Shan thought back to the strange video that had so disturbed him. Abigail had told someone to think of his family and of the Eight Treasures in a Winter Melon, the classic gourmet dish. “Did he encounter Abigail at a painting site?”

“I told him to stay away, that foreigners were trouble. But he could speak some English. He began to help her with little things. Tashi didn’t like it. He threatened to tell her uncle.”

Shan studied Hubei. “Were you the one who found your brother’s body?”

Hubei’s voice trembled. “So much blood. At first I thought he must have been hunting for a goat for us to eat. But when I spoke to him, I saw something was wrong with his tongue. I kept talking to him, asking what was wrong, asking why he didn’t answer. Then I saw a stick of wood with eyes painted on it was jammed into his mouth. It took me a long time to realize that he was dead.

He couldn’t be dead! We had plans, we were going to start new lives. I didn’t know what to do. He had picked flowers and sprigs of juniper for an offering. I put them on his chest, and was going to cross his hands over them.”

“That’s when you saw he had no hands.”

The miner nodded. “I would have had my vengeance by now, but you came along.”

“It was you on the bicycle, with the club,” Shan said, “You who hung me on the rope today and beat me. You lit the fires in the barley to punish Chodron for failing to punish Hostene.”

Hubei said nothing.

“If you think Hostene killed your brother, why help his niece? Why undertake to do the shopping for the things on the list she gave to Bing?”

“Because it’s the way to find her again. And when I have her, I will get her uncle.”

“Where were your purchases to be taken?”

“Bing has a map. To a place with black sand, near the summit.”

“Why did she have your brother put out those skeletons?”

“She wanted to keep people away from the old paintings.”

“People?”

“Some of the other miners. There were legends about an ancient gold mine. I had told my brother about the skeletons Bing and I had set out, so he wouldn’t be frightened. He must have told her.”

There seemed to be a surplus of bones on the haunted ridge. “They were ancient bones, weren’t they?”

“Very old, I think. Last week, they all disappeared, even the skeleton on the grave.”

Right after Thomas had boasted of being able to tell old bones from new, Shan realized. But fortunately for Bing a new body had materialized, the corpse of the farmer who had been struck by lightning. Bing had staged his death as a murder to keep the miners frightened of the haunted ridge.

Gao was becoming impatient. Shan went to the car and spoke to him.“How do I find this black-sand place?” Shan asked Hubei when he returned.

“It’s past the old shrines, near the top of the mountain. All summer she kept moving higher up the slope, looking for paintings with the little ovals. Watch for the crazy monk, if you want to find her. She could speak to him, calm him, and get him to help her.”

“What do you mean, little ovals?”

“Tiny ovals, outlining shapes. She taught my brother to use her video camera, so he could take pictures of them.”

A siren blared. Hubei looked as if he were about to bolt.

“Do you know what reincarnation is, Hubei?” Shan asked.

“This is Tibet. Everyone knows.”

“You have just been reincarnated, without going to the trouble of dying. Congratulations.”

Hubei stared at a paper Shan had dropped into his lap.

“It’s a ticket to Golmud, in the north. A big factory town. Lots of jobs. You’re not going back up the mountain.”

“Like hell.”

“I’m saving your life. If you go back up the mountain you won’t survive the summer. What do you think Chodron and Bing will do, once they find out you burned the barley fields?”

As they spoke a bus pulled up, northbound.

Hubei stared at the bus, stared at the ticket, then boarded the bus.

“There are sleeping quarters upstairs,” Gao announced when they met the others at the company compound. “I will arrange for food.”

They ate in the conference room, with the driver perched at the window like a guard.

Hostene broke their weary silence. “She intended to trick us. Abigail never left the mountain. I don’t understand.”

“She intended to make you leave, to get you out of harm’s way. She knew Thomas had been killed, and she knows the killer is close. But she is determined to reach the summit. Only two things are important to her now-your safety and reaching the end of the pilgrim’s path.”

“A cheap trick,” Hostene said. “We came all this way because of that damned Bing.”

“It was her trick,” Shan pointed out. “Abigail wrote that note willingly.”

Hostene nodded. “She doesn’t want us to interfere. She asked us for a box and postage. She means to send her work home.”

“It’s as if she-” Gao did not finish his thought. As if she didn’t expect to make it off the mountain.

“If the doctors are right, she has three or four months before her strength fails.”

“If I went to Ren right now and explained, he would forget the rancor between us,” Gao said. “This is the kind of thing he lives for. He could have a hundred men on the mountain tomorrow.” He handed a folded paper to Shan.

“No,” Hostene said, and it seemed to settle the point. “It’s between me and Abigail.”

“And the killer,” Shan added.

“And the killer,” Hostene repeated. “But if we don’t find the killer, what becomes of Lokesh and Gendun?” he asked Shan. This was the question that never left Shan’s mind.

There were only three beds for visitors in the upstairs chamber. When Shan arranged a blanket for himself on the floor Yangke argued, saying he should take it, as the youngest, relenting only when Shan explained that after so many years in prison he was unable to sleep on a mattress.

As Gao began to draw the curtains Shan put a hand on his arm. “No. Don’t give them any reason to think we are trying to hide.”

“You think they are watching? Impossible.”

“Some people feel impending rain in their joints,” said Shan. “I can feel Public Security in my spine. They are out there, a team, at least two men, maybe four.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Yangke in alarm.

“What we are going to do,” Shan said as he removed his outerwear and stretched out on the floor, “is sleep.” But he did not sleep right away, for he had read the folded paper from Gao. It was a record of Bing’s assignments in the Public Security Bureau. For the five years immediately preceding his retirement, Bing had been commander of prison guards at a gulag camp near Rutok.

It was perhaps two hours past midnight when Shan awoke, trembling, from another recurring nightmare about Gendun and Chodron. Lifting his boots from the floor beside him, he tiptoed down the stairs, into the silent factory building.

There the gods awaited him. Lit by moonlight filtering through a high window, tiered rows of tiny Buddhas, Taras, and saints stood, waiting to be painted and packaged. An army of miniature Tibetans waiting for a signal. Lokesh would have said a prayer over each one.

He sat in a pool of light facing the little figures, like a lama facing his students. Or perhaps from another perspective, they were like a legion of lamas patiently abiding their single, faltering student.

He lowered his head, shamed by his earlier relapse into his Beijing incarnation. “I’m sorry,” he heard himself say to the figurines. “I strive to become a shape like them.” His audience of perfect little ceramic gods would know he meant Gendun and Lokesh. “But the only clay I have to work with is that which I brought from the outside.” He fought a chaos of thoughts, forming his fingers into a mudra, Diamond of the Mind, and focusing on it, letting the storm within him blow itself out. Eventually, for the first time in nearly two weeks, he found a quiet place, a meditative place, and worked to stay there. It was, as Gendun once told him, like balancing a smooth weathered rock on the tip of one finger.