"Headquarters," Jakli repeated the words. "It could mean regional headquarters in Urumqi," she said, referring to the capital city of Xinjiang, six hundred miles to the northeast. "Or it could mean Beijing." She looked about, wide-eyed, as if she had seen a phantom. In either case it meant someone else was watching Yoktian County, from high above. Jakli moved as though to rise but seemed to have lost her strength. She sat back heavily and stared at the screen.

Shan stood suddenly. He felt short of breath. He stepped outside and breathed in the cool air. It had been Public Security headquarters in Beijing that had sent him to the gulag. He had assumed that the very worst that could happen to Gendun would be capture by the local knobs. But the headquarters knobs had university degrees and high ranks in the Party. The boot squads were their special soldiers, always led by a political officer. They would see Gendun differently. He would be an experiment. They might seek to use him, after breaking him with technologies not even the most serene mind could resist. They had done it before, more than once. They had even taken the Panchen Lama, the highest of all reincarnate lamas after the Dalai Lama, and imprisoned him for ten years in a maximum security prison near Beijing after he had spoken out for Tibetan independence. He had emerged a different man, married to a Han Chinese woman.

Inside the tent by the stables Shan found Malik kneeling by his bag, smoothing out a pallet consisting of three small carpets stacked together. Lokesh was sitting cross-legged on a similar pallet facing an assortment of objects that lay on a small red carpet, a Muslim prayer rug. He was holding the stub of a wooden pencil in his palm, in front of his chest, his eyes closed.

Shan's foot brushed against a tin can containing small bits of glass that lay at the edge of the red carpet. It tipped over, making a tinkling sound that snapped Lokesh out of his trance.

"He didn't have much," the old Tibetan sighed, gesturing toward the objects before him.

"These were the boy's?"

Lokesh nodded and stared inquisitively at the objects. The tin can with glass baubles. Three pencil stubs. A small, lute-like instrument with only two strings. A braid of leather straps that showed signs of having been repeatedly braided and unbraided, as if in practice. A single jade ball, the size of a large marble. Five pieces of dry, brittle wood with black marks that could have been writing on them. A young boy's treasures.

Malik raised the lute and plucked a string absently. "A dombra," he said sadly, "for singing the old clan songs."

Shan knelt and lifted one of the pieces of wood.

"We found them, that day," Malik said, looking at the pieces with a puzzled expression. "It had been smashed, the pieces scattered around his body."

What had been smashed, Shan almost asked, but he began fitting the pieces together and soon saw that the object was composed of two pieces, a flat bottom frame into which a wedge slid. The top of the wedge held two lines of text written in small fluid characters that resembled Sanskrit, the nearly extinct language of the lands south of Tibet. When it slid open, the flat surface inside, complete except for a large splinter missing from the center, was filled with writing in the same script. Like a letter, he thought, with the address on top.

He looked up to see Lokesh staring intensely at the collection of objects. Like an investigator, Shan thought. No, not exactly, he realized as he watched Lokesh slowly extend his hand and brush his fingertips over each item, for the old Buddhist would never see the collection as physical objects, as the meager trail of a young life. He would see them as the vestiges of a young soul, as signals for the boy's spirit, the tracks of the boy's inner god. Lokesh seemed to no longer be aware of Shan, as if once again the unpredictable embers within had ignited. The old Tibetan stared at the jade ball and slowly leaned toward it, as if it beckoned him. Shan picked it up and extended it toward Lokesh. They were in the land of jade. China had always obtained its jade from the Turkistan kingdoms north of the Kunlun. The Jade Bitch, the Uighur had called the prosecutor. Shan saw that the jade was delicately carved with tiny lotus flowers, with a hole running through its center. A bead. He dropped it into the Tibetan's open palm.

"What is it, old friend," Shan asked. "Who was the boy? Did you know Khitai?"

Lokesh sighed. "Not this boy," he said, as if there were multiple Khitais, then stared at the bead as a single tear rolled down his cheek.

It was almost dusk before Shan was able to return to the boy's grave, having finally left Lokesh in Jakli's care. His friend seemed to have gone into a strange trance, staring at the jade bead for more than an hour, during which the wild-eyed woman had reappeared, with a quiet, morose air, and sat beside the old Tibetan. When Shan had left the tent, the woman was patting Lokesh on the back like a sick child, humming one of her cradle songs as Jakli tried to coax him into eating some buckwheat porridge.

The last rays of the sun washed the back of the clearing, causing the grave to glow with an eerie pink light. Inside the rock enclosure the air was deathly still. A solitary cricket chirped.

Shan moved slowly along the edge of the rocks, then dropped to his knees beside the small mound of earth. He placed his palms on top of the loose soil, then stroked it, realizing after a moment that he was repeating the motion of the crazed woman, rubbing it the way a parent would smooth the blanket of a sleeping child. He had a son somewhere, not seen in years. With a stab of pain he realized that he didn't know if his own son was still alive. The possibility of his son's death had never occurred to him. But the tides of insane violence that had surged through his country did not discriminate between young and old. Children died for the sins of their parents, sometimes quickly, sometimes by the slow extinction of being abandoned. No, that was history, a voice in his head argued, and Shan's son would have the protection of his mother, a high cadre in the Party. Then he looked back at the grave under his hands. Khitai no doubt had thought himself well protected with the Red Stone clan. Children still died.

Was that indeed why he was here? he wondered. Was there something historic in the death of the woman Lau, something sensed by the old lamas that signaled a new tide of destruction, that meant a new demon of repression had been unleashed?

He absently scooped some of the loose earth from the grave, then slowly sprinkled the soil back over the mound and patted it smooth again. What was it about this homeless Kazakh boy that made him suddenly so dangerous to Bajys that he had to be shot? Had he indeed tried to stop Bajys's betrayal of the clans and the secrets of Fat Mao? Had he stolen something? Was it punishment? A mischievious boy who wandered from camp to camp might learn things, might be tempted by things that in turn could tempt Bajys. But what? The meager possessions of impoverished nomads? And what could he have that Bajys did not also have? Both boys, he remembered. Alta and Khitai had played together and had then been killed two days apart. One beaten and shot, the other beaten and stabbed. Maybe the boys had known something, had discovered something so dangerous to their killer they could not be left alive. They lived in a land of secrets. Secret families. Secret dissidents. Secret army bases.

As he idly stroked the earth, his fingers brushed something hard. He probed the soil and retrieved a curved piece of wood, small enough to fit into his hand. It had been crudely carved into the image of a bird in flight. It could have been one of Khitai's toys. It could have been a religious symbol. He pushed his fingers into the sandy soil and dragged them along the length of the grave. Near the head of the mound they touched something else, a five-inch splinter of wood. It was the missing piece from the strange wooden letter, containing a single line of the Sanskrit-like text. What did it mean? Was it an epitaph? Could the killer read the strange text? Did it contain a message that had caused the boy's death? He laid the two objects, the splinter of text and the crude bird, before him. Had they been buried by the same person? Perhaps they were both just offerings, or mementos. Did they mean something when put together?