"You mean Drakte agreed."

"Drakte is one of you," Shan asserted. He and Lokesh had met Drakte nearly a year earlier aiding prisoners in the gulag camp where they had served. It had been Drakte who had intercepted them two months ago and taken them to Shopo's hidden hermitage. "We will go when the lamas and Drakte are ready. He is coming to show us the way. A few more days at most."

"We don't have a few more days," the purba groused. "And don't expect Drakte. He's not keeping his appointments."

"Missing?" Shan noticed a bulge under the man's jacket, at the waist, and looked back at Gendun. If the lamas thought the man had a gun they would insist he leave.

The purba shrugged. "Not where he was asked to be."

"And you've come in his place?"

"No. But I was hoping to find him at that hermitage. There is news. And I brought something he had asked for," he added in a peevish tone. "He said the lamas needed it. He said if we did not agree to retrieve it he would go himself, all the way to India if necessary." The purba lowered a long, narrow sack from his shoulder and produced an eighteen-inch-long bamboo tube, which Lokesh eagerly accepted.

"What news?" Shan asked.

Before he replied the man pointed to one of the herders, then to the top of the hill where the guards had been watching the road beyond. The herder sprang up the slope. "A man was killed. An official, in Amdo town," he said, referring to the closest settlement of any size, nearly a hundred miles away. "Public Security will sweep the hills and detain people. When they interrogate, they will learn of the hermitage." He cast another frown toward the lamas. "You may call it sacred, what you are doing, but they will call it a crime against the state." He took a step toward Gendun as though to try again to drag him away, but a herder in a fleece vest stepped forward with a hand raised in warning.

"Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?" The purba's hands clenched and unclenched repeatedly. He seemed ready to do battle with them. "No one told us you would wander around the mountains like this. You could go to prison, all of you. For what? You can't fight the Chinese with sand and prayers."

Lokesh uttered a hoarse sound that Shan recognized as a laugh. "I have known Chinese prisons," the old Tibetan said. "Sometimes sand and prayers are the only way."

The purba fixed Shan with a bitter stare. "You are the famous Chinese who fixes things for Tibetans. You know better, but still you let them do this."

Shan paused to study Gendun and Shopo. "If these lamas asked me to jump into this river with my pockets stuffed with rocks," he said quietly, "I would thank them and leap in."

"Lha gyal lo," the herder in the vest whispered, as if to cheer Shan on.

Lokesh touched the warrior's arm. "It is difficult for one so young to understand these things," the old Tibetan said. "You should return with us to the hermitage and see."

"Unlike Drakte, I obey my orders," the man snapped. "I am needed elsewhere."

Lokesh raised the bamboo tube in his hand. "Then look now," he suggested, extracting a roll of cloth from the tube. As Lokesh straightened it Shan saw that it was an old thangka, one of the cloth paintings used to depict the icons of Tibetan Buddhism.

When the purba's light hit the painting the man grimaced and retreated a step. One of the dropka guards moaned loudly. It was the image of a fierce demon, with the head of a bull garlanded with human skulls, surrounded by swords and spears and arrows, holding a cup of blood. The flayed skins of its victims lay at its feet. Lokesh studied the image with a satisfied grin, then motioned the purba forward.

"Look carefully," the old Tibetan said, pointing to the head of the terrifying image. "This is what we are doing. This is how we win without violence. This is how the artifact will be returned, how that deity is going to be repaired. Because this is what he is becoming."

"Who?" the purba asked, the anger in his voice now tinged with confusion.

In the dim light Shan thought he saw surprise on Lokesh's face, as though the answer were obvious. Then Lokesh gestured from the skull-clad demon to Shan. "Our friend. Our Shan."

The spell cast by the words silenced the purba and the dropka, all of whom stared uneasily at Shan. Shan searched Lokesh's face for an explanation, but his friend just grinned back expectantly, as if he had given Shan a great gift.

Suddenly another desperate cry split the air. The guard at the top of the ridge frantically stumbled down the slope. "A patrol! Knobs!" he cried, meaning the soldiers of the Public Security Bureau. The purba and Shan leapt up and moments later gazed down at a troop transport half a mile away, edging its way slowly toward their position.

"That helicopter spotted us," the purba said. "Last month they used infrared to find an old hermit who only came out at night to pray." Shan sensed the fierce determination rising in the warrior's voice and shuddered.

At the river three of the dropka were in a cluster around the lamas, facing outward, as if preparing to engage the knobs with their staffs. The fourth, the man wearing the fleece vest, stood apart, staring into the black water. As the purba marched purposefully toward the lamas the herder in the vest spun about and hurled himself on the purba, shoving him to the ground, then just as abruptly pulling away. In his hand was a large automatic pistol.

"You fool!" the purba spat. "They have to be taken away! We can't fight those knobs."

Shame crossed the herder's face as he looked at the pistol in his hand, and he held the weapon clumsily, fingers around only the grip, not touching the trigger. "You see that one," he said, nodding toward Gendun, who still communed with the river. "My mother stays at that tent by the hermitage. She calls him the Pure Water Lama. You know why? Not just because he never registered with the bastards at the Bureau of Religious Affairs, but because he took his vows more than fifty years ago, before the invasion. Before the Chinese scoured our land and changed it forever. He has never gone into exile, never been captured. His words are uncontaminated, my mother says, because they flow from a stream the Chinese never discovered." The man spoke slowly, with a tone of wonder, as if he had forgotten the knob patrol. Beside him two of the herders knelt at the river and began collecting pebbles.

"I need my gun," growled the purba, still sprawled on the ground. He was scared, Shan saw. Sometimes traditional Tibetans hated the purbas as much as the Chinese. "We need to get them out of here."

The herder shook his head. "I have never done anything with my life," he said in a hollow voice. "The Chinese would not let me go to school. They wouldn't let me travel. They wouldn't let me get a job. I'm like a little stunted tree that can never grow, and that one, the Pure Water Lama, he is like the towering survivor of a forest where everything else was leveled."

He cast a smile toward Gendun, then looked at the purba, his face hardening. "Here is how we protect such men," he said, and he threw the gun into the black water. The two herders at the river's edge rose and stepped to his side, pulling slings from their pockets. "We have heard how to do this from others. We will smash their searchlights and fill the air with stones. If we are lucky they will not see us. Chinese soldiers get scared in the night. They hear stories of demons." He glanced at the thangka, still in Lokesh's hand, then at Shan. "The lamas must fill the jar," he said to the purba, "and then you will take them back. My younger brother knows the way," he said, gesturing toward the remaining herder. "If we do not stop the patrol, you are the one who best knows how to evade the soldiers."