Shan stared in confusion. Marco had just sentenced the man as surely as if he had been in a courtroom before armed guards.

At the corridor Osman spoke with Hoof's companion, who grimly nodded and escorted his friend out of the building. Shan stared at the empty doorway. It had been foolish, what the Tadjik had done, almost unbelievably foolish, as though perhaps he had had another motive they had not seen. He picked up the ball and tossed it from hand to hand, until he noticed that it had words imprinted in English. "Made in America," he said to Jakli, translating to Mandarin. He used the traditional Chinese words for America: Mei Guo, Beautiful Country.

"Beautiful ball for a beautiful country," a deep voice said from behind him, in English. Shan turned with a start to see a tall man in his mid-forties, with sandy-colored hair turning to grey. A pair of bright blue eyes stared at Shan from behind gold wire-rimmed glasses. The man raised an oversized leather glove in his left hand, punched his right fist into it, and opened the glove toward Shan. "That would be mine," he said, his eyes full of challenge.

Shan weighed the ball once more, remembering at last what it was, then tossed it into the glove. "Baseball," he said in English, in an awkward rhythm. The last time he had pronounced the word out loud had been with his father, over thirty years before. He returned the stranger's steady stare. "You're American," he added, as an observation, not a question.

"Dammit, Deacon," Marco muttered. "You don't know him."

"He's with Jakli," the man said. "That's good enough."

Meaning what? Shan wondered. That the American was usually hidden from strangers. But also that Jakli had a much closer connection to the two strange men than he had thought. Shan studied the man named Deacon. There had been another American hidden away, inside a burlap death shroud.

"Jacob Deacon," the American announced, extending his hand to Shan. "Just Deacon will do. You're a friend of Nikki's?"

Shan returned the handshake uncertainly, looking at Jakli.

"A friend of some Tibetan priests," Jakli said.

"Okay," Deacon said with a small smile. "I believe in Tibetan priests too." He looked at Marco. "How about you?"

The Eluosi frowned. "I've known priests and mullahs. And I've known commissars. Commissars are easier to deal with."

Deacon laughed and pounded Marco on the shoulder, then pulled a bottle of water from a carton behind the bar. He poured a glass for Shan, then one for himself. "The real thing. And it's free." Shan studied the man. Had he been listening from the rear corridor the entire time?

"When is Nikki coming?" The question burst from Jakli with a sudden energy that caused Shan to look back at her.

"Caravans are unpredictable." Marco shrugged. "Maybe he decided to hole up in Ladakh for a few days because of patrols." He placed one of his paw-like hands on top of Jakli's head for a moment, the way a father might touch a daughter. "He'll bring you something bright and shiny. Or maybe something soft and flimsy."

Jakli's face flushed and she good-naturedly batted Marco's hand away, then quickly grew serious again. "Shan needs to know about Auntie Lau. Two of the children have died now too." Osman cursed. Marco raised his head with a growling sound, suddenly very sober, as Jakli explained about Suwan and Alta. "Shan thinks it started with Lau. He needs to know who might want to kill her. What happened before she died."

"A good woman," Marco said solemnly. "A bad death."

"Why would someone do this to an innocent woman?" Shan ventured.

"Innocent?" Marco asked. "That's more than I know."

"You don't consider her innocent?"

"Of course not. Are you? I sure as hell am not. Osman's not. My camel's not. They've proven Jakli's not innocent, three times over." The words brought a bitter smile to Jakli's face. Marco looked over to Osman. "Ever meet an innocent person, old friend? I haven't. Hell, Osman's got a niece six months old, still at her mother's breast. She's not innocent. She's Kazakh."

"You're saying Lau was killed because she was Kazakh?" Shan asked.

"No. But maybe in the end that's what it was. What being Kazkah made her do. The bastards."

"What bastards?"

Marco poured the remains of the vodka into a glass. "Just bastards in general," he muttered.

Shan turned toward the rear corridor. The American was gone. He felt Marco's gaze.

"You'd be wise to be gone yourself," the Eluosi observed in a dangerous tone, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "It's a bad place to be asking questions."

"If you would talk with him," Jakli suggested, "maybe he wouldn't have to ask so many."

Marco sighed. He stepped behind the bar and retrieved three of the flat nan breads. He tossed one to each of them, then mounted a stool and chewed meditatively on the third as Osman collected glasses from the tables. "It was just before Nikki took the last caravan out," Marco said. "We had to pick up some men. Lau rode in that evening, all excited about something."

"Alone?" Shan asked.

"Alone. Her horse was so exhausted we were scared it would die. Osman stayed with it, rubbing it, walking it, making sure it was copied down before drinking."

"Who did she speak with?"

"No one. Everyone." Marco stared at his crust as he spoke, then looked up with a new sadness in his eyes. "They say she was a healer, but many didn't understand the most important thing she did, the most important healing." He paused to bite off a piece and chew. "There's a little brown mouse in the desert," he said in a contemplative tone. "It collects things, like a pack rat. But where the mouse lives is so harsh that it usually just collects thorns and sharp pieces of crystal and small dried dead things. Lau was like that, with people's troubles. People would tell her their nightmares, their painful memories, their fears, and they would feel better, like she had taken them away, collected them inside herself, so they could heal."

"You're saying people confessed things to her?"

Jakli nodded. "It's true. I keep wondering. What if someone told her something, a secret she wasn't supposed to know? What if they changed their mind later and decided she had to be silenced? People get drunk and talk. She had a way of getting people to talk."

"No," Marco disagreed. "You didn't see her that night. The way her legs were beaten. If you want to stop her from spreading your secret, you just shoot her. If you want to pry out someone else's secret, you beat her first."

Shan took a bite of his bread and looked up. "You mean, you saw her."

Marco stared at his piece of bread. "I mean I found her. Nikki and I. Nikki first, at the quiet place she liked to go to. Only she and Jakli were the ones who usually go." He glanced at Jakli. "Nikki missed you. I think he went there because it reminded him of you. But when he went inside he found her tied to the old statue. He came and got me, with tears in his eyes." The big Eluosi looked down into his hands. "His mother taught him that, that sometimes it is all right to cry." Marco raised his eyes to Jakli, who seemed to be fighting back her own tears.

"I used to see it a lot, when the Red Guard were roaming the land," Marco said with a bitter tone. "They would break bones in the feet with a hammer. If you do it just so, it makes the skin agonize to the touch. Then they hit the feet and shins with a stick. Doesn't take much force to create a lot of pain. Sometimes they just used chopsticks, snap the skin with chopsticks. Do one foot, start with the second if they still don't talk. Afterward, you would see them on the street. The knobs would laugh and call them drunken foot, because they couldn't walk in a straight line anymore. The ones that held out, they did both feet. No one did much walking after that. Her killer, I don't think he intended that she leave the room, no matter what she told him."