Slowly, as reverently as he knew how, he eased the scarf above her forehead. A hole, over a quarter-inch wide, was at the hairline. He brought his lantern closer and saw dark smudges around the wound. It had been done at close range, execution style.

"Do you think it will keep growing?" Jakli inquired. She was looking at the ice patch again. "Maybe it will reach out and cover her. She could last a long time like that. Thousands of years."

Shan rose with a reverent bow of his head and noticed Jowa standing at the entrance. The purba had not ventured further into the chamber, as if he had decided to stand guard. Or was frightened.

On the wall that curved away to the left, toward the entrance, Shan noticed dark shapes in the ice. He extended his electric torch toward them and saw that they were hands. At least a dozen hands had been pressed into the ice and left their unique indentations on the wall, like farewell salutes.

A tomb of ice, Shan thought. A guardian to the cold hells. What had Auntie Lau's final hell been like? She had not been killed randomly. She had been sought out. But why?

He gave voice to his thought. "Could she have been robbed of something?"

"She owned almost nothing," Jakli said. "The Brigade school gave her a room and an office."

Shan stepped to the end of the platform and knelt. "When she was prepared, before she was brought here, did anyone see-" As he slowly, painstakingly unwrapped the leggings, he answered his own question. "Ai yi!" he gasped under his breath. Bruises and welts, never healed, were on top of her feet. She had been beaten, beaten long enough before dying for the bruises to appear.

"We saw," Jakli said, her eyes welling with tears. "She must have been in such pain." Her hand shot to her mouth and she turned away. "But she wouldn't have talked. She was strong."

Shan nodded, not because he understood Lau but because he understood interrogation. Either she would have talked after the torture on one leg began, or she would have kept silent through the torture on both legs. He moved to her side after quickly covering the legs again and slowly rolled up the sleeve on Lau's lifeless right arm. Inside the elbow was another welt, centered over a tiny red spot.

"I saw that also," Jakli said over his shoulder. "Just a bruise. Nothing," she said in a cracking voice, a voice that told Shan she knew what it meant.

There was a movement at his side. Jowa had approached to look at the arm. "Injection," he announced solemnly. "She was injected with something when the beating didn't work." The purba exchanged a knowing glance with Shan. It meant her killer knew interrogation technology and had access to the drugs that were used by government interrogators. She had been killed for something she owned after all. She had been killed for information, tortured to reveal something.

Lau seemed more a mystery now than before he had visited her. Shan turned toward the entrance, then hesitated and stepped to the left wall. On an impulse he pressed his palm into the ice, near the impressions of the other hands.

"Why," he asked, feeling the numbness spread through his fingers, "did she stop serving on the council?" He pulled his hand away and studied his ice print. It was deeper than the others.

"When we did that," Jakli said, nodding at the handprints, "Akzu said that if the ice doesn't shift, the hands could be preserved for centuries. He said it would be the only evidence that we ever existed." She looked at the prints, then fitted her hand into one near the center as if confirming it was hers. "Just an emptiness in the ice in a dark cave on a forgotten mountain."

Shan looked at the woman, startled by her words. Jakli kept facing the wall. "I washed her at the stream," she said in a whisper. "I keep thinking of the terrible pain she died in." She pushed her hand more firmly into the ice, as if to create a greater emptiness. "Lau was disqualified somehow," she continued in her whisper, as if worried Lau might overhear. "Four months ago someone said she was no longer eligible to hold office."

"Someone?"

She shrugged. "The rules change all the time. The Brigade has taken over many of the functions of the old councils."

"But someone announced that Lau could no longer serve."

"I don't know, I guess. She just was gone. Someone else just started attending instead of her."

"Who?"

Jakli did not respond until she had stepped to the entrance to the larger chamber. "Ko Yonghong," she said in a brittle voice. "Comrade Managing Director."

"Was Lau told the reason?"

"If she was, she never told anyone else."

"You never thought it was odd, the timing?"

Jakli shook her head, confusion clouding her face.

"It was not long after that she asked for her body to be taken here." Shan reminded her. "As if it was only then that she became worried. Why, do you think?"

Jakli looked back on the dead woman, biting her lower lip. She looked as if she were about to ask Lau herself. Then she shrugged and turned back to Shan. "She associated with undesirables."

She was referring, Shan knew, to herself, and Akzu and the nomads. Perhaps even the Maos.

"But who was closest to her? Did she have a helper? Perhaps she was training someone. I need to know what her reaction was, when she heard she could no longer serve. Angry? Scared? Relieved?"

"No one."

"No one? Or no one you want me to see?"

Jakli seemed to consider his words as she bid farewell to Lau with a nod of her head, then stepped back into the larger chamber. "It's complicated," she said. "I want you to find the killer. But this is a land of secrecy. The Chinese make it that way. There are things that could be dangerous for you to know."

"Dangerous to whom?"

"Me. You. Others."

"You mean the resistance? The lung ma?"

"Resistance? There is no real resistance. Just intelligence gathering. How can we resist the People's Liberation Army or the Security Bureau? The Tibetans tried it, using flintlocks and swords against machine guns. A million of them died. Not resistance. A preservation movement, that's the best anyone can hope for. It's what Lau told the zheli a hundred times. Preserve what is good for the day when the bad goes away."

A minute later they were nearly at the mouth of the tunnel. Jowa and Lokesh could be seen outside by the old pine, straightening the stick-figure offerings. Shan paused at the entrance, holding his light close to the wall. There was something he hadn't seen before, a drawing made in chalk, a series of lines within a six-inch circle. At first it appeared to be an egg with a small plate on top, capped with something like a button with a flower growing out of it. Below the egg shape on either side were flowing, curving lines, like a banner blowing in the wind.

With a flash of recognition Shan pressed the light closer. It was in white chalk, recently laid on the rock.

"Do you know it?" Jakli asked over his shoulder.

"A bumpa, it's called, in Tibetan. A sacred treasure vase. One of the eight sacred Buddhist symbols."

"A vase?"

"An urn. A sacred receptacle," he said, his brows wrinkled in confusion. "It means hidden treasure."

Jakli stared at the chalk drawing a moment, then slowly stepped outside, leaving Shan alone. As he stood there, a particularly strong gust of cold air hit his back. Lau's breath.