"Do you know Khitai?" Malik asked Lokesh.

The old Tibetan shook his head slowly.

Malik stared at Lokesh with round eyes, feeling, Shan knew, the same emotion as Shan himself, a confused awe of the strange magic that seemed to be working in the Tibetan. Shan had been wrong. It had not been Alta who had visited the camp but another family, another dropka family with a boy named Suwan, who had taken his belongings into the Red Stone tent, as if moving in. Khitai had changed places, switched positions on the zheli tether, with this boy, who had complained that his foster family couldn't speak his native tongue.

"Did Khitai speak Tibetan?" Shan asked.

"No. He was Kazakh," Malik said with a puzzled tone. "But he wanted to go higher."

"Higher?"

"Deeper into the mountains than Red Stone goes. The season is almost over, and the herding families live close to town in the winter. But word came that the Brigade was breaking up all the clans, that maybe the zheli would be broken up and shipped away to Chinese places. Khitai was very scared of the Chinese. I think they did bad things to his people when he was young. Khitai talked about getting away, to the last range, we call it. The highest part of the Kunlun, where the glaciers live."

They watched the fire in silence.

"Did you return that piece of wood to his grave?" Shan asked at last.

His words seemed to frighten Malik. He squeezed Shan's hand tighter, as if to remind him that he was not an old man after all, just a boy who kept burying other children. "I found it the next day," Malik said. "My aunt had collected all the other pieces and put them with his things. I was going to bring it to the tent too. But I didn't want to touch it so I pushed it into the grave with a stick."

"Why?"

"Maybe that was what had called to the demon. The killer broke the secret writing apart. Maybe that's what had made the killer so angry."

"You mean Bajys?"

Shan saw Malik nod in the dark. "The thing that Bajys became, my uncle said." The boy was quiet a long time, watching the dying flames. "I know there are protective deities, like those that watch over animals. I know, because I have seen how lost babies find their mothers on the far side of a mountain. And if there are protective deities then there must be the opposite kind," the boy said in a knowing tone, as if he had often thought about the possibility.

A destructive deity, Shan thought. A demon.

"And it's still out there," Malik said in a haunted voice. "The thing that kills children."

"We have to leave as soon as possible," Lokesh announced suddenly in a weak voice. "We must go and talk with Auntie Lau."

Shan looked at his friend with worry. Something inside Lokesh seemed to have been collapsing since he had first heard Khitai's name. "Do you know about lamas here?" Shan asked Malik. "Was there one who was a friend of Lau's perhaps? One who is missing?"

"Holy men?" the boy asked. "No. That Prosecutor Xu in Yoktian, she would never allow it. She gives speeches sometimes. She hates Tibetans. She says they are all traitors." Malik thought in silence for a moment. "She wouldn't kill them, though," he said with a certainty that chilled Shan. "But she would take them to a place where it is easy for a holy man to die."

The rising sun washed the peaks in a blush of gold and pink as they rode down the rough northern slope of the Kunlun mountains. The light seemed to revive Lokesh, and he broke into one of his traveling songs, praising the deities who preserved mountains. Akzu and Jowa rode ahead, out of earshot, speaking in the same urgent tones they had used in the yurt with Fat Mao the day before. Every few minutes Jowa stood in his stirrups, looking ahead as if searching for something. Fat Mao, perhaps. The Uighur had been gone when they awoke.

Suddenly Akzu raised his hand in warning. As they stopped, the sound of hoofbeats came from higher on the slope, from a trail that ran along the crest of the ridge above them. A small rider appeared on a loping grey horse. Shan heard Akzu curse, then call out to the rider, who wheeled the horse to a halt fifty feet above them. It was Malik.

"The zheli have to be warned!" the youth called out to his uncle. "Khitai is still alive. The thing that is Bajys will come for him too, and maybe the others!"

Akzu cast a worried glance toward Jakli. "We need you, boy," he shouted in reply. "You don't know where to seek. This is not the time." Anger seemed to enter his voice as he spoke. "I am head of Red Stone clan. I tell you no."

The young Kazakh gazed out over the mountains for a moment. When he turned back toward his uncle Shan saw pain in his eyes. "And I tell you I am tired of digging graves," he called back, then kicked his horse into a sudden gallop.

Shan watched Akzu as the headman gazed toward the boy and saw his face shift from anger to fear and then pride. "Go with God, boy," the old man offered quietly, then muttered to his horse and continued down the trail at a fast trot.

Half an hour later, at the top of a ridge that descended sharply in a series of switchbacks, Jakli pointed to a ribbon of grey on the northern horizon. "The highway," she said, "four hundred miles west to Kashgar."

Shan leaned forward in his saddle and pointed toward a huge rock formation a quarter mile to the west. It stood like a massive sentinel, towering three hundred feet above the ridge. At its top, fastened to a long pole held fast with a cairn of rocks, was a large square of ragged red cloth, perhaps six feet to the side. It was a huge lungta, a Tibetan prayer flag. In front, Lokesh stopped singing and stared toward the cairn, his hands cupped around his eyes. As he recognized the flag he began to wave, first at Shan, then toward the flag.

Shan studied the towering rock. It seemed impossible to climb. But someone had done so, as if daring the Chinese to risk their own lives to take it down. Not just someone. A Buddhist. It was a border land. Many different peoples lived here, Jakli had said. But Tibetans, Malik had warned, were singled out by the prosecutor for special treatment. Border lands had people of mixed blood. Like Jakli herself, part Kazakh, part Tibetan. Mixed blood and perhaps mixed allegiances. Like Lau, perhaps- the mysterious woman with a Han name whose death had so stirred the lamas, the dead woman Jakli was taking him to visit.

"Lha gyal lo!" Lokesh called out in his loudest voice, causing Jowa to spin about with an angry glare. The old Tibetan ignored the purba. "Lha gyal lo!" he repeated. "May the gods be victorious!"

"Your friend," Jakli said, looking at Lokesh, who waved at the flag again. "Is he crazy? I'm sorry- is he touched from old age, perhaps?"

"Senile?" Shan smiled as he studied his old friend. "If senile is being unaware and lost and unable to connect things, then Lokesh is the opposite of senile. He has seen too much. All he wanted was to be a monk, a monk healer. But he so excelled at his lessons that his gompa sent him to work for the government. Then Beijing came and said he couldn't be a monk anymore. After a few months he got married, to a nun who had also been expelled. Two weeks later he was thrown into prison for being a government official."

"For thirty years," Jakli recalled.

Shan nodded. "Every visiting day his wife would come. Usually she wasn't allowed close enough to talk, so they would wave at each other, just wave for hours. And two days after he got home his wife died."