"I need food for the others," Batu said tentatively.

"Others?" Jakli asked then, as if grasping his meaning, she knelt by the boy, her hand on his arm. "You know where other zheli boys are?"

The boy looked about warily. "At a place called the old lama field. It is safe there, high in the mountains. I was going there. Khitai told us that it is protected by the mountain deities."

Lokesh looked up with a new alertness in his eyes.

"You mean he took you there?" Shan asked.

"Yes. Years ago, the first time, when he was only seven. He had never been there then, but somehow he sensed where it was. When he found it he kept laughing, like he had found an old friend. Just some ruined walls. But a beautiful painting. I think Khitai is there now. He might go for the flowers, the assignment."

"Assignment?" Shan asked.

"Lau's last assignment to the zheli. A collection of autumn flowers. The flowers were beautiful by the lama field, she always said so."

Shan looked at Jakli, remembering the flowers at Lau's cave. Some of the other zheli children had remembered their assignment.

"Khitai knows that one of the shadow clans tended sheep in the mountains above the field," Batu continued. "That is where he might go after getting his flowers, with the clan who watched over Suwan."

Lokesh stood up, erect, like a soldier preparing for action. Suwan had visited the Red Stone camp and died. But his clan might have left with another zheli boy, with Khitai, knowing that Lau sometimes let the zheli switch families, unaware of Suwan's fate.

Jakli went to the front of the shed and looked out, as if collecting her thoughts, then turned. "I know this place. It's near an old Russian lodge," she said, looking to Marco.

"Like hell-" the Eluosi sputtered.

"They have nowhere to go," Jakli pressed. "You can't stay here. The Brigade is bringing in horses all the time."

"I can't-" Marco spat, then he looked at Jakli and a low audible exhalation escaped his lips, not quite a whistle, almost a snort. He looked to Shan in exasperation. "May as well argue with a gnat up your nose," he groused. Sophie turned and made a snickering noise toward Marco, her tongue exposed. "God's breath," he muttered, "not you too."

And then Jakli took the boy's hand and suddenly placed it in Shan's.

The action shook Shan so greatly he almost jerked his hand away. He stood in silence, unable at first to even look the boy in the eyes, unable to understand the sudden acrid taste of fear in his mouth or the welling of emotion within. Slowly he brought his eyes up and Batu looked at him with a small, uncertain smile. He knew children, he could talk with children, he had shared secrets with Malik. But this boy, he was Lau's boy. Shan had had such a boy once, a son, and he had lost him when he was Batu's age.

"This is Shan," he heard Jakli say. "A friend of Auntie Lau's."

Shan found himself on his knees in front of Batu and saw that he was tying the dangling laces of the boy's boots. His hands had taken him where his heart needed to be.

As Jakli tied the bag with the bridle to Sophie's saddle, Marco found a brown shirt in his saddlebag and told Batu to slip it on over his red shirt, then leaned into the camel's ears. The camel make a slow, snickering sound, then Marco straightened. "Okay, mount up," he said, with raised brows, as if expressing surprise. "She says okay. But-" he pointed to Shan, "you've got boots and-" he added, pointing to Lokesh "-you've got bags." He ignored the inquisitive looks on the their faces and led Sophie out of the shed, then turned as he reached the sunlight. "One more thing. She says if any of you ever breathe a word of where you are going or how we get there, the blue wolf will track you down and put you in his belly."

Batu nodded solemnly and looked at Sophie with wide eyes.

Jakli hugged Batu again. "You're safe now," she said, then broke away with a quick glance at Marco and Shan. "Three o'clock tomorrow," she reminded them, then jogged away toward town.

As they led the camels away from the settlement, they passed a cemetery on the far side of the river. Near the bank was a fresh grave, with a small brown and white horse standing nearby, its head hung low. They paused to look at it.

"Most of the zheli didn't even have their own horses," Batu explained. "Kublai was singing for a month last year when they gave it to him." The Kazakh boy shook his head and sighed like an old man as he looked again at the animal waiting at the boy's grave. "Now look. It's hard on a horse."

The three camels moved quickly up the valley, along a trail that paralleled the river, then over a long ridge into a landscape that Shan recognized, the small valley where Lau's cabin lay. Shan kept his eyes on the wooded slope above as they passed the building, toward the cave where Lau lay waiting for her justice.

They quickly left the valley behind, and the sun had passed its zenith before Marco slackened the pace, pausing at a pool below a small waterfall. They were deep in the Kunlun, and the wind blew cool and fresh out of the icefields above them. Marco watched the horizon with restless eyes.

"If something happens," he said in a voice that seemed taut with premonition, "do what I do. Do it fast. Don't talk. Listen to me. Listen to the camels."

Batu rode with Shan, sitting double on the camel behind Sophie, and they followed the silver camel southwestward on a trail that opened to long vistas over the distant desert. Then the trail dropped abruptly into a long valley of brown grass and gravel, down which a swift stream rushed. The path through the landscape was surprisingly wide, as if cleared long ago for heavier traffic. Batu pointed out things Shan did not see. A pika stuffing its cheeks with grass to store in its winter den. An eagle soaring over the adjoining ridge.

Suddenly Sophie stopped. Shan clenched his jaw, but relaxed as he saw that Marco was not searching about for danger. Then he realized that the Eluosi was watching Sophie's head. The silver camel jerked her nose toward the western ridge and brayed. Marco shot out of his saddle. "Helicopter!" he roared and shouted several words in Russian.

The camels bolted off in different directions just as their riders began to climb down. They tumbled to the ground as the camels themselves dropped, folding their legs under their bodies, tucking their heads against their shoulders. From somewhere nearby Shan heard Lokesh laughing. He looked over the side of the camel to see Marco lying against Sophie, curled in the shadow of her body. Lokesh, still wheezing with laughter, was slowly doing the same. The appearance of the animals with their riders pressed against them, would be that of three more boulders in the grey and brown landscape. It was why Marco had asked Batu to cover his red shirt. A surveillance team, flying fast, could easily overlook them.

A low ululating rumble rolled up the valley now, a sound that took Shan to the edge of terror, for fear that Lokesh and the boy would be taken. This was how the army and the knobs kept the nomads intimidated, by suddenly appearing out of the sky to check for illegal weapons or identity papers. You can't hide from Chinese, an old dropka had told Shan once. They have machines with guns that live in the clouds.

Shan caught a glimpse of the helicopter as it cleared the ridge. Then someone pulled his head down and pushed it against the camel. Batu.