“A teacher of ancient religions would recognize the square, and she would have done what was intended,” Shan countered.

Hostene followed Shan out onto the plain.

Assuming that the top of the square would lie to the north, Yangke led them to the section corresponding to the number one. He dropped to his knees, extended his arms, and lowered his body to the ground, then pulled forward as he folded his body up.

“I don’t understand,” Hostene said.

Shan watched the Tibetan and gave a hesitant nod. “Yangke is right. We must be pilgrims in all respects. The pilgrim would proceed by prostrations.” He saw the frustration on Hostene’s face. “Some pilgrims still travel hundreds of miles this way, taking months to reach a shrine. We,” he said as he dropped to his knees, “only need repeat the Nine Paces of Emperor Yu.”

It was a slow, laborious process. On the third square, Yangke sneezed as he inched up from the dust of the reddish gravel that was scattered about the square. On the fifth square Shan paused for a moment to look at the white dust that suddenly appeared on his hand. At the edge of the last square, where their prostrations finished, there was an small overhanging shelf of rock that, from the perspective of someone walking by, would have obscured the words painted on the flat wall underneath. But they were prostrate pilgrims, and saw it. Om nidhi ghata praticcha svaha, they read.

“A mantra used in offering rituals,” Yangke said. “It refers to the sacred treasure flask.”

“But we could have just come here directly. It is the only way,” Hostene complained as they joined the short steep path that led to a bulging rock formation in the broad shape of a treasure flask.

“No,” Shan said, “there was a reason.” He halted and studied the squares again, the colored stains on his hand, the discolorations on all their knees. “It is the colors.” To Hostene’s obvious chagrin he walked back onto the squares. Some-but not all of them-bore faintly colored soil or fine gravel, noticeable to the pilgrim with his face on the ground but so subtle as not to be obvious to the casual glance. “A sequence,” Shan observed, “red, white, and green.”

“Why?” Yangke asked.

“I don’t know,” Shan admitted. “The treasure flask will tell us,” he suggested, and led them back to the trail.

The climb to the flask rock was arduous. They were reaching an altitude where the thinness of the oxygen might affect them. Hostene had to pause often, leaning on his knees, and seemed about to collapse onto a rock at the side of the trail when he uttered a cry of glee. As Shan ran back to him Hostene pointed to a white chalk mark on the rock. Drawn hurriedly, in the shape of the Emperor Yu’s paces, it showed that Abigail had been there.

What they found under the wide overhanging rock behind the flask tower was not an homage to the gods but a memorial to the frailty of man. Men had labored there, for there was a blackened, shaped hole in the rock wall that appeared to have been a small furnace. There were bits of cast iron on the ground, a lichen-covered iron shape on a stone pillar that proved to be an anvil with an iron ring attached to its base, a few feet from a weathered juniper post in the ground holding fragments of what had been a large bellows. But Shan’s companions’ attention was focused elsewhere.

On a large slab beyond the furnace lay a dozen skeletons arranged like the spokes of a wheel, skulls at the hub. On a small, narrow shelf beyond, deeper in shadow, were twenty separate skulls. On a lower shelf, five feet off the ground, lay skeleton hands and arms, mixed with the weathered hands and paws of protector demons from ritual costumes.

Hostene, who shied away from owls and even from talk of death, stood as if petrified in front of the display. Yangke, however, seemed fascinated. “Pilgrims,” he declared in an awed whisper as he leaned his staff against the wall and pointed to the hands. “From centuries of following the path. Can you feel their-” His sentence ended in a terrified gasp as one of the demon hands reached out, grabbed his wrist, and jerked him toward the wall. His head struck the rock and he slumped against the wall, then slid lifelessly to the ground. Breaking out of his trance, Hostene darted to his side. Yangke’s staff rose and slammed against the Navajo’s back, knocking him off his feet.

Shan leaped forward, then froze. A pistol had materialized in the floating demon hand, aimed directly at him.

Shan said, fighting to keep his voice level, “Those who built this place, Captain, would have told you that bringing a weapon here would damage your spirit.”

“It wasn’t to enrich my soul that I followed you up here.” Bing stepped into view. The hands, Shan realized, were not arrayed on a shelf carved into the rock but atop a squared-off boulder whose back was totally obscured in shadow. One of Bing’s arms was covered by the costume of a demon, a long black glove-like device with bones of whitewashed wood affixed to it over the hand. Switching the pistol to his bare hand, the mayor of Little Moscow pulled off the glove with his teeth and tossed it into the shadows.

“Damn, you’re slow,” Bing said. “Performing all that mumbo jumbo below, when any fool could see you had to come this way.”

“Is that when you passed us?” Shan asked. From a position of prostration they would have seen nothing. “You made it from the chain without a staff?”

“I have the legs of a frog, my mother used to say.”

“I did not see you at Little Moscow this morning,” Shan observed.

“I was waiting at the painting.”

Shan understood. “You destroyed it, but you still did not understand what lay beneath.”

“When I saw you up on the rim above the town this morning, I knew you’d get to the painting sooner or later.”

“Like Abigail Natay.”

“Like the American woman,” Bing agreed.

Shan bent over his friends. Hostene was still conscious, although he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Yangke, who was beginning to stir, had a jagged cut on his forehead.

Shan rose and paced around the skeletons, ignoring Bing’s gun. “This is what happens,” he said.

“Happens to whom?”

“You should go back, Captain. You should go back now, or else promise to help us find the Navajo woman. The people who built this path intended the wrong minded to stay on it forever.”

“You make it sound like I’ll encounter three-hundred-year-old pilgrims still wandering about,” Bing sneered.

Shan gestured to the skeletons. “Something like that.”

Bing kicked the nearest of the pilgrim bags that lay on the ground before kneeling and upending it, without taking his eyes off his prisoners. “And what about you, Comrade Shan? Are you so saintly that you need not worry?” He picked up an apricot and took a bite, the juice running down his chin.

A small ache rose in Shan’s heart. “Me? I am beginning to realize I can only live between worlds. I’m not sure the deities take much notice of me.” The words had been uttered without conscious thought, as if something in the shrine had pushed them from his heart directly to his tongue.

Bing laughed derisively. “As much as I’d like to stay and hear the contrite confession of another prisoner,” he said in a mocking tone, “I haven’t got time. Where are the other packs?”

“There’s only one more. We lost one.” Shan pointed to his own bag by the old anvil. Bing kicked it toward the one he had already emptied and upended its contents. He drained one of their two remaining water bottles, then began filling his pockets with their meager rations.

“Abigail!” Hostene shouted, as if she might be near. Then he called again, and again, his last word like a cry of pain.

Bing grinned. “Is it really true, old man, that you came all the way from America for this?” he said.

“Is it really true,” Hostene shot back, “that you could kill so many in cold blood?”