"But then when my grandfather wouldn't move his herds from the pastures our clan had used for five centuries, so that Chinese farmers could come with machines and rip up the land, I learned differently. A demon came and threw grenades in his tent while he and my grandmother slept, and it machine-gunned all the herd, killing everything, even the lambs." Shan looked about and saw Jowa and Fat Mao standing close now, listening with grim expressions. "I was the one who found the bodies, when I rode to sing songs with my grandfather. Their valley ran with blood. Since that day I believe in demons," Akzu said, in a calm, matter-of-fact way that chilled Shan. "The demon is released and it wants the orphans. I think it wants to finish what it started with their parents. Twenty-three orphans Lau had" he announced with foreboding in his voice, and looked toward the northern horizon. "Only twenty-one now," he added with a whisper.

He wasn't simply speaking of the traitor Bajys, because a man like Akzu understood that it was never just one man. The demons of modern China were the irrational, unpredictable political fevers that struck and infected some with hate and others with such fear that it drove them to betrayal and murder. Maybe Shan had been sent to track the demon that had killed Lau, but it could be the same demon that was now killing her children. He put his hand on Lokesh's shoulder and looked to Jowa, then Akzu. "We must go with you to this camp," Shan told the old Kazakh. "We must go to where this boy Khitai died."

Akzu stared hard at Shan, then turned to Jakli. "It may be that this demon is going to kill them all. I will not put our clan in its path," he said to her with a fierce glint in his eye, then turned back to Shan. "And if you get in its way," he warned, "it will kill you too."

It comforted Shan that there were places on earth like the terrain they now rode through, places that could never be tamed. Some said such places were good for the planet, others that they were good for the soul. But Shan had met an old priest of a tiny, nearly extinct Tibetan sect who had insisted that such distinctions were misleading, that souls could not thrive unless the land thrived and that where the land deities had been shackled souls became grey, hollow things. The lama had lived all his life in the high ranges, but said that he had seen how Chinese made roads of asphalt and concrete. He had professed quite confidently that man, without knowing it, was making shackles of asphalt around the entire planet. When the last link of asphalt completed the last connection across the continents, he said, the world would end.

They rode for three hours in the shadows of rock walls, dashing over low passes where the sunlight exposed them, circuiting the perimeter of a vast grassland bowl because, Shan realized, there was no cover for riders who moved across it.

As they rode Shan asked Jakli about Auntie Lau. A teacher, she said, and until recently a member of the local Agricultural Council, a body which advised the local government on agricultural policy, elected by the local agricultural enterprises. Lau had been perhaps fifty-five years old, an orphan herself, without a family "but a mother to everyone," Jakli said, pushing her horse forward as Akzu turned with a chastizing frown. Sound carried far off the faces of the rock, and Shan had not missed the anxious way the old Kazakh studied the landscape.

A grim silence had descended over Akzu and Fat Mao as they trotted down the trail. At first Shan had thought it was still resentment over his presence, but then at a fork in the trail where Akzu led them down the least used of the two paths, he had seen that it was skittishness, even fear. Even the horses seemed reluctant to take the path and had to be reined tightly, before the riders could pull them between the two boulders that marked the trailhead. Akzu had dismounted to cut the bells from the harness of the camel.

Jakli rode in front of Shan. "A shortcut," she called back. But Shan saw the skittishness in her eyes too.

As they rode in the shadow of another rock wall he studied the five-mile-long valley it surrounded. It was not as fertile as the valleys in central Tibet but still held enough vegetation and water to support the small flocks of the dropka. There should have been herds, he knew. There should have been sheep or goats or yak, even the low-slung felt tents of a shepherd's camp. But it was empty, barren of life, as if somehow it had been sterilized.

The trail rose toward the crest of the ridge that defined the south end of the valley, and a small cleft in the rocks at the top appeared. Akzu signaled for the column to stop, then dismounted and led his horse to the opening. He pressed himself against the side of the cleft and peered through it. A moment later, visibly relaxed, he stepped quickly past the cleft and signaled for them to dismount and proceed. Shan awkwardly slid off his mount and followed their lead, but paused as he moved past the opening.

The object of their fear dominated the landscape beyond the ridge, a compound that, although at least two miles away, was clearly of huge dimensions. A long line of high wire fence, punctuated at intervals by guard towers, surrounded a complex of low, gleaming white buildings and cement bunkers.

"When I was young," a soft voice said behind Shan, "there was a nest of scorpions on the next hill from ours at our summer pasture camp. My brothers always wanted to kill them."

Shan looked at Jakli in confusion, then back at the complex. He knew what a Chinese prison looked like, and this was no prison. It had many guard towers but was too new and clean; too much of Beijing's money had been spent on the facility for it to be simply part of the gulag. But it also wasn't like any army base he had ever seen. Everything seemed to be made of cement. He saw nothing that looked like barracks. There were small buildings, the size of toolsheds, at regular intervals inside the wire.

"No, my father said," Jakli continued. "Let them live. I would not have you walk the land without fear."

As he shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun, now high in the sky, Shan could see a large radar antenna sweeping the sky from the center of the compound. Brilliant white domes were arrayed beyond the antenna. Satellite communications links. The small buildings were not sheds, he realized, but entrances to an underground complex.

"We call it the Mushroom Bowl. One night I saw them do a test," Jakli said. "It went far into the sky, like a shooting star going back to its home."

A shiver swept down Shan's spine, and he could bear to look no longer. "I'm sorry," he said, without knowing why.

Jakli returned his gaze with a small, wise smile. "It is just our nest of scorpions."

The main purpose of Tibet and western China was to act as a buffer, Shan had once heard a top general opine at a Beijing banquet, a staging area and shield against the next wave of aggression. Which meant, more than anything, that the vast wilderness was the hiding place for the country's most important weapons. Many politicians boasted in the capital that Tibet received the equivalent of billions of dollars from Beijing. All but a fraction of that money went to hollowing out mountains for troop garrisons and building secret nuclear missile installations like the one Shan had just seen. The Mushroom Bowl. Named for the white domes that had sprouted there after Beijing's invasion and perhaps also for the specter of the warheads inside its missiles.

The wilderness had been tamed after all, he thought. Maybe the old priest was right. When a sacred land got harnessed this way, it could mean the end of the world. The People's Liberation Army had its secret, buried ways to protect the world, or at least Beijing's world. For some reason he remembered the low rumble that was always present at their Lhadrung hermitage, the sound of the giant prayer wheel, kept moving by two monks at all hours, in a small chamber carved into a nameless mountain in remote Tibet. The lamas' secret, buried way to protect the world.