Shan gazed about the circle at the three men who sat with them. Lokesh offered his lopsided grin, made crooked years earlier when the boot of a knob had broken his jaw. He looked from Lokesh into the smiling countenance of Gendun, who solemnly nodded at Nyma, then at Shan, as if to confirm that yes, this would be the night, yes, despite the torment raging elsewhere in Tibet, in their little remote outpost all was right with the universe.

Beside them, in a tattered maroon robe, sat Shopo, who had tended the illegal hermitage since being driven from his monastery twenty years earlier. "It has all become the right thing," he observed serenely. Nyma's contribution was the perfect offering for completing their work, made all the more powerful by the reverence she had shown the mountain. She had not taken the vermilion sand, but had waited for the ice to melt, had waited for the mountain to offer it to her.

Shopo lifted the pouch and reverently poured its contents into a clay pot. As he raised the pot toward the sky, a tall man with a narrow, downcast face appeared around the corner of the nearest building, carrying a large leather sack over his shoulder. It was Tenzin, who had been at the hermitage when Shan and Lokesh had arrived, carrying his day's collection of the yak dung they used for fuel. Tenzin stared woodenly at the clay pot, placing one hand over his gau, the silver prayer amulet that hung from his neck, then nodded and continued toward the hut where he stored the fuel.

"Lha gyal lo!" Shopo called toward the heavens in a joyful voice. "Victory to the gods!" He rose from the blanket, both hands cradling the pot, and carried it into the compact stone structure that housed half a dozen meditation cells and the hermitage's lhakang, Shan and his companions close behind. Silently acknowledging the Buddha on the altar at the rear wall, Shopo set the pot on a cedar plank that held ten similar pots and several long, narrow bronze funnels, then turned toward the multicolored, seven-foot circle that covered the center of the stone floor, a reverent awe filling his face.

It was called the Vajrabhairava, the Diamond Terrifier, one of the rarest forms of the intricate mandala sand paintings that had been part of Tibetan ritual for centuries. It had frightened Shan at first, when he heard Gendun explain that the deity they were invoking was one of the fiercest of all the Tibetan deities, and he watched now as the dropka woman halted and grimaced at the old thangka of the Diamond Terrifier, which Lokesh had hung in the lhakang. Some may have thought it meant Shan and his friends were on a path of demons and destruction but Shan had learned how such severe images were used by the lamas as symbols of higher truths, and he knew now not to see violence in the image, but hope. The Diamond Terrifier was the form wisdom assumed to challenge the Lord of Death when it sought to take humans before they achieved enlightenment.

At first Shan and Nyma had listened for hours every day as Gendun orally painted the complex mandala, describing it inch by inch from memory. Finally, a month earlier, Shopo and Gendun had laid out intricate chalk lines on the stone floor, outlining the foundations of the wheel. It had been thirty years since Gendun had helped create this particular mandala, taught to him by a lama who had been ninety years old at the time, but he recalled its many symbols perfectly. The mandala held dozens of symbols, each made by pouring a few grains of sand at a time with the chakpa, thin five-inch-long funnels. Indeed, every image, even every color, was a symbol, and each symbol had a teaching associated with it. Shan gazed upon the grounds of the symbolic palace at the center, divided into intricate quadrants. The white east held the wheel of dharma, the yellow south wish-giving jewels, the red west the lotus of purity, and the green north a flaming sword.

After a quarter hour, buoyed by the joy of the Tibetans, Shan drifted outside to the circle of earth in an outcropping above the buildings where he had passed many hours in meditation during the past weeks. Gendun would want him to contemplate the lesson of the sands on this final day, but suddenly Shan felt too full of life, too content with the knowledge that he had, after the ordeal that had been his life thus far, finally found a place in the world.

As he watched the clouds, letting his contentment push back the fear he had felt when sitting by the jagged stone, Shan discovered an unfamiliar nervousness. For tonight, instead of filling the chakpa for Gendun as the lama painted the mandala, Gendun would fill the chakpa for him, so Shan could create the cloud and mountain images along the perimeter of the painting.

For hours the lamas had taught him the proper posture of the hands, and mind, in applying the sand, until Shan sensed he was not so much holding an implement for art but offering a prayer with sand. Then together they had practiced the cursive pattern Shan would create with the white sand along the outer perimeter of the circle.

"Follow the curve a lark makes in its flight," Gendun had explained, referring to the long graceful dip made by the bird between wing beats, and the lama had expressed wonder about the strange blend of excitement and sadness that had appeared on Shan's face.

"It's nothing," Shan had whispered, after floating for a moment on a tide of memory. His father had used almost the same words, almost the same voice, speaking of birds and willows and the wind, drawing patterns with his brush in the air, when he had taught Shan how to create his first Chinese ideograms.

Suddenly Shan became aware of someone sitting beside him. He turned from the clouds and looked into Gendun's serene face.

"We will have mountains to climb," the lama observed abruptly. He was sitting beside Shan in the lotus fashion, his legs crossed, as if he had been spirited there from a meditation cell. The words were Gendun's way of asking if Shan was ready, not for the mandala, but for the journey they would begin afterwards, for it was because of that journey they had undertaken the mandala. Just as others might methodically assemble supplies and study maps to prepare for arduous travel, the lamas had been methodically strengthening Shan, Lokesh, and Nyma with images of the Diamond Terrifier. Or perhaps, as Lokesh had chillingly suggested, preparing Shan to do the work of the Diamond Terrifier.

"I am ready for mountains, Rinpoche," Shan said, using the term of address for a revered teacher.

Gendun's eyes twinkled as he studied Shan's face. More often than not the two did not need words to communicate. "And there will be more than just yak chips to watch for," the old lama added.

Shan studied his teacher in confusion. "I thought Tenzin would stay here, Rinpoche," Shan said. Tenzin had not spoken a word during the two months Shan had known him, but Shan had recognized the man's sad, broken nature, and the way the dropka warned him away from roads. He was an escapee from the gulag, Shan had realized, another fugitive trying to revive himself, to discover the spark inside after having had so many, for so long, try to extinguish it.

"He is going north. Someone died."

The remnants of Shan's grin vanished.

"No," Gendun added quickly. "Not that way," he said, meaning not one of the violent mysteries the old Shan had been obsessed with solving. "Nothing to do with the stone or any of us. He's just going north and I worry about him."

Although Tenzin usually ate with them and shared their chores, he had stayed away from Shan, denying Shan the chance of knowing him better. Despite all their weeks together, Tenzin was as great an enigma as ever. At first Shan had taken his manner for an aloofness tied to the oddly aristocratic air he projected, even when carrying his dung sack. More than once Shan had wondered if Gendun or Shopo had given the man penance, in punishment for something. Sometimes such men committed violence in making good their escape. Gendun might not condemn him for killing a jailer, but would worry about the damage such an act would cause to his inner deity. The tall, silent Tibetan left at dawn each day with his leather sack and returned at dusk, having filled it with yak dung, a meager haul for a day's work. But even with a single sack a day he had filled one of the smaller huts to the ceiling with fuel for the hermitage.