Hostene stared into the heavens. “This is how the world ends, my wife said once, how great civilizations fall to pieces. The old things meant to be passed down, they are the best things distilled out of thousands of years of experience. But somehow in the last century we decided our own lives were too important, that fast cars covered with chrome, and television, and computers made us better than our ancestors. That’s the lie that kills the great things.”

“When I finally settled down and learned my two chants, I was going to have the tattoo removed but then I decided to keep it, to remind me of my shame.” Hostene stared at the summit again. “Now that she needs me, what do I know about being a pilgrim? What do I know about gods?”

“People here aren’t dying because of gods,” Shan said. “They’re dying because of gold.”

Shan was alone before the little fire when a hand reached out of the shadows for him. Yangke gestured him into the cave. Then, lifting a butter lamp from the floor, he silently led him down the corridor Shan had taken before, to the chamber with the pilgrim’s equipment. But they continued until they reached what appeared to be the end of the tunnel, a chamber smelling of old incense, whose ceiling was blackened with the soot of butter lamps.

Old Trinle sat near the center of the room, gazing up at another painting, his eyes filled with tears.

“He won’t speak to Dolma about this,” Yangke explained. “He said he never came here before, that it was only for the senior lamas.”

Another fierce protector was depicted, Shan thought at first, though the image was unlike any he had seen before. The god in the center was dragon-headed. Two dozen small demons surrounded it along the sides and bottom.

“It is the druk deity, god of the mountain, the earth god,” Trinle declared in a raspy voice. “This is where the lamas started and finished each pilgrim season. He is the one the fortunate ones meet at the top.”

Yangke said, “All these years, Rapaki didn’t know why, despite his years of meditation, he wasn’t shown the Kora. I think he decided he didn’t have something the god wanted. He kept looking, trying to understand what that thing might be. He had no teachers,” he reminded Shan.

“You must not tell Dolma,” Trinle told Shan.

Shan stepped closer to the painting, not yet comprehending. Yangke handed him the butter lamp. Then he saw.

He had seen paintings of old gods with necklaces and bracelets of human skulls. He had seen images of gods adorned with human skins. Until now he had never seen a god wearing a necklace made of human hands.

“After so many years alone,” Yangke said in an anguished voice, “the mind might go to places. .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t think he is exactly a murderer, not the way most people think of murderers.”

Shan said, “Perhaps. But if one has an appetite for hands,” he said, “someone else who is a murderer might find it convenient to feed that craving.”

They lingered in silence, unable to break the spell of the deity before them. Yangke lowered himself beside Trinle. Shan found himself staring at the unsettling dragon-headed image.

“I could have learned its secrets,” came a cracking voice, full of remorse. “I could have saved Rapaki,” Trinle said.

In the quiet that followed only the occasional crackling of the lamp could be heard and a sound that Shan had begun to detect in all of Tibet’s deep caves, a strange low resonance that was sound and not sound, something that made him feel small and meaningless, an intruder into a place not meant for mere humans. Lokesh had a name for it-mountain speaking.

“My uncle was the abbot,” Trinle continued. “I was sent to the monks when I was ten, as had been the tradition of our family for centuries. But when I was seventeen I fell in love with a girl who tended the sheep. I would say I was meditating out on the mountain but it was not meditation I sought. We became like man and wife. When my uncle found out he banished me from the temple and took my robe away, saying the only way I could stay near the temple would be if I was digging its holes and tending its gardens. A year later, when the Chinese were advancing, my woman went down to Tashtul, to look for her mother. I never saw her again, never heard from her.

“I think it is true, that this is where the first gods started,” Trinle declared after a long time. “A thousand thousand seasons ago. Once there were more gods than people. People were just made, like artwork, the way later people made paintings of gods.” The old groundskeeper seemed about to weep. “Then there came to be too many people for the gods to tend, too many people who forgot the nature of prayer. The world could no longer be relied upon. And now,” he pronounced in a thin, anguished voice, “I think there may be only one earth god left, a frail old dragon at the top of this kora. When he finds the strength, he prays.”

“What does he pray for?” Shan asked.

The answer came not from Trinle or Yangke, but from a lean, weary figure standing at the entrance to the chamber. Shan had no idea how long Lokesh had been there.

“That,” his old friend said, “is the most important question in all the world.”

Yangke began a whispered mantra. Trinle rose and brushed the dust from the deity’s painted eyes. When Shan turned again Lokesh was gone.

He found Lokesh in the equipment chamber, at the wicker chests, gazing at the old masks. He lifted the headdress of a horned bull god and set it on an adjoining chest. “Trinle and Yangke tried to learn, but they had no proper guidance.”

Shan noted the heavy-bladed instruments beside the yak-tail whips-ritual axes with curving steel at the top, a four-inch blade in the center. An outline in the dust showed one was missing.

“You must return with me,” Lokesh said. “Now that we know what is here, the entire village will surely understand. Gendun says he needs to speak with Chodron, that if he can just sit and meditate with him, Chodron will see the error of his ways.”

Shan could find no answer that Lokesh would comprehend.

“Then you are going up that kora tomorrow. Tell me that by doing so you will not beget more violence and more suffering.” Death did not upset Lokesh for to him it was but a stage before rebirth. It was violence, which fed the imbalance he sought to heal, that he feared.

“I wish I could find such a way,” was all Shan could say.

Lokesh stroked the golden nose of the horned bull headdress. “Return with me. Gendun and I will find a way. When he is healed, the three of us can climb to the summit together.”

“If I return without discovering an answer to the killings, Gendun will be tortured again. To Chodron he is only a weapon to use against me.”

“You know that is unimportant to Gendun.”

“It is important to me.” Shan’s heart felt as if it were in a vise.

Lokesh tilted the bull up so that it seemed to be looking him in the eyes, and spoke to its golden face. “It is a season for killing, Dolma says. She says it is like a storm, that it needs to blow itself out so we can get on with life.”

IN THE MORNING, outside the cave, Lokesh would not speak to Shan, would not look him in the eye.

Dolma transferred some apples and apricots from her own bag to Shan’s pack, handed him one of the pilgrim bags Trinle had brought from the cave. “He says this is not what the track to the gods is for,” she said in a strained voice, “that you must stop this, that you cannot turn it into some sort of contest between predator and prey.”

“We have no choice.” Shan lifted one of the pilgrim staffs and looked at his old friend, who stood on a rock, facing the sunrise.

“He says,” Dolma continued, “that he wished they had taught you better. He says you know that if you follow the upper kora more people will die than if you did not. He says if he has a chance to remove Gendun he will do so. He says he does not know if the old hermitage is safe now, that he will not be able to leave word of where they are going.”