his glass. "Welcome to the Karachuk Nationalities Palace, Comrade Shan," he said, referring to the gaping halls built in provincial capitals for the glory of the country's multiple cultures. Low snickers rose from the tables.
"You- you are a visitor as well, I see," Shan said awkwardly, still confused by the man's Western appearance.
Several of the men laughed again.
"By the spirit of the Great Helmsman, you offend me!" Marco boomed. "I am the best damned socialist in the land! If anyone ever gave me a passport, which they won't, it would be red. With a big yellow star and four small ones," he said, referring to the emblem of the Chinese state. "I am as stalwart a citizen as can be found in Xinjiang."
"That's not saying much," Shan offered. It was a dangerous game they were playing, especially because he did not understand the connection between Marco and Jakli, and how much her protection accounted for.
Marco's grin returned. "A silk robe with a sense of humor." He leaned toward the man behind the bar. "Must be true what they say, Osman," he said in a sober tone, his eyes twinkling. "The worker's paradise just keeps getting better and better." He shifted on his seat, causing his heavy wool tunic to fall open. Two objects became plainly visible to Shan. One was a heavy silver chain, attached to a large pocket watch. The other was the biggest pistol Shan had ever seen, a revolver that looked like it had been made in the nineteenth century.
"I didn't hear the rest of your name," Shan said to Marco.
The big man looked hard at Shan. He was clearly not accustomed to being pushed. "I am called many things. But I was baptized, Comrade," he said in a taunting tone. He seemed to enjoy the look of confusion that flashed across Shan's countenance.
"Yes, baptized. By an old priest who once gave communion to the Czar. My mother chose the name, for the many strange lands she expected me to see. Marco Polo Alexei Myagov. A member of one of our country's honored minorities. The most loyal white Chinese in the land."
An Eluosi. Shan had almost forgotten they existed. Most of the Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks eastward across the Pamir or Tian ranges eight decades earlier had moved on to Shanghai, then eventually emigrated to Europe or America. Some twenty or thirty thousand, however, had stayed in Turkistan, even when another generation of communists had annexed it as Xinjiang. He had heard once that visiting certain villages in the far north of Xinjiang was like paying a visit to Czarist Russia. A few thousand of the Eluosi were still scattered among the population of Xinjiang and had even been granted special privileges for hunting and fishing on the lands originally purchased by their forebears from local warlords. Otherwise, they were a people lost to the world.
"It's many a year, I wager, since anyone has visited Karachuk from Chambaluc," Marco observed, using a name for Beijing Shan had not heard since he was a boy, the name given to the city during the Yuan dynasty, when the khans, linked by blood to the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang, controlled all of China. It was, Shan realized, the name many of the original inhabitants of Karachuk would have used. Marco's voice was warmer but his eyes remained suspicious. "What did you do there, before you earned your tattoo?"
"I was with the Ministry of Economy," Shan said self-consciously. "An inspector."
"But you inspected the wrong people."
"Apparently."
Marco's laugh was too large for the room. It rattled the stacked glasses. He poured himself another vodka and gestured toward Shan's still untouched glass.
"Well, Comrade Inspector, here we're all just faceless members of the glorious proletariat. Gan bei," he toasted, and drained his glass.
Shan stared at his glass, then lifted it under his nose. It was the closest he would knowingly get to tasting the hard liquor. It was not because it would violate the vows of the monks, which he had not taken, but because somehow it felt as though it would violate his teachers who still sat behind prison wire in Lhadrung.
Marco surveyed the room as he drank. Suddenly his glass stopped halfway to his mouth and he spat a curse, then sprang to the chess table in two long strides. He let out a second sound that was not a word, but a roar. "She's gone!" he barked.
Osman trotted to the table. "Impossible. Your empress was there last night. I was sitting here, thinking about my next move."
Marco's head swayed like that of an angry bull as he surveyed the room. "Osman and I have played this game for six months," the Eluosi declared loudly, to no one in particular. "In the winter, I sometimes bring food and fuel and stay for a week, at this table."
Shan stepped to his side. The game pieces were of ancient bronze. One army was red, one green, identified by small rubies and emeralds inlaid on the head of each figure. The stones were heavily scratched. Shan did not have to be told that the figures had been dug out of the desert sand.
"My empress!" Marco bellowed again. Shan saw that the ruby-capped counterpart to the green queen on Osman's side of the board was missing.
Osman leaned toward Marco's ear and spoke quietly, nodding toward Hoof.
"Mother of Christ!" Marco exploded as Shan retreated toward Jakli. "Two thefts! You swine!" he shouted at the general population of the room. "Lau's body barely cold, and now this! I won't have it. I should kick every man jack one of you to whatever hell you believe in. We have honor here. Shepherds. Caravan men. Smugglers. We treat you like brothers and sons. Where in hell do you think you are? Urumqi? Yoktian?"
"That Xibo from Kashgar was here," Osman offered anxiously. "Just released from detention. Probably it was him. Nobody followed Hoof out. But the Xibo left five minutes before Hoof. Probably took the queen, then jumped Hoof for his pouch. Miles away by now."
"The thief is still here," Shan said, very quietly.
Marco did not seem to hear him. He moved to the bar and took a deep drink directly from his bottle, then turned to Shan as he wiped drops of vodka from his beard with his sleeve. "Again."
"I believe the man who did this is still here," Shan said in the same low, self-conscious voice.
Marco stared at him in brooding silence. "An inspector, you said. So just like that, the inspector knows who the criminal is." He looked out over the men in the room. "This isn't Beijing, you know. People are not simply guilty by decree here."
"It's just a matter of understanding the facts," Shan offered. "When the facts are properly understood, justice may find a way."
"Justice?" Marco asked incredulously, his thick brows rising. "Did you say justice?"
Shan looked at Jakli, hoping for help. But she was staring nervously at Marco.
"Here is a strange creature for you, Osman," Marco said, his voice as sharp as a razor. "A silk robe who worries about justice." He put his hand around the nearly empty bottle and turned to the tables. "Gentlemen of the court! We have an entertainment. The renowned detective Shan Tao Yun from the court of Chambaluc is about to show us astounding feats of reasoning and deduction! No doubt he is a descendant of the great Judge Dee, magistrate of the Tang dynasty," he barked out, referring to the legendary investigator whose exploits had been the subject of folktales for centuries.
Marco whispered to Osman, who retrieved a long club of black wood from the corner behind the bar, then stood by the corridor to the front door.
"But I can't-" Shan protested, thinking of making a dash for the door himself.
"More crime has been committed among our own," Marco spoke in a tone that told everyone that the joking was finished. "As if what happened to our Lau wasn't enough. There will be an end to it," he vowed with a sound like a snarl.
Shan realized that he was not being offered a choice. He stepped back to the bar, his eyes on the little Buddha. "I would like," he said in a tentative, uneasy voice, "another cup of tea."
Osman smiled, as though pleased with Shan's discomfort, then stepped away from his post by the door long enough to pour the tea.
"I don't wish that anyone be hurt," Shan said after a sip from the cup. This was Turkistan, he reminded himself, where retribution was always a few steps ahead of forgiveness.
Marco merely stared at him.
Shan sighed. "Something happened in here a few minutes before I arrived. An alarm. A signal. A new arrival, perhaps."
"Nothing," Osman said in an impatient tone.
"Sophie," the bald man in the fleece vest called out. "I said I heard Sophie coming."
Marco raised his eyebrows toward Osman.
"True enough," Osman said. "But no one else heard anything. We didn't expect you."
Shan looked at Marco. There was someone else with the Eluosi, someone with the improbable name of Sophie. "The possibility that you were coming scared Hoof," he said.
"Because?" Marco asked.
Shan replayed the events in his mind. Hoof had not simply been trying to flee. He had been wounded and then had lied, trying to blame Shan, and then had given up when he saw Jakli. Shan had not understood the disappointment on the Tadjik's face. "Perhaps because he had taken something. Because he had to lose it, or hide it now that you were coming. He only had a few moments."
Hoof had stood and was inching closer, his compnion behind him. "I've ridden with Nikki," the little Tadjik blurted out. "I have groomed your animals. This Han insults me. He hates our kind."
Marco silenced him with a raised hand, then turned back to Shan.
"All right, tai tai," Marco said. Tai tai, esteemed one, was a form of address reserved for the most venerable of the mandarins.
"Where does Hoof wear the missing pouch?" Shan asked Osman. Hoof retreated to stand with his back against the wall, looking toward his companion, who seemed to be edging away, back toward their table.
"It was big," Osman answered, "it hung from his belt. His left side."
Shan nodded. "Perhaps this is what happened. Hoof had the empress in his pouch. When Marco was coming he had to be rid of it, because Marco of all people would notice it gone. Get rid of it but not get rid of it. Hide it, so he could get it later. He cut off the pouch and hid it in the corridor. Through the opening in the door he saw me, a Han, coming. Thinking he could blame it on me, he cut himself and threw himself on me as I opened the door."
"Someone could have been waiting with a knife in the corridor," Marco suggested. "The Xibo."
"Exactly," Hoof said eagerly. "He stood in front of me, he rushed me." His eyes did not move from Marco.
Shan shook his head. "That floor in the corridor had half an inch of sand," he observed. "It would have left signs of a struggle. But look at it, you won't see any. And he blew out the flames on the oil lamps as he went down the corridor, to make it appear an ambush had been set. The lamps had just been extinguished when I entered. I could smell the oil."
"True," Osman added. "They were dark when I went out to see who was shouting."
"But surely he wouldn't cut himself," Marco countered.
"Not a bad cut, just enough for blood to show," Shan said and saw that Marco was not convinced. "This is how it happened. The cut was on his upper right arm. A thief's knife would have been low and to Hoof's left, to cut away the strap of the pouch, not high and to the right. Hoof held the knife in his left hand and cut his own right arm. I was watching everyone drink. Hoof is the only man in this room who is left-handed."
Osman nodded. "Bad upbringing. A good Muslim is always trained to use his right hand."
"So what?" Marco asked.
Shan extended the index and middle fingers of his left hand like a blade and made a chopping motion on his upper arm. "He cut himself like this. A thief would have swung low, cut his belly on the same thrust maybe, but not the upper arm." Shan shrugged, and looked toward the shadows of the front corridor. "There must be shelves in there or niches for the oil lamps."
Osman nodded, pulled a lantern from its hook, and led them into the corridor. The original builders had provided four deep concave shelves for lamps. The first two niches were nearly obscured by cobwebs behind the lamp. At the third the webs had been recently broken. Marco reached in and pulled out a pouch. Making a small, angry growling noise, he marched back into the room and snapped out Hoof's name.
The Tadjik stood with his back to the wall, alone, abandoned by his friend. Marco held the pouch by the man's nose for a moment, then reached into it and pulled out the emerald queen.
Hoof's hands began to tremble.
Marco upended the pouch on the bar and out tumbled two large round objects, both the same size, each wrapped in white paper. Marco shook one and an apple fell out. "You stole from me," Marco growled as he extended the queen toward the Tadjik. "You stole at Karachuk. You stole when we were still mourning our lost aunt."
Hoof looked back at his companion, who stared at him stonily.
"Say it," Marco boomed. "Say you stole."
"I st- stole," the Tadjik murmured.
"Why?"
"Last year, you hit me. I was unconscious for an hour. My head hurt for a month."
"You insulted my camel," Marco shot back.
No one laughed.
Shan picked up the second round object. He pulled on the edge of the paper and a ball rolled out, a three-inch white leather ball joined by heavy reddish seams. Although Shan had never seen such a ball before, it looked vaguely familiar. He stared after it as Osman picked it up, shaking his head at Hoof, and placed it on top of one of the glasses, then tossed the crumpled paper into a basket that was nearly filled with empty bottles.
The men in the room began moving out, trying to look inconspicuous, their heads turned away as though they had seen something in Marco's face and were scared of it. Only six remained by the time Marco noticed. "No!" he called out. "Stay and witness!"
The big Eluosi pointed to the floor in front of the bar and Hoof stepped forward, cowering, his arms half raised as if he expected to be struck. "Here is what you will do, Hoof the thief," Marco announced as he paced around the Tadjik. "The uncle of Osman, he has a camp near the Wild Bear Mountain, at the ford of Fragile Water Creek. You will go there. You will tell them my words. They lost a son to fever this spring. They are outside the county, not in the Poverty Scheme. Which means they are going to winter camp soon. They will need help to gather fodder, to milk the goats. If you leave before they take the herds to spring pasture, I will know it. We will all know it, we will understand that you are indeed someone without honor. And then you will have no protection. Do you understand?"
Hoof lowered his arms and nodded slowly, then more vigorously, as though grateful for Marco's mercy.
Shan stared in confusion. Marco had just sentenced the man as surely as if he had been in a courtroom before armed guards.
At the corridor Osman spoke with Hoof's companion, who grimly nodded and escorted his friend out of the building. Shan stared at the empty doorway. It had been foolish, what the Tadjik had done, almost unbelievably foolish, as though perhaps he had had another motive they had not seen. He picked up the ball and tossed it from hand to hand, until he noticed that it had words imprinted in English. "Made in America," he said to Jakli, translating to Mandarin. He used the traditional Chinese words for America: Mei Guo, Beautiful Country.
"Beautiful ball for a beautiful country," a deep voice said from behind him, in English. Shan turned with a start to see a tall man in his mid-forties, with sandy-colored hair turning to grey. A pair of bright blue eyes stared at Shan from behind gold wire-rimmed glasses. The man raised an oversized leather glove in his left hand, punched his right fist into it, and opened the glove toward Shan. "That would be mine," he said, his eyes full of challenge.
Shan weighed the ball once more, remembering at last what it was, then tossed it into the glove. "Baseball," he said in English, in an awkward rhythm. The last time he had pronounced the word out loud had been with his father, over thirty years before. He returned the stranger's steady stare. "You're American," he added, as an observation, not a question.
"Dammit, Deacon," Marco muttered. "You don't know him."
"He's with Jakli," the man said. "That's good enough."
Meaning what? Shan wondered. That the American was usually hidden from strangers. But also that Jakli had a much closer connection to the two strange men than he had thought. Shan studied the man named Deacon. There had been another American hidden away, inside a burlap death shroud.
"Jacob Deacon," the American announced, extending his hand to Shan. "Just Deacon will do. You're a friend of Nikki's?"
Shan returned the handshake uncertainly, looking at Jakli.
"A friend of some Tibetan priests," Jakli said.
"Okay," Deacon said with a small smile. "I believe in Tibetan priests too." He looked at Marco. "How about you?"
The Eluosi frowned. "I've known priests and mullahs. And I've known commissars. Commissars are easier to deal with."
Deacon laughed and pounded Marco on the shoulder, then pulled a bottle of water from a carton behind the bar. He poured a glass for Shan, then one for himself. "The real thing. And it's free." Shan studied the man. Had he been listening from the rear corridor the entire time?
"When is Nikki coming?" The question burst from Jakli with a sudden energy that caused Shan to look back at her.
"Caravans are unpredictable." Marco shrugged. "Maybe he decided to hole up in Ladakh for a few days because of patrols." He placed one of his paw-like hands on top of Jakli's head for a moment, the way a father might touch a daughter. "He'll bring you something bright and shiny. Or maybe something soft and flimsy."
Jakli's face flushed and she good-naturedly batted Marco's hand away, then quickly grew serious again. "Shan needs to know about Auntie Lau. Two of the children have died now too." Osman cursed. Marco raised his head with a growling sound, suddenly very sober, as Jakli explained about Suwan and Alta. "Shan thinks it started with Lau. He needs to know who might want to kill her. What happened before she died."
"A good woman," Marco said solemnly. "A bad death."
"Why would someone do this to an innocent woman?" Shan ventured.
"Innocent?" Marco asked. "That's more than I know."
"You don't consider her innocent?"
"Of course not. Are you? I sure as hell am not. Osman's not. My camel's not. They've proven Jakli's not innocent, three times over." The words brought a bitter smile to Jakli's face. Marco looked over to Osman. "Ever meet an innocent person, old friend? I haven't. Hell, Osman's got a niece six months old, still at her mother's breast. She's not innocent. She's Kazakh."
"You're saying Lau was killed because she was Kazakh?" Shan asked.
"No. But maybe in the end that's what it was. What being Kazkah made her do. The bastards."
"What bastards?"
Marco poured the remains of the vodka into a glass. "Just bastards in general," he muttered.
Shan turned toward the rear corridor. The American was gone. He felt Marco's gaze.
"You'd be wise to be gone yourself," the Eluosi observed in a dangerous tone, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "It's a bad place to be asking questions."
"If you would talk with him," Jakli suggested, "maybe he wouldn't have to ask so many."
Marco sighed. He stepped behind the bar and retrieved three of the flat nan breads. He tossed one to each of them, then mounted a stool and chewed meditatively on the third as Osman collected glasses from the tables. "It was just before Nikki took the last caravan out," Marco said. "We had to pick up some men. Lau rode in that evening, all excited about something."
"Alone?" Shan asked.
"Alone. Her horse was so exhausted we were scared it would die. Osman stayed with it, rubbing it, walking it, making sure it was copied down before drinking."
"Who did she speak with?"
"No one. Everyone." Marco stared at his crust as he spoke, then looked up with a new sadness in his eyes. "They say she was a healer, but many didn't understand the most important thing she did, the most important healing." He paused to bite off a piece and chew. "There's a little brown mouse in the desert," he said in a contemplative tone. "It collects things, like a pack rat. But where the mouse lives is so harsh that it usually just collects thorns and sharp pieces of crystal and small dried dead things. Lau was like that, with people's troubles. People would tell her their nightmares, their painful memories, their fears, and they would feel better, like she had taken them away, collected them inside herself, so they could heal."
"You're saying people confessed things to her?"
Jakli nodded. "It's true. I keep wondering. What if someone told her something, a secret she wasn't supposed to know? What if they changed their mind later and decided she had to be silenced? People get drunk and talk. She had a way of getting people to talk."
"No," Marco disagreed. "You didn't see her that night. The way her legs were beaten. If you want to stop her from spreading your secret, you just shoot her. If you want to pry out someone else's secret, you beat her first."
Shan took a bite of his bread and looked up. "You mean, you saw her."
Marco stared at his piece of bread. "I mean I found her. Nikki and I. Nikki first, at the quiet place she liked to go to. Only she and Jakli were the ones who usually go." He glanced at Jakli. "Nikki missed you. I think he went there because it reminded him of you. But when he went inside he found her tied to the old statue. He came and got me, with tears in his eyes." The big Eluosi looked down into his hands. "His mother taught him that, that sometimes it is all right to cry." Marco raised his eyes to Jakli, who seemed to be fighting back her own tears.
"I used to see it a lot, when the Red Guard were roaming the land," Marco said with a bitter tone. "They would break bones in the feet with a hammer. If you do it just so, it makes the skin agonize to the touch. Then they hit the feet and shins with a stick. Doesn't take much force to create a lot of pain. Sometimes they just used chopsticks, snap the skin with chopsticks. Do one foot, start with the second if they still don't talk. Afterward, you would see them on the street. The knobs would laugh and call them drunken foot, because they couldn't walk in a straight line anymore. The ones that held out, they did both feet. No one did much walking after that. Her killer, I don't think he intended that she leave the room, no matter what she told him."
Jakli tore away with a sob and ran out the back passageway, followed a moment later by Osman.
"Maybe she didn't talk," Marco suggested. "She was a tough one." He poured them both some tea.
"She talked," Shan said, and told Marco about the bruise on her arm, the place where a syringe had been inserted.
Marco sighed heavily. "What's the point of beating her, then?" he asked into his glass.
Shan looked up into Marco's eyes and knew he didn't have to explain. The injection meant that the killer was someone experienced in interrogation technique. Those who were hardened to it sometimes developed appetites for watching people in pain.
Marco was silent a long time. "We would have seen a knob or a soldier," he said in a low, angry tone.
"Not if he was well trained. Or if he was disguised," Shan suggested, and related what Prosecutor Xu had said to him at Glory Camp, how she had mistaken him for a knob agent.
"God's breath," Marco said, and shifted in his seat to face the empty tables, as if trying to fix in his mind each of the faces of the men who had occupied them. "It's a bad time."
Shan watched the brooding Eluosi. A bad time just because of the treachery, he wondered, or bad timing for the treachery, because of something else?
"Why here?" Shan asked. "You were here. A few others. This settlement here, it's not a big place, not easy to hide in. I think the killer took a big risk, killing Lau here. But he had to, because suddenly it was urgent. He couldn't wait."
"Nothing's changed."
"Not yet," Shan said and saw Marco clench his jaw. "What if the secret she died for was your secret?"
Marco drained his tea in one long gulp and fixed Shan with a stare. "You should go home, Comrade Inspector. I will get the bastards."
"You sound as if you know who did it."
"Not yet. But it's what I do. I get bastards." He spoke in a stark, haunting tone, as if it were a threat against the entire world, including Shan. "My hobby," he said with a thin smile. "I remember. I watch. I make sure others don't forget."
Shan considered Marco. A forgotten man of a forgotten people, without legal travel papers, without hope of ever getting legal papers. Not unlike Shan. Maybe that was all that Shan was about too, about getting the bastards, whomever they were. He recalled what Marco had done to Hoof. He had gotten the bastard.
Marco suddenly appeared very tired. He stretched and lifted his heavy frame from the stool, then moved to the center of the room and collapsed into the overstuffed chair. He shut his eyes and quickly drifted into the deep slow breathing of slumber.
Shan sat silently, trying to make sense of Lau's killing, trying to keep at bay the question that lingered constantly at the edge of his consciousness, the question of Gendun and his safety. From the basket he retrieved the paper that had been wrapped around the ball, flattened it, and sketched on its clean back a rough map of Karachuk, to have a context for the location of Lau's killing, to fix the spot when Jakli finally showed it to him. Lau had not died in this room, or in the nearby huts. He remembered Bajys' words. He had gone to the place of sands to find her, to the lhakang there, the sanctuary place, which, Shan knew, must be the quiet place Marco referred to, the place where Lau's body had been found. But he had been too late. He hadn't found her in Karachuk. He had only found pieces of bodies. She had died tied to a statue in the quiet place, Marco had said. Shan sat on the floor by the bar, in the cross-legged lotus style, contemplating his map, then finally rose and moved out the rear corridor.
The passage led down a curving hall to a small plank door that opened to the east, at the back of the makeshift community, onto a sandy swath, across which stood the rock outcropping that defined the eastern boundary of the ancient city. The sun was low in the sky. A cool breeze was blowing. There was no sign of life, except in the corral, where the horses had been joined by half a dozen camels, including one huge silver creature that seemed to study Shan as he moved.
Shan climbed halfway up the rock, stopping when he was just above the domed building. He sat and leaned against the warm rock, drained mentally and physically. Someone had tortured a woman here, a healer and a teacher. She had been killed for a secret, but in order to find her, her killer had penetrated another secret, the secret of Karachuk. Because she had not been just a healer and a teacher. Lau had lived in many worlds, it seemed, just as Shan had traveled through many worlds to arrive here, at this ghost city in the desert where the gentle Lau had met her violent end.
He pulled out the paper he had taken from the dead American and studied the strange combination of letters. FBP the first line said. Could it be a code for numbers, with F meaning six, for the sixth letter of the English alphabet? He quickly calculated that FBP would mean six, two, and sixteen. Meaning what? An address? A phone extension? Or were the letters geographic abbreviations? FBP could mean Frankfurt, Beijing, and Paris, or a thousand similar combinations. He sighed and took comfort from the knowledge that the paper wasn't for him, not part of the mystery he was meant to solve.
His eyes fluttered with drowsiness. For a moment he saw Karachuk the way it had been, smelled the spices brought by the caravans, heard the creaking of well ropes, the laughter of youths dead all these centuries. It was still an oasis after so many years, it still attracted refugees from a harsh world outside. Perhaps the very fact that its current inhabitants were outcasts from politics and technology meant that they were much like the original citizens of the town. A dog barked from somewhere, whether from his dreams of the past or from the present he could not tell. The wind blew a sheet of sand around the shoulders of one of the stone sentinels on the distant wall, making it appear as though it were wearing a cape that flapped in the wind.
A small sad smile rose on Shan's face as he looked out over the ruins and contemplated not the mystery of Lau's death, but the mystery of life. He closed his eyes and let the timelessness of the place seep through him. A fragrance of spice wafted through his imagined caravan city, like the ginger he always smelled in those rare, perfect moments when he was able to conjure up a vision of his father. But when he opened his eyes to a dusk sky streaked with vermillion, the smell was so pungent that he stood to look for its source. It wasn't spice, he realized after a moment, but incense, and he followed the trail of the scent toward the top of the rocks.
The outcropping was wider than he had thought, easily a hundred feet across at the top, and in a shadow near the center he discovered steps that descended into a cleft in the rock. He followed the carved steps, worn smooth and hollow by centuries of use, and as he descended he heard a woman crying.