When he went below Bajys had Jowa's coat on the table, brushing it with a tuft of horsehair, his hands trembling as he worked. Jowa sat nearby, staring at a map.

"There were gompas," Shan said to Bajys. "Gendun said there were still gompas of the Yakde. He said they grew out of the empire period, when there were armies that moved through this area. Meaning, maybe there were gompas established along the old empire routes here. How far is the nearest?"

Bajys just shook his head.

"If Khitai had lived," Shan pressed, "if you had known Lau was dead and had to take Khitai somewhere, where would you have gone?"

Bajys kept brushing. "Secret places," he said, looking over his shoulder toward the portals as if someone was hovering outside to overhear. "Lau knew them," he said, then glanced at Shan apologetically. "She was never going to die," he added in hollow tone.

Jowa looked at Bajys with a strange, expectant expression, as if at any moment to speak to him, to offer the words that might finally bring the tormented man's soul into balance. Or maybe just to embrace him, to comfort him and assure him that he had done no wrong.

"You mean, unregistered places," Shan suggested. No gompa was permitted to function unless licensed by the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

"I know about the Yakde gompas. I've read about them," Jowa said with a meaningful glance toward Shan. The purbas kept an ever-expanding chronicle of the atrocities committed by the Chinese, with copies maintained by purbas all over Tibet. "They were always in the remote places," Jowa said. "Out of touch with everything. Out of touch for years, sometimes. Places where no one would live, places where you would think no man could live. They were dying out, even when Religious Affairs started looking for them. Some were closed, their monks imprisoned. But some were too remote, too tiny for the government to worry about. The air force made bombing practice on three or four, didn't bother with the rest. Word was that in some of them disease swept through and killed all the monks."

"But Bajys," Shan said, putting his hand on the nervous man, guiding him gently onto the bench beside him. "They must have told you. A place to take Khitai in case of trouble, in emergency. A dropka, like you, could find places in the mountains."

Bayjs pressed his hand against his forehead, as if it hurt. "Lau. I was to go to Lau."

"Did she ever speak of another place? Maybe she went there herself sometimes. Maybe the waterkeeper went there."

"A diamond lake," Bajys said. "All I know is she went there for strength once, to a place with a diamond lake."

Jowa's head shot up. "There's a lake, a shrine lake, an oracle lake, a few miles from here. I saw it once from a distance, with an old hunter. He said it froze much later than others, that deities must live in it because it always shined like a diamond."

They walked in silence for hours, through the high barren landscape, wary of any sound, dashing for cover even at a sudden roar of wind, fearful that it could be a plane or helicopter. Their paths were the trails of wild goats, their landmarks distant peaks that Jowa frequently stopped to study, as if he were mentally triangulating their postion. The purba led them around a valley where a small herd of antelope ran, then passed over a saddle of rock and began climbing a long ridge, always climbing, jogging along the bare places without cover, stopping twice to add rocks to the cairns built at high points as offerings to the mountain deities. A raven flew over them for an hour, watching them closely, circling back, roosting from time to time as if waiting for them. Bajys, whom Shan always kept in front of him, stopped often to stare at the creature, as if somehow he recognized it.

They went higher, over another pass, then up a steep trail of switchbacks. Shan found himself gasping for oxygen for the first time since acclimating to the Tibetan altitude years earlier. They found a stream of blue glacier melt and drank long. Jowa remained squatting by the stream. "I was wondering," he said to Shan, "did you tell Lokesh where the waterkeeper is?"

Shan rose and looked at the purba. "He listened while I spoke about it," he recounted slowly, then saw the concern in Jowa's eyes and understood. Gendun and Lokesh might try to find the waterkeeper, a link to the lost boy. Shan closed his eyes and fought the image in his mind's eye. If the lama decided Glory Camp was where he needed to be, he would walk right up to the wire, walk right up to the knobs and Prosecutor Xu.

Before they left Bajys had collected a dozen stones and built a small cairn, a tribute to the deity who lived in the mountain they climbed. It was to gain merit, Shan realized, part of atoning for losing Khitai. Bajys started down the path as he finished, but Jowa and Shan lingered, each adding several stones himself, sharing, Shan knew, the same silent fear of Lokesh and Gendun being captured at Glory Camp.

The further they climbed, the greater became Shan's sense of entering a different world. Bajys seemed to sense it too. He hung back, trying to let Shan pass him, to let him linger behind, but Shan pushed him on. A snow squall passed over them, obscuring Jowa but leaving his tracks outlined in white for them to follow.

"If Jowa is wrong," Bajys said as Shan caught up with him, sounding suddenly very confident, "we will die in the cold that dwells this high." They had a single blanket for the three of them, only a small pouch of cold tsampa to eat, and nowhere was there sign of fuel for a fire.

Abruptly the sky cleared into a deep, brilliant cobalt.

Looking below, Shan saw that the snow had not stopped but that they had simply climbed above the storm.

They walked for another hour, over another ridge, then found Jowa waiting for them at the top of a small ledge that overlooked an extraordinary valley. They stood at the northern head of a mile-long expanse of gravel and dried grass that dropped between two long, massive rock walls with such perfect symmetry that they gave the impression of two monoliths that had once towered at the north end of the valley but that had been pushed over to shield the valley. Between them at the far end was a lake, still and clear, a piece of sky fallen to earth. The walls dropped at nearly identical angles toward the lake, each lined near its top with a tier of snow so perfectly straight that it seemed a baker had frosted them. Surprisingly, despite the cold and altitude, a few gnarled junipers grew at the edge of the water. And at the end of the valley, there was nothing but air. The world simply fell away past the strip of land that defined the end of the valley. In the far distance mountains could be seen, hugged by mist, but between the far peaks and the valley was only sky. Shan remembered stepping above the snow squall. It was as if they had arrived in a land that floated in the clouds.

"I thought this would be the place," Jowa said, with worry in his eyes. They would have no time to return to the shelter of Senge Drak before nightfall.

Shan moved to his side and looked down the face of the ledge they stood on. Three hundred feet below, past a series of ledges that jutted out like giant steps from the cliff face, there was a row of rocks. No, he saw, not a row, but a wall of rocks.

The silence was broken by a sudden hollow tapping sound from nearby, so loud it made him jump. A raven called as if in reply, and Shan looked up to see the large black bird land on a rock thirty feet away. Somehow he knew that it was the same bird that had followed them.