"But after three terms, it's hard labor," Shan said soberly. "The gulag." He remembered Akzu's warning when she had first appeared at the trailhead. It's too dangerous for you, he had said to his niece.

Jakli nodded slowly and pushed back a loose strand of hair. "But that won't happen now. Nikki will protect me."

"Nikki. He is Marco's son."

Jakli nodded again and turned her face to Shan's, suddenly smiling through her damp eyes. The strand of hair fell back, and she curled it around her finger with the shy expression of a young girl. "We're going to be married- at the nadam, the horse festival."

Shan looked away self-consciously. He did not know what to say. Marriage, and all it implied, was so distant to him it seemed like some vague concept he had read about in an old book. He looked back silently for a long moment. "But he is away."

"On the other side of the border. One last trip."

Shan nodded. The son of Marco the smuggler was a smuggler himself. "And Lau knew about your marriage."

Jakli nodded, still fingering her hair. "She was filled with joy when I told her. Nikki was always one of her favorites," she added, and her eyes drifted back to the flame.

Jakli was going to marry a young Eluosi, the tiger for whom she had gone to jail. He studied her. The longer she sat looking at the flame, the more frightened she appeared to be.

Shan looked about the chamber again. Lau had been there alone in the flickering light when Nikki had found her body. "Who was here that night, at Karachuk?" he asked, staring at the stained Buddha. He walked slowly along the wall, feeling one moment warmed by the simple beauty of the ancient painting, the next chilled by the thought of the violent death Lau had met there. She moved from one person she trusted to another, Wangtu had said, as though from one oasis to another.

Jakli sighed. "Marco was here, Nikki, and Osman. Others, drinking at the inn. When we took her body to the cave we asked all the obvious questions. For hours we talked about it. No strangers were here. No one even saw a strange horse or camel. A vehicle would have been heard. Osman said it was the ghosts. Everyone laughed, but he wasn't joking."

"A horse could have come," Shan suggested. "It could have been left on the far side of the wall and not have been noticed. Or the killer could have left the horse on the far side of the rock, and climbed over without going inside the old city."

She nodded slowly. "Lau came on her horse. You heard Marco. Her horse was all lathered, she had been riding hard across the desert."

"Because she was rushing to see someone?" He stopped by the table and looked into the box of religious artifacts again. Something glinted in the light. He reached down the side of the box and pulled out a long cylindrical object, capped by a needle. A disposable syringe.

"No one," Jakli said in a faint voice. She was looking at him with a stark, frightened expression. She had seen the syringe. "No one knew she was here."

"The killer knew." Lau was running from someone, Shan thought. And came to Karachuk for sanctuary. He looked back at the statue. In the dim light it looked like the Buddha had been shot and had bled its heart onto the floor.

He stared at the syringe in his hands, then abruptly let go of it, as if it could strike him of its own will. It dropped into the shadows and he stood staring at his empty hand. He paced around the chamber, studying the old painting again, somehow sensing something of Lau. An old monk had told him that sometimes when people died in great pain little pieces of their soul broke away and wandered aimlessly about. "Do you know now why she wrote that letter to the prosecutor?" he asked.

"She didn't mean it," Jakli said.

"No. She did mean it. I think I understand. It was her gift, like trying to protect Wangtu by not giving him any more teas. She was worried about you. Three bowls of lao jiao. Ready to be married. She wanted to be sure you were protected, safely held in probation, so you couldn't get arrested again. It would have caused her pain, but she did it for you. She would have sacrificed much, even your feelings toward her, if it meant you would be safe." Despite what Lau had done, Jakli was defying her probation, as if she didn't care, as if she were out of the prosecutor's reach, or would be soon. He looked at Jakli. She was biting her lower lip, tears on her cheeks again, staring at the lamp. He sighed and slipped away.

All traces of the sun were gone as Shan stepped out of the cave, but the sky was brilliant with trembling stars and a rising two-thirds moon. A chill wind blew, the kind some monks called a soul-minding wind from the way it made the spirit wary and instantly alert. From across the desert came the howl of a night animal and, much closer, the chirp of a cricket.

He found his former perch overlooking Karachuk and turned up his collar against the cold. There was no activity, no sign of life, except a few glimmers through the thin cloth that hung in half a dozen windows. His fingers absently ran through the white sand by his leg. He longed to return to the dreamlike state he had felt when he first sat on the rocks, but the vision of Lau dying in the Buddha's arms had burned too deeply. His fingers made random shapes in the cool moonlit sand. Then he stopped, wiped the sand smooth, and made a two-part ideogram. The top was a small cross mark whose ends swept into right-facing curves, with a long tail to the left. It symbolized a high barren plateau and implied emptiness. The bottom half had two Y-shaped figures standing on a curved line, showing two humans standing back to back on a mound. The ideogram meant openness and was the sign his father always used for Chapter Eleven of the Tao te Ching. Using what is not, it was called:

Thirty spokes converge on a hub

What is not there makes the wheel useful

Clay is shaped to form a pot

What is not there makes the pot useful

Doors and windows are cut to shape a room

What is not there makes the room useful

He mouthed the words silently, then heard the last lines in his mind so crisply it was as if one of the Taoist priests of his childhood were reading beside him:

Take advantage of what is there

By making use of what is not.

What was not there, he knew, was the motive, for the motive was the connection that had driven Lau to Karachuk, where smugglers hid, where the American waited- the connection that had taken the killer from Lau to the boy Suwan at the Red Stone clan, then to the boy Alta in the high Kunlun. And on to where? Back to Karachuk? If the motive was simply to find secret Buddhists, the killer might be seeking the waterkeeper. If the motive was to find and kill particular children, then the zheli was the trail, the chain that guided the killer, a chain the killer destroyed as he followed it. Unfinished business, Akzu had said. The clans of one or more of the zheli might have been targeted years earlier, and the killer might have reappeared, as though awakening from a long hibernation, to stalk the last survivors. Kazakhs and Uighur clans had fought soldiers years earlier and been destroyed or dispersed in punishment. But they had inflicted significant losses on the army, and perhaps somewhere had kindled a lust for revenge that had smoldered for decades. Lau may have been alive during those terrible years, but not the zheli. What kind of bloodlust burned so deep it drove the killer even to the offspring of his enemy?

A movement below broke the spell. A dark, hulking shape, barely lighter than the shadows it moved in, stole along the back of the domed building. It made no sound, and the animals in the pen ignored it, almost as if they could not see it. Ghosts roamed the Taklamakan. For centuries Karachuk had been a city inhabited only by ghosts, Jakli had said.