"There is no easy path in Tibet, Rinpoche," Shan said. With an ache in his heart he recognized, for the first time since he had met Gendun, something like regret in the lama's voice. "You were not hiding. You were being true." The old lama still stared out the portal. "There are people who are treasures, people who are irreplaceable. You are so vital to all of us that the right thing for me, for Jowa, and many others, is to protect you."

"I have lived in caves for many decades," Gendun said. "It never felt like hiding until now."

Shan wrapped his hands around his mug and looked at Gendun. "Auntie Lau was hiding, and what she was doing was the right thing."

Gendun turned to face him. "But she wasn't fleeing."

"No," Shan agreed. "She was protecting someone. The boy. Protecting him and teaching him."

Gendun and Lokesh did not respond immediately. Lokesh rose and filled their mugs again.

Shan moved to the portal and looked out into the night sky.

Lokesh began singing the old spirit wedding song in a hoarse whisper.

"The boy Khitai was not aware. He didn't know she was dead," Gendun said suddenly. "He is still looking for her."

He was. He is. Shan was there for the dead boy. Gendun and Lokesh were there for the living spirit, the thing that survived Khitai. A small boy spirit.

"The boy," Shan said tentatively. "The boy who was not a boy." He thought of the strange words uttered by Bajys. That was the one I loved. That was the one I was to keep safe. He'll be dead again. But that was the one I knew, Bajys had said.

Gendun slowly approached, carrying a stick of incense.

"It is a way of saying it," Gendun agreed. "But words of the tongue are not made for such things. I have searched, and I can find no words to explain it. All we knew was that Lau's death was of this world. All we wanted to do was protect the boy. We thought if you would find the truth about the killer of his teacher, then the truth would protect him." Gendun moved so close to the open portal that he seemed in danger of falling out.

"And the rest was-" Shan struggled to find the words. They hadn't intended to mislead him. They had not misled him. They had been unable to translate between worlds.

"Not secret," Gendun said, "just-" He sighed as he looked at a star. "Just not a thing of the world below." The wind tugged at his robe, giving it the appearance of a great rippling prayer flag.

Shan stepped to the portal and put his hand on Gendun's shoulder. "Rinpoche, I am trying to see to the other world, I must see to it. Because the answer lies where the two worlds intersect."

Gendun looked out into the night. A shooting star burst across the horizon below them.

"He was a friend of mine," Lokesh said in his distant voice. "Once, when I was a small boy, he saved me in a snow avalanche. He pulled me in and held me behind a rock as the snow tumbled over a cliff." He smiled. "After that we walked and found high places where we recited the sutras." He reached out and placed his hand around the battered cup from the boy's bag. "He carried this cup, and we would drink with it from mountain springs. We played with dogs and looked for caves. Sometimes we found things left by hermits."

"Khitai?" Shan said in a helpless voice.

Lokesh nodded and sighed with a strange dreamy expression. "Once on the Dalai Lama's birthday we climbed a mountain and threw paper horses into the sky," he said, referring to the old custom of sending paper horses into the wind. When they were found by needy travelers they would turn into flesh and blood creatures. Lokesh drifted back to the brazier and dropped in several juniper splints, then saw the confusion on Shan's face. "He wasn't called Khitai then. He was Tsering," Lokesh spoke with a satisfied smile, as if he had explained everything. "Tsering Raluk."

"And before that," Gendun prodded.

Lokesh shrugged. "Before that he was born in Kham, with the name of Dorjing." He looked at Gendun, who nodded for him to continue. "Before that his incarnation name was Ragta, born in Amdo. Before that, my brain is in shadows. In a long ago time I remember there was a boy in Nepal."

Shan found his way to the table and dropped onto the bench. "I don't understand. Incarnations have no prelife memories. They have no direction over where they reemerge."

He looked at his two friends, who stared at him with wide smiles, like children sharing something wonderful.

"Ai, yi," Shan whispered in realization. "He is a tulku." He never felt more ignorant than when the truth slammed into him, never more blind than when at last he could see. It wasn't a boy they were after. It never had been. He walked back to the exposed portal, and stood where the wind, now quite chilling, hit him with its full strength. He closed his eyes, his mind racing, and let the wind do its work, peeling away the chaff. A tulku was a reincarnate lama, a soul so evolved it could direct its reincarnation, could even have memories of its past incarnations.

"There was a gompa in the mountains halfway between Mount Kailas and Shigatse, for many centuries one of the largest in Tibet," Gendun explained. "The first abbot was a tulku, the Yakde Lama, the leader of one of the old sects, one of the lost sects." Although traditionally Tibet had been led by the Yellow Hat, the Gelukpa sect, many other sects had existed in the country, most small and nearly extinct, some tiny but still vitally alive after all the centuries. "Or nearly lost. The last Yakde Lama had a dozen gompas, small ones, mostly built during the old empire period. He had always trained at Shigatse as a young boy," Gendun said, referring to the huge Tashilhunpo gompa that had once dominated Tibet's second largest town. Only a small number of the reincarnate lamas survived in Tibet. But they were the essence of the church, for many Tibetans the most important leaders, the ones they rallied to.

"We can't let them do what they did to the Panchen Lama," a voice said from behind them. Jowa stood there, still looking haggard. But his eyes had fire in them.

Shan nodded sadly. The Tenth Panchen Lama, the highest reincarnate lama next to the Dalai Lama, the traditional head of Tashilhunpo gompa, had at first chosen to cooperate with Beijing, hoping to avoid bloodshed, accepting assurances that Beijing would preserve his gompa and the Buddhist traditions of Tibet. After he had been taken to live in Beijing, the army had imprisoned the four thousand monks of his gompa. Following years of indoctrination, he had been deemed sufficiently subdued to return to Tibet, but at a festival in 1964 he had discarded his speech prepared by the Bureau of Religious Affairs and shouted out his support for Tibetan independence before an audience of thousands. For that one act of defiance he had been sent back to Beijing in chains. After his death, under highly suspicious circumstances, the Bureau of Religious Affairs announced that it had found his reincarnation in the son of two Party members and took the boy into its custody for special education. The Buddhists, with the help of the Dalai Lama in India, using ages old divination practices, had separately identified a Tibetan boy as the rightful Panchen Lama, but the boy had been abducted by the government and not seen for years.

"I heard about a speech in Lhasa," Lokesh said with pain in his voice. "The government said it had been too tolerant, that they won't allow any more incarnations of senior lamas to be recognized. That there will be no more Dalai Lama after the fourteenth dies."