"I'm sorry," he heard himself say. He knew there were no words he could give the dead boy. What had Marco said- no one was innocent anymore. "I would have given my own life," he said in a steadier voice, "to keep more of you from dying." As he spoke he realized that Khitai had not been the next name on the list. Because perhaps he simply had the bad luck to be at the lama field when the killer appeared. Or perhaps, he thought, remembering Lokesh's reaction at the grave, Shan had been wrong, and the killings had not been about the Americans. Had Khitai always been the target? It was as if there two were motives, two killers, two mysteries at work.

He knelt in silence until he heard Marco call from below. Then, quickly, he ran his fingers through the loose soil. He found a familiar object at the head of the grave, a curved piece of wood carved to look like a bird. It was what Malik made for dead children. A few inches away his fingers touched something so hard and cold it made him start. He pulled out a black, hinged, metal container and opened it. It was a compass, an elegant device filled with oil and bearing a red cross on its face, above the words Made in Switzerland. He stared at it in confusion. Such an instrument cost more than most herders made in a month.

Marco called out again. Shan buried the bird and pocketed the compass, stood and paused. He ran to the mani wall, selected one of the stones inscribed with a Tibetan prayer and placed it at the head of the grave, then jogged back to his companions.

As he reached the others, Malik was pulling Marco away from a small boulder near the ruins. It had a hole at its base. "Don't go near that nest," Malik warned. "That pika, he has a demon in him now."

Shan and Marco exchanged a puzzled glance and stepped to the hole, around which dried grass and twigs had been stacked. Marco knelt and cursed as he looked into the shadow. Shan bent and saw it too, a gleaming red dot of light in the hole, like an angry eye. The Eluosi reached in and pulled out first the battered, lifeless body of a ground squirrel, then a small video recorder.

"Motion activated," Marco spat, as he pulled out the tape. He threw it high overhead, where it lodged on a shelf in the rocks, then slammed the camera against the boulder.

"When they left they tried to get the helicopter to land by the flag," Malik explained as they were poised to mount, "but the wind deities protected it. So they shot at the flag with a gun." The flag did indeed seem more tattered than when Shan had first seen it.

"But that's all right," Batu assured them. "That man Bajys, Khitai's friend, he told us old men come and fix the flag sometimes, that they have for hundreds of years. Old men," the boy repeated with a wise nod. "Or maybe they're mountain deities."

They mounted, with the younger boy riding behind Lokesh, and after crossing a low ridge soon reached the head of a deep valley. Marco dismounted. "It is dangerous now. Walk, and walk carefully." He checked the harnesses of each of the camels and tied the reins to the saddles. "The camels know the way." He patted Sophie's hindquarters and she bolted onto a side trail that led to what appeared to be the base of a cliff. Not a cliff, Shan soon saw as the camel began to climb a narrow switchback trail. It was a steeply sloped rock face. At the top, far above, Shan could see a chimney-like rock formation.

The arduous climb took nearly an hour. After they cleared the crest, Shan stood in wonder. Behind the crest was a small plateau, invisible from below. Thick clumps of conifers surrounded the bottom of the rock formation, which, he quickly realized, was man-made. An ancient watch tower. Two sides of the plateau were surrounded by steep rock walls rising to the summit of a mountain more than a thousand feet above them. Two hundred feet up the wall, a spring emerged, descending in a long crystal ribbon to a small pond. A grass-strewn meadow covered two-thirds of the plateau. Scattered across it were half a dozen Bactrian camels.

"The armies of the Tibetan empire," Marco explained as he joined Shan. "They built roads down the river valleys leading out of the Kunlun, then garrisoned troops where the roads could be defended." He gestured toward the old tower. "Shepherds rebuilt it. When my father tried to take our family out of China, into India, an army patrol chased him. We hid here while the soldiers searched. A week, then my mother got sick. A month, then the camels ran away. After a while my father just started building. 'Stay the winter,' he said, 'it's safe here.' 'Might as well stay the summer,' he said later, 'good hunting here.' " Marco shrugged. "Almost forty years ago. We just kept building."

As they led the camels past the base of the tower, a large structure of logs came into view. It had clearly been built from the tower in stages, with a chamber butting against the tower that led into three sections of varying height. Neglected flowerbeds sat on either side of an oversized wooden door with handwrought ironwork. At the end of the building, under the largest pine on the plateau, a large double-barred cross stood over three graves.

Shan and Marco pulled the saddles from the camels as Malik and Batu helped Lokesh to a stump, where the Tibetan sat with his head in his hands. He had not spoken since leaving Khitai's grave. Marco cast a sad look at the old man, then wrapped an arm around each boy and led them to the doorway. Stepping in front of them he made a small bow and with a sweep of his hand gestured them inside. "Welcome," he said, "to the Czar's summer palace."

The Eluosi escorted them into a warm, intimate room whose plank floors had been lined with thick carpets. On the front wall, flanking the door, hung the skins of several large animals. The afternoon sun that found its way through the open door reflected off a large brass samovar sitting on a table at the far side of the chamber. Shan moved toward the urn in admiration, but was distracted by several small, faded, black and white photographs hanging above it. They were of figures inhabiting a different world. From one yellowed photo stared an old man with spectacles and a long white beard; his eyes seemed to be animated with rebellion, or anger perhaps. In the next frame a man with a sharply trimmed beard stood beside a beautiful fur-clad woman with light-colored hair. A horse-drawn buggy and driver waited behind them. The woman's mouth was opened in a smile, as if she were announcing good news.

The man and woman appeared again in a photograph set in rugged mountainous terrain. They were dressed in simple woolen tunics now. The man's beard was no longer trimmed, and the woman's hair was in braids, the way female workers wore their hair in the fields. In the man's arm was a child, a boy who stared defiantly with a strength that seemed to have been lost in his parents. Inserted into a bottom corner of the frame was another photo, also faded but more recent. It was of another woman, with strong weathered features and light-colored hair tied in a scarf. Batu stepped outside and a moment later reappeared, leading Lokesh.

"Family," Marco said behind Shan, in a mellow voice. "In a better year. Near Yining, in the north." He stepped across the room to a large door that stood ajar, leading into a room of stone walls. The base of the ancient guard tower. "The best place for a Russian to be, where Moscow had forgotten you. But then in 1950 somebody in some god-rotten Party headquarters in Beijing opened a map and saw a big wide open space with not enough red flags on it. When they sent troops to Turkistan, they decided that the mountains to the west should be the obvious border. Yining was on this side so they shipped in a few thousand retired soldiers." He snapped his fingers. "Just like that, Yining was no longer a free White Russian town, it was a Chinese town. And the original inhabitants had only one right, the right to leave. Except there was no place to go by then."