Jakli appeared beside him. She stood in the chill wind with her eyes closed, reverence on her face, as though praying. He had heard of such caves. Some said that death lived in these frigid places and that such wind was its breath. Some of the old Tibetans said such places were portals to the eight levels of cold hells that were taught by the oldest of the Tibetan sects.

Jakli reached into her pocket and produced a small battery lamp that she handed to Shan, then reached behind the pile of flowers and retrieved two sticks saturated with resin at the tips. She handed them to Jowa, produced a box of wooden matches, lit the torches, then took one for herself and stepped into the cave. Shan followed her closely, his throat suddenly dry. They were going to visit Auntie Lau.

After half a dozen steps, the passage widened to ten feet, but the ceiling dropped so low they had to bend over, holding their lights extended at their sides. The cold wind seemed to increase, dampening the light of the torches. Moments later they emerged into a larger chamber, perhaps fifty feet wide and three times as long, with a twenty foot ceiling. The air was more still, but even colder. Jowa uttered a gasp of surprise as he extended the torch over his head. The ceiling was glowing. Long stalactites of crystal hung down. It was ice, Shan saw. The entire ceiling was coated with ice.

"It wasn't so long ago that the glaciers left these hills," Jakli explained in a low voice. "Their roots are still here." She led them across the chamber to a five-foot-wide opening, which led into a smaller chamber with the same high ceiling but no more than twenty feet long.

In the dark and the cold, Auntie Lau was waiting.

She lay on a knee-high rock slab at the rear of the chamber, her hands on her stomach, her face so peaceful it seemed she was only napping.

Jakli knelt at the dead woman's side. Shan watched as she pulled a sprig of heather from her pocket and dropped it on the slab beside the body.

"I met her when I was just a girl that first summer she appeared. I was just eight or nine years old. My horse had a stomach sickness. I heard a healer was at a sheep camp so I was going to walk my horse to her. But after three or four hours my horse would go no further. He gave a long bellow and stood, weak and aching. I sat and made a fire, and suddenly she was there. She said she had heard a sick animal call. But she wouldn't give it medicine, not right away. She wanted to know about my horse, about how long we had known each other and where it had been born and how it acted in the rain. Then she touched the horse in many places and spoke to it. Finally she mixed some herbs and told me to stay there that night and sing to it. In the morning he was better, so strong he wanted to run all the way home."

Lokesh sat beside the slab, giving Jakli a small nod as if to encourage her to continue.

"One of my cousins said she must be some kind of sorcerer, when I told him," Jakli recounted. "But I said she laughed too much to be a sorcerer. I saw her many times after that, often unexpectedly, in the mountains, in the desert, wherever. Once she was healing a small squirrel that had been dropped by an owl. She said it was her duty to heal all the injured and the sick but that the greatest duty of a healer was to the smallest and the weakest."

"What do you mean, she appeared?" Shan asked.

"You know. One of the homeless. Her family had been lost too. She was like a wandering healer. We were fortunate she decided to stay in Yoktian County."

Lau's hair, black with a few strands of grey, had been set in two short braids tied with dark red ribbon. She was dressed in a long grey robe embroidered with flowers along its edges, her legs wrapped in red woolen leggings that covered the tops of a pair of small, well-worn leather boots. A red scarf, embroidered with flowers and leaping deer, covered most of her head, pulled low over her brow. Someone had dressed her for the cold.

"How far away is the place where she was killed?" Shan asked.

"Karachuk? In the desert, many miles inside the desert. They used her horse, then a truck to bring her body. Half a day's travel."

"Did you bring her?"

Jakli nodded. "From the road. The Maos came and told me at the factory, and I met them at the road."

"So the Maos were at this Karachuk when she was killed?"

"No. Some others, who went to the Maos." Jakli returned his steady stare with a cool, determined expression. There were secrets she would not tell.

"And she told you she wanted to be left here? Is this the Kazakh way?"

"No. But she had ideas. I mean, she lived her life in her own way. I think she wanted to leave it in her own way as well. She said to take her to this cave above the cabin."

"Who?" Shan asked. "Who did she ask?"

"She told her friends. About three months ago, she told her friends this is where she wanted to go."

The body had been kept remarkably fresh by the cold. It could stay like that for months, he thought. Maybe years. "It's a lot to ask of friends."

Jakli looked at Lau with a sorrowful smile. "It wasn't any trouble."

"But the way you speak about her, she wasn't the kind to put burdens on her friends."

Jakli knitted her brow, as if trying to understand Shan's point. "Lau was only going to die once," she said slowly.

But why this cave? Shan asked himself. It was as if the cave itself meant something. But what? A place where demons lived. Or maybe a place that demons feared. He walked slowly around the slab of rock, studying the dead woman. "If she was an outsider, without papers for a work unit here, how could she have been elected to the local council?"

Jakli shrugged. "She was checked, no doubt. She was Kazakh, and the herders loved her. As I said, she was everyone's aunt. And it was only the Agricultural Council. No real power."

"But the authorities. To get on even such a council a background check would have been required."

Shan could see in Jakli's eyes that she understood. Lau's family could have been lost in many ways, for many reasons. If it had been imprisoned, officially disbanded, or executed, its members by definition were bad elements in the eyes of the state. Holding office even in a lowly Agricultural Council was a privilege denied bad elements. He remembered Akzu's suggestion at the grave of the boy buried by the Red Stone clan. The demon wants to finish what it started with the parents of the zheli. Lau too had been from a lost clan. The secret that bound the victims could be from decades earlier, when the Kazakhs and Uighurs were being subdued by the People's Liberation Army.

"She was rehabilitated. I don't know. The people wanted her. The government is more forgiving now." Jakli spoke the last words without conviction, while looking at the slab of ice that covered much of the wall behind Auntie Lau.

Shan knelt by Lokesh, at the woman's head. The light of the torches gave her bloodless flesh an orange glow, adding to the sense that she was only sleeping. It seemed that at any moment the woman might sit up and chide them for disturbing her rest.

"We had to let people think there was an accident," Jakli said. "There had to be an explanation. We couldn't report her murdered and have the government involved."

Shan looked up. It was as if Jakli had waited to explain, so there would be no secret from Lau.

"A riding accident," Jakli continued, looking at Lau now. "We arranged for your-" She paused and drew in a deep breath. "We arranged for her horse to be found walking along the high road that follows the Yoktian River. The next day, someone at school reported her missing. She had a jacket, given her by the Agricultural Council, with her name on it. Fat Mao dropped it in the river. A woman found it floating downstream, near town."