Jakli appeared behind Sophie, looking worn and fretful. She was carrying Shan's drawstring bag.

"You need to go home, Chinese," Marco said.

"I have no home."

"All right, Back to Tibet."

"I am not finished."

"Sure you are. The knobs are finishing it." Marco seemed to see the determination in Shan's eyes. "The hornet's nest has opened up. You don't want to push another stick up it."

"I cannot stop unless asked by those who sent me here," Shan said quietly.

Marco shook his head. "They don't know this land. You don't know this land." He looked past Sophie's neck toward the desert. "It's the way it has always been. Like a tide on the great sea, the beast comes. People build a good life around a herd, an oasis, a small valley in the mountains. Every few years it is swept away. They know it. They come to expect it. Long ago, when Karachuk was fertile, sometimes locusts came and ate everything green for a thousand miles. Sometimes, before the desert finally consumed everything forever, it was a giant sandstorm, a karaburan, the kind that can blow for days and destroys anything softer than a stone. Sometimes it's an army. The Mongols invaded. The Chinese invaded. The Persians invaded. They say the Romans invaded once. If you believe all the stories, even an army of tigers invaded, ridden by monkeys." He looked back at his knots, gave them a final tug and unwound Sophie's reins from her neck.

"Monkeys on tigers, knobs on tanks, it's all the same. If you want to live and keep those important to you alive, you fade away. Become invisible. Go underground. Go to the high mountains. Just get out of the path of the beast."

Shan well knew the beast Marco referred to. He had been swallowed into its belly for over three years. "The beast doesn't always have to win," he said stubbornly. Jakli was near him now, looking anxious to be gone.

Marco stared soberly at Shan. "That," he said after a moment, "depends on how you define winning." He turned and nuzzled his face into the thick hair on Sophie's forehead, as if consulting the animal. "Look, Comrade Inspector," he said, lifting his head, "Jakli says you have no papers at all. Let her take you back to shelter. Wait a week or two at least. Go to Red Stone clan. Count the sheep."

Shan did not move, did not take his eyes off Marco. "Red Stone has enough troubles of their own."

The Eluosi frowned and shifted his gaze to Jakli. He stroked his beard and glanced at Osman, as though remembering the innkeeper's warning about the coal mine prisons. "You have to hide, girl. Come with me. Don't get taken now, not so close to the festival."

Jakli smiled and, standing on her toes, kissed Marco on his cheek. "I'm staying with Shan," she declared brightly. "I made a promise to Lau."

But you also made a promise to Nikki, Shan almost said, then he looked into her eyes and realized it wasn't simply defiance he saw there. She had made a vow not just to Lau but to herself. She had to find justice for Lau before she was married.

Marco stepped back, rubbing his hand on his cheek where she had kissed him. The boisterous Eluosi seemed at a loss for words. "Damn it," he muttered, "then take him to Senge Drak," he said to Jakli. "Shan's their problem, not ours."

"Senge Drak?" Shan asked, looking to Jakli.

"In the Kunlun," Marco said, and paused with a meaningful look at Jakli. "Whoever killed Sui could be there," he said to her in a quizzical tone, as if the thought had just occurred to him. He turned back to Shan. "You want to stop the beast? Then take Sui's killer to the knobs."

The whinny of a horse interrupted Marco. They turned to see the remaining men of the compound mounted and moving in single file up the path that Shan and Jakli had taken the day before. The riders at the top of the column had stopped and were waving.

As if understanding the distant gesture, Sophie knelt in the sand for Marco to mount. The instant he was in the saddle she leapt forward at a trot. An energetic laugh escaped the Eluosi. "May the god of all creatures watch over you, Chinese," he called out. "Since I cannot." In a few seconds he was at the head of the column.

A strange emotion surged through Shan as he watched the line of riders and pack animals file out of the compound. It was a sight out of the past, out of the Silk Road, out of Karachuk as she was meant to be. A caravan of adventurers heading toward dangers known and unknown.

Jakli steered in a new direction as she drove the truck away from the ruined city, straight south, toward the high peaks that were the walls of Tibet. Toward the edge of beyond. Shan watched the barren landscape, fading in and out of wakefulness as the truck rocked along another river bed. After an hour Jakli stopped in a grove of willows and poplars by the Kashgar highway and asked him to climb out to confirm that no other vehicles were in sight. He waved her across, and they followed another stream bed for a mile until, with a lurch of speed, Jakli shot over the bank and onto a track just wide enough to accommodate the truck.

Shan studied the map on the seat. "It's not far to Glory Camp," he observed.

"Too risky for that again," Jakli said, shaking her head. "Not with knobs watching. Not after what Xu did with you."

"There were sheep on the hills over the camp," he said, and explained what he wanted to do.

Jakli sighed and stopped to study the map again. Half an hour later they had parked in a clump of trees and were climbing over a low ridge that ran along the east side of the rice camp. Halfway up, Jakli stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, then whistled sharply. Thirty seconds later a huge dog appeared above them, followed by a man whose face showed no sign of welcome. They approached the man, who acknowledged them with a conspicuous frown, then bent over the dog and ordered it away with a low command.

The shepherd pulled a pair of high-powered binoculars from his neck and handed them to Jakli, then spun about and led them up the trail. As they passed under a large poplar tree near the crest of the ridge, the man muttered a word of the Turkic tongue, and the same word was called back from above. Shan looked up to see a second man perched with another set of binoculars. They weren't shepherds. They were Maos.

Jakli handed the glasses to Shan as Glory Camp came into view and motioned him into the shadows of a large shrub. Nothing unusual was happening yet, Shan heard the man report to Jakli as he surveyed the compound. No more truckloads of detainees. The prisoners were in class. The grounds were empty. The building with the holding cells appeared quiet.

"Nothing," the man repeated impatiently to Shan's back.

But there was something. At the flagpole in the center of the compound, a compound, a grey shape that could have been mistaken for a rock. He pointed at it.

"Him?" the Mao asked. "Been there all day. You think he's suffering? He's not suffering."

Shan extended the binoculars to Jakli. Was the man being punished? he wondered. Had he chosen to sit for hours in the sun and wind?

"It's nobody," the Mao said. "You couldn't recognize anyone from here anyway," he added and stepped away.

But Shan did recognize the man.

After ten feet the Mao turned. "You can't break them out," he called in a surly tone. "People get killed trying to break out," he warned and continued down the trail.

"I don't understand," Jakli said. "You know him?"