“But then those two men died.”

The man inhaled deeply on his cigarette, studying Shan. “A day after the murders I was on a high trail, walking along the top of a slope almost as steep as a cliff, when I saw two men above me, maybe three hundred yards higher up. I ducked into the shadows and didn’t think they noticed me. They were carrying heavy loads wrapped in cloth, on shoulder poles. One of them dropped something that rolled down the trail toward me. Round as a ball, in a burlap sack. It rolled almost to me before it fell off the trail and bounced into the gully far below. Some use twine to mark out their claims. I figured it was a ball of twine until it fell out of its sack. . ”

“But it wasn’t twine,” Shan said as he gently eased the man’s foot back into his boot, lacing it loosely. He lifted the man’s staff and began working on it with his pocketknife.

“It wasn’t anything I ever want to see again. It had been pounded by the rocks, as if someone had played soccer with it. I looked up and one of the men was studying me with binoculars. I leaped up and ran down the slope like some damned fool. That’s when I twisted my foot.”

“The head in the bag,” Shan said. “Young or old?”

“It’s not like I had time to study it. But I saw some gray hair.”

So two men had been involved in the killings, and they had cut the bodies up to dispose of them. “Where would you go, if you had something like that to get rid of?”

“Right about where they were. There’s a crack in the cliff that goes down deeper than anyone can see.”

“The cliff where a miner was chased away from his claim?”

The man thought for a moment. “Now that you mention it, yes, it was the same place.”

“Did you recognize the men?”

“They were too far away. But they had binoculars. They saw me.”

Shan kept whittling on the staff. “Were you here last year when a man was killed?”

“That’s over and done with.”

“What do you mean?”

“The son of a bitch was a claim jumper. We found claim sticks taken from four of us at his camp. No one was sorry to see him disappear. But it spooked us.”

“You mean because of the way he died?”

“Because he was found in front of one of those paintings of demons, the one of the blue bull, and there was fresh blood on the painting, as if the demon had come to life. Because his hands were cut off. But that’s ancient history. Captain Bing proved who the killer was and chased him off.”

It was Shan’s turn to look up the trail in alarm. “Captain? You mean the army was involved?”

The miner offered a sour grin. “Call it the miners’ militia. Bing discovered that the man’s own partner had killed the claim-jumping bastard. Later, the dead man took care of things.”

“The dead man?”

“We buried him in a shallow grave under a mound of heavy rocks. Two weeks later a skeleton appeared, draped over the grave. Some said the dead man rose up from the grave, that he was too angry to stay buried before obtaining vengeance. But then we saw the skeleton’s fingers.”

“The fingers?”

“One of them held his partner’s ring,” the man said with a shudder. “The skeleton was that of the dead man’s partner, who’d killed him. I saw it with my own eyes. The dead man did rise up and take revenge. No one goes near there anymore. We know better than to interfere with the business of the dead.”

“Where exactly is this no-man’s-land?”

“The grave is on a long black ridge that juts out to the west. About a mile north of Little Moscow.” The man saw the confusion on Shan’s face. “And if you don’t know about that already, you don’t want to know. They don’t take to strangers. Captain Bing organized things last year after those killings.”

Little Moscow. Captain Bing. The lonely mountain was becoming more crowded all the time.

“Don’t mess with Bing. He’ll chew you up and spit out your bones.”

“So at least one man was killed last year. And two men were murdered last week. Was there anyone else?”

“Why do you care?”

“I collect stories about the dead. Something I started in prison.”

The miner contemplated the point for a moment, glanced at his expertly bound ankle, and nodded. “A young miner, a newcomer barely out of his teens, was killed in front of a painting of a blue bull demon. The body disappeared so fast no one knows for certain what happened. Only one other miner saw it before it was carried away. Ugly business. He said at first he thought the boy was just lying down, smoking a cigar.”

“A cigar?”

“But when he came close he saw it was a small stick, jammed into the boy’s dead mouth. Not a claim stick. It had eyes carved into it. It scared everyone, because of all the other things that happen on this mountain.”

“You mean the skeletons.”

“Skeletons. Ghosts. Those damned paintings. People say this is where all the old demons come, to hide from the rest of the world, that the demons in the paintings come to life at night.”

Shan handed the man the staff he had been working on. He had cut off some of the stubs protruding from the juniper limb and turned the top joint into a smooth, curving cradle. The staff had become a crutch.

The man accepted it with an approving nod, then rummaged among the packs on the mule. “If you don’t take something it’ll jinx me.” He extracted a small blue nylon pouch tied with a drawstring, hesitated, then tossed it to Shan. “Take it. Not my kind of trinkets.” He avoided Shan’s gaze now, tending to his packs, talking soothingly to his animals. He seemed grateful to be rid of the little blue sack.

“After this fork in the trail,” Shan said, “the quickest way down is straight, past Drango. It is why your mule stopped here. It knows the way.”

“Not today,” the man said, with a wary glance in the direction of the village. “If you see that prick Chodron, give him a message,” the miner said as he rose. “Tell him I left his payment on the trail.” He hobbled away, using more of the grass to coax his mule onto the side trail.

Shan waited until the man was fifty yards away before sitting and emptying the sack onto the ground. In it was a small plastic thermometer with a ring by which it could be attached to a lanyard and a small stack of papers bound with a rubber band. Each was covered with little round discs with adhesive backing, in half a dozen colors. A small pencil sharpener. Three identical screwtop brown plastic containers. The first contained matches, the second a variety of medicinal tablets, and the third was apparently empty.

He laid his discoveries on a rock, studying them, trying to understand what he saw. At last he picked up the thermometer and read it. The degrees were marked in Fahrenheit, only in Fahrenheit. It had belonged to someone from America.

Nothing appeared to have changed when he entered the village. But when the guard at the stable door hesitantly lifted the bar for Shan something seemed to be blocking the door from the inside. “One moment,” he heard Lokesh say, and seconds later the door opened and his old friend motioned him inside. The stranger lay flat. Gendun, at his head, looked frail. The lama’s arm trembled where the electrodes had been attached. But Gendun was steadily murmuring his prayers. Dolma, nearby, worked a small wooden churn.

At the sound of the bar dropping into place Dolma stopped and Lokesh bent to a cluster of butter lamps he was using to heat a tin kettle. Dolma extended a hand and the stranger grasped it, pulling himself up as he fixed Shan with bright, intelligent eyes.

“Tashi delay,” Shan ventured, offering the traditional greeting.

“He doesn’t understand us,” Lokesh said. “He speaks one of the ancient tongues.”

“Ni hao,” Shan tried, switching to Chinese.

“Ya’atay,” the stranger said. It was neither Tibetan nor Chinese, nor any language Shan knew.