They drove up switchbacks over a high ridge for a quarter hour, then stopped just past the top to help Gendun out of his barrel. As Lokesh slid out of the cab, Jowa touched Shan's arm. "I don't know who they were," he said. "I thought soldiers at first."

Shan realized Jowa was asking him to explain. "We're close to India and the road to Pakistan. There are smugglers. Maybe they were waiting for a shipment." Jowa pulled out his map and climbed out to study it in the parking lights. Shan turned to look through the rear window. No one was in the cargo bay. He looked in the side mirror. In the moonlight he saw Lokesh, sitting alone on the ground. Shan jumped out and jogged to the back of the truck.

Lokesh was holding his beads near his chest, counting them quickly. Shan climbed into the cargo bay. The hiding barrels were empty. Gendun was gone.

Shan stood with his hands clenched on the side of the barrel they had hidden Gendun in, his heart pounding wildly. A small white square of cloth was tied to the board above Gendun's barrel. A khata, a prayer scarf. Shan untied it and stared at it in confusion.

"Where is he?" Shan called out in alarm and darted to Lokesh, shaking his shoulder.

Lokesh looked up to the sky, slowly surveying the stars, as if they might show sign of Gendun. "He is gone now," he observed in a tiny voice.

Shan ran up the road a hundred feet and called Gendun's name, twisting the khata around his fingers. The sound flushed a bird from its roost and it flew across the face of the moon. He turned and saw that Jowa was in the bay now, staring at the empty barrels. Shan jogged back and squatted at Lokesh's side. "Where is Rinpoche?" he repeated desperately. "Was he taken by those men?"

"Lokesh, you must understand-" Jowa called out from behind Shan, "he's our-" His voice drifted off as he looked at the dark horizon. The wind seemed to rise, a cold wind that hinted of snow.

"He could be lost," Shan said in a brittle tone. "He could have fallen out of the truck on the steep slopes."

"He must have been taken," Jowa declared. "The bastards in the red truck. And we just drove away."

"Sometimes," Lokesh said with a long sigh, "a lama just gets called away." His voice was calm, but his eyes were forlorn. He saw the khata in Shan's hand, its end fluttering in the wind, and reached for it. Shan let it go. The old Tibetan laid it on his thigh and stroked it with a small, grateful smile, as though he needed reassurance that the Gendun who had traveled with them had been the flesh and blood Gendun. Shan dropped to the ground beside Lokesh, but his heart felt too heavy to pray.

Gendun was with the strange men in the red truck, the ones who acted like Public Security, who could chew up and digest a man like Gendun in hours if they chose. At best, Gendun was alone in the wilderness of mountains. Gendun, who had hardly known the outside world until seven days before. With a pang he remembered the first time he had met Gendun, hidden away in his hermitage. He had marveled over the watch on Shan's wrist. When Shan had let him examine it, he had listened to it, and shook his head, not just for the wonder of its workings but that people would think they needed such things. "You Chinese," he had said with a grin and a shake of his head.

Jowa turned the truck around and drove slowly in the direction they had come as Shan stood on the sideboard and held onto the mirror mount, calling out Gendun's name. Jowa turned on the headlights. They drove for a mile, then Jowa stopped and turned off the engine. Jowa sat at the wheel, gripping it tightly, torment twisting his face. Shan looked at him a moment. Did Jowa's pain come because he was a warrior who could find no enemy or because of what he had said before, that if the lamas didn't survive, there was no point in continuing?

"What if it just ends like this?" Jowa asked in a near whisper. "The last of the old ones just disappears. And the world stumbles on, a body without a soul." He looked out at a tall precipice that rose toward the heavens, a vast, darker shadow in a landscape of shadow. "What if he were the last one?" he asked the mountains, so low Shan barely heard.

"They said a lama was missing," Shan reminded Jowa. "Lau was killed and a lama was missing."

Jowa gave a small, stiff nod. "So your demon's appetite just gets bigger and bigger," he said in a hollow voice. "Three killings now, and two lamas gone."

They drove slowly back to Lokesh, who still prayed at the roadside. Jowa got out and sat with him in the moonlight, lighting a stick of incense as Shan climbed into the cargo bay.

"What is it?" the purba called out when he saw Shan emerge with the tattered canvas bag that carried his meager belongings.

"I will go back," Shan said. "I will go no further until I am sure he is safe."

"You can't," Jowa said.

"I have to." Shan squatted by Lokesh, who looked at him with pain in his eyes.

"You can't because they sent you," Jowa protested. "Because Gendun said you're needed in the north."

"That woman and the boys are dead," Shan said. "They are dead, and Gendun is not. Not yet."

Lokesh, his eyes now locked on the ember at the tip of the incense, slowly shook his head. "Those evil men were meant to be on the road tonight," he said. "And Gendun was meant to disappear tonight."

"And maybe I too was meant to disappear," Shan suggested.

"No," Lokesh said. "You are meant to go on." The certainty in his voice rang like a bell.

"Lokesh, my friend," Shan said, and he knelt now, putting his hand on Lokesh's shoulder. "I have been torn apart and patched back together so many times I am like a ragged old quilt. There are still so many pieces of me that don't fit together that sometimes I wonder my soul doesn't burst apart." He sensed the anguish in his voice, but he could not hide it.

"And you think Gendun has to put them together, Xiao Shan?" Lokesh asked.

"I don't know." He looked at Jowa, who stared at him, his face seeming to swirl with emotion. "But I know that of all the world I have seen, the lamas are the best part of it."

Shan stood, holding the straps of his bag, which still sat at his feet. He looked over the mountains, the snowcaps glowing in the moonlight. The wind blew steady and cold, reminding him that Gendun had nothing but his robe and a thin piece of canvas against the elements. An animal howled in the distance.

"We will wait here for Xiao Shan," Lokesh said to Jowa, as though Shan had already left, and raised the stick of incense in his hand as if it were a torch. "Xiao Shan will come back." He spoke as though Shan had already gone. "Because somewhere, on a high mountain, he will realize something. We are not responsible for Gendun. Gendun is responsible for us."

Shan realized that his fingers had closed around his gau, the box that carried his prayer and his feather. Gendun had sensed something that afternoon when he had given him the token, when he had emphasized to Shan that their trip could end in unexpected ways. Slowly, almost unconsciously, he sat down with his companions.

They prayed until the stick burned out, then they climbed back into the truck. Shan stood in the back, fiercely gripping one of the ribs of the bay, watching the blackened mountains as they moved on into the night.