The understated energy in the authoritative voice at the other end disturbed Shan as much as the ice in Chodron’s eyes. It was, unmistakably, the voice of the Public Security Bureau. “Lhasa has been assigned a quota,” the man said. “Major Ren is coming soon.”

Shan did not miss Chodron’s reaction at the mention of the officer. “How soon?” the headman asked.

“Not for a few days. Let me arrange a helicopter today and I can offer the cultists to him. We like to feed our jackals well when they go hunting.”

Chodron smiled as he covered the microphone with his hand. “Your lama stays with me,” he told Shan. “You report to me what you find, only me. If you go up the mountain and don’t report back within, say, three days I will give him up to Public Security. Try to get Gao involved and he goes to Public Security. Embarrass me in front of my village again and he goes to Public Security.”

Shan looked down at the floor. “If you hurt him-”

“You’ll what, prisoner?” Chodron hissed. “Send a letter to the Party chairman? The lama is mine. And the stranger remains in the stable with him.” Chodron lifted his hand and laughed into the microphone. “Slow down, comrade. I don’t have them in custody yet. We don’t want to spook them into hiding. I know how to smoke out such creatures. Leave them to me.”

“Watch your back,” the officer replied. “Those old ones can turn themselves into dragons.”

The grin on the headman’s face as he shut off the receiver revealed a row of uneven teeth. “Major Ren. Biggest shark in our sea full of sharks. He’s not as subtle as I am. If I use one battery for tamzing, he uses three. Where I might hit you with a baton while you stand, he would first strap you to a table and then use a lead pipe. Perhaps you are acquainted with the type.”

When Shan did not reply Chodron grinned again. As he gestured Shan toward the door a woman outside shouted in alarm, and someone else uttered an anguished cry. Shan ran. Chodron reached the villagers gathered at the base of the sloping fields half a step behind him.

A man was being carried by two of the shepherds. Or what was left of a man. The body was strung from a pole, suspended like fresh game. The two men seemed weary beyond words as they reached the village, but few words were needed. The corpse was that of a farmer. His left temple was soft and pulpy. It had been crushed by a violent blow.

A woman collapsed over the body, sobbing.

“Murdered!” shouted another, fixing Chodron with an angry gaze.

“Another murder!” The fearful cry swept through the crowd.

Several of the villagers, Shan realized, were looking at him. As he stepped forward the crowd wordlessly parted. He knelt as the weeping woman was pulled away from the corpse, quickly examining the man’s pupils, touching the spongy flesh around the wound, confirming that the hands were intact, noting the discoloration on the man’s fingertips, then checking his clothes, pausing for a moment over his strangely misshapen belt buckle. Even Chodron stood silently by as Shan unbuttoned the man’s shirt to look at his skin. A dim red pattern showed on the skin of his left shoulder. One of the farmers helped Shan ease the man onto a blanket that had been spread at his side.

“Ay yi!” came a frightened cry as Shan pulled away the shirt, exposing the man’s back. The pattern continued from the shoulder down the dead man’s back. It was as if a long red fern leaf had been etched onto his skin, radiating upward from the spine just below his heart.

“The gods!” came another alarmed cry as the villagers shrank away. “The deities have touched him!”

“The gods took him!” moaned an old woman. Several villagers murmured nervous agreement.

“Get the lama!” a forlorn voice called.

But the young shepherd who broke away in the direction of the stable was seized and shoved to the ground before he could get very far. “Murder!” shouted Chodron as he stood over the man. “Anyone can see it’s murder,” declared the headman in a loud voice. “Another hammer blow to the skull.” A hesitant expression twisted his face a moment later. He glared at Shan. Chodron recognized his dilemma. The headman could not tolerate the suggestion that a god had marked the man but if, as he had just declared, someone had murdered him with a hammer, the killer could not have been Hostene. The headman barked out orders for the body to be taken to the victim’s home, then summoned Shan to the shadow of the nearest granary.

It took three hours for them-Shan, Yangke, and Hostene-to reach Hostene’s campsite. Although Yangke was carrying a pack containing food for three days, he leaped over rocks, apparently feeling only a slender connection to gravity now that he had been freed of his imprisoning beam. Hostene, having eaten a huge meal in Dolma’s house, likewise seemed a new man. He often paused to ask Yangke questions about why certain boulders were painted red or why mani stones had been left beside one boulder and not another. He stood attentively as Yangke drew in the dirt the bizarre image that had appeared on the dead farmer’s back. When Hostene suggested that it must have been some kind of decoration painted on the man’s body, Yangke insisted it was exactly as he had drawn it, the perfect image of a fern leaf etched into the man’s skin like a tattoo, where no mark had existed the day before. The two men looked at Shan as if for an answer, but Shan kept on walking up the trail.

Lokesh had had his own theory when Yangke had described the mark in the stable. He thought the image was of the spire of a chorten, a sacred reliquary shrine. Shan had not replied, only held Gendun’s hand a moment, for the old abbot had grown faint again.

“See that he eats,” Shan had said. The memory of the lies he had been forced to tell in front of his friends was like an open wound.

“Dolma will do that. I am going with you,” Lokesh had replied.

“No. You must not.” Shan could not recall ever before arguing with his friend but he was not going to expose him to the dangers on the mountain. He knew from experience to trust the deep feeling of foreboding that had been rising within him. “You must stay to help Gendun.”

“You are mistaken, Shan,” Lokesh had said. It was as if the mountain itself were coming between them. “You don’t understand this mountain. Dolma says its deity has been growing weaker and weaker. What you intend could kill it.”

It was the blackest thing the gentle old man had ever said to him. From the way the words had been uttered it seemed they tortured Lokesh’s soul.

Shan did not know how to reply. They were speaking of things for which words were useless. It was possible that Lokesh knew something of Shan’s intentions that he himself did not know. There might have been things about the mountain that Lokesh and Gendun could not explain to him. But there were certainly things Shan had seen on it that they could never grasp, and if the old Tibetans did touch them they would be like moths to a flame. They had sat silently as Hostene had readied himself. Then, leaving Lokesh gazing into Gendun’s nearly unconscious face, Shan had left the stable and barred the door.

DURING THE SECOND half of their trek, Shan and Hostene, aided by a new staff cut for him by Yangke, walked side by side. Shan pieced together the journey Hostene and his niece had made to Sleeping Dragon Mountain. They had landed in Beijing a month earlier, where they were joined by Professor Ma, who had been a colleague of Abigail’s when she had done a six-month exchange tour teaching Eastern religions at Beijing University. Professor Ma had spent several summers studying ruins fifty miles to the south, where he had met the Tibetan guide who had brought them to the mountain.

Abigail Natay was a thirty-four-year-old woman who had spent her childhood in the Navajo lands but had fled to California as soon as she was old enough to leave home, distancing herself from everything tribal as she pursued an academic career.